All Too Common...

From I09:

The Semmelweis Reflex

Do people reflexively fear the new? They seem to reject it often enough that there's a psychological syndrome to explain it. The Semmelweis Reflex is named after a guy who came up with a radical idea that could have saved thousands of lives — only to see everyone reject it and continue with the killing.

Ignaz Semmelweis was a smart guy. He was an observant guy. These qualities did not serve him well. He was a doctor, and one of the things he observed was other doctors walking straight from treating the dying, and cutting up the dead, to the maternity wards where women were giving birth. He also noticed that the maternity wards had some absolutely horrible death rates. Women were better off giving birth on their own than going to the hospital.

After some time, and some more observation, he came up with a solution. It would be much better if physicians washed their hands somewhere between handling sick patients and newborn babies. Physicians, as a whole, said, "To hell with that guy." Some became even more stubborn about not washing. Semmelweis died impoverished in a mental institution.

Since his death, medical science realized that he was right. He was so simply and obviously right, and so universally scorned, that he became the namesake of the Semmelweis Reflex. This is a name informally given to the rejection of a new idea or evidence simply because it's new. The reflex stems from people's unwillingness to shake up the customs they're used to — after all, no amount of evidence could ever be enough to make people do that.

This certainly happens, but is it really a reflex? Even Semmelweis's own case suggests that there's more to it than that. Semmelweis wasn't just asking doctors to do something new; he was saying that they'd actually been killing their patients. That had to be a bitter pill for doctors to swallow.

There was also the matter of reprisals for those who hadn't followed Semmelweis' directives once they were released. Medical lawsuits aren't new. A lot of pride and money were resting on Semmelweis being wrong.

Via Process Studies

North Carolina Official Fired After "The Daily Show" Appearance.

Oh!  I saw that segment on Daily Show.  This dude was loathesome.

There was this one part where Mandvi says "Right, the law isn't racist and you aren't a racist."

The guy makes a face and says "Well... some people have called me a bigot.  But one of my best friends..."

Mandvi winks at the camera after that one, because we all know what comes after that.  Then the dude proceded to blithely make a string of racist statements about 'lazy black people", how it's frowned upon to use the n-word (and uses the actual word) but that African Americans use it so why can't white people, how he posted a manip of Obama as a witch doctor on his facebook...  yeah.

Funny bit was Mandvi asking "You realize that we can hear you, right?"

Anyway, this dude was apparently enough of an embarrassment that:

NC GOP official fired after bragging voter ID law would ‘kick the Democrats’ butt’

A North Carolina Republican official has been fired from the state party executive board following an appearance on The Daily Show in which he boasted about the implications of the widely-criticized voting law recently enacted by the GOP-heavy state legislature, but he refuses to apologize for his remarks.

“There’s nothing I said that I would take back. So be it,” state GOP executive committee member Don Yelton said in an interview with the Asheville Citizen-Times published on Thursday. “The activity going on across the state today proves what I said is true. The Democrats are jumping on it like flies after honey.”

In the interview, which aired Wednesday night, Yelton tells Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi that the new voting law, which mandates voter identifications, the curtailing of early voting operations and does not allow college students to vote using their school ID, “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.” He also dismisses concerns that the law will particularly affect communities of color by saying, “If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”

The interview was quickly criticized by the state conference of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a statement on Thursday.

“I was disgusted, but not surprised, by Don Yelton’s arrogant remarks about North Carolina’s voter suppression law,” conference president Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II said in the ACLU’s statement. “This Republican executive committee member laid bare everything that we know politicians are trying to do through this legislation – which is to manipulate our voting laws, making it harder for certain communities to participate, in order to unfairly win elections. This shameful law is not about stopping voter fraud; it’s about stopping voting.”

According to WRAL-TV, Buncombe County GOP Chairman Henry Mitchell confirmed in a separate statement that Yelton had been asked to vacate his position and also called Yelton’s statements “offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party.”

“Let me make it very clear: Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon,” Mitchell’s statement read. “This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.”

Watch the interview that got Yelton in trouble, as aired Wednesday night on Comedy Central, below.

source has Daily Show video in question

I'm calling bullshit on the guy who fired him though. What the asshat said on TDS didn't err on the side of misrepresenting the purpose of pushing these laws. No, it deviated from talking point script by admitting the true purpose OUT LOUD.

How To Make A Ridiculous Show Work

From i09:

How To Make a Ridiculous TV Show Work

Sleepy Hollow is very possibly the most ludicrous show that has even been on TV.

It’s about the Headless Horseman being one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Ichabod Crane being sent to the present by his wife (who’s a witch) to stop the apocalypse… for starters.

This is completely absurd, and yet Sleepy Hollow is also one of the most entertaining shows on TV right now. Here’s the rules Sleepy Hollow and ridiculous shows are following to defeat your common sense.


Make your characters likeable.

First and foremost. Your show can be the silliest, dumbest thing on TV, but as long as people enjoy watching the characters, they’ll probably still stay tuned. The best example of this right now is indeed Sleepy Hollow, as Tom Mison’s delightfully bitchy Ichabod Crane is just wonderful to watch, no matter how absurd everything else is.


( Read more... )

Have the characters take the ridiculousness seriously and realistically.

You can get away with pretty much any plot as long as the viewers feel like the characters are responding to it like real people actually would. For many shows, that means a profound bafflement.  Real people would be boggled by these things, and to immediately brush them off is simply dumb. The flipside to this is that at a certain point, characters do need to accept the ridiculous of their situation, or they actually become stupid by ignoring their reality. Seeing is believing, and most humans, when faced with enough facts, will accept almost anything.   Realistic characters will understand that their situation is absurd, but they'll also admit it to themselves and then cope with it. This also means…



Don’t make your characters stupid.

The show may be ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean your characters have to be.( Read more... )

Play by the rules you’ve set.

Your show can be as completely insane as you want it to be. You want to take the legend of Sleepy Hollow and have the Headless Horseman be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and also there’s a demon named Moloch in charge who’s decided a small town in New York is ground zero for Armageddon? That’s completely fine. But once you establish what you’re working with, you’ve got to play by the rules you set, otherwise you break the covenant you have with the viewer. They’ve agreed to suspend their disbelief for your premise — there’s a little bit of wiggle room there — but something that directly contradicts what’s come before is a dealbreaker. For instance, as insane as Sleepy Hollow is, at no point are aliens going to be able to show up. A good example of a show that fucked this up is Alias; it was a very ridiculous — and fun — spy show that required a fair amount of disbelief, with ridiculous double-crosses, insane plans, and assassins modified to look like other people. But then Alias somehow became about zombies. Not that there can’t be shows about zombies, obviously, but you can’t throw them in season 4 of a non-supernatural show and expect people to keep watching.



PACING.

Perhaps even more important that having likable characters is pacing. Lethargy is death to the ridiculous show, because any lulls give the viewers time to realize what they’re watching is kind of dumb. Sleepy Hollow avoids introspection of its completely ludicrous plot by keeping the mysteries and action coming continually.( Read more... )

Don’t focus on unnecessary shit.

I know you have a large cast and you feel compelled for them all to have something to do every episode. I know that logistically, your star can’t appear in every scene of every show without committing suicide from overwork. But if you can’t tie a subplot back to the main story — or at least use it to explore the setting of the show — you need to cut it. Not to pick on Grimm again, but half of Juliette’s scenes last season could have been cut without losing anything. Not that it’s a scifi show, but Dexter was horrible at this — think of all the time spent with LaGuerta’s troubles, or Quinn, or, most useless of all, Masuka and his daughter. None of those scenes mattered at all to Dexter, the character or the show. They went nowhere, and never did anything but waste time. Some shows can make these scenes work by simply exploring the other characters, but those characters need to be likable and interesting. Agents of SHIELD’s non-Agent Coulson people are getting there, but for now, when the team isn’t advancing the episode’s plot or Clark Gregg isn’t on screen, viewers are more likely looking at their watches than the screen.




When in doubt, go crazier.

People watch ridiculous shows because they’re fun, and the more ridiculous they get, the more fun they are. Whether you’re planning a show — “The Headless Horseman is actually Death!” — or in the middle of it — “The lost colony of Roanoke moved to upstate New York into some kind of weird dimensional pocket and also they have the plague because of Pestilence!” — there’s no downside to going balls out crazy. Again, you can’t break the fundamental rules of the show, but as long as you don’t break your initial deal with the audience, you’re gold. As problematic as Lost’s ending was for some, this is exactly kept people watching for five full seasons without ever practically explaining anything sufficiently. Polar bear! Smoke monster! Hatch! Dharma Initiative! Frozen Donkey Wheel!  And so on and so forth. Whatever you think about Lost now, it was thrilling to watch each new bit of weirdness get revealed, and it kept people watching until the end.