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28 November 2018 at 15:38 #66000
You hire writers on the strength of the story they’re pitching and the commitment they bring to that idea rather than filling quotas.
Sounds great. Would be wonderful. Doesn’t work in practice.
Mainly because we tend to pick ‘people like us’, and then rationalise that they pitched the stronger story/played the best/were the best candidate. Meantime, the people who aren’t like us are struggling to gain as much experience as the ‘people like us’ – so while their talent is the same, their experience isn’t.
This came up recently in my area because a person at a higher management level, to his eternal credit, realised that while he was utterly committed to ‘best person for the job, regardless of colour, gender preference, school, etc’ – he was somehow managing to appoint white public schoolboys. So he got someone to look into it. It’s called ‘unconscious bias.’
One method of combating it is to specifically say ‘I will cast a woman as the Doctor, I will accept the best pitch by an Asian writer and the best pitch by a Black writer and I will ensure that I hire at least two women directors.’
Oh, and – @pedant gets to refer to “pustulant sore on the arsehole of the universe”, “Shitstain” and ‘wailing fanboys’ without comment and I get my wrist slapped for ‘Shouty Little Boys’? What IS that?
28 November 2018 at 13:37 #65997Yup, ‘we’re more than our clothes’ might be the message. I’m firmly in the ‘there’s a reason for not changing the costumes’ camp – I just don’t know what the reason is.
But then, isn’t that what we’re all here for? The only problem with ‘hologram costumes which didn’t work on King James (VI and I)’ is that it’s a bit too tame for our strapline. 😀
28 November 2018 at 13:30 #65996The psychic paper works on me too. When I look at it, I see the words “Plot Device” printed in bold lettering. I find it a bit clunky.
That’s because it IS a plot device. It’s just as much a plot device as the Star Trek transporter, which was created to save the writers having to take the Away Team down to each new planet by shuttle. Like the Star Trek transporter, it’s a plot device to speed up the action, so we don’t have to waste time on the mechanics. If we still had four episodes per story, we could spend time on the mechanics of the Doctor getting people to trust him – but we don’t.
In story, we can presume that the Doctor’s found it somewhere and realised how useful it was, or alternatively invented it because he was sick to death of arriving on a spaceship or a planet and being threatened with instant execution.
28 November 2018 at 13:20 #65993@pedant
Good point. I think the answer is that he may have made it an issue with the line about Team TARDIS meaning to turn up at the coronation of Elizabeth I. Because the line really wasn’t necessary, and points up that the team should be in period costume.I suppose it could be an accidental leftover from the original script, put in to explain why Team TARDIS is fetchingly attired in a selection of Tudor bonnets and ruffs. But that still implies a deliberate decision to instead keep Team TARDIS in modern costume, and it does beg the question of why they didn’t ADR the line to make it, say, Elizabeth II’s coronation. Given the speed of TV production an unchanged line could be one of those slight goofs that slip through somehow, but it does feel like – at some point – there was a conscious decision to NOT go period.
Re: gurning. Yup, that was me. I did say it was okay – the Smith Doctor could have powered entire substations with his windmilling arms and the Tennant Doctor wasn’t exactly Doctor Stoneface, either. It’s more a note: it seems to be part of her characterisation and she seems to be using it in an almost childlike way. This seems to be a very young Doctor, in contrast to Smith’s ‘old man in a young body’.
27 November 2018 at 22:50 #65973I just found it hard to accept that her extremely irregular actions would have escaped official notice for so long, even in darkest Lancashire.
Except that they hadn’t, because the King himself had turned up. 🙂
I do get what you’re saying, because I’ve had times when a lack of accuracy has ruined a book or programme for me – but in this case, I think we were given enough signals that this wasn’t meant to be one of the historically accurate episodes. For me, the absurd death rate was one of those signals – thirty five dead in one village on the say-so of a local landowner who wasn’t even a magistrate? No way.
At the very least one of the villagers would have fled to relatives or friends, possibly making a complaint to the magistrate in that area. Even witches were entitled to a trial, after all.
27 November 2018 at 13:04 #65959Hi, @craig
Spammer on the BBC Approved Spoilers forum. @blair2019 is the ID.
27 November 2018 at 12:14 #65958The alt-right and the alt-left are two cheeks of the same arse (or ARSE) when it comes to playing the ‘Twitter pile-on’ game. And misogyny can be found in both of them.
In fact, there are some writers who work in the wider Whoniverse who are a) Whovians b) right of centre and c) even voted Brexit. 😀 Which is how it should be – writing Who can be political, but it shouldn’t be party political. The writers should be kicking shit out of my assumptions, and @jimthefish‘s assumptions and all our assumptions (though probably not in the same episode). The best way to do that is to make sure you’re deliberately commissioning writers you don’t agree with politically – otherwise unconscious bias kicks in and you start selecting ‘people like me’.
I get the impression that Chibnall has been doing that – Kerblam! was certainly a more comfortable episode for the right-of-centre than the left-of-centre. Getting people talking about stuff like that is good. Is it ‘The System’, or was the young, entitled, highly educated Definitely Not Momentum Honest Charlie the real problem? Or, as Miapatrick said elsewhere (I won’t at her, as I don’t know if she reads the BBC Spoilers) – did offering people loads of low skilled wage-slave level jobs in fact delay the discovery that not needing to work can be an escape?
But, as @pedant says, YouTube and Twitter both push the combative style rather than the sitting down and having a discussion about politics style. Which means that Twitter has morphed from a lovely, funny, sociable place for people to chat – into a cesspool.
And what we’ve got at the moment with the fandom is all the little white boys who never grew up complaining that their show is no longer about them. Never mind the ‘unconscious bias’ thing, this lot are flat-out biased, and they’re not interested in being told how wrong they are. It’s not the main fandom; you can see on Twitter how many people love the Whittaker Doctor, enjoy the shows and are really having a great time. But they’re being shouted out by the Shouty Little Boys
The new scarf is terrific and really suits both costume and actor – apparently it’s a Paul Smith design, ‘Rainbow Edged Scarf’ and could technically have turned up in a charity shop if anyone wanted to give away a £64 Paul Smith scarf. For some reason it’s out of stock at the moment. I can’t think why.:)
But my first thought on seeing it is that it’s both a deliberate callback to the Tom Baker Doctor, and a statement that ‘We’ve moved on since then’. So, @thane16, it’s almost a ‘You want a war? You won’t win – because we’re Doctor Who, and we’re not backing down.’
27 November 2018 at 10:51 #65956The Doctor could apparently easily keep them in contact by jazzing up their phones, but for some reason has chosen not to.
That’s because mobile phones are a plot killer. From the days of Star Trek onwards, when practically the first thing every writer would do was have Kirk’s communicator damaged or stolen. Killer of Plots – you don’t want Yaz, for example, to whip out her mobile at a tense moment and ask the Doctor to come rescue her or can everyone come over to the forest when you need them to be discovering the axe. 🙂
In-story, I’d suggest that the Doctor’s experience with lending Elvis a mobile and discovering that he’d lent it to Frank Sinatra has rather put her off letting the things outside the TARDIS. We already know this Doctor is a bit more cautious about interfering with the past than she’s been for many a century.
I was annoyed at the psychic paper, which continues to seem just an easy out for the writers,
That is exactly what it is, because AG Who has only one or two episodes. In BG Who you could afford to spend an episode with the Doctor slowly establishing his authority – in AG Who you can’t, and the Psychic Paper handles the situation with aplomb.
It’s also a versatile plot-device, because it’s well established that it doesn’t always work. It overloads when the Doctor tries a ‘lie too big’, some people can spot that it’s a fake, and now it seems that some people can partially see through it. That is, King James of the double numbers knew something was wrong with a woman being Witchfinder General, but couldn’t quite see through the psychic lie. So he translated it into Witchfinder’s Assistant.
I don’t have any historical knowledge to know how he might have realistically behaved
I doubt he was as camp as Alan Cumming, because very few people can be as entertainingly camp as Alan Cumming in full flow. But there are certainly records showing that it was completely obvious to everyone that he was homosexual (we’d probably say bisexual today). Given that Alan Cumming has to establish this in less than fifty minutes of screen time, translating it into modern ‘camp’ was a pretty good acting decision.
I think I’ve said upscreen why the Lady of the Manor might have taken an axe to the tree herself – it was ‘sacred’ and no-one else would dare. It was also her act of defiance against the grandmother who’d brought her up (there are faint hints of that resentment). Plotwise – she has to, because it’s the Inciting Incident. If somebody else had chopped the tree down, someone else would have got infected (and Becca wouldn’t) and the entire plot would have been seen flying off into the distance as it blew apart.
I agree that the ending was rushed. Look, if we want new writers to come into Doctor Who, people with new stories to tell, we have to allow for them to make errors of timing or set up on their first scripts. I understand that Russell T. Davies had to do massive script edits on almost every episode of AG Series 1 – because at that point, all his writers were effectively new writers. Steven Moffat had a much easier job, because by then he had a core of writers who’d written RTD episodes.
But Chibnall has (bravely) decided he’s going to expand the pool, bring new voices in, try new things. We are going to get things like ‘Drat! I’ve spent 42 minutes setting up the alien menace and now only have 8 minutes for the Doctor to find out who they are and send them back under Pendle Hill!’
We can live with that. It’s happened in a number of other episodes, in both the RTD and Moffat eras.
@nerys
This episode seems to be a ‘Marmite’ episode. Online, there seems to be a clear division between people who really enjoyed it and people who thought it was awful.27 November 2018 at 10:13 #65955I would class it as ‘people wanting something to moan about,’ and I suspect that in some cases, it definitely is. One poster on T’Other Place was, for example, insisting that it was an example of ‘lazy writing’ even when I’d pointed out that the decision to NOT dress Team TARDIS in period costume had to get past the Director, the Costume Designer, the Producers – and probably every member of the crew.
But I think it was also that this episode is the first one where the decision to keep Team TARDIS in modern clothes throughout has really been noticeable. Previous TARDIS crews (and Doctors) have dressed for the period if they know in advance they’re going to Georgian London, or Victorian England – and this lot knew they were off to see Elizabeth I’s coronation. It’s not like the Tennant Doctor trying to look alien so he’d flush out the Zygons. And I don’t think it would have broken the budget to order four more costumes from Angels.
Given that most actors love dressing up and getting paid for it, I don’t think the actors would have objected that much. You’d need to pick a costume for the Doctor that could survive a dip in that semi-frozen pond (those poor actors! Apparently it was snowing!), but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
They never have yet changed out of modern dress. So far, we haven’t had an explanation. Is that because Chibnall wants us to speculate, or has a line been cut?
26 November 2018 at 23:52 #65940Mist Over Pendle is a brilliant novel.
I understand there have been quite a few local jokes over the episode. My favourite is the comment by Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership that there are NO mud aliens beneath the hill – followed by a number of replies along the lines of ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’
My second favourite was the laconic ‘Well, that explains Burnley.’ 🙂
Yes, some things can blow suspension of belief out of the water. But I argued in a couple of posts at T’other place that the writer signposted the fictional nature of the story. Graham clearly says that he’s been on the Pendle Witches Tour, and that a village where thirty five people were murdered out of hand would have been mentioned. Then he adds that he’s never heard the name. He’s practically waving a big flag, especially if you know how famous the Pendle Witch Trials were with ‘only’ ten convictions.
There’s something going on with the clothes. I think it’s been most noticeable in this one because Rosa was close enough to our time that Team TARDIS’s clothes might have passed. In Demons of the Punjab, Team TARDIS might have been seen as ‘weird Britishers’. But when you plonk them down in Jacobean England and they still haven’t changed their clothes, then it starts to feel like some kind of explanation has either been cut or is turning up later. They have never changed their clothes to fit in. Chibnall’s doing it on purpose.
Becca explaining the significance of the ducking stool pretty well explained the odd aspect of the ‘witch trial by ordeal’. She’s not testing for witches, she’s shutting people up. That’s why she wants them drowned.
As for James VI and I – I’ve mentioned above why I think the decision was to make him the comic relief. Personally, I mentally junked any real pretension to historical accuracy when James VI and I, Secret Witchfinder first appeared. I’m not sure he even visited Lancashire. 😀
P.S A few people have noted that James spotted the weird clothes. It was established in Time of the Doctor that some people can ‘see through’ holograms, or that they can be wrongly set so that only some people see them. I wonder if, since Team TARDIS were heading for the coronation of Elizabeth I, they’d set the holograms for the wrong monarch?
Alternatively, it could be something along the lines of the Shakespeare Code, where Shakespeare can’t be fooled by the Psychic Paper. James wouldn’t have been at that level of genius, but he certainly translates ‘Witchfinder General’ into ‘Witchfinder General’s Assistant’.
26 November 2018 at 18:36 #65935Okay, I’ve now watched this again. Broadly, this series has had six episodes out of eight that I actively wanted to watch again – the two that I didn’t were The Ghost Monument and Anarchids in the UK.
This was one of the ‘ooh, I want to rewatch now‘ episodes. It fits nicely into the developing ‘the most dangerous monster is ourselves’ theme. Becca manages to kill thirty six people, all because she was self-centred enough to chop down a ‘sacred’ tree that was ruining her view. I think a few people online have enquired why the Lady of the Manor would take an axe to the tree herself – possibly the implication the director or the writer wanted was that no one else would have had the sheer bloody minded hubris to chop the thing down.
And, also, it would have ruined the entire plot if she’d had her minions do it. 🙂
But having got herself infected by alien goop, she then naturally translates this into the world view she understands – Satan’s influence. The problem with both Becca and King James (VI and I) is that they correctly identify something evil, then proceed to externalise it. All will be well as long as they get rid of those nasty witches, those minions of Satan. The evil is not in them, oh no. It’s outside them and in the outsiders.
It’s a bit like the Mitchell and Webb sketch: ‘Are we the baddies?’ Only instead of wearing skulls on their hats, Becca and James are torturing people, drowning them and hanging them. Yup, they’re the baddies. Becca has a moment of self-realisation before death – she is the real witch. But James survives to learn from this.
The reason King James (whether VI or I) is played more sympathetically is probably that – as the script points out – it would have been pretty darn difficult for him not to have been as paranoid as all heck. He really did grow up effectively orphaned, surrounded by the most vicious court intrigue, bedevilled (as he must have seen it) by plotting, murderous courtiers.
But I reckon there’s another reason for casting Alan Cumming and then the director letting him chew so much scenery it’s a wonder there’s any interior scenery left at all. I really don’t get the internet hate this episode is getting (or rather, I suspect I do) because this is a good, solid, old fashioned scary Who script. And if they hadn’t let Alan Cumming play James as so camp he could have provided tents for both the Scottish AND English armies, this episode would have been as dark and scary as Hell itself.
And we’re wanting Who to scare kids behind the sofa and give them nightmares, not traumatise them for life. There’s always that fine line that Doctor Who has to tread – scary, but not traumatising. Scary enough that an eight year old should be watching with their parents/carers, but not so scary that those caregivers can’t comfort the child.
But it’s a scary theme. Evil is externalised, good people are accused because their accusers don’t want to be next, ‘justice’ is a catch-22 situation whereby the innocent are drowned and the surviving ‘guilty’ hanged. Being good is no defence, ‘stand up to the bully’ is useless, because we’re in a world where the bully has the power to kill you.
And the Doctor, who kids rely on to protect them through the story, is being downgraded, denigrated and ultimately nearly murdered herself. Not because she’s The Doctor, which is the normal reason for her getting into trouble. But because she’s a woman trying to take charge. Not only is she not allowed to do that, the conditions of the time allow people to ‘put her in her place’ (James VI and I), ‘shut her up’ (Becca spells out what the ducking stool is for), and finally threaten not just her life, but the lives of her friends (accusations of witchcraft).
Is this sounding familiar at all? Anyone like to check out the Internet hate for the Whittaker Doctor – especially for this episode? Ooh, the evil social justice warriors, suggesting that a woman can possibly play the Doctor. Wouldn’t it have been better if Bradley Walsh had got the role?
Sorry, almost-entirely-guys. In case you didn’t notice, the hat’s been passed to the woman.
Thankfully, in the middle of these scary and serious themes, we have comedy King James, busily providing the light relief as he tries to simultaneously play secret witch hunter, hit on Ryan and protect his subjects, even as he fails to notice the big silver skull on his – well, probably on his pricker. 🙂
Jodie Whittaker seems to have decided that the Whittaker Doctor is a gurner. Which is fine, truthfully, because Matt Smith seems to have decided very early on that the Smith Doctor couldn’t talk without waving his arms around wildly and by the end of his run they were making jokes about it. She also seems to have gone for a very ‘young’ feel – appropriate for a Doctor who’s at the beginning of a new cycle. If we see the Capaldi Doctor as the last of the male Doctors, then the Whittaker Doctor is a new beginning – and that probably accounts for the almost childlike way that the Whittaker Doctor expresses every emotion in her facial expression. It can be disconcerting – we’ve got used over the After Gap period to Doctors who are suffering from PTSD. This new, female body seems to be – really new. As if the angst of the Capaldi Doctor’s ‘Am I a Good Man’ was the final outpouring and working through of the guilt from the Time War, and the ‘now I can start again’ was symbolised by the new start of a female body.
And a new style. S/He’s tried being a hero. He’s tried being a warrior. He’s questioned whether he’s a ‘good man’. Be a Doctor?
Perhaps. But as we see in this episode, even a Doctor can’t always defeat evil by themselves. Sometimes standing up to the bully by ourselves just makes things worse. We need to wait (Yaz), to accept that we’re going to have to play to someone else’s prejudices (Graham), to just listen sympathetically (Ryan) and to let other people help us (the Doctor).
Team TARDIS. A very flat structure, says Graham. They each have their own skills. Which we really see here, with all of them not just assisting – I don’t think the Doctor could have succeeded without Team TARDIS, and their willingness to each pull their weight.
Of all the people the Doctor has learnt to be, ‘team-mate’ is probably the most difficult. S/He’s always been the Captain of the TARDIS. The Leader. The Time Lord, galloping in on his white horse. And now she’s a woman, and she’s going to go into places where people simply won’t accept that she can be any of those things.
Which means, instead of always insisting that HE is the one who protects HIS companions, SHE may find that it’s HER companions who need to protect HER.
A very thought provoking episode. It’s not just tentacles rising up from the mud. 🙂
25 November 2018 at 21:09 #6592225 November 2018 at 19:52 #65917They got the hanging right! They got witches in England being hanged right!
@pedant I agree that Alan Cummings’ James VI and I was one of the highlights. But there were so many highlights. The Doctor being ducked as a witch was one of those things that was just going to happen when she regenerated as female, the monsters were suitably monstrous, and the fact that it was not a genuine historical episode was signposted. 🙂
Oh, and we were reminded that the Doctor spent some time learning escapology from Houdini (and can hold her breath much longer than a human). Basically, what’s not to love?
I also thought that Whittaker really came into her own in this, and the ‘Bradley Walsh should be The Doctor’ types suitably chastised.
19 November 2018 at 19:21 #65787Something else no-one so far seems to have commented on – we’re now up to three deaths where the Doctor accepted the need to be responsible for the emotional clean up. In one series.
Grace, where she attended the funeral. Standing at the back and not joining in, but there. She also supported Ryan before the funeral itself. Then the General, where she not only attends the funeral, she joins in. In this episode, when Yaz wants to be the one to tell Dan’s daughter how her Dad died, she agrees that it needs to be done. We don’t see her taking Yaz there, but we don’t have to.
I really am getting the feeling that Chibnall’s putting in a very important piece of character development for the Doctor – moving the character away from refusing to accept death and towards accepting it as a part of life. No longer flying off in (his) little blue box.
For that matter, I think the marriage scene in Demons of the Punjab may be connected as well. A few people have remarked how jarring it is that the Doctor talks about love as the most powerful force in the universe when she knows Prem will die in a few hours. I’m not quite sure how, yet, but I think it’s connected to her sudden willingness to attend funerals, which we haven’t seen the Doctor do since the Time War.
19 November 2018 at 18:54 #65786Yes, I agree absolutely about Charlie. This was no union man, concerned about keeping humans in the workforce. He was, if you like, a ‘Human Rights’ terrorist. Kid brother to the mass murdering racist in Rosa.
I agree that The System was completely wrong to kill Kira in order to get Charlie to see that what he was doing was wrong, but we’re back to utilitarian ethics again. What sort of ethics will a machine have? Well, if killing one person saves several thousand, surely that’s ‘good’, right? The maths is right. Um. Errr … Doctor, help!
19 November 2018 at 18:45 #65785this incarnation seems to be in no way affected by her previous experiences prior to this story
Quite. Which is, in itself, a stonking great clue – because the delivery package itself refers to her previous incarnations and she mentions another event later.
And yet, her reaction to the Kerblam man is ‘Yippee, this is a package and there’s a cute jingle,’ and her reaction at the end, when Kerblam has nearly been destroyed, is one of sadness. Furthermore, we’re told that she’s bought stuff from them. So one clue that Kerblam is generally seen as a ‘good’ company is the Doctor’s happy reaction to it.
Other stonking great clues that this is not in fact an Evil Corporate Entity (TM) as in Oxygen is the break room being a lovely artificial park and the reprimands being given in (admittedly creepy robot) positive way. Social interaction is good, but keep it to the break room rather than letting it slow down your work.
I think at the moment we’re rather over-programmed to think of corporations as bad things. You could go into the way the current system is set up, with the board legally obliged (at least in the US) to maximise profits for shareholders. But as @juniperfish reminded us, socially/employee aware companies are a matter of historical record. No reason a ‘Cadbury’ style delivery company can’t be set up in some other star system. Required to include humans in the workforce? Fine, their jobs may be dull and boring, but let’s make sure they’re reasonably paid, have good break facilities, don’t feel they need to give birth in the toilet, etc, etc.
The impression I got was that Dan didn’t value his work as much as he valued being of value, so to speak. Being paid enabled him to support his daughter’s education, and he valued that. Being a poster boy for Kerblam showed his work (if dull) was appreciated, and he valued that. Similarly, sweet little Kira did value her work – because she could see that it was useful. Dull for her, but fun for the kids who were going to received the packaged presents.
I agree that this bit was rather confusing, but the idea that everyone should have exciting and fulfilling work is a bit problematic, so it may simply be that the writer was trying to work through the problem himself and didn’t quite come up with an answer by the time the script had to be turned in. Currently a very large number of people are primarily interested in their job because it pays for things their kids need – and they can and do work in a huge, boring dispatching centre to provide for their kids.
18 November 2018 at 23:58 #65745I think they’ve said that the walls of the TARDIS set are movable – so I hope they move them. This set really doesn’t seem to be working; for one thing there isn’t anything for the actors who aren’t Jodie Whittaker to do apart from hang around the console and try not to get a crystal up their backside. I noticed the director last week trying to vary things with a shot from above, but this really does seem like the designer thought about it from the point of view of the Doctor flying the TARDIS. And forgot that they do an awful lot of exposition in the TARDIS.
The double levels of the Pickwoad sets, plus the varied seating, meant the actors and directors could change levels, fling themselves into a chair, show an explosion by swinging on the railings – lots of stuff. They looked like great sets to act in. The Eccleston/Tennant TARDIS didn’t have the double levels, but it did have seating, railing, props.
This doesn’t seem to have anything apart from the walls (which look fine, but it’s really hard to acto off a wall) and the console.
Oh, and I’m not a bubble wrap popper either. I’d have a collection of tiny explosive bombs in my cupboard…
18 November 2018 at 23:41 #65743The economic history of the Industrial Revolution isn’t my specialist period, but I will say one thing. Agriculture is, generally, over-romanticised. My great-grandfather had a smallholding in the hills; it’s not something I’d ever want to do.
The most recent industrial revolution is in China; it’s noticeable how many agricultural workers were desperate to go to the terrible working conditions, long hours and separation from their families that was involved in factory work – because they were already working those kind of hours anyway, and the money was a lot better. China tried to control things with internal passports – didn’t work.
Farmwork can easily be eighteen hours a day, having a cow bite you can be as bad as any industrial accident, and you have to feed the animals every single day. Compared to that, sixteen hours a day (and getting paid every single week rather than seasonally), and a day off every week doesn’t sound so bad.
18 November 2018 at 23:28 #65741Politically, for me, this one pulled its punches in a way Rosa and Demons in the Punjab did not.
I actually think it did something very daring: it chose not to make the obvious critique. Writers and artists, at the moment, tend to be left of centre – as you say, this particular episode looks conservative compared to previous Who takes on this topic. Which is probably why T’Other Place appears to be full of highly entitled vitriol right now. 🙂 And it may possibly be why you two fishies are feeling so uncomfortable, because (as Juniperfish has spotted) this week it’s those left-of-centre assumptions that are being opened up for discussion. 😀
But it isn’t small c conservative – the main question which is very much one that is being asked this series. Namely, is the problem racism, nationalism, capitalism, pick-your-ism? Or is the problem us? Because whatever the problem, the real problem is often someone who picks their ideology (capitalism, human employment, nationalism, racism) over human life. Is the problem the system? Or is the problem us? And that’s what the Doctor comments on. Our tendency to blame the system; juxtaposed against other episodes where the system is, absolutely is, unjust – and we have to fight against it.
This is an episode I really want to watch again, because every time the writer came up against a standard Who trope (evil robots, oppressed employees, evil management, uncaring corporate entities – I’m sure there’s a couple of others) he seemed to deliberately reverse it.
The system is not uncaring, not unaware that there’s a real problem, genuinely wants to sort it out. And that very idea is making people feel really, really uncomfortable.
Interesting episode. 🙂
18 November 2018 at 22:25 #65736Charlie’s another fanatic. We’re racking up quite a lot of fanatics so far, with often very different beliefs – some of them reasonable, some not.
But the point I picked up was that Charlie wasn’t a Luddite as such, because he wasn’t really one of the warehouse workers who were doing jobs that could have been perfectly well done by a machine. He was, by the sound of it, a highly educated middle class person who could easily have been in a non-automated job.
Likewise the middle managers being nice (or at least, decent enough to try and work out why some have gone missing, which isn’t the same as nice) is given away by the backstories of the employees – who end up getting killed because Charlie messed with the system programming. And, in fact, the ‘Head of People’ title, rather than ‘Head of Human Resources’, even if Judy Maddox does keep having to remind herself that the employees are people.
Given the huge numbers of unemployed on the parent planet, plus the fact that the jobs ‘reserved’ for humans are largely unskilled – the ‘People Manager’ has resorted to picking people who need a job – any job – for their self-esteem. The Dad who’s failed as a partner, but could feel that he was at least contributing to his daughter’s education. The orphan who can feel that she’s doing something that makes people happy. Etc.
The satire is that there’s nothing wrong with Amazon style warehouses as such – they provide needed jobs. What’s wrong is treating the employees in them as if they were machines and forgetting that they are people. The problem with places like Sports Direct is also that they don’t invest in automation, cutting up-front costs by getting large numbers of people on minimum wage to do a basically mechanical job.
The question is whether this highly automated world is going to be like the Industrial Revolution – temporary disruption that eventually ended up in a much higher standard of living for everyone – or a permanent state of mass unemployment.
@jimthefish – I think the point for the Doctor is that the corporate managers of Oxygen even costed their employees’ breath. The corporate managers of Kerblam! abide by the law that says they have to have a diverse workforce 🙂 and provide good facilities for their human employees. The personnel manager ensures that human employees receive little presents on their birthdays, for example. Try and imagine that one in the corporate nightmare of Oxygen.
We’re talking apples and oranges here – the irony is that it’s the highly automated, computerised system which treats its employees like human beings. What the Doctor is recognising is that whether work is hell or a means of giving people dignity depends on what we do with the system.
I think the thing I most like about this episode is the way that every expectation is reversed. Right down to the point that it was the system itself that was crying out for help.
17 November 2018 at 22:13 #65706The bit where you leave out the little knob thing in the middle isn’t half as annoying as the bit where you remember said little knob thing AND put the lid on and the madly vibrating blender still somehow makes the lid (and accompanying soup) fly upwards and then deposit said lid (and soup) all over the kitchen.
@blenkinsopthebrave
Alas, BBC Studios have claimed copyright infringement and is blocked ‘in my country’. So there.17 November 2018 at 17:03 #65700I know the feeling. The medics have recently been staring suspiciously at a red/black mark on my toe – but so far, it looks like it’s on the toenail and can be expected to remove itself.
Hope the evil-mole removal goes well and that the resulting hole isn’t too big.
17 November 2018 at 16:39 #65699Yeah, the rumours were definitely 2019. The first series of a new producer, so far, has always taken longer in production time than subsequent series. Given that the post-production of later episodes can continue while the first episodes are being broadcast, I’d have expected pre-production to be starting around now if they were to make an autumn 2019 date.
The speculation is interesting – but if you’ve got a successful series on your hands, then rumours of ‘we’re thinking of leaving’ from star and producer can be seen as the opening shots in ‘we want some changes around here’. It’s a fairly standard negotiation tactic – made more powerful by their very success, and made even more powerful if Chibbers can say ‘I go, and my star goes with me’.
It’s perfectly possible that Chibbers is genuinely so unhappy that he’ll go after series 12 – after all, if we’ve been picking his scripts to pieces and examining every flaw, what do you think he’s been doing – but nothing is final until the announcement is made. 😀 Until then, I’d read it as ‘they want changes, and will go if they don’t get them.’
15 November 2018 at 20:48 #65666Did I offend someone with that question?
I can only refer you to the following dialogue from Time of Angels
THE DOCTOR: Er, no offence, Bishop.
OCTAVIAN: Quite a lot taken, if that’s all right, Doctor.Ratings were discussed in the On The Sofa thread. Short version – each episode to date has higher ratings than any series since 2012, or even earlier.
15 November 2018 at 19:06 #65658Sorry, @craig. Yes, I got a private message asking me to email her hotmail address.
15 November 2018 at 19:05 #65657@KevinWho
Love and Monsters is the lowest, at 76. An AI of 80 is fine – generally the BBC 1 average is around 81 – and I suspect the BBC is smart enough to realise that some respondents might be reacting to the perceived criticism of the good old British Empire, sun never sets, etc.
Apart from those two episodes, everything else is comfortably at 82 or 83.
15 November 2018 at 18:50 #65655We seem to have a new little friend, currently called Hariatta Hester. She works for the ‘united nation’. I’m not sure which nation is united. Certainly not ours, right now. 😈
15 November 2018 at 15:44 #65650Opinions can vary on whether The Doctor Falls should have been Capaldi’s swansong. Personally, I prefer regeneration dramas that don’t have me wondering if I should see my GP about some psychological counselling. Or whether I could borrow someone else’s anti-depressants. 😈
Of course, this is a personal view. 😀
As the end of the era of all-male Doctors, I think having the Capaldi Doctor meet the Bradley Doctor and work through his hatred of regeneration was a much better coda. As, indeed, was the hint of hope gained from the unexpected survival of Captain Lethbridge-Steward, rather than the despair of ‘even the people we rescue now are going to be turned into Cybermen later’.
But while Moffat gave rescuing the Christmas Special a valiant try, I think this may be Chibnall putting a good face on a choice he didn’t make. It’s not that the 2017 Christmas Special did spectacularly badly in the ratings compared to the other Capaldi Specials (it was in the BBC1 Top Ten for that week) – but even adding the regeneration made it barely more popular than the previous year.
If I were a BBC exec, I’d certainly be wondering if maybe there’s only so many exploding Christmas Tree monsters that can be done, and if moving it to New Year would free up the scripts and get the missing three or four million viewers back.
P.S. Not a spoiler, but rumours are going round Twitter that some of the crew have been putting a 2019 series on their CVs. Which suggests we’re in pre-production.
12 November 2018 at 23:54 #65597From George Sheard on Twitter:
Ep1: finalised at 10.96m – Highest Ratings for a series opener. Ep2: finalised at 9.00m, which are the highest ratings for Ep 2 since 2008. Then:
Ep3: 8.41m – Highest Ratings for Ep 3 since 2012
Ep4: 8.22m – Highest Ratings for Ep 4 since 2010
Ep5: 7.76m – Highest Ratings for Ep 5 since 2012Ep6 is still only on overnights, but was the second most popular programme on Sunday. And has lots of people bawling their eyes out on Twitter. 🙂
12 November 2018 at 18:07 #65585I think quite a few Sikh people have mentioned that – but it’s clear from Vinay Patel’s tweets that he knows about the Sikh experience of Partition, but decided he needed to concentrate on one cross-cultural pair of neighbours. Fair enough – you can’t do everything in 50 minutes.
I can imagine that Yaz would not have looked back. That the Doctor would not have looked back. Yaz has demonstrated before that (as a trained police officer) she’s perfectly aware when a situation is beyond her capacity to handle. But she is a trained police officer, and she chose that job because her instinct is always to try and intervene to keep the peace.
If she’d turned and look back, would she then have been able to continue walking away? Yet Prem was letting himself be killed, not only to save his beloved wife, but to save the children and grandchildren she’d have without him. In a very real way, he died to save her, Yaz, as well as Umbreen.
So I’d understand why an acting decision might be ‘they’d both walk away and not look back – because that’s the only way the Doctor and Yaz would be able to keep walking and let Prem’s sacrifice mean something.’
12 November 2018 at 12:43 #65570One which seems consistent is when each time the subject is being explained (eg 1950’s segregation; environmental issues or Partition) it feels to me like the Doctor is reading from the school’s syllabus.
Absolutely agree that Chris Chibnall needs to up his game on the infodumps. Because that’s what they feel like – and I would say that one area where Jodie Whittaker, the actor, is definitely struggling is those exposition/infodumps – because they’re not written in the style she’s developing.
It may sort itself out. Next series we’re going to have writers who’ve watched the Whittaker Doctor and have more experience of this iteration of The Doctor; the exposition may be better written for her style.
12 November 2018 at 10:54 #65565While we’re discussing Demons of the Punjab, can I just give a shout-out to another programme in the BBC’s Remembrance Day schedule – They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Whovian Peter Jackson.
He appeared in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, and I think he may have done some other stuff as well. 🙂
The project sounded slightly doubtful in advance – he’s used CGI to colourise the original archive footage, together with lip-reading techniques to work out what some of the people in the archive footage were saying. Then actors have revoiced their words.
But in fact, that colourised and dubbed footage has been worked into the documentary with great sensitivity. There’s no narrator – the narration is oral history recordings collated from the Imperial War Museum’s archives. The colourised footage is used for Western Front scenes, and it has been done in such a way that it simply feels like this is what the war reporters would have shot – would have wanted to have shot – if they’d had the technology available at the time.
It’s well worth watching; it can be distressing. Especially seeing the genuine footage of the real cost of the war – all those dead young men, without the distancing effect of black and white.
12 November 2018 at 10:28 #65564I got the definite impression that, while it was left open, Yaz’s Nani had indeed realised that her granddaughter had somehow managed to go back in time to the day of her wedding. That the conversation was in effect saying ‘do you want to talk about it?’, and Yaz acknowledging that she understood how painful it would be for her Nani to have that conversation.
I suppose that if Nani has never met Ryan or Graham, it’s possible she simply thinks that Yaz is very like that cousin who turned up – but if she has met any of Team TARDIS, it seems impossible that she wouldn’t have realised that they were that oddly assorted (for 1947 Punjab) group who turned up for her wedding. After all, while aliens don’t turn up in Sheffield, and some people still doubt they exist, the Whoniverse has enough experience of them for the obviously very smart Umbreen to realise that such weird goings on can and do happen.
12 November 2018 at 10:15 #65563I really, really get how you’re feeling – it might just be that Chibnall and the Whittaker Doctor simply aren’t your cup of tea, or it might be that the change from the direction of the Moffat years is so great that it’s going to take a series to get your head round. I’m sort of coming at it from the opposite direction, of course. Only time will tell (sorry!).
I will say that I feel a blog coming on, which for me is a good sign. Chibnall’s taking us in a very different direction, but it’s definitely Doctor Who. As a few people have already mentioned, Demons of the Punjab would have fitted perfectly well into a Verity Lambert Who directed by Waris Hussein. The difference is that in 1963, the events of Partition were so close that it’s unlikely that the BBC would have let them do it.
Okay, let’s talk about the ‘nervousness’, because I certainly spotted that last night. This is very much an episode I want to watch again, but I think what Whittaker’s going for might easily be confused with Jodie Whittaker, the actor, being nervous about her performance when it’s actually the Whittaker Doctor, as the Doctor, being nervous about herself.
Because one of the things that may be happening is that not only are we, the audience, being taken out of our comfort zones (cue Angry Virgins wailing about PC Gone Mad), but the Doctor is covering up that she’s way out of her comfort zone, in oh-so-many ways.
The Whittaker Doctor was really, really out of her comfort zone last night. She’s taken Yaz back to her own timeline because Yaz is considerably more sensible than Rose ever was, and she knows her well enough now to realise Yaz won’t (and doesn’t) try to divert time from its path.
But the Doctor herself has to be one of the girls, when she’s always been one of the boys. Then the aliens that she thinks are part of what you might call ‘comfort zone pattern’ – nasty aliens, here to assassinate some innocent human, leading to ‘The Doctor saves the day!’ – aren’t. They’ve moved on.
Then she has to officiate at a wedding, and talk about faith. The Doctor comes from a culture that hates religion, and she hates acknowledging that she, too, has ‘faith’ in intangible things. And she has to do this while knowing that this marriage is going to be destroyed in a few hours.
Then she, a rebel Time Lord, has to act like everything she hates about the Time Lords. Not interfere while terrible things are happening.
‘is this Doctorey enough? I think it’s Doctorey enough. Maybe it isn’t
Yeah. Except that this must be the question she’s asking herself throughout. Everything she knows about how to behave as ‘The Doctor’ is pretty much the wrong thing to do.
@kevinwho
Now we just stand around a lot while terrible things happen to other people.
Exactly! And it’s deliberate: it is an artistic choice being made. Vinay Patel chose to have those aliens be non-threatening, and Chris Chibnall approved it. It’s moved on from Rosa, where the Doctor can at least stop another alien from interfering, and moved to a point where the Doctor discovers what ‘don’t interfere’ really, really means.
It means walking away as a man is murdered. Because the alternative is worse.
11 November 2018 at 20:01 #65545Okay. Chris Chibnall may have a very different style in mind than Steven Moffat, but that’s the second story this series that’s had me in tears by the closing credits.
Wow. Especially the idea of a race of aliens who aren’t monsters, who are trying to honour the forgotten fallen. What a theme for Remembrance Day.
8 November 2018 at 23:56 #65502Yikes! What is it about BMW drivers?
And if he was going under 40 mph in a 60 mph zone, he must be the only BMW driver in the UK who drives under the speed limit.
Glad you at least found out the blood sugar is regulating. Hope you’re not too shaken up.
6 November 2018 at 10:28 #65441It’s the trolley thought experiment on a massive scale.
No, it’s not. IF the medics are volunteers – which was the impression I got; they knew what they were doing and they knew about the bomb – then it’s not utilitarian at all. Quite the opposite.
Utilitarianism in the Trolley Experiment style is seen in Torchwood: Children of Earth, where Jack has to consistently decide whether to sacrifice a small number of children to save a larger number. It’s utilitarianism, rather than another moral system, because the children concerned are never given the option to make their own choice. They’re simply tools of the adults. Sacrifices, if you like.
But in this particular story, the impression I got was that the medics (and later the General) willingly volunteer to risk their own lives in order to save a larger number of people.
To put it into trolley experiment terms, the people at the lever can see the people on the tracks – but someone has volunteered to see if can reach the smaller number of people in enough time to rescue them. The kicker is that if the volunteer can’t rescue them, they’re going to get squashed too…
So the person on the lever is making a choice between killing a larger number of people – or a smaller number of people – as in the trolley experiment – but knows that there was (and is) an attempt to rescue the smaller number, and that the volunteer rescuers tried and failed. They also know (because we’re told in the script) that the volunteer rescuers have done this before, and have rescued a lot of people from those tracks.
It’s not a utilitarian ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ decision, because this society is starting from a position of ‘we will try and save everyone, even if our volunteers die in the attempt.’ Yes, if the attempt fails, they have to make a similar decision to the trolley problem. But morally, they’re coming from a different place; they have set everything up so that it’s at least possible to rescue the small number of people.
This is why I don’t like the trolley experiment – it’s a fake experiment which does NOT give its participants any real choice. You have to murder someone. Now, how many people do you murder? Okay, what does that tell us about you?
In this case, nothing, because the moral agent was the person setting up the experiment. The participants can only choose between ‘lesser evil’ and ‘greater evil’. It’s also why I don’t like utilitarianism, because ‘greatest good of greatest number’ has led to some of the worst evils on our planet. 🙁
But in the Tsuranga Conundrum, the society that sends out the Tsuranga aren’t utilitarians, because they’re trying to rescue a small number of people knowing it creates a risk for the greater number. They can minimise the risk as much as they can – but they’re still going to send out the ambulance. The people who die for the ‘greater good’ are people who were either going to die anyway – the ambulance tried to save them, but failed – or people who volunteered.
Astos dies having made twenty seven successful runs. How many people did he save? The General dies having saved the survivors on the ship – and it’s implied she’s spent her military career defending her people. The Doctor’s impressed by her – the Doctor isn’t easily impressed by the military.
Ronan is the dark question in this script, because he seems to be treated as a machine that can be switched off rather than the self-aware person he clearly is – but even he seems to choose to sacrifice his job and his life (which depends on keeping the General alive) to save everyone else.
So it’s not utilitarianism. It’s an alternative ethical system, in which a hero chooses to sacrifice themselves to save others. I think the script shows signs of not having had quite enough time to finish it properly, but it’s got some good questions in it – especially because, at the beginning, the person who really wasn’t a hero, who was trying to sacrifice a lot of little victims for her own ‘greater good’ – was the Doctor herself.
🙂
5 November 2018 at 20:13 #65426Oh, and to add on to that: I vaguely thought I’d heard Tsuranga before. It’s a mix – or may be a mix – of Tsur/Tzur, which is Hebrew for ‘rock’ and the Maori Tauranga, which means ‘safe haven’. The Hebrew also has the meaning of ‘safety’ – the kind of rock you hide in, use as a natural fort. So a very good name for an ambulance ship
And Tzur’s metaphorical use is ‘salvation’, ‘being saved’ or sometimes ‘God’. Tzur Yizrael – the Rock of Israel.
5 November 2018 at 19:55 #65425“May the saints of all the stars and constellations bring you hope, as they guide you out of the dark and into the light, on this voyage and the next, and all the journeys still to come, for now and evermore….”
Yes, I had a feeling that the Whittaker Doctor being present at Grace’s funeral was significant. That was, as far as I know, the first time since the Time War that the Doctor hasn’t run away from his dead. The change from his to her; also a change from running to mourning. So at Grace’s funeral she was present, but not taking part. She was standing at the back of the church, she was supporting Ryan – but she didn’t take part in the liturgy. Why should she? It’s not her liturgy, and Time Lords make Prof. Dawkins look like a devout Anglican. 🙂
But she was there. She didn’t run away; didn’t leave it to others to inform the relatives, attended the funeral. She mourned the dead and acknowledged their life.
But now she’s moved on still further – to taking part in a liturgy that expresses hope. I wonder where we’re going next?
5 November 2018 at 19:44 #65423What was most interesting to me was that the ship could so easily be blown up remotely, and would be, to protect the main world.
Which connects with the idea that this is a century that’s used to terrifying bio-weapons capable of destroying entire fleets/planets. If you notice, the medical crew were fully aware of the possibility of being blown-up – and the three-strikes-and-you’re-out was a system that at least gave them a chance to sort the problem out before blowing them to kingdom come.
But if the choice is between bringing in a bioweapon (possibly via an innocent patient) or blowing the ship up, what are you going to do? Let any medical emergencies die because you don’t dare send out an ambulance ship? Rely on the medical staff’s iron willed ability to suicide if they have to, rather than risk the death of the planet?
Or have an ambulance ship with the minimal crew possible (the medics), a pre-programmed method of destruction, and make sure the crew are volunteers who know what the procedure is. They’ve got three goes to get any major problem sorted; after that the assumption has to be that the poor sods either weren’t able to solve it in time or (understandably) don’t want to suicide. So someone else has to set the bomb off for them.
5 November 2018 at 19:21 #65421@kevinwho
Yes, I get why you should feel that way – you’re interested in why individuals could be racists.However, as far as I can see, what Michelle Blackman was interested in – when she was writing Rosa – was the institutional racism that existed in Montgomery, Alabama.
Krasko, the cop, the waitress, the bus driver are racists, and nothing more. We aren’t invited to understand why human beings could make such inhuman choices.
Nope, we’re being asked to understand how there could be such a thing as an entire legal, political and social system that not only allows human beings to make such choices, but approves them. Provides police power to support those choices. Pushes those who do not approve (you mentioned George Washington) into making racist decisions themselves.
We’re not invited to understand why the cop, the waitress, the bus driver are racists because the reason they are racists is almost certainly that they were born and brought up in Montgomery, Alabama and have been socialised all their lives to be racists. That’s the system they were born into, and they are decent, law-abiding, productive members of an institutionally racist society. When the cop comes into the motel room, when the waitress tells Ryan and Yaz to leave, when the bus driver tells Rosa to move – they’re all upholding the norms of their society.
That’s the truly scary thing; more terrifying than any monster. They’re all just doing their job.
Throughout the script we discover that being a well-meaning non-racist white person is insufficient. The Doctor and Graham are told to get out of town, and have the police checking their motel room to see if they smuggled in the ‘mongrels’. The Doctor sits next to Rosa on the bus – and is told that she can’t, because Rosa will still have to move.
And Graham, who has a black step-grandson and who tries to protect Ryan throughout, is forced into the situation of being the white man that Rosa Parks was supposed to give up her seat to. The fact that he didn’t want the seat, would have been perfectly willing to stand, is irrelevant within this system. It forces compliance.
And that is institutional racism. And it’s really important that we recognise it when we see it.
4 November 2018 at 21:12 #65398Anyway, one of the links between the stories is genetically or physically modified creatures. In the first episode, the locator device is a bio-engineered creature. In the second, the entire planet is full of bio-weapons. In the third, the ‘villain’ has been modified to be unable to physically harm people. In the fourth, the spiders have been modified.
And tonight, the P’Ting is, I suspect, an escaped bio-weapon.
4 November 2018 at 21:08 #65397Russell T Davies wrote eight out of thirteen episodes in his first series of Doctor Who.
Steven Moffat wrote six out of thirteen episodes in his first series.It seems to be a ‘first series as Head Writer’ thing – presumably by the time the new Head Writer is into their second series, the writer’s room has a better idea of the tone required.
4 November 2018 at 21:01 #65396The latter mentioned Alvin Plantinga who my teacher was not happy about: (sorry ‘Pip) “as a theist he’s morally invested in the God Problem.”
Well, if your teacher was teaching Philosophy at the equivalent stage in the UK (A level – last two years of secondary school) he’d have to teach Plantinga, because he’s on the syllabus. And you’d lose marks if you didn’t include him in any essay on the ontological argument.
And God, Freedom and Evil is one of the Further Reading books. 😛
“Morally invested?” Wow. He’s supposed to be teaching you how to construct an argument and counter-arguments, not encouraging you to use ad hominems.
31 October 2018 at 23:41 #65299@thane16
You need an argument that leads to your conclusion.
Okay, so your argument is that you cannot establish the existence of God using rational argumentThe important thing is to define ‘establish’ – I’d guess that your teacher intends ‘Show (something) to be true or certain by determining the facts’ (OED). In everyday English, you’ve picked ‘you can’t prove that God exists by using rational arguments.’
It would be perfectly valid in most philosophy of religion courses to discuss the point that Reason is only one means of proving the existence of God – and if most religions (as they do) rely on Revelation and Experience, that certainly suggests that Reason is, in itself, going to be insufficient proof. It’s also perfectly valid to say that none of these arguments can stand alone: all of them really need supporting by other evidence.
Okay: the arguments you are trying to knock down are the Ontological. The big counter argument to the Ontological would be Kant – his argument was that ‘existence’ isn’t a predicate. If we say that dragons don’t exist, we aren’t saying that there are non-existent dragons in some other dimensions – we are saying that there’s no such things as dragons. A predicate, according to Kant, must be a genuine property. You should also bring in Bertrand Russell, because he discusses this as well. (admittedly, I find Russell’s argument a bit on the circular side, but still).
Then look up Gottfried Frege, because he has some nice things to say about first order predicates (a thing’s nature) and second order predicates (a concept about a thing) and whether ‘existence’ is first or second order. There’s also Brian Davies, who discusses the use of ‘is’ and the way we use it to define – A Time Lord is a noble Gallifrayan – and to explain that something exists – There really is a Gallifreyan race in our universe.
You can see that the first use of ‘is’ defines something alright – but it’s defining something imaginary. It’s only the second usage (which isn’t defining anything) that claims Gallifreyans exist. So how can you argue from a definition – we can define God – to proof of existence?
On the arguments for God’s existence, make sure you use Alvin Plantinga, and Norman Malcolm.
Teleological: Kant (again). If there is order in the universe, how do we know that that apparent order isn’t a function of our own minds?
David Hume and John Stuart Mill: generally, even if we prove that the universe was designed, it doesn’t prove that it was, say, a omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god. Both argue that the existence of evil is evidence against this. Hume also suggests that since we have rather limited experience of the universe, how do we know only one God designed it – you might want to drag in the Big Bang at this point. Things have moved on since Hume. 🙂The various Darwinian arguments are also popular, as the neo-darwinian suggestion is that evolution does the ‘design’ work.
The pro teleological arguments come from Aquinas (of course), Paley, Swinburne. F.R. Tennant’s Anthropic Principle – the mathematical chance of conditions existing for life is miniscule. He also uses the Aesthetic argument – if natural selection explains everything, what ‘purpose’ does our appreciation of art, music, or Doctor Who serve? 🙂
Cosmological: Hume again. Why does the universe have to have a beginning (again, Big Bang. How do we know that was the real start?). Even if it did, why does it need a cause?
Again, Russell also uses this argument: just because everything we can see has a cause, it doesn’t mean that the universe can’t just have always been there.The Steady-State theory is generally rejected nowadays, but you could certainly bring it in, as it relates to Russell and Hume.
Kant: we’re arguing outside our experience. God, if He exists, is outside our space-time experience, so we can’t know what God created. Supported by the idea that we have no idea, what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang. Well, unless you watch The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit.
Hope this is helpful. I’ve mostly tried to give suggestions rather than doing your homework for you
30 October 2018 at 23:09 #65248Also: at any one time the UK has on hand between 4 and 7 days food.
Yeah, that’s because pretty well every first world country only has between three and seven days food in its warehouses. We’re not going to be eating rats, you know, if we had to fall back on our own food production. We would be willing to kill for a banana if, for some mysterious reason, we had to become completely self-sufficient – but they don’t come from the EU anyway.
Broccoli would be in short supply. Meat – we produce about 80% of our own meat. We’d probably get really sick of potatoes. We are totally self-sufficient in potatoes. 🙂
If you want a fun article about our lack of self-sufficiency, as opposed to a fun fact, it’s here
30 October 2018 at 22:50 #65246So on that basis, do you think there’s merit in the argument that the Common Market *did* grow ; *did* transform, and that Europe and the UK (and indeed the world) have changed so much since 1963 that de Gaulle’s reasoning no longer applies?
I think de Gaulle’s reasoning still applies. Yes, the ‘maritime’ has changed, but the ‘exchanges’ (read finance) is still global. The economy is now more ‘services’ than ‘industry’, but it still isn’t very like a lot of Continental Europe. The habits and traditions are still quite distinct, and there is still that rather ‘centre of the universe’ feeling that you get on an island.
Essentially, if there are going to be strains and stresses in the EU, you’re probably going to see them first of all in the countries that are not ‘keeping pace’ – that have to make quite large changes to be able to converge with the rest of the EU. I don’t think historians in the future are going to see Brexit as an unexpected shock – there are fairly clear long term causes – though they might well speculate on what would have happened if the vote had been the other way.
If we’d had a referendum back in 2006 about approving the proposed EU Constitution, we might not be Brexiting now – because I think that would have vented a lot of the strains and stresses. Opinion polls were consistently reporting that over 50% of UK voters did NOT want an EU constitution. Maybe there’d have been more of a discussion about what type of European union the people who live in Europe want, rather than the type of European Union that the ‘movers and shakers’ wanted.
Or maybe not, because France and the Netherlands did get to reject the proposed Constitution – and instead of taking that as ‘please slow down’, the choice was to go forward with the Treaty of Lisbon. Since Treaties are Royal Prerogative, that meant that a referendum wasn’t required.
30 October 2018 at 20:30 #65226What I said was:
It’s the EU’s big fault – their instinct is to expand
What you replied was:
In the case of expansion, the UK was driving it.
To which my reply would be: ‘well, yes. That was kind of what we were doing from the start – even when we joined we were trying to expand the then EEC (by joining it).’
You’re making a fairly massive assumption, which is that when I say ‘the EU’s big fault is their instinct to expand’ I am not referring to the UK. The UK is, in case you haven’t noticed, part of the EU. That is, after all, what the whole Brexit thing is about? Wanting to leave an organisation we’re part of?
The EU’s big fault is its instinct to expand – and the UK is just as much a part of that blind optimism and papering over any obvious future problems as the other EU nations.
Leave voters didn’t even realise it was a UK proposal, so your scenario doesn’t arise. It really illustrates how sucked in your were by Leave lies.
No, it actually illustrates how you (and many on the Remain side) were and are still being sucked in. Sorry, but again, if you read what I said it included the wonderful phrase (about Remain)
went back to explaining the actual facts
So I actually said that the Leavers had got their facts wrong. The point I was making – and you keep making it for me – is that the Remain side, by and large, respond to people who are generalising madly (which was me, because at the point I posted I was at lunch and had to zip off that post fairly quickly) by correcting their facts.
And in doing that, they simply make things worse, because the exact facts aren’t the problem.
Let’s take that bloody bus. ‘We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead’.
As far as facts go, that particular slogan was definitely post-modern. No, we don’t send the EU £350 million a week. I don’t think we’ve ever sent the EU £350 million a week. Possibly in a technical, legalistic sense, if you look at it cross-eyed on a Thursday, we might be able to say that without rebates and the grants we receive back and adding on interest, we might get up to £350 million.
As a political trap though, I’m sorry, but Remain fell right smack into it. Because every time they explained on the doorstep or on TV that this figure was rubbish because the real figure is more like £250 million a week, or roughly £150 million if you count what the EU spends on and in the UK – guess what happened?
Ye Average Voter heard ‘£250 million a week’ and thought ‘Bloody Hell, that’s a lot of money’ and when told that the EU spends slightly less than a third on us anyway thought ‘Can’t we just cut out the middleman and pocket the rest?’ Remain might have been better off just handing out the Leave leaflets.
The exact facts were not the problem. The problem was a perceived, low-grade, continual irritation that a large number of people in the UK were being asked to make changes that they didn’t see the reason for, make adaptations that they didn’t want to make, paying taxes where they genuinely didn’t know what they were getting for the money – and generally were being taken in a direction they didn’t want to go in while being told that any complaints were stupid because they’d got their facts wrong.
Which is why I am more interested in the wholesale corruption of democracy that the law-breaking Leave campaigns wrought through foreign financing and misuse of illegally acquired data.
I’m not sure where the hilarity which is the Leave Campaign vs the Electoral Commission is up to this week, but last time I looked Leave were being informed that they’d broken the law because they’d followed the Electoral Commission’s written advice.
[Disclaimer: This is an exaggeration for the purposes of comedic effect.]
Personally, I am more concerned with the wholesale corruption of democracy that would follow when 17.4 million people were told that their votes were invalid because the losing side thought they were stupid. Yay, great we’ll have improved our economic standing and told those nasty foreign financiers (sorry, but which side is supposed to be the xenophobic one?) and evil data miners (aren’t we supposed to be full steam ahead on the Information Revolution?) where to go – but we’ll have completely stuffed up our Constitution. Because the voters will know their vote isn’t worth the ballot paper it’s written on – unless they make the ‘right’ vote. Still, I suppose it’s a small price to pay. Dunno what we’ll call the new thing. But it won’t be democracy.
Democracy means that losing side always thinks the winning side is stupid – but that we all accept the stupid, what kind of idiot would vote for /Brexit/No/Trump/insert whatever daft decision the voters made this month/ thing. Democracy includes the right to make stupid decisions.
Democracy includes the right to decide that what is working for approximately half the country – and the EU was working for what you might call the mobile professional class – is not working for the other half. And if half the country tells us that the status quo is not working for them, and vote for something they were told would be a disaster – we’re supposed to listen. Not tell them that they’re stupid, got their facts wrong, were sucked in by sinister foreign financiers with dodgy accents, and have generally been highly inconvenient to our wonderful selves.
Told you this would get angsty. 😀
30 October 2018 at 12:28 #65193Okay, now tell me what advantages to remaining in the EU were expounded by the Remain campaign.
Advantages, please. Not ‘disadvantages caused by leaving.’ Not ‘these facts aren’t quite the way they’ve been painted.’
Actual advantages used by the Remain side in the Referendum campaign. What was the positive view of the EU that they presented?
One of the reasons for Brexit is that the Remain side ran a bloody awful campaign – you’ve just given a classic example. The UK government wanted stronger regulation, the EU watered it down slightly. If you explain that to a Leave voter, their response is likely to be ‘why is the EU telling me which vacuum cleaner I can buy?’
If you say, ‘ah, well it’s really the UK government’ – the answer will be, ‘Yes, but if I don’t like what the UK government does I can write to my MP, vote Labour/Conservative, if necessary protest … what do I do if I don’t like what the EU does?’ If they were a bit more knowledgeable, they might point out that they had 8 MEPs and which one of them were they supposed to talk to? Pick one out of a hat?
It was at this point the Remain side activists, bless them, usually got a bit stuck and went back to explaining the actual facts, thus accidentally emphasising the very thing the Leavers were often genuinely unhappy about – that the EU has an awful lot of influence in our day-to-day lives, and it’s really, really unclear who the heck the average person in the street contacts or what they should do if they don’t like it.
This is the downside of insulating the EU from direct contact with voters (yes, the directly elected EU Parliament is doing sterling work in increasing its powers, but I think it was too late for the UK).
And it’s part of what I mean when I say we were trying to integrate a country with a very different system – and in the end, people didn’t want to go there. A large number really did just want a trading alliance, not something that impacts on stupid things like whether you can sell olive oil from a barrel.
30 October 2018 at 09:30 #65182Well the first problem is that Leavers and Remainers generally mean different things when they talk about ‘sovereignty’.
Continental Europe and the UK have very different histories when it comes to the formation of nations. Then there’s the legal systems, where England (specifically) has a system that’s based on different premises to most Continental European nations. Economics is on a rather different basis, as well.
This isn’t just my opinion – it was what De Gaulle was saying when he refused the UK entry to the then Common Market. Smart guy – he spotted that the UK was very, very different to the then member nations and integrating it was going to be a nightmare. It’s the EU’s big fault – their instinct is to expand, and they often expand with nations they really, really shouldn’t have allowed to join and then don’t think how on earth they’re going to integrate that ‘problem’ nation. Like, say, Greece and the entire Euro debacle.
So I would say that when most Leavers talk about ‘sovereignty’, they don’t mean a formal legal definition. Legally, the UK always had sovereignty, but often didn’t choose to disagree with things decided at a EU level They mean a sense that the UK-as-part-of-the-EU is heading in the direction of a more Continental European national, legal and economic system – and they don’t want to go there.
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