Monday, July 23, 2018

SJWho?

Or Why I stopped watching Doctor Who

I will confess to having been an avid Doctor Who Fan for much of my life. It was a wonderful premise of the maverick alien pootling about the universe in a Police Box battling demonic pepper pots and mechanical men with ear protectors. I know that it was rather ramshackle at times, the sets wobbled, you could spot plasma balls being passed off as vortex manipulators, and some storylines were on the bonkers side of loony, but it was a show I grew up with. There was Good and there was Evil and sometimes it wasn’t absolutely clear which was which, even with the Doctor at times. There were explosions and drama and death and tragedy as well as comedy and mystery and science.

However, I will not be watching the series again, for much the same reason why I left the CofE: they are changing the show to indoctrinate people with the current Cultural Marxism. The catalyst for me is the fact that the Doctor, despite having been played by twelve actors, is now to be played by an actress. That’s not the cause of my disenfranchisement, it’s a symptom of it. It has only been in the last few seasons that the notion that the sex of a Time Lord is interchangeable despite it being quite fixed for the major part of the series. There are ways in which a female Doctor could have been achieved quite reasonably and in ways that made sense, but it has clearly been introduced as a norm for the Doctor that biological sex is fluid. Yes, I know that the Doctor is a “shape-shifting alien” (yet, he isn’t – the evidence of the series is regeneration, not “shape-shifting”) and thus anything can happen in science fiction, but the mechanism for this change is pure political correctness.

I didn’t watch the last episode of the series because, by then, I had had enough. Apparently, they brought back the character of the Doctor’s first incarnation and gave him lines which were deliberately sexist in order to show him as a thing of the past. This doesn’t fit in regard to the idea that Time Lord Sex is fluid, because if it is, then for the First Doctor to be sexist is completely incomprehensible. Yet it is clear that this was deliberate so that the audience could distance itself from values of the sixties when the series first aired.

Of course, that’s fine. Sexism, properly defined and properly understood, is an evil that must be eradicated. Women are not objects to make a cup of tea, wear pink, or submit to the wishes of their husbands; the fact that we have challenged that grotesque caricature and won is a true joy. But we cannot airbrush that out of history as if it never happened, nor can we demonise historical figures for attitudes that were socially acceptable then - that's not to say that by not demonising we are condoning their ideas. This demonisation of the past is, however, very short-sighted given that the same thing will happen to this milieu. All this Cultural Marxism will be looked back on with the same awkwardness and discomfort as we might encounter the phrase, “Women! Know your place!” We have to accept the facts of history as they are. I believe in objective moral standards by which all human beings and all ages will be measured. Sexism was wrong in the sixties, but that does not mean that we are any morally superior today! I think our Society is very good at virtue signalling when it comes up against attitudes of the past.

Of course, much of the motivation behind this is part of the phenomenon of the Social Pendulum that swings between the Liberal-Conservative, Socialist-Capitalist and Traditional-Progressive spectra. The physics of the Pendulum shows that the Pendulum always passes through the Equilibrium point with the highest speed. This means that just when Society has the balance right, the momentum of political swings always carries it through into political incorrectness. Why haven’t we learned this simple fact and worked out how to stop the Pendulum properly so that it balances?

You can see just how much the politics of Cultural Marxism is invading simple television shows by listening to the new producer of Doctor Who, Chris Chibnall, the man who is responsible for the sexual fluidity of Time Lords. On casting the female Doctor, he says:
“I just felt the time was right. I think if the show hadn’t done it, we would have been behind the world, and Doctor Who has got to be out front leading the world, and being a great example of all the amazing things that are in the world. So, it wasn’t even a question in my mind.”
What Mr Chibnall has just said is that he believes that a television programme is going to change the world for the better. He declares that it is his vision that everyone will subscribe to the moral values that he writes into his scripts. Mr Chibnall is a Social Justice Warrior par excellence, seeking to indoctrinate people against modern political incorrectness. What was a television programme that set out to inspire with ideas, to thrill with stories, and to pull on the heart strings has become a vehicle by which people are told what is good and bad.

There have been quotes in the series that are not so much Feminist (in the best and proper sense of standing up for women's equal humanity with men) but rather anti-Men. At one point, one female character says that she will hit the Doctor so hard he’ll regenerate. If a male character were to say that to a woman, there would be many moral questions asked. Yet, if the Doctor’s sex is fluid, then this horrible threat has already been said to a female character! But then, if sex is fluid, what is female and what is male? The attitude of many SJW activists is based on whether you feel male or female and thereby render language captive to the sensibilities of social groupings.

Of course, I am not allowed to voice my opinion on any official site because I will be shouted down. Apparently, my privilege as a white Englishman will be showing. Because "I" have been the oppressor, I must now take my turn to be oppressed. Apparently, this is socially just. It doesn't matter that two wrongs don't make a right, everyone needs to fit into the correct stratification according to privilege. Thus, stories which surround an itinerant Time Lord which have entertained me and inspired my thinking for much of my life must be taken away in order to teach me a lesson in how to be part of Society.

But the thing is, I have my imagination, my memories and an "off" button on my remote control. No amount of attempted Social Justice Indoctrination is going to prevent me from using them all.

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