Daleks.
Nicks dalek piece in The Evening Standard today. Where does the joke start and where does it end? Is there a joke at all? Surely he can't mean any of it, can he?
V.
Update 27/12 (BD) Nick's webmaster seems remarkably shy about putting the piece in question up on the blog, so here for your edification and delight it is.
ON CHRISTMAS Day, BBC1 will present a peace-loving Dr Who.
A fictional British PM will implicitly rebuke Tony Blair when she says of the American President: "He is not my boss and he is certainly not turning this into a war."
As the writer, Russell T Davies, emphasised: "There is absolutely an antiwar message because that's what I believe."
I won't go on about BBC bias; if the governors don't want to tackle it, that's up to them. I just wonder if Davies reads his own scripts.
At the end of his last series, Rose used the power of the Tardis to inflict genocide on the Daleks without as much as a second UN resolution.
True, the Daleks wanted to exterminate the human race. But Davies must know that exterminating is a part of the Dalek way of life. As a good BBC liberal, he should not have imposed his values on them but respected their cultural identity.
After all, the fascistic culture of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party allowed the extermination of the Kurds, the Communists, the trade unionists, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Shia, the Marsh Arabs, the Iranians and the Kuwaitis. If the broadminded Davies would have allowed the Ba'ath to stay in power, why is he so judgmental about the Daleks?
The whole thing is online. As I believe that one of my colleagues has a greater understanding of economics than myself (not hard) perhaps he'd also care to explain:
The net has changed many things. It is keeping inflation down and stopping British consumers from being ripped off by allowing us to compare prices. I couldn't live without it. I'm writing a book which would be impossible without the net. The weblogs give me access to arguments the mainstream media ignore.
Is the net keeping inflation down? Is keeping inflation down a good thing? I managed to compare prices before the net; it used to be called "window shopping." And -- yawn -- Nick does the usual hack thing of doing down the "mainstream media". Where does he think he works? If he makes these arguments, the "mainstream media" can't be said to ignore them. If he doesn't, why doesn't he? (As a philosophical aside, I'm inclined to think that the number of possible arguments is very limited; the number of facts, or things to argue about, however, tends toward infinity. Just as all jokes stick to a few structures with only the names of ethnic minorities or hair colour changing, so there are very few possible arguments.)
V.
Update 27/12 (BD) Nick's webmaster seems remarkably shy about putting the piece in question up on the blog, so here for your edification and delight it is.
ON CHRISTMAS Day, BBC1 will present a peace-loving Dr Who.
A fictional British PM will implicitly rebuke Tony Blair when she says of the American President: "He is not my boss and he is certainly not turning this into a war."
As the writer, Russell T Davies, emphasised: "There is absolutely an antiwar message because that's what I believe."
I won't go on about BBC bias; if the governors don't want to tackle it, that's up to them. I just wonder if Davies reads his own scripts.
At the end of his last series, Rose used the power of the Tardis to inflict genocide on the Daleks without as much as a second UN resolution.
True, the Daleks wanted to exterminate the human race. But Davies must know that exterminating is a part of the Dalek way of life. As a good BBC liberal, he should not have imposed his values on them but respected their cultural identity.
After all, the fascistic culture of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party allowed the extermination of the Kurds, the Communists, the trade unionists, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Shia, the Marsh Arabs, the Iranians and the Kuwaitis. If the broadminded Davies would have allowed the Ba'ath to stay in power, why is he so judgmental about the Daleks?
The whole thing is online. As I believe that one of my colleagues has a greater understanding of economics than myself (not hard) perhaps he'd also care to explain:
The net has changed many things. It is keeping inflation down and stopping British consumers from being ripped off by allowing us to compare prices. I couldn't live without it. I'm writing a book which would be impossible without the net. The weblogs give me access to arguments the mainstream media ignore.
Is the net keeping inflation down? Is keeping inflation down a good thing? I managed to compare prices before the net; it used to be called "window shopping." And -- yawn -- Nick does the usual hack thing of doing down the "mainstream media". Where does he think he works? If he makes these arguments, the "mainstream media" can't be said to ignore them. If he doesn't, why doesn't he? (As a philosophical aside, I'm inclined to think that the number of possible arguments is very limited; the number of facts, or things to argue about, however, tends toward infinity. Just as all jokes stick to a few structures with only the names of ethnic minorities or hair colour changing, so there are very few possible arguments.)
posted by Anonymous at 12/21/2005 07:09:00 PM
8 Comments:
It starts on the Biased BBC weblog and ends in the pub, I think.
Funny logic for a war though, "you were happy to kill the Daleks, so what's different about Saddam?"
V.
The Standard columns still not available online?
I'm in London briefly in the New Year, so I will have to borrow a copy.
they're on the cohenblog a day later usually.
"you were happy to kill the Daleks, so what's different about Saddam?"
Pity I can't get to the article, but V's quote is bizarre. NC doesn't know his Who, or didn't watch the recent series: Tom Baker's Doctor rejects the chance to kill the Daleks at birth (as it were) in a pre-emptive strike in 'Genesis of the Daleks'. Also, Eccleston's incarnation may have waged the Time War against them, but he's not one for fabricating an excuse to invade a sovereign country (or indeed planet). Then again, comparing Saddam to a Dalek makes a change from Hitler, even if it doesn't work. (Note to NC: Daleks aren't real, so you can come out from behind the sofa now)
PS: I'm not really a Who-watching anorak, honest
Redpesto - I *am* a Who anorak and your analysis is spot on ;-)
I do think that the analogy would have been clearer if the Doctor had invaded the Daleks as part of a coalition with the Master and half the population of Earth was destroyed as collateral damage.
On a less lighthearted note, I am not at all happy with the "it's in their culture" crack in the NC column. It looks a bit racist to me.
Okay, now that I've had a chance to watch The Christmas Invasion and read NC's column, it's clear that NC was talking even more cack than I suspected. He obviously missed the Belgrano reference at the end of the episode (the Sycorax ship gets blasted despite heading away from Earth) and the Doctor's outraged response. (Incidentally, was Rose fully aware of what she was doing, given that she had looked into the heart of the Tardis?) Somehow, I don't think a 'Decent Left' Who would work - or is Cohen touting for scriptwriting work?
PS: Is DA's dietary regime an attempt to disguise the fact he is one of the Slitheen < Whovian joke >?
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