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The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

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Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#131

Post by geowwy »

ux-app wrote: post #130
geowwy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. That characterization of Old Testament vs. New Testament is one of my pet peeves. There's some horrific brutality and violence in the Old Testament. But the overall story is one of Yahweh's love and compassion for his people in a world where everything is falling apart around them. The same theme carries through into the New Testament. If the Old Testament is really as bad as people say then Judaism really ha…

dude, c'mon get real. I've read the old testament. It's brutal. Yahwe loved him some genocide.

I know the Bible pretty well. I couldn't get realer.

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#132

Post by pavlov »

geowwy wrote: post #121
humanrebar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the New Testament disagrees with your characterization of the Old Testament. Pretty much the entire New Testament goes on about how the Old Testament is a series of stories about how cycles of rule making and rule breaking do not lead to real justice, peace, or life. In particular, both Romans and Hebrews (though not exclusively those books) cite Old Testament stories to make the case that the Old Testament (…

Agreed. That characterization of Old Testament vs. New Testament is one of my pet peeves. There's some horrific brutality and violence in the Old Testament. But the overall story is one of Yahweh's love and compassion for his people in a world where everything is falling apart around them. The same theme carries through into the New Testament. If the Old Testament is really as bad as people say then Judaism really ha…

If the Old Testament is really as bad as people say then Judaism really has a problem. But in my experience Jews aren't any more violent than Christians.

A group of people is not defined by a 3000-year-old folklore collection. You can’t infer anything about the text this way.

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#133

Post by Retra »

dingaling wrote: post #128
rukuu001 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is always about respect, diligence, and humility My 2yo nephew recently started watching Thomas. It was my first real exposure to it. After watching a few episodes I remarked that the central messages of Thomas are: - Authority always knows best. - Never think for yourself. - You have no value until you are 'useful'.

> Never think for yourself Independent thinking is lauded ( Toad suggesting how to save the whale ), but unilateral action is not. > You have no value until you are 'useful'. In the wider context of society that's entirely accurate. Community doesn't exist unless people contribute to the group.

There is a risk of setting up a situation where "useful" is determined by presumed authority rather than any objective sense of utility. There's also the problem of how to deal with things that are not useful now, but presumably will be (in an emergency, for example.) There's also the problem of usefulness that is not communicated effectively; maybe we don't know how to express the usefulness of some activity. This does not mean it is not useful.

So it's a mistaken ideology from the start. Usefulness is valuable -- that's practically the definition of the term. But life requires finding a way to be valuable in predictable ways just as readily as it does finding a way to be valuable in unpredictable, circumstantial, and unforeseen ways.

So it's not entirely accurate. It's partially accurate; it is as much a lie by omission.

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#134

Post by nerfhammer »

Stratoscope wrote: post #48

> In 2009, the show went completely C.G.I. As much as I love the New Yorker, my fondest hope is that one day the N.Y.C. media will free themselves from whatever repressive authoritarian soul compels them to put those dots in every single acronym and initialism, when the rest of the country abandoned the dots long ago. They even put them in names that once were initialisms but now are genuine names on their own: they…

IIRC the NYTimes at least used to have a policy where it if you pronounce the acronym out loud as a word it doesn't get periods, but does have periods if it would be said out loud as individual letters. E.g., "Joint NASA - E.S.A. space mission launch", "F.B.I. agents meet at FEMA office". As far as that rule would be concerned SOS is pronounced as letters and not as a word perhaps like "sauce".

But I've just seen some clear violations of that rule by them (they don't spell "SAT" test with periods) so maybe I'm misremembering or maybe they've changed it. Similarly to SOS, the letters SAT don't stand for anything, at least not officially anymore.

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#135

Post by paulddraper »

linkregister wrote: post #107
humanrebar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the New Testament disagrees with your characterization of the Old Testament. Pretty much the entire New Testament goes on about how the Old Testament is a series of stories about how cycles of rule making and rule breaking do not lead to real justice, peace, or life. In particular, both Romans and Hebrews (though not exclusively those books) cite Old Testament stories to make the case that the Old Testament (…

This analysis, while novel and interesting to me, is not supported by the bulk of events in the early Old Testament. I will name some examples of God personally meting out the death sentence en masse as punishment for sin in various books of the Old Testament. 1. The Great Flood (Genesis), 2. Sodom (Genesis), 3. The Plagues of Egypt (Exodus), 4. The Exile of the Israelites from the Promised Land (Exodus). Redemption,…

> Paul cannot retcon, try as he might, the events of the Old Testament

IDK if he needed to. Jesus declared he brought not peace, but a sword. Ananias and Sapphira were killed outright for lying about their finances. Revelations details enormous amounts of suffering for a fallen world, perhaps more than every other book combined. The New Testament is replete with examples of God's justice.

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#136

Post by Godel_unicode »

linkregister wrote: post #107
humanrebar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the New Testament disagrees with your characterization of the Old Testament. Pretty much the entire New Testament goes on about how the Old Testament is a series of stories about how cycles of rule making and rule breaking do not lead to real justice, peace, or life. In particular, both Romans and Hebrews (though not exclusively those books) cite Old Testament stories to make the case that the Old Testament (…

This analysis, while novel and interesting to me, is not supported by the bulk of events in the early Old Testament. I will name some examples of God personally meting out the death sentence en masse as punishment for sin in various books of the Old Testament. 1. The Great Flood (Genesis), 2. Sodom (Genesis), 3. The Plagues of Egypt (Exodus), 4. The Exile of the Israelites from the Promised Land (Exodus). Redemption,…

You'll notice how those examples are from two (and the first two) books and you're replying to a comment about how the Old Testament is about cycles. This is not a coincidence.

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#137

Post by Godel_unicode »

linkregister wrote: post #129
geowwy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...the mainstream Christian opinion that the Old Testament is vengeful and the New Testament is merciful... That's not mainstream Christian opinion. It's called Marcionism and it's universally condemned by mainstream Christianity.

Your characterization of my viewpoint is highly distorted. No credible mainstream Christian rejects the Old Testament.

The "it" to which gp refers is not the old testament.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#138

Post by colordrops »

WalterBright wrote: post #126
colordrops wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously think that there is no corporate agenda in the US? It's not even conspiracy theory. A good chunk of the daily news stories are related to the topic.

I've been involved with various corporations. I have yet to be informed of what the national "corporate agenda" is. When I read the business news, it always seems that corporations are at each other's throats, always suing each other, trying to get the government to run each other out of business, lobbying against each other, etc. I'm curious if you can provide a link to the national corporate agenda. Maybe it's lowe…

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-the-bilderbe...

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#139

Post by peteretep »

alexilliamson wrote: post #104
rjromero wrote: post #3

My mother didn’t let me watch anything but Thomas and Friends. She said after watching Rugrats or Spongebob i would turn into a disobedient brat, but after watching Thomas I was apparently well mannered and well behaved. I ended up becoming a soft well mannered programmer. Fuck you Thomas!

I thought I was the only one who wasn't allowed to watch rugrats! For the same reason!

We should stop teaching little boys about dinosaurs too. Those T-Rexs are _terrible_ role models!

Re: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”

#140

Post by ux-app »

geowwy wrote: post #131
ux-app wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dude, c'mon get real. I've read the old testament. It's brutal. Yahwe loved him some genocide.

I know the Bible pretty well. I couldn't get realer.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Examples_of_God_personally_kil...

seems pretty fked up to me :)

I don't know anything about rationalwiki.org, it's the first site that showed up when I googled "old testament character punished"

Each statement is linked to Biblical verses though, so any objections would be to the spin they put on it rather than disputing whether those passages are actually there.

Basically, old testament Yahwe is a weird dude. Very thin skinned with a hare trigger temper. He's a sociopath who "tests" people by murdering their family among other atrocities. He does have his bro's back though. He sent 2 bears to maul 42 youths to death for mocking Elijah's bald head.

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