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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”

#181

Post by pygy_ »

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 don't show Thomas to my kids for that reason (and because of the show's racism)[1], but I can totally see where your mother came from.

I avoid showing Fireman Sam to my 4yo son because otherwise he channels Nicholas—the self-centered, boastful troublemaker—so much that he's not manageable.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15363728

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

#182

Post by thatsethnz »

dao- wrote: post #151
thatsethnz wrote: post #113

Once upon a time, there was an engine called Henry. Henry was asked to help but refused. So Henry was put in time out. Henry didn't enjoy time out and wanted to be let out. So was let out, and learned to be responsible and helpful. The reason you teach a toddler this should be blindingly obvious. Once upon a time, there was a journalist called Jia Tolentino. Jia was a special kind of stupid. Allegory, you see, was en…

> The reason you teach a toddler this should be blindingly obvious. Not at all. People should help out others out of altruism, because they understand that society is cooperative, or because they value other people. "Be helpful or be punished" isn't a lesson I'd want to teach my kid.

But you have to teach altruism, cooperation and the valuing of other people. And you teach it by (gently and respectfully) disincentivizing the opposing behaviors.

It's not "be helpful or be punished" it's "don't pour your cereal on your brothers head or you will get time out", "don't wake your brother when he's sleeping or you will get time out" "stop biting your bother or you will get time out", "no you cannot wear your new shoes in the mud and if you don't stop asking and complaining you will get time out". These are the bread-and-butter conversations of parenting.

Like it or not, you will be a valid authority in your child's life, and you will need to teach compliance with proper authority, and model how to be one, and that there are consequences to the defiance of proper authority.

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

#183

Post by jdietrich »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #85
paulddraper wrote: post #13

Thomas & Friends is gold. The show is dignified and wholesome. It is always about respect, diligence, and humility. It isn't there for stupid antics and wacky laughs. It doesn't blast color explosions and ADHD-fueled off-the-charts mind-numbing exuburance to capture kids attention. And it's been doing that for decades (pretty much eternity, as far as kids TV goes). Not since Mr. Rogers has there been a better kids TV…

The comparison with Mr. Rogers is instructive. Both shows seem rooted in a minister's desire to encapsulate ideals derived from the Bible. But while Mr. Rogers is New Testament, the Thomas books are Old Testament. Henry, for example, gets punished for the sin of VANITY -- he doesn't stop in the tunnel in order to shirk work, but rather to avoid getting his nice new paint messed up. To see the difference between the s…

"You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are." - Fred Rogers

Rogers might have been a seminarian, but he taught the dharma.

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

#184

Post by lazyman75 »

paulddraper wrote: post #34
ux-app wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The show is dignified and wholesome. really? I always found it to be quite creepy. The constant obsession with being a "really useful" engine. The shaming of engines who don't toe the line. Victimisation of engines who misbehave. The show makes me strangely uncomfortable for some reason.

It doesn't make as much sense for our imminent future state, when robots do all our jobs and we sit around all day, but I like the distinctive "really useful engine" complement. Obedience, diligence, and selflessness are admirable qualities. All kids and adults should strive to be really useful, in the best sense of the phrase. There's far too much narcissism in the world.

"Imminent"? Mixing optimism with delusions is bad, m'kay?

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

#185

Post by lazyman75 »

Retra wrote: post #133
dingaling wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The only way you can objectively judge utility of a human is by ignoring the part that makes us .. us (whatever it is) and look only at the physical part - how much calories you could gain from eating a body, how much energy from burning it, how well it would serve as a emergency flood barrier ...

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

#186

Post by westiseast »

paulddraper wrote: post #13

Thomas & Friends is gold. The show is dignified and wholesome. It is always about respect, diligence, and humility. It isn't there for stupid antics and wacky laughs. It doesn't blast color explosions and ADHD-fueled off-the-charts mind-numbing exuburance to capture kids attention. And it's been doing that for decades (pretty much eternity, as far as kids TV goes). Not since Mr. Rogers has there been a better kids TV…

It annoys me too. The interpretation ignores all the obvious positive lessons in TtTE and only accentuates the post-modern and political interpretations as if they're the major themes.

I remember one episode where the Fat Controller hires new engines to break a strike. There's obvious political overtones there that reflect the times it was written in perhaps. But in the context of the kids watching and learning, it's about not throwing tantrums to get your way, and the new engines being polite and humble in their work.

Conversely, a lot of the modern cartoons around are about breaking rules, getting away with stuff because the protagonist is 'special' and fighting.

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

#187

Post by Maarten88 »

westiseast wrote: post #186
paulddraper wrote: post #13

Thomas & Friends is gold. The show is dignified and wholesome. It is always about respect, diligence, and humility. It isn't there for stupid antics and wacky laughs. It doesn't blast color explosions and ADHD-fueled off-the-charts mind-numbing exuburance to capture kids attention. And it's been doing that for decades (pretty much eternity, as far as kids TV goes). Not since Mr. Rogers has there been a better kids TV…

It annoys me too. The interpretation ignores all the obvious positive lessons in TtTE and only accentuates the post-modern and political interpretations as if they're the major themes. I remember one episode where the Fat Controller hires new engines to break a strike. There's obvious political overtones there that reflect the times it was written in perhaps. But in the context of the kids watching and learning, it's…

> ... hires new engines to break a strike... about not throwing tantrums to get your way ...

Would you really cast that as a positive lesson? I have never watched this series as a kid, but it seems really awful and confirms the argument of the article.

In the moral system I was raised in (EU), people have a legal right to strike and helping break it is highly immoral.

To me it seems abusive, and ignoring historical lessons, to teach this kids the other way around.

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

#188

Post by merraksh »

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…

("S" is dit dit dit in Morse, and "O" is "dah dah dah".)

Some old Nokia phone used to have a single-pitched ringtone for text messages that sounded ". . . _ _ . . .", which is Morse code for SMS.

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

#189

Post by jamiethompson »

stordoff wrote: post #36
paulddraper wrote: post #13

Thomas & Friends is gold. The show is dignified and wholesome. It is always about respect, diligence, and humility. It isn't there for stupid antics and wacky laughs. It doesn't blast color explosions and ADHD-fueled off-the-charts mind-numbing exuburance to capture kids attention. And it's been doing that for decades (pretty much eternity, as far as kids TV goes). Not since Mr. Rogers has there been a better kids TV…

> Better known as Sir Topham Hatt since the 1950s. Seemingly only in the US ("the Fat Controller is always referred to by his real name, "Sir Topham Hatt" in the US"[0]). I was born in 1990 (UK), and as I recall he was almost always refered to as "The Fat Controller". [0] http://ttte.wikia.com/wiki/Sir_Topham_Hatt#Trivia

Yeah, the US Thomas & Friends books you kinda have to translate on the fly as you're reading them. There are various differences.

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

#190

Post by ux-app »

geowwy wrote: post #180
ux-app wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> seems pretty fked up to me :) I'm sure it does. You're a product of the Enlightenment and when you read you read the Bible you interpret it as a product of the Enlightenment. If you want to actually understand what the Bible was trying to communicate you need to remember who the Bible was written by and who it was written for. A Bronze-age Middle-Easterners is going to get a very different message from the Bible th…

>If you want to actually understand what the Bible was trying to communicate

Why try to whitewash the bible? The old testament Jehovah was a vile sociopath. Jesus is a cool guy with a dad that has some screws loose. I grew up in a fundie family, the hoops fundies jump through to justify old testament idiot God are ridiculous and I have no time for that.

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