FerretBrain - Recent Comments

You can see the most recently posted comments here, 24 at a time; or, if you prefer, we've got a news feed...

Arthur B on We Need to Talk About Conan at 20:37 on 29-07-2014 - link The Nazis named the Aryans after ancient Persians. White supremacist mythology a) likes to whitewash cultures that the myth-maker in question likes and b) has only the loosest of connections to historical accuracy.
http://scipiosmith.livejournal.com/ on We Need to Talk About Conan at 19:39 on 29-07-2014 - link Do you know if the fictional Cimmerians are supposed to have any relation to the actual Cimmerians? It seems surprising that Howard would give Conan's race the same name as an asian tribe.
Dan H on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 10:43 on 29-07-2014 - link @Cheriola

I'm curious, how would one push atheist extremism on kids?

You'd take the Richard Dawkins approach. Ban fairytales because they aren't true. Teach that religion, by its nature, is essentially harmful. Actively and deliberately deride the beliefs of your religious pupils. Teach that the Catholic Church is full of paedophiles, that Muslims are all terrorists, that Buddhism is perfectly okay because ... I mean ... it isn't really a religion anyway is it? Quietly ignore the Jews because you don't want to look antisemitic.

Routinely indoctrinate your students in the idea that God provably does not exist, that anybody who claims to believe in God is deluded or, more probably, lying. Blame religion for all of the world's problems. Job done.

@scipio

I can't help thinking that all the 'British values' stuff is because we're jealous of the Americans, with their flags in classrooms and all that god bless the president, my country 'tis for thee stuff.

A lot of the senior Tories do seem to really wish we still had an Empire to bang on about.
http://scipiosmith.livejournal.com/ on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 09:31 on 27-07-2014 - link I can't help thinking that all the 'British values' stuff is because we're jealous of the Americans, with their flags in classrooms and all that god bless the president, my country 'tis for thee stuff.

That, and there's a certain strand in British thinking that says that ever since our pomp of yesteryear became one with Nineveh and Tyre we haven't really known what to do with ourselves. I think the government is hoping that if they talk about British values enough someone will actually work out what this country stands for now.
Cheriola on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 18:38 on 26-07-2014 - link Addendum because the linked article says that there are 21% protestants in East Germany: That's probably the official number of how many belong to the Church and pay church tax. (You mention it on your work papers, tax returns etc., so it's an easy statistic to collect.) However, most people are only in the Church for greatful nostalgia reasons (like the artile mentions, the Protestant churches played an important part in the revolution), or because the tax is a very easy way to give to charity. My parents were such a case - both christened Protestant during or right after the war; Mom attended a private Catholic highschool because the state highschool wouldn't let her study to university-level (because her father was bourgeois and she had no special talents); both atheists and never attended any service other than their parents' funerals; married in a civil servant's office; they never christened me; but both stayed in the Church to the end. And as for the younger generation: one of my teenage nephews just joined - not because he believes in god, but because he wanted the pomp and circumstance (and the money gifts) of a confirmation, and the humanist/atheist Jugendweihe wasn't offered in his area.
Cheriola on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 18:09 on 26-07-2014 - link
Does anyone else read "required to teach British Values" as a gigantic red flag?

Oh yes. I can just imagine the kind of shitstorm something like that would start here in Germany.

I don't have anything worthwhile to add to the topic, since I don't understand the situation in Britain, and don't pay enough attention to immigration / Islamism issues in my own country. (It's just too depressing.)

The initial words about not teaching any extremism in school just made me smile and fondly remember my highschool politics teacher, who was clearly sympathising with the RAF (which led to us staying on that topic for several months), and once called a boy "traitor" for admitting that he wouldn't actively try to avoid military service. (We still had general conscription until 2011, though you could get out of it on ethical grounds if you did a similarly long period of community service instead.) Oh, and the music teacher who taught us that awesomely bitter left-anarchic anti-government/church/capitalist song. And the history teacher who did half a year on the Russian revolution once we were done with the mandatory curriculum. (She would have done Chinese history, too, but couldn't find highschool-appropriate textbooks on that.) And the English teacher who had us read IRA-themed literature. ("Cal" by Bernard MacLaverty)
I guess that's what happens when you take a bunch of socialism-educated teachers and then force them to evangelise about the new capitalist system. (Whether or not they actually supported the dictatorship, most people here did believe in the general ideals.)

I'm curious, how would one push atheist extremism on kids? I'm not being facetious - I live in what is now officially known as the most godless place on Earth. 52% atheists, and about 40% agnostics who just don't care one way or another. (A statistic that I only saw in German said that about 85-95% of East Germans, depending on the state, said that religion didn't play much of a part in their life.) I literally have known only 3 people in school who were part of any religion, and for 2 I only know that because they once mentioned being forced to attend Christmas mass by their parents instead of being able to visit their romantic partners. (The 3rd one was an apprentice of my Mother's who belonged to some American Evangelical sect and was a hardcore believer. Everyone thought she was weird and faintly creepy.) Well, okay, 4 - if we include the vaguely neopagan goth girl.
I can't imagine what it's like for religion to play any role in school other than as context information in history class, and maybe when the arts teacher goes over the differences between romanic and gothic architecture (only time we ever visited a church in school). It's not like they actively told us Religious beliefs were wrong. (Well, okay, I did a presentation in 12th grade Biology once on the topic of Creationism and why it's ludicrous.) It's just... The non-existence of any god was taken kind of as a given by pretty much everyone, nothing worth discussing. Religion was always talked about as a cultural phenomenon to establish group identity, a form of oral history keeping(we did go through the Old Testament as part of a module on Jewish history), or like as a way for the powerful (mainly feudal lords) to subdue the lower classes and to appropriate lands/money from the Catholic church.

Though I think they do have 2 years of a general cultural class called "Lifestyles, Ethics, Religions" these days, in 8th and 9th grade, and you can substitute Protestant Christianity for that if you find a pastor to teach it. I suppose a general cultural primer like that is helpful, especially to better understand the ethnic minorities who make up most of the single-digit percentage of religious people here, but also because the bible is still the source of a lot of cultural touchstones in central Europe. (Not so much in terms of values, more in the sense that you should know what the nativity scene is about, and why you get a day off on Pentecost.) My parents certainly made up for the lack by giving me a few kid's bibles to read in elementary school (along with Greco-Roman mythology and Grimm's Fairytales) - I actually ended up far better informed than my 2 friends who were christened and everything, which tells me they didn't take their religion seriously at all.
Cheriola on Red Seas Under Red Skies at 16:16 on 26-07-2014 - link You know, oddly most of the things you mention didn't bother me at all. Except the utter pointlessness of the opening cliffhanger.

The only thing I did have a problem with is the way Jean shames Locke out of his depression, and Locke keeps apologising for "letting Jean down" in those few weeks for literally the next two years. I mean, in this book, it still reads like he's just mourning/recuperating a little too self-indulgently and maybe like he has a really short bout of alcoholism - but since the next book starts pretty much the same (except Locke has even more good reason to be depressed), and Jean then actually makes a reference to some kind of mental disorder (more something like Freud's innate death wish than depression, but still), it becomes problematic in hindsight. Especially since, either intentionally or not, Locke pretty much reads like a textbook case for bipolar disorder (spending most of each book in a manic phase), if you read all 3 books right after another. So for largely-neurotypical Jean to go "If I can handle our losses, why can't you?" and being sucessful at shaming/angering Locke out of suicidal depressive phases, that's rather problematic in my eyes. I know it fits with the setting that nobody has a clue about modern psychology and how Locke's mood issues are a disease, not willful misbehaviour, but Lynch should find a way to make at least narratively clear that Jean isn't right to do this. Besides, that kind of shaming would just make things worse with a real depressive person.

By the way, I'm fairly sure Locke is supposed to be a straight up trickster hero. Like Robin Hood, or the characters of the show "Leverage". He's not just a crook, he's also a priest and he really does believe in his duty to the dead and that holy mission for class revenge that Father Chains put them all on. (Even if this was retconned into this book and not in the first.) If anything he gets ever kinder from book to book. I think the third one literally points out that Camorr culture is particularly brutal, macho and homophobic compared to all the other city states, and much of Locke's initial darkness is part of his culture (like for example an extreme belief in having to take personal, blood-feud style vengeance) and that this is supposed to be a character flaw. But as he spends time in other cultures, he grows out of some of it. For example, in the first book, he calls the villain homophobic slurs several times. After encountering the queer-positive pirates in the second novel and that little discussion with "I'll try anything once - or 5 or 6 times" guy, he never does that again. And by book 3, when encountering a random pair of gay lovers making out in a garden and being tempted to go through their discarded clothing for their wallets, he stops his kleptomaniac impulse by reminding himself that doing malice to happy lovers would be bad karma.
Also, the losses of his friends, the brush with alcoholism and several with death have seemed to have made him a lot more sympathetic with other people's failings and tragedies. I actually really liked this character development. Yeah, he starts out as a bit of a cock-sure, obnoxious ass, but he does grow up and mellow out over the years, as one should expect.

Heh, but one character actually goes into a rant in the 3rd book about how Father Chains ruined them all for life as hardened, greed-motivated criminals by saddling them with a conscience. So I guess Lynch sees your problem.

By the way, can you really call a character a Mary Sue if literally none of his grand plans for cons ever work out, sometimes because of his own sheer stupidity (e.g. forgetting the cats), sometimes because his mark is just plain cleverer than him (e.g. the paintings), and the author takes an almost perverse delight in beating the crap out of him on a regular basis?

And, as in Lies, the mysterious Sabetha, the apparent love of Locke's life, is alluded to but remains absent: for fuck's sake, Lynch, stop it. You know she's just going to be a total let down after a build up like this.

I thought so, too, and got annoyed at the on-the-pedestal-putting. But now that I've read book 3, which features Sabetha both at about age 30 and when they were both teenagers: She's not. She's really, truly not. In fact, I was genuinely amazed at Sabetha - she's the best feminist (NOT straw-feminist!) character I've ever seen a male author write. And even if half of her discussions with Locke function mainly to introduce the male part of the audience to concepts like male entitlement to female sexuality, Nice Guy behaviour, Shroedinger's Rapist, victim blaming, the general frustration inherent in being an ambitious, highly talented woman in a patriarchal society and the frustration of being in love a with patriarchally socialised guy (who messes up occasionally even if he tries very, very hard not to, and who can't help the unfair male privilege that said society gives him), and that what feminists most want in a man is the ability to listen and learn - even if she's a bit of a mouthpiece in that regard: It's for a good and noble cause, and the author's heart is in the right place. And besides, there still is a clever, head-strong, angry, conflicted, and of course snarky character behind all the Issues. Her characterisation and reasons for leaving are thoroughly believeable, and also function as an Author's Saving Throw by actually pointing out in-text that the worldbuilding in the first book was problematic. Locke and Sabetha are still in love when they meet again, and they are surprisingly mature about their falling out and their attempts to fix it (if not in their professional rivalry...)
And Locke's adoring pedestal-putting, claiming her to be the love of his life, and his whole fixation on her are just that, quite literally - and the text seems aware that it is creepy, and the only thing that saves it is the fact that Locke is absolutely respectful of Sabetha's wishes and never, ever would force so much as a kiss on her. (I found the retconned-in reason for the fixation a bit sad, though: Until book 3, Locke could be read as demisexual for only ever being romantically/sexually attracted to one person. Then it's retconned as having creepy magical reasons that I don't want to spoil.)

The only thing about Sabetha I found a little... amusing, was that teenage Locke was almost too understanding and willing to accept anything feminism-related that she says and to change accordingly. Like I bet the author wishes he was at the age of 16, now that he finally gets it. Still, again, if it serves as a positive role model for male teenage readers, I'm fine with that kind of Mary-Sue-ism. Maybe it's a little preachy, especially since Lynch tries to cover so many topics, but I was just smiling through the whole thing. We do need more books like this.

The con plot of book 3 is a bit meh (basically it's a satire about 'democratic' elections, where Sabetha and Locke are press-ganged into controlling the campaign of one rivaling but politically indistinguishable party each, with all methods allowed short of murder, all ostensibly just for the entertainment of the people who really control the power in this 'republic' - their lives are being threatened to keep them in line, but it just doesn't have the personal stakes and sense of danger that the previous books had), and the teenage flashback is largely about the gang having to stage an annoyingly faux-Shakespearean play while conning a noble into paying for the production. So the relationship between Locke and Sabetha and the object lesson in how to make feminism 101 easily digestible in a fantasy novel, really are the main draws of the book. The meta plot for the series gets going right at the end, though. Which to me felt a bit like jumping the shark, but YMMV.

But I really do recommend the 3rd book, even if the plot is a little weak. Just for the sheer surrealness of reading a male author who manages to get practically everything right with regards to feminism. I mean, I've just read Elizabeth Bear's "Carnival" thinking she must have been the one to teach Lynch - but even she had like two dozen points in that ecofeminist polemic that made me headdesk.

(That book also needs a Ferret review, by the way. It's not thoroughly bad, as such, but the social philosophising made me uncomfortable and I wasn't always sure if I was supposed to be, and the worldbuilding has huge holes at least from my biologist/ecologist point of view. Still, queer protagonists are rare and deserve a mention.)
Ash on Pedo Snore Screed of a Octafish at 21:22 on 23-07-2014 - link In a shocking twist, ice comets are apparently a thing, now. (I have spent way too long trying to figure out why this news srticle made me think of talking horses.)
Arthur B on Enduring Outlast at 10:21 on 23-07-2014 - link For the most part you don't notice that the character model hasn't changed because (as far as I am aware) you only have the first-person viewpoint so you're only shown the parts of your body the game wants you to see. Dong is very much on view during the abortive surgery segment itself.

That said, there's a bit towards the end where you look down at yourself and you are very obviously wearing clothes, despite there being no point between the surgery scene and the end of the game where you actually find and put on some clothes.

And you're immobilised in the surgery scene so dick waggling physics are not implemented.
Alasdair Czyrnyj on Enduring Outlast at 05:27 on 23-07-2014 - link Oh yeah, I'd heard about Outlast, but most of what I saw made it clear that it wasn't really my thing. I don't find the idea of big dudes running after me that "scary" (sort of an animal fear vs. human fear thing), and I didn't like that they just went the "abattoir swimming in Manson family rejects" route for the asylum. Honestly I think they'd have got more mileage out of making Mount Massive a much sadder place.

There is one thing about the game that I find interesting, though; the fandom that's grown up around Eddie Gluskin, aka The Groom. Just fire his name into Tumblr and you'll see what I mean. What's even more interesting is that his fanbase is predominantly women (with a few gay men, of course), and it expresses itself in all the traditional fandom ways: comics, fanfic, Gluskin/Waylon shipping, all that good stuff.

Naturally, all the traditional objections have been raised here, there and everywhere: he's a psychopath who fixes his rage on idealized female figures and destroys all who fail to embody this ideal, everything he says is out of the abusive boyfriend/husband handbook, he cuts people's willies off and tries to have sex with the hole, etc, etc. All that is true, but to criticize people for overlooking these facts is, if you will forgive the irony, perhaps missing the point. I haven't plunged into the deep end, but most of what I've seen doesn't read as "OMG I want this man to give me a storage locker hysterectomy." There's a lot of interest in Eddie as a perpetrator, as a hunter and dominant figure, rather than as a victim, but there isn't that much focus on the actual acts. I'd say a lot of people are using Eddie as a way to play with their own feelings about that churning netherworld of sex and violence that is the erotic impulse. Eddie is just a way to play with a confident, aggressive persona. Not being a real person and having a voice made for the talkies are just bonuses.

Finally, to change gears entirely, isn't there a point in Whistleblower when Park loses all his clothes, but nothing about his character model changes? Missed opportunity in my opinion. I feel we, as a society, are ready for a game with dick waggle physics. We have the technology and the ability. All we need is the will to make that helicopter twirl.
Arthur B on Enduring Outlast at 00:55 on 19-07-2014 - link
I also thought the reliance on gore turned out to be a major Achilles heel. Yes, it's horrifying the first time you see a dude with his intestines spilled out all over the floor, but by the time you've waded through the 80th pool of bloody shit it starts to lose any impact, as much as I appreciate Red Barrel's dedication to having a disemboweled corpse visible on screen at all times.

Yeah, I think if the main game had been a couple of hours shorter it would have been stronger for it. On the other hand they did play a few nice tricks with the gore. One of the more memorable bits from my playthrough involved creeping up to a door with a window in it, taking up position immediately by the door, uncrouching to peep through the window, and seeing this enormous mountain of bodies, so huge that it was stopping the door from opening. That was something.

Speaking of which, maybe this is just a personal hot button topic but I really did not like the direction they chose for The Groom. The character came across like an attempt to use transexuality as a horror trope, just as the rest of the game uses mental illness as a horror trope, and it felt like it was playing to a lot of misconceptions and cultural prejudices about trans women, namely "OMG THEY GET THEIR DICK CUT OFF UGH THAT'S SO WEIRD AND GROSS WHY WOULD YOU EVER DO THAT".

On the one hand, I think it was fairly clear that the Groom himself was not a trans person and nor were any of the people he attempted surgery on, so the door is at least open to take the stance that the horror there is less about the surgery in principle and more on the combination of a) plastic surgery inflicted on you in order to impose someone else's idea of what you should look like, and b) surgery conducted in a completely amateur fashion using rusty rotary saws.

On the other hand, the parallels are definitely there and are definitely prominent enough that it's off-putting. It does not help that the writing on Whistleblower isn't remotely good enough to really handle the sort of fine nuances that would be needed to make the character work without the uncomfortable transphobic connotations.
http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/ on Enduring Outlast at 00:20 on 19-07-2014 - link I came away from Outlast feeling fairly positive about it, possibly because these days "horror" games with high production values overwhelmingly tend to just be action games that happen to feature monsters. But I do think it also has some serious issues.

The big one for me came when I realized that 90% of the time sprinting around like a bunny on roller skates is far easier and more efficient than actually using stealth. Miles can take a surprisingly large amount of damage before dying and the enemy encounter areas are small enough that you can easily trial and error your way through them. When you add in squeezy narrow spaces that make enemies instantly wander off and leave you alone, most of the tension goes out of the set pieces. Hell, in several places (like the bit where you have to escape the doctor) enemies seemed to just give up and stop chasing me for no reason if I ran around a bit, as if the designers hadn't anticipated that anyone would use that strategy. I get the feeling this is a consequence of implementing both stealth sections and bits where you have to run away.

I also thought the reliance on gore turned out to be a major Achilles heel. Yes, it's horrifying the first time you see a dude with his intestines spilled out all over the floor, but by the time you've waded through the 80th pool of bloody shit it starts to lose any impact, as much as I appreciate Red Barrel's dedication to having a disemboweled corpse visible on screen at all times. Frustratingly, Whistleblower's solution to this was to just ramp up the gore even more.

Speaking of which, maybe this is just a personal hot button topic but I really did not like the direction they chose for The Groom. The character came across like an attempt to use transexuality as a horror trope, just as the rest of the game uses mental illness as a horror trope, and it felt like it was playing to a lot of misconceptions and cultural prejudices about trans women, namely "OMG THEY GET THEIR DICK CUT OFF UGH THAT'S SO WEIRD AND GROSS WHY WOULD YOU EVER DO THAT".

I wouldn't have had any problem with a character who runs around cutting penises off, but the fact that it was specifically framed as an attempt to turn the victims into women really repulsed me. A major case of a developer really not thinking an idea through properly.
http://mmmarcusz.livejournal.com/ on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 21:58 on 18-07-2014 - link I have several things to say about this. Firstly, I see nothing uniquely British about these values at all. Indeed if anything they have a distinct whiff of revolutionary France and its values of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Moreover, it seems like an odd set because it excluded property rights, which are at the centre of any traditional view of English/British liberty, but might seem a bit too pro-rich people to actually say out loud.
https://profiles.google.com/108141131867234631336 on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 02:52 on 18-07-2014 - link @Dan H

Although I would assume that these teachers were working on their own initiative, not following a state-sponsored curriculum

To avoid the confusion I created in myself the first couple of times, I will define a few terms/spellings to try and keep this all straight (maybe)

Federal = over-arching government of the USA
State (note capitalization) = over-arching government of one of the 50 constituent parts referenced in the S in USA
County = local government for one of several administrative units in each State (varies from 3 to 254, depending upon the State).

Unfortunately, there is no state-sponsored curriculum in the US, if by that term you mean a curriculum devised by the highest level of government in the nation. The Federal government has a Department of Education, but it has essentially no real power over education beyond some rah-rah cheerleading duties and vague suggestions that virtually no one listens to. Most States also have Departments of Education that are completely separate from the Federal one. Each State essentially runs its own education system to whatever standard it feels like - and considering that the party in control of most state governments is also the one actively denigrating having _any_ education is a sign of pure unadulterated evil, let's just say those standards are pretty low. Furthermore, most states only provide rough outlines of desired outcomes, not anything resembling a proper curriculum. Most "you will teach _this_" planning happens at the County level, if not the individual school level. The guy determining the curriculum at my high school was at most four administrative steps above the teachers teaching the Jesus-talk. And he was directly involved in hiring them - there was no renegade teaching, because there was no room between idea and implementation for reneging.

There has been a recent push for a voluntary, non-Federally-mandated common curriculum across several states. The polite way to describe the response by most Counties and States is batshit insane frothing rage. And these are pretty low standards too. Along the lines of "we would like for your child to graduate secondary education not being a drooling moron" low - and yet the howls of outrage can be heard echoing across the Great Plains well-on nightly. Oh, and the state with the largest number of school systems, and thus the one that buys the most textbooks, and thus the one that drives what goes into the textbooks regularly demands less evolution and more Jesus in the biology texts.

To me, the idea that y'all are arguing over a few schools only somewhat not hewing to a nation-mandated curriculum is like listening to the inhabitants of Heaven complaining the ambrosia is a couple of degrees too warm.

And as an aside: Besides the obvious Jesus-clobbering, I received a pretty good education from what I can only attribute to blind chance. Of particular note was the inclusion in my 10th grade (out of 12) literature class of Lysistrata as the Greek drama selection. 19 students blandly reading the text in a dutiful manner, and 1 me giggling like an idiot because I got the dildo references. My (non-Jesusy) teacher for that class was mildly amused at the fact I was the only one who recognized any of this.
Dan H on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 12:01 on 17-07-2014 - link @profiles.google.com

Having grown up in the American South, I would respectfully disagree with that statement.

I stand corrected. Although I would assume that these teachers were working on their own initiative, not following a state-sponsored curriculum. Effectively you went to the equivalent of one of the Trojan Horse schools - a school with a religious ethos which deviated from the one mandated by the state.

Indeed, ironically, my understanding is that one of the arguments people make in favour of teaching that evolution is a communist lie is the notion that evolution is an atheistic, and therefore explicitly religious theory, and should therefore be prohibited *because* of separation between church and state. People interpret their own beliefs as neutral, after all.

I'm not suggesting that religion isn't a presence in American schools (it manifestly is) but that there is a state mandate to keep it out of education rather than to put it in (although this manifestly fails to work, not least because scientific facts seem to get labelled as religious assertions). The fact that officially secular American education winds up being more religious than officially religious British education is a phenomenon which both countries could probably learn a lot from.

@Daniel F

I suppose you could make a case that British students need to learn the history of Britain, so that they can understand how the society they live in came to be. That’s not something you can teach without teaching people about Christianity (as distinct from teaching Christianity). That sounds superficially reasonable, at least to me, but it does mean that you would be teaching all children the basic elements of Christian doctrine without touching on other faiths.

True, although even then I might suggest that you don't need to know as much about Christianity as you might think. The way that things like Henry VIII, Richard the Lionheart and the Civil War get taught in schools tends to be extremely superficial. I'm pretty sure I studied the Tudors in primary school, but I'm equally sure that I was in my 20s before I heard the word "Lutheran". I learned that the Crusades happened but learned very little about what they were about - and mostly what we learn about Richard the Lionheart was that he was a jolly good King who did jolly fine things like fighting bravely for Christendom.

I'm also pretty sure that most people in the UK believe the Civil War was primarily a disagreement about haircuts.

I'd also point out that the Trojan Horse schools were uniformly performing well academically, so they clearly *can't* have had any problems teaching their students history, or literature, or anything else.

Indeed I might suggest that the "background level" of Christianity you pick up going to an English school is actually completely different from the "background level" of Christianity that informs most of British history and literature. The kind of background level Christianity you get in school is grounded in things like the way people use "Christian" as a synonym for "good" or assume that you will get time off school for Christmas and Easter. It's things like recognizing that a man with long hair and a goatee is Jesus even though he looks nothing like a man from first-century Judea would have looked. It's things like assuming that weddings happen in churches and that vicars are necessarily nice people. It's vaguely associating Catholicism with Irish terrorists.

I suspect that the understanding of Christianity you would need to actually understand its influence on British history and literature is, ironically, one that most Britons lack.
Daniel F on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 06:24 on 17-07-2014 - link Arthur:
I think to a large extent it comes down to the experience of immigrant communities in general rather than Islamic communities specifically. A lot of anti-Islam rhetoric over here is actually anti-immigrant rhetoric after a find-and-replace job when you look at it closely.

That fits well with what we get over here as well. Fears about Islam are bundled up with fears of the hordes of boat people, and of course we’ve inherited a lot of ‘Arab terrorist’ stereotypes from the US. Islam is particularly convenient for xenophobic rhetoric because it is not technically a race.

Dan:
This is true, and actually raises a point I'd been intending to address in the original article, which you *could* make a case that, since England is an officially Christian country, it makes sense for Christianity to have a privileged place in our educational system and that, therefore, a school which doesn't teach its children about Christianity is more of a problem than a school that doesn't teach its children about Islam.

I suppose you could make a case that British students need to learn the history of Britain, so that they can understand how the society they live in came to be. That’s not something you can teach without teaching people about Christianity (as distinct from teaching Christianity). That sounds superficially reasonable, at least to me, but it does mean that you would be teaching all children the basic elements of Christian doctrine without touching on other faiths.

It’s particularly difficult because, well, there are an awful lot of things regularly taught in British schools that you can’t teach without a background knowledge of Christianity. You can’t teach history: Henry VIII or Richard the Lionheart or the English Civil War or whatever are all topics that necessitate some teaching about the church. You can’t teach a lot of literature or English: Shakespeare makes very little sense without knowledge of the religious background of Elizabethan England, for instance. When I studied Jane Eyre at IB level, I had to read a lot about the Christian context. And so on. If you don’t want to overhaul the entire syllabus, you must teach people what Christianity is, and how it fits into British culture.

Whereas non-Christian religions – assuming that my experiences were in any way similar to those of UK students – are lucky to get some time in social studies. I generally approve of classes on world religions, so that everyone has a basic idea of what Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc., are, but those overviews don’t compare to the background Christianity that suffuses the rest of the syllabus. There’s always an imbalance, and I can’t quite bring myself to think that British schools shouldn’t teach British history or literature or whatever out of fear that it carries Christian baggage.

Shimmin:
Next random point: familiarity bias and cultural weight. Because of the weight of historical Christian influence on British culture and language, I suspect that a majority of lessons will feature something you could trace back to that, be it expressions used in class, moral positions taken, off-the-cuff examples, historical titbits or whatever.

Yes, exactly. The difficulty is that since the development of a British national identity is so closely intertwined with religion, separating out British-ness from Christian-ness is really hard. There is an assumed background level of Christianity in British culture, to the point where even the most dramatic defectors from it still share many of its assumptions. (It’s hard for me to not see, for example, Richard Dawkins as an Anglican atheist, for instance: his entire protest against religion is marked by the ideas and structures of the Church of England.)

You could in theory have a school that cuts out as much of that background Christianity as possible. It might replace it with background knowledge from another tradition: an Islamic school might teach Muhammad’s campaigns instead of the Reformation in England, say. It’s just that it doesn’t take too long before you reach the point where it’s hard to see how they’re teaching anything of British culture or history.
https://profiles.google.com/108141131867234631336 on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 04:56 on 17-07-2014 - link @Dan H

I'd also point out that Christianity is at least as important to American culture, history, and national identity as it is to that of Britain, but the USA is very scrupulous about keeping religion out of state schools.

Having grown up in the American South, I would respectfully disagree with that statement. Actually, I would do so, but am too busy cleaning Coke off the wall. I had teachers in school teaching Christian ideas - as Christian ideas - and actively scoffing at the idea of separation of church and state in a state school. We had a biology teacher reamed out for not stating evolution was a Communist lie and God made the Earth and all creatures in 7 days in 4004 BC - to an Honors class, no less. We had school assemblies during the school day specifically to be proselytized at. I got more Jesus thrown at me in my state school than I did actually sitting in my reasonable conservative Methodist church on Sunday. My home county sets up an official Nativity creche on the courthouse lawn with the sort of belligerent deliberateness you get from a gaggle of Orangemen on a stroll in Belfast. The wall of separation of church and state was made of tissue paper and gasoline - and the fundiban were wielding flamethrowers.

And then you get charter schools. They are privately run, yet publicly funded, schools. Some are okay, but the vast majority teach a curriculum straight from the Piney Woods Primitive Baptist Lernin' iz fer Commie Faggots line of "educational" aids.
Shimmin on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 00:43 on 17-07-2014 - link Some scattered thoughts, sorry quite long.

My first question would be, “what is a value”? There’s obviously the rather dubious list, but leaving that aside, what is meant by values in terms of teaching them; what sort of status is being claimed for these? Because that would reflect the kind of classroom coverage you might expect. Are they supposed to be things that are ambient facts of life by mutual consent, if not necessarily consciously recognised? Things society at large agree are important and support enthusiastically? Issues of morality that we have essentially agreed on and brought into being? Things the people agree are moral concerns but are in no way achieved?

So for example, let’s say a value is gender equality: if it’s am ambient “value” you want to enculturise children into, you could bring them up with this value instilled by demonstrating gender equality throughout school practices, such as equal attention in classrooms (oops), equal expectations on behaviour (oops), avoiding gendered language especially where praise or criticism is involved, normalising cross-gender interaction, not dividing by gender for sports or other activities, gender-neutral uniform policies, and so on and so forth. If it’s a decided moral issue, then you’d expect a kind of low-level exploration with a lot of assumptions in the same way as we do for theft and murder and slavery. If it’s a moral issue that clearly needs work, you’d expect it to be given explicit attention, with exploration of the subject and reasoning, to encourage pupils to accept it.

Another point that occurs to me is, whose values are they talking about? Leaving aside religious or nation-of-origin differences*, I suspect that if you a) knew what a value is; and b) examined people across the country, you’d probably find substantial differences in values, and perhaps most prominently in how different values are ranked. I don’t pretend to know what they are. It seems likely, though, that there might be differences between say:
“C”, an independently wealthy, privately-educated member of the political elite, with a circle of powerful friends in media and celebrity, a privileged background, several homes in expensive parts of the country and a jet-setting lifestyle;
and
“W”, a state-educated minimum-wage employee from a community of minimum-wage employees, in a run-down provincial town with a fairly homogenous population, friends in similar jobs, a rented house and cheap motorbike, who sometimes holidays in Spain or Prague;
and
“R”, a retired middle-class bank worker and housewife from a close-knit community of like-minded people, now largely housebound and confronted with demographic and cultural changes, health problems and life on a pension.

How do they value, say, freedom of movement? Free speech? Democracy? Free healthcare? Respect for the elderly? Age equality? The welfare state? Universal education? Public transport? I dunno, but I bet there are some differences. For example, it’s well-recognised that politicians put a lot of effort into appealing for retired voters in swing constituencies, and very little into appealing to young voters in heartland constituencies, who tend not to vote much, so democracy may well be ranked differently. Would the British Values, on inspection, turn out to be mostly the values of privileged political élites?

*I’m not sure this is necessarily possible in Britain, as I’ve seen some argument that historic ethnic group (Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or Norman) has a measure of influence still, partly because it ties in with things like geography and family background.

Next random point: familiarity bias and cultural weight. Because of the weight of historical Christian influence on British culture and language, I suspect that a majority of lessons will feature something you could trace back to that, be it expressions used in class, moral positions taken, off-the-cuff examples, historical titbits or whatever. Many people will not notice these at all, especially people who aren’t actively interested in religion, comparative culture and so on, i.e. most people, or they will seem familiar and British and neutral with perhaps a slight tinge of Anglicanism. If you swapped all of those out with historical comparisons from Egypt, Japanese sayings and so on, it would immediately seem foreign and strange, even if they were equivalent. In fact, I reckon even swapping out proper names would do the trick. Even in maths.

On hair: I’ve been meaning to say something about this for a while, but the agonising over headscarves seem somewhat ironic to me, because when I was growing up I saw headscarves everywhere. In my largely-white, small provincial town, most women over 50 wore headscarves until perhaps ten or fifteen years ago. I have no idea what it was like elsewhere in the UK. Now they have largely disappeared, and I can’t help wondering if there’s a connection between that and the hijab issue: either people feeling more threatened by the hijab because white women tend not to wear headscarves any more, or people feeling reluctant to wear headscarves because they’re now associated with cultural otherness. For reference, according to conversations I’ve had, it was due to a mixture of lingering cultural-religious views about covering hair (hence hats or headscarves) and the rather more pressing need to protect ubiquitous and expensive perms or blue-rinses, which meant many women covered their hair whenever they left the house.

On anti-extremism: this seems like one of those very dodgy areas to me, where I find it hard to believe it isn’t essentially targeted at Muslims. Unless every single school is obliged to feature anti-extremist education, it’s immediately going to come down to inspectors judging which of them require it. Middle-class school in privileged all-white area of the home counties? Probably not. Harrow? Doubt it. School with lots of Buddhists? Unlikely. Majority Muslim school? You betcha. I’d be genuinely interested to know if schools in poor but minimally-Muslim areas are expected to educate against things like the BNP, especially considering some families may be affiliated with that strand of politics and willing to say so, so it wouldn't just be box-ticking.

“I'm not sure that having a different idea about what counts as appropriately modest dress for a woman counts as a deviation from the fundamental ideals of a democracy.”

This makes me think of the whole Essex Girl stereotype, to be honest. Regionally and economically there’s probably a fair swathe of difference of opinion about this stuff.
Dan H on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 18:40 on 16-07-2014 - link
Query: do Ofsted have different criteria for judging faith schools and secular schools?

Short answer: I don't know.

Long answer: I think so, to some extent. And to an degree that's perfectly reasonable - a school that is *supposed* to have a religious focus is going to be more religious than one that isn't. And I can see the argument that people who want their kids raised in a conservative religious environment should be allowed to arrange for it, while people who don't shouldn't have it thrust on them by a minority of interfering governors. On the other hand I'm aware that it's easy to see your own politics as neutral (secular liberalism is, after all, as much of a religious and political value system as religious conservatism).

Ofsted-wise I suspect that part of the problem is that Ofsted tend to be quite blinkered by their criteria. As long as you've got your schemes of work in order, integrate numeracy and literacy into your lessons, and jump through whatever other hoop they've decided you're supposed to jump through this term, they don't pay very much attention to what you're actually *teaching*. And often they won't be qualified to assess content anyway. I suspect the average Ofsted inspector has no idea where the Sun gets its energy from, or what the actual evidence for or against Darwinian evolution is. I suspect that the trappings of a religious education also seem a lot scarier when it's a "foreign" religion. I can see ACE looking quite benign to an outsider who is perfectly used to Jesus and the Bible and prayer being seen as either Perfectly Harmless or Jolly Good Things, while Koranic Arabic and *Muslim* prayer look all scary and alien.
Arthur B on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 17:14 on 16-07-2014 - link Worth noting too: the part of the UK which is the most religiously conservative, and in which certain politicians consistently rake in far more advantage than disadvantage by being loud and proud about their religious affiliations, is Northern Ireland.

When the Blair government started talking about allowing more faith schools to be set up, some of those objecting pointed to the situation in Northern Ireland, where there's de facto segregation into Catholic and Protestant schools. One of the "British values" I suspect Gove is trying to push is the idea that people from different backgrounds can get on better if they go to school together.

Query: do Ofsted have different criteria for judging faith schools and secular schools? If you gave an Ofsted inspector the set of facts found in the inspections of Trojan Horse schools but didn't tell them what sort of schools were involved, and asked them to compile a report on the assumption that the facts related to faith schools, would they give a clean bill of health? If you gave them the lowdown on Maranatha and had them compile a report as though Maranatha were a state comprehensive, would they slam them?

If there is an internal culture in Ofsted which assumes that faith schools are run by nutters for nutters, so therefore in that context nutty lessons are par for the course, that's obviously a huge problem for all sorts of reasons.
Dan H on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 16:41 on 16-07-2014 - link @ronanwills

Does anyone else read "required to teach British Values" as a gigantic red flag?

I think it sounds a bit more benign to a native Brit because our politicians talk about values, like, a lot. And "British Values" sounds a whole lot less psychotic than what they were banging on about in the '90s which was, I shit you not, "Victorian Values" (so ... military expansionism and child labour?). But yeah, it has a really creepy vibe to it.

The actual values involved are a lot less problematic in that they're mostly perfectly sensible western liberalism stuff, but trying to dress it all up in notions of Britishness leaves me extremely cold.

@Daniel F

There are a whole bag of issues to do with religion and culture here, though, aren't there? You note that many British institutions are explicitly undemocratic; many of them are also historically Christian.

This is true, and actually raises a point I'd been intending to address in the original article, which you *could* make a case that, since England is an officially Christian country, it makes sense for Christianity to have a privileged place in our educational system and that, therefore, a school which doesn't teach its children about Christianity is more of a problem than a school that doesn't teach its children about Islam.

I'd say two things in response, the first of which is that this is a perfectly reasonable argument, but it isn't the one that the government (and Ofsted) are making. I'd be perfectly happy for them to say "look, this is a Christian country, you have to teach your students about Christianity" - I'd disagree, but I'd be happy for them to say it. I'm very much less happy with them pretending that a failure to teach Christianity is a failure to "respect other religions" or "prepare students for life in a multicultural society".

The second thing I'd say is that I suspect the reason they *didn't* mention Christianity explicitly, but instead dressed everything up in terms of "Britishness" and "freedom" is that a lot of people get really upset when the government starts explicitly promoting Christianity. Which implies to me that the notion that Britishness is inherently Christian is one many Britons don't share.

I'd also point out that Christianity is at least as important to American culture, history, and national identity as it is to that of Britain, but the USA is very scrupulous about keeping religion out of state schools. Of course I understand that this often backfires, and you wind up with things like people trying to suppress the teaching of evolution on the grounds that it's promoting a religious viewpoint, but it would seem to suggest that you can have a majority-Christian country without Christianity being an expected part of school life.
Arthur B on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 15:00 on 16-07-2014 - link
My understanding is that Islamic communities in general are struggling to find where they fit into modern Europe, and that for the most part modern Europeans are not helping.

I think to a large extent it comes down to the experience of immigrant communities in general rather than Islamic communities specifically. A lot of anti-Islam rhetoric over here is actually anti-immigrant rhetoric after a find-and-replace job when you look at it closely.

Which isn't to say that there isn't an Islamophobia problem; what I am saying is that in Europe we have this perennial thing where we get all fussy about some immigrant population or other before we move on to the next scapegoat.

The Islamophobia thing is handy if you have a broad anti-immigrant agenda partly because it lets you tar about a third of the world with the same crude, simplistic brush, and partly because slamming people based on their region of origin is generally accepted as being beyond the pale whereas criticism of religion is seen as a valid and necessary component of free speech.

Probably the closest analogue is Europe's long-standing hobby of antisemitism. The Trojan Horse letter is basically the same sort of animal as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, after all, with the only significant difference being that it was narrow rather than general in scope and so incorporated more specific details and allegations.
Daniel F on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 13:14 on 16-07-2014 - link I think now we are increasingly reconciled to the thought that church affiliation need not correspond to piety or to genuine belief. Often church attendance is simply meeting expectations, or being part of a particular social circle, while there are some very devout people who avoid any explicit church institutions.

You're right to bring up the medieval church, though. The distinction between the church and the crown is an interesting quirk of medieval society. It's not secularism in the medieval context, but it is a precedent for the idea that there is a class of professional religionists and a class of rulers, and they (at least in theory) have different spheres of interest.

That distinction helps to undergird the idea of separation of church and state as well. If the church and the crown are (again, at least in theory) occupied with different concerns, it's perfectly sensible for them to adopt a policy of amiable non-interference. Even though it's practically guaranteed that religious teachings will have social implications. Many churches or other faith communities, especially in the modern day, might feel obligated to make those implications explicit. That doesn't seem like a fault to me.

Argh, waffling again. I suppose the point I'm wavering towards is that there's probably no such thing as a religiously neutral or truly secular society. Different faith communities struggle to compromise with the convictions of the societies they find themselves in, and there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. My understanding is that Islamic communities in general are struggling to find where they fit into modern Europe, and that for the most part modern Europeans are not helping.
Arthur B on Timeo Daneos et Donar Ferentes at 11:46 on 16-07-2014 - link It's interesting because on the one hand the institutions had all these historic links to Christianity, on the other hand you can kind of see a basis for secularisation of governmental institutions in the way the medieval church made this firm distinction between the church's sphere of influence and the secular authority's sphere of influence (as in the distinction between canon law and the king's law and the disputes over investiture of bishops), and on the third hand you have a desperate wish to avoid being dragged back into multi-generation sectarian conflicts shaping a lot of institutions (especially after the Civil War).

And on the fourth hand you have the eternal unknown of how many people in History actually deeply and passionately believed in the faith they espoused and how many gave the faith and its institutions lip service because that's what they were socially expected to do. Now that it's neither legally actionable nor socially disapproved of to not go to church, attendance has plummeted, and there's lots of people who think of themselves as being spiritual or religious but feel no need to connect to any exterior institution of faith.

« last 24 - next 24 »