Why I Like Doctor Who

I discovered Doctor Who when I was starting high school. Late Saturday nights on PBS stories were shown without breaks for hours and hours every week. I loved watching it and thinking about how incredibly strange and radical the ideas in the show were. Without internet, I also wondered how or why British TV shows were so long. Only later did I figure out it was episodic.

John Pertwee who was the third doctor (my favorite) once said in an interview that he thought the Doctor was a boring know-it-all cruising through space – or something like that – and decided he would add in some bits of dialogue to humanize the doctor, or well, make him seem a lot less like a intergalactic know it all and more like an adventurer. The current show with all its backstories, twists, and recurrent characters I think owes a bit of a debt to Pertwee’s idea here.

I think the difference between classic who and contemporary who tracks on the difference of public attitudes toward science and knowledge. Contemporary versions of the Doctor are a lot more certain and a lot more committed to a particular base of knowledge that companions can’t really access – although they can understand. In classic who, the Doctor would be as in the dark as his human companions however he had something they did not – a method of inquiry and a process of working through a moment or a situation to determine what he should do (or more often not do).

The 2005 reboot is a product of its time – here’s a guy who is an expert on the future, science, history, everything. This might not really be possible or even desirable among a time travelling scholar. Commitment to a certain mode of inquiry – the kind the 3rd and 4th doctors represented best – is not only more reasonable to imagine in relation to time travel, but could also be a very good model for us when we encounter the novel and inexplicable.

Recent episodes, since the end of the 10th doctor to today are all about the Doctor’s psychology and personal traumas. This resonates with our contemporary situation where trauma, personal experience, and known innner truth have taken the lead in public discourse, inquiry, politics, and the like. Instead of questions, the Doctor has answers. And those answers are only revealed in the last act. We, the audience are to marvel at the Doctor not stand beside them. We are to be impressed, not seeing how easy it would be to think, believe, and act like the Doctor.

It’s not possible to know all the history, science, and meaning of cultures across every point in space time. It’s also unreasonable to think personal trauma and feeings would be able to be mapped across culture and civilization through space and time. It’s not possible for us to do either on one planet with one creature (humans). It’s better to think of Doctor Who as a show about how we should encounter the strange and new – with a process of inquiry, interactivity, and uncertainty – rather than the idea that we know or have felt what others have.

Winning Arguments Podcast & Behind the Scenes

Here’s the latest episode of “Winning Arguments,” a podcast I’m doing with some friends I’ve made who work with Canonical Debate Lab.

What we’ve been trying to do is build the podcast in public, meaning we share the run up, pre-show and all meetings about the podcast, then have the episode separate. I’m sharing the whole thing on here, and I thing I’ll just send out a note every time we make one.

We’ve been trying to find a Tweet-as-argument and evaluate how it works and what could be done to improve it. I think it’s really coming together in a lot of good ways. Looking forward more than anyone to see what the final form is.

ACAC

Using stasis to expand productive policy invention

“All cops are bad” – this kind of lazy thinking that is not only dismissive but a refusal to address the problems facing the police state (as it reveals itself more and more to only be this) is a phrase that should be altered to “All cops are cops.”

It’s weird to think of a cop as a Swiss army knife. A cop – based on what they are meant to do and their training – is really a steak knife. It’s difficult to think of a diverse police force, or a police force that would be able to respond to a number of situations out there. But since neoliberal faith has destroyed all public institutions, gutted them, or made them functionally a joke there is little left to do but call the police for every situation that requires government intervention.

Realizing that cops are cops – they are there to stop, halt, detain, and intervene in criminal situations – means that we limit the conception of the police as a multitool. Instead we realize how inadequate it is to have the police come to every single crisis moment that happens. Instead, we should reserve the police for particular kinds of interventions, then create other organizations to respond to issues that do not require the full force of the state to stop something.

This makes me think back to rhetorical stasis, that ancient world conception of how to find the controversial points in an argument or debate. Stasis theory was used, and is still taught, as a method to explore a controversy to determine the best place to hold the disagreement. By “hold” we mean something similar to the ancient Greek word stasis – a point of no movement, frozen (not temperature), where the force is high but motion is not happening. In the case of “All cops are bad,” people have decided to have the argument around the stasis of degree, or quality: How intense? How harmful? It’s a debate about degree or amount. I think this is a mistake as it encourages us to “measure” the individuals who are cops against one another, or take the set of people who serve as police, and equate them all with the worst possible actions of the police.

Instead of a judgement on the nature of the person or the title or organization – “All Cops are Bad” – it might be better to provide a more definitional approach rather than qualiity (using the old stasis terms). “All Cops are Cops” indicates that the police attract a person who wants to do police work, comes with training in police work, and does not offer much else. Police are trained to enforce the laws. This seems like it’s at the center of things. After that you could make claims like “The police protect the public.” This is a bit harder to prove but you could make a convincing argument here based on what police are taught and paid to do. As you move out from this, it becomes more and more spurious to prove. This is where you might get the idea that they are “all bad.”

In a recent book, Benjamin Bratton argued that the only part of the state apparatus to survive both neoliberalism and the COVID fiscal cuts is the police. This means the police will be relied on for just about any public need that requires state intervention. If we want this as our world, we should either alter police training, or have the police serve as one branch of a response force that is publicly funded for the variety of things that require state intervention to protect citizens. But in order to get here, we should stop looking at the quality of the people in uniform and just the uniform itself. Cops are not failing in totality; cops are cops. Sometimes – very rarely – this kind of legal force is required. But it shouldn’t be the first response. Realizing that cops are cops – and only cops – is the starting place to have the “defund the police” conversation, however that naming is a lot of trouble too.