Why settle for coherent when you can make it complicated and unintelligible? Private Eye is saying that the show's been put on hiatus for at least 3 years - so plenty of time to reverse the polarity on the complexity inhibitors.
Yes. Regard it all a bit like the Valeyard: ghostly future echoes of what could have been. The more appealing stuff can always be reintroduced afresh. If you don't like Eight - I could be convinced with Seven. I'd be happy with a pre-Rose Nine as well.
(I'm increasingly an advocate of (re)introducing the Faction, if Miles would allow it, who have been there all the time messing with time, causing temporal collapse - from which emerges new timelines which simultaneously embrace and reject everything before. And behind that a greater War in Heaven which makes the Time War look like a scuffle in a playground.)
Family. Country. Flag. King. Sunday dinner. The village green. Fish & Chips. God. Now that's patriotism. Who wouldn't want a bloodbath to save all that from the fiendish Enemies of England who eat babies and don't speak the King's English and whose leader is insane?
Do you mean nazis or German soldiers? There is - if you know your history - quite a difference. But, to answer your question, yes. A bit like British conscripts going off to fight and it being drilled into them to follow orders along with the threat of being shot if they didn't follow orders. You seem to forget that the Allies also committed terrible atrocities on the European mainland in both wars. I don't think ordinary people - German, Russian or British - are inherently evil and bloodthirsty in the way you seem to. But I do think that tools like propaganda and patriotism can be used to manipulate and coerce.
A bit like all those young men slaughtered in the World Wars (and about every war, really). When the lord of the manor or the king or your priest tells you to sign up and fight, you fight to defend their property. When foreign armies invade, they're not after the houses and property of the poor or to take over local communities for some vague reason. They're commanded to go after after the land and property of the rich (for their king or oligarch). It's not hard to understand that. But, as you say, you go and do you and die for your abstract country, king and god.
Then who triggered the invasion? A whole race of evil Russians who do it because... because... they're evil Russians? I don't think so.
Wars are always caused by the ruling classes whether oligarchs, millionaires, aristocrats or whomever. They don't end up fighting but leave it up
to the ordinary people to give their lives. Those Ukrainians dying are certainly not the rich. Ukrainian rich are all in places like the South of France and LA.
Blue Labour are turning out to be a bit like Farage and Reform. The right-wing media will give them
a platform out of all proportion with their actual support... until they've had so much coverage that their support catches up. Every time the govt say something they'll be a Blue Labour comment.
It's that old idea that you can build weapons in order to get yourself out of an economic crisis. Didn't seem to work in the run-up to 1914 or 1939 and I doubt it'll work this time either. But it'll distract the ordinary man or woman on the Clapham Omnibus from realising how shit everything is.
Anyone sane would agree with you. This is "war"
between oligarchs and the very rich. It shouldn't involve everyone else. I'd like to see gladiatorial solutions to conflicts. Put Starmer in a cage with Putin if they really want to wage "war" on each other. I'm sure most Russians don't want war and just want to go about their lives like the rest of us.
Great. More money flowing upwards into the pockets of the billionaire industrialists who own weapons manufacturing. Plus the joy of watching their media wind everyone up into hysteria about a war. If we're really lucky they'll then provoke a war and cause millions of us to die in the first blasts and then millions more in the radioactive wastelands afterwards.
As I've enjoyed saying: the show has reversed the polarity up its own vortex. A day after watching and I'm still traumatised by the exuberance of the shark-jumping I saw. The Doctor riding a Flash Gordon-like skysled to crash into Ming's Rani's HQ was just one I can't seem to shake. Or the Two Ranis Ronnies' joke. "It's goodnight from me."
Yes. I'm out. Watched for about 50 years. I knew it when the Rani did the Two Ronnies' sign off before she time-looped away. There's only so much shark-jumping you can watch.
Keep searching Youtube. It's been put up and taken down a couple if times already. It'll be put back up again.