On that note, it's not wrong to make lemon cake for breakfast, is it?

With curd and frosting?

Yeah, I agree. Definitely the best culinary decision I've made all week!

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As I said, Eva and I watched DS9 yesterday

That episode where Keiko is teaching about the wormhole and Winn is all "There's not enough religion in this!" and Keiko goes "Well, that's not my job!" and it's a whole big thing.

That episode falls a little flat for me, and on this watching I worked out why.

1. Keiko is kinda arbitrarily a jerk here. I mean, yes, she was blindsided, and yes, Winn would try the patience of a saint, but Keiko doesn't even pretend to take her seriously. When nearly all of your students are religious Bajorans, it makes sense to treat their beliefs with a tiny modicum of respect.

It's not her fault, though. It's the writers. It's like they know the other side (in our world, creationists, but that analogy is imperfect and I'll get to that) has a point, but they can't be bothered to understand what that point is and they're pretty sure that point is stupid, so in order to make it look fair they resort to having Keiko go on the defensive and act like a jerk.

In fairness, creationism and abstinence only education and the like are pretty stupid... but you don't convince anybody of that point by saying so to their face. You engage with them and let them figure it out on their own. Keiko doesn't even want to make an effort. Some teacher she is!

2. Of course, the analogy is flawed on the very face of it. Creationism is flat-out wrong. Abstinence only education is associated with terrible results. We can prove this.

But let's look at Winn's original complaint: Keiko referred to the inhabitants of the wormhole as "aliens" instead of "Prophets".

Well, the wormhole aliens provably are the same entities that the Bajorans worship as Prophets. And they really have taken an interest in Bajoran affairs and sent those mysterious orbs that non-Prophet science apparently can't explain. This isn't really a Galileo situation. It wouldn't have killed Keiko to just say "You're right, the Prophets built it" and go on from there. (You and I know that that smarmy bitch Winn would have kept picking a fight until she got the results she wanted, because she didn't really care about education at all, but at this time Keiko had no way of knowing that and all the Bajorans who withdrew their children probably were decent individuals.) But instead she had to be "NO! That would be denying them knowledge!" which pretty much says "Bajorans, they're deluded fools, am I right?"

It's not so much that Keiko is wrong, it's just that she can't see that there might have been a better approach. And when the whole plot is so obviously allegorical, it's really frustrating to see that it was all a secret agenda by Winn ( Read more... )

. And then once it's said and done, everybody forgets all about it, which most definitely does not happen in the real world.

I don't know. I just feel that if they were going to make this analogy, they could've picked a better one and maybe shown more of a good faith effort by Keiko to understand the opposing point of view, even as she still rejected it. You can't teach people if you don't understand them and don't want to.

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