Archived Discussion Main / NoDelaysForTheWicked

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Working Title: Nameless YKTTW: From YKTTW

Pastafarian: I feel like this trope really isn't prevalent enough for aversions to be worth noting. Should something to that effect be put into the main page?

Actually, I belive Mussolini did get the trains running on time - he rewrote the timetables to match the actual performance of the trains.

Real Life

• Partially subverted by the entire Bush Administration. Under Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and David Addington et. al., the Republican Party was supremely competent at exactly one thing- getting what they wanted politically. However, they maintained the trope in that whenever they got what they wanted, it turned out to have exactly the opposite result than they had intended.
  • They got to invade Iraq. Their invasion turned to shit.
  • They got to torture prisoners. Their torture never caused more good than harm. (the invasion of Iraq was justified in part on information gained by torture which later turned out to be false).
  • They got to create a rigged judicial system (in violation of the US Constitution, no less!) for instantly prosecuting suspected terrorists. No one respects its verdicts.
  • They got their economic policies (endless tax cuts, privatization of core government functions). Those policies caused a recession and turned this into the most inefficient government in modern US history. Remember that, despite Jonah Goldberg's quote at the beginning of this entry, even the most incompetent government agencies, conspiracies, etcetera have to be good at at least one thing: getting into power and staying there long enough for their incompetence to damage the functions of the system. That lousy baggage handler may not know how to do his job, but he damned well knew how to get employed. Incompetence is usually highly selective in that way.

Aren't there time when you just want to hold every single American's head underwater until they all drown?

Phartman: I was about to say something, but then I remembered that self-righteous pussies need to say things like that to make themselves feel better. And the economic crunch is due to government interference in private industries, not the other way around (research the Community Reinvestment Act, for example, if you'd like to know how the housing market ended up in the crapper). I'm glad the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement is around to get stupid bullshit like this off the main page.

Nornagest: Your bureaucratic overlords in the TV Tropes Forums (all hail!) have discussed renaming this trope here, and an apparent consensus has been reached. If that consensus is not broken by 3 April 2009, this trope will be renamed to No Delays for the Wicked.

Nornagest: Countdown over. Moved everything.

Also cut the following — the idiom appears to be used to mean something different.

* Mussolini's alleged quotation is explicitly referenced in Exosquad, where La Résistance leader admits that whatever you may think of the Big Bad's regime, he makes The Trains Run on Time.

Nornagest: Cut the following indiscriminately. We don't need people flogging conspiracy theories here.

** Seriously, if the feds can't cover up a hotel break-in without some guy who watches too much porn blabbing on them, there's no way they're hiding aliens.

*** Unless, of course, they lost them.

** This troper would like to reiterate; most 9/11 conspiracy theories require the whole thing to be run by George W. Bush.

*** Or Dick Cheney...

*** Who once mistook a human being he was apparently incredibly familiar with for a quail. Yeah.

*** That was no mistake. It was part of Cheney's plan to convince the public that he was a human capable of fault, not a heartless robot.

*** But what about all those heart attacks he had?

*** That's his heart rebelling against his totalitarian orders to keep pumping blood 24/7.

*** Don't forget he's also Osama bin Laden's CIA handler. And Karl Rove shot down Paul Wellstone's plane with an EMP.

** Or the theory that the Roosevelt administration knew that the Japanese were planning an attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing to stop it because they wanted an excuse to enter World War II. Similar to the theories about Bush and company knowing about the 9/11 plot before it happened and doing nothing to stop it because they wanted an excuse to invade the Middle East, actually...

*** But more believable, because the US was already offering aid to the Allied Forces and seemed to want to take a more active role, but since they had essentially declared "you stay out of our hemisphere and we'll stay out of yours" way back with the Monroe Doctrine, they needed the Axis Powers to make the first move in order to get the public's approval.

** Simple trick to debunk most conspiracy theories—anyone organized, efficient and ruthless enough to maintain a nefarious conspiracy for decades would have no trouble silencing those who speak out about said conspiracy.

*** That's exactly what THEY want you to think.

*** Also, completely unnecessary. Real Life is too disorganized, inefficient and apathetic to sustain sensitive information. Even if real information ever gets out, it quickly mutates from the real goods into incomprehensible gobbledegook. You don't need to be The Chessmaster to get away with mass murder; all you need is to whip the media into a frenzy, let them spray excrement everywhere, and the truth destroys itself. For example, the wingof the Pentagon that was hit was opposite the point of the stated plane's highjacking, there are confirmed recordings of Janet Reno ordering the use of incendiary tear gas(the better to burn the place down), and ANFO is a really weak explosive that somehow still caused the total collapse of a building while leaving nearby buildings unharmed.

*** 1- Planes can turn, you know.

*** To miss the parts of a building that are not under renovation?

*** 2- Why would you set your tear gas on fire?

*** Umm, to kill everyone with fire?

*** 3- ANFO is still pretty damn explosive. Collapsing one building whilst leaving others intact is not all that unusual, especially if fire damage in involved.

*** How do you get two hundred pounds of crap/oil pudding to ignite all at once?

*** The point is you don't need to be a Magnificent Bastard to get away with barbarism. You just need to be psycho enough to purposefully take Refuge in Audacity. Paperclip, Tuskegee, MKUltra; guess what? NOBODY CARES.

Peteman: I think we should cut Star Trek or list it as an aversion, because we've discussed how the various interstellar empires screw things up (Klingons have a corrupt government and lack of safety concerns destroyed their moon which crippled them, Cardassians have their three-way power struggle, Romulans have rotating governments as the old one gets deposed, Dominion have their shaky alliances, the Borg even have Unimatrix Zero)

• Similarly, while the Federation has to deal with incompetent bureaucrats regularly, where are the Klingon, Romulan and Cardassian incompetent bureaucrats screwing up their empires?
  • Then again, the show is more about the people in the Federation, not the other empires. The Cardassians have a three-way power struggle between the civilian government, the military, and the secret police, the Romulans have had numerous plots that had been started and abandoned as the faction that started it got deposed (like Picard's clone in Nemesis), the whole reason the Klingons underwent their Heel–Face Turn was because reckless disregard for safety resulted in the destruction of the Praxis moon, which crippled their military production and ruined their homeworld, and the Dominion had its major internal problems stemming from rocky alliances they made to gain a foothold in the Alpha Quadrant. Compared to all that, the Federation is a model of political stability and economic efficiency.
    • The Cardassian military is also notoriously corrupt.
    • Economic stability is easy when replicators are commonplace and there is no currency. They never did really explained what all those merchant ships were doing, they must run on barter.