Fanra: I'm moving non strawman religious stereotypes to the
Religious Stereotype page. Non strawman political stereotypes to the
Political Stereotype page. Please forgive me if I make some mistakes and feel free to fix them. Thanks.
Fanra: Someone removed the image from the page that I added, without explaining why they did so. So I'm putting it back. Please give a reason before removing something someone put on this wiki. Thank you.
GG Crono: That was me, sorry. I just didn't think it was a particularly good answer of the trope in and of itself. He's SAYING that he's a strawman, but he's not really being one.
Fanra: It seems like people (including me) are forgetting the idea of a strawman. It isn't just making a character that seems like a stereotype. Someone put in the mother in the film
Carrie was a strawman religious nut. No. A strawman is someone put in place who opposes the hero's viewpoint in order to make the hero's viewpoint look good. Just a stereotype is not a strawman. They have to be contrasted by the protagonist. In other words, some stereotypes can be strawman but not every one is.
Morgan Wick: So... isn't this just a subset of
Idiot Of The Week?
Seth: You could call this and
Idiot Of The Week related but this trope lends itself to one shots like movies better whereas Idiot is more for TV programs.
Morgan Wick: Erm... then what is it doing here at all? We still haven't become a movie wiki.
Seth: I just call us a media wiki and add anything i feel is relevant to entertainment as a whole, maybe make a
section for it if enough examples are added. Expansion and all that cricket. There isn't any real issue with this entry, it seems different enough from idiot that it can pull its own examples even if they are from films. That being said from a theoretical standpoint i don't care either way, if anyone cares that much maybe just merge this as a sub trope of idiot.
//Later: We do actually have a
Film section, it just seems ignored.
Corvus: This "trope" has existed since at least the 5th century B.C. and is not specific to TV, movies, or media. Nor is it restricted to politics.
The description given is so vague it overlaps with that of
Idiot Of The Week,
Idiot Ball,
Idiot Plot, and about half the stock characters. Some of these articles even use the same examples. The article should be rewritten or merged.
Seth: And what does the strawman part of the name mean?
HeartBurn Kid: It's taken from the
Straw Man Fallacy
.
Grev: Well then, why not just put it at
Straw Man and take all of the politics out of it. Heck, you could probably fold
TV Genius into it, too.
Seth: I wouldn't fold
TV Genius into it, the trope is too developed already but creating a
Straw Man page and calling it a subtrope might work.
Ununnilium: Heck, I could've sworn we already had one of those.
Edit: Also, are you sure you mean
Battlefield Earth and not
Mission: Earth? There aren't many liberal politicians
After The End...
Morgan Wick: And of course, Seth has completely overshadowed my original question...
Smapti: I'm sure I mean
Battlefield Earth. The planetary council the humans create after they retake the Earth has all the earmarkings of strawman liberalism, with a touch of Hubbard's psychiatro-phobia thrown in. It's around the page 400-600 range.
Ununnilium: Ahhhhh. I lost the copy I was reading before that point...
Andyzero: Changed to a more neutral title.
Looney Toons: I heard something once which really applies to this entry, but I'm at a loss as to how to incorporate it smoothly: "Conservatives think liberals are foolish, but liberals think conservatives are
evil."
Guess Who: And both are right.
Morgan Wick: And conservatives think liberals are evil and liberals think conservatives are foolish too.
Man Called True: Deleted the "Truth in Television" entry for a very simple reason: we don't want to start that fight.
J Random User: Well, it wasn't my intention to start a fight when I posted that example. But the three I posted most certainly play into the caricatures liberals would like to paint conservatives as. But if everyone believes it's too inflammatory, I've no argument with removal.
Ununnilium: A Strawman Whatever is
by definition not how a real member of that class functions. No real-life examples here, please.
Phartman: I'd drop that Entertainment Weekly article. It positively
reeks of the implication that "If only they'd stop and
think for a change, they'd see it my way," which is exactly what both sides are guilty of in the case of political strawmen. Unless, of course, the author of the piece is himself is being used as an example of the trope, then I guess it's okay.
Eric DVH: Pulled the
Path to 9/11 example for head-slappingly obvious reasons.
Later: We do actually have a Film section, it just seems ignored.
<- Would probably help if someone added it to the Categories Bar (
Cassius335)
There's an in-depth description of the Straman Conservative, but nothing of the sort for the Liberal...
Looney Toons: Um, in the example
- The global government in the Left Behind series starts out this way.
Which way is "this way"?
Fast Eddie: Good question. Heresay evidence has it that
Left Behind is something about post-Rapture, pre-Rapture, or something. So, a fair guess would be a global government in that setting would be straw-liberal, what with about 75% of the world having no Rapture concept.
The Red-Hatted Plumber:
I'm removing the following, as this constitutes discussion. It can remain here, however.
- I admit I haven't read most of the side books - mostly because I didn't like the Honor Harrington series much - but I find it hard to believe Weber would've included a story he didn't approve of in a collection. Furthermore, in the main novels there hasn't been much talk of political opposition because the war's united everyone behind the Alexander Government. It probably helps that High Ridge and his cronies screwed over three entire parties for a good long time by being corrupt to the bone.
- Montaigne's assumption of the head of the Manticorean Liberal Party occurred at the same time it was revealed that Baroness Mourncreek, former head of that party, was actually a corrupt hack in the pay of the Mesans with no actual Liberal principles whatsoever. In other words, the purpose of creating Montaigne's character was not to be a token, but to absolve the Manticorean Liberal Party of their entire previous bad characterization by retconning it as them having been the victims of a Mesan Xanatos Gambit, and now that they've thrown out their hacks and hypocrites, the real Liberals can get on with providing some much-needed voice of conscience in the Parliament. It's anyone's guess as to whether Weber decided to do this on his own or Eric Flint talked him into it, but the point is, he did do it.
thatother1dude: Removed:
- Boondocks makes plenty of uses of the regular kind of strawmen, though, especially conservative strawmen. "Uncle" Tom, the rather anvilicious "sellout" black character, is revealed to only be an upright servant of The Man because of his fear of anal rape. And that's without even getting into Uncle Ruckus.
Tom is generally portrayed positively, if somewhat of a wimp and a
Butt Monkey. Most of the characters that think of him as a sellout are the ones that are heavily mocked (see "Thank You for Not Snitching). I'm not quite sure what thing about Ruckus it's talking about though.
Filby: I think Tom is canonically a Democrat (he once went on a rampage trying to stop Ralph Nader from "stealing votes" from Al Gore, I think), too, so it's doubly inappropriate.
((Jordan}}: I'm not sure if that comment about Marx being from the "high bourgeois" is correct. My recollection was that he was born into a rather poor middle class family and that when he was writing in England he was generally impoverished as well. Perhaps that troper is thinking of Engels who was the child of a factory owner and was Marx's friend and patron?
Some Guy: Just wiped out the Marx entry completely. Any feelings I had that the entry was legitimate disappeared after the new sub-entry about Socrates and Marx showed up. People, this website is about tropes in media. It's not a forum to bash political ideologies you don't like.
Chuckg: Took out some of the back-and-forth in the Tom Clancy entry. Also removed the Heinlein entry, because the troper did not specify any characters or incidents but instead posted a vague, unsourced blanket indictment of Heinlein's entire body of work.
Janitor: Pulling
natter. Discussion is great, but it goes on the discussion page.
- This troper thinks that competent or not, they were still strawmen.
- Can you actually have fascist strawmen? It's not exactly controversial to say that fascism is bad and that people who think that fascism is good are bad people.
- No, but the psychology of people who willingly support or lead fascistic movements or states (of which there is usually no shortage) can be examined insightfully or lazily. Good people can and do support bad regimes for reasons other than apathy, fear, greed, or megalomania.
- Clancy takes it to ridiculous extremes in Rainbow Six. Despite being written in the late 1990s, it appears the titular international anti-terrorist team was not formed to combat contemporary terrorist threats. Instead, Rainbow Six finds themselves battling European leftist terrorist groups that have been inactive for decades.
- Well, the plot lampshaded why the last remnants of these inactive groups were being reactivated — as dupes for the master villain's Xanatos Gambit.
- I still find it difficult to accept that radical student activists would still cling to the exact same methods and ideology into their 40s after two decades of complete inaction.
- To add further insult to injury, the worst threat of all are shown to be tree-hugging hippie ecoterrorists.
- Well, many of them have claimed, repeatedly, that they want to reduce the world population to a "sustainable" one billion... just how is one of the many Unfortunate Implications of such a belief.
- Granted, but such groups are so far out on the fringes they'll never have the capabilities to carry out threats of mass destruction—and certainly aren't going to attract hundreds of PhDs and MDs to assist in their nefarious schemes.
- To be fair, the novel was written to be a tie-in for the video game of the same name. This troper has to point out that American extremist movements or bombers of any kind would fall onto the jurisdiction of the FBI or the ATF, and not to some multinational anti-terrorist force.
Some Guy: Removed the entry about Fox News. The network definitely has a conservative slant, but not every single left-of-center commentator that appears on the channel is a strawman. The allegation that Juan Williams is a strawman particularly irked me.
Fanra: Removed:
Lootin is particularly confusing as a villain considering that the series was the baby of Ted Turner... one of the richest people on the planet.
Because unless I'm wrong, the show didn't say everyone rich was evil, just
this rich guy.
Rann: Removed the Shortpacked
Justifying Comic. Not only was it discussion in the main page, justifying editing, and all that... the argument's not even a good one, and boils down to "When Willis can make excuses for me, my actions were good and just and my own, and when Willis can't make excuses for me, it was the comic writers' fault, not mine." That's spin an
actual politician can only envy.
Not to mention characters like annoying twit Sally Floyd, who would be an obvious strawman liberal under most other writers (If you don't know anything about NASCAR or Myspace, you're hoplessly out of touch with the American public? Really?). Word Of God says we're supposed to take her seriously.
Gattsuru: Not to defend the idiocy of this particular individual, but I can not think of a single liberal, strawman or otherwise, that knows a thing about NASCAR. "NASCAR fan", in American parlance, is a byword for drunken Southern rednecks and trailer trash; politically left-leaning folks wouldn't want to be caught dead knowing about the topic. It might be a joke that of the quarter-million folk at the Charlotte raceway, none of them would vote Kerry or Obama, but it's one treated fairly honestly. Floyd's a lot of things, but her arguments aren't really mockeries of liberal or Democratic arguments.
Coolnut: Pulled the GTA4 snark. While conservatives have it bad, liberals have it just about as bad as well (have you seen Congress's approval rating lately?) Nevertheless,
cheap political snarks are generally out.
Balso Snell: It says in there that Andrew Ryan is not a typical Objectivist because he "hates charity." Um, preface to The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, anyone? "Charity is the single worst sin ever committed by society"?
Gattsuru: Yeah, Ayn Rand and even modern Objectivists are pretty heavily against the whole 'imposed charity' thing, the only aspect that Andrew Ryan really rants against. The intro to Rapture with the Sweat of the Brow speech, really didn't sound too far from something Rand herself would have been proud of.
He
is still a strawman, but more for the whole "socializing entire industries", "banning entire forms of trade", and "stringing people up in the streets" part. Those are kinda wallbangery.
<random troper>: Added a new Truth in Television catch-all for the 50-odd years the sitting president/congress has been made into a strawman, particulalry in television and new media. Doesn't matter who is in office, their supporters will write books saying they're a spotless saint, and their detractors write books decrying them as the Worst Ever(tm).
Lord Seth: Is Michael Moore really a "real world" strawman like the article claims in its description? Yeah, he's pretty liberal, but he doesn't seem to be a strawman liberal to me.
Nornagest: From where I'm standing, almost all high-profile ideologues on both sides of the aisle have some straw in them. Michael Moore is worse than average, occupying something akin to Ann Coulter's position on the right.
Filby: The difference, though, is that while both of them are loud, obnoxious, and frequently twist facts in their favor, Coulter's message is that of a radical reactionary hate-monger while Moore's is that of an establishment center-leftist.
Soap: That, my friend, is up to debate. As far as I can fathom,
these are not the words of a center-leftist, but of a true-blue hate-monger. Plus, as for the claims that Moore is merely "pretty liberal": Eric Alterman, uber-liberal writer for
The Nation and author of such books as
What Liberal Media? and
Why We're Liberals has recently gone through hoops to make it clear that Michael Moore
does not speak for liberals.
it's Ryan who uses violence first against more traditionally non-ideological Corrupt Corporate Executive Fontaine, which ought to be an Objectivist no-no.
Gattsuru: It's been awhile since I've played the game, but I was under the impression that Fontaine had used violence against the average people long before Ryan did tried to take him down; there's a lot of voice logs that boil down to kidnapping, gang intimidation, or all-out-violence. Fontaine's entire methodology is based from the ground up around false contracts, something Ayn Rand found detestable, too. It's Ryan socializing Fontaine's Adam sales (and earlier ban on the import of certain texts and weapons) that represent Ryan's biggest fall from Objectivist grace.
Farseer Lolotea: I take it
Jack Thompson is being used as an example of a real-life "Straw Liberal" here. Considering that (from what I've read of his rants, anyhow) he actually seems to be rather reactionary...
why? (As for actual real-life Straw Liberals, I personally think Michael Moore
would qualify if he were just a touch more venomous.)
Gattsuru: Jack Thompson claims he's a Republican, although his politics seem to fall somewhere between Moral Majority and Tipper Gore, but stripped of anything approaching sanity. He's not really a "straw political party" as a "straw political position", like Weird Al's
Don't Download This Song is to RIAA. For Michael Moore, I think accusing people of actively wanting to maim hundreds of children because they advocate the careful, cautious, and legal exercise of a right is venomous enough.
Admiral-Bell: I removed the the Real Life example of the terror preparation drill. It didn't seem to be an example that everyone could get behind.
Chuckg: And I just put it back, because regardless of your opinion on religion, the idea of a "realistic" drill where a "Christian militia" occupies a school and takes everyone hostage is positively cracktacular. When the hell has that ever happened? Ma'alot? Beslan? Oh wait, that was someone else.
Admiral-Bell: You know what, it is a pretty good example.
Fifth: Just to have said it but a lot of examples on this page seem premised on the rather ridiculous notion that people are incapable of being ill-intentioned or, barring that, being honest (intentionally or unintentionally) about their ill intentions. Last I checked, 'Strawman' means something being portrayed //inaccurately//, not just in a way you don't happen to like.
CapnAndy: Removed the entire Watchmen entry, for three reasons. I'll reproduce it first.
- The opening credits of the Watchmen movie. Approximately four minutes in, you will see a scene flashing back to the 1960s where peaceful hippie protesters, standing in an orderly line waving their signs, are confronted by a line of National Guardsmen with rifles levelled and fixed bayonets. The entirely peaceful protesters, committing absolutely no violation of the law save possibly holding a public demonstration without a parade permit, then have one of their number — a pretty young woman — shyly creep forward and tuck a peace lily into one of the soldier's rifle barrels. At this point, the soldiers volley fire directly into the crowd. Regardless of your particular opinion of the 60s and the antiwar protests, showing the US Army unhesitatingly committing mass murder of an unresisting, unarmed crowd in the opening credits of your movie has to be a new world's record re: lack of subtlety.
- The movie's general determination to strawman the conservative political side actually winds up doing a Fridge Logic number on the end that the graphic novel very narrowly avoided (maybe); the small, independent newspaper is vilified as such a little bundle of conservative hate and just a teeny tiny step above a crazy guy photocopying a newsletter in his basement that even if they did publish Rorschach's letter revealing Veidt's scheme, absolutely no one would believe it.
- Not to mention "Who would ever want a cowboy in the White House?!"
Okay, so. On the first example, I hate to spoil a perfectly good rant, but that shit
actually happened, right down to the pretty young woman tucking a flower into the soldier's rifle barrel. That moment is
famous. The difference is that in the real world, the soldiers didn't do anything, so it's remembered as a victory for peace and love over war and hate, which is why it's so famous. Changing it so the soldiers open fire is a demonstration that the Watchmen world is considerably more brutal than ours, there's no more political subtext there than there is in any of the other famous moments from history the opening credits show us being changed by the presence of the Minutemen and Watchmen.
Second example just makes no sense to me. The graphic novel is where the independent newspaper is "vilified as a little bundle of conservative hate and just a teeny tiny step above a crazy guy photocopying a newsletter in his basement". The movie never even mentions it until the last scene; this example is all bass-ackwards as written since it's using stuff from the movies to
Fridge Logic (how?) stuff from the graphic novel. Guh?
Finally, that last line is a joke from the comic that didn't transfer well — in the comic, the cowboy actor with the RR initials running for President is Robert Redford, but a cowboy actor will never be president, get it, hahaha. In any case, it's worth noting that with Nixon (a Republican) in office, Reagan must be running as a Democrat.
Chuckg: Um, re: the whole 'actually happened but...' — so, as near as I can figure, you
admit that the point of that moment was to portray the government as hideously brutal, but its not a
Strawman Political. I mean, hey, sure this portrays the forces of anti-flower-power (i.e., conservatism) as being as evil as the Nazis, but hey, that's what the story is about, so its OK! Say
what? As for 'all the other events' — I was being
restrained in not griping about the Comedian shooting President Kennedy, because while that also arguably qualifies (Hey, did you know the 'conservative' member of the superhero cast freaking whacked the President?!?), at least its from the original graphic novel. The bit in the credits with murdering protesters, on the other hand, is wholly made up for the movie, and gratuitous as hell. And so, I'm putting that entry back in.
Matthew The Raven: I don't get the bit about the Comedian being the 'Conservative member.' Most of the superheroes were conservative. Blake's the Fascist nihilist who kills people for shits and giggles and has no regards for civil rights, "almost a Nazi." He killed Kennedy because he's a ratfucker, and someone ordered him to wack a political opponent. Rorschach is a far-right winger too, but a different type. Hollis Mason is a classic Mom-and-Pop conservative, and a good guy, and Captain Metropolis is a decent guy with some horrible views on race, which were common for people from his generation. It's really a rich spectrum of conservatism in Watchmen. The only confirmed liberal is Ozymandias, with Manhattan being apolitical and Laurie and Dan being someone moderate.
Tricksterson: I would say Hollis is conservative in his personal behavior but not particularly political. Dan also I would say is basically apolitical and Laurie is somewhat liberal but more in kneejerk revulsion to the Comedian than out any solid conviction. As for The Comedian himself he's conservative only because it's a conservative government that allows him to indulge in his atrocities. If the US was run by Stalinists he'd be just as enthusiastic as long as he got to kill and rape.
The Minsky Terrorist: I find it a tad off that you think that Nazis, racists, a fascist version of Richard Nixon, and "Mom-and-Pop" types are the "diverse" forms of conservatism, or that you think that Nihilism has anything to do with conservatism at all. Who doesn't have a kneejerk revulsion to every single main character in the book?
None of them have politics unless you give them politics, or watch the movie.
Count Dorku: Cut this -
"Compare
Straw Priest."
Because there is, at present, no such trope.
Filby: I'm guessing s/he was thinking of
Holier Than Thou.
