Find a way to allow real life examples?: Of The People

So I just happened upon this article and noticed pretty quickly the "no real life examples, please" notice. Personally, I think we should try to find a way to allow the real life examples (and there are plenty of them- most of the ones I can think of are Native American tribes), because they actually do help explain where this trope came from. As it is now, with the only category for it being Speculative Fiction Tropes it looks like some weird thing that a sci-fi writer came up with for his Space Elves rather than an actual occurrence.

I think the main problem, that probably let to the real life examples being deleted, is the description, which is really negative and makes it sound like any society that names itself this way is full of racists. Obviously we don't want to say that about real life societies, so maybe we should try to rewrite the description to make it less judgmental?

If we really can't put in real life examples, we should probably at least have the description mention that it does happen in real life.

Fixed tag.

...Flame Bait is Flame Bait. Not going to happen, I think, in any productive manner...

Put in a sentence "This can be Truth in Television" and leave it like that, possibly with reference to the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment. I agree that there's no need to add real life examples, and it would mostly likely cause harm to do so.

I support the above sentiments.

Just as an anecdote, I proposed the original YKTTW because a politician in my home country had a habit of using "Of The People" a whole lot in his speeches. When I started to think it over because of his overuse of it, along with what (in my partial opinion) were signs of anti-middle/upper class populism... his use of the phrase started to make me really uncomfortable.

I believe this is used by many different Real Life cultures and languages, not just Native American ones.

Also, I think the title is off: it didn't make me associate to the trope at all, despite it being a trope I'm familiar with. I'd prefer just The People, though that would probably end up being misused. But Of the People makes me think of some Communist state where all public buildings are called "the People's Art Gallery" etc.

edited 9th Sep '11 9:59:24 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Being an American, I recognized the reference and was able to at least vaguely guess at the trope's nature, with some help from the OP, that it was probably about direct democracy or anarcho-democracy of some kind. But still, it isn't exactly intuitive, and -

(actually looks at trope)

What.

What's even the emphasis of this trope? That they call themselves "the people", or that they consider outsiders "not-people"? The topic of the thread has me confused; if it's the latter, real-life examples aren't that relevant anyway.

Morgan Wick,

My guess would be that both of the "call themselves the People" and "call others Not-People" are important components of the trope. I agree that the clear point of the trope is a bit unclear though. I think part of that may be related to the current name of the trope.

I wonder if the title Of the People is too opaque. I mean, on its face, all it really means is "about a certain group of people," right? I am not exactly sure what a clearer name would look like, but the current trope does not have an incredible amount of use so if other people think a rename is called for, it is definitely not out of the question.