This thread's purpose is to discuss politics in works of fiction/media. Please do not use this thread to talk about politics or media in isolation from each other.
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I was thinking of asking what people thought were the most interesting post-election Trump related media.
The Good Fight on CBS Access devoted their entire second season to dealing with the subject.
Edited by kory on Feb 26th 2025 at 5:46:51 AM
I'm reminded of an idea I had for a character in my tabletop games:
Basically, they're a missionary or a diplomat for an evil cult. When they talk to people outside the cult, they present themselves as a friendly moderate whose views really aren't that unreasonable. However, when in the company of their fellow cultists, they go right on ahead being just as bloodthirsty as the rest. And then back again.
Though, in their case it's less that they're lying per SE and more like their beliefs are highly susceptible to peer pressure and they have a self serving memory.
Basically, when around non-cultists they decide, semi-sincerely, that they "didn't really mean" all that hateful stuff they said. But they thought they meant it when they said it.
Leviticus 19:34Well, it's generally a good idea for an evil cult to avoid getting on the radar of, say, the dominant religion or the government of an area when they're still on the smaller side.
It's kinda hard for a cult to survive a full purge and reveal of their beliefs.
Edited by Zendervai on Dec 8th 2022 at 10:17:10 AM
So, the setting is a sci-fantasy setting, mix of knights and wizards with marines and scientists.
This particular cult is a vaguely far-left movement that believes the society they split off from has become too dominated by dehumanizing technology, materialism, and capitalism. They essentially seek to tear down civilization in general in order to rebuild it in the form of an anarchic utopia built around their spiritual values.
They're willing to use very extreme methods to do so (everything from child soldiers to biological weaponry to dangerous occult magic stuff), and in the places where they've succeeded their "utopia" is a rather creepy prosaic hivemind of sorts. They also don't think every race in the setting can be made to fit into their new utopia.
However, it's not uncommon for them to pretend to Dark Is Not Evil rebels seeking to fight the injustices of a legitimately flawed system, and plenty of people view them as such.
Leviticus 19:34Granted, as they often try to hide it in public. But one thing I'll still say for sure is that they don't hide it by claiming to hate everyone. No, they hide it by claiming not to hate anyone, but just love their own. Claiming to hate everyone would be a completely counter-productive strategy for them which is why they don't do that.
Exactly.
I see a lot of more left-leaning people use the term "far right" for both standard conservatives and people actually on the extreme right (neoreactionaries, ethno-nationalists, etc.)
I'll also see this justified by saying "Well, the right has gotten more extreme over the years! The overton window has shifted rightward!" I'm surprised to hear this from people older than myself, because here I am thinking . . . do you remember the Bush era? In the 2000s USA, same-sex marriage wasn't legal in most states and conversion therapy was allowed. Fastforward to the 2020s and you have openly gay conservative pundits.
As for neo-Nazis and other open white supremacists, those have always existed in the USA since the 1960s at the latest. The only thing that has changed is that they learned to be more subtle about it. Hate crimes weren't invented at Charlottesville in 2017.
Sorry if that was off-topic, I'm gonna respond to Protagonist506's tabletop idea a little later to re-rail the thread.
JustForFun.How To Be An Anti Hero@Lone Courier There's a few in the setting. The most far-right faction is The Infernal Dominion, which are The Legions of Hell whose political ideology is basically Nazism mixed with oppressive feudalism. There's another alien race called The Rein that want to spread a clinical form of totalitarianism across the galaxy that's probably rightist (it's hierarchical but scoffs at traditionalism and culture in general).
There's a corporation called Helix Corporation that's a sinister corporation, though they're explicitly a Lighter Shade Of Black among its villains.
I'm also planning on putting in a heroic leftist faction called The Kezari to balance things out further.
Though the main conflict is between a "Space America" faction and the cultists.
Edited by Protagonist506 on Dec 8th 2022 at 9:22:14 AM
Leviticus 19:34Ah nice.
So, far the Alien antagonists in my setting mix Spartanism and Darwinism but don't have a high trust in corporate control either. And have a a Blue-and-Orange Morality of sorts when it comes to discrimination. Basically, they disown Human racism, but only on the basis of how looking someone down who share the same bones and skin to be counterproductive and a sign of "weakness" in an evolved society.
"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try."They're willing to use very extreme methods to do so (everything from child soldiers to biological weaponry to dangerous occult magic stuff), and in the places where they've succeeded their "utopia" is a rather creepy prosaic hivemind of sorts. They also don't think every race in the setting can be made to fit into their new utopia.
I have to say that's a surprisingly realistic depiction of how extremist groups work. Cults in general need to cut off their members from the outside world, which is what makes political resistance groups really good at being cults since they're pretty firmly against a major institution. Very easy to isolate people that way.
Though I'm somewhat interested in what exactly their goal is in creating their hivemind. Why would they complain about dehumanizing technology while also wanting a hivemind?
Also, I'm kinda reminded of an idea for a fantasy setting I had with another vaguely-lefty cult, though that one was more focused on recruiting people with an extremist pipeline. I haven't fleshed out that setting in a long while though and kinda just remembered it now.
JustForFun.How To Be An Anti HeroWhen I say "prosaic hivemind" I mean to say that they aren't literally a hivemind, just a very collectivist culture.
Basically they are an anarchic society that requires a high degree of trust between members. So this means they demand a lot of commitment and loyalty between members of their various communities.
They tend to hock this as a sort of warm, familial piety. They're very much "But Family!" people.
And of course, they tend not to like people who are not "family".
Leviticus 19:34As an aside, this only appears to be a contradiction if you start with the assumption that humans aren't or shouldn't be an hivemind. The term has negative connotations of creepy bug aliens so people don't tend to use it or think of their own views that way, they think of it as "unification" or "one vision, one purpose" and other aspirational-sounding descriptions.
(And on the more literal side, there's an argument that humans maybe should be considered borderline-eusocial - as an extraordinarily social species, which regularly or circumstantially demonstrates the various criteria for eusociality, it is not incomparable to bee species which have gained and lost their caste structures multiple times in their evolutionary history but never passed the point where they can't function without them.)
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOCalling humans "eusocial" I think is overstating it. Eusocial, I think, requires a species to essentially be a "superorganism" where multiple individuals "share" a single set of usable reproductive organs.
In the case of this cult: A good way of putting it is that they're interested in humanity as a collective and human culture, not necessarily the desires of individual humans. In fact, they tend to view something like greed as something that detaches you from the greater spirit of the humanity/"the people".
Leviticus 19:34It's obviously a controversial claim, but the accepted criteria for eusociality are
- Reproductive division of labour
- Overlapping generations
- Cooperative home construction and care of young
All of these have appeared frequently in human cultures in different times and places - extended family structures where parents give birth and then grandparents and childless relatives provide childcare are examples of the first kind, as are concepts like wetnurses or daycare facilities - so the argument isn't without some basis. I think it would be more convincing if a situation ever emerged in which, say, parents can't nurse and wetnurses can't give birth, though.
There's a fourth criterion of a 'point of no return', where it's impossible for individuals to transition from one behavioural group to another, generally because group differentiation occurs before reproductive maturity. No eusocial species with this characteristic is known to have evolved back into social behaviour, but there are a number of eusocial species without it, including mole rats and aforementioned bees. And human advancements in biotechnology may make this point meaningless, when anyone who wants can make such thorough transitions artificially.
Edited by Noaqiyeum on Dec 8th 2022 at 7:43:30 PM
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NO...other than my own very preliminary scribblings? I don't know. Brave New World-inspired dystopias, mainly. Possibly there's something more Hainish out there I don't know of, but to my knowledge "human xenofiction" is not a very well-defined genre. :P
Sorry, I meant to add an interesting aside, not to derail the thread.
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOI'm curious about the use of War Is Hell in media. Many stories portray war as an inherently immoral thing but is the way its frequently used actually kinda naive? I've been having questions like this since Russia invaded Ukraine, many stories have the different groups fighting for no reason but from what I've seen, there usually is a reason.
Edited by Kaiseror on Dec 9th 2022 at 10:42:24 AM
The reasons are usually decided by a small group of people with little input from the people who will actually take part in the fighting. War Is Hell usually takes place from the point of view of the people who were not involved in this decision making and now have to fight on behalf of uncaring old men playing at geopolitics.
Even if you are one of the 'good guys', chances are that i)you probably didn't the war to happen in the first place, but the war happened anyways and you have to fight for a better outcome and ii) it is really hell, since you are in danger of dying horrible deaths and your family back home is at risk of suffering from atrocities.\\
"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory Doctorow

I have seen in my experience, that if far righters usually believe a majority of their office colleagues, family or friend circles to be tolerant if not outright accepting of their views, then usually just the right political event, not even alcohol, is all it takes for their toxic beliefs to surface...before it goes back again and they go back to acting like completely nice people.