Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

A lot of people seem to agree Utopia Justifies the Means.

It's just they turned a blind eye that it was never going to happen on a mountain of corpses.

Or that large portions of the public don't agree with their vision of utopia.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 19th 2019 at 7:25:58 AM

What if the story shows that The Extremist Was Right?

I mean, are there stories which starts off as showing that Utopia Justifies the Means is wrong, but eventually morphs into The Extremist Was Right?

Baron Wulfenbach in Girl Genius.

He is an Emperor Scientist who conquerors Europe and is hated as a tyrant by the nobility, by the public (who mock him mercilessly), and rules solely through a monopoly on Mad Science. Our heroes are opposed to his ruthless suppression of Sparks and the nobility as well as personal antipathy to the heroine.

Then he's overthrown and everything completely goes to shit. Because it turns out that everyone he bullied and oppressed into obedience were complete assholes.

(Somewhat mitigated in the fact that Agatha the protagonist is a much better potential ruler - and so is the Baron's son that she loves)

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 19th 2019 at 7:45:13 AM

It is noted that Klaus Wulfenbach was not officially Emperor. He kept the Baron title as a deliberate rejection of the system.

One antagonist claims that if Klaus had taken the throne and the crown, all of the nobles would have gladly become his followers. They hated him not because he was a tyrant, but because he snubbed them. He mocked the very institutions and power structures that legitimized them as the upper class, he refused to play the game...and that was an unforgivable insult to them.

Interesting. I'd better read it then.

EDIT: God damn, that's a lot of pages. Guess I'm not sleeping for the next few days.

Edited by TechPriest90 on Apr 19th 2019 at 11:13:38 AM

That is how tankies look at the world, they don't?

Also, I've realized something. If I try to write a Utopia Justifies the Means and imply at least some The Extremist Was Right...I usually tend to make the utopia to be sobrenatural and very obviously something that humans can't realize for themselves. Dunno what that says about me, maybe a warning that while theorically, every sacrifice for a utopia is genuinely necessary, that only is valid when the utopia is probable...and humans are very shitty at creating them without external help.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Apr 19th 2019 at 10:35:25 AM

Wulfenbach is an interesting character because he could be a hard man making hard decisions type fellow but he's actually a Deconstruction of a bunch of the traditional "strong man" tropes with the fact that he hates ruling, allows the public to make fun of him mercilessly, and primarily rules by the fact that he does make constant compromises (despite his claim he won't).

His Empire's stability is weak but he's the next best thing to someone who can actually unite it with love.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 19th 2019 at 8:37:48 AM

The biggest sign that his "rule" was flawed? Because it depended entirely on his image as an untouchable unstoppable badass, the moment he was incapacitated, all of Europa fell into chaos.

Edited by M84 on Apr 19th 2019 at 11:41:22 PM

If you look at Russia, China, and other Eastern Bloc countries, the switch from nominal State-controlled Communist Party Rule to Crony-Capital-controlled Oligarchy being an improvement is debatable, but then again the Oligarchs and the Oppressors were roughly the same people.

It's an improvement in the sense that a lower % of their populations are starving to death.

TLDR- Right Wingers are a easy Asshole Victim that makes almost everyone against them look sympathetic.

Dunno, that is how I'm seeing the situation in the West and in the former Communist countries, it usually starts with the right being asshole enough that a communist revolution becomes a actual possibility.

Is funny how the Cold War anti-left paranoia have ensure that the West really don't knows or care about Leftist dictatorships because they have no emotional connection with them.

I wonder how it would have be if USA actually suffered from a Soviet attack?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Apr 19th 2019 at 11:13:06 AM

Well, the Right Wing in general is always doomed in the long run because nothing ever lasts no matter how hard they try, so how badly they want to prevent change writes the narrative of revolution.

Ironically, the center-right best times might be when there a legit far-left.

At the same time, the Rightwing always comes back in one form or another.

Because it's rooted in nostalgia for "The Good Old Days". Something that is timeless.

There's a reason Trump's slogan is Make America Great Again.

Edited by M84 on Apr 20th 2019 at 12:16:08 AM

The center-right and the far-right have an uneasy coexistence and are frequent co-belligerents against any sort of leftism. What's happening right now, with careerist conservatives teaming up with white nationalists, isn't an anomaly. They hate the large scale structural changes of the left wing programme more than the violence and rejection of formalism of the far right. Their actions makes far-left revolution more necessary, more likely, and ultimately more damaging because of their intransigence. There's never a "good time" to be the Nietzschean Last Man.

That's true, the rocks always exist in some form, but the river destroys them nonetheless.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Apr 19th 2019 at 12:19:34 PM

The problem is that there's always someone ready to dump a new pile of rocks in the river.

No, the problem is that the river will never run out of rocks. It's rocks all the way down. Exhibit A: Colorado. Exhibit B: the Ocean.

Yes, well, God's mill grinds slowly, but it grinds finely, and all that. My point wasn't that conservatives don't exist, it's that their cause is simply doomed. The conservatives fifty years ago failed. The conservatives a hundred years ago failed. They died, their ideas died with them, and the society they were trying to freeze in place changed with or without them.

Honestly, this is one of the reasons I think human immortality would be terrible. Imagine if our Boomer-ridden Congress still had five hundred year old fossils in the year 2450. Human frailty, human mortality, and the unending changing of the world dooms any enterprise built on things staying the same.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Apr 19th 2019 at 12:24:15 PM

Yeah, some ideas have been thrown into the dustbin of history almost certainly for good in terms of what is considered acceptable by civilization.

Like slavery.

Edited by M84 on Apr 20th 2019 at 12:23:24 AM

You mean [conservatives] in the sense that Innuendo Studios studied? I don't know if "Hierarch-ism" or Kyriarchy are ideas that we can overcome. I don't know if we'll ever outgrow the need to give people power over others on arbitrary grounds.

The End of Slavery, which was concurrent with the End of Aristocracy, does indeed sound like a good sign. But Dialectic Materialism, this is not.

Edited by Oruka on Apr 19th 2019 at 9:25:29 AM

I wonder if the world might be better if they were gone.

Not that I would try it (doing so suddenly surely would cause a lot of violence and more issues than what it solves, if it solves any), but in a Alien Space Bats sort of way.

I still imagine tons of issues, obviously. And stuff that we barely could imagine, for good...and bad.

Not hierarchy — everything has hierarchy because individuals aren't interchangeable. Tradition, devotion to formalism, religion, prejudice, those are the underpinning tenets of conservatism, not just hierarchy.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Apr 19th 2019 at 12:26:23 PM

Conservatism and progressivism can’t exist without each other, and moreover they’re both necessary for the discourse to work. Conservatives always lose in the end, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist.

...Eh. Maybe? Some things that Conservatives preach though, like Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, and Sexism, need to die in a fire. There's no use for it, only to hurt people.

As a Conservative, I define Conservatism along the following lines:

-Pro-Culturalism: Society is good, or at least can be made good. Most of society's problems are caused by individuals failing the system rather than the other way around. Flaws with society are usually treated as recent problems caused by society forgetting what it should be.

-Social Moralism: Conservatives believe society must have a code of Social Morality that needs to be enforced by society. Think Moral Guardians here. Codes of Social Morality can vary wildly (one code might say interracial marriage is wrong, another might say racism is wrong). This is potentially Not So Different from political correctness, actually (itself a code of Social Moralism). The key difference, though, is the pro-culturalism aspect-they view society as the solution rather than the problem.