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

I should have specified some, though my point is that even in a Society without writen laws, some things will be...well, laws in all but name

Eh, the whole point of judges was the idea that written laws were draconian as without human judgement, the law would quickly become intolerable. Circumstanecs needed a human advocate to explain their POV and context.

Very few laws should be absolute. Some? Yes. But circumstance can change much.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 22nd 2019 at 5:48:43 AM

As nobody has said that we should have laws enforced by robots your point seems rather out of nowhere Charles.

As I’m pretty sure I’m the only person here who has lived in something approaching a commune let me lean on my experience a bit.

We wrote shit down.

We had all sorts of rules, we had to, so we wrote them down in a big old book everyone could go check, if you thought someone had broken a rule you’d bring a case to the community and we’d decide on how/if they should be punished.

But we still wrote shit down, we needed it as a reference guide, if nothing else it helped let up work out standard fines to have them written down, rather than us have to try and remember what fine we imposed on the person who did the same thing a month ago.

Don’t be a dick is a great base rule, but it causes far to many issues if you don’t establish some common standards for what counts as being a dick, otherwise people will do things they think are okay but that have been agreed to not be okay.

Freedoms inherently conflict, you have to establish where the line between two peoples’ freedoms sits. Is it okay to scream your head off at 8am on a Saturday? After all a person is free to make noise, but another person is also free to sleep in, so where is that line drawn? You establish that line and publicise is so that people don’t cross it.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 22nd 2019 at 1:08:01 PM

Uh, not really. Judges were originally essentially the entirety of the legal process, empowered by a king to travel the country in a “circuit” investigating and deciding on legal matters. Previously kings had done that themselves, but as countries grew they were no longer able to reasonably do so. It didn’t have anything to do with laws being “too draconian”, they were essentially just the king’s agents. When they first came about they were highly unpopular, there was a perception that they were unforgiving and used to oppress the populace.

But either way, your point that no law should be absolute is a little off-base considering we already have a legal system where laws are subject to interpretation by courts. It could be argued that currently no law is absolute, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at there.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 22nd 2019 at 6:15:12 AM

I'm actually genuinely confused what your point is.

Then again, I haven't disagreed with what you've said from my opinion.

Seems like the judges of old were more like Judges than modern day judges. Though even the Judges still have to follow written laws and burden of proof and such.

As for absolute laws...yeah, we don't have any. At least not in the USA. Every law we have is subject to change and interpretation by our courts. Even the Constitution isn't set in stone (literally and metaphorically).

Edited by M84 on Sep 22nd 2019 at 9:54:39 PM

There is something I can want to ask.

If you want said were most persistent theme in post 2010 fiction, what would be?

I mean, when people ask about 90, people said: drugs, gang violence, corrupt CEO, force pro envrioment stuff, first racial and sexual quality, aseops,etc.

what could you said is the new teens tropes?, the one you will see in the past and said "yeah, that was my time".

In the USA at least there's stuff about mass shootings, the existential dread of climate change, and immigration issues. Media tends to reflect the fears of our time.

Oh, and Trump. We just can't get away from him in our media.

Edited by M84 on Sep 22nd 2019 at 11:44:13 PM

From what I see, the most common theme nowadays is the conflict between the little and big narrative, often portraying the latter as villainous or unsympathetic.

Edited by raziel365 on Sep 22nd 2019 at 10:07:22 AM

In terms of US media, the 2000s' would obviously be under the shadow of terrorism. 2010s seems a little trickier, since I'd say you'd have to tie the dominance of superheroes into the grander scheme. Making Iron Man a transition point, I suppose.

This the theme I see in most fiction:

Optimist swing: I will said that compared to 2000 to 2010 decade who was very edgy and more ambigous, today I see more a trend toward more black and white morality, the strugle against evil again and so on.

Pacifist heroes: with many show of disney and other I see the idea that conflict can be resolved without violence.

Also a sightly biggest push in diversity, I will said this the biggest push in media so far, we know even animated media show it up, that is something.

Could you elaborate on this please?

They more or less went around killing people who didn’t like the king. It wasn’t until much later that they became proper arbitrators, which at that point was more a matter of practicality.

You seem to have an idea of what the law is that doesn’t necessarily reflect what it actually is.

The point about judges being created to soften the law kind of shows this. Judges were originally just as bad, or worse, than the law they enforced. As the law changed to become more varied and inclusive, their role changed as well. “The Law” is not some horrendously evil thing that people inevitably suffer under.

I was using it as an example of arbitration, not historical veracity.

Judges aren’t an advocate in an adversarial system, though. The attorneys are the advocates, the judge is an impartial mediator.

Either way, it’s inaccurate to say that the “whole point” of judges is to soften the law. And it’s inaccurate to say our laws need to be made context-sensitive, because they already are.

Media from the 2000s had more of a tendency to glorify anti-intellectualism and excess.

Media from 90 put conspiracy theorist as harmless thing, after 9-11 and them they ether show to be right or to be nutjobs.

I will theorize that in the future(that it, 2020 and beyond) climate change is going to be push HARD as theme in fiction, I can see another capitan planet reboot.

Have you guys ever heard of Worldwar by Harry Turtledove where aliens invade the Earth during WW 2 forcing the allied powers and axis forces to team up to fight the alien threat. The series goes from the 1940's to an alternate 1960's with a cold war between the human nations and the alien forces.

I was wondering if such a series could be made nowadays due to the fact that the Nazi's and Imperial Japan are allied with the other human nations to fight this alien threat?

Have you guys read this book series and if so did you guys find anything problematic with them especially in our current political landscape?

While the concept highlights something often said about humanity - that we stop fighting each other as soon as somebody comes along who're further removed from us than the previous outgroup to gang on up on them - but such a series would be widely (and rightuflly so) lambasted for being apologia.

Especially with the recent surge of fascism and other far right ideologies.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 23rd 2019 at 4:44:01 PM

I read it a while ago. It's a series... Which I gave up on.

It was so... blah. And, sex-obsessed in the most empty way (even though it kind of touched on the social and gender aspects, it came across as, well... a guy thinking he knows more than he does). Being asexual, I noticed that more than others around me who where also reading it.

Blah.

Especially because in the year 2031 the Nazi Regime is still in power and the United States is still somewhat allied with them.

I just know in that universe WW 2 movies have to be fucking weird.

I think the series could possibly work in our current times if it served as leftist critique of the United States and the problems in that country such as racism and authoritarianism despite being known as the land of the free.

To quote Emma Goldman " Much as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco", she wrote to a friend, "I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise."

Edited by warrior93 on Sep 23rd 2019 at 11:33:32 AM

Yeah. No. Leftists trying to compare USA with fascist states are a joke.

For what I understood of the series, the whole series is a analysis of the Gray-and-Black Morality of WW 2, with the Western Allies being shown in a positive light (thought called on their flaws), the Race being Morally Gray (They're imperialist aliens, but they give you basic rights that people in Nazi Germany, the URSS and Imperial Japan—dominated areas would love) and the URSS and the Axis being...themselves.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 23rd 2019 at 10:46:56 AM

It's a Deconstruction of Alien Invasion stories to a large extent and I think some context is needed in the fact that the USA is allied with Nazi Germany. It's meant, basically, to be a statement that doing so was a serious moral failing and horribly evil. The typical Alien Invasion story has all of humanity band together against the Scary Dogmatic Aliens and that's exactly what happens in this story.

Except, well, the Race are NOT Scary Dogmatic Aliens. They're Feudal Future assholes, yes, but the thing is that it's explicit they're not objectively worse than most of humanity and they're a huge amount better than Nazi Germany. Jews get shit on in-universe for allying with the Race against the Nazis but what the fuck should they have done?

Turtledove basically said the series functioned on Star Trek morality but no one realized it because no one thought to question the idea of Human vs. Aliens being an unnecessary binary choice.

He said a lot of fans missed it as well until the ending where, yes, humans have to deal with aliens living on their planet and aliens the same with humans in space.

Glad to know I worked the punchline out about the time ginger became used as a subversive "weapon"... And then clocked out of the series.

I'd been struggling before that point, but... That was the final straw. I don't generally like poorly executed Poor Communication Kills plotlines. xP On top of all my other issues with that series. <_<

Turtledove was very ham-fisted on a lot of topics in that one.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 23rd 2019 at 5:31:55 PM

I read that series. One thing you'll notice is that despite ostensibly working on the same side now, the Nazis never stop being Nazis. They're still rounding up minorities and killing them, still fanatically loyal to Hitler, still taking out anyone who doesn't toe the party line, and still stabbing their partners in the back.

At the beginning of the series, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto initially even welcome the alien invaders. They're a massive step up from the Nazis and nobody cares that Berlin was nuked in the opening invasion. It isn't until they do the same to Washington, DC that they have to reconsider resisting the Lizards or be considered traitors to the all humanity.

Another Jewish woman in Britain related to a POV character how she fled from Germany after Hitler came to power, but prior to that she had thought herself a proud German and was eager to embrace the nationalism the Nazis brought only to break down in tears, still not understanding why her country hated her so much.

The Lizards' leader listens to a speech by Hitler where he screams and rants about how he's ready to nuke everything and everyone and if the Germans lose then they aren't worthy of him and he won't be sorry to see them all die. The Lizards are disturbed by how insane he sounds and by the fact that the crowd clearly loves him for it.

A German tank commander becomes increasingly disillusioned with his country when he's forced to confront with his own eyes what they've been doing, including using Jewish and homosexual slaves to work on their atom bomb project, even as they're dying of radiation poisoning. He starts feeding the Jewish resistance information when the Nazis plan to use them as sacrificial lambs and gets arrested by the SS for it.

Then the Germans break from the rest of the Big Five and try to nuke a city during peace negotiations with the Lizards, much the rest of the world's horror.

The Japanese don't get any favorable light at all. The Italians might as well not exist.

The US gets called out on its racism, with a few Southern characters having to eat humble pie when black people show them up. In the follow-up series it's revealed they're behind a massacre of alien civilian colonists.

The Soviets are the Soviets.

Interestingly, the UK actually gets worse after the war, as being allied with Nazi Germany makes them more and more fascist. A Jewish character from the first series ends up immigrating to Canada because of it.