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A Fistful of Tropes

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Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#31

Post by pjc50 »

gary_0 wrote: post #4

> Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where…

I would note that the original origin of the zombie trope among Haitians was a slightly different fear: what if slavery didn't end when you die? What if there was no release, ever, from being controlled? That you could be raised from the grave and made to do more work?

(hardly anyone does a zombie movie from the POV of the zombies; most people treat it as given that they are dehumanized, the Other that it's safe - no, morally necessary - to kill)

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#32

Post by giraffe_lady »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #14
pavlov wrote: post #2

> “Note that I'm allergic to kitsch Americana, especially Westerns, am a singularity skeptic and atheist in real life, expect FTL travel and/or time travel to prove impossible, ditto mind uploading and "true" general artificial intelligence, and strongly suspect the answer to the Fermi paradox is that our kind of tool-using intelligent life is vanishingly rare in the cosmos. Manifest destiny is white supremacist (rea…

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the lab…

A fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter.

The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#33

Post by FFP999 »

eesmith wrote: post #19
pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for providing context for the joke.

What makes the joke not work is that cstross is really the autopope, drunkenly mislabeled the antipope. You can clearly see he still provides pontifications. If Musk is the opposite of the autopope, what does that make him?

A manualpope. Same basic function as an autopope, but needs a human operator.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#34

Post by FFP999 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #32
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the lab…

A fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter. The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." -Mark Twain

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#35

Post by starkparker »

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization

Are we really at such a point where all thoughts on colonization are exclusively the realm of Western imperialism? There have been plenty of massive human empires where white people weren't involved, and reducing colonization to white supremacy feels more like erasure than anything.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#36

Post by slowmovintarget »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #32
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the lab…

A fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter. The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.

How is useful to refer to attempting to find new homes in places other than Earth "nazi bullshit?"

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#37

Post by giraffe_lady »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #36
giraffe_lady wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter. The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.

How is useful to refer to attempting to find new homes in places other than Earth "nazi bullshit?"

Whose homes? Under what conditions and decided by which institutions, under what power dynamics? When you elide all that as "find new homes" you are leaving a lot of room for work colonies, extractive exploitation, and eugenics, yes.

"Is having friends a conspiracy?" well... maybe, it depends on what you do with the friends. In cases like this you need to be at least a little specific about the implementation.

If this sort of straightforward rhetoric gets even a handful of people to notice that the concrete plan musk has is at least agnostic towards nazi bullshit then it was precisely useful.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#38

Post by giraffe_lady »

starkparker wrote: post #35

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization Are we really at such a point where all thoughts on colonization are exclusively the realm of Western imperialism? There have been plenty of massive human empires where white people weren't involved, and reducing colonization to white supremacy feels more like erasure than anything.

I mean when the mughals show up and attempt to create indentured servitude on mars we can generalize a bit. Right now it doesn't seem necessary.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#39

Post by Keysh »

starkparker wrote: post #35

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization Are we really at such a point where all thoughts on colonization are exclusively the realm of Western imperialism? There have been plenty of massive human empires where white people weren't involved, and reducing colonization to white supremacy feels more like erasure than anything.

Well, it's not as if people originally from Asia went and colonized islands all over the Pacific over the last few thousand years or anything.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#40

Post by Keysh »

defrost wrote: post #5
gary_0 wrote: post #4

> Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where…

If you're intent on imagining a subtext to Night of the Living Dead a movie which never mentions zombies and features the (undead) neighbours harrass a black man who is ultimately shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy then you might also want to recall it was conceived in the aftermath of the Detroit and Newark riots and released to audiences who had just seen National Guardsmen shoot antiwar protesters to death at Kent St…

It's kind of interesting to read about contemporary reactions to Night of the Living Dead, which included "it's obviously a commentary on the Vietnam War" and "a critique of American capitalism". The closest anyone got to racial issues was the observation that at the end, the (black) main character is killed by a (white) posse led by a sheriff -- which seemed to some people to be an obvious commentary on the Civil Rights Movement and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X.

The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)

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