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A Fistful of Tropes

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Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#41

Post by Keysh »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #37
slowmovintarget wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Would it make any sense to describe the Polynesian settlement of Pacific islands as "nazi bullshit"? (Granted, we have little or no access to proto-Maori ideologies of the 13th Century, say, but discussions of what "colonization" is or means tend to be really Eurocentric...)

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#42

Post by giraffe_lady »

Keysh wrote: post #41
giraffe_lady wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Would it make any sense to describe the Polynesian settlement of Pacific islands as "nazi bullshit"? (Granted, we have little or no access to proto-Maori ideologies of the 13th Century, say, but discussions of what "colonization" is or means tend to be really Eurocentric...)

There's actually quite a lot of scholarship about what empire and colony can mean and look like in non-european contexts. People who do that work define and qualify the terms carefully.

In this case it makes sense to focus on europe, because european colonialism has recently & radically shaped the world we live in a way none other has. To the extent non-euro states are currently attempting or achieving empire, they are doing it based on the model and tools of european colonialism. Right now, as discussions of space colonization are taking shape, they are as well.

A joke I made elsewhere in this thread: when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#43

Post by lacrimacida »

blowski wrote: post #8
lacrimacida wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure but Musk is certainly trying hard to be the Pope of something, not exactly sure what but I noticed a very high number of ads and posts that are more or less self promoting.

He’s the Citizen Jane of our day. Trying desperately to be loved by anybody who’ll have him.

I think he’s also swindling his followers with Dogecoin and other stuff nefarious schemes.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#44

Post by Keysh »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #42
Keysh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it make any sense to describe the Polynesian settlement of Pacific islands as "nazi bullshit"? (Granted, we have little or no access to proto-Maori ideologies of the 13th Century, say, but discussions of what "colonization" is or means tend to be really Eurocentric...)

There's actually quite a lot of scholarship about what empire and colony can mean and look like in non-european contexts. People who do that work define and qualify the terms carefully. In this case it makes sense to focus on europe, because european colonialism has recently & radically shaped the world we live in a way none other has. To the extent non-euro states are currently attempting or achieving empire, they a…

_when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with._

If you could travel to Mars in an open-air vehicle, and then land and survive on the surface wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, and get your water from local streams and rivers, and grow crops on the surface with no special effort -- _and_ if Mars was already inhabited by human societies adapted to the land, whose food you could eat, with technology roughly equivalent or somewhat below yours, and political divisions you could exploit, and wealth and products you could extract -- well, then your European-colonialism analogies might have some relevance.

The reality is "the narrow model" (of European colonialism) doesn't remotely fit "the conditions we are presented with"... But we seem to be in the mode of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": when all you know is European history, European history is the only possible model.

(Really, something like the Maori colonization of New Zealand -- which had no pre-existing population, and required the settlers to bring their own crops and scout for resources for making tools -- is _marginally_ more relevant. Even more relevant are things like research stations in Antarctica, where -- again -- there's no pre-existing population, and where you simply _can't_ grow food locally or easily survive outdoors.)

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#45

Post by yaqubroli »

Keysh wrote: post #39
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.

…Japan?

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#47

Post by extraduder_ire »

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.

As an aside, it's probably for the best that the aforementioned bundle of rods around an axe isn't often used in a pro or anti context these days. Otherwise people might freak out about the design of the lincoln memorial or something. (this thought's been stuck in my head since I noticed them adorning a bridge's sides in a city where I lived next to a 1916 memorial.)

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#48

Post by extraduder_ire »

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…

An antipope is someone trying to be pope, confusingly enough.

See also; St Peter's cross.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#49

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #37
slowmovintarget wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

So what you're saying is that The Three-Body Problem, a pro-space colonisation novel is in fact white supremacist and espouses a Nazi ideology, despite being Chinese and written by an overtly pro-CCP author?

As is Dyson Sphere Program, a game developed by Chinese studio Youthcat Studios?

Okay, enough about China, what about Japan? Legend of Galactic Heroes, Xenosaga, Crest of the Stars, Superdimension Fortress Macross, Space Battleship Yamato, Starship Operators, Bodacious Space Pirates, Star Ocean? White Supremacy seems awfully popular among these non-White creators.

Re: A Fistful of Tropes

#50

Post by defrost »

Keysh wrote: post #40
defrost wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 R…

> The closest anyone got to racial issues was ..

You apparently missed the explicit references to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots

both of which have been cited by Romero as events he watched while writing the film. I'm guessing that perhaps you skimmed over those and mentally bundled them in with the Kent State shootings as "obviously Vietnam war"?

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