Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
It gets even weirder when the group that it is derogatory to forget that the term is bad.
Cliches you can't stand
- Thread starter Mithras
- Start date
Yeah, but that's seldom stopped people from doing so in reality or in fiction.
I'm reminded of a bit in the Harry Dresden novel White Night that I found funny, probably unintentionally. There's this scene with a large meeting of White Court vampires in an underground sanctuary where they sit around referring to humans as "kine" (cattle") and in general talk about how superior they are and weak humans are...while they are hiding from those humans, in an underground shelter, and keeping their existence secret from the humans.
I found the dissonance rather funny; you don't exactly see human ranchers hiding from their cattle in underground bunkers lest the cows fall upon them and destroy them.
- Location
- Northern Hemisphere
I probably should've clarified that my issue isn't so much that it's derogatory but that it's never called out. I've yet to see a character go, "You know, I don't like the term 'muggle'. It's offensive, dehumanizes people, and makes me feel uncomfortable. I wished we'd stop using it."
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
True, human ranchers are known to lack a sense of self-preservation like that.
You'll notice that the largest concentrations of humans tend occur far away from ranchers and their cattle. Perhaps there is a reason for that.
Also they aren't creative. Most of them just literally mean 'you don't have magic'.
Ah, true. Just because there's a term doesn't mean people should accept it!
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We don't live in cities because we're afraid of cows lol.
Do the deer actually kill them, or is it just hitting a deer with your car and dying in the resulting accident?
- Location
- The Old Dominion
Most of the time its people hitting deer with their cars and getting killed but apparently sometimes people get gored to death by deer.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Deer exceed the cows on hunters that walk up to them attempting to deliver a coup de grace shot to a wounded animal and then get antler'd easily.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The whole facism is super efficient meme needs to die, it was the opposite
Something that doesn't help is when you have "China/Vietnam's Educated Leadership has crushed COVID while European and American Democracies dither" being mainstream talking points.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
And people sometimes confuse the ability to crush any dissents as efficiency, or at least the factor that can lead to more efficiency.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think they'll confusing causation and correlation. China has a authortian leadership. But actually competent diseases control
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The amount of anti-homeless propaganda in our culture is disquieting my dad said don't feed the squirrels when I asked him to give homeless people
Madam Carstein
Cheerful Middenlander Demoness
- Location
- Middenland
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
Except the Third Reich like... actually wasn't that great at dealing with dissidents beyond the bare minimum.
Most authoritarian regimes are relatively competent at dealing with such, otherwise they don't stay in power, so there is a certain bare minimum of competence, but we should remember that the Reich's literal intelligence agency was headed by a man who was actively working against the regime from within and passing vital information to British intelligence.
Honestly, the degree of infighting, incompetence, and extraordinary inefficiency that existed within the Reich should by any account have resulted in its collapse years before the historical date of such.
People generally tend to assume that evil is more efficient and effective than good; so people who regard authoritarianism as immoral will tend to assume it works better. Fiction is full of people anguishing over making the moral and ineffective choice, or the "hard choice" that works, because it's almost always taken as a given that the more ruthless option will work better.
As I've said in the past, it would make a funny premise for a short story to have Nazi "super scientists" near the end of the war invent a machine that lets them see alternate universes, and go looking for help in a universe where the Third Reich did better. Only to find out that they are the outlier, and the vast majority of alternate versions of the Reich collapsed much sooner.
Madam Carstein
Cheerful Middenlander Demoness
- Location
- Middenland
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
If anything, I feel like the opposite is true: authoritarian state systems and governments are generally much less capable at providing for their people than democratic ones. Democratic governments don't have the same kinds of incentives to conceal disasters or problems in the way that authoritarian ones do. If a famine or other disaster happens in a dictatorship, it makes the regime look weak and ineffective, and when dictatorial governments lose the perception that they are in control, they are generally under extreme risk for popular discontent.
So in situations where a nation's government is facing a crisis, the tendency becomes denialism: there is no famine, there are no massive crop failures causing starvation in rural areas, the economy isn't collapsing, etc.
Edit: Where things get weird is in dealing with repressive states that have some democratic trappings like Apartheid South Africa. Apartheid South Africa did have regular elections (which were whites-only) and resistance to Apartheid by various opposition groups in parliament opposed to the National Party did happen but like...
The fundamental nature of the Apartheid regime was deeply and inherently authoritarian. Anyone who acted against the regime could be banned*, imprisoned, or assassinated.
*To be banned in the Apartheid Era meant being severely limited in terms of one's contact, one's ability to speak in public or disseminate written work, etc. It was often applied to journalists or various leaders within the African resistance to Apartheid. The liberal white journalist, Donald Woods, was banned prior to eventually fleeing South Africa. As was the anti-Apartheid activist, Steve Biko, who was eventually detained and killed by the police.*
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I was talking more on the technological side of things, because everybody from Wolfenstein to P.K. Dick indulged in the "Nazi Super Science" trope that we all know and "Love", and still persists to this day. Let's take for example, the Tiger Tank, an overly complex piece of machinery that required an ungodly amount of maintenance and was incredibly slow. The Soviets, OTOH Had a far more practical T-34 and IS-2 Medium and Heavy tank respectively that could be mass produced and had lower costs in terms of both maintenance, supplies, and crew training time (And both would give way to the T-44, a prototype MBT. Then there's the "Napkinwaffe" that were fever dreams of desperate engineers.
And yet, China has managed to get a handle of COVID far better than Western European Democracies despite being less developed, while the latter have been paralysed in perpetual lockdowns*. And you already see the common talking point of "China's educated leadership ensures the masses wear their masks!" even among progressives.
*Australia and New Zealand's situation was such that even DarkSydePhil couldn't mismanage the situation to the extent of, say, Trump.
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- Location
- Somewhere
The thing is, it's fiction, so "awesome looking but impractical" will always get more attention than "easily mass produced and efficient". And let's be honest, what mad scientist wouldn't want one of these:
Mortis Nuntius
Theon Killjoy
- Location
- United Kingdom
The Tiger Tank was the IS 2 equivalent not the T-34 equivalent, a heavy break through tank. The Panzer 4/Panther were the closest match ups to a T-34.
The Tiger's breakdown rate was pretty typical, it was more reliable than a Panther and about on par with everything else. Its main issues stemmed from the situation rather than inherent flaws. All tanks breakdown all the freaking time, even the T-34 but as the Germans began retreating suddenly it became impractical to extract their damaged or non functioning vehicles and Tigers took a lot of effort to extract because they were big.
Early war Soviet tanks had very similar issues of breaking down all the time and having to be abandoned for the Germans to happily take up and use later, they also had an issue with their crews not being trained or familiar with all these new vehicles and thanks to mass production all sides produced a lot of gear that was notably poor quality because they needed to cut corners. These issues were vastly reduced by the end of the war on the Soviet side whilst the German issues got worse but most German vehicles were never Tigers, they were Self Propelled guns and upgunned and uparmoured panzers and whatever they'd captured over the years.
The thing is the Germans made a massive propaganda deal out of the big cats and the Allies at the time fully bought into this, every allied loss was attributed to Tigers, every allied kill was against a Tiger. The Allies take extra losses because they are on the offensive? It must be because their gear is substandard. At the most common ranges a Tiger could be knocked out by most of what it was facing though it was better at longer rangers than a lot of what it faced, but this somehow translated into it being an unkillable monster facing mobile coffins. The Germans had some fancy stuff and great PR throughout but also it suited a lot of people facing them to make out they were just naturally better at warfare and industry because it made the various setbacks along the way more palatable and it made those who eventually beat them look good.
Of course what the Germans actually did to win wasn't what they built so much as how they used it, they were big on lower level decision making and put a lot of time and effort into training their NCOs and making sure every tank but also frontline units had radios and early war were fighting far less flexible enemies with air superiority and late war the bulk of their enemies in the West were far less experienced and had a bunch of internal factors hampering them. They still got crushed again and again as the war went on. If anything the popculture view of the war is completely arse ended, the Germans were usually outnumbered and much of their gear was adhoc or stolen and poor quality, but they got a lot out of everything they had and were notoriously flexible and aggressive. Just well pluck and grit doesn't matter too much when fighting 80% of the world.
- Location
- Back in the 90s (In a very famous TV show)
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Ve/Ver
Doesn't China also have experience with pandemics in the past, like SARS? That might be why they've done better.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I am reminded of a statement by Guillermo del Toro:
I'd argue that horror has its roots in fairy tales, whose implicit or explicit focus on karma makes them very political, arguably moreso than most genres. I mean like a romantic comedy you might have some messaging about whether nerds or jocks deserve to get the girl and what is or isn't acceptable for courtship and the like. In horror though the stakes are typically who lives or dies, and its usually decided based on who 'deserves it' wholly independent of actual character competence.
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Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
In the slasher's Italian predecessors, the virginity of the victim does not guarantee anything - and not that they come across there. In addition, it is worth considering that in the American counterparts there is a nuance - "innocence" is mostly feigned. To be saved, you need to commit a murder - and often this means that the "last survivor" is likely to be the first victim in the sequel.
Let's make a discount on the early Gothic British tradition, where the main character is sweet, modest, and good-natured.
In any case, I continue to insist that if slasher is conservative, then it is not Reagan's conservatism, but the Apostle John's (although I'm not sure if the word conservative can be used in relation to early Christians).
Let's make a discount on the early Gothic British tradition, where the main character is sweet, modest, and good-natured.
In any case, I continue to insist that if slasher is conservative, then it is not Reagan's conservatism, but the Apostle John's (although I'm not sure if the word conservative can be used in relation to early Christians).