Those those statements seem to make sense, based on comparison to the rest of America. (I would argue that 'Idahoans are conservative.' and 'Idaho is a conservative state.' say slightly different things...the first is probably what we're trying to say, what the citizens of Idaho think, whereas the second seemed to describe where the state currently is located. States can be located somewhere different than their citizens on the political axis, although that usually doesn't last long. But that's not that important here.)
I'm just not entirely sure saying 'America is center-right' is supposed to mean. America is exactly in the center compared to, uh, America, just like the average IQ is 100. So clearly it can't be that.
I _think_ when people say 'America is a center-right nation' is what they actually mean 'Americans are slightly to the right of where the laws of America are'. Which is just flat out, 100%, completely wrong, at least at the Federal level of laws. (An argument could be made, considering who Americans have elected at state level, that they want incredibly far-right state laws...but I rather suspect all examples of that recent nonsense is going to end in flames.)
Alternately, people are trying to say something about the mean vs. the medium. They're trying to say that most American are slightly to the right of center, with a smattering of very far left ones driving the average left-ware. Which is _also_ completely and utterly wrong. (If anything, that's exactly backwards!)
I can't think of any way that 'America is a center-right nation' really makes sense, unless the people saying it mean 'American politics are slightly to the right of where Americans are'...which, while correct, is probably not what the people saying it are trying to say.
And comparisons to the rest of the world are not workable.
I mean, are we more conservative or liberal than, for a random example, the Republic of Ireland? Ireland has, as far as I can tell, higher individual taxes (Slightly lower income taxes, but higher 'sales' tax, or rather VAT tax.), but it has lower corporate taxes. It has almost no legal abortion, but it has some of the strictest gun control in Europe.
Talking about 'left' and 'right' is already hard enough, and nonsensical enough, within the US. It's a system that squeezes a bunch of random vague things into a single one dimensional axis, and works extremely poorly to start with.
It doesn't really work at all when compared to other countries.
I always find it interesting, when looking at so called comparison charts, to notice what was and wasn't included as parts of the 'right' and 'left'.
Oh, and I know that Sweden has less progressive taxes _on paper_ than America. It doesn't have them in practice, however, because it doesn't exclude so much of income from the standard rates.
Are you referring to that study where they misrepresented Sweden’s wealth distribution in the charts they showed to people because Sweden’s actual wealth distribution didn’t differ dramatically enough from the US’s?
No. I'm talking about payment of taxes. I'm not entirely sure it was _income_ tax specifically. But Americans, when asked the percentage of their income that different groups should pay in taxes, picked a level that was closer to Sweden for high income people.
Of course, part of this is due to the fact that people vastly overestimate what percentage of income the rich pay, because they are informed repeated that 'the top 1% pay 33% of income taxes', which is, of course, inherently a lie. (Did you know that 20% of the population pays 100% of the cigarette tax?!)
So people polled pick something like 'Rich people should pay 3 times more taxes on each dollar earned than people making average wages', and _think_ that means they're reducing that amount. Because they've bought the lie that the rich are paying 33 times more tax on each dollar (Huh? That'd be like 1000% tax rate?!) or whatever they think is going on. (The rich, of course, actually pay about twice as much on each dollar as average.)
Sadly, I have no idea where this poll actually is, and can't find it.
I think you're talking about some other poll about wealth distribution, which I've heard of and don't know any problems with. Can you point to something discussing it?
@will-truman In that sense, we are a center-right nation.
I would argue that, _politically_, at this point, the Federal legislature is mid-right. The Democrats are standing slightly right, with a few outliers like Warren barely stretching over to 'moderate left'. And the Republicans have actually fallen off the far-right to the point where they literally have no policy to put forward for anything all.
I actually think it would be best if everyone stopped talking about where 'America' was positioned, because no one knows what 'America' means in that context. The American people are in one location (moderate left to center-left, depending), and assert they're in another location (center-right). Meanwhile, the legislators average way the hell somewhere else (middle right.)
@leeesq When you ask American general questions about their political beliefs, you usually get conservative or moderate answers. When you go into the specifics, you get more liberal or left-leaning.
That's sorta what I was trying to say above in my post.
Americans often say they're conservative. (Actually, Americans tend to say they're whatever _hasn't_ been recently been used as insults, so you find few 'liberals' and, now, few 'conservatives'. Instead you find 'progressives' and 'libertarians'. But whatever.)
Anyway, Americans will often repeat conservative concepts about things, framing their political positions through a conservative lens, even asserting they agree with the right...and then demand liberal laws.
However:
Part of this is the weird misinformation campaign being waged by right-wing media to make the country's left seem much more liberal than it is (And to bring this back to the article, they're not doing it because it helps politically, they're doing it because of ratings.), so you end up in surreal positions where people assume the laws are impossibly liberal, and they want them to be 'more conservative', where in actual fact the laws are father to the right than what they actually state they want.
And I think another part of it is just the fact that the right has spent decades, since the 1980s or so, talking about the framing of issues.
I'm not sure how much of this has anything to do with 'Americans' per se, as opposed to how _current_ Americans have been taught to talk about things. I mean, in the 60s, were Americans 'ideologically conservative and functionally liberal'? The 30s?
Is this how 'Americans' think, or is it just how Reagan made them think about issues, now combined with gibberish from Fox News flooding actual facts?
They control the House (and have little prospect of losing control of it),
Why do you say this?
They're going to keep the House in 2014, of course, unless they do something inconceivably stupid. (Although they have already done several inconceivably stupid things, so who knows? They could default on the debt ceiling, for example.)
But that's doesn't mean they'll keep in 2016. Gerrymandering only goes so far.
they have tolerable odds of seizing the Senate
I don't agree, but am I the only person who thinks the Republicans seizing the Senate while they had the House would be hilariously bad for the Republicans? Bad for the country, yes, but really really bad for the Republicans.
At some point, the Democratic Party stops fearing the Republican Party and start viewing their intra-party rivals as “the problem.” The Democratic coalition is pretty dependent on a viable Republican threat.
I accept that as a possibility, but I'm not entirely sure where the faultlines would be.
In the past, before racism on the left jumped ship, the unions were pretty racist. So we can imagine a 'civil rights' vs. 'unions' situation, or even 'immigrant rights' vs. 'unions'...but that would be a pretty difficult point to get to. (Not to mention, uh, the union influence even within the left is rather weak.)
The only real faultline I can imagine is some sort of populist uprising WRT businesses and banking, aka, the 'DLC vs. OWS' scenerio.
It’s possible that the two-party system that emerges from there does not include the Republican Party as one of those party. I’d bet money that it does.
*If* some sort of DLC vs. OWS situation happens, I would bet on the DLC Democrats jumping ship to the Republicans, and the non-crazed Republicans (If, by that point, there are any remaining.) moderating.
I.e., it's hard to imagine a scenario that doesn't include a party with the name 'Republican' at the end, but it's easy to come up with one where both parties are mostly previously Democrats.
Or, if they are Republicans, were previously forced out, like Lugar and Barr. Just as examples, I don't think either of those are going to come back. It would be people forced out at the very very end.
(1) America is generally a center-right country and
Either that's a meaningless comment, or it's wrong.
I actually think it's meaningless. A country cannot generally occupy a location on the political spectrum, because the political spectrum does not exist in some sort of objective unchanging sense.
And if there _was_ such a thing, if it was possible to average where all democratic countries of the world were and plot the US on it, the US is not to the center right of the average. It's 'generally' to the left. For example, we don't have a fascist party. And nativism and racism must be carefully disguised. (Although, again, I'm not sure it makes sense to try to compare countries like that.)
And of the right, 80% of people appear to be either low-information voters or ones who have single issues. Right _now_ the right has an entire generation or two taught into being far right due to racial animus and propaganda, which sorta tilts the playing field.
We are in a country where the right wing has won, for the last few decades, despite the people not actually appearing to agree with them on policy. We are in a country where people, if you ask them without relation to political party, think we should have a more progressive income tax than _Sweden_, think we should provide a lot more government services than we do in any _specific_ instance, and are in nearly complete agreement about every aspect of the ACA, despite half of them hating 'Obamacare'.
Everyone on the right saying we are 'center right' does not make us so. We're actually more 'middling-left' people who have been convinced to vote right...except that also stopped, and right now the right is only in office there due to gerrymandering and low voter turnout.
Now, of course this is going to change, as you talk about. No two party system will keep operating with one political party completely disliked. And with new parties we end up with new positions on the political spectrum. So I wouldn't bother to mention this except you forgot one option...
This will go down roughly either one of two ways: the GOP will tack back towards the center and it will be the same as it ever was or the GOP will run itself into the ground and some new center-right party will emerge.
Or the _existing_ center-right party, aka, the Democrats, will continue their rightward movement, the existing far-right party will fall off the map (Which has arguably already happened. When was the last time the right proposed _policy_? Any policy? At all?), and we'll get a new left party.
We just gave the Syrian regime legitimacy because we’re now going to partner with it to control its chemical weapons – which were a useless distraction from the real conflict.
Uh, no, we're not. No one's proposed that at all. _Russia_ is going to partner with them, but Russia already does that.
Unfortunately the efforts have hit stumbling blocks because there are too many bad actors among the Syrian rebels, and our trust is low. Yet, despite that, our interests are strong. John McCain, one of the leading hawks on Syria before the CW dust-up, was urging lawmakers to strongly back the Syrian rebels with heavy weapons and surface to air missiles, even visiting rebel-occupied areas personally.
So what's you're _actually_ saying is that we had already submerged ourselves in the clusterfuck of supplying weapons to people who hate us, both religious fanatics and wannabe warlords, which, of course, surely wasn't going to backfire horribly on us _this_ time.
And Obama managed to sabotage our completely fucking stupid behavior.
Yes, I'm sure _not_ secretly supplying weapons to Al Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups is going to destroy how the world thinks about us. The world wants us to run around toppling governments by secretly arming random idiots.
You know, I always thought Obama's 11-dimensional chess stuff was a joke, but, Jesus H. Christ, what's the emoticon for a standing ovation?
It’s as if, on the eve of D-Day, Churchill and FDR had said the whole war was about Hitler’s V-2 rockets.
Godwin. And a stupid analogy. Our problem with Hitler is that he was _invading other countries_.
Various neocons and liberal interventionists are trying to move the goalposts to claim that this won’t fix Syria the only logical response is to shrug “wasn’t the goal, propose a fix for it yourself and send your children to go enforce it”. And leave them to splutter.
If the goal was to 'fix Syria', there's no way that the targeted bombing Obama was talking about would have done that _anyway_. That was _explicitly_ agreed to by _everyone_ just a week ago.
Everyone is indeed moving the goalposts. There literally never _was_ any sort of plan to fix Syria here, and people pretending there were are talking total nonsense.
Obama stated he wanted to show Syria that CWs were not acceptable and could not be used. That was it. That was the entirety of what he said he was going to do.
And he's apparently managed to that _without committing a single US resource_. At all. Not a single boot, not a single bomb, nothing at all. He glared at an ally of Russia, and Russia, sensing things were a little out of control here, figured out _they_ better fix this problem.
What a total failure. At least in the interventionists, aka the 'We must use bombs to show how big our penises are', sense.
And now we just _didn't_ randomly bomb a middle-east country, making ourselves enemies in 20 years. If we're not careful, we'll run out wars.
However, in Obama’s favor, no other country in history has lost this much power and influence in 48 hours without suffering a catastrophic military defeat that took the lives of thousands of soldiers. Obama accomplished it without losing one, and using the logic of jobs “created or saved”, that’s like several thousand soldiers to the good. He’s winning!
And it's stuff like this that leave me completely baffled as to conservative's thought processes.
The US threatened war because of something.
This forced both Syria _and_ Russia to do something about that thing, without the US actually having to even send troops.
You seemed to have failed to notice that Obama made this entirely about chemical weapons, and as as long as the chemical weapons are secured, the US 'won' in the eyes of pretty much anyone. We, like, _double_ won because we managed to do it by just looking at them menacingly and not actually doing a damn thing.
In what universe does the fact we can apparently raise our eyebrow's threateningly at a Russian ally's behavior, and get Russia to actually something about it, cause us to 'lose power and influence' in the world?
(Now, _internally_ to the US is something else entirely, and I admit calling for bombing before then putting it up to a vote that didn't look good was silly looking, but that's an entirely different issue of internal politics the world has very little understanding of.)
1. Help others as much as possible.
2. Don't hurt others or use them as slaves.
3. If leaders tell you to hurt others, disobey.
4. Mingle often with other tribes and races.
5. Don't assume anyone's situation is their fault.
6. Don't allow families to keep inheriting money.
7. Don't waste the planet's resources.
8. Neither mate has control over the other mate's body.
(Let's see, that's all the moral ones, let's help them a little in other ways.)
9. When sick, wash hands and cover mouth.
10. See something, think of the explanation, test that.
Incidentally, WRT to #8, I see a lot of people trying to make rules about LGBT and stuff, and have apparently missed the fact that a lot of homophobia is stuff to do with gender roles, and gender roles is stuff to do with men owning women, and frankly if we just nip _that_ in the bud they'll be at a lot less stupid place later.
Likewise, a lot of violence is due to Othering, and if we can actually make a world where 'Hang out with other societies' is a rule, we'll have stopped a lot of that.
The point isn't to make rules aimed at _fixing_ our problems. Primitive societies don't _have_ our problems...they have stupid patterns of behavior that, thousands of years later, became our problems.
It's interesting how the Tea Party Patriots came to the conclusion they should support solar power. It was a rather fundamental breakdown in right-wing propaganda. The current propaganda system, where heavily subsidized corporations run around screaming 'free market' when the government choosing to subsidize some _other_ thing...did not work. The TPP said, 'Hey, wait, we're subsidizing all those other power types also, and the government micro-managed monopoly on power is not actually the free market anyway.'
With that concept in hand, with no one in the group caring to fight solar power, the fight for it appears to have been decided by a combination of two sub-groups: First, the individualists who think they should be able to operate off the grid, and sell their power back. They combined with the conservationists in the group, because the Tea Party might be somewhat dubious about global warming, but that doesn't mean they're a fan of our coal and nuclear plants.
(I don't know if that's how they actually decided, but they've said all those sorts of things during this fight.)
Yeah, I'm starting to agree with you. I think when I start trying to explain how art works I gone so far down the rabbit-hole that at this point, the conversation would be better just starting the entire thing over.
Anyway, let us leave this conversation with me agreeing with you that it is entirely idiotic that some liberals don't think Firefly is libertarian art. It 'is', or at least it's a libertarian setting with libertarian themes in it.
Or, for another qualifier, it's a universe where libertarianism appears, at first glance, to be a more obviously correct political philosophy than in the actual universe. (Which is sorta what I think you mean by 'advancing a worldview'.)
The thing is...that's almost an incidental side result of art. Joss Whedon didn't set out to make that universe, anymore than Gillian's Isle set out to make a universe where the obviously correct thing to do is eat Gillian, or Star Trek a universe where the obviously correct solution is to fire all the engineers and put Wesley Crusher in charge of everything because he can fix anything in two seconds.
Fictional universes often end up with all sort of weird cruft and unintended 'truths'.
And now I'm thinking about Murphy Brown, and the outrage towards her, and the bafflement the left felt over that, wondering if the right actually did understand she was a fictional character.
Of course they did, but I'm starting to wonder if there's some sort of different levels going on here. The right often appears to take issue with _the fictional universe itself_. Or, in the case of Firefly, love it.
@will-truman Which, since you don’t believe that conservative entertainment (or liberal entertainment) exists, makes me wonder why you’re even participating in this conversation to begin with.
I don't understand why you would be wondering about that.
The article's claim: There are specific-political-philosophy art, and conservative and libertarian art is not anywhere near as numerous as liberal art.
My claim: Conservatives have picked a non-existent battlefield to fight on. Art, instead being 'about' something in that sense, has numerous themes at once, some of which align up with specific political philosophies. And art often has contradictory themes in the same piece.
And a further claim of mine is that conservative-aligned themes are actually doing fairly well. They're doing better than many liberal themes. Just check out how many TV shows there are about, I dunno, unemployed or min-wage people that actually tackle money issues. 2 Broke Girls, maybe? (Libertarian themes, although I didn't say, are not that prominent, but they're probably _proportional_ to libertarian thought in the general population.)
Now, I could be wrong, about either how art works (Pretty certain I'm not, but who knows.) or how well conservative themes are represented (And that theory would be a lot easier to talk about if a conservative would actually state some conservative themes.), but it's a perfectly reasonable _claim_, and I fail to see how this isn't the right place to discuss it.
To clarify, the word I said I'm not going to quibble over was the word conservative in this sentence, and _ONLY_ this sentence 'So, if the real layer is, well, real, it is the status quo. It is how things are. It is conservative.'. That's it. That one _very very specific_ sentence. That's the totality of things I will not discussion, because I explained it right there, and attempting to discuss what I mean by conservative in the context of 'status quo' in discussion where people are using conservative in the political sense would completely confuse the hell out of everyone. (Not that this concept actually needs discussion, it's a fairly traditional use of the word 'conservative', but whatever.)
Which is _exactly_ what happened. Hey, look, I'm psychic!
Sometimes I wish people would believe me what I say 'That word is not actually important. If you have an issue with it, please imagine I said some other word there. Did you grasp the concept I was trying to convey, or should I explain it again differently? Either way, I will not stand here and justify my word selection there because I can't imagine a more pointless discussion to waste everyone's time.' (And this specific time, it was confusing on top of that!)
My use of the word 'conservative' in the political sense is exactly how everyone else uses it, and has nothing to do with the fact I assert 'specific-political-philosophy art' does not exist.
@will-truman There is an argument to be made that, if Person of Interest is a liberal or conservative show, it’s closer to the latter than the former. A liberal could make a case that it’s the other way, though, and I couldn’t argue.
That's because the entire premise is flawed. Shows cannot be X. Shows can merely exhibit X themes. They will also exhibit other themes, because no one can write any sort of story with a single theme.
And people can identify themes they agree with much more than themes they don't. They'll say 'Oh, that show agrees with me', whereas other people will just 'That is just the universe of that show'. As I said, I look at Firefly and can identify plenty of liberal themes.
Art means different things to different people. And any sufficiently complex TV show is going to produce themes that are, at times, in conflict with each other.
While I could make an argument for Person of Interest as a primarily conservative show, it would be harder for How I Met Your Mother. I couldn’t make the argument that it’s liberal, though, either.
How I Met Your Mother is quite possibly the most pro-marriage and pro-family show on television today. In a world with a reasonable conservative party, it would be held up as some sort of moral paradigm of family values. I am not in any way kidding about that.
This would require a conservative party that wasn't about 50 years out of date, though, and didn't freak out because, gasp, thirty-year olds are having sex before they are married. (Like, oh, approximately 95% of the population.)
I don’t have to imagine a conservative show. I could name a couple that I consider to be conservative or leaning in that direction. A couple more that could easily be conservative if they didn’t make the effort not to be. But, again, you really aren’t using the words as I use them. We seemed doomed to talk past one another on this subject.
Well, yeah, as long as you keep talking about 'conservative shows'. ;) Cause there ain't any such thing as 'specific-political-position TV shows'.
@jm3z-aitch Quibbling” over words is important, because if we mean different things with the same word, then we’re not actually communicating.
Except you're trying to quibble over an unrelated use of the word 'conservative' which has very little bearing to any of the conversation, and, as I pointed out, is a word with different meaning in different contexts. I believe I have explained my use of the word in the context I used it, namely, to mean 'The status quo'.
If you do not like that word there and feel it is not correct, you should feel free to replace that with another word with the same meaning. I'm not going to dragged into a stupid discussion about an explanation about how narrative art often has themes about the status quo being incorrect, unless you actually wish to discuss _that_ idea instead of my word choice.
Meanwhile, again, saying 'conservative means status quo' is _clearly_ not using conservative in the same context as this article is, because this article is talking about in the political context. There is no actual way to be confused by that, especially as I _at the same time_ explained that the way the article is using it is meaningless!
Of course, there _is_ such a thing as 'conservative art' in other meanings of the word conservative. For example, an oil painting is a conservative choice of art medium, well understood and represented in art, whereas something like a painting in colored superglue would be rather experimental and require a lot of trial and error to come up with workable techniques. Or you can talk about 'conservative art' choices would be ones that make money, like action movies, whereas other choices are more risky.
It just makes no sense to say 'specific-political-philosophy art'.
So you say you’re not using it the way people who complain about a lack of conservative themes do because they “literally” don’t know what they mean.
Literally does not belong in quotes. There is an entire conversation here about the lack of something that absolutely no one can define a damn example of. It's complete nonsense.
'Does anyone find it strange there's almost no narcoleptic art out there, but there's plenty of mimsy art?'
Words are not just letter strung together in the correct order. Words and phrases must refer to explicable concepts. Especially if your premise is that it is _missing_.
If someone can't give an example of what 'conservative art' would look like, or what attributes it would have, how the hell would anyone know if they found it?
Of course, Will Truman has a perfectly valid point about how this works in practice, but, again, I'm not one of these hypothetical liberals denying Firefly is libertarian art. (It's not, but that's because there's no such thing as specific-political-philosophy art.)
So, there, we've got some libertarian themes actually showing up on TV. 'A government that seems to fairly democratic, but yet is unfair. A war against people who just want to be left along. Government secrecy to extremes. Legalized prostitution. Wild-west style freedom. People fighting against the government'. Libertarian themes, those are indeed them, right there. The libertarian themes cannot be more obvious.(1)
Now, how about those _conservative_ themes we're not seeing? Anyone come up with one of those yet?
I think you’re wrong about that (are you a conservative? should I trust what a non-conservative says about conservstives’ understanding ofvtheir views?), but more importantly, I think ND does know what he means by conservative. So in trying to parse your response to him, I need to know if you’re using the jey term the same way before I can discern whether you’re really addressing his argument or a subtly different one.
I'm _not_ a conservative, and I was trying very hard to keep from having to define what conservative themes would look like.
Sadly, literally, and yes I mean literally, no conservative will step forward and define what they see as missing from TV shows. So I eventually had to suggest a few.
Conservatives have, so far, failed to either confirm nor deny them, which I suspect means they recognize them as conservative themes, but also recognize they appear on TV all the damn time.
1) Ayn Rand has proven me wrong. Apparently, you can make libertarian themes so obvious that the reader starts bleeding libertarian themes from the ears.
@jm3z-aitch Are you using conservative in the sane way ND is, or have you subtly shifted the meaning?
Okay, I'm not doing this weird game where I've already explained myself and we quibble over words.
It should be clear I was speaking generalities, that art _usually_ starts with what is currently true, which is _usually_ conservative. And then it comes up with problems and criticism of that, and often those problems are the exact ones that liberals point out.
So art has minor inherent bias towards 'Not as things are', which often matches the same direction as liberalism, whereas conservationism has a quite clearly stated bias towards 'As things are'.
That is all I am saying. I am not in any way saying that art cannot work the other way. It can. In fact, art can even look backwards and criticize modern society while suggesting the solutions are in the past.
I'm not even saying this bias is actually that important, because art usually has a variety of themes at once.
I'm just explaining why art often superficially looks like it's making a liberal critique of society. It's not. It's just making a critique of society as it currently is.
However, as I've said in other places here, I can't possibly be using the word 'conservative' in the same way that people talking about the lack of 'conservative arts' are using it, because those people literally have no idea what _they_ mean by 'conservative' there. Poor Will Truman has been reduced to pointing out, correctly, that even liberals don't know what that means. Yeah. No one does. No one is even vaguely sure why 'How I Met Your Mother' isn't full of conservative themes. Or why 'Person of Interest' doesn't have a conservative worldview.
'Does fleebernorf, which we can't explain, exist, or not, and if not, why not, and if so, why, and how come no one can figure anything out about fleebernorf?' I feel like stamping a big 'Words: You are doing it wrong' caption on this entire conversation.
For the love of God, will some conservative please sit down and actually come up with a conservative theme that you would like to see represented in a TV show. Come up with what a conservative worldview would look like.
David, how many of those sitcoms and dramas, if conservatives actually tried to claim them as advancing the conservative worldview, would liberals respond “Yes, that is conservative and contrary to my own liberal worldview”?
Except, of course, that liberals and conservatives share almost the exact same worldview. Seriously, we're all 20th century Westerners. (Except those of us who are 21st.)
But liberals don't get annoyed because a TV show demonstrates a straight married couple raising a kid. Whereas conservative apparently do when it's a gay couple, and now it's magically a liberal show. Or even a single parent. (Despite conservatives attempting to claim 'strong families' as their own theme.)
As I pointed out in hypothetical example, which no one guessed, so I will reveal it is Buffy and I gender-swapped Tara, there are plenty of very conservative themes that are on TV. Buffy is a frickin _morality play_ about _vigilantes_ who can't trust the government (And yet there's a good depiction of the military once it manages to get out from under the heals of government idiots) who fight _evil_.
The problem is, conservatives don't seem to actually be able to articulate what they are looking for in TV.
I mean, we're having a big discussion about this and we _still_ don't have anyone articulating the themes they want. What _exactly_ is missing on TV? Lone heroes who fight the system? A dime a dozen. Happily married families raising children? Almost every sitcom. Government bureaucracy, incompetence, corruption, and ass covering? Yup.
I think the complaint here halfway boils down to 'Conservatives don't show up to scold liberals enough on TV' or something. Seriously, Someone please come up with a conservative theme that is not on TV. Any example. At all.
If you want to talk about what hypothetical other liberals say about 'conservative shows' and what is or isn't them, you're going to have to find someone who thinks the entire concept of 'conservative shows' or 'liberal shows' isn't complete nonsense to have that discussion with.
@will-truman Conservatives believe that there are lots and lots of problems with the world.
The important part of the sentence was 'needs fixing', but that's actually a bit unclear. 'Believe a problem can and should be fixed by intervening in it' might be a better term.
@jm3z-aitch So if we’re critiquing, say, the prevalence of abortion in the post-Roe U.S., then the status quo prevalence of abortion is the conservative reality, and the pro-life symbolic critique is the liberal position?
Leaving things how they are is, indeed, conservative. It's not my problem if conservatives have actually become regressive on an issue, wishing to change things. Take it up with conservatives, or just recognize that words have different meanings in different contexts.
The opposite position is not liberal, but that's because liberal does not mean 'any change whatsoever'. (Whereas conservative does mean 'no change' or 'very little or slow change'.) Liberally actually have a pretty specific direction of change. So I was probably misusing the word there. _Most_ of the change that art here wishes to use thematically would be changes that liberals would support, but not all.
I mean, Nazi propaganda was art that thematically asserted there should be changes the world, but that doesn't mean the changes they wanted were 'liberal'.
But here in _this country_, right now, the deficiencies in the status quo that are most exposed in art are deficiencies the left tries to do something about.
Because, and boy is this claim going to get some blowback, a lot of the deficiencies of the right are _imaginary_. Jesus Christ, on of those articles links above talked about art criticizing high government debt. Yeah, that's a reasonable thing to make art about. I'm sure everyone will connect to those spreadsheets on an emotional level. It could be the next RENT!
@will-truman David, I think art qualifies as conservative when it advances the conservative worldview, and liberal when it advances the liberal one.
As I said elsewhere, I suspect the problem is that conservatives do not actually understand their own worldview. Or aren't able to state it reasonable.
Almost every drama is very conservative. A good half of sitcoms are also.
Here's a conservative TV arc: A man, who's been torn down his entire life for his strength, goes off to college where he finds a group of friends, along with a strong women who he falls in love with. Together, they help fight the forces of darkness, outside the law. Eventually, his family returns, intend on harm (In an episode called 'Family', no less.), and his friends, his new family, helps hold them off, showing him that he is loved, and does belong.
Conservative, right? Anyone want to guess what TV show I'm talking about, and what fact of that explanation I fudged, which instantly made it Not Conservative?
@will-truman It’s not true that art is something that necessarily pushes against tradition and norms. If we think it is, that says a lot about a lot of things.
It's not that art pushes against tradition and norms. It's that art is _something besides what is there on the page_.
Art is when you present something that, like everything, has some meaning in itself. And then it has another meaning on top of that.
Narrative arts - aka books, plays, motion pictures, video games, even some dance - tells a story. But a story is more than 'events that happens'. It is a cohesive whole that attempts to impart something besides the actual events.
Hell, if you just wanted the events, you could read a plot summary. Although I don't know why you'd bother, considering the events didn't really happen anyway! 'I better read up for my 'Fictional history' exam!'
Narrative art (and that's really what we're talking about here, when people claim that art has a liberal bias they usually don't mean paintings.) is creating those events, and displaying them _in such a way as to convey meaning and themes_. (Or, as I said, _attempt to_ do that. Art can fail.)
And, and this is the actual point, art must have two layers(1), a real and symbolic, and the real layer is almost always something understandable. (Otherwise you have to explain that, which gets in the way of the symbolic stuff. This can be done...see 'speculative fiction'...but notice the amount of shorthand tropes we have in that to keep from having to explain things.)
So, if the real layer is, well, real, it is the status quo. It is how things are. It is conservative. An easy contrast to that is to put a symbolic layer on it that has liberal things. Show the status quo, and then show how that has _failed_.
It's not that art that is always pushing against traditions and norms, it is that art is often showing the actual real world, and trying to get across the message there are problems with it. That is probably the premise of 50% of all art currently made.
And believing that problems actually exist and need fixing has somehow become a liberal concept.
1) Technically, there are three layers. There's the fact people are standing on a stage wearing costumes and pretending to be other layers, there's the situation they're trying to convey, and there's a _meaning_ beyond that. Which is why suspension of disbelief is important...if the viewer can't get past the 'all this is pretend', there's no way in hell he's getting to the symbolic stuff.
I’ll say here what I said there. Conservatives are criticized for failing to embrace the conservatism that exists in entertainment. But then, when they try to claim something (like, ahem, libertarians claiming Firefly) they are scoffed at.
What conservatives _should_ be criticized for is having created this problem in the first place. ;)
There is no such thing as conservative art, just like there's no such thing as liberal art. Art has _themes_, it does not have types. (Well, it has types like 'musical theatre' or 'painting', but you know what I mean.)
So when conservatives started nonsensically claiming there was no such thing as conservative art, they ended up in a weird middle ground where they can't win in either direction.
So Firefly is not conservative art because...there's no such thing. Firefly does have some libertarian _themes_, although libertarians are probably focusing on those specific aspects more than other people. (Which is fine. That's how art works.)
A hell of a lot of modern drama have _very_ 'conservative' themes....and will also have some random gay character somewhere, and suddenly it's 'liberal'.
Although a lot of the problem appears to be that conservatives appear to have forgotten what they themselves are supposed to care about. Perhaps conservatives need to sit down and actually list some conservative _themes_, and I'm sure we could easily find TV shows that include those themes.
Everything they say about the ACA? Climate change denial?
And I don’t really see the distinction that you’re making. Is there any political candidate/movement that doesn’t use attack ads?
The keyword there was not attack ads, it was 'lying'. And candidates usually (Yes, yes, Jaybird, I know) can't get away with provable lies in their attack ads. They are usually forced to at least withdraw the ads.
The Koch brothers's organizations, however, have no problems with that, and have repeated run ads that are, in fact, _blatant_ lies.
It's a rather new and novel approach. Just _keep_ lying. Even after being called on it. And because it's not a candidate doing it, there's no backlash on the candidate.
Instead, of course, there's a backlash on the Koch brothers.
Are there any NGOs that don’t fund themselves through contributions from rich patrons?
Firstly, yes, there are, and secondly, that doesn't have any bearing on what I said.
As I pointed out, the Koch brothers have started up multiple organizations that are pretending to be 'grassroots'. That's a little different than funding think tanks, and it's also different than rich donors donating to actual grassroot organizations.
But, hey, don't ask me. Ask the Tea Party how much they like the Koch brothers organization's pretending to speak for them. There's a lot of honest Tea Partiers here in Georgia who bought into the idea that it was actually a grassroot organization, and are rather pissed that the Koch brothers are now attacking _their_ solar energy free-market initiative.
There’s nothing that the Koch brothers do that isn’t standard operating procedure for political movements in this country. They only happen to do a lot more of it and with a much more focused ideological bent.
Erm, what? What does that have to do with anything?
My point was that liberals criticizing the Koch brothers actually have some sort of reasonable claim of 'misbehavior' to criticize. Those two are doing things that we, as society, should disapprove of. It doesn't really matter that they're really just doing Extreme Politics(tm) that everyone else does to a lesser extent, and it fact it makes perfect sense to criticize the _worst_ actors, so I am confused at the point you're trying to make. (Admittedly, you might have some hypocrisy claim somewhere if the left was fine with lies of their own side, or of phony grassroot movements, but you're going to have to make that claim yourself, but I do not see that happening on the left.)
Whereas conservatives criticizing the art for being liberal are just talking nonsense. Mostly because, as I talk about elsewhere here, conservatives don't seem to understand the medium and the art are not the same thing, and you can create art using conservative themes that has *gasp* gay people in it.
The whole problem here is the delusion that a universe can be conservative or liberal.
About half the complaints about TV from the right seems to be that the universe does not match what they want it to be. It has too many gays or artists or pagans or elites or something.
That...uh...does not decide what the theme of the work of art is. That is actually completely irrelevant to it.
It's like conservatives literally do not understand what 'art' is. Art is not actually the thing you are actually looking at. That's a medium, not the art. Art is the message the medium is trying to convey.
If this is confusing, consider photography. All photographs are photographs (duh) but not all photographs are intended to be art. They're only art if there's something _besides_ the actual picture that is being convey. (Or, at least, if they _attempt_ to convey something else. Art can indeed fail.)
Art is not 'liberal' because it uses things that liberals are okay with but conservatives freak out about, anymore than art is 'pro-Disney' because it uses depictions of Disney characters, or 'pro-shooting people' because has people getting shot in it.
Creating art using liberal characters does not make it pro-liberal. Creating art using gay characters does not make it pro-gay.
In fact, it is nearly impossible to _criticize_ something in art without representing it somewhat correctly. Otherwise it turns into an obvious strawman polemic.
Admittedly, the actual _art_ does get lost, it does fail, if the viewer is too busy freaking out over what it's made out of to miss the intended message.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Sailing to Irrelevance: Irrelevant is the New Normal”
@will-truman
do you have a problem with:
Those those statements seem to make sense, based on comparison to the rest of America. (I would argue that 'Idahoans are conservative.' and 'Idaho is a conservative state.' say slightly different things...the first is probably what we're trying to say, what the citizens of Idaho think, whereas the second seemed to describe where the state currently is located. States can be located somewhere different than their citizens on the political axis, although that usually doesn't last long. But that's not that important here.)
I'm just not entirely sure saying 'America is center-right' is supposed to mean. America is exactly in the center compared to, uh, America, just like the average IQ is 100. So clearly it can't be that.
I _think_ when people say 'America is a center-right nation' is what they actually mean 'Americans are slightly to the right of where the laws of America are'. Which is just flat out, 100%, completely wrong, at least at the Federal level of laws. (An argument could be made, considering who Americans have elected at state level, that they want incredibly far-right state laws...but I rather suspect all examples of that recent nonsense is going to end in flames.)
Alternately, people are trying to say something about the mean vs. the medium. They're trying to say that most American are slightly to the right of center, with a smattering of very far left ones driving the average left-ware. Which is _also_ completely and utterly wrong. (If anything, that's exactly backwards!)
I can't think of any way that 'America is a center-right nation' really makes sense, unless the people saying it mean 'American politics are slightly to the right of where Americans are'...which, while correct, is probably not what the people saying it are trying to say.
And comparisons to the rest of the world are not workable.
I mean, are we more conservative or liberal than, for a random example, the Republic of Ireland? Ireland has, as far as I can tell, higher individual taxes (Slightly lower income taxes, but higher 'sales' tax, or rather VAT tax.), but it has lower corporate taxes. It has almost no legal abortion, but it has some of the strictest gun control in Europe.
Talking about 'left' and 'right' is already hard enough, and nonsensical enough, within the US. It's a system that squeezes a bunch of random vague things into a single one dimensional axis, and works extremely poorly to start with.
It doesn't really work at all when compared to other countries.
I always find it interesting, when looking at so called comparison charts, to notice what was and wasn't included as parts of the 'right' and 'left'.
"
Oh, and I know that Sweden has less progressive taxes _on paper_ than America. It doesn't have them in practice, however, because it doesn't exclude so much of income from the standard rates.
"
Are you referring to that study where they misrepresented Sweden’s wealth distribution in the charts they showed to people because Sweden’s actual wealth distribution didn’t differ dramatically enough from the US’s?
No. I'm talking about payment of taxes. I'm not entirely sure it was _income_ tax specifically. But Americans, when asked the percentage of their income that different groups should pay in taxes, picked a level that was closer to Sweden for high income people.
Of course, part of this is due to the fact that people vastly overestimate what percentage of income the rich pay, because they are informed repeated that 'the top 1% pay 33% of income taxes', which is, of course, inherently a lie. (Did you know that 20% of the population pays 100% of the cigarette tax?!)
So people polled pick something like 'Rich people should pay 3 times more taxes on each dollar earned than people making average wages', and _think_ that means they're reducing that amount. Because they've bought the lie that the rich are paying 33 times more tax on each dollar (Huh? That'd be like 1000% tax rate?!) or whatever they think is going on. (The rich, of course, actually pay about twice as much on each dollar as average.)
Sadly, I have no idea where this poll actually is, and can't find it.
I think you're talking about some other poll about wealth distribution, which I've heard of and don't know any problems with. Can you point to something discussing it?
"
@will-truman
In that sense, we are a center-right nation.
I would argue that, _politically_, at this point, the Federal legislature is mid-right. The Democrats are standing slightly right, with a few outliers like Warren barely stretching over to 'moderate left'. And the Republicans have actually fallen off the far-right to the point where they literally have no policy to put forward for anything all.
I actually think it would be best if everyone stopped talking about where 'America' was positioned, because no one knows what 'America' means in that context. The American people are in one location (moderate left to center-left, depending), and assert they're in another location (center-right). Meanwhile, the legislators average way the hell somewhere else (middle right.)
@leeesq
When you ask American general questions about their political beliefs, you usually get conservative or moderate answers. When you go into the specifics, you get more liberal or left-leaning.
That's sorta what I was trying to say above in my post.
Americans often say they're conservative. (Actually, Americans tend to say they're whatever _hasn't_ been recently been used as insults, so you find few 'liberals' and, now, few 'conservatives'. Instead you find 'progressives' and 'libertarians'. But whatever.)
Anyway, Americans will often repeat conservative concepts about things, framing their political positions through a conservative lens, even asserting they agree with the right...and then demand liberal laws.
However:
Part of this is the weird misinformation campaign being waged by right-wing media to make the country's left seem much more liberal than it is (And to bring this back to the article, they're not doing it because it helps politically, they're doing it because of ratings.), so you end up in surreal positions where people assume the laws are impossibly liberal, and they want them to be 'more conservative', where in actual fact the laws are father to the right than what they actually state they want.
And I think another part of it is just the fact that the right has spent decades, since the 1980s or so, talking about the framing of issues.
I'm not sure how much of this has anything to do with 'Americans' per se, as opposed to how _current_ Americans have been taught to talk about things. I mean, in the 60s, were Americans 'ideologically conservative and functionally liberal'? The 30s?
Is this how 'Americans' think, or is it just how Reagan made them think about issues, now combined with gibberish from Fox News flooding actual facts?
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They control the House (and have little prospect of losing control of it),
Why do you say this?
They're going to keep the House in 2014, of course, unless they do something inconceivably stupid. (Although they have already done several inconceivably stupid things, so who knows? They could default on the debt ceiling, for example.)
But that's doesn't mean they'll keep in 2016. Gerrymandering only goes so far.
they have tolerable odds of seizing the Senate
I don't agree, but am I the only person who thinks the Republicans seizing the Senate while they had the House would be hilariously bad for the Republicans? Bad for the country, yes, but really really bad for the Republicans.
"
At some point, the Democratic Party stops fearing the Republican Party and start viewing their intra-party rivals as “the problem.” The Democratic coalition is pretty dependent on a viable Republican threat.
I accept that as a possibility, but I'm not entirely sure where the faultlines would be.
In the past, before racism on the left jumped ship, the unions were pretty racist. So we can imagine a 'civil rights' vs. 'unions' situation, or even 'immigrant rights' vs. 'unions'...but that would be a pretty difficult point to get to. (Not to mention, uh, the union influence even within the left is rather weak.)
The only real faultline I can imagine is some sort of populist uprising WRT businesses and banking, aka, the 'DLC vs. OWS' scenerio.
It’s possible that the two-party system that emerges from there does not include the Republican Party as one of those party. I’d bet money that it does.
*If* some sort of DLC vs. OWS situation happens, I would bet on the DLC Democrats jumping ship to the Republicans, and the non-crazed Republicans (If, by that point, there are any remaining.) moderating.
I.e., it's hard to imagine a scenario that doesn't include a party with the name 'Republican' at the end, but it's easy to come up with one where both parties are mostly previously Democrats.
Or, if they are Republicans, were previously forced out, like Lugar and Barr. Just as examples, I don't think either of those are going to come back. It would be people forced out at the very very end.
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(1) America is generally a center-right country and
Either that's a meaningless comment, or it's wrong.
I actually think it's meaningless. A country cannot generally occupy a location on the political spectrum, because the political spectrum does not exist in some sort of objective unchanging sense.
And if there _was_ such a thing, if it was possible to average where all democratic countries of the world were and plot the US on it, the US is not to the center right of the average. It's 'generally' to the left. For example, we don't have a fascist party. And nativism and racism must be carefully disguised. (Although, again, I'm not sure it makes sense to try to compare countries like that.)
And of the right, 80% of people appear to be either low-information voters or ones who have single issues. Right _now_ the right has an entire generation or two taught into being far right due to racial animus and propaganda, which sorta tilts the playing field.
We are in a country where the right wing has won, for the last few decades, despite the people not actually appearing to agree with them on policy. We are in a country where people, if you ask them without relation to political party, think we should have a more progressive income tax than _Sweden_, think we should provide a lot more government services than we do in any _specific_ instance, and are in nearly complete agreement about every aspect of the ACA, despite half of them hating 'Obamacare'.
Everyone on the right saying we are 'center right' does not make us so. We're actually more 'middling-left' people who have been convinced to vote right...except that also stopped, and right now the right is only in office there due to gerrymandering and low voter turnout.
Now, of course this is going to change, as you talk about. No two party system will keep operating with one political party completely disliked. And with new parties we end up with new positions on the political spectrum. So I wouldn't bother to mention this except you forgot one option...
This will go down roughly either one of two ways: the GOP will tack back towards the center and it will be the same as it ever was or the GOP will run itself into the ground and some new center-right party will emerge.
Or the _existing_ center-right party, aka, the Democrats, will continue their rightward movement, the existing far-right party will fall off the map (Which has arguably already happened. When was the last time the right proposed _policy_? Any policy? At all?), and we'll get a new left party.
On “The President Goes Prime Time on Syria: Initial Reactions”
We just gave the Syrian regime legitimacy because we’re now going to partner with it to control its chemical weapons – which were a useless distraction from the real conflict.
Uh, no, we're not. No one's proposed that at all. _Russia_ is going to partner with them, but Russia already does that.
Unfortunately the efforts have hit stumbling blocks because there are too many bad actors among the Syrian rebels, and our trust is low. Yet, despite that, our interests are strong. John McCain, one of the leading hawks on Syria before the CW dust-up, was urging lawmakers to strongly back the Syrian rebels with heavy weapons and surface to air missiles, even visiting rebel-occupied areas personally.
So what's you're _actually_ saying is that we had already submerged ourselves in the clusterfuck of supplying weapons to people who hate us, both religious fanatics and wannabe warlords, which, of course, surely wasn't going to backfire horribly on us _this_ time.
And Obama managed to sabotage our completely fucking stupid behavior.
Yes, I'm sure _not_ secretly supplying weapons to Al Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups is going to destroy how the world thinks about us. The world wants us to run around toppling governments by secretly arming random idiots.
You know, I always thought Obama's 11-dimensional chess stuff was a joke, but, Jesus H. Christ, what's the emoticon for a standing ovation?
It’s as if, on the eve of D-Day, Churchill and FDR had said the whole war was about Hitler’s V-2 rockets.
Godwin. And a stupid analogy. Our problem with Hitler is that he was _invading other countries_.
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Various neocons and liberal interventionists are trying to move the goalposts to claim that this won’t fix Syria the only logical response is to shrug “wasn’t the goal, propose a fix for it yourself and send your children to go enforce it”. And leave them to splutter.
If the goal was to 'fix Syria', there's no way that the targeted bombing Obama was talking about would have done that _anyway_. That was _explicitly_ agreed to by _everyone_ just a week ago.
Everyone is indeed moving the goalposts. There literally never _was_ any sort of plan to fix Syria here, and people pretending there were are talking total nonsense.
Obama stated he wanted to show Syria that CWs were not acceptable and could not be used. That was it. That was the entirety of what he said he was going to do.
And he's apparently managed to that _without committing a single US resource_. At all. Not a single boot, not a single bomb, nothing at all. He glared at an ally of Russia, and Russia, sensing things were a little out of control here, figured out _they_ better fix this problem.
What a total failure. At least in the interventionists, aka the 'We must use bombs to show how big our penises are', sense.
And now we just _didn't_ randomly bomb a middle-east country, making ourselves enemies in 20 years. If we're not careful, we'll run out wars.
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However, in Obama’s favor, no other country in history has lost this much power and influence in 48 hours without suffering a catastrophic military defeat that took the lives of thousands of soldiers. Obama accomplished it without losing one, and using the logic of jobs “created or saved”, that’s like several thousand soldiers to the good. He’s winning!
And it's stuff like this that leave me completely baffled as to conservative's thought processes.
The US threatened war because of something.
This forced both Syria _and_ Russia to do something about that thing, without the US actually having to even send troops.
You seemed to have failed to notice that Obama made this entirely about chemical weapons, and as as long as the chemical weapons are secured, the US 'won' in the eyes of pretty much anyone. We, like, _double_ won because we managed to do it by just looking at them menacingly and not actually doing a damn thing.
In what universe does the fact we can apparently raise our eyebrow's threateningly at a Russian ally's behavior, and get Russia to actually something about it, cause us to 'lose power and influence' in the world?
(Now, _internally_ to the US is something else entirely, and I admit calling for bombing before then putting it up to a vote that didn't look good was silly looking, but that's an entirely different issue of internal politics the world has very little understanding of.)
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #14: For I am your Tod, and you shall have no other Tods before me”
1. Help others as much as possible.
2. Don't hurt others or use them as slaves.
3. If leaders tell you to hurt others, disobey.
4. Mingle often with other tribes and races.
5. Don't assume anyone's situation is their fault.
6. Don't allow families to keep inheriting money.
7. Don't waste the planet's resources.
8. Neither mate has control over the other mate's body.
(Let's see, that's all the moral ones, let's help them a little in other ways.)
9. When sick, wash hands and cover mouth.
10. See something, think of the explanation, test that.
Incidentally, WRT to #8, I see a lot of people trying to make rules about LGBT and stuff, and have apparently missed the fact that a lot of homophobia is stuff to do with gender roles, and gender roles is stuff to do with men owning women, and frankly if we just nip _that_ in the bud they'll be at a lot less stupid place later.
Likewise, a lot of violence is due to Othering, and if we can actually make a world where 'Hang out with other societies' is a rule, we'll have stopped a lot of that.
The point isn't to make rules aimed at _fixing_ our problems. Primitive societies don't _have_ our problems...they have stupid patterns of behavior that, thousands of years later, became our problems.
On “The Paradox of Bashing Institutions for Cultural Elitism”
Kim:
http://grist.org/news/tea-partiers-fight-over-solar-power-in-georgia-and-the-solar-fans-win/
It's interesting how the Tea Party Patriots came to the conclusion they should support solar power. It was a rather fundamental breakdown in right-wing propaganda. The current propaganda system, where heavily subsidized corporations run around screaming 'free market' when the government choosing to subsidize some _other_ thing...did not work. The TPP said, 'Hey, wait, we're subsidizing all those other power types also, and the government micro-managed monopoly on power is not actually the free market anyway.'
With that concept in hand, with no one in the group caring to fight solar power, the fight for it appears to have been decided by a combination of two sub-groups: First, the individualists who think they should be able to operate off the grid, and sell their power back. They combined with the conservationists in the group, because the Tea Party might be somewhat dubious about global warming, but that doesn't mean they're a fan of our coal and nuclear plants.
(I don't know if that's how they actually decided, but they've said all those sorts of things during this fight.)
"
@will-truman
Yeah, I'm starting to agree with you. I think when I start trying to explain how art works I gone so far down the rabbit-hole that at this point, the conversation would be better just starting the entire thing over.
Anyway, let us leave this conversation with me agreeing with you that it is entirely idiotic that some liberals don't think Firefly is libertarian art. It 'is', or at least it's a libertarian setting with libertarian themes in it.
Or, for another qualifier, it's a universe where libertarianism appears, at first glance, to be a more obviously correct political philosophy than in the actual universe. (Which is sorta what I think you mean by 'advancing a worldview'.)
The thing is...that's almost an incidental side result of art. Joss Whedon didn't set out to make that universe, anymore than Gillian's Isle set out to make a universe where the obviously correct thing to do is eat Gillian, or Star Trek a universe where the obviously correct solution is to fire all the engineers and put Wesley Crusher in charge of everything because he can fix anything in two seconds.
Fictional universes often end up with all sort of weird cruft and unintended 'truths'.
And now I'm thinking about Murphy Brown, and the outrage towards her, and the bafflement the left felt over that, wondering if the right actually did understand she was a fictional character.
Of course they did, but I'm starting to wonder if there's some sort of different levels going on here. The right often appears to take issue with _the fictional universe itself_. Or, in the case of Firefly, love it.
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@will-truman
Which, since you don’t believe that conservative entertainment (or liberal entertainment) exists, makes me wonder why you’re even participating in this conversation to begin with.
I don't understand why you would be wondering about that.
The article's claim: There are specific-political-philosophy art, and conservative and libertarian art is not anywhere near as numerous as liberal art.
My claim: Conservatives have picked a non-existent battlefield to fight on. Art, instead being 'about' something in that sense, has numerous themes at once, some of which align up with specific political philosophies. And art often has contradictory themes in the same piece.
And a further claim of mine is that conservative-aligned themes are actually doing fairly well. They're doing better than many liberal themes. Just check out how many TV shows there are about, I dunno, unemployed or min-wage people that actually tackle money issues. 2 Broke Girls, maybe? (Libertarian themes, although I didn't say, are not that prominent, but they're probably _proportional_ to libertarian thought in the general population.)
Now, I could be wrong, about either how art works (Pretty certain I'm not, but who knows.) or how well conservative themes are represented (And that theory would be a lot easier to talk about if a conservative would actually state some conservative themes.), but it's a perfectly reasonable _claim_, and I fail to see how this isn't the right place to discuss it.
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To clarify, the word I said I'm not going to quibble over was the word conservative in this sentence, and _ONLY_ this sentence 'So, if the real layer is, well, real, it is the status quo. It is how things are. It is conservative.'. That's it. That one _very very specific_ sentence. That's the totality of things I will not discussion, because I explained it right there, and attempting to discuss what I mean by conservative in the context of 'status quo' in discussion where people are using conservative in the political sense would completely confuse the hell out of everyone. (Not that this concept actually needs discussion, it's a fairly traditional use of the word 'conservative', but whatever.)
Which is _exactly_ what happened. Hey, look, I'm psychic!
Sometimes I wish people would believe me what I say 'That word is not actually important. If you have an issue with it, please imagine I said some other word there. Did you grasp the concept I was trying to convey, or should I explain it again differently? Either way, I will not stand here and justify my word selection there because I can't imagine a more pointless discussion to waste everyone's time.' (And this specific time, it was confusing on top of that!)
My use of the word 'conservative' in the political sense is exactly how everyone else uses it, and has nothing to do with the fact I assert 'specific-political-philosophy art' does not exist.
"
@will-truman
There is an argument to be made that, if Person of Interest is a liberal or conservative show, it’s closer to the latter than the former. A liberal could make a case that it’s the other way, though, and I couldn’t argue.
That's because the entire premise is flawed. Shows cannot be X. Shows can merely exhibit X themes. They will also exhibit other themes, because no one can write any sort of story with a single theme.
And people can identify themes they agree with much more than themes they don't. They'll say 'Oh, that show agrees with me', whereas other people will just 'That is just the universe of that show'. As I said, I look at Firefly and can identify plenty of liberal themes.
Art means different things to different people. And any sufficiently complex TV show is going to produce themes that are, at times, in conflict with each other.
While I could make an argument for Person of Interest as a primarily conservative show, it would be harder for How I Met Your Mother. I couldn’t make the argument that it’s liberal, though, either.
How I Met Your Mother is quite possibly the most pro-marriage and pro-family show on television today. In a world with a reasonable conservative party, it would be held up as some sort of moral paradigm of family values. I am not in any way kidding about that.
This would require a conservative party that wasn't about 50 years out of date, though, and didn't freak out because, gasp, thirty-year olds are having sex before they are married. (Like, oh, approximately 95% of the population.)
I don’t have to imagine a conservative show. I could name a couple that I consider to be conservative or leaning in that direction. A couple more that could easily be conservative if they didn’t make the effort not to be. But, again, you really aren’t using the words as I use them. We seemed doomed to talk past one another on this subject.
Well, yeah, as long as you keep talking about 'conservative shows'. ;) Cause there ain't any such thing as 'specific-political-position TV shows'.
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@jm3z-aitch
Quibbling” over words is important, because if we mean different things with the same word, then we’re not actually communicating.
Except you're trying to quibble over an unrelated use of the word 'conservative' which has very little bearing to any of the conversation, and, as I pointed out, is a word with different meaning in different contexts. I believe I have explained my use of the word in the context I used it, namely, to mean 'The status quo'.
If you do not like that word there and feel it is not correct, you should feel free to replace that with another word with the same meaning. I'm not going to dragged into a stupid discussion about an explanation about how narrative art often has themes about the status quo being incorrect, unless you actually wish to discuss _that_ idea instead of my word choice.
Meanwhile, again, saying 'conservative means status quo' is _clearly_ not using conservative in the same context as this article is, because this article is talking about in the political context. There is no actual way to be confused by that, especially as I _at the same time_ explained that the way the article is using it is meaningless!
Of course, there _is_ such a thing as 'conservative art' in other meanings of the word conservative. For example, an oil painting is a conservative choice of art medium, well understood and represented in art, whereas something like a painting in colored superglue would be rather experimental and require a lot of trial and error to come up with workable techniques. Or you can talk about 'conservative art' choices would be ones that make money, like action movies, whereas other choices are more risky.
It just makes no sense to say 'specific-political-philosophy art'.
So you say you’re not using it the way people who complain about a lack of conservative themes do because they “literally” don’t know what they mean.
Literally does not belong in quotes. There is an entire conversation here about the lack of something that absolutely no one can define a damn example of. It's complete nonsense.
'Does anyone find it strange there's almost no narcoleptic art out there, but there's plenty of mimsy art?'
Words are not just letter strung together in the correct order. Words and phrases must refer to explicable concepts. Especially if your premise is that it is _missing_.
If someone can't give an example of what 'conservative art' would look like, or what attributes it would have, how the hell would anyone know if they found it?
Of course, Will Truman has a perfectly valid point about how this works in practice, but, again, I'm not one of these hypothetical liberals denying Firefly is libertarian art. (It's not, but that's because there's no such thing as specific-political-philosophy art.)
So, there, we've got some libertarian themes actually showing up on TV. 'A government that seems to fairly democratic, but yet is unfair. A war against people who just want to be left along. Government secrecy to extremes. Legalized prostitution. Wild-west style freedom. People fighting against the government'. Libertarian themes, those are indeed them, right there. The libertarian themes cannot be more obvious.(1)
Now, how about those _conservative_ themes we're not seeing? Anyone come up with one of those yet?
I think you’re wrong about that (are you a conservative? should I trust what a non-conservative says about conservstives’ understanding ofvtheir views?), but more importantly, I think ND does know what he means by conservative. So in trying to parse your response to him, I need to know if you’re using the jey term the same way before I can discern whether you’re really addressing his argument or a subtly different one.
I'm _not_ a conservative, and I was trying very hard to keep from having to define what conservative themes would look like.
Sadly, literally, and yes I mean literally, no conservative will step forward and define what they see as missing from TV shows. So I eventually had to suggest a few.
Conservatives have, so far, failed to either confirm nor deny them, which I suspect means they recognize them as conservative themes, but also recognize they appear on TV all the damn time.
1) Ayn Rand has proven me wrong. Apparently, you can make libertarian themes so obvious that the reader starts bleeding libertarian themes from the ears.
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@jm3z-aitch
Are you using conservative in the sane way ND is, or have you subtly shifted the meaning?
Okay, I'm not doing this weird game where I've already explained myself and we quibble over words.
It should be clear I was speaking generalities, that art _usually_ starts with what is currently true, which is _usually_ conservative. And then it comes up with problems and criticism of that, and often those problems are the exact ones that liberals point out.
So art has minor inherent bias towards 'Not as things are', which often matches the same direction as liberalism, whereas conservationism has a quite clearly stated bias towards 'As things are'.
That is all I am saying. I am not in any way saying that art cannot work the other way. It can. In fact, art can even look backwards and criticize modern society while suggesting the solutions are in the past.
I'm not even saying this bias is actually that important, because art usually has a variety of themes at once.
I'm just explaining why art often superficially looks like it's making a liberal critique of society. It's not. It's just making a critique of society as it currently is.
However, as I've said in other places here, I can't possibly be using the word 'conservative' in the same way that people talking about the lack of 'conservative arts' are using it, because those people literally have no idea what _they_ mean by 'conservative' there. Poor Will Truman has been reduced to pointing out, correctly, that even liberals don't know what that means. Yeah. No one does. No one is even vaguely sure why 'How I Met Your Mother' isn't full of conservative themes. Or why 'Person of Interest' doesn't have a conservative worldview.
'Does fleebernorf, which we can't explain, exist, or not, and if not, why not, and if so, why, and how come no one can figure anything out about fleebernorf?' I feel like stamping a big 'Words: You are doing it wrong' caption on this entire conversation.
For the love of God, will some conservative please sit down and actually come up with a conservative theme that you would like to see represented in a TV show. Come up with what a conservative worldview would look like.
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David, how many of those sitcoms and dramas, if conservatives actually tried to claim them as advancing the conservative worldview, would liberals respond “Yes, that is conservative and contrary to my own liberal worldview”?
Except, of course, that liberals and conservatives share almost the exact same worldview. Seriously, we're all 20th century Westerners. (Except those of us who are 21st.)
But liberals don't get annoyed because a TV show demonstrates a straight married couple raising a kid. Whereas conservative apparently do when it's a gay couple, and now it's magically a liberal show. Or even a single parent. (Despite conservatives attempting to claim 'strong families' as their own theme.)
As I pointed out in hypothetical example, which no one guessed, so I will reveal it is Buffy and I gender-swapped Tara, there are plenty of very conservative themes that are on TV. Buffy is a frickin _morality play_ about _vigilantes_ who can't trust the government (And yet there's a good depiction of the military once it manages to get out from under the heals of government idiots) who fight _evil_.
The problem is, conservatives don't seem to actually be able to articulate what they are looking for in TV.
I mean, we're having a big discussion about this and we _still_ don't have anyone articulating the themes they want. What _exactly_ is missing on TV? Lone heroes who fight the system? A dime a dozen. Happily married families raising children? Almost every sitcom. Government bureaucracy, incompetence, corruption, and ass covering? Yup.
I think the complaint here halfway boils down to 'Conservatives don't show up to scold liberals enough on TV' or something. Seriously, Someone please come up with a conservative theme that is not on TV. Any example. At all.
If you want to talk about what hypothetical other liberals say about 'conservative shows' and what is or isn't them, you're going to have to find someone who thinks the entire concept of 'conservative shows' or 'liberal shows' isn't complete nonsense to have that discussion with.
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@will-truman
Conservatives believe that there are lots and lots of problems with the world.
The important part of the sentence was 'needs fixing', but that's actually a bit unclear. 'Believe a problem can and should be fixed by intervening in it' might be a better term.
@jm3z-aitch
So if we’re critiquing, say, the prevalence of abortion in the post-Roe U.S., then the status quo prevalence of abortion is the conservative reality, and the pro-life symbolic critique is the liberal position?
Leaving things how they are is, indeed, conservative. It's not my problem if conservatives have actually become regressive on an issue, wishing to change things. Take it up with conservatives, or just recognize that words have different meanings in different contexts.
The opposite position is not liberal, but that's because liberal does not mean 'any change whatsoever'. (Whereas conservative does mean 'no change' or 'very little or slow change'.) Liberally actually have a pretty specific direction of change. So I was probably misusing the word there. _Most_ of the change that art here wishes to use thematically would be changes that liberals would support, but not all.
I mean, Nazi propaganda was art that thematically asserted there should be changes the world, but that doesn't mean the changes they wanted were 'liberal'.
But here in _this country_, right now, the deficiencies in the status quo that are most exposed in art are deficiencies the left tries to do something about.
Because, and boy is this claim going to get some blowback, a lot of the deficiencies of the right are _imaginary_. Jesus Christ, on of those articles links above talked about art criticizing high government debt. Yeah, that's a reasonable thing to make art about. I'm sure everyone will connect to those spreadsheets on an emotional level. It could be the next RENT!
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@will-truman
David, I think art qualifies as conservative when it advances the conservative worldview, and liberal when it advances the liberal one.
As I said elsewhere, I suspect the problem is that conservatives do not actually understand their own worldview. Or aren't able to state it reasonable.
Almost every drama is very conservative. A good half of sitcoms are also.
Here's a conservative TV arc: A man, who's been torn down his entire life for his strength, goes off to college where he finds a group of friends, along with a strong women who he falls in love with. Together, they help fight the forces of darkness, outside the law. Eventually, his family returns, intend on harm (In an episode called 'Family', no less.), and his friends, his new family, helps hold them off, showing him that he is loved, and does belong.
Conservative, right? Anyone want to guess what TV show I'm talking about, and what fact of that explanation I fudged, which instantly made it Not Conservative?
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@will-truman
It’s not true that art is something that necessarily pushes against tradition and norms. If we think it is, that says a lot about a lot of things.
It's not that art pushes against tradition and norms. It's that art is _something besides what is there on the page_.
Art is when you present something that, like everything, has some meaning in itself. And then it has another meaning on top of that.
Narrative arts - aka books, plays, motion pictures, video games, even some dance - tells a story. But a story is more than 'events that happens'. It is a cohesive whole that attempts to impart something besides the actual events.
Hell, if you just wanted the events, you could read a plot summary. Although I don't know why you'd bother, considering the events didn't really happen anyway! 'I better read up for my 'Fictional history' exam!'
Narrative art (and that's really what we're talking about here, when people claim that art has a liberal bias they usually don't mean paintings.) is creating those events, and displaying them _in such a way as to convey meaning and themes_. (Or, as I said, _attempt to_ do that. Art can fail.)
And, and this is the actual point, art must have two layers(1), a real and symbolic, and the real layer is almost always something understandable. (Otherwise you have to explain that, which gets in the way of the symbolic stuff. This can be done...see 'speculative fiction'...but notice the amount of shorthand tropes we have in that to keep from having to explain things.)
So, if the real layer is, well, real, it is the status quo. It is how things are. It is conservative. An easy contrast to that is to put a symbolic layer on it that has liberal things. Show the status quo, and then show how that has _failed_.
It's not that art that is always pushing against traditions and norms, it is that art is often showing the actual real world, and trying to get across the message there are problems with it. That is probably the premise of 50% of all art currently made.
And believing that problems actually exist and need fixing has somehow become a liberal concept.
1) Technically, there are three layers. There's the fact people are standing on a stage wearing costumes and pretending to be other layers, there's the situation they're trying to convey, and there's a _meaning_ beyond that. Which is why suspension of disbelief is important...if the viewer can't get past the 'all this is pretend', there's no way in hell he's getting to the symbolic stuff.
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I’ll say here what I said there. Conservatives are criticized for failing to embrace the conservatism that exists in entertainment. But then, when they try to claim something (like, ahem, libertarians claiming Firefly) they are scoffed at.
What conservatives _should_ be criticized for is having created this problem in the first place. ;)
There is no such thing as conservative art, just like there's no such thing as liberal art. Art has _themes_, it does not have types. (Well, it has types like 'musical theatre' or 'painting', but you know what I mean.)
So when conservatives started nonsensically claiming there was no such thing as conservative art, they ended up in a weird middle ground where they can't win in either direction.
So Firefly is not conservative art because...there's no such thing. Firefly does have some libertarian _themes_, although libertarians are probably focusing on those specific aspects more than other people. (Which is fine. That's how art works.)
A hell of a lot of modern drama have _very_ 'conservative' themes....and will also have some random gay character somewhere, and suddenly it's 'liberal'.
Although a lot of the problem appears to be that conservatives appear to have forgotten what they themselves are supposed to care about. Perhaps conservatives need to sit down and actually list some conservative _themes_, and I'm sure we could easily find TV shows that include those themes.
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To what specific lies are you referring?
Everything they say about the ACA? Climate change denial?
And I don’t really see the distinction that you’re making. Is there any political candidate/movement that doesn’t use attack ads?
The keyword there was not attack ads, it was 'lying'. And candidates usually (Yes, yes, Jaybird, I know) can't get away with provable lies in their attack ads. They are usually forced to at least withdraw the ads.
The Koch brothers's organizations, however, have no problems with that, and have repeated run ads that are, in fact, _blatant_ lies.
It's a rather new and novel approach. Just _keep_ lying. Even after being called on it. And because it's not a candidate doing it, there's no backlash on the candidate.
Instead, of course, there's a backlash on the Koch brothers.
Are there any NGOs that don’t fund themselves through contributions from rich patrons?
Firstly, yes, there are, and secondly, that doesn't have any bearing on what I said.
As I pointed out, the Koch brothers have started up multiple organizations that are pretending to be 'grassroots'. That's a little different than funding think tanks, and it's also different than rich donors donating to actual grassroot organizations.
But, hey, don't ask me. Ask the Tea Party how much they like the Koch brothers organization's pretending to speak for them. There's a lot of honest Tea Partiers here in Georgia who bought into the idea that it was actually a grassroot organization, and are rather pissed that the Koch brothers are now attacking _their_ solar energy free-market initiative.
There’s nothing that the Koch brothers do that isn’t standard operating procedure for political movements in this country. They only happen to do a lot more of it and with a much more focused ideological bent.
Erm, what? What does that have to do with anything?
My point was that liberals criticizing the Koch brothers actually have some sort of reasonable claim of 'misbehavior' to criticize. Those two are doing things that we, as society, should disapprove of. It doesn't really matter that they're really just doing Extreme Politics(tm) that everyone else does to a lesser extent, and it fact it makes perfect sense to criticize the _worst_ actors, so I am confused at the point you're trying to make. (Admittedly, you might have some hypocrisy claim somewhere if the left was fine with lies of their own side, or of phony grassroot movements, but you're going to have to make that claim yourself, but I do not see that happening on the left.)
Whereas conservatives criticizing the art for being liberal are just talking nonsense. Mostly because, as I talk about elsewhere here, conservatives don't seem to understand the medium and the art are not the same thing, and you can create art using conservative themes that has *gasp* gay people in it.
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The whole problem here is the delusion that a universe can be conservative or liberal.
About half the complaints about TV from the right seems to be that the universe does not match what they want it to be. It has too many gays or artists or pagans or elites or something.
That...uh...does not decide what the theme of the work of art is. That is actually completely irrelevant to it.
It's like conservatives literally do not understand what 'art' is. Art is not actually the thing you are actually looking at. That's a medium, not the art. Art is the message the medium is trying to convey.
If this is confusing, consider photography. All photographs are photographs (duh) but not all photographs are intended to be art. They're only art if there's something _besides_ the actual picture that is being convey. (Or, at least, if they _attempt_ to convey something else. Art can indeed fail.)
Art is not 'liberal' because it uses things that liberals are okay with but conservatives freak out about, anymore than art is 'pro-Disney' because it uses depictions of Disney characters, or 'pro-shooting people' because has people getting shot in it.
Creating art using liberal characters does not make it pro-liberal. Creating art using gay characters does not make it pro-gay.
In fact, it is nearly impossible to _criticize_ something in art without representing it somewhat correctly. Otherwise it turns into an obvious strawman polemic.
Admittedly, the actual _art_ does get lost, it does fail, if the viewer is too busy freaking out over what it's made out of to miss the intended message.
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