Games

But for those who don’t, and who don’t see beyond the surface veneer of “we’re defending Earth from invaders”… It looks a lot like AmericaWorld, where everyone is happy and free and kept safe from the nasty aliens.

If you don't think of it as a military dictatorship (remember, this is not the real world, it's fiction and people read into it whatever they want) then super earth is the good guys.

Super earth is painted as the most pristine fascist ideal of the polity united under a single uniform banner (because everyone who wasn't in line has already been purged or will be, shortly), why would your average normie (who by definition won't be strongly objecting on principle) ever oppose that if not for the means it was achieved with?

Most people come into fiction assuming the author agrees with whatever they think.

That's why you can hear lefties praise Ocarina of Time as anti-monarchist because Link is deposing Ganondorf, when it's obviously restorationist since Link is actually reinstating the rightful king of Hyrule, not ending monarchy altogether.

That's also why preachy, obnoxious, clumsy propaganda that bludgeons you with its political stance sells about as well as a kick to the teeth. Anyone who agrees will be bored by hearing repeated talking points, and anyone who doesn't will despise the message, not be moved or convinced.

Good art with a political message makes you actually come to the conclusions the author came to through the process of enjoying the art and having the experience the author has built in it.

For instance, by humanizing a character with ideas or traits you find distasteful.

Like the original Starship Troopers book, whose main character is not a blonde blue eyed all American boy, but Tagalog-speaking Filipino Johnny Rico, whose ethnic background Heinlein hides until the final chapter to make his 60s mostly WASP teenage boy audience identify with him, so they can have the realization that in a society that does not care about race they would not even realise which race the characters are until something practical comes up (his natively speaking Tagalog in this case), which was exceedingly anti-racist for the 60s.

Bad art tells you the political conclusion you should reach then calls you a bigot for rejecting its message. It's less than worthless as a political tool, it's actively detrimental because it creates the kind of staunch opposition and attempted purges we see weekly at this point trying to get woke shit out of media, the same way we had those in the 2000s with conservative trash like the "drugs are bad and a single joint will ruin your life" we would see in sit-coms every fucking season.

Every side does this when they have hegemonic control of media production, and everyone who isn't aggressively brainrotted eventually gets fed up because not only is it not helpful, it makes for bad art even when you agree with it.

Eh, in Fallout 3 and 4 Bethesda diverted the canon a bit too much for me. It never seemed like they understood the universe. In 1 and 2, the BoS was, if not good, at least lawful neutral, and quite helpful, despite isolationist. I haven't played New Vegas yet.

We are talking about the same people who think Fallout isn’t political and the Brotherhood of Steel is a cool good guy army.

Firstly, in the Bethesda games the political aspect of Fallout is so paper thin they may as well be correct, most people have not played the Black Isle fallouts.

Secondly, you need to realise that people don't see something as political if there is no dilemma in their mind, they see it as moral instead.

A good example: the Megaton ""dilemma"" in Fallout 3. Ostensibly, you could make an argument that the conversation of land development vs settler rights is a political one. The argument as to whether the lives of rando fucks living in shanties and slowly dying of radiation exposure are worth preserving if the alternative is starting over and building something better for other people could also be political at some point in history.

But in modern society, shaped by enlightenment ideas of equality and the concept of human rights and dignity, these have stopped being political questions because they sit in conflict with the basic social mores (hence moral questions) our society is built upon, and thus they take on a moral character instead.

The question "should we slaughter a bunch of useless peasants we are not in charge of to turn their land into my 15th palace" would hardly have been a matter of debate for some Mongolian horde for instance (yes, I know they didn't have palaces, you get the point), the debate would have been about ratios of enslaved captives vs killed in battle, if anything.

The vast majority of people's engagement with politics doesn't even approach the level of brainrot you see online.

People want security, prosperity, and for people not to suffer needlessly. That's about it.

In fact, most debate in society is about what those 3 concepts mean, not whether they're good ideas.

Some people also demand freedom but they're not the majority, and definitions of such and whom it should extend to also vary greatly.

So looking at the fallout 3 and 4 Brotherhood and saying "those are the cool post apocalyptic knights and they're the good guys" is a perfectly in line read for the average not politically savvy person. The Brotherhood is not perfect, but they want more or less those things.

That's also why New Vegas is by far the better game because it actually poses 2 forces (Legion and NCR) in opposition as to the meaning of those concepts and not as to whether they are goals worth pursuing, an actual political dilemma, unlike say "should people be allowed to drink water without getting radiation poisoning."

You’re giving these people too much benefit of the doubt on their critical thinking skills.

I extend the same benefit to people who make comments like this one, despite their blatant disregard for the humanity of their opposition and their expectation that disagreement with them means inability to conceptualise the world to the same level of complexity, instead of simply conceptualising it differently.

I might be wrong to do either, who knows, maybe I should treat all people who disagree with me with the contempt someone unintelligent and beneath me would deserve, I'm sure that never went poorly before.

To them, any politics is blatant cringeworthy soapboxing, and their definition of politics is anything that disagrees with their black and white worldview. They don’t think any deeper than whether something affirms their worldview or not. They’ll go from supporting the cops and government taking away other people’s freedoms to screaming at a cop a second later for giving them a speeding ticket because the cop “violated their first amendment rights” or whatever.

You know absolutely nothing of rightwingers or right wing thought. The fact alone that you'd flatten them all into one mass with a black and white worldview when "the right" encompasses such a massive swath of political ideologies to dwarf the left in variety should make you re-evaluate how much you actually understand them and how much of this is partisan hatred and dehumanisation.

By that exact same token I could paint the exact same picture of a leftwinger. Hell, it was all the rage to do so in 2016, and i'm sure you know exactly what I'm thinking of if you are old enough to have been politically involved back then.

These kinds of people believe that there are two groups of people: an in-group that consists of themselves, and an out-group that is everybody else. And they aren’t political, but the out-group is. They believe that there are two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. Two genders: male and political.

Good job erasing conservative blacks, conservative latinos, conservative immigrants, conservative women, and what few conservative LGBT people exist (not that many admittedly, but a few nonetheless).

It's really funny to see someone decry the inability of others to conceive and appreciate diversity, while doing exactly the same on a different axis.

You can have Coco Chanel. I'm taking Hugo Boss. The Nazis did NOT deserve to have that stylish of uniforms.

Obama an ultraconservative. I have seen enough for today

Are you high?

No but the fumes off of this comment might get me there.

Fascists are really good at misreading shit. They can assume ethnic homogeneity.

Ok, important distinction: fascists don't give a shit about race, identitarians (nazis) do. And yes, it's different, that's why I used the word "identitarian" and not "fascist."

Nazis would literally never assume homogeneity, nazi groups purity spiral around what ethnic group you belong to, let alone fucking skin color, they would absolutely want it to be an explicit ethnically homogenous group.

Everybody likes Mussolini

Which, not whom. The pronoun refers to the world in the prior phrase, not the person.

And on that topic, a lot of people really really like the idea of being free to remove people they disagree with from society, either by straight up violence, or by starving them out of work, civil liberties, protections, etc, regardless of political side.

Which is basically exactly what fascism is in thoery and in practice. Fascism is a non-ideological anti-liberal totalitarian government.

It explicitly has no tenets other than "whatever the few running the party believe works" and "you disagree, you disappear".

And I'm going to go out on a limb that since you called fucking Obama an ultraconservative, you probably have a sizeable list of people you'd get rid of "after the revolution," so forgive me if I'm not surprised that you don't see that the fascists' mentality is a lot more widespread than you think.