“X is acting like Voldemort. Voldemort level evil. Literally 1984.” What are you a child?
If someone brags about reading for status but only reads fiction, their knowledge is useless in practice. Fiction can be great, but treat it like junk food, enjoyable but not real world wisdom
Fiction can be great, but treat it like junk food, enjoyable but not real world wisdom
I don’t agree with this. Fiction was the wrapper that we used for passing down wisdom for generations. Modern fiction is a direct descendant of the oral traditions that many of our cultures used to propogate knowledge when our minds were the only data storage method we had available. Even now, it remains one of the most powerful pedagogical tools because humans love stories and delivering a lesson in story form is still the best way to bypass the affective barrier and get knowledge to stick.
It’s also why US control over Hollywood and the Anglophone Internet is one of their most powerful propaganda tools, and a perversion of storytelling from something that passes down wisdom into something that shapes narratives.
When people started comparing Russia to Mordor and Russians to Orcs, I was pretty annoyed. Tolkien being used by Nazis for their race politics is hardly new, but it was just showing that the Ukrainians are going all in on appealing to the kids.
It shows me that the person is quite ignorant on three things:
- on the very material they are comparing against;
- on the history to pull from other things to compare against;
- on recognizing that we are talking about actual human beings, their problems and plighs, instead of some Hollywood movie film.
I do like the exploratory part of fiction, like “what if X was real” and stretch it as far as it goes. But no, sometimes, we can use parable as a way to understand a little better facets of things, but not it as a whole. That’s where I think people miss the forest for their Voldemort shaped trees.
on recognizing that we are talking about actual human beings, their problems and plighs, instead of some Hollywood movie film.
There’s been a real epidemic of adults thinking real life works like a Marvel movie. Like Epstein discourse went from an actual discussion about elites using their power to abuse kids into a secret society headed by a literal supervillain that we don’t know about.
I like it. It tells me what sort of illiteracy we are dealing with and how much time is worth spent on it. However, I wonder if they are still more literate than the generations before them.
Yeah I think it is not only illiteracy but specifically historical illiteracy. There are plenty of real people in history that could be used for comparison, but most people have greater familiarity with fictional characters in popular media.
Illiteracy is often a function of educational access; the joy or pain is in how open a person is to learning and how much of wilful anti-intellectualism exists to protect any relative class privileges.
It reminds me of when I watched the Malcolm X (1992). Malcolm X is in prison before he joined the Nation of Islam and Malcolm character swears and the John Bembry character says “a man curses because he doesn’t have the words to say what’s on his mind.” He was then told to read the dictionary to find words to better articulate what he was saying.
I think the same thing applies here.
Fuck, that’s good advice /gen
“Vote blueMAGA because trolley problem”
They won’t extend that metaphor for those on the ground actually fighting against the empire (ie not - as another lemmgrader put it - “angry parades”)
I always ask them to justify their position with a different ethical framework.
What’s the deontological justification for voting blue no matter who? Go on. I’ll wait.
That usually shuts them up
comparing dick cheney to darth vader was usually funny at least
It’s liberalism. People have no material basis for comparison, so they use fiction.
I feel like calling fiction “junk food” is more than a little insulting to fiction. I’m not saying its a substitute for knowing irl facts obviously but it’s certainly not “junk”
Its not all junk but, like most commodities, a large chunk is junk. Same goes for non fiction of course.
Ive never been a fan of the liberal take that all book reading is inherently good. Its weirdly focused on a specific format, to the point that some novels considered classics today might not have been considered “classics” (in this framing) if they weren’t intentionally moved from a serialized format to a novel format. reading newspapers, magazines, instructional materials (text books, etc), even general non fiction in some circles, seems to be considered less important or “cultured” than reading novels. I guess poetry is usually included in the elevated status but short stories often aren’t ime.
The actual problem of course isnt that fiction is inherently bad or junk. Even if all fiction was junk would be fine. the problem happens when people use a fictional framing to fully understand the world around them rather than actually engaging in the world around them more directly to actually get some semblance of understanding. To OP’s example, Harry Potter fans that avoid reading other works (even other fantasy works) then use HP as a world framing, even as analogy, are borrowing a liberal, racist, TERF idealistic worldview from a (now billionaire) author and lazily applying it to everything.
In that sense, fiction can be junk.
100%. I think there’s certain information that you need to understand things like history and politics that can only really be found in non-fiction literature.
Fiction is awesome and but we all need to eat our vegetables at a certain point. If reading just all by itself somehow made us wiser than we could read instruction manuals and end up just as aware and informed as somebody who has read the complete works of Marx and Engels back to front.
We should strive to try and keep a healthy diet of information just as we strive to keep a healthy diet of food, and that has nothing to do with like, policing what is and isn’t art (never a fruitful conversation to have anyways, art can be anything for all I care).
Yeah greek mythology was mostly fiction, and still is referenced aplenty in the works of most of our beloved socialist revolutionaries.
I read that people who read fiction have higher empathy levels than those who don’t.
Oh. Well I may have been mistaken. I was thinking that people would read fiction as a substitute for non-fiction, like how in my school there were tons of fiction books that took up the center, and a smaller amount of non-fiction books that lined the edges.
Maybe I was a bit harsh on fiction.
I like both.
I recently read an article referencing some old sociologist (I don’t know his name, and yes I know this is like the Galician Syndicalists meme) about how the two inventions that helped bring about Nationalism as a concept were the Printing Press (language standardization, newspapers, etc.) and, more interestingly, the Novel.
The Novel trains people (or, in other words, helps people build the skills) to be able to empathize with and understand people we have never really met.
Reading fiction and basing your reality on fiction are very different things.
Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some truth to that, considering written fiction tries to put you in the mind of someone else. Like their inner thoughts, fears, beliefs, emotions, and so on. So it’s sort of practicing empathy in a way.
The caveat being that being practiced at empathy doesn’t necessarily mean one will practice good politics. There are liberals in the imperial core, for example, who are very empathetic and then get mislead by atrocity propaganda into believing that commies, or even just anti-imperialist self-defense liberators, are cartoon villains.
Did you read that in a fiction book though?
No an article about a study that was done.
That’s peak liberal political analysis.
REAL
I’m a similar boat of this, I hate… Fucking HATE, when ppl want to play “evil” campaigns in games like dnd and shit. Cause it’s one of two fucking things.
- “I am a demented little incel fascists who wants to live out my power fantasies by raping and torturing people in game, and deserve to have my head caved in.”
OR the more likely scenario
- “I just want to play a murder hobo, anti-hero and my basis for “evil” is based on Harry Potter and marvel shit.”
I once had a group of ppl I know what to play an evil campaign and it was 100% #2. So I trolled them so hard and all I had to do was constantly suggest shit from the US Feds handbook. lol. They eventually stopped talking to me about that game. I was like "we need to set up an ever expanding pedophilia ring that we use to blackmail and control the elites of ever nation "
It pisses me off. The naivety. Grown ass ppl that live with this fairy tale mentality.
I mean, it is only a game. There are video games like Postal 2 and Carmageddon that don’t necessarily make people more inclined to violence. That was probably what they were trying to get out of D&D.
I’d probably be too self-conscious to play a bad character with other players in a DnD type of thing, but I’ve definitely done stuff like dark side runs in Knights of the Old Republic and see no harm in it. For the most part, in those type of games, the evil is so over the top that it almost loops around to being comedic. Like “rah you looked at me wrong, I’m going to be evil to you!” Though to some extent, life experience colors it too. Like I most played that stuff when I was less informed on the world and knew less about how it works.
Nowadays when I play a video game where violence is the norm, it doesn’t matter much whether it’s an “evil” playthrough or an (allegedly) “heroic” playthrough, I can’t help noticing just how many games rely on this implicit design where it’s fine to murder hordes of enemies, while sometimes having stories with moral qualms about whether you should kill a significant named character. It’s the same superhero logic that Pete Holmes makes fun of in his “Badman” (parody of Batman) sketch, the one called Batman vs. The Penguin. “My one rule is I don’t kill,” then he takes out henchmen without a second thought.
I find the inconsistency of it to be impossible to unsee and that more than fictional good/evil character choices is the part that stands out to me. Typically in games with a hero or villain playthrough option, the heroic path also involves murdering lots of enemies along the way. The net kill count isn’t actually that different. The main difference is whether you do the story-based good/evil cinematic choices, which often involves an impact to the game world that you don’t even visibly see. So you’re largely playing as a hypothetical hero or villain, removed even from much of a simulation of consequences.
Yeah, I’d stop talking to my friend too if they decided to ruin everybody’s fun by being this petty, toxic, and immature.
You seem to have trouble distinguishing between reality & fiction if you think wanting to play evil in a table top RPG is the same as being a psychopath or edgelord or that it means they don’t understand how real life evil works.
You’re operating with the same mentality as claiming video games cause violence.
We are currently in a “media consumption = my values” and frequently “depiction = endorsement” moral frenzy. Not more than 5 years ago it was perfectly understandable by all, that supporting the “villain” faction/character in fictional media doesn’t instantly mean you endorse those values in real life.
I’m honestly split. On one hand, it’s only a game. On the other, wanting to ruin the lives of characters for fun actually is being immature, even if there are no real-world consequences. Really, it’s hard to distinguish the impulse to be “the bad guy” and the impulse to be an edgelord. They do purposefully transgressive activities that most teenagers find thrilling and glamorous, along with some adults. Like this Playstation commercial!
Really, as the world gets worse and worse, playing as the edgelord who conquers a whole town gets less and less appealing. It doesn’t seem so transgressive anymore when the news reports on more and more taboos being broken. The question becomes less “How can I have fun?” and more “How can I mentally heal myself?”. Of course, with someone still playing Lex Luthor, it would seem that they are being unearnest and purposeless, or lack the desire to help others to the point where they’d scoff at at least emulating helping others.
I do understand the worry that these people are just emulating Joe Lieberman in regards to Mortal Kombat. But these are entirely different people. They aren’t going to someday go “and now you can’t show real firearms!”, or worry more about a gamer’s individual habits than the economic system they live in.
There’s people that treat novels like they’re theory, they are stories and their outcome is decided by the author.
Whenever I venture out into the liberalsphere, this is something I encounter so often and, I dunno, after having unplugged from it for a good and well-needed while now, it kinda shocks you. I’ve gotten so used to reading Marxist theory (sweating and struggling to make sense of it lol), historical analysis and revolutionary practice all across the world, I find that non-fiction just has such a grip on me. Whenever I think of things along the vein of “X is as evil as Y”, Y is almost always the American regime, so that’s kinda funny, if not completely morbid. lol
Whenever I consume any fiction, I always keep class differences and dialectical materialism in mind, and it helps me a lot when I try to ground the story in reality. Sometimes you can also indirectly pick up on the author’s political leanings lol
Either way, dialectical materialism has had a very profound effect on how I consume media and on which side or character I sympathize with
I don’t think I could turn it off even if I wanted to, because I think I’ve already internalized this way of seeing the world
This is now simultaneously your gift and your curse. How dialectical!
