gdp's Comments

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:33:36 +0000

I left a long response noting that I have to work today (lucky socialist laborers...) but will return later to discuss some of your points further. I also have major reservations on your bad-faith assumptions about liberals/the left, etc. but I'll address that tonight. However, when I published the comment, all that came out was "this comment has been deleted by the administrator." Um, ok...? Hopefully this one has better luck. At any rate, hope you're felling better by the end of the day.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:59:40 +0000

Yeah, the majority of people I've engaged on this thread have been civil and thought-provoking. I've seen much uglier threads, and would guess that in this case most of the trolls are lurkers or MIA...

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:38:29 +0000

Yeah, at this point I just kind of find it amusing and disregard the points altogether. There are the people who come here for intellectual debate and the ones who...don't. And I fully expect this comment to get thumbed down ;)

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:31:18 +0000

Wow, not sure that simple factual observation deserved subtracted points, haha...

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:02:04 +0000

Oh, and damn you El_Gordo. I thought I was finally outta here after spending all day checking up on these debates. ;)

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:00:04 +0000

"Nazis believed in the total organisation and mobilization of society under the Party, including the military and everything else" El_G, militarism was far more central to the Nazis than simply being one aspect of the total organization. The party had its roots in the paramilitary organizations post-WWI and was rooted in a sense of the heroic soldiers of Germany having been stabbed in the back by Jews and Bolsheviks. The militarist identity was central to the Nazi ethos.* "The left is not relativist when it comes to their own values." This isn't true for all leftists, and indeed is something conservatives often argue against. Certainly no one posits that radical Islamist goals like subjugation of women or observation of sharia law coincide with those of the left. Yet leftists are accused (and in some cases accurately) of being cultural relativists in saying that the Islamist world has a right to its values. Leftists CAN BE relativist when it comes to their own values. *("the heroic...Nazi ethos" added after this comment went up, as the sentence was accidentally stopped short; sorry if it was read before this was fixed)

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:55:47 +0000

El_Gordo, they also mixed this with paeons to a glorious pagan/medieval/imperial past, and called themselves the Third Reich as well as the New World Order. One reason some (indisputable) right-wingers of the time were more comfortable with them than with Marxists, and that political scientists have generally characterized them on the right, is that much of their appeal was based on a desire to return to a golden era, or rather to re-create it in new terms. They wanted to do this through modernism, an inherent contradiction (and why today we still have so much trouble locating them ideologically) but there was a fundamental difference here between Nazism and Marxism, which was entirely future-focused. To a certain degree, the right-wing groups of the immediate post-World War I era were an attempt to adopt the means of the left for the aims of the right (the right in Germany obviously, which was attempting to revive/preserve something quite different than the right in America, for the most part).

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:48:36 +0000

El_Gordo, it's important to note that Nazism did not rise out of Italian fascism, but rather simultaneously to it. The tie to fascism is not the primacy of the collective, which is of course a feature of communism as well but the particular direction this collective action is directed in, as well as the nature of the collective (which preserves distinctions vs. a complete dissolution as Marxism seeks - in other words, there are still workers and owners but their inequality and oppositional roles become less distinct and less important than their role in the party - think of it like a body: yes they are all parts but the head and the fingers are not the same). "Whether it is race or class based is a mere detail" - no, not at all to the people advocating these approaches. This is what I've been saying to Andrew: in analyzing results, yes it makes sense to focus on governance; whether a brownshirt or a red-flag-waving ideologue is harrassing you, you just know you're being harrassed. But historically, analyzing causes and ideologies and developments, values are far more important. To delineate everything into neat little groups, where this is left-wing and only left-wing, that is right-wing and only right-wing, does not do justice to history. In the 30s, many on the right willingly associated themselves with fascism or Nazism which they saw as a bulwark against Marxism (democratic practices and temperance were less important to them than preservation of private property in some fashion and of privileges; despite Nazism's and fascism's State control/supervision of the private sector it was not comparable to Communism, duly noted by the industrialists who accepted Hitler and fully collaborated during his regime). The argument that Nazism is some kind of super-capitalism, which I've heard socialists make, is fairly ridiculous, but so is the argument that it is fundamentally left-wing. One could make the case that Hitler doesn't fit any prevailing political paradigms, or that he was on balance right-wing but in no way related to American conservatism, or that he mixed left and right freely, or that his was actually a crazy aesthetic development more than a political one (the documentary "Architecture of Doom" covers this argument fairly well). That Hitler was a liberal is not an argument that comports with the historical record, either in rhetoric or actions. What Nazism and fascism have in common with progressivism (and communism) - where Goldberg's book is most on the money - is that they are facets of modernism, and indeed the making of a "new man" is central to all of these. There were varying degrees of creative destruction in all of these (far less so in Rooseveltian and Wilsonian progressivism than any of the others, where the goal was more evolutionary than revolutionary). Whether or not this automatically makes them left-wing is a matter of great debate (obviously) - I say no, because I define left and right in terms of central values. I think a left-wing goal can be pursued by anything from democratic to totalitarian means (even libertarian means - see anarchists), and so can a right-wing goal. I do not believe that only conservatives defend founding principles and the traditions of the USA (during the Bush administration, it was liberals who took up the mantle of civil liberties and conservatives who sought dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy - though I believe you & I debated this over a year ago so it may not be worth chewing over again). And I certainly don't believe that all facets of the American left seek to "destroy the given society, its traditions and values." A disillusioned conservative on another board I was visited posited that virtually everyone in American politics is the heir to "progressivism" with conservatives wanting a slower approach, more keyed to the free market, and liberals seeking a faster one, more centered in the federal government. I tend to agree: even those who seek a rollback in the New Deal or the income tax (a minority, I presume) tend to preserve some facets of the 1904-1913 era. A lot of this trying to tar American liberals or conservatives with association of foreign elements (Gingrich's whole Founding Fathers vs. Saul Alinsky canard, as if Alinsky himself didn't namedrop the Founding Fathers left and right all over his book, and as if Tea Party activists haven't availed themselves of Alinsky's tactical advice to their opponents) is just standard political operating procedure. The differences between the mainstreams of left and right in American politics tend to be of the ideological nature of a tempest in a teacup.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:07:16 +0000

"The poor despise the bourgeois because they earn their keep." All of the poor? Or just the ones you know?

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:40:43 +0000

No worries and no rush. I can't say I see it the same - I think socialist thought it was one of many forms of discourse that have an impact on culture and language but I don't think it has a monopoly. But I do think Marxism is probably the most important ideology/philosophy/worldview to emerge since Christianity, in terms of how it has shaped and defined terminology and policy. Part of it might just be historical contingency: it emerged just at a moment when religious faith was weakening in the west and addressed concerns drudged up by the relatively new industrial revolution. Right time, right place.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:32:44 +0000

Hitler and Stalin were allies for seventeen months between August 1939 (Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) and June 1941 (invasion of USSR, not a falling out but a pre-planned invasion). Before and after that, they were bitter enemies - indeed, Communists were at the forefront of the Popular Front whose primary purpose was to unite "progressives" against fascism. Outside of the Stalinists and some fellow travelers (generally Stalinists by another name) most leftists remained virulently anti-Hitler from 1933 to 1945. The Pact was not the result of ideological agreement but political convenience; Stalin feared a German invasion and had no allies in the west, while Hitler wanted to focus on the rest of Europe before launching a Soviet invasion.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:57:17 +0000

Sore winner.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:39:36 +0000

Capt, I have heard that the graphic novel of V for Vendetta does this - in fact a friend wrote an article on it a while back, contrasting the movie to the book in this regard, noting both that the vigilante is more ambiguous in the book and that the treatment of the totalitarian state is more clear-eyed. To wit: "Lloyd’s work in V for Vendetta has a distinctly shadowy, noir-enthused atmosphere, with inky darkness cloaking nearly every surface and giving a greasy sheen to almost everything else. Paired with the strict grid-panel design that Moore typically writes for, and you have a world on the page that’s as cramped and claustrophobically crowded as any of the sordid underworld night clubs and cabarets that the characters visit to take the edge off. It’s a dirty dystopia, one where nobody’s hands or memories are clean of the misdeeds done in past or present, the whole of London made into one big concentration camp. One would think that this vision would be easy enough to reproduce on film, especially after the grimy landscape of the future that the reality of the Matrix narrative proposed, with its post-apocalyptic cyberpunk wastelands contrasting with the green-filtered artificiality of the digital world. But instead, the Wachowskis, McTeigue and cinematographer Adrian Biddle (working on his last film) render a strikingly clean, symmetrical and brightly-lit picture of tyranny. It’s one that fits what we expect from dramatic presentations of dictatorships, all those aspirations to neatness and order, polished surfaces and endless repetition, everyone trying to live up to the propagandized-myth that Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl promoted." http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/...

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:24:23 +0000

There was also a great comic from the 50s (don't know the name, i think it was ec) where a guard was confronted by one of his victims in a subway station - you think he's just an ordinary old man and then via the confrontation, a flashback. Pretty memorable. It was definitely on the radar but I would say it wasn't the focus like it became later.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:02:25 +0000

Well, just to (hopefully) wrap up quickly, there's two schools of thought on whether or not it's inherently progressive or conservative. One is that there's a matter of principle, and when conservatives slip on this (say, like Bob Barr or others advising Tea Partiers to use Alinsky's teachings against the left) they are no longer being conservative. I've heard the argument that the Tea Party isn't actually conservative for a variety of reasons, which is interesting. However, I tend toward the other school which is that liberalism/conservatism, left/right and so forth are defined more by central values - the ends - rather than the methods - the means. Otherwise, I find the terms no longer really apply in American politics (I mean if we start calling the Tea Party a "left-wing" movement things get pretty confusing). In that case, some liberals or conservatives will use any means to achieve an end, others won't - but it isn't precisely a matter of being liberal or conservative. But I've kind of debated the conditions of those terms with Andrew a good deal above, so no reason to revisit at this juncture. I've laid out my position on that. "I would suggest if you have to look for reasons not to get off the Internet, it's probably time to get off the Internet" Ha, yes that's never worked for me. At any rate I was hovering waiting for a post to go up on another site, and now it has so probably time to make a hasty exit. "My thanks to you for a calm and rational discussion." No problem, same here.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:44:09 +0000

I see. Well, the problem is the first two aren't typically associated with "modern liberals", even on the right, while the rest, to various degrees, are. So the sarcasm didn't really play...

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:24:52 +0000

No disagreement here.

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:20:15 +0000

*I changed the above from "because they regard the end as less important than the means" to because they regard the means as less important than the ends" which is what I obviously meant to write... Hope you were able apply "selective interpretation" there...

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:17:59 +0000

As for whether progressives support racial equality, my impression is that progressives didn't have a set position on race until the 50s-60s. I don't buy the argument that they were inherently racist before then, just that race - at least among white progressives - was not a consistent concern. But that's a separate argument, not sure why I bring it up except to further divert myself from getting off the internet. :)

Big Hollywood : The Politics of 'Star Trek': 'Patterns of Force'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:16:27 +0000

"But whether it is or not, you can't advocate it only when it results in outcomes you agree with" Well, according to whom? I would say people do this all the time precisely because they regard the means as less important than the ends. That's why I don't see judicial activism as inherently progressive - I think it's a tactic progressives will use (and decry in other circumstances) to achieve a desired aim. "But it sounds like you're saying "progressives support racial equality, therefore a progressive would not have supported the Plessy case, therefore the case was not a progressive ruling."" No, not this - rather, "political ideologies are defined more by their values than their methods, thus the fact that the method behind Plessy resembles the method behind progressive court decisions doesn't necessarily make it progressive." And also, "To call Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education both progressive decisions (which I believe would be consistent as Brown was selective interpretation too) based on the methodology (judicial activism) rather than the ends (segregation vs. integration) seems to me to miss the point." Hope that's (somewhat) clearer.