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What is the weird EU justification for the shadows behaving the way they do being discussed in the no spoiler thread? I just figured it was a "any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" thing so First Ones casually violating what we think of as "laws of physics" makes sense.
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Feb 13, 2021 22:09
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Timby posted:Goblin Craft isn't a troll, he's been posting in B5 and Doctor Who threads for like a decade-plus (back when his username was Komrade Hitlerstalin), he's just very unabashed about being a conservative. I think my main failing is that when people ask "why would a conservative like this show," I don't realize it's a rhetorical question and no one is actually interested in hearing an answer.
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Feb 13, 2021 22:10
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VinylonUnderground posted:What is the weird EU justification for the shadows behaving the way they do being discussed in the no spoiler thread? The fandom article says they can move in and out of hyperspace the same way their ships do.
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Feb 13, 2021 22:14
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Goblin Craft posted:I think my main failing is that when people ask "why would a conservative like this show," I don't realize it's a rhetorical question and no one is actually interested in hearing an answer. You never gave an answer though, you just went off on a self-owning tangent about "Both Sides!"
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Feb 13, 2021 22:27
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Goblin Craft posted:I think my main failing is that when people ask "why would a conservative like this show," I don't realize it's a rhetorical question and no one is actually interested in hearing an answer. Poor persecuted conservatives, nobody even *wants* to understand you!
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Feb 13, 2021 22:35
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Goblin Craft posted:I think my main failing is that when people ask "why would a conservative like this show," I don't realize it's a rhetorical question and no one is actually interested in hearing an answer. I went back to look because I thought i missed a tangent but you are the guy who got mad at cable news. I wouldn’t even have known you where conservative going by that
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Feb 13, 2021 23:14
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Ssshhhhhzzzppp Makes "let's not" hand gestures
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Feb 13, 2021 23:14
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318 was originally intended to air right after 315, but got moved so that there wasn't a four month wait between the two parts of 316/317. Should someone who's watching for the first time watch in the original broadcast order, or in the intended order? I think the pacing of late season 3 works a little better in the intended order and would recommend that, but at least one person disagrees.
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Feb 13, 2021 23:28
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VinylonUnderground posted:You never gave an answer though, you just went off on a self-owning tangent about "Both Sides!" Goblin Craft posted:I don't know if it helps you guys, and it may even surprise you, but right wing people don't typically see themselves as the caricatures you foist upon them. No one has to listen to me, but looking back I could stand to work on my approach. This was my first response to the topic, which I admit is passive-aggressive. I have tried to answer in the past, though, usually in the Star Trek threads. I don't think I've said anything out of line, a lot of the responses to me were trying to put words in my mouth. But I agree that it's best to drop it for now, I'll take the L.
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Feb 13, 2021 23:29
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As someone watching Point of No Return right now for the first time: gently caress Nazis forever. gently caress them. God I hate fascists. I hate how prescient this show was.
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Feb 14, 2021 00:01
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StrixNebulosa posted:As someone watching Point of No Return right now for the first time: gently caress Nazis forever. gently caress them. God I hate fascists. I hate how prescient this show was. it seemed a little silly and on the nose at the time 
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Feb 14, 2021 00:45
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Goblin Craft posted:No one has to listen to me, but looking back I could stand to work on my approach. This was my first response to the topic, which I admit is passive-aggressive. I have tried to answer in the past, though, usually in the Star Trek threads. I don't think I've said anything out of line, a lot of the responses to me were trying to put words in my mouth. But I agree that it's best to drop it for now, I'll take the L. You seemed like you felt threatened by my comment about conservatives being into fake news, so you jumped in to falsely equivocate all cable news, but then I didn't even mention cable, so trying to act like you're not invested in the media that you specified is kinda bizarre. I do think that there's a lot of false information in the conservative movement and being spread by conservative and far-right media that has real political power and effects that there just isn't any equivalent to on the other side of the aisle. Most recently, there were the lies about the election, but before that, there were the lies about coronavirus, the Qanon garbage, and going further back there's more documented lies about global warming, the false premise for the war in Iraq, the myth of Republican fiscal responsibility, and supply-side economics. Just feel like I had to clarify, even though this isn't really the thread to really dig into this.
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Feb 14, 2021 01:17
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Goblin Craft posted:Let us never speak of this again Agreed.
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Feb 14, 2021 01:47
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I'm still legitimately curious about how conservatives view themselves as the heroes of B5 beyond anodyne concepts like "everyone views themselves as the hero of their own story". So what? How does W, someone who thinks using torture to elicit false confessions is an awesome idea, see themselves as the noble Sheridan vs the craven Clark?
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Feb 14, 2021 03:44
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When you think about it, the Shadows are kind of conservative, of an anarcho-libertarian-darwinist flavor. A philosophy of driving advancement through chaos, competition, and conflict.
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Feb 14, 2021 03:47
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VinylonUnderground posted:I'm still legitimately curious about how conservatives view themselves as the heroes of B5 beyond anodyne concepts like "everyone views themselves as the hero of their own story". So what? They don't think that torture elicits false confessions but that punishing the guilty is righteous. It's more like Sheridan blowing up the shadow planet or breaking formal rules because it's the right thing to do or because it's satisfying.
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Feb 14, 2021 03:51
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Feb 14, 2021 03:52
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why are people so astounded that conservative politicians would identify with people like sheridan? B5 is a good show but it's quite literally fukuyama's end of history taken out to 2260, it's not exactly profoundly leftist.
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Feb 14, 2021 03:55
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Horizon Burning posted:why are people so astounded that conservative politicians would identify with people like sheridan? B5 is a good show but it's quite literally fukuyama's end of history taken out to 2260, it's not exactly profoundly leftist. Rush Act, Nightwatch, creeping fascism (as a bad thing), ethnonationalism (as a bad thing), Imperialism and its legacy (as a bad thing), Paternalistic neo-imperialism (as a bad thing), etc. The parentheses do a lot of heavy lifting but the Neoliberal "end of history" it was presenting was strongly opposed to the Gingrich Revolution, let alone W's Neoconservatism. You are right "Clinton, but Forever" is not leftist. It is significantly to the left of every post-2001 Republican.
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Feb 14, 2021 04:05
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Cowardice like this always irks me. Either stand up for what you believe or don't.
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Feb 14, 2021 04:06
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VinylonUnderground posted:Cowardice like this always irks me. He got asked by a mod to forbear and is doing that. being visibly right wing on sa is not the way to a long posting career tbh
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Feb 14, 2021 04:33
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sebmojo posted:He got asked by a mod to forbear and is doing that. being visibly right wing on sa is not the way to a long posting career tbh Mods enabling conservative fragility isn't helping that situation.
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Feb 14, 2021 04:41
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sebmojo posted:being visibly right wing on sa is not the way to a long posting career tbh also reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744 Assepoester fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Feb 14, 2021 |
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Feb 14, 2021 04:47
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I wouldn't act like values like that are ironclad tied to political affiliation, especially after a few decades. These things shift around and often are the result of a moment's pragmatism. Politically I think that torture only became an issue after the US got caught torturing people and a bunch of people wanted defend the concept to save face. I don't actually know if torture in fiction was a response to that or it was just an outgrowth of a lot of media getting heavier on punishment in general, but definitely after it hit the news, things really slotted into place. Before America wound up doing it, people were well aware of like North Korea or the Soviet Union trying to force false confessions, and I think the sicko who developed the US torture program actually got started with a program to train agents to resist being tortured into giving false confessions. And the familiarity with the concept is how both TNG and B5 both wound up doing torture episodes,
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Feb 14, 2021 04:47
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Horizon Burning posted:why are people so astounded that conservative politicians would identify with people like sheridan? B5 is a good show but it's quite literally fukuyama's end of history taken out to 2260, it's not exactly profoundly leftist. Uh, the end of season four shows the exact opposite of this. e: and yes I know what "the end of history" means McSpanky fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Feb 14, 2021 |
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Feb 14, 2021 04:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:I wouldn't act like values like that are ironclad tied to political affiliation, especially after a few decades. These things shift around and often are the result of a moment's pragmatism. Politically I think that torture only became an issue after the US got caught torturing people and a bunch of people wanted defend the concept to save face. Within the context of "Why the hell would, specifically, George W Bush, like B5?" I feel the line of discussion is pretty relevant. Like, pre-Obama, this website was super Libertarian and weirdly pro-War. Surviving from that era is a bit of a living dinosaur but not totally unheard of. Anybody with an older regdate was probably the kind of moron who was still a Libertarian during college (or a Libertarian in their late teens/early 20s when "normies" were going to college).
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Feb 14, 2021 04:56
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Goblin Craft posted:No one has to listen to me, but looking back I could stand to work on my approach. This was my first response to the topic, which I admit is passive-aggressive. I have tried to answer in the past, though, usually in the Star Trek threads. I don't think I've said anything out of line, a lot of the responses to me were trying to put words in my mouth. But I agree that it's best to drop it for now, I'll take the L. Appreciate it fam!
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Feb 14, 2021 04:58
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CainFortea posted:I was using Chrome/Win10. I'll try with edge and post another side by side. After my friends and I do a remote party watch of Hackers. If y'all waiting in this sorry we lost power and not sure when it's getting fixed. I haven't ghosted you!
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Feb 14, 2021 08:08
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Babylon 5 has a lot of tropes being turned on their head; the "savage" and mean-seeming G'kar turns out to be something else, the Vorlons are actually Pretty Freaking Bad Dudes, even Sheridan is not the paladin of Earth Force he's introduced as. That said, there's clear underlying messages and themes in the show. Clarke seemed, when I was watching it as a kid, as an eerie parallel to Bush II later on, and nowadays, welp! And obviously the fascist trappings of the Night Watch, what they do with Sheridan when he's incarcerated, even Garibaldi's brain washing, are all more or less references to what earlier authoritarian regimes had done, and were portrayed as bad things. Garibaldi's whole redemption arc hinges on the idea that we accept that him being abused by Bester made him "bad", and now he wants to make up for it! The whole shadow-Vorlon-conflict is somewhat muddled, since as the show progresses we see that both sides (hah!) are actually terrible in their own way, and the GET THE HELL OUT OF MY GALAXY resolution is ambiguous, as far as contemporary politics are concerned, other than maybe judging colonialism? But on the other hand, the Centauri are clearly the most "conservative" of the main races, with their royal court and emperors and all that, and it's fairly obvious that the show criticizes how the court operates, even if at the same time it serves as a vessel for Londo's tragedy. I guess the Minbari are sort of "conservative" in their own ways since they have a heavy caste-system operated society and all that, but it's not as clear an analogue to Western politics as the Centauri, I think. And while the show isn't "profoundly leftist", we see actual tangible things like labour arbitration being portrayed on screen, even if it's for minor plotlines. The Earth civil war plot is expressly about Earth turning hard-authoritarian, and the colonies rebelling against that. I can sort of see how that could be construed as a defence of some idealized conservative world-view, but how overtly evil and oppressive the Clarke regime is portrayed as, combined with the heavy emphasis on xenophobia and the Night Watch, it seems hard to justify that this is anything but an authoritarian-right allegory, shown as the Bad Guys.
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Feb 14, 2021 08:14
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Rappaport posted:I guess the Minbari are sort of "conservative" in their own ways since they have a heavy caste-system operated society and all that, but it's not as clear an analogue to Western politics as the Centauri, I think. Minbari are absolutely "inscrutable Asians". In the '90s there was a set of transitions where all the old tropes were for the Chinese but had been updated for the Japanese during the '80s but then were starting to get re-applied to the Chinese again. Orientalism is, by definition, not nuanced. JMS or at least someone on the writing staff was at least familiar with if not outright sympathetic to the Confucius->Kant theory or at least Confucius/Kant parallels and how that places the Minbari within the Western context of the show (while flipping Perry on his head).
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Feb 14, 2021 08:30
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VinylonUnderground posted:Minbari are absolutely "inscrutable Asians". In the '90s there was a set of transitions where all the old tropes were for the Chinese but had been updated for the Japanese during the '80s but then were starting to get re-applied to the Chinese again. Orientalism is, by definition, not nuanced. they are space elfs
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Feb 14, 2021 08:41
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CainFortea posted:If y'all waiting in this sorry we lost power and not sure when it's getting fixed. I haven't ghosted you! No problem, and thanks again for researching this. I'd take a screenshot myself but I don't have Edge or Safari, or Windows 10, and apparently that's needed to get full quality with Vudu. That scene you used before, with the control panel in the background, is an excellent test. One other note, watching Vudu stuff on my TV, I notice that I often need some time for a Vudu stream to settle into full quality, where I usually get full quality right away on Netflix or Amazon. Vudu will still display a stream I'm playing as "HDX" even before it gets up to full bitrate/quality.
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Feb 14, 2021 09:19
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VinylonUnderground posted:Like, pre-Obama, this website was super Libertarian and weirdly pro-War. Surviving from that era is a bit of a living dinosaur but not totally unheard of. Anybody with an older regdate was probably the kind of moron who was still a Libertarian during college (or a Libertarian in their late teens/early 20s when "normies" were going to college). Yeah no
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Feb 14, 2021 10:42
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Wiki posted:
Honestly, that sounds like the kind of thing Sheridan’s superior (General Hague) was trying to do behind the scenes in the run up to Severed Dreams. Difference being Hague failed, and the real shooting started. Sheridan and Hague were not Free Mars protestors, they were conservative-minded high ranking military raised into political roles by Santiago’s running mate. Really not hard to see how that story line appeals to that generation of conservatives. It genuinely may even have influenced their behavior during the coup.
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Feb 14, 2021 14:10
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Yeah no Also no
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Feb 14, 2021 14:30
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I think it’s important to remember conservative is a bit of a broad term especially in America. Realistically CNN and MSNBC are pretty conservative but just not in the way say fox is
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Feb 14, 2021 15:42
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radmonger posted:Honestly, that sounds like the kind of thing Sheridan’s superior (General Hague) was trying to do behind the scenes in the run up to Severed Dreams. Difference being Hague failed, and the real shooting started. Sheridan wasn't conservative; He only acted conservative to look like a good yes-man to hold Babylon 5 in check for the new government under Clarke.
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Feb 14, 2021 15:58
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Timby posted:Goblin Craft isn't a troll, he's been posting in B5 and Doctor Who threads for like a decade-plus (back when his username was Komrade Hitlerstalin), he's just very unabashed about being a conservative. I suspect I’m one of the more verbose posters in this thread, but I know the difference between an effortpost and a post so long and tangential to the purpose of this thread that it has nothing to do with having a conversation. So while I appreciate the “well, actually,” can we discuss Babylon 5 instead of a stand-up nontroll guy previously named Hitlerstalin? Rappaport posted:Babylon 5 has a lot of tropes being turned on their head; the "savage" and mean-seeming G'kar turns out to be something else, the Vorlons are actually Pretty Freaking Bad Dudes, even Sheridan is not the paladin of Earth Force he's introduced as. That said, there's clear underlying messages and themes in the show. Clarke seemed, when I was watching it as a kid, as an eerie parallel to Bush II later on, and nowadays, welp! And obviously the fascist trappings of the Night Watch, what they do with Sheridan when he's incarcerated, even Garibaldi's brain washing, are all more or less references to what earlier authoritarian regimes had done, and were portrayed as bad things. Garibaldi's whole redemption arc hinges on the idea that we accept that him being abused by Bester made him "bad", and now he wants to make up for it! “Conservative” is a fluid term, and there were times in American history where the Republican party mainstream were opposed to fascism instead of being attracted to it. For that matter, much like the Vorlons and Shadows, most bad and abusive people believe they are good and doing what is necessary. B5 has compassion for some of its bad people, like Londo, and not for others, like Cartagia. As for the Vorlon/Shadow “both sides” point, I think it’s a bit more complex because there is no Kosh equivalent for the Shadows. Kosh, original flavor, is presented as well-meaning. And JMS has presented their two questions as having a logical order to them: the danger from the Shadows is that you need to know who you are before trying to get what you want, while the danger from the Vorlons is that while they may help you define who you are, they think that should get frozen when discovered and that you should only want what they tell you. And of course, there’s the bigger problem that both groups have “lost their way” and no longer act to teach and support their values; arguably, both groups repeatedly undermine them. Given that we see no internal dissent among the Shadows (which is either profoundly odd, or a big clue) and that the Vorlons don’t debate but do change their approach after Kosh’s death, they come across as monolithic in a way that no real-world polity can be without fascist intervention on a massive scale. Ironically, this makes Clark’s failed attempt at imposing his world-view on all of humanity an attempt to rewrite the human polity as a monolith like these two ancient and lost peoples. Hard to say whether the Deconstruction “human-Vorlon” comes from a unified polity, as we only see one of him, but we can infer a lot from the history he has elected to preserve.
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Feb 14, 2021 16:09
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Narsham posted:“Conservative” is a fluid term, and there were times in American history where the Republican party mainstream were opposed to fascism instead of being attracted to it. Those times were exactly December 8th 1941 to May 7th 1945. By 1948 the McCarthyites were already designating people as "premature anti-Fascists" if they had spoken in favour of America entering the war before Germany declared war on the US.
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Feb 14, 2021 19:32
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Narsham posted:“Conservative” is a fluid term, and there were times in American history where the Republican party mainstream were opposed to fascism instead of being attracted to it. For that matter, much like the Vorlons and Shadows, most bad and abusive people believe they are good and doing what is necessary. B5 has compassion for some of its bad people, like Londo, and not for others, like Cartagia. Can you name that time? From the Klu Klux Klan, Business Plot, "Premature Antifascists", J Edgar Hoover's whole reign, Civil Rights opposition, backing Franco, Suharto and a number of other fascist dictators, Cold War policy in general, South American policy in general, etc. I'm not sure you can confidently point to a time when American Conservatives weren't explicitly pro-Fascist other than accidentally for a very brief period in the '40s and that's just because we ended up on the other side of a war. The only way to parse your statement in a way that would be true, would be to accept that "Republican = Conservative".
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Feb 14, 2021 19:33
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