I love good science-fiction and political satire. The over-the-top nature of of sci-fi and satire highlights and magnifies issues in real life.
In the world of literature, George Orwell is the king of political satire with Animal Farm and 1984. Animal Farm was modeled on the Soviet Revolution and 1984 on the worst aspects of Stalinism.
A close second to Orwell is the story of Harrison Bergeron in Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. It is impossible to read Harrison Bergeron and not think about affirmative action and its ugly cousin of checking one’s privilege. It is a world in which the attractive, the strong, and the smart, are forced to be hobbled so that they are no more capable than the lowest common denominator.
On screen, the champion of science-fiction and political satire is Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. To this day, The Masks is one of the most eerily disturbing episodes of a TV show to tackle the weakness of the human soul.
I am a huge fan of old radio sci-fi like Lights Out and Dimension X, especially the works of Arch Oboler.
As a passionate lover of sci-fi and satire, I have come to the conclusion that Liberals/Progressives cannot write sci-fi or satire. When they try, it falls flat on its face. The more they try to us it to highlight what they believe is the absurdity on the right, the more they focus the mirror on their own failure.
Case in point, the movie Elysium. In a nutshell, it is supposed to be a movie critical of America’s immigration policy. However, on earth in 2154, America has open borders and Los Angeles has turned into a crime ridden, third world, desert shit-hole where Matt Damon is the last white guy who speaks English. Why should I be in favor of a policy that clearly destroyed southern California so badly that people had to flee off world to get away from the hellscape?
EconPop does a great breakdown of why Elysium sucks.
That is a very long winded intro to the main point of this post.
Today I was dealt a one-two punch combo of truly shitty sci-fi satire.
First, it is free Cinemax week on my TV. I took the opportunity to DVR some movies, and finally got a change to watch them.
I had written about The Purge: Election Year before. Now it was time to watch it. What a festering turd of a movie. I didn’t make it past the 20 minute mark.
The movie was supposed to be a dead on prediction for the 2016 election and beyond. Eight minutes in, the Senator who is obviously supposed to be a sexy version of Hillary Clinton (don’t think about that too much) says that the annual purge puts money “into the pockets of the NRA and super rich.”
Seriously. To the writers of The Purge: Election Year, the NRA, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization is a group the profits off genocide. It is clearly stated in the movie that the purpose of the purge is to save money for the rich by killing off the poor so they don’t need welfare, healthcare, public housing, etc. However, by the time we get to Election Year, it is the working class that are getting purged, and so a senator for “the people” is campaigning on ending the purge.
This of course begs two questions:
- Why would a clearly homicidal, tyrannical, goverment (the New Founding Fathers/NFFF) allow the people to have free elections in which they (the NFFF) could lose?
- Do the rich not want mechanics, construction workers, pool cleaners, garbage men, and the myriad of other working class jobs that make society function? What is the point of being super rich in a nation if you can’t get a service tech to chance the oil in your Mercedes because the service tech was purged?
None of this was thought through though. It didn’t need to be. The rich white men of the NFFF, clearly modeled on Trump, hire a bunch of tattooed neo-Nazi/white supremacists, clearly alt-right Trump supporters, to kill Sexy Hillary and her supporters. And the NRA profits from it.
Except…
In 2017, the masked militia committing random acts of political violence goes by the name Antifa. They are far from being clearly Trump supporters. In fact, the people they target for violence are… Trump supporters.
Following the beating that they took at the hands of some on the [alt-] right who fought back, it seems that Antifa is looking to get their hands on some real ordnance with the intent of inflicting casualties on those who don’t hold fast to Far Left ideology.
The Purge may be coming true, but not by the people against the people the movie claimed. It is the mirror opposite.
The second bit of hysterically bad sci-fi prognostication for the day was the adulation of Hulu’s adaption of The Handmaid’s Tail.
Harper’s Bazar said of the series “‘THE HANDMAID’S TALE’ IS THE FEMINIST HORROR STORY 2017 NEEDS.”
Good Magazine said “New Hulu Series The Handmaid’s Tale Is Must-Watch TV For This Moment.”
The New Yorker said “WE LIVE IN THE REPRODUCTIVE DYSTOPIA OF “THE HANDMAID’S TALE.”
Tech Cruch said “The dark future of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ feels terrifyingly real.”
Lastly, The New Republic said “The Handmaid’s Tale Is a Warning to Conservative Women.”
HO-LEE SHIT!!
Did I fall asleep and wake up in a bizarro world where we live in the Islamic Republic of America with Donald Trump as our Ayatollah?
OK, so Donald Trump signs an executive order that allows states to withhold federal funds from women’s healthcare services that provide abortion, namely Planned Parenthood. Money is fungible. Saying that the government isn’t funding abortion because it puts money in your right pocket and you pay for abortion out of your left pocket is ridiculous.
To the deep thinkers on the left THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS RICH MEN BEING ALLOWED TO BUY SEX SLAVES FOR IMPREGNATION. Yes, they said that.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, gays are executed. The New Yorker calls that a “Pence Prequel” and the AV Club says it’s “Pence’s dream.”
Tell me exactly when Pence called for the execution of gays?
The Left is so unhinged on this issue when Senator Marco Rubio condemns the torture and execution of gays in Chechnya, Towleroad shits all over Rubio because he is a Republican. When you are so far Left that you attack a Republican for condemning the torture of your people (it’s a gay magazine), you’ve lost your fucking mind.
In the show, a handmaid is forced to undergo genital mutilation for some reason, and Harper’s Bazaar relates that to Trump.
This is clearly in-fucking-sane.
There is a place where women are sold as sex slaves, forced to cover their bodies, forced to undergo genital mutilation, and gays are executed. It is called the Middle East and it occurs under fundamentalist Islamic regimes like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
NOT IN THE UNITED STATES OR THE WESTERN/CHRISTIAN WORLD.
The Handmaid’s Tale is the 1984 of America under Islamic control.
Margaret Atwood is a Western feminist who wrote the book to castigate the Christian Right. These are the same feminists who won’t dare criticize Islam.
Fuck if feminists didn’t march on DC, led by Linda Sarsour, who is an advocate for Sharia Law, which is the Islamic legal system that empowers ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Iran to oppress women as much as they do.
The Left is all but worshiping a Hulu sci-fi series that projects what they think the Right wants while defending the religious ideology that actually wants to impose this dystonia lifestyle.
Trying to wrap my head around this is going to give me a stroke.
These people are the worst parody of themselves. The targets of their attacks are themselves and they don’t realize it.
The Right Wing of The Purge is Antifa. The Right Wing of The Handmaid’s Tale is Islam. These people take aim at their enemies and then shoot themselves.
The sad part is that the Leftists who watch this shit from inside their echo chambers are too ideologically blind and stupid to understand that.
I think it’s interesting that the antifa are considering arming up. Watching their discussions though is hilarious.
They talk about arming up, but then they all get cagey because of the laws in the cities where they have a presence. A lot of these guys and girls profess anarchist leanings.
Now, wouldn’t a real anarchist damn the machine and get themselves a gun anyways via unlawful channels?
Maybe they’re exercising good operational security, by not suggesting breaking state law. Reddit could report their IPs and the cops could swoop in.
However, that would be inconsistent. In their discussions, they casually fess up to violent assaults with improvised impact weapons, which is a felony as well. So I’m seeing a bit of a disconnect when it comes to guns. Is their ideology married to the Democratic one that they won’t cross the line of getting guns ‘by any means necessary’?
They shouldn’t be calling themselves anarchists then. They’re just “statists by convenience”.
However, I wouldn’t let their dicey nature concerning guns make the rest of us sit at ease. All it takes is one or two kids in the crowd with pistols to incite a very bad day for all concerned. Be prepared. Practice, and be aware of the situation in your location. The easiest way to win a gunfight is to not get into one in the first place. If you see trouble a-brewing, take the long way home. If trouble finds you, try to get out of it without drawing or firing. If all else fails, may your aim be true.
A good idea as well is to maybe have an independent camera (GoPro or something) in case things go south. Try to record if you sense there’s going to be a problem.
The “anarchy” they support is end-stage Marxism, the “withering of the state” after the dictatorship of the proletariat has perfected humanity. They want that dictatorship first, of course, so they can get their genocide on.
As often happens, movie remakes end up being worse than the original. And in this case, the original truly sucked.
The producers of The Purge explicitly state that their movies are a rip on conservative beliefs. They dodge a bullet by a technicality in the first movie by saying that “NRA” stands for the “National Restoration Administration” or something, but it’s really just a farce.
The irony is even the liberal characters in the movies have to end up defending themselves with guns. I don’t think pussy hats and placards would be of much use.
So let me get this straight. In “The Purge”, you can tell the government is run by horrible Reichwingers because they release violent criminals onto the population once every year to… what? How exactly does this do ANYTHING that anyone to the right of Fidel Castro would find useful? I mean, I could see how a left-wing autocracy might try something like this: hell, in California THEY ALREADY ARE releasing criminals onto the population (cuz overcrowding is like bad, and the law-abiding have to be punished for it…m’kay?) and there WILL BE civilian victims because of it.
Now, if the movie was about letting armed citizens INTO the prisons once a year to ‘take out the trash’ … or if the released felons would be met by roving gangs of NRA members, who would hunt them through the streets like rabid dogs… THEN it would be competently aimed at the horrible Reichwingers. But this? This is a bad attempt at displacement.
[…] the most repressive Christian society she could and came up with… Iran. Proving once again, Liberals can’t write sci-fi that fits their narrative in any believable […]