Bookmark1995
Banned
So the TTL mood isn't some nationalist sense of self-righteousness, except maybe among some Cold War hawks, but a humble optimism built by a decades-long improvement in standards of living?
Reds! Official Fanfiction Thread (Part Two)
- Thread starter Miss Teri
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So the TTL mood isn't some nationalist sense of self-righteousness, except maybe among some Cold War hawks, but a humble optimism built by a decades-long improvement in standards of living?
Yeah, I agree with Terri, there's too much projection of OTL viewpoints into Reds! and then just giving it a Red flavoring to make it look communist/socialist. I just don't know how to further expound from that.
The important thing though is that UASR Americans are not going to approach the situation of the Cold War from a jingoistic perspective that looks like just a left-wing variety of IOTL American exceptionalism.
This is different.
For example, in SV, I made a Michael Brooks Show ITTL that did feature him, at least in terms of mentioning it, making fun of far-right figures from the AFS, but it's different. It's just... different. I can't properly portray it.
And even if we have the Red neocons through the Liberation Communist Party, it's... going to be different.
But ITTL Americans do recognize that their way of life is in a sense, superior, from the capitalist way of life, but they do not have to propagandize it like how Republicans ITTL in the United States tend to be so ignorantly certain of the American way of life being the best ever and stuff like that.
Which does sound like it's all coming from a place of insecurity. Which is not the case here.
And ITTL Americans do not have that sense of existential threat of a possible internal fifth column of capitalist restorationists within their ranks, or at least a group of people that can be considered vulnerable into believing in such a thing. It's a different environment. There may have been in the 1930s or 1940s but it becomes a joke by the time of the Second Cultural Revolution.
Please try to approach the situation @Bookmark1995 in this way.
If France has its French Revolution of 1789, the UASR has its 1933 revolution. 1933 is America's 1789 moment minus the Thermidorians and the Bonapartism and a more permanent Jacobinical stage whose intensity ebbs and flows depending on time period.
In such a situation, there is a more permanent break that's more in common with colonial America's break with the British monarchy. But in this case, the monarch is not an ocean away. The monarch is in the home soil. So it's an even more impactful change.
So think of how absurd the situation could be of a political program of feudal restorationism to exist then by the time of the Third French Republic. How alien it is. It's not really a threat unless it was imposed from the outside.
But it's different if the political program is about advancement of the greatest number of people in society, which is going to be inherently attractive, no matter where in the world. And that's the situation of the message of communism and socialism, so it has to be combatted aggressively. But that's not the reputation of capitalism in the UASR, in the same way that it is for feudalism and monarchism for the people of France or of the United States.
That last work reflects more of a situation that it still looks like that ITTL Americans are feeling insecure on aspects of the capitalist way of life and so... it must be make fun of. Which in the first place is not going to really that appealing. Many things about the capitalist way of life are... more depressing than anything funny or to make fun of. And it will also make Americans look bad from a propaganda perspective. So you kind of get it... it's different.
We don't see a lot of propaganda stuff of us making fun of the feudal way of life, after all. In fact, you can find that there are some aesthetically or even practically appealing aspects of it that's being portrayed up to now in our media. So it's more nuanced.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
In another words, the TTL American general isn't some nutcase who dreams of bombing the crap out of so and so.
He seeks the liberation of the peoples of the world, but from a more dignified sense of justice.
I can't see the insanely reckless behavior of the likes of MTG as anything but a deep insecurity born from what is perceived as a decline in power within one segment of society.
So for TTL Americans, capitalism is this old past nobody wants to return too? They're not pompous because they "know" they are going to win in the end?
Unlike the OTL Soviet Union, which constantly had to purge itself of counterrevolutionary influences, the good life Americans enjoy means there isn't a sense of searching for enemies to kill, just a desire to help the comrades abroad?
1. Allied/American strategic bombing strategy IOTL is not adopted by the UASR Air Force. The military doctrine is a bit more different, which involves the participation of the working class in the "enemy states" in making their own liberation and overthrowing their own masters, so bombing the hell of out of their homes and places of work is going to be more counterproductive.
2. Pro-capitalist restorationist politics will become even less of a problem through time than the neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Ingredients for any form of pro-capitalist restoration does not exist here. In fact, the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat will advance further towards further abolition of market forces and lingering remnants of the capitalist mode of production.
3. Yes, capitalism is that alien of a way of life that it's inconceivable for a return to it to be advocated except by a few thousand people. There is an intrinsic understanding of the maxim "socialism or barbarism". There is no need for any "Blue Scare" and there are not enough reactionary institutions and authorities that will create "moral panics" over social advances within society.
It sounded a bit utopian with the way I say it but that's more or less correct. Americans ITTL also have an understanding that the only thing that's keeping the Blue bloc from becoming Red is the nuclear bomb.
Bookmark1995
Banned
So the mood of America is optimism about their way of life, with a few guns to deter aggression and promote the socialist way?
Hmmmm... it's a bit of the atmosphere of Star Trek the Next Generation with a bit of Voyager and Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. You'll get it if you watched those shows. It's kind of like those.
There is definitely a bigger deal of optimism but tempered by the reality that the Samson's option of the nuclear bomb is an available deterrent from the other side and that everything that's been built up can be destroyed instantly. The threat to America does not come from internal fifth columnists of possible reactionaries, it's more from the outside in a nuclear-armed Third World War that is going to end with MAD.
Bookmark1995
Banned
But what are the cultural consequences of the threat of nuclear war? A deep disdain for the Blues for threatening world revolution with a nuclear cloud? Films mocking the Blues since a war of guns is the only war that can be fought without a mushroom cloud hanging overhead.
Or it could be a group of more or less pacifist socialists believing that all you have to do to deal with the threat of the Alliance of Free States is by basically doing nothing and let them rot and die out of their own internal contradictions so in that way, you not only keep the world from going into a destructive nuclear conflict but you are also allowing the AFS to just rot and die on its own and then the Comintern will just swoop in at the last minute to claim victory? (Mind you, there are literal people in the UASR who believe in this... they even have an entire political party.)
Americans themselves have their Cold War foreign policy differences in terms of strategy and philosophy. My problem is that you are portraying all Americans in a single box most of the time. As if they are in a single hivemind. It's not natural.
And you also do it with the FBU and the capitalist countries, as if they don't have their own set of people that wanted to see a peaceful resolution to the Cold War, however impossible it may be in this case.
Disdain can be too emotionally strong of a word, but Americans do have figures or entire countries from the other side that they held in disdain like Rhodesia.
One thing I notice is that you are putting too much emphasis on Americans paying a great deal of attention on the AFS than usual. And Cuba of all places in the world. Remember, the UASR is itself not a workers' utopia. They have their own issues to deal with.
Think of it in a way that leftists tend to focus themselves in real life on other leftists rather than on the rightists and apply this situation to the UASR and other Comintern countries writ-large.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
I don't feel I've done that. I'm not trying to overtly demonize the UASR in any of my posts.
I've just tried to show how Red Americans, like any society, can produce blockheads and meanie-weenies, even if you do everything you can to improve their quality of life of their citizens.
I've contributed to these fanpages because I want the UASR to feel real. I dream of living in a country where education and healthcare are human rights, and where civic participation is encouraged. But I also think exploring the dark side of that society makes the dream more healthy, because you can more easily explore the strengths and weaknesses.
Sorry.
I don't have an SV account, so I haven't examined the SV thread.
I'll read it more, so I can get a better feel.
But I will still give those posts my critical eye, examining the strengths and weaknesses of what I read.
If you decide to open an SV account and try to post there, try to communicate with Terri about it first too. And it will be much better if you go to Discord since a lot of the activity happens to be there.
AH.com is still a home for Reds! but there's been a diversification in the past few years and people have moved on by inertia towards new platforms to discuss Reds!
I am sure that you are not trying to demonize the UASR in your posts but you are making a lot of assumptions about Americans ITTL that is not in line with what the authors are thinking about. You are not in the same wavelength and you have to fix that.
Creating blockheads and meanie-weenies does not necessarily equate into making the UASR "feel real" too, especially if you don't necessarily understand the general background of what you are writing about and especially if the kind of blockheads and meanie-weenies that you are creating are the kind of people that are empowered to do a lot of important decisions in many things in real life capitalism without any true accountability to their actions, which is not going to happen a whole lot in the UASR.
The UASR is not the United States of America. Try to get rid of this idea of the UASR like it is a USA with Red flags.
You should read more of the Reds! SV to get a better feel, especially the media posts.
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There is also a fanfic thread there.
Most TL activity is on SV now and for the foreseeable future, so I highly recommend looking at the latest version there.
Bookmark1995
Banned
OK, I will.
Can you send me a link to the fanfic thread as well.
I will still post here, but I try to be more in line with what''s written on SV.
Reds Official Fanfiction/Weird History Thread
This is the official fanfiction and weird history thread for Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline. If you're unfamiliar with the timeline, here's the SV thread to catch up with everything: Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline Timeline - Post-1900 TL;DR it's a fanfiction thread for Reds, as well as a place...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Preaching to the choir is a thing of course. It is generally necessary to raise the morale of one's base and remind them "why we fight."
For another thing--the established custom in Reds! of improbably carrying over OTL persons, even those born long after the 1930s Revolution, in recognizable but ideologically flipped form is fun and I also approve, for what my vote is worth, on grounds of ATL "mechanics," which contrary to the Butterfly Church I claim permit authors to be selective among all possible TLs to have whatever peculiar features they like; a world where such figures as Carol Burnett or Sean Hannity exist in the late 20th and early 21st century is hardly impossible; it may be infintesimally probable versus one where no one is recognizable, but that doesn't matter too much really. It gives us OTL a convenient shortcut to gauging the general cultural sense of things and that is worthwhile I think.
But a logical consequence is that any claims that this that or the other grouping of people we might choose to carry over as samples are morally and ethically "better" or worse are dependent on how much we think "human nature" is governed by environmental factors. My take on the Comintern, often denounced by some of the canon collective of authors to be sure, is that people are better off and therefore happier and saner, more altruistic and fair-minded and generous, because broadly speaking everyone has less to fear, and because terroristic social practices we accept as routine and "inevitable" or even necessary and therefore good OTL are disapproved and weakened.
But probably not totally eliminated! In critiquing my own tendency to reason from the relative moral perfection of the Red sphere vs anything OTL, my canon-collective critics often stress the imperfection and gradualness and sporadic surges in social progress, not to mention unintended consequences that arguably might actually delay certain OTL insights, as well as the notion that bourgeois values among ourselves, the OTL fan, make for some wrong predictions about what comprises social progress.
Meanwhile, is there such a thing as "human nature" and general cussedness that causes some unfortunate, cruel notions and patterns of behavior to persist no matter how much the general wisdom about human society is objectively superior to OTL? Human, all too human!
So it is that it makes good sense we can recognize say ATL Sean Hannity as the same guy as OTL, despite his radically different ideological patter. Fundamentally, we have someone here who values strength in numbers, being on the winning team, and conformity to platitudes versus some kind of nuanced sense of celebration of diversity. The winning team of ATL is different but he remains a shallow-minded cheerleader nonetheless.
Now my sense of OTL Carol Burnett, based entirely on watching a lot of her shows in the 1970s and a bit later, is that she is not a particularly mean lady, nor is she some kind of reactionary extremist--I stand ready to be corrected by persons who have bothered to track her activities off-stage. Indeed her shows I would characterize as "dumbed down populist," but she isn't aiming for a self-selected submass of moralistic crusaders--she is apparently cooperative with the conventional wisdom of mass showrunners who aim for the common denominator, and in the ATL that common denominator is in fact the general public that the UASR constitution and its revolutionary history aims to serve. I would argue that the general sense of nuance is pretty high among American masses, due to intelligent approaches to education, a society that aims for maximum inclusion (of those who accept its fundamental premises and are not sworn foes of it), and genuinely wide open opportunities for persons of quite ordinary, common extraction. All the stuff so-called "middle class consensus" of OTL 1950s-'70s claimed to be true for ordinary Americans is actually true in the ATL UASR and Western Hemisphere Comintern in general.
Nevertheless, I daresay a comfort zone exists, much as OTL, and from a standpoint firmly grounded in the researched dead center of this comfort zone, dumbed down common denominator humor remains a thing. Carol Burnett of the ATL apparently has a style that resonates with this broad if shallow audience and gives large numbers of people a shared easy warmth they collectively enjoy. It may well be that a larger percentage of these common audience members are more critical of this than OTL (or may not be, perhaps we tend to underestimate the private reservations of apparently conformist people, because they tend to play it close to the vest for quite understandable reasons) but also, I think, less defensive. Everyone has stronger grounds for believing that in fundamental matters of right and fairness, their interests will be essentially protected, and that any sacrifices and tradeoffs are negotiated openly and transparently, and fairly shared as well. So everyone is less threatened and tends to have a broader tolerance of their own oxen being gored somewhat, in spirit of fun, as long anyway as they don't find themselves singled out as the routine scapegoat again and again and again.
My assumption has been that media channels have been far broader overall, with more numerous options for audiences of mass media to select. But perhaps it is a bit much to expect the sheer number of television channels for instance to be greater in number. I do expect UASR technology to pull ahead of OTL US capabilities the more years we have accumulated since say 1940. But it may be that better capability for huge numbers of media channels as of ATL 1997 versus OTL is offset by a lower priority given to mass media, versus people being persuaded to limit their screen time by superior opportunities for meaningful engagement, growth, and plain fun in the real world--that to a great extent 20th and 21st century US society shepherds ordinary citizens into movie houses and sitting in front of the TV or streaming shows on their higher tech phones and tablets and computers as a diversion from real life that tends to immobilize and then channel us.
So say the broadcast world is roughly parallel in both TLs, so that from say the victory in the Second World War to around 1980 or so, TV is typically just 3-6 useful channels in most zones, with a scattering of poorly served zones in the boonies getting even fewer or perhaps none, and the egalitarianism of the system frowns on the major metropolitan centers taking too much advantage of their ability to provide more with higher concentration of infrastructure, and somewhat puritanically prioritizes rather boring utilitarian purposes for such metropolitan surplus. In this case, while I judge that artistically as well as in terms of fidelity to verifiable fact and scientific nuance as well as nuance of social debate, the quality of the limited bandwidth in the UASR is higher overall, still quite a lot of broadcast time is devoted to rather mass, common denominator stuff--time slots and even maybe whole channels are devoted to more arty, edgy, challenging stuff, and citizens are encouraged to tune in to this from time to time, but comfort and affirmation are what the masses basically want, and what they are in a political position to demand a fair ration of. It is up to the artistes to convince people that they enjoy more daring stuff in the baseline.
So it is that as broadening the bandwidth becomes more feasible at moderate diversion of social infrastructural capacity, in line with an ethic of fair distribution of opportunity to all whether they happen to be living in metropolitan centers where such expansion is fairly cheap versus serving society in some back of the beyond rural zone, that raises the overall cost with the need to expensively expand general bandwidth in such low-population and high cost zones in fairness, say it works out to a wash versus OTL.
Then we'd expect that in the 1960s and '70s, UASR/Red Western Comintern collectively develops space launch assets for satellite telecommunications that first of all devote bandwidth toward improving reliability and capacity for mainstream purposes, using traditionally developed channels at higher volume and lower cost (per signal; overall investment of social energy is higher, but perhaps not as a percentage share, general capabilities are rising close to exponentially in this period). In the early phase, first of all Stavka mainly benefits for superior military redundancy and effective command, control, communications and intelligence. Then the general telephony network is upgraded to higher capacity and in particular to filling in gaps in the broad but underpopulated zones so that essential services such as emergency response meet improved standards of effectiveness, at considerably increased marginal cost (offset by rising social product). Common citizens go from dial phones to touch-tone in a coordinated phase in over several decades, social discouragements of casual use of long distance (which might or might not be market-based) are relaxed so long casual phone calls between say Anchorage Alaska and San Juan PR become common, along with the much more common calls between distant major centers, and between persons in isolated and distantly separated rural zones--these dwarfed by ongoing local calls, as locally is where most practical business and sustained friendships will be, but with the long distance stuff being a rising percentage of all calls. Cell phones I suppose will develop first as a state-issued priority to those who have useful social business taking themselves from land lines--emergency response teams including police, other agents of social authority such as social workers who might need priority communications with central offices on an unplanned basis. Gradually they will become more and more generally available, on the basis of "social merit" more than on ability to pay. It is possible that more effort will go into satellite phones and less into developing local ground based cellular service too.
As for video media then--videotape, followed by various forms of random access storage (laser disk tech might be bypassed by chip-type storage for instance) will as OTL start out as studio technology, and as improved and cheapened, eventually become cheap enough to be made available on a mass basis, but I suspect versus OTL USA will be loaned out from libraries, and viewed in collective (if small) groups rather than individually; it may be far longer than OTL before it is common for a single person to be practically able to view something for just themselves alone. Against the general trend to stay more collective and less individual, there is no industry pushback based on desire to monopolize revenues for a media product--once created, reproduction and distribution of this or that show is understood to be in the freedom of the people as a whole, and practically speaking a matter of persuading authorities that this product should be made available to that audience. As costs of reproduction and distribution plummet, authorities will be more and more relaxed about it and requests granted more and more pro-forma. Meanwhile the creative group that produced this or that production might be regarded as having to be gratified with having got the support they needed to produce it as a gift to the people, with nothing more than moral gratification of observing their product widely viewed, or conceivably some sort of proportional reward or prioritization of future creative grants might be linked to general popularity. But no creative producer will have an interest in limiting the distribution; the difference between a properly distributed and "pirate" video will come down to a matter of fidelity. Artists might indeed have grounds to have objections to misrepresenting themselves by persons downstream editing their work, to cut out material or splice in stuff they did not intend, but I suspect this comes down to their being able to require downstream manipulators to include "credits" before and after their revised product taking credit--and thus blame--for any alterations to let the original producers off the hook with washed hands.
In parallel with widening availability of stored video (once upon a time IIRC on this thread, I suggested alternative technology based on film with synchronized sound track, also on the same film) is some pressure to widen broadcast video, which requires either improved RF technology or a shift over to cable and perhaps optical networks--as these tend to privilege urban persons over the dispersed small populations in the countryside, I suspect it will again be diverted away from cable and toward direct RF, via local relays or direct from satellites; perhaps fun ATL intermediate stuff like airships or airplanes maintaining high altitude near-stationary deployment can fill in too.
Thus the number of channels offered individuals at more or less standard TV sets might multiply much more slowly than OTL, due to this explosion in the later '70s and '80s happening largely via cable networks whose centralized ground stations could more cost-effectively use satellite relay--in the ATL, growth of such cable networks might have to be justified as a cost savings versus accomplishing the common channel broadening via direct satellite, with urban people held to relatively few channels well below their cable bandwidth capability in solidarity with their rural cousins.
This might help explain Carol Burnett having a big audience share still in 1997; the citizens of UASR might only have a dozen or so channels to choose from even that late, and therefore the mass audience oriented stuff still dominates--people could be watching something more esoteric and sophisticated, and many are, but many choose to stick to the old channels they are comfortable with and which cater to be comfortable for as many as possible at once.
Not that I am saying Carol Burnett is a dumb person, nor unsophisticated; it may be that she is quite bright, knowledgeable and with the best humane intentions in both TLs, just that her talent lends itself to giving the common denominator what it (more or less legitimately!) wants. For that matter enjoyment of the common denominator stuff is no barometer of individual shallowness or ignorance or pig-headedness either. Including people with such faults or limits among the pleased does not exclude other people from getting a warm comfortable feeling when they just want to relax.
It is quite possible that UASR broadcast video will remain far lower in bandwidth indefinitely, freeing up telecommunications bandwidth for interactive communications, and that persons who want to view some media production will put up with the slight inconvenience of having to schedule a taping or disc-burning or chip-programming at some nearby media center in easy reach, say downstairs in their apartment block lobby, and walk down to pick it up and take it home to view it, by and by returning the medium to central storage--popular programs will be kept for other requests, less popular ones eventually erased and recorded over.
But one reason it does--"Sean Hannity" in particular--is that Aelita did bring him in in canon, pretty early on. Now it may be that that canon has been retconned away, and with it the general tendency to have late 20th/early 21st century "bridge characters" who clearly have corresponding more or less flipped characteristics.
Also it is clear that while the UASR is a much nicer place overall than OTL USA or anywhere on Earth, and the goalposts of civil behavior and responsible intellectual nuance are moved in a better direction, consistent with leftist thinking in general that tries to get away from simplistic binaries of good and bad and consider human behavior in context of the structure of material incentives that exist, I certainly would expect that a spectrum would exist, in which some people are much more comfortable with more black and white, us versus them, thinking. They might be under more pressure to justify their categorization and hold an open door to the idea that "bad" people can reform; eradicationist rhetoric would be inexcusably barbaric and hold such persons up to well deserved contempt and ridicule, so they'd make some effort to avoid being caught saying such things. But would there be an audience for a gladhanding cheerleader of the UASR as something to be uncritically loved and celebrated and its foes sneered at and denounced as bad guys? I'm sure there would. And so pundits of the Hannity type could have popular followings, and as Red political discourse is kept wide open, barring straying into clearly anti-humane tropes, it doesn't have to be universally popular to be permitted space in the bandwidth.
Clearly then there would be room for someone like a flipped-ideology Sean Hannity to exist at all. They would be on notice to at least pretend to some nuance and sophistication, and I'd hope their audience percentage would be far lower than OTL's, because they would lack much in the way of institutional backing. Certainly in the highest circles of governmental power would be some people with distinctly crusty attitudes, more or less representing a sector of the public with such views, but it would not be like the opaque situation under capitalism where certain forms of extremism get quiet backing from sectors that cynically support "prolefeed" as Orwell called it they themselves stand aloof from--when asked frankly what they actually believe, in a candid moment when they would answer honestly. What they believe instead might be even more appallingly sociopathic to be sure. And I daresay, and fear, that OTL quite a lot of big money backing of right wing punditry comes from rich individuals who do uncritically believe a lot of this stuff, because it is less unflattering to themselves to believe they believe in the half-baked positives of conservative screeds than face that when push comes to shove they don't care even about the idealized common conservative man they profess to care about. One way or the other, cynical or true believing, it is the same reactionary propaganda of course.
I'm suggesting the flip version of ultra-leftism with the humane restraint baked out of it in favor of mindless team spirit is correspondingly far weaker, because it gets support for a hearing only in proportion to the actual numbers of persons high and low who sincerely believe it, and these are fewer because they are critically attacked by persons with a more humane and also rationally based world view; they are a thing I think, but a marginal thing, tolerated rather than a major factional player. Their numbers might be enough to have weight in proportional election outcomes, but functionally they either rubber-stamp widely accepted socialist policy, or when in dissent, are consistently outnumbered and bypassed, and it rarely is the case anyone who wasn't in this crusty minority ever has cause to regret that. They lose numbers as young people influenced by the viewpoint shake it off more often than not, and are sustained by very elderly people who just reach certain limits of adaptation to evolving norms and balk.
But while I agree I think with consensus here that the UASR is not a mirror image of the USA with the two morally equivalent--UASR is a much better place--I don't think that means UASR would not have any traces of perverse mirroring of OTL stupidities. They just would have a much smaller following.
I don't think we should get sidetracked and let's go back to what's the issue.
The issue that was pointed out is certainly a product of a lack of understanding of the general situation of the timeline, partly because the source material that's being used for such works are very much outdated by five or more years. That's part of the problem. Another important thing is just the general failure to use sociological imagination to be able to grasp the nature of how the UASR came into being and how it evolved and something like that. And in relation to that, there is a need for a certain way of thinking that needs to be suppressed that UASR popular culture here is going to have certain qualitative similarities to many things of US popular culture, especially in its worst elements in almost the same way, except that the UASR version is going to be coated Red and failing into account the general conditions as to how US popular culture became what it is IOTL in a sociological context and then failing to see how UASR culture, even with the familiar IOTL parallel products that come up in Reds! American culture, will look like in a wholly different country and society.
It's not a question of trying to portray positive and negative things because the UASR is certainly not a perfect workers' paradise. It's basically trying to portray both things and getting both wrong.
One example that was pointed out is a rather exaggerated attention of UASR Americans, as portrayed in some pieces submitted (and maybe a misinterpretation on the part of the reader) with cultural ongoings from the Alliance of Free States, particularly Cuba, and these things to become a subject of either obsessive mockery or extreme derision and a source of satire for Americans. It's just either mockery or derision in terms of such reactions and there is no spectrum of reaction available that can being portrayed. There is a certain failure of getting what's going on and it is not in step, unfortunately, with the general spirit of the timeline that the main troika of authors are trying to make. It's certainly looking almost all the time like Americans are just following a form of jingoistic nationalism that's cloaked in Red. And while this may be the case in a certain way in the UASR in a subsection of the population, the general portrayal in some of the pieces is that it is presented in quite of a manner that UASR Americans are stereotypically like this all the time and that's kind of wrong. That's what we need to get fixed and it shows in some of those works because the author does not have a proper grasp of what's going on, thus the suggestions given to the author to seek the new material from SV or to see more of the discussions in Discord to get a better understanding... and as a result the author gets to do better works.
I do hope that it's not taken in the wrong way.
The issue that was pointed out is certainly a product of a lack of understanding of the general situation of the timeline, partly because the source material that's being used for such works are very much outdated by five or more years. That's part of the problem. Another important thing is just the general failure to use sociological imagination to be able to grasp the nature of how the UASR came into being and how it evolved and something like that. And in relation to that, there is a need for a certain way of thinking that needs to be suppressed that UASR popular culture here is going to have certain qualitative similarities to many things of US popular culture, especially in its worst elements in almost the same way, except that the UASR version is going to be coated Red and failing into account the general conditions as to how US popular culture became what it is IOTL in a sociological context and then failing to see how UASR culture, even with the familiar IOTL parallel products that come up in Reds! American culture, will look like in a wholly different country and society.
It's not a question of trying to portray positive and negative things because the UASR is certainly not a perfect workers' paradise. It's basically trying to portray both things and getting both wrong.
One example that was pointed out is a rather exaggerated attention of UASR Americans, as portrayed in some pieces submitted (and maybe a misinterpretation on the part of the reader) with cultural ongoings from the Alliance of Free States, particularly Cuba, and these things to become a subject of either obsessive mockery or extreme derision and a source of satire for Americans. It's just either mockery or derision in terms of such reactions and there is no spectrum of reaction available that can being portrayed. There is a certain failure of getting what's going on and it is not in step, unfortunately, with the general spirit of the timeline that the main troika of authors are trying to make. It's certainly looking almost all the time like Americans are just following a form of jingoistic nationalism that's cloaked in Red. And while this may be the case in a certain way in the UASR in a subsection of the population, the general portrayal in some of the pieces is that it is presented in quite of a manner that UASR Americans are stereotypically like this all the time and that's kind of wrong. That's what we need to get fixed and it shows in some of those works because the author does not have a proper grasp of what's going on, thus the suggestions given to the author to seek the new material from SV or to see more of the discussions in Discord to get a better understanding... and as a result the author gets to do better works.
I do hope that it's not taken in the wrong way.
PNWKing
Banned
Do Not Adjust Your Dial
Do Not Adjust Your Dial is an American television series that ran from 1959-1967 on PBS-3. The show, created by World War II veteran Rod Serling, was known for it's social and political satire.
Some episodes of Do Not Adjust Your Dial that are well known:
Do Not Adjust Your Dial is an American television series that ran from 1959-1967 on PBS-3. The show, created by World War II veteran Rod Serling, was known for it's social and political satire.
Some episodes of Do Not Adjust Your Dial that are well known:
- He's Back: A neo-Nazi in Havana is visited by the ghost of the real Adolf Hitler.
- A Haunting at Stowe Creche: The ghost of a war veteran who died teaches his daughter, who is living in the Harriet Beecher Stowe Creche, moral lessons.
- Love-Sick Hearts: A teenage girl named Emma (after the revolutionary Emma Goldman) sees her boyfriend Thomas die in a car crash before Thomas is due to marry Emma.
PNWKing
Banned
The possibility that the "MacArthur Awards" thing merely reflects a niche view in UASR society is actually possible. That would explain why in 1995, Carol Burnett is hosting. They can't find anyone more current, so they have the show hosted by a washed-up ex-celebrity from the 1970s. It's possible that this ceremony is more akin to the Golden Raspberry Awards. Why would the UASR not do cable and satellite television?