Neronium said:
Diablo1099 said:
To give Fox News credit, at least it wasn't Bengazi they based their title card on.
Give it time, I'm sure they'll add it in. XD
OT: Reminds me of the time a little after BioShock Infinite came out in which some people in the Tea Party were usings the propoganda Comstick had around Columbia as actually posters for their rallies. The irony in this is just as strong as that one.
The Irony isn't quite what you might think. To be honest I've been of the opinion for a while that on a lot of levels "Bioshock" has gone over the heads of the people who play it.
Spoilers Below:
To put this into context in the original "Bioshock" a lot of people were jumping up and down saying that game "zapped" Ayn Rand. The problem with this is that while it starts out that way, eventual revelations in the game turn the message into the opposite, or at least make it very neutral. After all "Rapture" worked just fine as an institution, it wasn't a uptopia by any means, but it was functional, and most people were fairly happy. The problems actually came from a revolutionary who pretty much wrecked it. Indeed one of the big moments of the game is when you find out that while no saint, the guy you think is the bad guy really isn't, and he's the one who enables you to set things right. Now "Bioshock 2" which is generally agreed to be a far inferior game, got that way in part because it pretty much gave people what they thought the first game was about, by exaggerating the problems with the status quo, and making Ryan out to be a lot worse than he was supposed to be, which kind of ruins the impact of the big reveal in the first game.
When it comes to "Columbia", where this is from, as a general rule you can't say there isn't a lot wrong with what Comstock is doing to begin with. Basically, he disagreed with US policy, so he left. His disagreements weren't even that unreasonable, he did things like go to war for the US, putting his entire city at risk, and then was told to stand down for political reasons before the situation could be resolved. While the boxer rebellion was the example, this basic metaphor could be used for a lot of other wars like Veitnam, or even the current War On Terror, where soldiers are called upon to put their lives in danger, and then sent home with the job incomplete by politicians, rendering their efforts, losses, and risks, irrelevant due to never having achieved the intended objectives, from which politicians might have been holding them back to begin with. While the recent upswing in chaos in The Middle East after Obama's troop pullbacks hadn't happened at the time "infinite" was released, a lot of people (including me) were pretty bloody sure this was coming. I think part of what "Infinite" did here was make a statement it's developers figured would seem visionary in response to upcoming events.
"Infinite" also involves several "X" factors involved in what happens. For example it can be argued a certain industrialist is the actual bad guy of the piece, which some people leaning left were upset about because Comstock is more like their stereotypical villain. What's more it subverts it's initial expectations by making it so that the final bad guys are not the statement like Comstock, or the Industialists like Fink, but the social revolutionaries who wind up being worse and more mindlessly destructive than either of the other groups, despite everyone having their failures. Indeed there is a sort of message in everything being destroyed, while the other forces (including Songbird) work together to try and stop the revolutionaries.
On a certain fundamental level, Bioshock also points out that just because your an immigrant doesn't mean your going to get a free ride. Sure the people who arrive on Columbia are poor and desperate, but why immigrate to such a place with finite jobs being available? Showing up on the doorstep and saying "your responsible for me" isn't entirely fair, and destroying everything when you get slotted off about your own stupidity doesn't benefit anyone, including you.
Basically Infinite has a straightforward message which is very "left wing" (if anyone never noticed I use quotes for a reason in most of my messages) while it also subverts it to have the opposite message when you actually look at the game. Granted everything generally comes out being fairly balanced... after all, at the end of the day in Infinite the entire destruction of Columbia is presented as being a positive thing, because in the future Columbia was going to destroy New York City for some largely undisclosed reason... and the person in command was going to be Elizabeth who wound up having second thoughts about it leading to some of the temporal misadventures when you get down to it. A lot of this can of course be blame on Comstock and the way he treated her, but at the same time that had little to do with Columbia itself or the principles it was based on.
I think the right wing doesn't really miss the point, but rather a lot of critics do. The only part the right wing misses is that some of the statements made were justified by Columbia cedeing from the union. Comstock did not turn his guns on the USA (though Elizabeth did in the future)) because he disagreed with the way policies were going, instead he chose to leave. On some ways this is glorifying the civil war, and at it's most radical could probably be a way of saying that a lot of the so called "Red States" should feel entitled to simply leave the country, where they can set their own policies if they disagree with the way the blue states are going.
As a general rule I think the USA is stronger together, but at the same time I do think within the scope of principles here different Americans have the right to live the way they want within their own interpretation of things. On a lot of levels I feel this is why there were separate states to begin with, and a lot of issues exist because of a federal government telling people how they have to live and interpret things, and forcing people to accept things they are deadest against in pursuit of a particular view of "the greater good". "Social Justice" to one person is not for
someone else. One of my big concerns with current political trends is that it's going to lead to another civil war where states are going to try and break off again, OR one side or the other is going to start a revolution to take back the country (which is bad given the divide is nearly 50-50). I think on some levels what "Infinite" was saying is that if you disagree with what the country should stand for that strongly, feel free to take your land and leave. Albeit it's easier to do with a flying super-city than it is to deal with say Texas, Arizonia, etc.. suddenly saying "we're now the Confederated States of America" or whatever and establishing their own governments while refusing to acknowledge US policy, debt, etc... and instead setting their own. This is the area where Fox News kind of misses the point, since the end result of that revolutionary dogma was "we're going to go somewhere else to live how we want and take our resources with us" not a matter of changing the US. The US wound up losing a lot of science and wonder out of the deal, as well as it's best weapon. Had Columbia decided it just flat out wanted to change the US, nothing could have stopped it as Elizabeth demonstrated in the future, even around the 1980s the US was apparently powerless before the science of Columbia (as retro as it looked, it was actually using stuff far beyond what we have today).
- but most of the writers/staff members/forum-goers on this site tend to be leaning towards the left...and that's being generous in the cases of some content providers *cough*MovieBob*cough*. That's why I don't set foot in the Religion and Politics section.
