If you want to split hairs as to what the responsibility of the Chairman of the Board of Directors does, you win.
IDK, maybe I'm a mushbrain but it seems like if someone said they're the chairman of the board, and you told them to their face "well it's not like you run the company..." they'd finish their drink and go talk to someone else for the rest of the night.
To paraphrase Peter Gibbons from Office Space, "The thing is, @moate, it's not that I'm unable, it's that I just don't care.", much like the rest of the public doesn't. I really do not think it is too much of us to ask that our entertainment actually be entertaining.
Your story was literally about your inability to recognize a message within media. That was the point you were making, that you were too young to realize what the adults in the room were talking about. Then you grew up and probably realized something incongruent between what you value in a society and what your favorite media was saying. People love the OG Star Wars trilogy and can enjoy it without recognizing that the Empire is the USA, but that doesn't mean that's not literally the point of the story. Right wing idiots can read 1984 and think "this guy is talking about how bad leftists politics are specifically and how only conservatism makes sense" despite points vaguely at the entire life of Orwell. I'm aware that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him literate.
As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.
Don't forget the Twilight Zone. The whole show existed because Serling wanted to make political statements and felt sci-fi might give him enough cover to make them. It's almost like...that's the point of the genre, to give enough of a fig leaf that the reactionaries will be lulled into allowing it...
I’ve found when people complain about something being “political” 9 out of 10 times they’re complaining that they dislike the author’s politics.
The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.
Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.
As someone with "Don't Panic" tattoo'd on my left forearm, and as I pointed out in another comment: Adams' Magnum Opus is in no avoiding its messaging, the politics/author's opinion is extremely clear.
Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.
Can someone give me examples of beloved, well written and respected sci-fi that was not overt political/social commentary to go along with all the discoloration of the above comment or is this just the standard "I like Rage Against the Machine because they're angry, but hate that they get political" nonsense?
Frankenstein: Political AF.
Asimov: So fucking political.
Dick: It's nothing BUT politics.
Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?
Asimov had plenty of stories with little to no politics, did you just read Foundation and skip his other works? Some of them are basically logic puzzles. Sure, Frankenstein has social and political commentary, but that's not what people remember it for (to me it's more philosophy than social commentary, but YMMV). Dick is more famous for being weird than being political, but that's just my own experience and how I was introduced to him, so again, YMMV. I’d say cyberpunk is in a similar position. Sure, it’s political, but you can enjoy the story without really engaging with the politics, and tbh, something like Snow Crash is so aggressively satirical and over-the-top that calling it a straightforward political statement feels like missing half the joke.
As for current stuff? The Martian has some politics w/ NASA and the cooperation with China, but it's certainly not what the book is about.
And I think you're not engaging with the actual complaint: poor, overly preachy writing is a terrible way to communicate a political point, much less persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
I think we're disagreeing on what "politics" means, perhaps. I'm going with something to the effect of "Politics is the process by which people and groups make decisions, rules, and laws to govern society and share resources" and you seem to be thinking "the affairs of nation-states and how they, specifically, govern". For example, Frankenstein being "social commentary" firmly makes it political to me, but seems to somehow exclude it for you.
Also, the idea that "there's politics in the source, but you can enjoy it without engaging with them" is sort of proving my Rage Against the Machine example from my original post (I picked the most overtly political band I could think of for the ad absurdum of it): Just because you don't CARE or agree with the politics, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm not saying you need to like, or engage with the politics in anything, but denying that they exist is...a political act!
As for your refutations of the people I picked, I didn't see you citing an example of a story Asimov had without politics/social commentary (the man was prolific and I haven't ready everything he wrote, I picked him because his best known works are Foundation and Robots series which are both very very political), if you felt The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids... (or Flow my Tears, or A Scanner Darkly) were just "being weird" and not political, again, I think we're just using different definitions of the word.
In H2G2, Adams says that Vogons, the galactic bureaucrats and face of the space government, make the 3rd worst poetry in the Universe. Now if one wanted to, one can make that a silly joke, or one could interpret that as people who are dedicated to maintaining the systems of government are the among least creative creatures in existence . And the weird thing is, somehow, even if one came to the 2nd conclusion, one could still think Adams wasn't making a political statement. Now why am I suddenly thinking about Claude...
Part of the problem, as always, is what types of people and activities are defined as "political".
Particularly in an office or other "respectable" setting, you've got people who are white, and people who are political.
You've got people who are straight, and people who are political.
You've got executives who are men, and executives who are political.
And so on.
What and whom one chooses to include in stories, and what ones chooses to leave out—and, perhaps even more importantly, what one includes and leaves out without even thinking about it, are, by their very nature, political.
I'm also reminded of the Dungeons and Dragons group I heard about, whose DM made one very simple change to the published adventure path. The players were going through the towns, and finding them filled with women. The other adventurers were women. The blacksmiths were women. Even the prominent goblins in the dungeon were female! The taverns had a couple of men in them, but apart from that, there were seemingly nearly no men in the entire world. The players were convinced there was something deeply sinister going on.
But all that had happened was that the DM reversed the gender of every NPC written into the adventure. An adventure full of men, that no one would have batted an eye at, suddenly caused shock and suspicion when it had exactly the same percentage of women instead.
So: was the original adventure author "political" for the gender ratio they put into it?
Yup, this one gets the ambiguity in the word "political", and then uses the broadest possible definition to avoid the narrower point I was actually making about preachy writing lol
Again, I get it: you don't want to engage in the politics of the writing you like. That's fine. But you don't get to say the politics don't exist in the text.
I promise, the authors you speak of would not respect your analysis of their text (and you're probably fine with that) but your narrower point is...not worth making? Anyone can like or dislike whatever they want for whatever reasons they want, what they can't do is say "that red barn can't actually red because I hate red barns but I like that one, and my analysis is valid". I mean I guess a P.K Dick character could, but I don't think we're ready to have that discussion.
Sci-fi and Speculative fiction, are, always political. Just like how romance is always about love, and mysteries are always about solving a puzzle. You were responding to my point, so I get to set the terms of engagement. Thems the rules of discourse.
I'll just come out and say it, your ability to analyze texts really comes into question when you say CYBERPUNK (of ALL the subgenres) can be anything but political. Again, if you really only want "political" to mean "involving governments" and not the LITERAL definition of the word, I don't know how we can talk to each other because we're speaking different languages (or rather, using language in entirely different ways).
And I'm not using "political" any more broadly than conservatives or self-proclaimed centrists do when they say they don't want anything "political" in their games, TV shows, movies, etc.
Because when they say that, 99.9% of the time, what they mean is they want their media to confirm their pre-existing biases, that straight white men are the most important, that straight women are there for their sexual gratification, and other people mostly shouldn't even show up, etc. We've seen this over and over and over again.
And the other part of what they usually say is that they want no politics in their media, just like in the old days.
But, again: it's always been there. They just didn't see it in the old days. They played Wolfenstein and shot Nazis, and didn't see that as "political", but nowadays if you put Nazis as a villain in a video game, half of those same people will scream that they're being preached to.
So if you read all those books you named, and didn't see any politics in them...
...maybe it's because they were simply confirming your pre-existing biases.
Or maybe it's because you didn't have the reading comprehension skills to understand where the politics in them were.
Because science fiction has always been political.
You've now gone from disagreeing with my definition to inventing beliefs for me and questioning my reading comprehension based on them, so I think I’m done here lol.
IDK what "never worked" means here, the market cap for Impossible/Beyond alone is still over a billion dollars. You can still get an Impossible Whopper at any Burger King in the US.
There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...
On the topic of replacing meat with fake meat, yeah it kind of does invite comparison, because they are essentially entirely competing industries at that point
That was not the issue pointed by GP. They noted that the comparison was between two companies, a whole industry.
>That’s a weird comparaison between one or two brand and "an industry".
In other words, Impossible and Beyond are not the only companies in meat replacement space. They are probably the largest, but comparing them to the whole industry makes no sense.
