There is wide chasm between weaving real world social problems into the story as part of worldbuilding and having the author's pet social problems be front and center the entire time. Some authors are so intent on propagandizing that they forget to be entertaining.
Propagandizing isn’t the word I’d use. I feel like we’re really watering down with propaganda actually is. If someone wants to write about a particular issue they can. You can prefer they don’t, which means you should buy it.
include as much real world problems in your fiction as you want. if you start pushing a political view point (communism is bad; capitalism is bad) without including the nuances of what you'd experience in a real world, then you get less good fiction. this is true of pushing political pov's, or other things when your fiction is out of balance. Author pushing a pov will usually degrade the quality of the work. just like contriving a plot to make it exciting debases your fiction. Generally speaking. in the end it's the delight in the spine the defines the quality of art.
Leave it to Beaver didn't consider the nuances of the impact on redlining and inequality in GI Bill benefits led to white suburbs it portrayed or whether the allocation of funding to car infrastructure rather than public transit left people behind, but it still pushed an idealized portrayal of suburbia regardless.
Nearly everything published in the last few years has been political, a growing trend since the mid-2000s. I'm finding myself watching shows from the 90s for escapism.
Can you explain? X-Men (starting in 1963, popular cartoon adaptation in the 90's) had a clear and unsubtle anti-racist, anti-apartheid message. Batman had an underlying message of classism and even homosexuality according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman#Interpretations.
I don't get commenters going "X has gone woke" when that's nothing new. Sure, a lot of modern-day media is overt and often unsubtle in its more liberal viewpoints to the point where it seems to detract from the story itself, but that's not a bad thing per sé if it means marginalized communities feel more represented and the non-marginalized communities get a counter from the preceding era's straight/white/male dominance.
Perhaps it's the art of subtly that has been lost. You could argue than any media is political, which is trite. Sometimes entertainment is just entertainment.
For things set in modern day America, I think it would be almost impossible to not be political. If you include minorities (especially LGBTQ minorities) then you can't write them realistically without politics coming into the picture. If you don't include minorities, then that is itself a political statement.
This is of course less the case for more fantastic settings.
It’s absolutely possible to have LGBTQ (main) character and plot lines while totally avoiding all political/ideological themes. Schitt's Creek (TV Series 2015‑2020) is a fantastic example.
Most works that have stood the test of time are political. Is this the part where you tell us that Rage Against The Machine only became political recently?
There's really no such thing as apolitical media. "Apolitical", escapist entertainment assumes a default political context (in the USA, white-normative and cisheteronormative). Not having the politics of the day affect you on a deep personal level is a luxury of privilege. For the marginalized, politics reaches out and touches them whether they want it or not.
> There's really no such thing as apolitical media.
You can make anything fit any narrative you want if you want to analyse something closely enough, but this statement isn't true in good faith. What's the political statement of Japan's Ringu? Or Swiss' Pingu?
> a default political context (in the USA, white-normative and cisheteronormative)
I don't see why the statistically likely (white, cis, hetero) is a "political context"? white-cis-heteros disagree on politics all the time.
> For the marginalized, politics reaches out and touches them whether they want it or not.
Politics touches everyone. I am already living with politics for 80% of my waking life, I would prefer my entertainment time not also reflect that unless I want to. Lazy writing and characterisation since the mid-2000s has made politics a character trait rather than a plot point and it's boring.
I fundamentally disagree that art is inherently political.
> War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.
Inequality is not at record levels, it's decreased since around 2016 in the US and it has substantially decreased globally (see recent work by Milanovic).
Israel is not "openly genocidal". I disagree that it is genocidal at all; certainly not openly. Arguments that Israel's policy is genocidal do not tend to survive acquaintance with a serious international lawyer. Human rights violations, maybe.
It is simply false that 92% of people have no effect on policy. (They elect presidents.) Maybe you think that 92% of people's preferences don't affect policy. That's almost certainly also false - use common sense - and based on correlational polisci work, in a setting where correlations are not very persuasive (I am thinking of Gilens and Page) and where the very idea of preferences is pretty suspect.
Nobody in this thread has complained about the existence of political work. They've complained about politics making the art worse. I'd say there are many cases of art which has been made worse by the clumsy addition of politics, or of bad art being praised because it had the right politics. Have you never seen that?
I think your opinions are much stronger and more certain than your knowledge base warrants.
Is it just me or are these sorts of statements becoming more common? Another commenter on this post told someone he was lacking reading comprehension skills in an argument about the political implications of the children's novel Harry Potter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38904272
> Arguments that Israel's policy is genocidal do not tend to survive acquaintance with a serious international lawyer.
False [1].
> It is simply false that 92% of people have no effect on policy
Oh yeah [2]? Also, the majority of the US supports free healthcare, a ceasefire in Palestine, free college, clean water, modern drug policy, fair housing, and higher taxes on the rich. It's pretty obvious that the people are not being represented.
> Nobody in this thread has complained about the existence of political work.
You're changing the argument.
> I think your opinions are much stronger and more certain than your knowledge base warrants.
You might be right. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, and your arguments that I am are pretty flimsy for a self-proclaimed scientist.
I'm glad you accept my point about inequality. For Gilens and Page, don't waste time reading TPM. Just read the original article. Notice that they correlate expressed preferences with policy, find it higher for rich people, and draw their conclusion. An alternative explanation, backed up by 50 years of public opinion research, is that most people don't have carefully thought out opinions on public policy. They have non-attitudes which will change whenever they are asked or depending whose asking. Not surprisingly, randomness doesn't correlate with anything. Rich people are often more interested in politics - you are likely an example.
As for Palestine, you're citing an advocacy organization, and the UN, of which the less said the better. To quote Ben Kiernan, "Israel's retaliatory bombing of Gaza, however indiscriminate, and its current ground attacks, despite the numerous civilian casualties they are causing among Gaza's Palestinian population, do not meet the very high threshold that is required to meet the legal definition of genocide." Here's another reasonable take: https://archive.is/O8HpJ
> This is what Israel has begun to do - we cut the supply of energy, water and diesel to the Strip ... But it’s not enough. In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza ... The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice.
-- Giora Eiland
> If we act strategically correctly, there will be immigration and we will live in the Gaza Strip. We will not allow a situation where 2 million people live there.
-- Smotrich
Two of dozens and dozens such statements, with rather tame language compared to others. Under the Geneva Convention the Israeli government is required to prohibit and prosecute such speech, not engage in it. And then there are is the actual murder, which in turn unrolls into hundreds of things, including soldiers incriminating themselves with a sort of "humor" that reminds of the cruelty of Abu Ghraib, plus "the Temple will be built soon" and all that.
It's worth noting that the Netanyahu government, in official statements, has disavowed Smotrich and Ben Gvir's rhetoric --- and claims that Israelis will re-settle Gaza in particular --- and that the war cabinet doesn't include them (was, in fact, formed in part to exclude them). There's probably no side of this debate that thinks Smotrich is anything less than a monster, so continually citing him isn't doing much to move the conversation forward.
(Smotrich and Ben Gvir have said worse things than this!)
None of this is to vouch for Netanyahu, who is himself a deeply problematic figure and is of course responsible for forming a coalition with these people in the first place --- something I think most people feel he did in order to escape prison.
Not to keep one of these cursed threads going even longer, just, if you're trying to parse reasons why citing Smotrich isn't getting you more traction with your interlocutors, that could possibly be one reason.
I appreciate your effort, but I am citing him because he's put it very succinctly. As I said, that unrolls to many other people saying the same or worse things, many of them in the government.
And their words match the current military actions, the flattening of villages, the religious zealotry, the wanton attacks on civilians. When I referred to Abu Ghraib I wasn't trying to be polemic, that's just the best one-phrase description I can give of all the shit I've seen and read and seen justified.
> There's probably no side of this debate that thinks Smotrich is anything less than a monster
When it comes to Israel itself, thinking that these people are "monsters" isn't enough under the convention against Genocide. As for the rest, where are the calls to stop this? Where is even honest reporting on it? NYT is currently lying about "Israel scaling back the war", meanwhile:
Again, just the tip of the ice berg. Videos chosen for not being very graphic. Just enough to realize that the convenient, clean narrative put forward can't possibly be correct.
And the people who watch in horror and watch how it's swept under the rug, how the people scratch each other's back while having "concerns" (say, Biden delivering weapons, saying no to a ceasefire, while paying some lip service to being a nice human because that's all he has against Trump), how Palestinians are just treated as non-persons, vermin to be exterminated to take their land, while that is glorified with sombre references to the Holocaust, will never forget it.
Every time there is something about, say, the atrocity that was putting Japanese Americans into camps during WW2 (which it was), they will think back on how Palestinian children and civilians were blown to bits, starved to death, in the ten thousands currently, with the declared target being hundreds of thousands if not millions, and how their neighbors, friends and family, shrugged and said "their fault for voting Hamas 2006", and how the connection they felt to that person died that day. That's not an argument, but that's what will happen. It already happened. We don't know why people do this or that, just like we never will fully understand the Holocaust, but we know what they did, and that will have to do.
I'm not saying this to convince anyone. I can't convince anyone who isn't shocked about what I already posted and looking into it themselves. I try to stay on top of it, and I pass on some of the things I saw I see nowhere outside of the sources I stumbled onto by caring about and researching the issue. I like to think that makes it valuable enough, certainly as valuable something that contains no quotes and just rephrases justifications that are well known. When I reply to a person I haven't talked to before in a thread I haven't posted in yet, I might repeat a quote or a link, obviously. I don't have the time to come up with something fresh every time.
Respectfully, there aren't a lot of new facts here, just a more impassioned restatement of the argument you've already made. But I'm not here to convince you of anything. You don't have to fend me off!
To the extent we're having these discussions on HN (which I think are largely cursed), I'm interested in the facts being on the table: that Gaza isn't somehow an independent territory Israel can wash its hands of, that Israel is not in fact populated mostly with Europeans and Americans, that everybody from Hezbollah to the IDF has used the "river to the sea" slogan, and so forth.
I meant what I said in my preceding comment. I'm not suggesting to you that because Smotrich is a fringe figure, you should recalculate your opinions about Israeli leadership. I'm literally telling you that you can make a better, more succinct, and more persuasive case by relying less on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Assume the persuadable audience for what you're writing already reviles both of those characters, and avoid giving your readers an excuse to stop reading by make them load-bearing parts of your argument.
Alternatively: stop having an argument at all! It's extraordinarily unlikely that you will ever on HN have a "debate" with a counterparty on the other side of this issue that ends in you somehow "winning". And as these "debates" progress, they get less compelling, more tedious, and more damaging to everybody's case. Apathy could have no better advocate than a 30-comment-deep HN thread.
Instead, just wait for things to appear that are contrary to the facts, and calmly correct the record.
So, you're literally a genocide denier. So is Ben Kiernan.
That's horrific bro.
Heinous semantic quibbles aside - 30,000 people have been killed. PEOPLE. Lives ended.
ZERO senior Hamas leaders have been killed.
ZERO hostages have been rescued.
75% of all homes have been destroyed, for 2.3 million people.
This result cost 11 figures.
And you and Ben Kiernan say you're not sure if there's enough intent to call it a genocide! Buddy, Israeli state TV have a bunch of schoolkids singing about "total annihilation" of Gaza. There's HD video of too many war crimes and atrocities to list. These people are filming unimaginable horror, and you're cherry-picking one genocide researcher's statment from 2 months and 20,000 murders ago. That's a yikes dude.
The list of genocidal statements from Israeli leaders is looooong - I already posted it. You dismissed it as "from an advocacy group", even though it's fully sourced. The less said the better about the UN?? Why - because Israel have killed more UN workers than any conflict in history?!
You are literally a genocide denier. You're helping ethnic cleansing happen. You are. Deny it, call it what you like, that is what you are choosing to do with your one life on earth. God help you.
That's correct. I'm denying that Israel is committing genocide, because I think it isn't.
1) Hamas quotes 22K people killed. I don't know where your 30K figure comes from. Even if you believe the figures of Hamas, which has every incentive to lie and no ethics to hold it back, this is 1% of the Gaza strip's population. If Israel wanted to kill many more times that, it obviously could. I suggest to you that urban warfare against irregular forces has inevitable casualties, which does not make that war unjust. Was the taking of Berlin genocide? If not, what is the difference?
2) Numerous hostages have been rescued, in negotiations which were enabled by the military pressure put on Hamas.
3) A senior Hamas leader was widely reported killed just 2 days ago.
I'm happy to believe that Israel has committed war crimes, and it would not surprise me. I worry about ethnic cleansing too - though that will be shown by what happens after the war and not by the fact that Israel encourages civilians to flee a war zone. Claims of genocide are overblown, and I suggest you should tone down your heated rhetoric. The original context was one guy making a lot of inaccurate claims; a second person doing the same does not weaken my case.
> The US is funding an openly genocidal regime that is killing a child every ten minutes, saying there's "no red line".
That's your political opinion.
> Maybe if the wilfully politically ignorant could figure out how to write good character driven stories, those people would have options. But for some reason, people with good souls and hearts write the best stories... And people without them write inane drivel that fails to connect on any deep level, ever.
That's your political opinion.
I don't see why it's not an obvious truth that sometimes people prefer not to have to think about politics or political ideology. And to suggest art or entertainment devoid of political ideology is "drivel" or for people without "good souls and hearts" is baffling.
> > The US is funding an openly genocidal regime that is killing a child every ten minutes, saying there's "no red line".
> That's your political opinion.
Not really, no. They have said as much themselves. "There is no red line" is a direct quote.
Zionists, aka the ones committing and supporting this particularly heinous genocide, consider it a political view - no one else.
Zionists say it's complicated, it's self defense; even as they openly state their true intent [0]. But the entire rest of the fucking planet considers it wanton murder, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. We're heartbroken, we're furious, and we'll not stop talking about it until it ends.
> I don't see why it's not an obvious truth that sometimes people prefer not to have to think about politics or political ideology.
I explained why, as did other commenters. If you want to be ignorant and apathetic towards 'politics' (inequality and genocide and the planet burning for profit) that's your problem. Not mine. But it's a bit rich to then complain that you can't find good character driven stories, that enable and support such an apathetic and delusional choice of worldview.
> to suggest art or entertainment devoid of political ideology is "drivel" or for people without "good souls and hearts" is baffling.
I didn't.
I 'suggested' that if you want good stories devoid of 'political content' then maybe you can't find them because vapid and ignorant and soulless people don't write very good stories. If you can find them, then why bother complaining that other people are discussing and enjoying 'political' content.
I'd like to know: What value you think lies within your hypothetical? Do you think either of those scenarios are possible?
Do you really think that if Hamas (not to be confused with the civilians who are being murdered) "laid down their arms" then Israel would start to treat Palestinians like humans? ... Really?
Do you think that Palestinians who lost their homes, their families, their whole world to this 3 month orgy of atrocity are more or less likely to take up arms than people with something to lose?
30,000 Palestinians have been murdered. A million people are facing death by starvation and disease. It needs to stop.
>I'd like to know: What value you think lies within your hypothetical?
>Do you think either of those scenarios are possible?
You either missed the part about thought exercise or slipped in a bad-faith query.
One side has tried repeatedly to compromise, the counter-party is fundamentally opposed to any compromise. Try gaming that out and see how you might succeed in reaching a successful compromise for peace.
>Do you really think that if Hamas (not to be confused with the civilians who are being murdered) "laid down their arms" then Israel would start to treat Palestinians like humans? ... Really?
What happened when Egypt was offered land for peace? What happened when the PA was offered 95% of the west bank in exchange for peace? Are you familiar with the "Peace Now" movement from the 1990s? It was way too large to call it a fringe movement? The response was suicide bombings. That was a quarter century ago and the last 25 years have made it rather bleak to realistically find peace, unless you think "the river to sea" as a peace proffer, perhaps. Do you? Really??
Granted its radicalizing for sure. Can you see how Palestinian if not Perso-Palestinian tactics would be as radicalizing on Israelis? Is one radicalization better than the other?
>30,000 Palestinians have been murdered. A million people are facing death by starvation and disease. It needs to stop.
Casualty stats are like polls. Its quasi data at best. OF COURSE it needs to stop. BILATERALLY. Have you heard one Palestinian person so much as nuance that their misery is a reaction to a Palestinian act of atrocity? Its a glaring double standard.
Its a race to the bottom, and pretending that the Palestinians are pure victims while the Israelis are pure evil only illuminates your one-sidedness in this matter.
Until both sides are able to find empathy for each other's existence, the race to the bottom is a sure thing.
One last question for you:
Can someone name a large-scale armed military conflict in which the civilian population caught in that conflict weren't treated as expendable?
Palestinians are resisting a decades long occupation.
Israelis are bombing refugee camps and hospitals. Openly calling for the destruction/removal of the entire population. Assassinating journalists, preventing food and electricity and clean water from an entire population.
> Casualty stats are like polls. Its quasi data at best.
30,000 murdered people in three months isn't a statistic. It's human lives. Those are real people. They have names, and you can see the lists compiled.
The average age of murdered children over there is five years old.
If you want better stats, get Israel to let journalists in (maybe ask them to stop killing them while you're at it).
> Can someone name a large-scale armed military conflict in which the civilian population caught in that conflict weren't treated as expendable?
Ah - there it is. Palestinian civilians are expendable to Israel, and you call this normal.
But how many senior Hamas leaders have been taken in Gaza? Zero.
How many hostages have been rescued? Minus three.
All while a child is murdered every ten minutes.
Israel is committing verified war crimes and atrocities every day. It's not excusable. There is a responsibility, even in war, to protect civilian life.
Where in those articles is the conclusive fact that Israel is an "openly genocidal regime". Was America openly genocidal for the civilian deaths in WW2? I would say Russia is openly genocidal, but ask a Russian and they say they are saving their Ukrainian cousins and it's Kyiv that is openly genocidal to Russians. If dead children makes a genocide then nearly every war ever fought was genocide. Israel will say they have teams of lawyers reviewing every strike and if the civilian to combatant or military objective ratio is within the bounds of international law then they will strike. The geneva convention is pretty clear on when civilian areas stop becoming protected.
They are facts; what your reaction or feelings about those facts are, is not a question of opinion and/or politics, but of morals and values. The question is not "is the murder of a child in line with my political views", it's "is the murder of a child in line with my own morals", which transcends politics.
The death of a child in a war can be against someones' morals but legal and not an act of genocide. For example, when fighting child soldiers, or human shields, etc.
Surely when every major genocide researcher and lawyer, human rights groups, etc are all shouting at the top of their lungs that this is the worst genocide this century, you'd try a little harder to make your case.
I call what's happening in Gaza and the WB genocide. Clearly, and to a horrific degree.
I have nightmares about it that linger with me for weeks. I've seen full HD horrors and atrocities being committed for 92 days now.
I've seen outrageous lies - beheaded babies, mass rapes - promulgated by corporate media and even the POTUS, all as a thousand very real babies have been murdered. Netanyahu is still repeating the beheaded babies lie. It's farcical, and I truly believe that only a highly deranged mind could fall for it. And yet at least 80% of Israelis think there hasn't been enough violence. It's a horror beyond comprehension.
I don't get why people are tolerating such genocide denial tbh. It's nice that we're so polite here, but like ... read the room. And by the room, I mean the vast majority of every single population outside of Israel; who all want the same thing: just stop killing so many people Israel, ffs.
Just stop killing people, and treat them like humans. It's not a big ask. It's not political. It's important, and if you try to tell people not to talk about it you can expect pushback.
You're either a delusional antisemite or grossly misinformed is a mess of a sentence. You can't write like that here. Everybody in this orange collegium is misinformed about all sorts of things, sometimes even grossly. You don't respond to that by saying "you are grossly misinformed", but rather by calmly correcting the underlying facts and ideas that were wrong. That's how a conversation works. Here, you're not even prosecuting; you're doing something even harsher.
First off: nobody is shouting "from the mountains to the sea". That's not a thing. You mean "from the river to the sea" --- the Jordan River being a claimed historical western border of Palestine and of "Greater Israel".
Second off: it is manifestly not the case that everyone shouting that slogan is genocidal. One indication of that: Israel has used the slogan itself. Most people who use it probably don't really even know what it means, as seems to have been the case there.
Third: please stop declaiming. It's not persuasive, it doesn't teach anybody anything, and it pumps cortisol into the thread. You don't have to have a thing to say here. Sometimes it's best just to let charged threads like these die down on their own.
The 90s with its apolitical cinema like Saving private Ryan or Forrest gump that certainly are not pro american propaganda or other great movies like the Matrix that do not denounce late stage capitalism as soul crushing and has no themes that could be interpreted about taking red pills and feeling more like yourself.
The 90s had a different context sure, capitalism was peaking, we didn't have the crushing reality of the post 2008 world, or the crazy chest bumping Murica militarism of the post 9/11 era. But the 2000s scare, the internet fear, the office jobs being boring/grey and soulless. The slight fear of science and progress (see Jurassic park, gattaca, fifth element), the work culture being inhumane and dehumanising (matrix, office space, clerks, american beauty), the same happened in music with grunge being one of the main genres of the decades.
All of this art was made in the backdrop of probably the most optimistic period of time, Disney had a renaissance, america absolute cleared the floor in the first gulf war, the stock market had an impossible never ending rise, pop music was happier than ever and fashion was in the most sexy, thin, in your face hotness ever.
If you only want to enjoy the 90s happiness without seeing the fact tons of counter art was being made and that our current cyniscim isn't only a product of the post 2008 economic stagnation but also comes from the seeds that were planted at the height of the cultural hedonism of the 90s then you are just straight ignoring some of the biggest hits of that decade.
Saving Private Ryan and the Matrix are some of my favourite films.
I enjoy media that has a political message or meaning.
Get Out was my favourite horror film of that year, and that very clearly exists in a world with a strong political undercurrent.
I'm saying right now, I want more media that is not drenched in political ideology, left wing or right wing. I (like the majority of people) live in a shit world with a shit job and a shit life. But it could easily be worse. I would rather not be reminded how shit everything is even when I just want to be distracted for a short while.
This is also why a lot of recent films have absolutely tanked in viewership lately. Everything just seems like preaching and it can be difficult to watch even if you agree with the message.
I'm getting near middle aged and have started watching more of the 90s scifi (with some good modern shows as well) when I just want to escape for a bit. I just started rewatching Farscape again. What a bizarre/wild ride.
Farscape is on my list. I've watched DS9 and Babylon 5 with my spouse in the last few years, and we both enjoy it very much.
> Everything just seems like preaching and it can be difficult to watch even if you agree with the message.
Maybe this is more accurate to how I feel. DS9 and B5 had a lot of plot lines that would probably be called political, but were abstracted away and never felt like I was being force fed political ideology, it was more of an exploration of those ideas.
Babylon 5 is the best science fiction series ever IMO (if you can make it all the way through). The first season was especially campy, but the world building, geopolitics (not politics, but how the alien species interact), storytelling, and philosophy are all very thought-provoking. Yeah it had amazing space battles, but where it shines the most is in the dialogue. I still get chills to this day from some of the discussions. The show is even better on a second or tenth watch as all the foreshadowing is so apparent.
I thoroughly enjoyed DS9 as well, but outside of some things like Quark and Garrak, I feel it to sometimes be a pale imitation of B5.
Farscape is just freaking weird, but just so much fun. The characters have no restraints on emotion. There is no chain of command.
Stargate SG-1 and all the spin offs are also extremely good and the only science fiction show my wife could really get into. If you haven't watched it yet...well then you have like 18 seasons and a few movies to get through if you count all the TV shows.
The amount of polemic going up is probably because creators are worried with the way things are going that more people just wanting to sit back and not think about the world’s problems.
I don't think that people don't want to think about the world's problems. We get that 24/7 it seems. Rather, people need a way to relax and have normally gotten that through books, TV, movies, and games.
Now all of those formats (ESPECIALLY books) have always had ones that were QUITE political, but there was also a lot of content that was just for relaxing and escaping from the reality of the world which has always sucked. Recently, it seems like they've started really ramping up the political content in many movies, shows, and games and some people certainly enjoy that, but then again...a lot of people don't like being preached to in every aspect of their lives.
I just don't see it. With the exception of children's cartoons/shows, there's just always been political stuff. Any USA show with a black family dealt with racism, and if they were wealthy, not being 'black enough'. Poor families like in Roseanne were dealing with layoffs and hoping that the trickle down effect of Reaganomics would kick in any day now.
Looney tunes, Animaniacs, some SNL skits, Blue's Clues- these all had that lack of present day political stuff, but even something as light as The Drew Carey Show had themes about stuff like political correctness in the office place, and cross-dressing/genderqueer folks.
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
The Harry Potter where the villains talk about racial purity, kill people who mix magical and non-magical blood, take over the government and use it to oppress people? That non-political Harry Potter?
(Yes, also the Harry Potter where one of the black characters is named Shacklebolt, the goblins are essentially a loosely tied pile of Jewish stereotypes, and plenty of other problems as well)
You know you've gone off the deep end when you start thinking of Harry Potter as something that contains intentional political messaging instead of something that overuses convenient off-the-shelf tropes for villains and everything else but manages to tell an engaging tale in spite of it.
In a perfect world, "racism isn't bad" wouldn't be a political message, it would be a common sense belief that everyone shared, but America and plenty of other places are still in a point where that's controversial and significant portions of the voting base are proud of their bigotry.
I think that if you think those tropes are just tropes and not intentional political messaging, then there is no longer any point in discussion with your level of reading comprehension.
For example, most of the greatest classics, e.g. "Anna Karenina", "East of Eden", "Mice and Men", "The Idiot", "Crime and Punishment", "Frankenstein" etc. etc.
You think "Crime and Punishment" is non-political? Have you read it? Have you read the Wikipedia summary of it? Dostoyevsky is deeply political.
"These books were written long enough ago that their political arguments have been internalized in modern cultures and no longer seem controversial" does not make a work non-political. Nor does "this book only espouses views I agree with" or "I did not understand the political topics raised in this work".
From your entire list:
* Anna Karenina: Talks about rural and urban life, faith, and social change in the 19th century
* Of Mice and Men: Talks about black people being isolated and threats of lyching. The premise of the story centers around an incident involving whether people are mentally capable of being found guilty (and false accusations)
* The Idiot: Centers around society's treatment of those perceived as idiots and/or socially inept. That's still a relevant political topic today and, for its time, was at least as relevant as modern works focusing on marginalized groups such as LGBTQ, etc. It also deeply dives into religion and atheism (political hot topics then and now). It has a long monologue about capital punishment.
* Crime and Punishment: The entire novel is a critique of nihilism, very much a cultural and political part of Russian society at a time, with thoughts on utilitarianism and rationalism. It's a deep dive into the radicalization of people. It also criticizes Western ideas.
I'm not going to bother with the rest, as it's clear to me you're just naming books you don't understand.
> Anna Karenina: Talks about rural and urban life, faith, and social change in the 19th century
Yes. But does not talk that much about politics. Unless for you the above things somehow count as politics?
> The Idiot: Centers around society's treatment of those perceived as idiots and/or socially inept.
Have you even read it? It's about someone so good that people treat him as an idiot. It's about morality, not politics.
> Crime and Punishment: The entire novel is a critique of nihilism, very much a cultural and political part of Russian society at a time, with thoughts on utilitarianism and rationalism. It's a deep dive into the radicalization of people. It also criticizes Western ideas.
Politics is just applied philosophy. Most topics that are political do not necessarily involve the government. If it political to say "this person is gay", it is ABSOLUTELY political to say "this person is a nihilist and look at all the trouble that causes"
Technically, all entertainment has a political reading, which is kinda fun to think about. Check out Robin Woods writings if that sounds interesting to you, recommend important cinema clubs episode on it.
But I get it. Lots of bad media now have very little substance compensate with ham fisted twitter-level political statements instead. Cant wait for this fad to end, just make something good.
Can someone explain the modern American usage of the word "ideology" to me? Because in my books, an ideology is something that promises to hold the key to all secrets and all future wonders, the explanation for all evils (which is usually failure to comply to the ideology). E.g. there is even a difference between just being racist on an individual level -- as sucky as that may be -- and explaining the whole world and who is to blame for evil in those terms, the latter being ideology, like white supremacism. Or say, Bitcoin. It can be just technology, but people can also turn cryptocurrencies into an ideology. Same with "AI" and so on.
That's how I understand ideology, to me it implies a narrow and distorting lens through which to squeeze all problems.
But the way I see it used, it seems to be more like something that makes some kind of moral judgement, or has an opinion on a few issues that are framed as "left" or "right" in the US public. I honestly don't know and just can't parse that word the way it's often used.
