insurgentrat [she/her, it/its] @hexbear.net

9h ago

I want to fell you about something small and petty that drives me absolutely fucking bonkers.

So there's this thing people do, it's harmless enough, but it also sort of hints at a completely incoherent style of thinking. It is absolutely unfair to judge people by random shit they write casually, after all I write like 3 geeked out baboons stacked atop one and other and yet I am a noble and refined rat.

Nonetheless I'm a judgy shit so I do. Ok so the thing? It's when people use a quote or situation from fiction as a predictor of what will happen in reality. A concrete example from earlier today paraphrased:

p1: I think blah blah thing will happen

p2: Ah but remember men in black? a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals

me: teakettle noises

The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It's possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it's also possible that it was included for many other reasons.

screeeeeeeeeee

Anyway, share your thoughts. Also your own ridiculous rhetoric irritations.

47 comments

Not only is it childish, but Terry Pratchett said the same thing, but better.

"We should do thing from Starship Troopers because in the book it totally works!"
It works because Heinlein believed it would work, not because it would work that way in reality!

I'm sure everyone's encountered some variation 'socialism good, communism bad remember animal farm', heard that one at work last week but was on the phone and could't do anything but make a face. The poor Murkkkian countrymen wouldn't know communism from any other -ism if it clapped both cheeks and gave them a copy of Wage Labor and Capital.

I try to reach further for examples when I'm talking about stuff specifically so I don't just resort to "this is like blideo gaem" but sometimes it's hard lol

I find it funny someone would turn to MiB for this instead of something like groupthink or any of the other social psych constructs that attempt to explain group behaviors. Literally a century of research into this kind of shit (not all of it is very useful)

this is like that time morbius said "It's morbin time!" and morbed all over the place
- to this day I cannot believe they let that much morb appear on screen at once - truly grotesque

I knew a person that quoted that MiB line all the time and I always wanted to call them out on that

I call it appeal to cinema. It's something my dad has picked up and gives me the same frustration and the thought "oh, this conversation is going nowhere in a hurry."
I remember one time he announced to me that he would "change the question" which is like going "now imagine yourself as this strawman."
- appeal to cinema is a nice punchy name for it!

Lord of the Flies is one of the biggest ones of these. MFer heard about people surviving collectively after a shipwreck, wrote a book about how humans can't do that, and now people cite it like it's a historical document
- I literally was taught this book alongside 1984 and Brave New World. It was like a whole anticommunist book unit
  
  Back when I was taught they did 1984, Brave New World, Handmaids Tale and Clockwork Orange back to back. It was miserable.
- People always miss the real point of that book: that british "people" are savages
- It's also a crap book. Read it as a kid, it sucks
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
  There was actually an IRL situation like Lord of the Flies, and the kids handled it pretty chill.
  
  Yeah that is what the book is based on.
- I am building a hell specifically for people who think Lord of the Flies has anything useful to teach us about the nature of society and cooperation.

p2: Ah but remember men in black? a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
And liberals will tell you with a straight face that they aren't propagandized.
Once had an argument with a guy who tried to demonstrate that communism is bad using the example of Lois Lowry's The Giver. When I pointed out the absurdity of trying to use a children's fiction book to prove your enemies wrong, he fixated on the "children's" part and started throwing out titles like 1984 and Atlas Shrugged.

a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
It applies well in the movie it was written for, in the context of extraterrestrial life existing as fugitives on earth, but there are of course other circumstances where a person can be a dumb panicky animal and a group of people can be reasonable.
I have a petty thing about a movie that I have spoken about but nobody seems to share my anguish. It's the famous "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?" zinger from Happy Gilmore, my mind is locked on the fact that Adam Sandler literally wrote the script, he made him say that dumb line so his character could respond in such a way.
- Happy Gilmore
  IIRC it was a running joke on that movie that "Shooter" McGavin's one liners weren't working. Like he said "and Grizzly Adams had a beard" sarcastically, only for a random guy to reply "Grizzly Adams did have a beard."
- Dan Harmon calls this "Monopoly Guy" after a scene from Ace Ventura.
  
  I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

-so you are a secret alien is what you are saying?

The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It's possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it's also possible that it was included for many other reasons.
People do this with all sorts of shit: from movies, to the bible, to things politicians say. It's just them laundering their own opinion through some perceived authority.
- I like to do it specifically with really dumb movie lines or make up a line that is the total opposite of the message of the movie or character.

This is just like in Idiocracy, probably.

We're talking about the humanities, not STEM here. It's not like there's a social physics with firm predictive formulas for individual or even aggregate human behavior we can use instead. I get what you're saying, and I don't disagree that the narrative priorities of a given author should be taken into account when using fictional works like this, but... Surely you wouldn't say that Dostoevsky's The Idiot or an arbitrary Discworld novel haven't got anything real and useful to teach us about actual human behavior?
- If the thing is in fiction because it happens in reality just use an example of it happening.
  Made up shit only supports arguments about made up shit.
  
  Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
  
  If one known to the commenter is readily available that's fair I suppose, but sometimes the fictional example can be particularly poignant and the basis of your criticism can be advantageously used to illustrate something specific about a given situation and its broader context or impact that an isolated real event might not. As an example, take this small except from Pratchett's 'Small Gods' - largely a critique of religious fanaticism, group think and in/out group behaviors - in which the fictional philosopher "Didactylos" debates the practice of capital punishment (by way of public stoning) of people who've transgressed against the stringent edicts of the central theocracy in that book:
  “I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?'
  'It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-'
  'Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.'
  'The state of the body is not-'
  'Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wasn't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.”
  I could instead have used some factual reporting about an instance of religious mistreatment by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran or something, but I frankly don't think that would have been equally illuminating.
  Edit: Separately, as a counter-point to your assertion that "Made up shit only supports arguments about made up shit.", I'd point out that that doesn't even apply in the hard sciences. Einstein - with his justified love of the Gedankenexperiment - would have vehemently disagreed. So would Nicola Tesla, without the imagination of whom we probably would have eventually had a moden transmission system for energy, but nowhere near as early.

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