chat

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collectively after a shipwreck, wrote a book about how humans can't do that, and now people cite it like it's a historical document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 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."

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.

this is like that time morbius said "It's morbin time!" and morbed all over the place

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.

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.

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

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

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 just like in Idiocracy, probably.

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

"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!

Nah you’re right tho. It’s also when people use idioms as logic. “time is money therefore money is time” type shit. straight up reality detachment

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?

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