'Walking Dead' Drops Liberal Platitudes, Goes Conservative

Big-Hollywood ^ | 22 Oct 2012, 11:16 AM PDT | Kurt Schlichter

[djone]

"We are only two episodes into the new season, and it appears that AMC's "The Walking Dead" may have been resurrected after last year’s mostly craptacular second season, which was preceded by a pretty craptacular first season. And the reason seems to be the conservative outlook that the show has now embraced. Let’s pause for a moment to let the fanatic liberal fanboy virgins fulminate and fret over the notion that their favorite zombie show may have been saved by their characters’ (and the writers’) change – unconscious almost certainly – from a liberal world view to a conservative one.... Let’s understand the difference between a liberal world view and a conservative one. It’s not necessarily about retail politics, though you got some sense of it with the “I don’t believe in guns” crap early on, as if the world wasn’t crawling with cannibal corpses looking to dine on the lesser cast members. And it is not just that the views of the Georgian characters seemed to be the same as the views of the provincial Hollywood screenwriters – country folk are racists and sinister, religious folk are abusive and borderline psycho, and the only good cops are the ones who soft pedal the macho......

...my other brother

[adorno]

It’s ironic that the show would have had a liberal leaning to it, since, the “good guys”, meaning, the undead, spent most of the show killing the dead, who, as we all know, tend to be liberal voters. That would make the show very politically incorrect towards that major liberal constituency.

[LizardQueen]

I cackled with glee the night they offed Dale. Thats been nearly my favorite scene in the show so far.

He was SUCH a libtard moron - probably a political science college professor somewhere in a coastal city pre-infection.

[21twelve]

“Not right after the zom-poc. They’ll get there eventually. Which is exactly what’s going on in the show.”

Was just watching the first episode with my kids again. And how everything still looked normal. Fresh cut and green lawns, plates on the dinner table - like it was just a dream and would come back to normal.

And as the seasons go on it gets darker and darker. Just like it would in real life.

My 15 year old daughter brought up the point about Dale, and his morals, and how that ended in last season. Although there are still morals. IIRC someone said something like “Rick is all for the group. Anything that threatens the group is open season.” (Threatens is the operative word - not just being a “stranger”)

True to form I think.

[Secret Agent Man]

liberals see man and the world from the ideology in their own minds.

conservatives see man and the world as they actually exist.

[Secret Agent Man]

there will still be room for that stuff, but not nearly as much as there is now.

[RC one]

I saw the Rick/Shane/Dale relationship as two alpha dogs fighting for control of a pack and one beta dog that didn’t know his place. There’s no room for two alpha dogs in a pack. One of them has to go, one way or the other. I’m glad it worked out the way it did.

[rdb3]

I don't always watch TV, but when I do, I watch Dos Deadees.

[fr_freak]

You're talking about a show set in the South - there would be guns EVERYWHERE. As it was, I recall Rick having a big bag of guns that he grabbed from the police armory. So, you teach everybody in your group how to use firearms, safety principles, how to aim, how to deal with misfires, etc. etc. and then YOU ARM THEM. It would, in fact, be immoral to be in possession of a big bag of guns but refuse to give them to anybody. That would be a potential death sentence. If the reason you are reluctant to hand out the guns is because they don't know how to use them, YOU TEACH THEM. IMMEDIATELY. You don't say, "Ah well, they're unfamiliar with guns, so let's keep them defenseless." Gun training would be an immediate priority, not "when we get around to it."

And excusing Lori's behavior by saying that she is a suburban housewife who is not used to having to watch her child is an incredibly unrealistic way of looking at it. People only behave certain ways when the environment allows them to. A person may have grown up his whole life swimming in pools and lakes, but that doesn't mean that he'll jump right in to shark-infested waters just because he's used to being able to jump right in. He'd say hell no, I'm not swimming in there. Likewise, Lori being a lazy housewife when the world was safe was reasonable, but being a lazy housewife in a zombie apocalypse is beyond unrealistic. If she cared even a LITTLE for her kid, she would never let him go beyond 3 feet from her sight. It would be INSTINCTIVE. They would all be scared, for one, and people don't do cavalier stuff when they are afraid. That is why having a bunch of sheltered, spoiled, never-seen-real-danger Hollywood left-wingers writing for a show like this tends to suck: they have no idea what real people would do in a survival situation because they've NEVER SEEN IT.

For that matter, ALL of the characters would be terrified, all the time. NONE OF THEM would ever wander off alone, especially unarmed. They would cling to each other like ticks. Very few, if any of them, would even CONSIDER leaving the relative safety of the group, not even to take a tinkle in the treeline. THAT would be reality. And it wouldn't be a conscious decision - it would be purely instinctive behavior. The writers can't grasp that because, most likely, none of them have ever been in survival situations.

Back to the gun thing - if you saw the season 3 opener, you'll notice that the kid, Carl, is suddenly a full-fledged gun-wielding badass who can get clean headshots from 50 yards away, at moving targets, with a pistol (evidence that the writers know exactly jack about guns). Well, someone apparently took it upon himself to see that Carl knew how to shoot, and them armed him. Unfortunately, it took months and a lot of whining before that could happen. With less liberal writers, that would have happened by the end of week 2.

[rdb3]

Dale was the liberal conscience of the show, and he was remarkably wrong in season two when it came to the prisoner they had in captivity. It was Shane that took care of that issue. And Shane was often characterized as being in the wrong, or at least the home of dubious strategies.

I thought Dale at least had a conscience, though sometimes wrong.

Shane was a p-whipped jerk! I was glad when he went toes-up for good.

He may have had some good points, but still...

The pain you feel today is the strength you'll have tomorrow.

[Secret Agent Man]

apparently in extended clips the mexicans were fooling rick, as they come back after a few days and find the gang gone and the old people murdered. it was a total con.

[fr_freak]

I don’t have a problem with the show focusing on the human conflicts and drama that would arise from a zombie apocalypse; I just think that the conflicts that they portrayed were unrealistic, and would not be the types of conflicts one would see in a survival situation like this. That’s what bugs me. We’re not seeing anything close to realistic human behavior.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

It has long been recognized that in “conservative horror”, “the threat is out there”. That is, monsters outside of us are trying to get to us.

“Liberal horror” is the opposite, that “the real monster is inside us.”

Importantly, both of these can be good horror shows, but they do not really overlap much. Usually one or the other predominates with just a smattering of the other.

But knowing this, the overall theme of horror is sometimes clearly oriented to one or the other. Zombies, for example, are “out there trying to get us.”

[barmag25]

Is there a walking dead ping list?

[ItsOurTimeNow]

It still is - the comics are up to issue 100+ now. there’s no liberal bent to the comics at all - it’s simply survive or die. Rick’s character goes to some really, really dark places as the story progresses, and I find myself asking if I’d do the same things to protect my kids if I were in the same situation.

The show diverges somewhat from the books, and has a much softer tone to it. The comics are very dark in some spots - almost disturbing.

[cripplecreek]

You're talking about a show set in the South - there would be guns EVERYWHERE.

I think you might be surprised at how many guns are in the north. States like Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania probably have as many guns as the rest of the country combined.

Come to think of it, the north might be preferable in a zompoc. The cold weather has to slow them down at least.

[Vermont Lt]

One of the games we play when we are watching is to call out, “Carl—go back in the house/tent/camper....!!!”

It seems no matter what, they were shooing him away.

[Marcella]

I have seen every episode and I didn’t see any of them as liberal when it started. Being afraid of a gun is not just a liberal view. What I saw was people stuck in “normal”, as in we don’t normally go around shooting people in the head and many loaded guns in the open is a dangerous situation since no one knows what the next guy will do with his gun. Mentally, they tried to stay in the world they knew that had a fair amount of security and was functioning.

It took experience in this new “nothing is there anymore” world for these people to slowly change and accept reality. I don’t see that as going from being liberal to being conservative.

In today’s world, those of us who have thought ahead, mentally play out what would happen if there was no more power for years. We would have to deal with “modern” zombies who have nothing and who are dying every day.

I don’t know how this series will resolve at the end and I don’t know how a world without power would resolve that problem.

[Kartographer]

"He epitomized the most selfish type of person — a person who makes other people make the hard choices, while he snipes from the sidelines"

Maybe Dale was a Freeper? That describes about have the post I see on here. ;-)

[Blackirish]

I’m betting that Michonne and Andrea go dyke!!!!

There both pretty butch as is.

[Kartographer]

Don’t look now, but your juvenile fantasies are showing.