Comment Re:SF Economic Plausibility (Score 1) 300
No. We are not talking about Concorde. We are talking about Hunger Games.
You are drawing parallels between pyramids and Nazis with Hunger Games - NOT with Concorde.
Or are you arguing that Concorde was created so people would suffer?
Which is where you draw, wrongly, the parallel with pyramids and Eichmann.
And NO.
Jews were NOT getting punished. They were being EXTERMINATED. Like lice. Or rats.
They were not deemed as people but as PESTS.
Nazis weren't killing or punishing members of their own society - they were exterminating ANOTHER SPECIES of lower, subhuman, toxic creatures who represented a danger to everything and everyone by their traitorous ways and their disease ridden foul and poisonous blood.
Don't you know that diseases come from impure and degenerate blood and mongreling of races?
THAT is what they KNEW. Not what they believed. KNEW!
It was scientific FACT and COMMON SENSE.
"Fire is hot" kind of thing. Not "Fire is a demon/spirit/god" kind of thing.
And most certainly NOT "Fire is rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products".
Neither pyramids NOR the holocaust have anything to do with "economical or sensible" - because both those actions WERE COMMON SENSE.
To their way of thinking/living.
Just like smoking cigarettes, or drinking, or racial segregation, or slavery, or burning witches is all COMMON SENSE to the people of the time it takes place.
Or take it the other way round - drug and alcohol prohibition, loose gun laws, treating corporations as persons...
Hunger Games on the other hand requires, DEMANDS, that we accept an economic and REASONABLE explanation for the districts.
THEN it demands that we accept that the problem is actually "crazy-mad rulers".
I.e. The system is FINE. It's just being run badly.
See... if we just get some of that glitz and technology to the districts, they'll be able to do their manual labor much more efficiently and thereby enjoy their startrekian technology which has no need for their manual labor... wait... umm... republic... freedom... stuff...
"Fire is an oxidation caused by demons."
The world you are describing actually makes more sense.
E.g. Imagine a scene where Catpuss Everwobble finds out that all that shit that districts were producing is just being dumped into the ocean by robots.
I.e. That the technology shown everywhere in the capitol is actually used in every facet of that society and that hard manual labor of the districts really IS just punishment for insurrection.
"You were born not to be a slave Miss Everwobble, but to be punished for the sins of your species against the something or other represented by the capitol. Racial purity, freedom, government, economy, god... stuff. Fuckit... what was the theme of this story again?"
But that never happens. Because - imagining a working economy demands scientific reasoning.
Collins writes children's fantasy books.