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Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. TVTropes has a real danger of adding its crazy vocabulary to your everyday life, especially on things unrelated to entertainment. (See also Idiot Ball, Fridge Logic, and Forensic Phlebotinum, which may be on topic.)

Really, someone should write up some of these political stories in terms of TVTropes so I can know how I feel about how the plot's progressing. So far it seems like we're in a poorly written mockumentary.

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Tvtropes tends to drain the specialness from an entertainment product and reveal the generic components. Applying the same lens to politics results in something like "Yes Minister", where we realize government actions aren't caused by "good" or "bad" actors, but the inherent structure.

Most current crises have a referent in "Yes Minister", including this one - when the PM denied the bugging of an MP's phone. ("He should not have denied something of which he had no knowledge.")

This indicates how few fundamental situations or tensions exist in modern government, and how often they reoccur.

I think you're right on each count. But I also think that there's a lot of benefit from having a vocabulary - even a goofy one - that allows these things to be broken down and understood. On some level it certainly does remove that je ne sais quoi from the topic, but on the other hand it illuminates it somewhat (so long as the terminology isn't too slanted). Even a mild bias isn't bad, since we naturally adjust for rhetorical tone, and it can add a bit of levity to an otherwise tedious discussion (see Phabricator for a nice case study in that).

At any rate, I really like the idea that there really isn't bad people conspiring but just a badly formed/tuned system. (I'm a process engineer, so I suppose that gives me hope where others wouldn't see any.)

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