Eh, a lot of the Arch-Conservative positions still sound kinda bad and aren't worded to sound good, you really need better NewSpeak. I've put plenty of NewSpeak into the game from a Liberal perspective, of course, to make Liberalism look good and Conservatism look bad, within the crazy little game-world.
Anyway I disagree about reversing the positions on Flag Burning. Conservatives tend to be much more nationalistic/patriotic than liberals, who take more of a view of trying to care about people in other countries and not care as much about which nation someone is from, at least that's a good stereotype we could use even if it's not entirely accurate.
So the C+ text for Flag Burning would be:
"The sacred symbol of our Republic is protected from desecration by traitors."
As for stuff like Privacy and Free Speech, a lot of Conservatives have a Libertarian streak so in a Conservative game where Conservatives are good and Liberals are evil, obviously Conservatives would be in favor of Privacy from Big Brother snooping on you and in favor of Free Speech that doesn't have any Misguided Liberal laws banning so-called "hate speech". I mean you can look at the NSA under Obama spying on all of us and how people like Rand Paul are against it or look at people like Rush Limbaugh as champions of free speech who the Misguided Liberals are always trying to censor when he says things that are politically incorrect so-called "hate speech", because obviously to Misguided Liberals, the Conservative Truth hurts so their only option is to silence it.
Using Arch-Conservative and Elite Liberal to refer to the 2 extremes, those can both still be kept if you have a pro-Conservative game... Elite Liberal sounds bad after all, and Arch-Conservative just means you deeply believe in the great Conservative principles our Founding Fathers founded this nation on in 1776 when they wore those tri-corner hats on top of their powdered wigs.
I mean, I've rewritten code for changes in laws to make them sound better, in the recent revisions of the game on SourceForge. This especially included making Conservative changes to laws sound better... any bill or proposition ought to sound like a good thing... the descriptions of bills and propositions are always written by the people in favor of them who want them to get passed, so generally it should be expected to have highly biased language that makes it sound like passing the bill or proposition is a good thing. I especially thought I came up with a clever NewSpeak way of referring to increasing nuclear power plants: "Supporting alternative energy sources", the kind of thing that sounds good to a Liberal, even though it's actually referring to the Conservative idea of building massive numbers of nuclear power plants with hardly any safety regulations.
Anyway most of those are fairly good but they could be better... I really dislike the sound of "rewarding industry", when trying to talk positively about pollution... it sounds much better to say that you are "protecting American manufacturing jobs". If you phrase it like that, even many Liberals would be like, hey, I want to protect American manufacturing jobs too!
So really I'd recommend increasing the level of NewSpeak and bias to make Conservative stuff sound good and Liberal stuff sound bad. Note that in real life I'm a liberal but that doesn't mean I can't play a Conservative in a video game. And of course the game itself is ridiculously biased to make Liberals sound good and Conservatives sound bad... although there are examples of Liberals sounding bad, like if you have low Persuasion skill, low Intelligence, and low Charisma, and go out to try and talk to people about the issues, you say really stupid things that make Liberalism look idiotic. Similarly if you had a Conservative game where Conservatism was meant to look good, someone with low skills who went to try and talk about the issues would likewise say stupid things that make Conservatism look bad. After all, Liberalism and Conservatism are basically mirror images of each other that oppose each other on everything, at least in the United States, due to political partisanship. In other nations, it doesn't work that way at all, and liberals and conservatives actually have quite a bit of beliefs in common and often form coalition governments together against people they disagree with, such as actual genuine socialists. In the United Kingdom for instance, the Liberal Democrats (who meet the British definition of what it is to be Liberal) are allied in a coalition with the Conservative Party, with the Labour Party (a bunch of socialists) in opposition. Of course in reality the Labour Party isn't really socialist anymore, as Tony Blair was a Third Way politician just like Bill Clinton, a neoliberal, who aimed to make his party more "moderate" and friendly to business interests. And the Conservative Party of Britain isn't remotely as conservative as the U.S. Republicans, so actually the parties in Britain aren't that far apart. The 3 major political parties in Britain are actually all pretty much the same to be honest.
But in the United States for some reason we have ridiculous levels of partisan polarization, Democrats and Republicans hating each other, Liberals and Conservatives being arch-enemies, you can easily see this on many Internet message boards like the comments sections on news articles online where the 2 sides are constantly at war in the comments. Then again, 90% of those people posting ridiculous stuff on news sites are trolling and don't actually believe the nonsense they are posting, they just do it foar teh LULZ. Half the time when I post stuff on those sites I don't really believe it 100%, and am maybe kinda trolling just a little bit, posting slightly more extreme stuff than what I actually believe just to get a reaction. But, I will say this, that I believe what I say when I am saying it... then after I post something I look at what I posted and think, wow, that's awesome, that's REALLY going to get a lot of people worked up when they read it, and people will favorite the comment and friend me or flag the comment and block me depending on their views, and they'll all reply either agreeing or disagreeing... Sometimes after I post a comment to some site like Huffington Post I post another one like 15 minutes later after reading more comments and I'm actually an open-minded person and sometimes change my mind on things, so sometimes 15 minutes later I post a comment on the same article espousing the exact opposite point of view on an issue from the one I held 15 minutes earlier... and I believe what I am posting at the time I am espousing it, both times... that is the peril of being open-minded... if your head's that wide open your brain is bound to fall out. I guess that's what I like about this game... since I'm perfectly capable of looking at things from the Liberal or the Conservative point of view... although I think maybe my Conservative point of view is warped which is why it seems wrong and the Liberal one seems right on pretty much everything... in other words when I try and think like a Conservative it ends up being like a straw man argument. Or maybe I am giving Conservatives too much credit whenever I entertain the notion that their philosophy is equally valid to Liberalism, I don't know. I guess the failing of both Liberalism and Conservatism in America today is neither of them is a coherent ideology, they are just both defined in opposition to each other, so each of them knows what it is against, but not what it is for. I have that problem too, I know what I am against, but not what I am for. There are a lot of bad ideas politically that I KNOW are wrong, but there are very few good ideas that I have any kind of certainty that they are right. I suppose the only solution to this problem is to use science... do controlled experiments with reproducible results that compare one policy choice to another. As an example I don't think capitalism is a good system but I don't think communism is any good either, I am opposed to both of them, and trying to look for an alternative system that is actually good, but I haven't found any yet. So for now I think the best system is the mixed economy, a mix of capitalism and socialism... which is what most nations, in practice have... but most nations don't have quite the right mix... I think we can find a better mix... Sweden has a good mix of capitalism and socialism, they do a mixed economy well, but I'm unsure whether it's possible for other nations to duplicate this success if those nations aren't similar enough to Sweden. For instance if you tried to put in place a Swedish economic system in Afghanistan, that would never work, since those 2 countries have nothing in common. It would probably work pretty well in the United States, though. Maybe.
Author
Topic: CCS Ideas (Read 2456 times)