Er, are the liberal ones supposed to seem reasonable or crazy, is what I mean.
I would think they're supposed to seem crazy, but not so crazy that you can't empathize with their justifications.
This is essentially it -- they are crazy people in pursuit of a believable agenda. You aren't supposed to think they're reasonable; they're shooting people for gun control, after all. But there are many people in modern society who actually agree with some or all of their goals.
little connection to reality or conservatism in general
Let me venture a guess here: the win condition of LCS is your own personal ideal of how you would like society to really genuinely be?
No, in fact I didn't even write most of the issues. More than half were written by Tarn Adams and I've altered very few of them. My personal vision of ideal society is significantly more conservative than the Liberal Crime Squad's.
radical islam and attributing them to conservatives
Radical islam is "conservative" in its view of women.
Within Islamic culture, it is "conservative" in the sense that they adhere to very traditionalist and anti-liberal views on gender equality that are based directly on religious views about protecting women and modesty. Within western culture, which is what LCS is based on, there is no precedent, going back through the renaissance, middle ages, classical era, or before when women weren't allowed to leave their homes without their husband. It has no relevance to reality unless you are ascribing Islamic views to the CCS.
Forget islam for a moment, and think about stereotypical conservative views of women:
Traditionally women cannot be priests? Check.
No women in the military? Check.
Women making wedding vows to obey their husband? Check.
The proper role of women is to stay at home and take care of the family? Check.
Women cannot leave the house without their husband?
Never in the history of western society has this ever been check. Why forget Islam if you're holding up uniquely Islamic ideals for gender roles as representing conservatism? Why choose something that even radical conservatives would oppose to represent them?
Several of these would also be objectionable since, even if they fit your stereotype of what conservatives think, they haven't represented conservative views in a hundred years. Sure, anti-suffrage has precedence, but is your Conservative Crime Squad from the 1920s, or the 2010s? This is dating back to when the south was a solid Democrat voting bloc.
This view of women as submissive creatures, as property, is very much in-theme with traditional conservatism. Confining them to the home is simply an extreme scenario. Extreme scenarios are what we're looking for. You might not personally relate...but I have a tough time thinking of something as "extreme" when I remember it actually having been that way in my lifetime.
You've cited suicide bombers and funeral crashing as extreme, even when they represent very common views, and simply express those views in an extreme manner. I doubt you'd have any problem seeing even Ron Paul Libertarians as extreme once they form a crime squad and start murdering fast food workers for their beliefs.
Keep in mind that at C+ levels the conditions I've described are reality now or have been recently. Even today the US military does not allow women to serve in some capacities. Women were only even given the right to vote in the past century. Prior to 1973 it was illegal in most states for women to have abortions even if they were raped.
On a five point scale, as is used in LCS, the range is:
L+
L
m
C
C+
Plus one additional level of absurdity for the lose conditions, which some people colloquially call "C++". Winning is the same as L+.
You're adding an additional + to the scale on the L and C parts, so that L+ means "liberal" and L++ means "liberal elite". So when you say C+ views are realistic, you are saying that the moderately conservative views -- which the CCS finds
insufficient -- are realistic. That's not what I'm talking about.
Conservative Crime Squad really should be made by someone
who understands conservatism and can do justice to a satire of the right.
Once again, I suggest that your personal views are sufficiently liberal that you're whitewashing what you're willing to accept as real versus fantasy. Going through my list, pretty much everything up to C+ levels is either real today, or has been real within my lifetime.
This is called a staw man argument, whereby you ignore that I'm talking about the "C++" entries on your lists, and claim I'm "whitewashing" because I won't accept that your "C+" views. Which is a complete misrepresentation. Indeed, many of these moderate conservative views aren't extreme enough to represent the CCS's views, because they represent compromises; so I agree that an additional level is necessary. Many US States would readily prohibit abortion entirely except in special cases, if it wasn't unconstitutional, and the push to overturn Roe vs. Wade is a quite mainstream movement intended to permit this. A proper CCS view would therefore be an extension of, as Asmodeous says, the principle of life beginning at conception. The fetus has citizenship. It's extreme, it's amusing, and it's
actually satire of the right. You could easily find people who would say "Okay, that's a little extreme, but they have the basic idea right." On the other hand, nobody is calling for putting women in jail because their husband beat them and they had a miscarriage.
handling of the political situation that will make the game appear
to have been written by a moderate cynic instead of a conservative radical.
Everything listed in this post is either real today or has been real within my lifetime. As such...I think it's fair to say that it could not be considered "radical." So, to be radical, all of these issues need to be anted up beyond what is listed.
Please set aside your own personal discomfort. If you don't want to live in the C++ world I've described, I understand that. I wouldn't either. But it is a plausible portrayal of radical conservativism.
So this is pretty amazing. I criticize your "C++" lines, and you defend with "C+" lines, then swap back to claiming "C++" is plausible, indeed necessary in order to make the CCS come across as radical. Is your game going to be about handing out flowers, such that you need to fabricate the political alignment of your protagonists in order for them to come across as insane, or is it going to be about shooting things and kidnapping people? Because if it's the latter, you don't need to do
anything to dress up conservatism to make it look radical. Everything is radical when sufficiently disproportionate force is applied behind it, and that's part of the irony.
It is more insulting than anything when you try to suggest to me that everything I've said comes from a "personal discomfort" and desire to not live in a society built by the CCS. What I'm doing is pressuring you to uphold the integrity of the game as a satire by actually representing a liberal-conservative dynamic through conservative eyes. If that's not the game you want to make, then go ahead and make your game, but don't call it Conservative Crime Squad.
I know the way the game rips on Liberalism is fairly meta and subtle, but it's not completely inscrutable here. You've obviously picked up on it and found the LCS to represent sufficiently crazy people for your taste, and that's with very few exaggerations on the left wing ideals.
Am I the only person who thinks this entire concept is flawed? You could make a clone of LCS for the CCS instead, but it wouldn't really contribute anything new or interesting, it would be a rehash of the same thing with the same gags but instead tied to the opposite extreme if you are going to put the hours into it to make this happen, instead just add to LCS and improve it instead. Or write something new and original.
This is more a matter of how a person wants to spend their time. I think a CCS game would be fun, but I agree that it's not worth the time it would take me to develop; I'd just work on improving LCS or develop something entirely different. But that's why I'm not personally working on it.