Talk:Utopia

Would this and Dystopian be more appropriate moved to and titled Utopia and Dystopia? Personally, I think those titles would sound/fit better.--Zelandoni 21:42, 16 September 2008 (EDT)
 * I agree, the titles always bugged me a bit. It makes linking either way easier, too: utopia and utopian, for example.  Will the content need a lot of reworking?  ħ uman  22:56, 16 September 2008 (EDT)
 * I doubt that the content will need to be changed much. May I?--ζειαηđδηǐ (τ|ϛ) 22:58, 16 September 2008 (EDT)
 * You did ;) so, yes.  Can you chase the links to the old names and fix them to skip the redirect?  Or do you want me to?  ħ uman  02:38, 17 September 2008 (EDT)
 * I'll grab them. Thanks though.--ζειαηđδηǐ (τ|ϛ) 08:01, 17 September 2008 (EDT)

Erm.

"It is often forgotten by true utopians that one person's utopia is someone else's Hell." According to who (or what)? The Bible? The mayor of Detroit? My aunt? How can we make such a sweeping generalization? Isn't this kinda like presenting "One man's trash is another man's treasure" as fact in an article on trash? (Do we even have an article on trash?) Unless I'm told differently, I'm removing it.

P.S. I also partially rewrote the last sentence of the article, because I don't think that the driving force of Communism is accusing people of working towards a utopia. A Writer of Vaudevilles 19:33, 13 November 2008 (EST)
 * While it is a generalization, one of the basic criticisms of utopias is that blueprinting an "ideal society" requires ignoring those who possess their own blueprints or who otherwise dissent. Thomas More's famed Utopia is a case in point: plenty of people (especially in earlier centuries) more or less admired the society it depicted and were inspired to write similar utopias, whereas others (especially nowadays) have denounced it as misogynistic, intolerant, totalitarian, and compared its attitude toward land with the concept of Lebensraum. --Ismailov (talk) 21:31, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

If this were the RationalWiki of 5 years ago
I'd be adding something about Todd Rundgren to the intro. Alas, those days are over. See also Television. Secret Squirrel (talk) 23:13, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Utopia/Distopia as a foil?
I mean in the literary sense; basically a way to represent a set of ideas on how to run society without the complicating factors of reality. Gives "falsifiability", or illustrates failure modes.

Of course, in contrasts some people espousing "utopian" ideas like anarchic capitalists don't really take criticism seriously.88.159.64.170 (talk) 16:36, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

A problem with utopias
They tend to be static and not account for the human desire to 'tinker with how things work', 'the world changing of its own accord' (positive, neutral or negative directions). Anna Livia (talk) 23:01, 2 July 2020 (UTC)