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Post by StyxD on Jan 24, 2018 0:42:34 GMT
It's almost like the people posting this stuff kinda know they are shills, just repeating the corporately approved mantra, and so are getting a bit defensive that people are noticing. Eh, I'm pretty sure they're doing this bona fide. I don't really understand the reasoning behind this. It would be super interesting to really drill into those people's heads. For now I have two hypotheses. 1. Fanboys with a cause. It's a thing I noticed about left-wing fans and I find it pretty horrible for both discussion and inclusivity and I should probably talk about in more length elsewhere. So, you got your typical fanboys and fangirls that fixate on some particular interpretation of the work or their favourite pairing or a theory they find particularly convincing, and then they evangelize their opinions to anyone listening. Annoying but harmless. And hey, I can totally empathize with that. I mean, for example, I will literally fight you if you disagree with me on who the parents of the protagonist of Hollow Knight are. But then you have fanboys with a "progressive" cause. They also have their fixation, except they strongly that everyone has a moral obligation to agree with them or else they're oppressing / erasing some group. Like "Give Else a girlfriend!" Frozen fans, except you're homophobic if you're not completely enthusiastic about the idea. (By the way, this kind of fans absolutely smothered Steven Universe fandom and it's karma for the creators.) It would explain the anti-backlash backlash, although it feels pretty unlikely that so many critics would also be this particular kind of vitriolic fanboy. But who knows? It's a Star Wars movie, and people who think it's great have also probably been familiar with the franchise for a long time. 2. Star Wars intellectuals. I've noticed a fair amount of opinions stating that TLJ was "the first intellectual Star Wars movie", that it had deep meanings and themes, and the subversions were all genius and casting the franchise in a completely new light… Or perhaps it just struck something personal with them. People who decry the very same points as bad writing are not just disagreeing on the quality of the movie, but also probably make it sound like a personal insult to them. I'm kind of banking on this one more. Some people who love the movie just feel so disbelieving and insulted when they hear criticism of it. I've even read articles saying things like "Last Jedi is NOT a flop" justifiying how it actually made tons of money and was not a disappointed. Now, to be fair I've seen some YT videos where haters are gloating about how TLJ is failing financially, so they can feel validated. So it's justified that some would want to do dismiss those claims. (I'm not being sarcastic, there is a real, totally serious article about how great Last Jedi is because its a condemnation of the evils of mansplaining. Yes, really.) Oh, I've seen that one. The ironic thing is that in the same article the author states that "good storytelling is not the same as wish fulfillment", yet defends Holdo's subplot on the sole basis that it's something they wanted to see. Rose wasn't there to make Tumblr fans feel special I'm pretty sure it was admiral Holdo's role, too. But not everything is Rose'y in the Social Justice land, as someone pointed out that while Holdo is a champion against mansplaining, the same subplot basically sets up Poe, a Latinx* guy, as a stereotypical hotheaded macho man that disregards a woman's leadership and need to be put into place for that. The battle on SJ buzzwords that then followed ended up dragging, with no definitive victor, at least as far as I've seen. *) So yeah, before happy TLJ fans I didn't know this word existed and I think it's an abysmal situation. I guess it's not cultural appropriation when SJWs borrow a word from a language spoken generally by a disadvantaged population (in North America), decide they don't like some features of the language and "fix" it. Good job, USA, you so enlightened that I need to wear sunglasses when I read feminist blogs from now on. As someone who's native language is a gendered one - yes, gender inclusivity sucks in this kind of languages, but it's problem that actual speakers of the language need to tackle, not some cool USA kids that decide to just put a big X over vowels that offend them! It's plain to see that people who came up with that word know fuck all about Spanish, since such a form would have far reaching consequences across many parts of the language… but when you're an ignoramus convinced that the extend of gender neutral writing is deciding which of the word-salad pronouns to use, I guess it's all peachy. If that is not cultural imperialism, I don't know what is. In fact, I'm not the first one to think this about this brilliant "Latinx" abomination, based on a perusal of search results, and the one response seems to be "well, Spanish is actually an imperialistic language since it was brought by conquerors, so that's okay." Which is moronic, but also… why are you then working on bringing gender neutrality to English and not Cherokee or any other native American language, since colonial languages are all bad and should be completely disregarded? I can't believe how damn parochial the supposed progressives are being in this case. But even if we disregard all this… how the fuck are you even supposed to pronounce this word in English? Tolkien's orcs have more pronounceable consonant clusters than "nx". At this point you might as well write it "Latin_" and pronounce it "Latinpfffrt!" for all it matters. Hey, if any of you guys have contacts with liberal English-speaking academics in America, feel free to drop this cognitive bomb on them for giggles: Slavic family names sometimes have different masculine and feminine forms. This is especially true for Polish-derived surnames ending with "ski" (feminine form: "ska") and Russian-derived surnames ending with "ov"/"off" (feminine form: "ova"). This cannot stand. Just using the masculine form always, as Americans usually do with those kind of surnames, erases female family members, but also restricts their gender identity. Sign a petition to Marvel to change Black Widow's name to "Natalia Romanovx" today! Sorry for going off on a rant, but languages are really important for me. I don't think I've ever felt so angry at American "progressives"… I guess everyone has their breaking point.
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Post by Horsie on Jan 24, 2018 0:57:35 GMT
Given what I've seen, I think this is the case as well. Hark mentioned it a little while ago, I can't remember where (though for some reason it reminds me of a hippo ). Even "ovx" isn't inclusive, as it assumes that there's supposed to be a letter following the "ov", that discriminates against people who identify as male. It should be "Romanx", you're so inconsiderate!
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 24, 2018 1:14:38 GMT
Latinx I have heard before. Its ASTOUNDINGLY racist. I mean the idea of telling people that you don't like the way their language is structured so want them to change to fit with the rules of english that you find more acceptable? The sheer arrogance is amazing. "Hay, spanish speakers, your language is actually bad, so I've taken the liberty to correct it to conform to my standards more. You are welcome!" It's like something some 19th century explorer would try to do. It is utterly gross. And all that is aside form that it was clearly made up by internet twats as it is virtually impossible to pronounce out loud.
It's not as stupid sounding as Misogynoir (the combination of racism and sexism that black women face...no really, that is a social justice term) but its pretty close.
I dunno when it all got so stupid. I feel like I didn't move, but the movement moved away from me and left me behind. These endless string of gibberish, offensive, poorly thought through terms and ideas that cloud any serious attempt at social progress drive me nuts.
What I find curious about the "backlash to the backlash" is its very much coming from the left. It's all the really liberally, social justicy type publications that seem most upset that people don't like the film. I think the intellectual explanation is close to the mark, but I think its made worse by people making the movie into a "cause" that needs to be fought over. like its a mile stone of equality somehow, rather than a big dumb event movie form a souless corporation. So when they are getting told their interpretation is wrong, its calling their intellectualism stupid, but ALSO calling their ideas of equality and feminism etc stupid (from their point of view) and this riles them up even more to need to fight back. There's deffinitely some kind of poltical element to it.
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 24, 2018 1:36:27 GMT
Regarding social justice being parochial; it is something you see a lot. Like sexism in America where women get wolf whistled is terrible, sexism in the middle east where women get stoned? No interest. The same with thinking immigration is great and being against it is evil, but having no problem with Japan, a country that is racially very homogeneous. If you raise these they get hand waved as "bad but not what we are talking about" or you are viewed as being racist for criticising a none white culture.
It also tends to involve a very simple "good guy vs bad guy" mode of thinking, like this is some dumb movie or something.
Like White people are evil oppressors, 'people of colour' are oppressed. it's why you get all that dumb "you have to have institutional power to be racist so a black person cannot be racist" redefinition stuff. it's because if they define it that way the problems only go one way so the good guy/bad guy thinking holds up. So when you have people of colour being racist to each other, or being sexist or homophobic, it becomes too confusing and difficult. When you've built your thought process around the need to defend a group and that people criticising a group are evil, its hard to flip and point out why that group is bad. So you have to do a bit of double think and push those to one side.
Their thinking is just too black and white... ....How ironic.
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Post by Canuovea on Jan 24, 2018 3:26:46 GMT
Yes, keep telling us your wisdom and deep understanding about what other people believe, Hark. I'm sure you've got it right.
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 24, 2018 7:55:09 GMT
Canuovea sorry I dont mean to paint with a broad brush. Obviously there are a wide range of people who care about social justice type stuff and have varying opinions of it. I was just trying to illustrate things in the movement that annoy me and are relatively wide spread. When you go on websites dedicated to those topics, the views I'm talking about are the mainstream ones they state.
I mean yes not everyone involved has identical views, but to be able to talk about the movement at all I have to generalise somewhat. Not every christian is homophobic and not every Tory hates the NHS but if I'm not allowed any generalisation in discussing those groups and why I don't agree with them then I'm reduced to saying what I think of each persons views on an individual basis, which seems to leave me pretending that the wider movements or ideologies don't exist.
I wasn't trying to describe you, or any individual proponent of those ideas. So I'm sorry if it came across that way or annoyed you.
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Post by StyxD on Jan 24, 2018 8:48:13 GMT
Guys, please, let's not hate on each other. Canuovea, I took offence with Hark's interpretation of the progressive movement several times in the past, but it's impossible to deny that all of the issues he describes do exist.
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 24, 2018 18:05:21 GMT
The thing to remember, when you read me saying something you think is stupid, its just must stupid opinion. I'm not smarter than anyone here, and unless the topic is Harkovast related nonsense, I'm not an authority on anything.
I dunno if anyone picked up on this, but after scoring all the star wars characters with porgs to represent how stupid they were...I gave myself 5 and a half porgs in my signature...
Back to the topic at hand, I think one reason I am skeptical of the movites of the backlash to the backlash crowd is I rememeber how it went down with Ghostbusters 2016. There was that one guy who said the AVGN was sexist for not wanting to watch the film...and then got called out for groping a woman in public and asking his friends to "smell his fingers". There was also a guy I saw pushing a similar line who was also slut shaming Trump's wife on twitter. (And before anyone gets outraged, when I said backlash to the backlash crowd I mean the reviewers posting the weird articles about how you are wrong if you dont like it and probably an evil monster. I'm bashing the liberal media here, not any individual who argues in favour of the film.)
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Post by StyxD on Jan 24, 2018 21:22:33 GMT
Eh, I wouldn't quite use this word. Spanish is not a race. It's not as stupid sounding as Misogynoir Hey, I don't think "misogynoir" is a stupid term. I mean, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's useful as a descriptor. And is a bit… lighthearted, even? As feminist terms go, it's better than "rape culture". I dunno when it all got so stupid. Maybe "Internet" is sufficient to say? I mean, conservatists got more bold-faced and stupid over the last decade, and unfortunately maybe there's no good reason why this process would spare liberals. like its a mile stone of equality somehow, rather than a big dumb event movie form a souless corporation Well, there has been a trend lately to clamor for representation in popular franchises. It's part fanboyism, part belief it will normalize more diverse casts. In a way, this probably makes cases like this "too big to fail" in the eyes of some people. Cause admitting the work is less than stellar might make big companies avoid diversity in future projects… or just give ammo to the detractors. Like sexism in America where women get wolf whistled is terrible, sexism in the middle east where women get stoned? No interest. Eh, this is actually justified. Things that are wrong are wrong regardless where they happen. Should a thief be able to defend themselves by saying "why are you going after me when you still have unsolved murder cases"? And there's enough men saying "stop complaining about Western men mistreating women cause they're mistreated worse elsewhere". Besides, what are Western feminists to do about Middle East? Launch a coup in Iran? They're not CIA. Ironically for this discussion, this deflection tactic is idiomatically called "and in America they beat up blacks" in Polish. Allegedly, this is what a communist party representative said to an USA ambassador when the latter was questioning him about human right breaches during communist regime. So when you have people of colour being racist to each other, or being sexist or homophobic, it becomes too confusing and difficult. Just yesterday I've seen an article that was a guide how to handle Lainlubba-dub-dub people being prejudiced towards black people. It's clearly a delicate operation. You could turn this into a series of O'Reilly books. I dunno if anyone picked up on this, but after scoring all the star wars characters with porgs to represent how stupid they were...I gave myself 5 and a half porgs in my signature... I thought it was because you didn't want to waste a perfectly good picture of a porg. Even "ovx" isn't inclusive, as it assumes that there's supposed to be a letter following the "ov", that discriminates against people who identify as male. It should be "Romanx", you're so inconsiderate! Renard, you're a genius. You solved gender neutral writing in all languages! Let's just remove all suffixes and replace it with "x"! Let's test this. Something simple, like maybe "My sister was sick." "Mx x* byx chorx." Looks legit. Now, for phrases that become abnormally short like "mx" we'll probably take a page out of the "zir" book and just make up something completely out of the left field. I'm almost tempted to make this a conlang. *) Polish lacks a general word for "sibling", at least in singular. Obviously, we can't allow such a blatantly gendering word as "sister".
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 24, 2018 22:14:52 GMT
Its true that there is a a legit stupdi thing of going "well what about this worse thing" to stop people caring about another problem and derail it, that's true. But the fact those other problems seem to get zero attention seems suspect to me. Perhaps its an over reaction to them being used as a distraction so now any mention of them is viewed as a distraction, to the poitn that they aren't viewed as important.
You rae right, I guess racist is the wrong word...maybe I should start sayign its colonialist and steal SJW terms. Its really gross behaviour whatever the right term is.
Another example of how American centric sjw stuff can be. They tried ot do a movement called Black Lives Matter UK.
UK police don't normally have guns, so don't shoot people much (black or otherwise). The movement ended up protesting an air port that was goign to make pollution they considered to be 'enviromental racism' (stay with me, I'm not making this up). They blocked some run ways and some roads and made being annoyed with them. Amusingly the ones blocking the air port run way were all white. The whole thing felt like young poeple who had gone online and got fired up but were not actually living in that country so couldnt' take pat, no matter how awesome they thought it would be.
Obviously not to sya there aren't social issues and racism and stuff over here, but the specific issue Black Lives Mattered formed over (police killing black suspects) isn't a thing over here.
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Post by Horsie on Jan 24, 2018 23:19:50 GMT
I think it's because, if we're talking about sexism in the places like Saudi Arabia, there's really fuck all anyone can do. Saudi is a pretty extreme example of course; the country is a patriarchal absolute monarchy, the people with wealth are all men, sexism is a feature of both the law and the state religion, and while you might see small advancements (like allowing women to drive, I think I heard they were considering that), you won't see any major changes. Even if a king came to power who had a serious liberal bent, the king is required to rule according to the very hardline interpretation of Islamic law used in Saudi Arabia, and I believe they could be removed from power if they don't.
In other places, like Afghanistan or Pakistan, you're dealing with cultures that are traditionally patriarchal and punish women for stepping out of line, or even disagreeing with the men of their family, women don't have the economic or educational opportunities that would allow them to pursue change, and I doubt most men are interested in changing things. Real change is unlikely, and when (if) it comes, it'll have to be because the culture is changing.
There are organizations that are trying to do stuff in the Middle East and other places where women live in discriminatory cultures, but for most people they're more interested in things that they can realistically do something about.
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 24, 2018 23:24:33 GMT
I must admit, I've become ultra cynical these days when it comes to political movements. I always assume the worst from them and their motives.
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Post by Horsie on Jan 24, 2018 23:54:22 GMT
I guess I never really invested enough of myself in any of them to get bent out of shape.
Besides, the internet is probably the absolute worst place to look if you're trying to get a feel for any movement; people are assholes (and stupid assholes) on the internet, you can't swing a cat without hitting somebody's half-baked, self-righteous screed, and dozens of people supporting it, but for every one of those people I bet there's at least hundred others who think they're a moron.
Fans of TLJ plan to castrate all you straight white guys if you don't learn to love the movie more than your own family (who you're likely oppressing, you evil bastards!). So I guess you're fucked.
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Post by Canuovea on Jan 25, 2018 3:25:17 GMT
Ah, whataboutism. Such a common thing. Its like if you were in ancient Roman times and suggested that they took their religious devotions a bit too seriously to be healthy, they'd turn around and scream: "But what about CARTHAGE! They sacrifice BABIES!". Which does nothing at all to disprove the original point.
Fact is, I don't live in Iran or Saudi Arabia, I live here. I should be concerned not just with bullshit elsewhere, but also bullshit here.
Furthermore, there is a tendency on the Left now to look down on telling other people and cultures what to do because obviously you, the enlightened person, know better than them. This is called cultural imperialism and is considered bad. Generally the idea now seems to support parts of other nations and cultures that decide they want to change their society for the better, in their own way, rather than forcing that change on them. This has both positives and negatives, but does take into consideration that perhaps we don't actually have the authority from on high to bitch other cultures out. Therefore we need to focus on ourselves and then support others when they want help.
I think you actually agree with this Hark, but then don't because whataboutism. Lets look at Latinx. I think its a bad term myself, and I'll say it is "racist" or at least "bigoted" if racism isn't quite right. I agree on that. Your reason for saying this was basically that its a bunch of SJWs somewhere deciding to force change on a culture not really their own. Deciding that there is something inherently bad about the very Latino culture/language and it needs to change. That does sound arrogant to me. Now if Latinos from those countries and cultures decided that was a change worth pushing for in their own language, hey, I'd support them.
So if Latinx is bad, what makes it different from Iran and Saudi Arabia? You think we should tell them how bad their culture is and dictate change to them, just like some try to do with the whole Latinx thing? Don't give me that. Not only is it horrendously arrogant but it wouldn't work.
You're right that there are problems of course. This respect for different cultures is all fine and dandy, but there is such a thing as culture clash. Immigration can bring this on, and it can cause trouble when the ideals of one culture conflict so much with the ideas of another. This should not be ignored by the Left and it is being ignored. That is among other things, yes. The problems mentioned do exist, often because "THE LEFT" is not a monolithic block, and there is no denying that; many members of the left are complete holier than thou assholes. Trust me, I've been there, I've seen it.
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Post by Harkovast on Jan 25, 2018 4:13:33 GMT
When you read me ranting about this stuff, its not meant to be me just damning the whole thing so much as me trying to get people to face up to whats wrong and how misguided the tactics are becoming. I doubt its very effective at that, but its what Im thinking when Im typing it. The left (for want of a better term) seems to be losing at the moment, and seems to be responding to that loss by doubling down. All the decent movements have been hijacked by idiots spouting nonsense. There are comments sections on their articles with rules so controlling I wouldn't dare post anything (and that was my reaction even before I lost faith in these movements). People get scorned for saying something is crazy, because that's ablist against mental illness, things like that. It's stifling to the point that I think I would struggle to express concepts effectively. This stuff is important, but eveyrone seems happy to let it slide into oblivion.
But It just feels like instead of ejecting these weird ideas or trying to distance from them, those ones are pretty much running the show. Maybe its party loyalty, where people don't want to attack their own side for going too far incase it helps the opposition. The only thing it seems safe to attack over is lacking ideological purity, which only serves to make the acceptable discourse more extreme.
Regarding the latinx thing- 1- comparing the cruel things they do in saudi arabia to women, to spanish speakers not talking the way I want seems a bit ridiculous, one is a huge problem that does objective harm, the other is just trying to make people confirm to what I'm comfortable with. Its comparing a serious problem to a trivial, invented one. Its like comparing forcing the natives to speak english and wear western clothes compared to forcing them to stop sacrificing babies to the gods. Not saying we have the right to do either, but they aren't exactly equivilent.
2-I wasn't saying they should meddle in other countries affairs, but it seems like they should acknowledge those cultures as bad for not meeting the same standards. Unless they are saying their standards only apply to western countries? The failure to condemn those cultures seems to extend to when people from those cultures come over to western countries, as you mentioned. How many social justice types think there is anything wrong with Japan being very limiting on taking in immigrants? That one actually should annoy them more since they are very bothered that immigrants dont have countries letter them in, but there is a rich country that doesn't take many in and the woke crowd seems completley okay with that. It seems inconsistent.
3-Whenever social justice types talk about white people and their privilege them seem entirely comfortable applying those rules universally (I've had plenty of them explain to me why a white man in china is still privileged because overall whites are more privileged on average over the globe.) So it seems they hold some of their standards as universal, but stop doing it when it leads to a conclusion they aren't comfortable with.
4- I dunno if you intended it, but what you are saying seems to highlight social justice hypocrisy, rather than my hypocrisy. I said why care about issues here but not abroad, I didn't say that meddling in foriegn stuff was correct, only that it seemed like a double standards to do one and not the other. (I might be wrong to compare the two things, but I'm not advocating for either.) HOWEVER the social justice crowd happily push the latinx shit but over look more serious problems. It seems like the application of the rules is very inconsistent.
Again, Im generalising, not everyone in social justice does the same ting blah blah blah but this is the stuff I come across and its the ammo that the anti sjw people are endlessly collecting to use.
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