Terrible people celebrate Sessions confirmation with racism, gloating, more racism

eli said

Certain people are just entirely resistant to any meaning below the most obvious surface of things. I see it plenty with older people too.

Older person here, but this is something that I’ve grappled with all my life, and it’s not resistance, but very much like what dlouwe said here:

I find this really interesting, because I’ve always had a great deal of trouble figuring out themes and subtext, and at times it’s made me feel insecure, but at no point have I ever felt the need to argue against the idea of theme or subtext. Like, when people bring it up, I think “Oh that’s neat, I wish I could have figured that out on my own!”

I have often wondered if it has anything to do with my extreme willingness to suspend disbelief in the face of any and all entertainment media. In fact, one of my YouTube obsessions is a particular movie critic who points out these things and I find it endlessly fascinating because I don’t think of them myself.

Thanks for all the replies, everyone! Some fabulous comments in here. That’s why I love this place – well, one of the reasons, at least. So many smarty-smarts in here. You all get gold stars!

I think that @mildlymagnificent may be the closest to this particular case I was talking about. The guy in my anecdote isn’t sexist or racist – well, he ain’t woke, but he’s compassionate and thoughtful when something bubbles up into his consciousness. He’s actually a social worker who spends his days working in a nursing home for schizophrenic people, and will defend them and their dignity like a bulldog. He’s a good egg. I think that he’s just not creative enough to see the meanings that lurk inside of media.

It’s a weird concept to me, I guess – I instinctively pull apart anything I read or watch for its themes. I can’t fathom watching something like The Matrix just for fight scenes and cool effects.

(Then again, I basically don’t watch Hollywood movies at all anymore, since there’s really not a lot beneath that)

Gotta wonder if that’s the same issue that plagues the terminally sexist/racist. They don’t believe that harm is being caused because they literally can’t imagine things outside of their lived experiences. Huh.

I have no idea who Kulinski is, but I get the impression that I’m not missing much.

I’d go on a purge of brogressive/white liberal media that I take in, but I don’t think I’d have much left otherwise. Needless to say, I don’t really get much news without me rolling my eyes and gritting my teeth these days…

@Scildfreja

I’d go on a purge of brogressive/white liberal media that I take in, but I don’t think I’d have much left otherwise

Not an easy choice, granted. However works for you tho!

@booburry

But Hillary saying it was high time for a woman to be president was divisive

#dealmein 🙂

I tend to agree with IP, in that I think that the Democrats would benefit electorally from a hard skew to the left; take something like BLM’s platform as the party baseline and run on that, they’d make hay. You can’t fight false populism with milquetoast centrism, nor with austerity and neoliberal bullshit. You need a proper populist platform, and the Democrats haven’t had one of those in my lifetime. (Or ever, really, but that’s a much longer discussion). Unfortunately, the last election provided a fascist appealing to the white working class, a quisling appealing to the white working class, and a neoliberal centrist. Who frankly mostly focused her appeals on whites AFAICT, if a little less.

@Boobury
The ‘justice democrats’ appear to have the same problem the party mostly has. Which, as I pointed out in another thread recently, is that most of the party leadership (and much of the white rank and file) are actually also white supremacists, just not as devoted to cutting off their own noses from spite. This is because white supremacy is built into the very bedrock of the United States, and has always been an intrinsic part of our culture. All American white people are raised as white supremacists to a greater or lesser degree, and those who don’t actively examine their actions on a continuous basis will continue to act in accordance with it, even when they say they aren’t. TLDR:They mostly don’t give a shit about intersectional concerns, but they’re willing to let those people tag along while they help cishet whites.
Also, that Ugyur fuck being involved makes me hate the ‘justice democrats’ by reflex. I mean, if they do good things, great, I’d love to see some of those planks enacted, for everyone’s benefit, but it’s a start, far from an end.

@Hambeast

I have often wondered if it has anything to do with my extreme willingness to suspend disbelief in the face of any and all entertainment media.

I, too, have an incredibly easily suspended disbelief (this extends to dreams and social interactions), which certainly could have something to do with it – I believe things to be true as they’re presented, and rarely try to look for anything deeper.

But on top of that, even when I’m looking for it, subtext tends to be pretty invisible to me. It always seems so obvious when pointed out, but I don’t even understand how to look for those sorts of connections. It just seems fundamentally impossible (or at least improbable) to be able to sift through every moment of a 90 minute film and recognize the few important ones that connect to form a clearly implied meaning. (Also possibly related: I’m crap at word puzzles)

@Scildfreja

It’s a weird concept to me, I guess – I instinctively pull apart anything I read or watch for its themes. I can’t fathom watching something like The Matrix just for fight scenes and cool effects.

I tend to instead pull apart the construction of movies. Filming, editing, direction, etc. I watch movies for the experience they provide – what they make me think and feel – and I love studying how they got me to think and feel those things. Like the thriller that enhances tension by skipping establishing shots, or the thoughtful drama that uses careful set decoration to foreshadow and reinforce the story. Every Frame a Painting is basically my bible.

@ dalillama

That’s why I thought of you when I read it; and that’s the Guardian.

Not that I’m aware of.

@eli
Sorry you’re having a rough day. 🙁

It bleeds into other areas, too. The person who complains to HR about sexual harassment is just a troublemaker. The disabled person asking for accommodation is being unreasonable. Etc. If you don’t go along with the status quo, you’re the problem. It can’t be that the way things were needed fixing because it’s working just fine for everyone else (so they think).

@ Hambeast and dlouwe: count me in when it comes to not looking for or finding subtext. *blushes*

I was the kid that even my own parents said never had “street smarts”. Someone said something in a confident, articulate way? I believed it. In my case, I’d been the classic hides-in-books type without much experience in dealing with people, but I even took what I read at face value. (There would’ve been a picture of a younger me next to the word “naïve” in the dictionary.) It took me until my thirties to work out that it was even necessary to look for subtext, context, or shades of meaning. In my case, it wasn’t that I didn’t notice the details or subtle cues or times when things didn’t “feel” right; it was that I didn’t consider them important. (Realizing the importance of those in hindsight, however? Been there.)

@ Scildfreja: I’ve probably been somewhat like the guy you described, except without the defensiveness. My response as a younger adult might’ve been equal parts surprise, confusion, and cluelessness w/r/t the movie. (The last time I saw The Matrix, in my twenties, I’d only gotten as far as working out that the plot revolved around Neo freeing his mind from some sort of authority’s control. Maybe I was halfway there?) As far as an awareness of oppression and privilege goes, it took me a long time to get even the general idea–probably too long. It took a lot of blatant statements before Captain Oblivious here started noticing things like racial profiling and class-based privilege.

So much interesting discussion in this thread! I’m glad the Folding Ideas video was linked, that is one of my favorite takes on the #GG debacle.

I have my own theories on the subtext discussion that come close to many of the ideas presented here. They have to do with the unwillingness of certain people, especially those who subscribe to right-wing policies, to see “evil” as punishable first and foremost (which is why right-wingers are big on punishment, not rehabilitation, for law-breakers). Their black-and-white view of the world prevents them from seeing nuance and realizing that even decent people can have bad thoughts and problematic views. Instead, they decide to shoot the messenger, the person who points out the problematic things in the first place. The unwillingness to improve is a byproduct of a worldview where being wrong is so undesirable that one has to try to alter reality rather than admit to one’s mistakes. Hence, the Trump administration.

@kupo

Ok, so I decided to read but only got about as far as this part. It’s an advantage to have boys? How the fuck so? Please, explain to my ladybrain why I should find it to be an advantage to have a boy if I love in a world where men beat women regularly? And an advantage that only comes to be once one has already reproduced can’t influence selection, so…

The idea that a man’s ability to produce a male heir (remember, the child is fully the cis man’s product, the cis woman is just the soil for the man’s seed and uggggh I feel dirty even typing this) directly correlates with violence and sexual virility as disgusting bedfellows are really staples of an environment marinated in toxic masculinity, aren’t they? The myth about men’s abusive qualities being what attracts women to men in the first place are just a by-the-by in a society where someone occasionally asks: “well, what do women actually want?” It’s just so sickening.