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Acid Haze posted:What the gently caress I'm assuming you're referring to film theory chat? I'm quoting you because that's less obnoxious than quoting everything McAlister wrote, especially since it's really tangential to the topic at hand. The issue I have with this analogy is applying the same rules to men (ambitious, positive portrayal, no revenge) comes up with an equally weak list of movies that could be nitpicked just as easily. Ambition in general is almost never treated as a good thing in movies, American culture, or anywhere else. Shoot, Harry Potter has an entire fourth of the cast be designated to a special club of people who are ambitious, and almost exclusively evil simply for possessing that character trait. Even Trump has to sidestep the whole ambition issue by pretending like the real reason he's running for President is because he's been summoned by God to use his awesome business management superpowers to save the country. Something Trump himself probably believes wholeheartedly at this point, since I doubt he was actually expecting to win the primaries and can come up with no explanation for this save for divine intervention. As for Hillary, well, at this point a lot of it is just that she's been around for a really long time. Sure the Republican smear campaign right now seems misogynist, but that's just because they frame the smear around to whoever happens to be leader of the Democratic Party at the time. Before Hillary was racist. Before Obama it was the effete New England elite. Before Kerry it was just the same old Clinton hate train and Hillary has inherited a lot of the baggage from that. But given the especially vitriolic turn American politics has taken to all politicians (not just Hillary), a lot of it may simply be bad timing on her part. She would have been a much stronger candidate, I think, in 2008 or especially 2004. All the same, it would not at all surprise me if she does, as predicted, become much more popular after becoming President simply because people care a lot less about the smear campaign when it's not an election year.
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Oct 3, 2016 10:17
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Film theory (which at this point is better described as pop culture theory) is very limited as an analytical tool because pop culture is ultimately a reflection of society rather than its genesis. At best this can turn into a positive feedback loop, but considering the extent to which the modern entertainment industry explicitly caters to feminist critique even that effect is pretty questionable. Remember that we didn't see this kind of antipathy to Hillary in 2008 when that was indisputably a much less gender-diverse pop culture landscape. Conceivably it might have affected the tone. I remember Obamabros putting out way more heinous misogynist poo poo than anything Berniebros this year would have considered acceptable. A lot of this has to do with other evolving trends, though. I mean shoot, ask any Bernie supporter on the question and they would have told you- want a woman President? Nominate Warren, because progressives actually like her. For an even more extreme example, Thatcher in the eighties with England was indisputably a more potent collection of all of Hillary's negative character traits. But not even conservatives especially cared because she was their rear end in a top hat, and more importantly, an elected one. First lady not being an elected position does stick with people, and it's not coincidental that Hillary has been playing down Bill's possible influence in the White House this year when back in 2008 (and 1992) their position as a power couple was treated like a two for the price of one deal. Really, you want to discuss pop culture, I'd say House of Cards has done more damage to the Hillary campaign than any more general trend, because it's a drama that explicitly states political power couples are cynically ambitious and unlikable people. If that's not a metaphor for Hillary and Bill, what is?
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Oct 3, 2016 11:49
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meristem posted:Nope. This would be dumb. Politics is based on personal connections, so this just means that she's qualified to do her job. So is everyone who sided with Obama over Hillary in 2008 an The reductive nature of this argument is what bothers me here, as is the usual watering down of slurs. Trump saying Hillary started the birther movement is an inflammatory lie. Bernie saying that Hillary may be compromised on financial issues because she takes a fuckton of money from banks is just, like, basic logic. Equalizing both of these as "lies" just waters down the word, encourages people to think that the only "truth" is in whatever political movement they have arbitrarily declared allegiance to, and further cements the abhorrent polarization that's turned our politics to poo poo in the first place. Oddly enough though I still find that preferable to this dumb film theory derail where our degree of feminist enlightenment is measured by a bunch of subjective film interpretations that have pretty much nothing to do with Hillary. If you really want to talk about feminism in mainstream film, Cinema Discusso strikes me as a vastly more appropriate context. edit: I think disenchantment with Obama is what's inspiring so much antipathy with Hillary. She is, for all intents and purposes, acting as his proxy successor. That has to have way more to do with this than her being a woman. Remember that Republicans tried attacking Obama for Benghazi back in 2012, and with Hillary now it's just transitive property. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Oct 4, 2016 08:43
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JFairfax posted:I'm talking about the sort of one party state where other parties are outlawed. I do question the extent to which this actually makes a meaningful difference. In the United States any political party outside of Democrats and Republicans are defacto outlawed, even if not literally, because the rules regarding political parties are explicitly designed to make competition impossible. While two-is-still-better-than-one sounds good in theory, when one of these unsinkable ships is turning into a massive dumpster fire that's uh, not good. Which incidentally is one reason why people hate Hillary. The very unquestioned nature of her existence at the top of the Democratic ticket is proof that we have way fewer options to meaningful change our government than we like to pretend. Presidential Elections in general are often not as a good bellwether of a country's democratic inclinations as we like to think, because they massively favor whoever happens to have name recognition, and the ability to gain name recognition is not necessarily presumptive of competence. Sure it gave us Hillary. But by the same token it also gave us Trump.
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Oct 5, 2016 03:25
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HorseLord posted:Ah, so your idea of democracy really is nothing but the act of choosing a party to rule you. That does tend to be the way we define it, yeah. Which doesn't make sense on all sorts of levels. Japan had single-party rule throughout the Cold War. So did the United States, at least when it came to the House of Representatives. But no one ever considers these blemishes to the idea of Western democracy when so many of our elections are mere formalities, and the ones that aren't (say Brexit) have potentially disastrous consequences far beyond the purview of the average voter. I used to think parliamentary systems might be better, but I've been astounded to read the UKMT thread and discover that it is somehow possible for the elected representatives of a political party to be radically at odds with what the actual members of the political party want. And that's only a result of recent changes making it more possible for normal Labour Party members to have a vote in leadership. Who knows how big this schism was in the past, it's just no one ever noticed because there were no elections to gauge popular support. The meaning of "democracy" is even muddier the farther back you go. The vast majority British soldiers in World War I couldn't vote, and the war persisted despite massive unpopularity until the German surrender, yet somehow the British represented "Democracy" in that conflict. Given all that, it's little surprise that our use of words like dictatorship today are so nonsensical. Sure, we can say that Erdogan is moving Turkey to fascism. But does anyone seriously believe that if the military coup had worked, and completely undermined civilian control of the armed forces, that the resulting state would somehow be better than anything Erdogan is doing right now? Words like democracy and dictatorship are more catchall terms for "thing I like" and "thing I don't like" than they are words with actual coherent meaning. And so it is with Hillary. Because "Hillary" is a simple known quantity, either of pathological communist evil (for conservatives) or relentless selling out to neo-political causes (for liberals). That these two identities are completely mutually incompatible is rather besides the point. "Hillary" is not an actual person, but a mythological representation of the American political system. And given that we're not allowed to hate America, it's little wonder people are more comfortable hating Hillary instead.
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Oct 5, 2016 04:40
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gnarlyhotep posted:holy crap I just realized this thread is 12 pages People like talking about movies. Also dictatorships. Hillary's kind of an afterthought. By the way I like the thread's title. I keep reading it in Jerry Seinfeld's voice. "And what's the deal with people who hate Hillary? Is it the pantsuit? Now I gotta admit, it's not high fashion, but it's not like regular suits are all that great. You ever go to a party and confuse the Senator with a waiter? Because I'm telling you, it is not a good time."
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Oct 5, 2016 07:45
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