turistas go home!

[intertribal]

The title is my reaction to Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  The above is also my reaction to every Indiana Jones movie, so I guess if you like Indiana Jones, you'll like it.

Let me just say though, that as someone who watched 9 FUCKING seasons of the X-Files, this sanitized, Americanized, and abridged version in 2 1/2 hours and M&Ms packaging just feels like a smack in the fucking face.

+ : every time Indiana Jones fails at something. 
- : every time Indiana Jones succeeds at something.
best character: crazy professor man + mutt
worst character: marion ravenwood + indiana jones
best impossibility: Indiana Jones gets pulled out of a sand trap by holding onto a snake that is somehow able to hold his entire weight!
worst impossibility: Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator and doesn't die of cancer in three weeks!

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

"I'm really sorry if you think I see you as less able to think about this because of being 'subaltern' or whatever, and that's what hurt me about your pointing this out."

No, no, no. I honestly never thought that you thought that about me, and I shouldn't have ever made it look like I did. That's what I was trying to correct.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm glad

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

One thing that's funny about this argument is that I actually don't think rationality and emotion are opposed. I think what you can rationalize depends on your assumptions, and in a lot of ways, what people are criticizing when then criticize "emotion" is actually those sort of assumptions....and emotion can guide rationality, make people rationalize things they wouldn't otherwise. All of our experience is partly emotional, even our rational experience. But assumptions about power and status can create emotions and attitudes that are only the outward signs of those assumptions.

Objectivity is more rightly (than rationality) opposed to a subjective point of view (rather than "emotion") that is grounded in certain assumptions about the world, and no one can be entirely objective. I suppose postmodernist thinkers would say that that's all there really is, you can't get at objective truth, so you have to just accept all the subjective ones on an equal basis. I think it is possible to be right or wrong in those assumptions, but most people don't reflect on their situation to see where they come from...there's a tendency to "reduce the search for causes to a search for responsibilities" (that much Bourdieu takes from Nietzsche, and I think it's a quote, but I've started packing my books). Which is why it also annoys me when white people accept that responsibility--which carries both agency and power, as well as blame and 'white guilt'--instead of actually 'objectively' looking at the conditions of their existence (and not just theirs, either).

Then you get people who think they're postmodern thinkers who are really doing just that, especially in academic fields, and god, I just had to write a discourse paper about these two camps of discourse analysis who are doing much the same thing, and they piss me off so much, and actually, writing this is making it more clear to me why than writing the paper did. It blinds them to the fact that those conditions carry an influence even when they think their assumptions are all against "oppression", and that's all they have to admit, or that if they say that they're "white middle-class North American men" that a) it means they can't have an objective opinion, and b) it doesn't mean that their saying that, their own postmodernism, their own guilt, is a part of the assumptions of that class/status/group--in other words, that they have the power to say that and have it not matter, that their rendering their own position entirely pointless by saying that they don't have any right to objective truth, is only possible for them, because it doesn't damage their economic or academic position one bit, and they themselves wouldn't expect any other group to do so.

Sigh.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Really, if that's all they're going to do, say "This is our opinion of how this is oppressive but our opinion doesn't count because we're part of an oppressive class," they might as well spend their time studying something else. Maybe they'd have something more insightful to offer to that, because they really didn't add much to either understanding oppression or understanding discourse.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

not to mention that the whole "subjective truth is the only truth there is" smacks of "if we can't be right, then no one can"...but then we can all agree in our false moral position against oppression, and then it's like the actual conditions that support it don't exist! Okay, maybe that last is a little extreme, but seriously, that sounds like where their argument is going, to me.

Everyone's experience is, yes, subjective, but truth...not so much. And that's the problem of reaching objective truth, not its nonexistence. In my opinion.