Thank you. I didn’t realize the actual interview had been released, I’ll have to give it a read through tomorrow 
1 Like
Stopping a child molester from becoming a Senator seems like significant real change to me. Bringing to light the actions of Weinstein, Ailes, I’Reilly, Lauer etc and having some modicum of Justice for their victims seems like real change.
Bringing to light what happened to Mira Sorvino and her career and decades of gaslighting her over the retribution seems like real change.
The victims seem to feel that change has been happening and that it has value. Should we tell them to wait until your perfect solution somehow vaguely precipitates out of non action?
Whose interest does that waiting serve?
24 Likes
It’s so much easier to criticize an entire movement when you have no fucking clue about what is really going on and you just live in the stupid, stupid, stupid bubble in your own blockhead.
18 Likes
In this case the full context is exactly what it says in the OP, your link provides no additional insight beyond saying it’s mob mentality that is shitting down the “discussion” with no actual discussion even attempted other than to disparage a movement he claims to not to disagree with.
6 Likes
Er, the failure mode of clever is dumb. This meme is ironic.
Melz2, as I read the poster, it’s possible that you (and I) are the one who believes “nothing is ever going to change, so there’s no point in even trying”.
He’s making the claim that all power corrupts. His solution may not to accept it, but to eliminate all significant power.
Now, you and I may claim that’s crazy talk - in other words, I certainly believe that nothing is going to change, there’s always going to be power, and thus the best we can do is look for a way to mold it.
But if his claim is correct, and power always corrupts, then there’s only one answer.
And moreover, from his perspective, believing that one can tame power is cancerous, because it prevents us from the “true” answer, burning all power to the ground. We perpetuate (well, at least I do), the fundamentals that allow all abuses to occur by accepting there will be powerful people.
Of course, there’s self interest in it for me. Truly removing all significant power gradients would almost certainly mean the removal of my power. I’m mail, white and in the global 1% - there’s probably no means of removing all my (in my case unearned) power short of killing me.
Of course, the only person I’ve heard truly espouse the “remove all power” did admit it required the entire de-industrialization of mankind, he thought it would require elimination of 90% of humanity to bring us back to true equality. (Sorry anyone in the developed world - we all have to go. Too much historic power. Luckily for him, he thought nuclear war would get us 80% there. From there it’s constant elimination of anyone who exhibits leadership to too great an extent.)
Anyway, just pointing out that I think he’s claiming not that we’re too ambitious, but we’re not nearly ambitious enough.
2 Likes
I’m not sure what it is you are complaining about here. This is a French news site that has distilled an interview into soundbites obviously translated from the French. The click-baity boing boing version makes it seem like Gilliam has just given a blanket defense of Weinstein’s actions, as if everyone that got raped had it coming to them. The actual article, choppy as it is, makes it clear that in Gilliam’s mind, the truth isn’t quite so black-and-white. Let’s revisit his comments on Weinstein:
While Gilliam condemned Harvey Weinstein as “a monster”, he claimed that he was not alone. The mogul was exposed because he is such “asshole”, he said.
Okay, so pretty clear criticism of Weinstein as a monster, and of Hollywood studio heads in general.
"I think some people did very well out of meeting with Harvey and others didn’t. The ones who did knew what they were doing. These are adults, we are talking about adults with a lot of ambition.
So… far from a blanket statement about all women meeting with Weinstein, or a defense, he’s pointing out that some women went into that situation knowing full well what they were getting into, judged the transaction to be acceptable given the potential benefits, and went ahead with the act. I don’t work in Hollywood- Gilliam does. I’m not privy to all the gossip and stories that go on there. I’m fully in support of exposing people like Weinstein, and more to the point, dismantling the entire corrupt system that has been a part of Hollywood’s DNA since it’s inception… but that doesn’t mean that Gilliam is wrong here. It’s entirely possible that SOME people this guy had sexual interactions with did it it completely knowingly and were okay with the transaction. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly isn’t false just because it offends my sensibility. This is Gilliam’s (totally valid) point about mob rule- any opinions other than the narrow, accepted one are declared void, offensive, and to be attacked rather than considered.
“Harvey opened the door for a few people, a night with Harvey – that’s the price you pay,” said Gilliam, who is in Paris to direct an opera, “Benvenuto Cellini” next week.
Apart from being a very bizarre journalistic device to plug his new project in the same sentence as you do discuss his views on Hollywood standard practices, it again adds a more nuanced point of view to this issue society struggles with about endemic sexism.
He said power had always been abused in the film world and “I don’t think Hollywood will change. Power takes advantage, it always does”.
I am a bit more optimistic about the future than Terry, and I hope Hollywood will change, but I’m not in my late 70’s, nor have I battled with that same power structure that rules Hollywood my entire life. Gilliam has. He’s no fan of Hollywood, nor an apologist- he’s merely a fatalist, as in one who has accepted his fate. The good guy isn’t going to win. The good guy can and should do battle with the giants (as Gilliam has done, creatively, his entire life) but in the end, Power will take advantage of its power. You can call him pessimistic, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
The great irony, he said, was that while #MeToo has been in full flow “a self-confessed pussy-grabber is the president of the US and is just walking around” unchallenged, he added.
This is a great irony indeed- one that many people from both genders have pointed out.
5 Likes
Always depends on what metrics you apply. After hearing some good things about Scalzi and thoroughly enjoying “Redshirts”, I read “Old Man’s War”. And now I know that Scalzi is a despicable militarist like all the others.
I have to admit I personally lean towards the anti-militarist side of things even by European standards, but still. if I called everyone a scumbag who I think supports or fails to oppose a toxic ideology that actually hurts people in real life, then Scalzi would be on the list, too.
He’s still telling women to shut up. Fuck that.
17 Likes
Except there was a time where women couldn’t vote and black people were not full citizens. We did that without changing the capitalist system. And of course misogyny exists in any social or economic system. It’s not a product of class relations, it was, as Engels pointed out, the very first division of labor and existed in the earliest days of civilization (the building of our first cities). Men have long worked to control women’s productive and reproductive abilities in almost every society that existed where wealth was distributed upwards.
Yes, let’s ignore that it’s about holding people responsible for their actions, and it has helped. We’re talking about it for one. For another, Weinstein is no longer in a position of power over others, and may very well be arrested. People have lost jobs for their action and been investigated. That’s not nothing. that is something.
22 Likes
Let’s be clear: the grey are is not the problem. Gilliam’s sense of nuanced argument is to take two largely unrelated things and making them opposing sides only to say the truth is in the middle for ge sake of saying the truth is in the middle.
MeToo is an advocacy group for women that got popularized after the Weinstein scandal, its function is to raise awareness of a topic and spread the message that it shouldn’t continue. To that (men in power can’t keep getting away with coercing sex with their power), Gilliam says absolutely nothing. Gilliam’s position isn’t actually on the topic itself at all, he says something along the lines of ‘that’s the way it is and advocacy won’t actually help women unless it funddamaentally changes everything about Hollywood’ and that ‘this is an unruly mob whose spreading of these stories hides the fact that these women knew what they were doing.’
That’s is within the context of the interview. Just because Gilliam also thinks that Weinstein is an asshole doesn’t mean he didn’t take the stance the OP article - because that’s absolutely what he did. On top of that, he says that by MeToo only exposing what Weinstein did without also chastising women for going through with it makes them an entity worthy of ridicule with his art.
And your take doesn’t change that view, and really just exposes the ignorance both you and Gilliam hold on a topic you are speaking expertise in. It’s not “ironic” that MeToo rapidly gained popularity with a pussygrabber in office, it makes perfect sense that a movement that began in 2010 continues to gain traction as highly-publicized abuses of power to take advantage of women become more and more glaring and openly tolerated by others.
15 Likes
He of all people should understand why we resort to animated memes in response. We of all people should cut the guy a break, not for being on a pedestal we put him on, but because he’s your neighbor, your pretty reasonable neighbor who mostly is right on and has shown you some damn good times, at no cost to you.
If ANYONE has a vision to address this through more than words, it’s Terry Frickin Gilliam. I wouldn’t leave all the ideas up to him, but as a translator of pretty good ideas presented with an absurdist skew which, as art, can cut through barriers of language and triggerwords and make an impression. A good one. He does not have to hit a home run everytime he opens his mouth any more than you or I do, does he?
Give him a full listen. Agreed.
2 Likes
Well, I’m not so young myself, and I do remember that back in the early 70’s, conventional wisdom that it was necessary to sleep around to get ahead in show business.
So yes, the world has seen some change as pertain to racism. Some. However it was after years of fighting, of demonstrations with hundred of thousands and even millions of people, of riots, of a large number of laws being passed (many of them mostly ignored), and also after a significant number of deaths.
And within all those freedom movements, having women in subordinate roles was seen as normal. When asked what the place of women was in the civil rights movement, the then leader of SNCC answered that it was to lay prone.
Things have changed since then, but not that much, and a bunch of people believe that a tweet stream is going to have any kind of significant result…
I guess I’ll not write down what I think of that, some people would feel offended.
Social media is but one form of activism now. Why are you acting like it’s the only one that the MeToo movement has engaged in? Maybe you’ve overlooked ignored some other recent forms of activism?
And also, my dude, don’t forget:
27 Likes
Do you have a way to really supervise what someone in power is doing?
Of course not.
That means that for one monster that might get caught, there is an unknown number - but definitly not zero - who will never face any kind of problem for their behavior. In other word, you’re pretty much leaving the possibility of stopping that to random circumstances.
Real action would be to try and change the system so that preventing such behavior would the norm, nevermind the idea punishing it afterward.
1 Like
Have you seen his animation? You must hate it. It’s notoriously unpopular too.
1 Like
Utopia
[yoo-toh-pee-uh]
noun
an imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as enjoying perfection in law, politics, etc.
Origin of Utopia
< New Latin (1516) < Greek ou not + tóp(os) a place + -ia -y3
12 Likes
You’re ignoring that there are other things going on here, not just online discussions. Me too was meant to share these stories and show people how very common they are - even among women we consider to be relatively powerful in our society. But there are other things happening - there are trials going on, people are attempting to instate new ways to curb sexual harassment in work environments, and women are learning that if they speak out and even just say no when they themselves are being harassed, that someone will finally back them up.
Just because these earlier movements didn’t fix everything, doesn’t mean that they weren’t productive or that they didn’t make substantial changes in our world. I’d guarantee that most women (of all races) and most, if not all, people would not go back 60 years, because it was measurable worse back then. The fact that we can speak out and that we can make changes in the first place is evidence of that. Class struggle is not at odds with racial and feminist struggles - it’s part of them.
25 Likes
Um… yes we do. Metoo and Black lives matter are actually examples of supervising people in power. As long as we have a rule of law and everyone can be subjected to it (in theory, at least, if not in reality), then we have an opportunity to fix our problems.
Which is why the me too movement exists in the first place. Which is why this did not stop at Weinstein, but has included other men in positions of power, being called to account for their actions.
19 Likes
Real talk; it’s all tied together, and you can’t really fix one issue without fixing the others, because it’s both systemic and self-perpetuating.
Obviously, the struggle is real and the fight isn’t easy, but implying that a nearly impossible option (the instantaneous removal of all systems of power) is the ONLY possible resolution seems like a disingenuous attempt to shut down the conversation.
30 Likes
