What is the genealogy of "white savior" as a term of discourse, is it Teju? Wikipedia blames Teju. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sav…
The classic examples of white saviorhood, as I understand the term, are acts of personal aggrandizement (and personal gain) undertaken by a white person under cover of goodness, that damage the non-white people who are being thus instrumentalized.
Anyway, classic case of "once you remove the systemic critique from a term and use it to describe a loose 'style' or 'vibe' it stops meaning very much"
no love for kidney donaters. you know who I blame? neoliveralism
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In my opinion, the Sopranos movie had lots of smart touches and moments and as a fan of the show, I enjoyed the fan service; I was well-served. However, so many of the things that made the Sopranos show work were glaringly absent, and the decision to Take On Race was a mistake.
The original show was so consistently clumsy about race that it feels like this writing choice was a penance of some kind, but after you've watched the movie, I challenge you to come up with what it's actually saying other than "also this stuff with Black people was happening?"
For me, the show was about dragging mafia mythology down to earth, about turning all of that cosa nostra mystique into the grotty compensatory fantasies of stupid lazy and vain men, and its core was the scene of psychoanalysis (even when Tony is in flight from self-knowledge)
At the level of character and dialogue, The Chair is excellently done; at the level of plot, however, I have a lot of questions about how power is supposed to work at this university.
Everyone acts as if being chair of the department gives her a great deal of power--which allows everyone in the show to *blame* her for everything that goes wrong--but I honestly can't tell if the show thinks that being chair DOES give her any real power. If so, it is not shown.
The list she is given, in the first episode: what power does she have to force retirements? She is blamed for this list--and punished for it in the final episode--but the notion that a department chair can fire tenured faculty is... not supported by the text.
It's interesting that the pandemic remains essentially unrepresentable in narrative TV, film, and fiction. Creators are essentially producing narrative in an alternate timeline where the pandemic never happened.
This made a kind of sense back when it seemed like the pandemic might last a year or two. (Remember all the people dreading The Pandemic Novels to come, and calling for escapist media to not go into it?)
But even as it seems clear that the pandemic is going to go on--albeit, hopefully, in a much less deadly form--for a while longer, it's a lot weirder that pop culture, as a whole, is just going to pretend it never happened.
"in practice, “let people enjoy things” means something else: it is rude or inappropriate to dislike something." gawker.com/culture/let-pe…
"criticism — by which I mean something that demands maintaining distance between the critic and the subject, not a negative or positive viewpoint — is, in a fandom world, an obsolete exercise."
An interesting detail of the original comic is that the person who says "let people enjoy things" is literally the person whose pleasure is being threatened, but who then makes the object of the sentence the third-person "people" to mask their personal investment
This is significant because the problem becomes something other than "how to persuade qanon addled reactionaries"; it becomes "how to do big government interventions that will succeed with disenfranchised populations"
Our healthcare system presumes that your health is your problem, and you should pay for it, and you should also do the work to figure out how to access care; given this starting point, it's not surprising that the same people who are always poorly served, continue to be
But if you are a Democrat who is invested in the status quo, and you don't want to spend money on supporting the poors, it is MUCH MORE ideologically comfortable to make the far right into the face of non-vaccination