Darth Wedgius wrote: ↑Sat Aug 15, 2020 8:53 pm
Just Some Guy on YouTube has what I think is overall a good take on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zQnMmFvKNc
Though the part I found most memorable was him quoting someone proposing the trans allegory:
As a good feminist, I know there is no such thing as a woman. As a woman, I resent this.
As someone who tries to be logical, I'm wary of "and that tells me everything I need to know about you" statements I've seen from the left. But this case was tempting.
I chucked open a private mode panel - the last source you sent me to was a white supremacist magazine, so my trust level is low - and checked this guy out. *sigh*. "Yes, Superman should be white" is one of his videos. Superman is an alien, and a radical egalitarian (although we can note his origins as a Jewish 'blow off steam/revenge' fantasy). His color literally does not matter. Still, I figured I'd give it a listen.
We start off retarded. "I hate allegory, I prefer history." Uh yes. Animal Farm, Brave New World, those are terrible works.
The Crucible and
Walker use history itself as an allegory. Allegory and history are not at all the same thing.
The second point he makes is that the Matrix has a lot of stuff in it. Well, yes. One of the advantages of allegory over history is you can fit a lot of different things in. History you are limited by historical accuracy and the constraints of actual events. It's hard to fit subtle points about the nature of reality into a film about Dunkirk, because you're making a film about Dunkirk, and thus have to put a whole bunch of things in there. By making an allegory, you can also fit many other things in.
But the third, and when we start really going off the rails, is when he defines allegory as "a 1-for-1 tradeoff." That's sheerly nonsensical. Look at his own fucking example, animal farm. For it to be a 1-for-1 tradeoff to the Russian revolution, it'd need animal Lenin, animal Stalin, animal Trotsky, etc. You'd need to recreate every historical figure 1-for-1. Because that's literally what "1-for-1 tradeoff" means. But George Orwell does no such thing. There's no Tsar, no western invasion to support the Tsar during the revolution (something that very much helped to drive the Cold War), none of the nuance and complexity of actual historical events. And it doesn't need or want them, because it is an allegory.
And that's where the entire video falls apart, because he spends the rest of the video not really comprehending what an allegory is, the difference between metaphor, allegory, and parable, or even what he's really talking about. For instance, at one point he says that leading a double life could be done by gay people, religious people, people with different politics, etc. Therefore it can't be a 1-for-1 representation. It's like saying that Pigs in Animal Farm can't be an allegory for the Party in the USSR because there's lots of elite ruling classes in history, like the nobility in Europe or white male landowners in America (prior to the 14th amendment), and anyway no one makes bacon out of the Party in Russia, so it's not 1-for-1.
Honestly it was just kind of stupid. The entire video was just filled with shit like this. I started skipping ahead after the ten minute mark because it was just all full of missing the point, and it's 20+ minutes of him missing the point because "it's not a 1-for-1 translation." Which is not what an allegory is.
There's one point around minute 17 where he just literally fails to understand anything, quoting an article he's mad about, misunderstanding it as saying "there's nothing good about knowledge", and then misunderstanding trans people. It's truly astonishing. The quote he's mad about is "What good is truth if nothing grows there?" which is a truism about the value of knowledge. Value of knowledge is only valuable in motion - in its growth. "I had a bowl of oatmeal with a little bit of salt and some cinnamon this morning" might be a truth, but it's a truth of little application. Truth is valuable in motion - when it reveals new truths, when it grows into new things. It's not a destination, it's a journey. You never arrive at "the absolute truth", but a series of truths that grow into more. We call that search "science".
The reviewer then rolls this misunderstanding of the meaning of "truth as a search" rather than "truth as a destination" into a misunderstanding of what "social construct is" (language itself is one, all forms of communication are social constructs, as are any abstract categories we create to communicate broader ideas) and decides all social constructs are made up, and therefore meaningless. Social constructs are indeed "made up", but try explaining to a US border agent that "countries" are a made up social construct and therefore you don't need a passport. He then rolls this into "therefore transgender people aren't real."
This sort of shit was what the term "sophomoric" was created to describe. As an aside, it's why I hate video essays (the worst parts of SF debris are the video essays, as opposed to the video reviews). Video Essays allow some truly terrible reasoning to float because people just string words together with no actual logical connection between them. It encourages sophomoric reasoning, because it is spoken rather than written, therefore errors in logic and reasoning are harder to detect. If we were actually reading this shit, we'd realize it was fallacious nonsense very quickly, because none of the points actually parse as logic.
Of course the fact this is a video essay meant he wrote it all out, read it through, said "yep, that makes sense" and then read it to us. So I'm viewing the work of an idiot.
