#askrandomshoes

Um, poorly? I’ve only seen the first season of The Newsroom, but it seemed like it embodied all the things people claim about The West Wing that aren’t really true. 

Aaron Sorkin (like Joss Whedon, actually) generally needs someone to tell him no sometimes, or things get out of hand. With Joss Whedon he just becomes sort of incoherent and random and you lose any sense of theme or meaning (see: Dollhouse). With Aaron Sorkin, and keep in mind I say this with love, you need someone to keep him from crawling up his own butt. I think my favorite mitigating force on Sorkin was actually David Fincher, but that’s another story. 

Also they apparently hated each other, so we won’t get that treat again any time soon.

On The West Wing it was a whole slew of very talented directors and producers (Thomas Shlamme, John Wells, Christopher Misiano, Alex Graves) taking Sorkin’s wordy scripts and making them visually beautiful. The whole look of The West Wing, the famous long shots and walk-and-talks, that’s them. Plus the warm, low lighting and incredibly detailed White House set (see: many unsung designers). This isn’t quite what the question was about, but I think they don’t get enough credit and I got up on my soapbox and wrote this already, so I guess I’ll leave that in.

Back to art criticism: what made The West Wing so damn good was the characters. If you loved the show, it’s because you fell in love with these people. Josh Lyman was my first great love (age 10), and I know for a fact that I’m not the only one who, on some deep level, feels like Jed Bartlet was a real president. Oh, and don’t let anyone tell you that CJ Cregg isn’t one of the best professional women characters ever seen on TV.

The West Wing isn’t about telling you what to believe or dryly discussing politics, it’s about these people trying to navigate political life and how they figure out what to believe. It’s about what happens when you try to do these jobs day in and day out. It’s what Aaron Sorkin does best: a workplace drama in the true sense of the word. Some people do this unusual job: let’s see what that looks like. Sports Night was the same idea. As was, for all its flaws, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Think of the early seasons of E.R. or Law and Order.

At first glance, The Newsroom looks like more of the same: it’s about a bunch of people who work in a place. But the core of the story has nothing to do with the job of producing a news show and everything to do with a political crusade a la Network. And you can do that, you can make a story that puts politics center stage and has a very explicit message and isn’t as character focused, that’s fine, but it doesn’t work here. 

The first problem is that putting the politics center stage without filtering them through characters highlights some of the problems with Aaron Sorkin’s actual politics. This becomes an issue not just because I disagree with some of them, but because if you disagree even a little with the point of an episode it becomes hard to watch. This happened occasionally in West Wing but it’s near constant in Newsroom. That makes it harder to get immersed in the world, because the world sort of bends to the desired political message instead of characters arguing different things based on their actual personality and life experiences. There are many, many instances in The West Wing where characters we like and know argue about important issues and we’re never told that one person is right. In any given scene in The Newsroom, I can tell very, very quickly who is “right” and that’s kind of exhausting and also fairly boring.

The second problem is related to the first. In the Aaron Sorkin seasons of The West Wing there is a basic optimism underlying everything. The characters believe that they can, just maybe, make a difference, and the world, occasionally, proves them right. Things are just a little bit better in this world, a little bit more reasonable. This works as aspirational and is also necessary if we’re going to sympathize with them and their struggles. But keep in mind, The West Wing went on the air in 1999 and Aaron Sorkin left the show in 2003.

Problem is, by 2012, for understandable reasons, Sorkin’s underlying political optimism seems to have degraded quite a bit, and the worldview of The Newsroom is condescending and angry. This could also be a perfectly good underpinning for a show (see: The Thick of It) but Sorkin doesn’t take it far enough and it just ends up feeling sad and kind of outdated. Also the world around the characters is still unrealistic, but it comes out more like an antagonistic world bending to a Mary Sue than anything else.

All that said, I enjoyed watching the show, Jeff Bridges is an amazing actor, and I never get sick of witty Sorkin dialogue, but then I just…never watched the second season, and I can’t remember any of the characters’ names, and I think that says a lot. 

tl;dr Josh Lyman is my waifu

…I have bad news for you. Eugenics was very accepted in academia for a very long time. So…. 

Old question, but I think the “more” here refers to MRA stuff? To be accepted in academia you generally need to a) have a basic grasp of history and the previous research in related fields, b) be able to write coherent arguments based on something resembling facts, and c) have been around as an area of study for a few decades or so. That last thing isn’t necessarily good in all cases, but there you go. 

Enneagram or Socionics/MTBI? 

With enneagram it’s 100% type 6. People stereotype them as meek follows or boring or something. @evilelitest2 is a type 6. They pathologically question everything. Also much is made of the phobic/counterphobic difference, but any 6 is both and moves between them. No 6 is unable or unwilling to use critical thinking at all. Usually they’ll have a blind spot or two they don’t question, but they’re obsessed with checking and rechecking and troubleshooting ideas (or anything, really), to the point of absurdity. They’re what you think of when you think of old school academia. 

The classic metaphor for type 6 goes as follows: the 6 is going to buy a house, but first they want to check to make sure the foundation is sturdy. So they start hammering on support beams over and over, with heavier and heavier tools, until the whole house collapses around them. Then they say, “See? The house wasn’t sturdy at all.”

As for cognitive types, it’s complicated. There’s a lot of versions of the Jungian system with different takes on different types, but my money for most misunderstood is on any type with Si ego (so xSxJ). Maybe ESFJ? There’s a joke we make that everyone’s mom is an ESFJ, because people associate ESFJs with the same things as soccer moms, i.e. suburban, shallow, sort of old-fashioned, efficient, social butterflies who are full of shit. They’re actually often described with some of the same disparaging qualities as 6s. It’s the type everyone has decided is bad, basically. The followers, the sheeple. 

Actual ESFJs I’ve know are social and popular because, shockingly, people like them. They’re not faking anything, they’re just friendly and good at reading a room and making sure others are having fun. They tend to be silly and maybe a bit immature (so not so much on the mom thing), they like to troll people and see how they react. The biggest difference is that they’re just as likely to cause a conflict or a negative emotional atmosphere as they are to smooth over conflict or make sure everyone’s happy. 

A few Fe users I know described having Fe as being able to “hear the social music,” manipulate it by changing the song or playing a solo, and in particular hearing when someone is playing off key. It’s a specific cognitive skill, not a catch all for the boring people who aren’t us.

Does it have to be literally one word? Because I’m not sure I can do that. Art is complicated. How about nine words, if I answer both questions?

Screw write what you know; write what you love.

…bitch?

The next ten words:

Oh goodness.That’s actually a complicated question, believe it or not. Partially because, in some ways, it’s not even true. I say it all the time, but I adore things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Neil Gaiman. In general I actually really like what is often called “urban fantasy”or maybe “low fantasy.” Conversely, I can’t stand the attitude and aesthetic often associated with “hard” sci-fi. I so do not give a shit if you explain everything in a scientifically accurateway. That is so dull, and exactly the reason I’m also uninterested inrealism a lot of the time.

So what did I mean when I presumablysaid this, way back in the stone age?First and foremost, I have akind of instinctual aversion to traditional, Tolkien-esque “high”fantasy. Why is up for discussion, and in fact has been discussed by @evilelitest2 and @afriendtokilltime. They, both being very muchfantasy fans, have run into this weird dislike of mine quite a bit. Ithink it has to do with the tropes associated with sword and sorcerystories and maybe the types of narratives and themes they gravitatetowards? But then, I really like Dragon Age? It’s a mystery.

So what do I like about science fiction(when I like it)? My favorite sci-fi is abstract, alien, and borderson philosophy. It also tends to be a bit detached and calculated andless character focused than a lot of fantasy. I adore Jorge LuisBorges and Solaris (the book)and Ray Bradbury’s short stories and…is Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”sci-fi? What about Flatland?And then, Alice in Wonderland islike 90% math jokes, but that’s fantasy right? Only, it seems to fit in here. Hmmmm…..genres might just be permeable, imprecisecategories with fuzzy edges……nah. Anyway, here’s Ursula K. LeGuin being more articulate than me:

“Thisbook [The LeftHand of Darkness]is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of otherscience fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says MaryShelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory;let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…. In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modernnovel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end;thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by theterms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.”

Ormaybe, more simply: “There’s something here that doesn’t makesense. Let’s go and poke it with a stick.”

Inthis way I think we can re-contextualize why we call it sciencefiction to begin with. Instead of it being fiction about science ortechnology or the future, maybe it’s fiction based on the scientificmethod, an experiment masquerading as a story, the answer to thefundamental question “what if?”

Ormaybe I’m just making up my own genres now? Anyway, back to fantasy. What is it that puts me off fantasy, in theory if not in practice?

Ithink the place to start might be exploring why I never found Tolkien(or rather, Lordof the Rings,I actually really want to read TheSilmarillion)at all interesting or appealing. Well, first, Tolkien is reallydetail oriented, one might say obsessed, and I find that difficult todeal with. It kinda breaks my brain a little, actually. I can’t eventake in the information most of the time, and it doesn’t help mevisualize or understand anything. (For those interested in socionics stuff, this is related to the fact that I’m Ne first and thereforehave low dimensional sensing functions). This is also why, aspreviously mentioned, I don’t like hard sci-fi or realism much. I’malso, at least in general, uninterested in descriptions of battles orcomplicated political machinations. It’s possible I have a slightlyskewed idea of Tolkien—I’ve read TheHobbitbut I’ve never read an entire LotR book. At any rate, there’sdefinitely at least something aesthetic putting me off.

Oh, goodness. I kept not getting to this question because I didn’t know where to begin or how to sum it up or connect everything or something. After having it in the back of my head for far, far too long, I think my biggest problem with the left right now is the obsession with moral purity.

This comes in many forms--the moral cholesterol discussion around problematic art, the desire to make people into simple good guys and bad guys, thoughtless call-outs over archaic meanings of words, labeling someone an NB-phobe because of a vague association with someone else *cough*. There’s this constant competition just under the surface for who can be the most woke, which also now is basically equivalent to being the most oppressed, and if you are ever found wanting by any criteria whatsoever you are going in the same box as actual nazis. Someone who’s not yet spoken to you misunderstands half a sentence from a conversation about ancient China? You are a now a racist and it is perfectly acceptable for you to be treated as sub-human and shunned like a leper. There’s no such thing as context, conversation, or clarification. You are guilty and there is no trial. This goes double if the person who’s decided to cancel you is in any oppressed group you are not in, and no, whatever oppressed group you are in doesn’t happen to matter today, because they say so. And if you happen to both be in the oppressed group under discussion, then it will become about how you are not a valid member of the group, not like them.

This is not how oppression or privilege work even on a large scale, and it’s CERTAINLY not how they work in interpersonal interactions. Pretty much everybody is oppressed in some way and certainly everybody I’ve ever met is privileged in some way. You can’t put everyone in the world in a neat hierarchy from most privileged to least privileged and then whoever’s on the bottom gets to tell everyone how to think and what to do. There needs to be room for anyone who is being thoughtful and reasonably respectful to come to the table and talk about these things, and we’re making it incredibly hard at the moment. 

Please, please stop telling people who disagree with you to sit down and shut up. Particularly within leftist spaces where people have the same goals as you and no one is throwing around slurs or hate speech. Try to step back and recognize who your actual enemies are, or you will be alienating a lot of people who are just as screwed by the system as you are. 

I will never forget being told, by someone I liked and thought I trusted, that I had no right to have an opinion or speak on an issue because I was white. This person happened to also be white, although I’ve heard similar things from non-white people directed at others I know. This was during the mess that was 2016, and I was disagreeing with the tactics that were being used and whether they actually accomplished anything. I think, up until that point, I had naively believed, at least subconsciously, that we all knew we were fundamentally on the same side, and that at the very least people I had actual emotional relationships with would be willing to listen to me and allow me to disagree with them on important issues. 

So now I was faced with a crossroads: capitulate and stop arguing, even though I still believed I was right, or have several people I actually knew decide I was being racist.

I would argue that The Social Network doesn’t depict Zuckerberg as a quick-thinking master manipulator at all. I mean, that’s what the character thinks he is, and he certainly talks fast (he’s an Aaron Sorkin character after all), but he’s terrible at manipulating other people, he’s incredibly rigid, and he doesn’t actually seem to be planning further ahead then next week. How do you get back at the girl who just dumped you? Get drunk and write nasty things on your blog. How do you steal someone’s idea and then string them along? Just awkwardly avoid them and tell them you’re still working on it. Hey look, Justin Timberlake is telling you he can solve all your problems! You should definitely listen to him! 

Pictured: Trustworthy Hair

That’s not master manipulator, that’s dumb college student. 

That said, what you’ve described is absolutely a trend in how popular culture imagines villainy, and I think it’s a bigger problem than just bad writing (which it often is).

I was once in a college class trying to explain to another student what systemic oppression is. I can’t remember the exact context, but I do remember that I said something like “I feel like you think that there’s a group of rich straight white men somewhere who meet to hand down edicts that the system will be racist and sexist and homophobic.” And she said, “Yeah, I kind of do.”

Which, yeah, I thought was pretty stupid at the time, but looking back on it I think she was just being honest, and saying something that a lot of people believe deep down: we want there to one, cackling villain organizing all the wrongs in the world, and even if we know better intellectually, we often still operate on the idea that if we find that villain (or those villains) it will fix everything.

So: 

These immigrants are ruining everything!

All men are pigs and rapists and we should just choose to be lesbians because that’s a thing we can do!

Let’s kill all [insert race here]!

somethingsomethingREPTILEPEOPLE!

Thanks, Obama!

It’s conspiracy theory logic, and as always, the best argument against any conspiracy is: 

People are idiots.

So then we get Trump: the most cartoonishly evil president in a long time, possibly ever, but also, and this is what trips people up, one of the stupidest. I’ve heard smart people claim that Trump knows what he’s doing, that he has some larger plan. And it’s just patently not true. If he behaves like someone who’s only in it for his own ego, who just does whatever he feels like doing whenever he feels like it, who’s making decisions based on pettiness, unthinking hatred, and plain old trolling? Then that’s probably what he is. Also, most of the horror, destruction, and death inflicted by humans was inflicted by exactly those type of people.

It was inflicted by instinct, by accident, by stupidity. That’s what real life looks like.

We can’t effectively combat people like Trump if we imagine him as something he’s not, and we can’t combat systemic problems at all if we imagine them as all about villains and victims.