Re: this:
(No tagging).
[Wow.
Can't be helped.***shuts book*]
Hmm, yet when I say I can’t be bothered, this is called ‘conceding’. How very interesting.
I think the issue with your approach, having reread all of the above many times in the last few days, is you do not take emotion into account, a problem which applies to this entire thread, by the way. There is the assumption that if you ‘decide’ diversity is good and fair and blah, blah, blah, it will remove the emotion of frustration and hurt on the part of those being policed and somehow make anti-diversity advocates see the error of their ways. Emotionally speaking, the people who are resentful of the suggested ‘reforms’ in the film industry to do with diversity will remain resentful, and no amount of rationalist ‘discourse’ will affect that.
There also seems to be an assumption that using academic (‘fancy’) terminology like ‘discourse’ and reductio ad absurdum (not ‘ad absurdist’, incidentally, as you can’t modify complete Latin phrases) whatnot will disguise the fact that the issue is inherently an emotive one. The difference between the way you and I approach this is that I have already accepted that nothing and no one is objective and impassioned. You still have a way to go.
No matter how many dictionaries and definitions are brought into this, human beings are driven by emotions and all attempts to artificially restrict those impulses are largely futile. This is what I have partly been intending to say, but I never anticipated such a torrent of bizarre literalism in interpreting the guidelines, nor comments about my rational faculties, so got a little derailed in communicating that very fundamental point.
I have used words evoking and referencing emotion very consciously, not because I was, as you say, ‘taking things personally’, but because I was seeking to illustrate that any attempt at objectivity was simply absurd in this context. Hence the humorous hyperboles and suggestions of what can and can’t be inferred are irrelevant outside a philosophy seminar.
A refusal to admit that people - I, Hollywood directors, actors, diversity activists and anyone who is human - do and will always bring emotion into their reading of everything, including the diversity guidelines, is simply a dismissal of human nature. Which is the fundamental problem with the whole diversity thing, because no one really cares whether it’s meant to be about behind the camera or in front of the camera or what, the immediate - and natural - knee jerk reaction is that of resentment, and even if we all agree that all the people feeling that misread, misunderstand or misconstrue things, and are generally not very intelligent (the horror!) or whatever ‘inferences’ can come in handy in this instance, the resentment will not go anywhere. It is pure emotion. Like children being told to go to bed. People don’t like being told what to do.
This - ‘it's already been shown to be a misreading of the diversity policy in question’ (no tagging....) - suggests that reading the guidelines literally, paying attention to every word like it’s legalese, removes the implication that they will likely be and are already being used to justify the policing of the creative process. It’s really very peculiar to assume that people will treat them in the same way as you and Takoma seem to, i.e. reiterating again and again that they are very lax and don’t have to apply to non-Best Picture contenders, and so on, ad infinitum. Yes, they are, yes, this is in the text, but no one cares, people only read the headlines of things and feel resentment at once. These people can be called out for misreading all you want. But that won’t change a thing.
I mean, it is extremely likely that plenty of people (especially the majority who can’t be bothered) will read them like I do, or even more dismissively, not bothering to go into the detail and deciding, ‘They are forcing me to hire women, how dare they!’ That doesn’t make anyone thinking the above evil or bigoted. If the guidelines were on only filming people wearing red, they would also provoke resentment. Creativity is incompatible with guidelines on choices that are at their heart emotive, aesthetic and spur-of-the-moment.
And it’s all very well to say that thinking ‘anyone is being forced to do anything’, to misquote Takoma, is a misreading of misunderstand or whatever, but it is not too much of a generalisation to say people skim over things, they speed read, and the natural reaction from anyone with an ounce of libertarian values would be one of resentment. Now, as one of the articles I linked in notes, once the boomers (British term, postwar generation) ‘die off’, these standards are likely to become more widely accepted, unless, by that point, the pendulum has already swung back and we are back to neoliberalism or classical liberalism. Not likely.
There is little tendency among the general population to read the legalese, so the real world external impact of these guidelines is to impede creators, restrict them in what they can do in advance and restrict access to funding and all matter of opportunities even further, or give them the impression that such restrictions are in place, which is equally bad or even worse. No matter in how cautious and caveated a manner I state this, the implication remains the same.
See, I do accept the double standards, and even the fact that no matter how hard I tried to be objective when it comes to hard evidence, I wasn’t. What seems amusing to me in this thread is that everyone is appealing to logic and fallacies and all the rest of the concepts that have no bearing on how the world has functioned since the beginning of time and will likely continue to. In fact, I would argue all these concepts (‘fallacy’ and so on) were devised to create artificial order where there is none, which is exactly the issue with any kind of diversity standards, but especially in the arts.
It appears to make sense to some people that by appealing to fallacies and rules on how discourse and business can be conducted they can affect the way people feel, which is that they are fragile, don’t like to be told what to do and feel resentment towards bossy individuals and standards designed to boss them around. It makes people feel still more fragile and still more resentful and is, therefore, counter-productive.
Yes, I find the murder example ‘irrelevant’, to use your word, or, rather, meaningless in this context. Emotionally speaking, people who want to kill will kill and, more importantly, will continue to want to kill, hence no matter how much directors are policed and restricted in their choices, some of them will secretly (or it) want to make a non-diverse film (and probably find a way around doing so), and it could be argued that the very existence of this persistent desire makes measures like imposing any kinds of diversity standards meaningless, because they will not change people’s minds or make the think differently. They will only aggrieve them.
Now, my point, once again, is not to say that diverse films should not be made or even that they won’t become even more prevalent, but that the whole initiative is not emotionally grounded and, if you like, misunderstands human psychology. What do people do when you’re forced to pay more tax than they want to? They move away to tax havens. When your parents tell you smoking is bad, you do two packs a day even if you hate the taste, just because. With diversity, people will inevitably find ways to evade the standards, which will likely show how odd it was to impose them in the first place.
As a huge generalisation, it’s quite amusing how the progressive society works to restrict all aspects of existence further and further in the name of ‘equality’. People will soon go to make films in Singapore or Russia, just as they go there for illegal commercial surrogacy, because ‘Where there is a will, there is a way.’