I mean, it does suck a lot for the people of Kazakhstan to be portrayed in international media as a bunch of incestuous racists.
Whatever problems Kazakhstan as a country or government has, it still feels wrong to me to punch down on ordinary Kazakhs.
I think the original joke was meant to be about people who saw that and thought Kazakhstan was actually that terrible, without either reflecting on the US or educating themselves even a tiny bit on Kazakhstan .
Like it's a spoof on how Americans view ex-soviet nations or any non-british colonial state, while America itself has no trouble partaking in nearly all of the same depravities that Kazakhstan supposedly does.
Making up a whole country would also work, but they probably thought someone would catch on if he was just saying a non-existent country, though in reality a lot of the people he interviews probably would have zero clue the difference.
I think there's merit to his tactic and I'd like to think he's not deliberately trying to be racist. But fuck I always think back to that scene from his "home" village (filmed in Romania) from that first film and it was just waaaayyy too much.
When I think about it, my main criticism against him is similar to one of the main criticisms against black face: someone is coming in and depicting a voiceless minority in an inaccurate and insulting way for entertainment.
Can blackface be used to effectively critique bad things? I suppose I can envision that. But still, it's inherently pretty dicey in my eyes.
Can blackface be used to effectively critique bad things? I suppose I can envision that. But still, it’s inherently pretty dicey in my eyes.
Interestingly, there were actually a number of minstrel show writers who fancied themselves “progressives” and tried (and usually failed) to use the genre to humanize black people.
There’s a famous minstrel song called “Nellie was a Lady” about a black steamboat captain who returns from a long voyage to find his wife as died. It was controversial in the South because it referred to a black woman as a “lady”. Thing is it was still sung by a white dude with burnt cork on his face. Most of these writers ended up realizing you can’t really use blackface progressively and abandoned the genre.
That's actually pretty interesting as an example of the limits of satire
Well the crude punching down on Lybia and Ghadaffi in The Dictator was blatantly intentional, so I don't think we can assume that Cohen is impervious to and thus not working from an internalised imperialist perspective.
It's one of them....how outrageous does it have to be for people to understand it's irony? It's not even like he skirts the line, he clears the line by miles and (some) Americans are still like "yup this is what everyone is like outside of freedom town".
tbh most of the people depicted don't look like the average Kazakh, who looks quite a bit more Asian.
Kazakhstan has lots of (recent) Russian migration and the people I saw in the movie basically looked either Caucasian or Russian.
making fun of racists is actually racist
hear that chapos? you're all fucking racist. you're also sexist, and fascist, and ... pretty much every bad thing. you're all capitalists. you're all landlords.
only i am without sin
i am finally the one true leftist
You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a nationalism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses.
It did cross my mind that SBC could’ve created a fictitious country for Borat in the same region
he did this for his next movie the dictator
i literally thought it was a fake country when i first saw the movie as a teen so he could have for sure
Central asia is extemely isolated due to their geoghraphy and when the ussr fell the nations that became independent were seized by authoritarian forces and they might aswell not exist
Ah yes, typical burger geography: "I never hear about this country so it might as well not exist".
seized by authoritarian forces and they might aswell not exist
That's a pretty dismissive thought about a region with 72 million people and painting everyone with a broad brush.
The authoritarian forces bit is true for perhaps Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan started out similarly, but has had constant power struggles and street uprisings over the last 15 years. Tajikistan had a civil war, a spillover from the Afghan war (because more Tajiks live in Afghanistan than Tajikistan), sending refugees all over, and ending in an uneasy settlement. Kazakhstan, with almost half the population of Uzbekistan, has twice the economic power thanks to enormous oil and gas reserves, which makes it as rich as (and sometimes richer) than Russia per capita - which might seem like nothing to Western audiences, but still makes it a middle-income European country with international significance. Kazakhstan also has complicated politics thanks to a mixed population of Kazakhs and Slavs. The whole region suffers from the authoritarians vs. Islamists dynamic, but it's on a tiny scale compared to the Middle East - and on the whole has a healthier state of religion than, say, France.
...Maybe you were making a joke? Anyway, "Kazakhstan" only being a joke to Western audiences (with Asian Kazakhs being played by European Romanians to boot) is Western arrogance defined. Sacha Baron Cohen is funny and plays great jokes at Americans' expense, but the fact that the feelings of non-Westerners are an afterthought to him shows through.
Edit: One more thought - there's this idea that newly independent Soviet republics that weren't countries before are somehow "fake" countries. The Soviet Union never should have fallen, but all the republics that made it up were very real - during its existence, before, and since.
part of a millennia-long stream of Turkic and Mongolic invaders that repeatedly conquered Europe
might as well not exist
Apparently Kazakhstan is cool with it because it raised their international visibility significantly and drove a lot of tourism.
I think i read somewhere that the first movie was in effect a positive for Kazakhstan with regards to name recognition, even though the things said about the country are untrue and disparaging they are at least outrageous enough that (most) people don't take them at face value.
Little known fact: Borat inspired the rebirth of the KKK in the 1920s
SBC should've made Borat from a fictional fucking country. It's actually fucking disgusting to portray kazakhs as holocaust celebrators and every type of 'backwards'.
It's actually bloody indefensible and he shouldn't get a pass because its a smaller and less significant country. This is literally a case of 'bad person making a good point'.
The point of the Borat character is that Americans are willing to believe kazakhs are actually like that. It's such an obviously absurd character that it is equally absurd that the average person just accepts it at face value. He's not making fun of kazakhs, he's making fun of people who don't immediately call him out as the clown he is.
he is making fun of kazakhs, half the fucking movie (admittedly I've only completed the new one) is for the audience and making jokes at kazakhstans expense. The plot parts which take place in kazakhstan and connecting tissue is fucked, Borat being marvelled by modern technology is fucked, so on and so forth.
if it were all bits where SBC plays funny foreigner and says rude things and americans agree or go along with it that'd be fine---but he surrounded it with racist context completely unnecessarily.
it's definitely problematic, it's the same shit elitist attitude that liberals have towards rural folks.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/nov/15/news
Nah. I the depiction is necessary for the film. The film sets up borat as a character from a "backwards" society and then he travels to the US and gets a bunch of people to agree with shit that he says. Like getting a used car dealer to tell him how fast he needs to drive in a hummer to make sure that the people he hits in it die.
Yeah, a lot of the villagers filmed are upset about their representation
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vLeaVbyCTyc
Such a bummer Taleb is a shitty reactionary. His Black Swan book blew my mind as a teen, he had so much potential.
The Chad Peter Daou vs the virgin Taleb
anyone want to lay odds on what the “certain word” Nassim has in mind is? he really wants to say it
Kazakhstan still has very strict limitations on same sex couples and only allows trans people to change their gender after they receive a "sex reassignment surgery" according to the law. Also the current president photoshopped pictures to remove his double chin. So yeah, it's not a great place to live.
Also the current president photoshopped pictures to remove his double chin. So yeah, it’s not a great place to live.
US president or Kazakhstan president?
same person.
:tromp: you heard it here first folks, i am annexing kazaghsta. kezorko. they call it kazaamland. there was a very popular movie about it where kazaam abdul-jabbar was a genie, who summoned so many hamberders, the best hamberders, and now its ours, okay.
This guy writes books about probabilities why do we care about his Borat takes
