Author: adavidjohnson

A David Johnson, of many. The (poorly) recovering journalist of West Texas extraction one.

‘So why can you be transgender but not transracial?’

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‘Race’ isn’t real in the sense that we use it. ‘Mongoloid’, ‘Negroid’, ‘Caucasoid’ are fictions of racism that don’t align with any evidence-based reality.

Sub-Saharan African populations are more genetically diverse than the rest of the planet combined; Aboriginal Australians are separated from by 60,000 years of descent, and Tamils and Melanesians all dark-skinned therefore would be identified as ‘black’ if living a society built on racism.

Racism isn’t grounded in reality, but it creates a reality people live in.

Continue reading “‘So why can you be transgender but not transracial?’” →

50 Shades of Week: Jan. 15-21, 2017

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‘Nostalgia is the memory of a place you’ve never before been—except maybe snuggled into your mother’s warm skin, fresh-fed full, sleepily safe more than happy.’

  1. 12 The Submissive will make herself available to the Dominant from Friday evenings to Sunday afternoons each week during the Term at times to be specified by the Dominant (‘the Allotted Times’).
  2. ‘I’m profoundly grateful and touched by the great compliment accorded to me by the authorities of WSU today.’
  3. ‘Got your attention now, haven’t I?’
  4. I flush at the memory.
  5. ‘My mom is wonderful.’
  6. ‘You like him!’
  7. Christian opens the passenger-side door to the black Audi SUV, and I clamber in.

In a good story, the opposing tension supports the weight

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The other day I watched the Black Mirror episode ‘The Entire History of You‘, and it was wonderful and terrifying and a really good work of science fiction.

Most of all, it was a really good work of fiction, period, because it successfully gave you two competing claims for a moral then forced you to decide which was right.

Continue reading “In a good story, the opposing tension supports the weight” →

50 Shades of Week: Jan. 8-14, 2017

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‘The internal creation of meaning allows its discovery even in places that don’t seem initially to warrant it.’

  1. ‘Anastasia,’ he warns, and I want to roll my eyes but quickly stop myself.
  2. ‘The NDA has been e-mailed to you, Mr. Grey.’
  3. ‘Come.’
  4. ‘The NDA, does it cover everything?’ I ask tentatively.
  5. The day drags at Clayton’s even though we’re busy.
  6. I scowl at her but can’t keep a straight face.
  7. ‘I have one condition.’

No one cares how beautiful you think someone else is—especially them

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“When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.”
—Steve Martin

HUMAN 1:
Can you BELIEVE how utterly SEXIST Steve Martin is?

In the year of our lord 2016 I can’t believe women are still so OBJECTIFIED

It’s getting to the point where even the most innocuous thing is setting people off because the in thing to do is get offended and cry foul.

When men die, their attractiveness as youths is rarely if ever included in a retroactive assessment of their life.

That’s why it’s sexist. Steve Martin felt the need to mention his approval of her figure and how much he wanted to bang her 40 years ago as a precedent to a more substantive compliment.

Being outraged about that is not useful or productive except selfishly to feel like you’re maintaining purity. Sure.

And yet that’s an entirely separate issue from pointing out what’s ‘problematic’ about that tweet.

Continue reading “No one cares how beautiful you think someone else is—especially them” →

‘Bone Tomahawk’ is a Western without the formula

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The other day, I re-watched Bone Tomahawk for I think the fourth time, and that one just as good as the first if not better. The same weekend I saw the original Django starring Franco Nero, and it impressed me in a similar way despite them not having anything in common beyond being Westerns and noticeably gory.

Continue reading “‘Bone Tomahawk’ is a Western without the formula” →

The model makes the minority

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Continued from racism and inequality.

HUMAN 1:
I think there is a misunderstanding on what the inequality with college is. It isn’t the cost. There are scholarships and people of color have easier access and thanks to affirmative action often easier standards to get in. The money isn’t the problem. The problem is affirmative action, scholarships, whatever, don’t do anything because they don’t address the problem of why they need to curve downward to increase enrollment in the first place. Which is impoverished environment. It is that they started out poor that put them behind. By the time college rolls around it is already too late. If we legit want to help poor people and minorities we need to get them out of poverty. The current system is useless.

That’s part of it, sure. We agree. And attending schools with the materials and funding to provide quality education, and being in a socio-economic life situation where you even can focus on doing homework instead of other concerns. Yeah, this is an issue that’s over-determined, absolutely.

But specifically with wealth, there are not nearly enough scholarships available that will cover the cost of tuition, books, housing, and other living expenses at a quality university. Continue reading “The model makes the minority” →

Racism is a grandfathered in to American society

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This criticism doesn’t mean that all white people are the devil, that malice or active racism are necessary. A hermit frontiersman in the 1800s might have had no opinion on slavery or even been against it morally.

But the act of doing nothing is tacit support of the status quo.

An auto union worker in the 1940s and ’50s may have thought segregation was wrong, but if they felt that opposition to anti-lynching bills in the Senate were equally important as economic policy, then their tacit support for a dehumanizing system of oppression is based on racism because it says that mobs torturing and murdering a man, woman, or child with impunity isn’t so important if that person is black.

In the same way, if you say that regularly stopping and frisking black and Latino people without any reasonable suspicion is ‘just one of many issues’, it’s because you think it’s unlikely to affect you or people like yourself, so you don’t care that much.

Malice is not required; apathy is more than sufficient.

Continue reading “Racism is a grandfathered in to American society” →

‘ “Teaching women to be safe” Why don’t you just teach men not to rape?’

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The issue with teaching women how to protect themselves from rape is not that it isn’t a practical concern worth considering & acting accordingly.

The problem is that by doing so, it frames rape as a force of nature no one in particular is responsible for committing but people are responsible for protecting themselves from, and in fact they are the ones to blame if they don’t protect themselves properly.

Continue reading “‘ “Teaching women to be safe” Why don’t you just teach men not to rape?’” →

Life hangs by the hairs on a chinny chin chin

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The idea of when personhood begins and ought to be respected is a sort of Zeno’s Paradox —like how many hairs it takes on someone’s face before they have a beard.

We have a commonly understood idea we all agree on, but defining the exact moment where something crosses over is always absurd and any given number of people will have different, contradictory, even self-varying opinions on where they draw the line.

If you say that someone with 3,017 chin hairs is still beardless but 3,018 has a beard, that’s ridiculous. But it’s also ridiculous to say that the first hair on someone’s chin is what makes them bearded if you want that concept to have any utility and align with anyone’s intended meaning.
Continue reading “Life hangs by the hairs on a chinny chin chin” →