A David Johnson, of many.
Human 1:
I’m watching Angel and women get brutalized exactly like men do all the time.
It’s the same with Buffy, and, going back in time a little bit, same with Battlestar Galactica, Kill Bill, Spartacus.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claim “no violence should befall fictional women”, and yet redhats and gamergaters routinely claim that women want all the benefits and none of the disadvantages.
How did this claim come to be?
I wouldn’t consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita a classic or say there’s more value to it than in a Michael Bay film.
It’s an impressive technical achievement, and it’s formally beautiful; if that justifies its existence, I don’t see how that’s enough to justify its study.
I once read an essay arguing that if there were a story about someone obsessed with chopping off dicks, it wouldn’t matter how gorgeous the prose was: no one would assign it. Instead, this is about lusting after and raping a young girl, so we can call it literature. If hedged, ‘provocative literature’.
There’s a lot of literature that’s beautifully written. This one in particular is studied because it allows people to lust after a teenage girl under the pretense of art, from within the gaze a sexual predator they’re allowed to empathize with without feeling guilty of it themselves.
Continue reading “‘Why is “Lolita” considered a literary classic?’”
If we pretend that culture and art are the hammers they were never meant to be, very soon we will arrive at a point which says other ideas and the people who hold them are wrong, then inferior, then dangerous, and finally as subhuman or not fit to live—or at least unfit to live around us, some illusory sense of social or culture “purity” now the goal.
I disagree with your premise. In a 2001: A Space Odyssey’ sense, we’re always trying to rid ourselves of the tribe the next hill over. Baboons and chimpanzees don’t need art criticism to break open the bones of rivals and suck out marrow in victory.
Continue reading “‘Civilization Does Not Civilize’ – or barbarize, either”
‘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?’”
“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”
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”
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”
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?’”
Two comments threads in response to the above image on Faceyspace.
HUMAN 1:
Not trying to be a jerk, honest. But if you think a guy can date a guy, a girl can date a girl, a guy can say he’s a girl and date a guy or girl. Then why is age gap bad?
Up to a certain age, everyone is the equivalent of falling-down drunk in their decision-making.
Now, some people can hold their liquor better than others. And some people, even blitzed, might not think unkindly on their drunken hookup when sobered up.
Yet: This is in no way a justification for sober people trying to have sexual involvement with drunk people.
Continue reading “Conversing with brave devil’s advocates in defense of creepy guys”
HUMAN 1
I’m not even going to dance around it and try to say there’s some other reason.I think if you kill somebody with the intent of doing so, you deserve to die.
And I’m not the only one who thinks this way, obviously.
The 4 percent of people executed being innocent is misquoted and here is the study it is misquoted from. Another misquoted number is 1.6% of people on death row since 1973 have been executed and later exonerated. This is not true: 1.6% of people on death row since 1973 have been exonerated, not executed and later exonerated.
Everything I have said is my opinion, you don’t have to agree with it, I don’t expect anybody to, but damn, calm down.
And to address some very thoughtful concerns on who kills the executioner, we don’t need to be smart asses, obviously nobody kills the executioner. I think that about covers it.
As the death penalty is applied in the United States, it’s more likely to be used if you’re a minority and poor than white and rich, regardless of other facts of the case.
In addition, whatever abstract sense of justice you may have about it, the utilitarian effect doesn’t seem to exist. Texas is not a less violent state than all others for executing more people than all others. In fact, nations that execute their citizens don’t tend to be more safe, or have a better quality of life, than those who’ve abolished it.
Finally, and to utilitarianism, if you remember the ‘crime of the century’ by Leopold and Loeb, the two of them murdered a young boy as nothing more than a game and to prove they could. But Clarence Darrow successfully spared them the death penalty. Loeb got killed in prison, but Leopold was paroled after 30 years and went on to have a peaceful, productive life in Puerto Rico until his own death.
My point is that rather than wasting energy & resources killing someone to attempt retribution and probably not getting it, it is possible to make someone capable of rejoining society and increasing its happiness.
HUMAN 1:
The numbers don’t look much different from what I would expect given more general crime statistics (FBI table 43 for example). Would you like to elaborate?
I admit, I didn’t realize the homicide statistics skewed that heavily demographically, so thanks for pointing my way to it.
However, the Uniform Crime Reporting table 43 you’re talking about is only somewhat related to the death penalty, because only very rarely does a homicide arrest lead to a death penalty case.
The time range of the Death Penalty Info page linked above doesn’t match up exactly with this Justice Bureau report that stops in 2005, but check out the race section starting with page 58. While 47 percent of homicide victims from 1976-2005 were black, only 15.2 percent of those executed killed black people.
It’s simultaneously fair to say that black Americans are underrepresented on death row by their proportion of homicides but still overrepresented based on the types of homicides that end up on death row.
White people show up as much as they do because, in practice, killing white people is considered by the criminal justice system a more heinous act than killing a black person, and 86 percent of white homicides and 94 percent of black homicides were intra-racial (page 66 ). Maybe, fundamentally, that’s a racial empathy thing going on.
In spite of the Jasper case referenced in the above Politfact article and Ron Paul quote, it is extraordinarily rare for a white person killing a black person to end up on death row, compared with a black person killing a white person. See page 6 for a more detailed breakdown.
I won’t promise to have read this research paper in its entirety, but the parts that were within my understanding were interesting and arrived at a similar place in a more methodical way.
Page 72: “Overall, the primary racial difference in capital charging is the difference across racial lines in intra-race cases. Homicides with white defendants and white victims are treated significantly more harshly than homicides with black defendants and black victims.”
Even assuming race were no factor at all, and you shouldn’t, prosecutorial discretion is extremely arbitrary even depending which part of a state you’re in, and whether an individual district attorney likes to seek the death penalty, just use it as leverage, or take it off the table entirely, is a disparity that has a real effect on people otherwise accused of the same level of heinous crime.
HUMAN 1:
Great post with some interesting points.
ADJ 