Desperately Looking for Racism

Here is a story of a man who walked the streets of New York with a shirt the resembled the Redskins logo but was instead the profile of a white man.  The faux team was the Caucasians.  That's funny.  I would laugh at that.  Certainly not offended by it.  Of note, the story is entirely self-reported.  The journalist takes his word for everything.  Sure, an old lady said it was disrespectful and a white guy called him an a--hole when he realized it wasn't a Redskins logo.  That is obviously the reaction Mr. Joseph wanted and that is the reaction he reports to Yahoo News.  And they parrot it without any skepticism.  Hmm.

By contrast, when a woman wanted to demonstrate that she was 'harassed' while walking down the street, she had it all on film.  Mr. Joseph should try his 'experiment' again and have a similar camera setup.  I am doubtful that his reported interactions would repeat.  Also, there would probably be a lot of laughs.  Checking the comments, it seems the majority had exactly my take on the story.

Speaking of the Redskins controversy, the team is not named that to be insulting or privileged.  Barring the rare exceptions (e.g. UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, UC Irvine Anteaters), team names are chosen for being fierce (e.g. Lions, Bengals, Bears), or cool (e.g. Cowboys, Patriots, Buccaneers), or representative of local industry (e.g. Oilers, Packers, Steelers), and so forth.  Serious teams aren't named the Village Idiots, the Dolts, the Weaklings, etc.  No one wants a name that will provoke scorn or disrespect.  Should I be offended by the Boston Celtics or the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame?

 

Thought experiment: What if there was exactly one incident of overt racism every day and that one incident led the news that night.  Would that give an accurate picture of the level of racism in our society?  On the one hand, racist incidents are in the news every night but on the other hand there is only 1 incident a day in a country of 320 million people.  How we see the world is shaped and molded by the editorial decisions of a relatively small number of people.

Doctor Who's Sex Change

Fifty-four years after the start of Doctor Who, the latest incarnation will be female.  The Doctor is an alien from the planet Gallifrey and somehow in those 5 decades it was never mentioned that Gallifreyans could change sex.  I lost interest in the modern version of the show sometime around the end of David Tennant and the beginning of Matt Smith.  It went from a young and frantic Doctor to younger and more frantic Doctor.  I tried getting back into the show when Peter Capaldi replaced Smith but was crushed by his introduction, notably the moment when his "companion" slapped him like he was a misbehaving child back when it was not child abuse to slap children.  Heck, the companion was more in charge than the bemused Doctor.

 

The planet Gallifrey had quite a few Time Lords and not all of them were men.  For nearly three years the Doctor was accompanied by Romana, a Time Lady.  Unlike the rest of the Time Lords, she did not die during the catastrophe.  She was stranded in E-Space, some alternate universe, where she presumably lives still.  If the BBC is so eager to have a female Time Lady, bring back Romana.  Nope, let's regenerated into a woman.  The outlandish comedy of Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death has ceased to be comedy and is now canon.  Joy.

 

For a former fan, this is depressing to see.  So many shows from my youth that have been rebooted have turned to crap.  Star Trek is self-hating drivel, Star Wars is on the social justice bandwagon, Ghostbusters was sold as feminist propaganda, Henry Cavill's Superman is a guilt-ridden white male, and now Doctor Who is transgender.  The Planet of the Apes franchise has been extremely well done and highly entertaining but, in the end, humanity is the villain.  Yeah, more of that self-hatred.

 

As for the Doctor, the BBC should have just gone all in and had the Doctor regenerate as a gay black Muslim woman confined to a wheelchair.  Just watch those ratings skyrocket with all that social justice.