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[–] 43 points 3 months ago (1 child)

My favorite scene in the MCU comes in Captain America - The Winter Soldier.

Hydra's toughest badass is holding a gun on an unarmed technician, telling him to set off a weapon.

The pencil necked nerd boy stands up to the killer.

"Sorry, Captain's orders."

That's the point of having heroes. They show us how we're supposed to behave.

It doesn't matter if you're doing it because you were inspired by Superman, Harriet Tubman, or Toto the dog.

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  • [–] 34 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    He also taught us you should drop netanyahu from the sky to make him crap his pants

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Superman taught me that you have to be born powerful to change the world.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Superman is not superman because he's a Kryptonian with super powers. Superman is superman because he's an idealist and selflessly works his ass off every day to uphold those ideals in any way that he can. It just so happens that what he can do is superhuman. But we can all still contribute to an ideal like him. We can refuse to accept the world we have, the would we think we deserve, the world we think is realistic, but instead work toward an ideal world that we push for every day.

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  • [–] 62 points 3 months ago (22 children)

    Superman comes from a position of absurd privilege wherein he can do whatever he wants without risk to himself, and can put on a pair of glasses to become anonymous afterwards.

    Everyone else has occasionally consider a compromise between what they think is right and what is pragmatic or necessary.

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  • [–] 68 points 3 months ago (14 children)

    Superman taught us to use the privilege we have to help those that don't.

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  • [+] -17 points 3 months ago* (13 children)

    and that's not at all condescending and dehumanizing to those we want to 'help'...

    also one of the historical justifications for colonialism. we need to colonize you to help you because we are privileged and you are not, let us 'raise you up'... and that went over so well...

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    It's not condescending or dehumanizing to recognize that some of us are less oppressed than others.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    as defined by who?

    I meet trust funders with graduate degrees who tell me they are the most oppressed people who ever existed and they are jealous of how good working class and immigrants have it. are they the ones who are the most oppressed?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Huh?

    If you find yourself in an state of privilege, use it to help others. I don't see how this concept is at all confusing.

    Are there idiots who don't understand their own privilege? Sure. Not relevant to this conversation.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    because everyone thinks they are underprivileged and oppressed by someone more privileged than them.

    nobody ever thinks they are in a state of privilege dude. it's everyone else who is, but not them. they are oppressed.

    the second you tell someone they are privileged the first thing they will do is point at someone else and say 'no they are the privileged person'

    and around and around we go. I know doctors and lawyers from multi-millionaire families who think they are the truly oppressed working class, and it's they are being oppressed by other rich people.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I don't think I'm underprivileged.

    Not to put to fine a point on it, but I think this is starting to sound like a you problem.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    ok, and how do you use your privilege to help the world then?

    Do you volunteer 20 hours a month? I do. Should I stop doing because it makes me privileged or something?

    I've certainly been lectured about my lifelong commitment to volunteering makes me a problematic privledged asshole, both on fediverse and in real life, and how I should just give the person lecturing me my money because that way they can go on a nice vacation since I am 'wasting my life' helping others rather than going on vacations in Europe.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Who hurt you?

    I've never once been given shit for volunteering. What kind of volunteering was it? It sounds like you know a bunch of assholes. The best way to deal with that is to not talk to the assholes.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    you did. with your smug posturing that you know best and you know who is privledged and who is oppressed.

    which is precisely what the assholes do, decide they know what is best and judge everyone else for not living up to their bullshit hypocritical definitions of 'oppression'. where i live it's predominantly young rich white women in six figure jobs who love to lecture other people how helping people is bad and perpetuating privilege unless you're specifically helping their intersectional ideal of someone who is poor, black, and trans, because they see everything through a fucked up min/max lens where if you help someone who is none of those things you are only making the world worse.

    because the idea of not judging people and just being nice to whomever asks for help, is so entirely lost on them. meanwhile they start demanding they should get paid for their volunteer work because they are women and women are oppressed... weird how that... circles around to them being highly privledged and them demanding more privileged while claiming it's because they are oppressed....

    weird how all of that works.

    oh and it's education. I have this radical idea that education should be available to everyone... regardless of how privledged or not they are. but what do I know, i'm an evil oppressor over here, with my disinterest in using racial and sexual identity to discriminate who deserves my help or not.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    You do know that it's strange to reply to a two sentence comment with a four paragraph essay that no one's going to read, including me.

    You seem unbalanced. You should work on that.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    You're right for history, although it's pretty obvious superman wouldn't be OK with twisting words like that.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    it's not about twisting words.

    it's about how good intentions often lead to shitty consequences for those subjected to the 'good' imposed on them.

    You don't get to determine what is good for other people. They get to determine that.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Yea, and superman should be smart enough to understand that. They touch on it plenty of times in various stories. Of course the quality varies based on the writers' understanding of self-determination, but it is a topic well addressed by Superman.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    My personal compromise is that I wear my underwear on the outside, but I don't do any of the other stuff Superman does.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah sounds kind of problematic to do whatever you think is good "no matter what the world tells you".

    Morality is born from a collective. Typical American superheroes with their shallow ideals.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    If only there were decades worth of stories where Superman's morality was defined and expanded upon to provide a reasonable template that lends to genuine analysis even in academic and philosophical studies.

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  • [–] -5 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Yes there are, do these stories not confirm Superman's morality as a distinctly Western liberal/Judeo-Christian ideal of the virtuous individual standing above society and deciding what justice is?

    It has a typical "we'll save the world and decide what's best" type of American arrogance to it, doesn't it?

    If you have any reading recommendations on the philosophical analysis I'm interested.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    The thing about comics is that many of them have been going on for so long, for so many different generations and audiences, that they actually handle all kinds of different perspectives depending on which stories you look at. A common theme for a long time is actually contrasting Superman against the Ubermensch idea from Nietsche and the Nazi's bastardized version of it, which is what led to things like Homelander (and Stormfront) in the Boys. There have always been many different perspectives on Superman, his powers, and his morality. The morality of WW2-era Superman is pretty different from Silver Age is pretty different from DCAU is pretty different from Snyder's Superman, etc.

    There are quite a few books about the philosophy of Superman out there. You can start with Superman and Philosophy: What Would the Man of Steel Do?, which is a compilation of academic essays analyzing Superman's morality.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    If a Zionist kills a child in front of me while laughing, being good would be smashing their skull in with a brick.

    *Not surprised I got two people to reply that I've already blocked lol.

    🙏 1
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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I'm the type of guy to say we ought to show the goodness of humanity even to our most evil members. But I'm not one to say you're unjustified for any actions you take when that evil is right in front you, murdering a child. I won't call your answer good, but I won't call it wrong either.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    I'll teach you to say fuck you to all the people that tell you to be mean

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago
    [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Superman taught me that green rock scary

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    I'm sure the vast majority of humans are good. just the definition of what is good differs quiet much

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    I don't get it, where is the depressing punchline?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Also Hawk Girl is a based mother fucker who what she did to Nenjamin Betanyahu

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Well, start.

    Start now!

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I mean yeah, but even if people boast about it, they did something good. I don't think you absolutely have to idealise it.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Oh but you do have to with Superman. That's the entire point of his character and when stories about him shine; when they're about pressing morals and not so much a big baddy to fight. He can do about anything he wants, so it kinda' requires him to be pressed in other ways. Stories that only put him in cliche fights or just have him morally grandstanding are the worst. He is idealized, and that needs to be reconciled with a world that has a lot of grey in it.

    The recent superman movie did a decent job of it, the one with Krypto.

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  • [+] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)
  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Superman is not Hollywood IP. Superman is the creative product of two Jewish-American boys born to immigrant families who created an icon of human potential, of righteousness and justice and service to others, at a time when such Ubermensch ideas were being twisted and used by the Nazis in Germany to dehumanize people like Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel. They made one of the most recognizable and beloved figures in the last century who remains relevant even now, more than 88 years after his first publication in Actions Comics #1. Hollywood has tried to co-op the character, sure, but it's hardly ever done right by him. But the character has never just been limited to a silver screen.

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  • [+] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)
  • [+] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    DC is a comic book publisher. How is that Hollywood? They're owned by Warner Brothers now, which is a Hollywood studio, but that doesn't mean that DC itself is Hollywood, or Superman. Also is an independent IP acceptable until they make a licensing deal for film rights?

    What sort of IP do you like exactly? Give me examples.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago

    According to Bob Chipman

    Superman only makes sense in the context of a worldview where good is the default setting of the universe and the job of a being of godlike power who aims to do good is to fix things when they break and thwart evil from spoiling the natural state of goodness.

    Because if the universe is not good at its core then the moral responsibility of that same godlike being who wants to do good is to assume power absolutely and make the universe good by force.

    And that’s not Superman.

    I don't think IRL, good is the default setting of the universe.

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