SkepticalButOpenMinded

Everyone likes him because the storytelling is good, which proves my point: Race/gender swaps are fine when done right. But when Miles Morales was first introduced, it was considered a race swap, and the usual crowd definitely moaned about it.

The multiverse explanation reminds me of people saying “But the elves liked being slaves!” in Harry Potter. Yeah, they were written that way, and they could have been written another way. The multiverse is being used to narratively justify a black Puerto Rican Spider-Man.

Kind of. Excerpt from this article by Ridley Scott:

“I think the idea actually came from Alan Ladd, Jr. I think it was Alan Ladd who said, ‘Why can’t Ripley be a woman?’ And there was a long pause that, at that moment, I never thought about it. I thought, why not? It’s a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went.”

This was the late 70s. “Man” was still so powerfully default that Ridley Scott had not even thought of the possibility of casting a leading woman action hero before a meeting with an exec. That, to me, is clearly a gender swap moment, because until that moment, it was a given that Ripley would be a man. The gender-neutral script just allowed for the possibility.

It’s hard to do well, but I disagree that it’s a slap in the face or a low blow. The gender swap of Starbuck from Battlestar Galactic was seen as sacrilege by fans, but she became one of the highlights of the show. Miles Morales was a creative way to do a race swap for Spider Man, and the narrative is richer for it. Jason Mamoa turned Aquaman from white to Polynesian, and the depiction was better than ever. Would Nick Fury be better as a white guy, as he was originally for decades, instead of Samuel L Jackson?

And then there are all the “swaps” that happen before the first day of filming, like Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien, who was originally (edit) going to be cast as a man. This was “controversial” at the time, with people decrying “political correctness”. I would not take “causing controversy” as a reliable indicator for whether something sucks.

Edit: point taken about gender neutral script. See discussion below.

That’s actually even more depressing. The legal minimum wage is so low that it’s not even lifting up the wages of the most modest jobs in the lowest COL areas. It functionally doesn’t exist.

Yes the exception is places like Massachusetts, which has some of the best quality healthcare in the world. But, you guessed it, they have a universal healthcare system similar to Germany.

Vox was started by Ezra Klein and has a good reputation in academia for explanatory journalism.

This is a myth. The suicide rate in Japan is lower than the US, and similar to European countries. South Africa, Russia, and Korea have bonkers suicide rates.

Maybe biking is an exception, but for public transportation and walking, it is absolutely true that pretty much all of Europe is much better. It’s not even close.

Yes, the lack of civic knowledge is sometimes frightening. I’m not one to say “both sides!”, but in this case, I see it on both the left and right: people who don’t seem to understand that most major bills in the US pass through compromise. This is true even when one party has a majority, because the US has some of the weakest party discipline of any system (eg people can vote against their party).

You are acccusing them of invoking a thing that only you invoked and when you’re called out on it, you accuse everyone else of “mental gymnastics”?

I agree with your sensible degree of caution, given the context. It’s good media literacy.

Agreed. I think both are part of the picture. Consumers are buying the wrong kind of car (or manufacturers are selling the wrong type of car), too big and too inefficient, and there is price gouging, especially during the pandemic shortage. It’s telling that car prices were the fastest to come back down of almost any consumer category last year. Shows how much they could come down.