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Torture is a war crime rule
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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The MCU is one of the biggest moneymakers in Hollywood. It is literally Disney's flagship media line and curiously when they attained Spider-man from Disney, the first thing they did was pull Spidey out of poverty and put Aunt May on the Avengers payroll.
It may not be that deep in the comics, but it's still teaching kids the way to fight crime is to punch them in the face, break their legs and put them in an impacted and inhumane prison system.
Just like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle taught us we should do as they were subsidiIng the prison industrial complex and pushing the War on Drugs.
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy Spider-man. I read Spider-man as a kid and my grandson does today. He also fantasizes about punching baddoes in the face, and I can only hope he'll realize that's fantasy before his first real encounter with law enforcement.
Alright but 99% of my memories of superheroes as a kid weren't them fighting crime, but them fighting supervillains, which is generally the main draw for kids.
It still instills a dynamic that the best way to solve disputes is by force and that some parts of the public are undesirable by fiat.
Given the current affairs of the US in which half our federal officials are trying to outlaw trans folk, I'm hyper-aware that this is a bad message to give.
How often is it that superheroes start the violence? Or are you suggesting that smiling as your teeth are knocked down your throat should be the reaction, here?
... given the predilection of comics for redemption arcs, antiheroes, the struggle of being different, and the fucking X-Men, I'm gonna have to press X to doubt on that.
You're hyperaware that a message that isn't being sent is bad. Okay. I'm very aware that Teletubbies advocating genocide is bad. Good thing that's not at all relevant.
How often is it that superheroes start the violence? Or are you suggesting that smiling as your teeth are knocked down your throat should be the reaction, here?
Here in the US, law enforcement escalates to force far more often than they encounter someone who is already aggressive, so it raises a question why villains in comics so consistently engage first?
The propaganda is in what is implied. Redemption arcs are the exception not the rule, and the implication is that most villains don't get redeemed.
Now maybe it's because they know their audience wants to see brightly colored supers knock the tar out of each other, and that might be true, but in the context of police work or vigilantism, it does paint human civilization as a lot more violent than it is. How often do heroes see violence break out during their day to day life (rather than, say, tracking it by police radio?)
I get that you don't want your hobby criticized too sharply. Still, have you seen Spider-man stopping Proud Boys from harassing a drag queen? Have the avengers interposed themselves between a BLM demonstration and the police armed with CS-gas and riot munitions? (I really don't know if they've done these things. I'd be delighted to see right-wing culture wars cross into the MCU, but Disney has their own opinions about their right to continue capitalizing.
... because superheroes aren't cops?
This is not in any way a normal reaction to a image of a woman in a catsuit called Black Cat singing showtunes from the musical Cats.
Take your hangups somewhere else.
Except that superheroes fight crime that's vigilantism or law enforcement. And yes, when they were fighting crime, the police did have a (well cultured) reputation of restraint, all the while releasing dogs on civil rights protestors. And yes, police in the comics were Andy Griffith police, not even COPS police.
Take your hangups somewhere else.
Feel free to block me if you truly think I'm being hyperbolic. I'm far from the first person to make these observations, though.
You do know that spider-man is famously hunted by the police and is rarely on their good side. They often open fire on him before even shouting freeze. Not only that but when spider-man was the ceo of a corporation he hired someone who he caught doing a crime instead of leaving him for the police because he was doing it for his family.
There are a ton of stories of spider-man just talking to the regular "criminals" he's going up against and helping put them on a better path or pointing them towards FEAST, a soup kitchen that also helps people find jobs. You're making massive sweeping judgments on a medium you literally haven't read based off of the most watered down, focused tested, US Military approved versions that exist (and anybody who has read more than 2 comics in their life can tell you're doing that)
And if you wanna talk about cops in comics how about you read The Punisher or Batman and tell me they don't deal with corrupt police
And before you pull the "billionaire does nothing but beat up poor people to fix things" card with batman (saving you from embarrassing yourself some more) he does put his money into making the city better in every way he can. The city's problems are just so deep that Bruce Wayne's money can't fix it all (ranging from things like corruption so deep the money goes back to the mafia to the city is literally cursed.
Pick up some of the better Green Arrow runs and tell me what you see is right wing propaganda
Read The Flash and act like it's anti-rehabilitation when it's literally a meme the community that when he shows up he makes his villains feel bad because he's disappointed in them
Or just read the freaking X-Men and tell me that shit ain't progressive
You know literally nothing about what you're talking about and "your" observations are as shallow as they come. Baby's first leftist comic critique
Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read your posts. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Curiously, the GCPD in much of the canon is owned by the Carmine Falcone which is a bit more typical of Chicago during Prohibition, and political power gained by law enforcement justified by organized crime (and the War on Drugs and the War on Gangs) that drove us to our present state in which precincts are run very much as crime syndicates, turning those powers to prey on common citizens. In the United States, the police industrial complex hunts for liquidatable assets that can be seized via asset forfeiture that are in the hands of civilians who could not afford a legal defense.
It's a huge racket. In 2015 it was estimated $5 billion had been seized across the states, which is more than all the burglaries. Some states are trying to limit or stop asset seizures. Police are often ignoring the law, figuring they'll get excused by IA or some back-the-blue judge.
I bet police in Batman aren't robbing the people this way, even in 2023. I'd be impressed if he was. I'd be impressed if Batman cared when SWAT raided houses in black neighborhoods or when police gunned down a kid without cause in the district park. I bet Batman is still punching thugs.™ I'd be delighted if I was wrong.
The United States (and the UK, and Canada, and parts of the EU) need to systemically change, and if superheroes aren't acknowledging this then they are champions of the establishment, not the people. We can't save the world by punching Thanos in the face; in fact, Thanos killed only half of all life. What is happening IRL is going to result in more than half of all life dying, and that's going to happen even if we achieved carbon-net-zero today. Thanos and Darkseid and all other fictional world eaters have been made irrelevant by real-world events.
And yes, Batman trying to save Gotham by punching thugs makes him irrelevant as well. Feel free to continue reading Detective and rooting for him, but we just don't exist in that world anymore.
Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read your posts. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
If someone's depending on me to inform their opinion, then they can't get much dumber. I invite people to go online and do some websearches about the real shit going on in the world, what real-world corruption in the 2020s looks like (as opposed to the 1920s) and the real monsters that we are facing that will take way more than superheroes to oppose.
But also I get it if you are so miserable, so overworked, so distraught that seeing Batman fight Two-Face is the only light in your world. In that case, yeah, read. Smoke your doobs. Do what you need to do to survive, because this world is fucked up enough that everyone is justified coping however they do, and comics are not the worst habit in the world.