#goingrampant

[philosopherking1887]

I had the thought that as with Thor 1 being the "chick flick" of the MCU and guys generally not understanding Loki's sex appeal, maybe the disrespect Loki receives in Infinity War is of a misogynistic nature, like he has traits more traditionally given to female characters and then is fridged like Gamora, et al. with the jarringness coming more from that a male character got the treatment traditionally reserved for female characters than to any good aspect of the death scene. What do you think?

Yes, I definitely agree with you, and I think I’ve ranted about it before. Actually, I think his treatment is misogynistic in two respects: his character is treated the way female characters usually are; and the way his death happened -- in the first 10 minutes for shock value, with unusual gruesomeness and brutality, and with that fourth-wall-breaking “No resurrections this time” line -- shows utter contempt for Loki’s fans, who are understood to be mostly female.

I searched “loki’s death in infinity war” on my blog and came up with this post where I answered a similar question from someone else and also linked to previous rants about it and reblogs of other people’s rants. Here’s another one that I don’t think I linked in that post.

I’m not sure how you feel about Ragnarok, but I’ve also reblogged and/or contributed to a couple of long analyses of how Loki’s discarding in Infinity War was connected to the deflation and ridicule of his character in Ragnarok, which was ultimately a misogynistic fuck-you to his fans: here’s one, here’s another, and here’s a third.

[fierceawakening]

I think you don't see reblogs of things I reblog from you if you're not the OP, so just thought you might find it interesting context that the OP of that anti-Latinx post started arguing with me about it with the assertion that non-binary genders do not exist (and the contradictory assertion that my viewing this as a trans issue mistakenly reframed as about racism/xenophobia is a misguided SJW conception of the world as social justice issues, while calling "Latinx" ethnocentric whitewashing).

Ugh, yeah, that’s something I disagree with, and I’m alarmed by the rise of comments I see in transmed circles like “Nonbinary genders don’t exist in non-Western cultures, it’s just their way of saying gay. Proof? I’m supposed to have proof? LOL WHATEVER, TRANSPHOBIC SNOWFLAKE WHO WANTS TO TAKE MY HRT AWAY. *flounce*”

But I don’t think the fact that that’s BS (or at least wildly unsubstantiated by people who don’t seem to want to prove it, which smells a bit like bull feces to me) invalidates that a lot of neologisms are not designed with non-native speakers in mind and really only make sense to people in on their creation. (I often wonder, for example, what non-native speakers of English make of “cis,” since its etymology is similarly opaque even to most of us!)

In fact, part of the reason I think… well, it’s not that I think people don’t get to or shouldn’t make up words. But one thing I consistently notice about neologisms, especially as they relate to trans people, is that certain subsets of the population seem to have real trouble adopting them.

For example, I don’t remember exactly when or who this was, but I remember a while back several neurodivergent bloggers who have trouble with language saying “I need you to know I can’t use your neopronoun. I have trouble processing language as it is, and the pronoun-set is one that my brain has serious trouble adding to. I hope you understand that, if I default to ‘they,’ it’s not meant as a snub.”

And from what I recall, people generally respected that and quickly picked it up. So where you used to have, like, “my pronoun is bun” (just choosing that one because it’s the one that became notorious, not out of a desire to imply anything about the person who used it), suddenly you started seeing like “bun/they,” meaning “I’d really prefer you used bun, but if you can’t, please use they.”

I responded to the latinxs post not because I think non-binary people don’t exist or that they shouldn’t make up words, but because my brain went “ah! You know, I’d nodded my head vigorously when people said disability made adopting this hard! And you just explained why I have trouble adopting this other similar neologism–because something that breaks how you learned your second language makes you go ????? Wow, thanks!”

But somehow… I feel like… eh. There are certain political views that people automatically associate with saying certain things, such that “if she said latinx is hard to learn, she’s either racist or only okay with binary trans folks or both! BOO URNS!” is an instant pattern match… even if you actually said “You know, as a non native speaker, I can really relate to this, because that’s so weird looking I cant’ even pronounce it INSIDE MY HEAD and that’s straight up unnerving,” which contains neither anything racist nor anything denying the existence of or disrespecting nb people.

[lierdumoa]

goingrampant replied to your post: christophoronomicon: glitchystardust:...

They figured out how bees could fly around the time they invented the helicopter. When aerodynamics were based around fixed-wing, they didn’t have a model.

The point is that no scientist would observe a natural phenomenon and say "this defies physics." They'd say "this is beyond our current, limited understanding of physics."

[marshmallow-the-vampire-slayer]

derekslaura replied to your post “ sulietsexual replied to your post “sulietsexual replied to your post...”

Where does this leave zombies?

slightly deader than vampires. or slightly less alive? either way.

goingrampant replied to your post “sulietsexual replied to your post “ sulietsexual replied to your post...”

Resurrected from a death-like state, now manifesting animation without the requirement of any oxygen blood level but as can only be sustained through consumption of blood or connection to totems imbued with animating projections of magical energy.

that is... oddly accurate. you’ve thought of this before, haven’t you?

darth-quax replied to your post “sulietsexual replied to your post “ sulietsexual replied to your post...”

They're only mostly dead.

this reminded me of Buffy’s “mostly, they’re just gonna kill you”. 

[philosopherking1887]

FWIW, my father, who is a hardcore Ayn Rand supporter, calls Thanos' philosophy derivative of a socialist mindset that doesn't recognize the value of human life, whereas my father believes capitalists see each person as capable of solving wicked problems in the future and therefore as valuable as the resources deemed scarce. Since you're calling Thanos hypothetically extreme pro-capitalist, here's what one extreme capitalist says. Maybe everyone just wants to push evil Thanos on their opponents?

I don’t doubt that people on both ends of the political spectrum want to disavow a view they see as obviously repugnant and blame it on their opponents. However, it also seems clear to me that the grounds on which people on the Left call Thanos’s worldview pro-capitalist and people on the Right call it socialist are quite different. In short, the leftist critics on Tumblr attribute his factual assumptions to capitalist ideology, while your Rand-supporting father is attributing his normative framework to a socialist mindset.

What people on Tumblr have been saying in various ways is that “overpopulation is a myth”: it is a false causal explanation for the existence and persistence of material scarcity. The idea of overpopulation, this criticism goes, enables rich people to blame poor people for their own poverty. The problem, these rich capitalists say, isn’t the distribution of resources; it isn’t that rich countries overproduce food and throw most of it away, or that rich people hoard money, or that powerful corporations renew patents on life-saving technology to make sure that the products remain scarce and expensive. It’s that those stupid poor people with no self-control just won’t stop making babies. I suspect that this criticism is something of an oversimplification; a growing human population will have more and more energy demands, which may or may not be possible to meet with only renewable energy resources, and will of course require more and more food, which will in turn require that wilderness be cleared for agriculture (unless urban farming and vertical gardens really catch on). On the other hand, population growth rates do slow down as societies become more educated and gender-egalitarian. So I suspect that the gap between the West and the rest of the world (whose labor and resources the West has been exploiting for the past few centuries) is a large part of the apparent problem, and if that gap were allowed to close, there would no longer be any reason to worry about runaway population growth.

What your father seems to be voicing is a general criticism of consequentialist ethics (which operates by maximizing some good outcome): that it aggregates well-being, and therefore has no problem sacrificing the well-being of a few people in order to improve the situation of a large number of people. The most common form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, for which the good to be maximized is pleasure or happiness. A criticism originally voiced by John Rawls and taken up by various other philosophical critics of utilitarianism is that it fails to recognize or respect “the separateness of persons.” It’s perfectly fine for one person to forgo a benefit at one time in order to enjoy a greater benefit at a later time, e.g., by saving and investing money, or by refraining from indulgences in order to preserve one’s health, because the near-term costs are borne by the same person who enjoys the long-term benefits. Utilitarianism makes the same kind of calculation across populations rather than across time, imposing smaller costs in one place in order to reap greater benefits elsewhere; but this is illegitimate (the criticism goes) because the people who bear the costs are not the same as the people who enjoy the benefits. Pretty obviously Thanos is reasoning in a consequentialist/utilitarian way: he’s trying to maximize average happiness by replacing a large number of low-quality lives with a smaller number of high-quality lives. It sucks for the people who die (or maybe not, since he wants to give them a quick, painless death) and for the people who lose loved ones, but in theory, things will be a lot better for the next few generations.

Consequentialism is a kind of collectivist thinking, you might say: the goal is to maximize well-being (however that’s defined) across the entire population of moral patients (creatures who deserve moral consideration, which might be humans, intelligent beings, sentient beings, all living beings…) without regard for how that well-being is distributed among the individuals. As a practical matter, utilitarianism tends to promote egalitarian distribution of resources because of the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility: each added unit of whatever goods (money, food, etc.) provides more pleasure/happiness to someone with less of it than to someone with more of it, so you’ll tend to maximize happiness as the distribution nears equality – ignoring things like different individuals’ utility functions (i.e., how much pleasure/happiness each person gets from one unit of the good at each level of prior possession). So I can see how someone might think of utilitarianism as a “socialist” style of ethics… except that a lot of socialists hate it, too, and attribute it to capitalism (Bentham’s utilitarianism is one of the foundations of modern economic theory). But then both socialists and capitalists like to accuse each other of regarding human life as expendable, as something you can put a numerical value on, rather than as sacred, inviolable, possessing immeasurable dignity rather than a measurable price.

[philosopherking1887]

I rewatched Thor last night. I hadn't seen it in a while. I didn't really like it before. I thought the larger than life good guys were a bit sloppily depicted, but I enjoyed it much better this time after having read your musings on Loki's psychology during the drama. I can appreciate it now. And when Loki falls into space, we can say goodbye to that characterization. I like Joss' flamboyant sexy bad guy characterization, but it distort the character away from his Shakespearean complexity.

Well, as many of my readers/blog followers know, I think there are ways to square the tragic Shakespearean anti-villain in Thor with the (apparently) flamboyant sexy bad guy in The Avengers, and my longest ongoing work of fanfiction is an effort to do just that. Loki’s time in the Void definitely changed him; it hardened him in certain ways, but clearly he has also fallen under Thanos’s power in some way or other and remains vulnerable. His loyalty to his family and Asgard (though not Odin) was also recoverable, apparently, so whatever happened didn’t completely turn him evil.

Whedon was deliberately leaving open a possibility for redemption by showing Loki as under threat from Thanos, and not just violent and power-mad but fearful. He also showed that Loki was conflicted, and genuinely tempted by Thor’s offers of affection and salvation. Ultimately, I think Whedon came closer than anyone else to approximating the classical tone of the first Thor, though The Avengers was more epic than tragedy.

[marshmallow-the-vampire-slayer]

sulietsexual replied to your post “ sulietsexual replied to your post “sulietsexual replied to your post...”

Lol, all good, like I said I was mostly just havin' fun, I often joke with my husband about how Buffy is a necrophiliac :P

of course, leave it to us to disagree on whether Buffy is a necrophiliac or not hahaha

goingrampant replied to your post “nikiiwi replied to your post “salvachester replied to your post “If...”

Honestly, if the undead were ever registered by medical science, they'd be called alive but in a weird way.

honestly, how would they register them? kinda alive? kinda dead?

[philosopherking1887]

Can I ask how you feel about Disney hiring Wernher von Braun? Do you think his apolitical personal nature makes his hiring apolitical in spite of his history as a Nazi scientist, or is his history of work unremovable from his person and reflect badly on Disney for putting a former Nazi front and center? (My dad thinks the former, while I'm inclined to think the latter.)

I didn’t even know Disney had hired Wernher von Braun, though i knew NASA did (I found an article about both). Tom Lehrer even wrote a song about it. You should listen to it, it’s funny.

No, I don’t think hiring von Braun was apolitical, either for Disney or for the U.S. government. But Disney was an antisemitic fascist-sympathizing fuck to begin with, so it’s not exactly surprising.