MTGAP
28d ago
This is how I interpreted it:
- Strength makes it easier to attain excellence.
- But strength does not particularly care about excellence. Strength only produces excellence as a side effect under certain conditions.
- If strength is widely denigrated, then the only way for strength to make itself look good is to be excellent.
- Therefore, we ought to denigrate strength, to force it to be excellent.
a stupid move because the characters that comics fans know and want are Iron Man, Captain America, and so on.
I think the issue was a bit different:
- Iron Man, etc. became popular because of the MCU movies. Back when Marvel was broke, they sold off the movie rights for all their most popular characters (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic 4, Hulk), and Iron Man and Captain America were the most popular out of the ones they had left.
- Captain America wasn't even popular in the first 2 movies he appeared in. I remember in the Honest Trailer for The Avengers[1], they called Captain America "no one's favorite character". He only got popular after The Winter Soldier came out because that movie was really good.
My point being, the MCU could have been just fine without Iron Man and Captain America. They made those characters popular, so they could have done the same thing again—introduce some new characters to the film-going audience and make them compelling. The problem wasn't that they brought in unknown characters, it was that they didn't make those characters compelling.
[1] This is a tangent but re-watching this video reminded me of how when they switched from their old narrator (who does this video) to the new one, tons of people complained that the old one was better. Which was crazy to me? The "new" narrator (not really new at this point, he's been doing it for >10 years) sounds like an actual movie trailer narrator, the old one sounds like a guy who can do a decent impression of a movie trailer narrator.
MTGAP
6mo ago
But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions.
This statement sounds weird to me? "There is no way to identify them, unless you use the extremely obvious and easy method to identify them."
MTGAP
7mo ago
Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available.
How does this work as a practical matter? How are modern people able to read a 1400-year-old version of Arabic?
MTGAP
10mo ago
Agreed that professors often overreach by compelling certain types of belief. But on my reading, the legislation is overly broad:
compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.
Suppose an economics professor has an exam that compels students (on penalty of getting a worse grade) to express that, in a hypothetical all-else-equal scenario, minimum wage increases unemployment. This is certainly a political belief (minimum wage is a controversial political issue), but I'd say it's fair game for an economics exam.
(The "inherently superior" wording is a bit weird, if you say political belief X is true and not-X is false, is that equivalent to saying X is inherently superior to not-X?)
MTGAP
10mo ago
This is a total aside but I find it curious what does and does not get labeled NSFW. I'm not criticizing you or anything, you're following standard norms, but I find it weird that a stand-up bit without swears is "SFW", and a stand-up bit with swears is "NSFW", even though the actual thing I'd get in trouble for at work isn't the swearing, but the fact that I'm watching stand-up while I'm supposed to be working.
Or, like, pictures of women in bikinis is "SFW", but pictures of topless women are "NSFW", even though I'd be ~75% as embarrassed to be caught at work looking at women in bikinis as at topless women.
MTGAP
10mo ago
The Jar Jar one always got me. I kept hearing people say Jar Jar was a racist caricature, but I couldn't figure out what race he was supposed to represent. Not a very good caricature if I can't even tell what it's caricaturing. (I think he's supposed to be quasi-Jamaican? But he really doesn't seem Jamaican to me.)
So by this logic, the government should require all drivers to install sleep monitors and then revoke the license of anyone who sleeps for less than 7 hours a night?
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