Yes, though they aren’t usually available at the concession booth in that format. Trader Joe’s has a nice basket of DC cups.

Communism could never exist in practice. You need to be able to distribute political power so that any given person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as any other given person. And while we can absolutely level the playing field more than we do we can’t ever get it that level without some magitech we haven’t yet conceived.

…and then the technicians who understand the system will still have an advantage we can only hope they don’t utilize.

Maybe in a participatory democracy run by supercomputer that has some super-amazing indexing so that everyone can set up default voting positions easily and then customize them as they go forward. It presumes they’ll also get informed about the customizations they make so they consistently vote in their own best interests.

Until you can distribute power that evenly, you can’t have communism. You can have command economics, but not communism.

Steel-manning the argument, there is the notion that we could create a functional well-regulated capitalist society that is robust against capture by companies and elites. The problems we haven’t solved are twofold:

One, company officials will do what they want rather than what maximizes profit, usually because the shareholders and watchdogs don’t always know what maximizes profit in the long term, so they can’t demand upper management to do that.

This is why we still have crunching in media development. This it’s why we have poor treatment of employees generally. (It’s established by data now that crunching doesn’t speed the way to meeting deadlines, and well-treated workers produce more value at a rate that exceeds the cost of treating them well in contrast to treating them poorly. Companies treat them like shit anyway.) This is also why we have a lot of bullshit jobs which are office clerks being used and treated more as courtiers and garden hermits than office staff.

And two is that once government is partially captured, it always moves towards getting more captured and serving companies over the public. This is the fundamental failure in the system that Marx defines in Das Kapital.

So far we’ve not figured out a way to counter these properties of capitalism as practiced worldwide. Should we ever, then regulated capitalism will be a viable economic model, but not yet. This isn’t to say a solution doesn’t exist, only we haven’t found it yet.

The struggle is not with the intent to successfully achieve post-scarcity communism, but to get as close as we possibly can, and once we get past efforts by the elite to sabotage those efforts, we can get pretty far (and have done so).

Think similarly to the objective to eliminate all petty crime in a society. You may never succeed, but you can reduce crime so that the rates are the lowest ever, and then go lower, and so on.

It’s not all that hard. We already have (or had – we’re in regime change now) socialist programs that target low-income demographics (e.g. SNAP) and we have socialist programs that provide for everyone (e.g. CDC) and socialist programs that provide for general use (e.g. the NHTSA). We have libraries, the post office, the space program, and so on.

Communism happens by extending this communal infrastructure as far and wide as possible without privatizing it (the way George W. Bush did with Social Security pharma coverage), up to and including things like food and home production, mass transit and so on.

We’ve seen the Soviet Union fail to make communism work before corruption (and sabotage by the elites) overran their infrastructure. Similar we’ve seen the US fail to make democracy work before corruption (and sabotage by elites) overran the elections.

We try, try, again until we get over that damn hill.

It’s okay. I prefer dark chocolate with peanut butter rather than milk, but Reese’s gonna reese.

There are two …fetish personality types I’ve seen that fit Ghislaine Maxwell.

One is the manipulative reverse cuckold, who tries to seduce lesbian or bi women and then coax them into letting their man conquer them, and this type gets off on the successful manipulation and vicarious conquest, especially if the victim / participant is not that into him.

The other is the woman pedophile by proxy, who enjoys underaged victims specifically because they’re verboten, and enjoys the pursuit and conquest. While I don’t know of Maxwell partaking of the victims herself, vicarious victimization would still be a viable end goal of this fetish.

I blame executive dysfunction.

Mom needed to start me with a comprehensive checklist of specific tasks. Clean the kitchen isn’t sufficient. Wipe down the counter, being sure to get under all the counter-top appliances is better.

Otherwise, my missed spots are due to insufficient instruction and insufficient training.

Without the writers, Batman wouldn’t exist. And my premise is that Batman can be written better. It’s not an entirely lost paradigm. It’s just they don’t, because it’s easier, but in doing so, Batman is bad art.

So I stand by my position.

I’m not at all clear where you got that from what I was saying, which was not that we shouldn’t have heroes, but we can have better heroes, ones whose flaws are acknowledged by the narrative.

Consider me thwarted.

It’s allegedly a documentary, not fiction. It should make sense from beginning to end.

Sounds like you feel the need to defend Kurzgesagt for sentimental reasons, and since they’re presenting themselves as a source for accurate information, that just won’t do.

Maybe he’s just flawed. I dunno, it’s just a comic book character.

Being just a comic book character is not a valid excuse, especially given the history of our society holding the presumptions that a) comics are just for kids, and b) we can hold content for kids to a lower standard of quality than we hold our content for adults.

Batman may be just a comic book character but then Batman is a bad comic book character and could be a better one. It’s worse since most versions of Batman in the 20th and 21st centuries portray hold him up as a paragon of righteousness. World’s Greatest Detective, indeed.

Portraying Batman as an anti-villain or antihero, in which the narrative reflects awareness of Wayne’s flaws, is, absolutely, a viable direction for Batman stories to go. And it sometimes has been done that way to make it interesting. But too often Batman is portrayed as a hero, and doing so comes with a tuckfun of unfortunate implications. Most versions of Batman have not aged well, and the general concept of Batman, played unironically, has not aged well.

I’m reminded of a presumption that comes with Superman 1978; To quote Bob Chipman:

[Superman] and his world only work when approached from a place of optimism: …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.

note: I quote this originally (and cite sources) here talking about Supergirl, who is, in the TV series, thrust in a world that is not inherently good by definition. And then Supergirl is then hobbled by government agencies with kryptonite technology and forced into becoming an agent of state. Where Superman is allowed to be a benevolent god (sometimes, but not always, having to contend with challenging problems), Supergirl always has to be overwhelmed by the forces against her… I digress.

Batman as the World’s Greatest Detective only works in the same system, albeit at a sociopolitical level. He works when the system of state and social institutions are inherently good, and he’s fixing corrupting influences, rather than fighting the system itself because it is so corrupt that it needs to be changed via revolution (not necessarily violent revolution, but certainly the degree of extreme overhaul and reform that warrants revolution). And Bruce Wayne is not revolutionary, in fact would oppose revolutionary efforts – and has.

This, incidentally is a failure of the MCU avengers movies, which take place in a post 9/11 America in which the climate crisis is real and the response to it by institutional powers has been underwhelming and ineffective (and have doomed 7/8ths of the human population and counting). The Avengers only work in a world where society is intrinsically good and stable. Curiously a lot of the antagonists are revolutionary but have to include a STEP 4: Annihilate a couple billion people in their plan to show they are, in fact, villainous.

Anyway, comics are not just for kids, and this has absolutely been the case since the 1980s. And children deserve a higher quality of comic book than ones that posit that Batman is a force for good in a society that works.

Yes, like Chipman, I’ve thought about this at length, and was a big fan of Batman as a kid and young adult until I realized the society we live in isn’t the good, stable one. It’s something of a grudge.

Feel free to explain it in better terms. TBH, I watched the first half and quit in disgust.

Are you comfortable and accepting Superman lasering villains when he could singlehandedly end food shortages worldwide and give free unlimited energy to the world by just turning a large turbine for years?

Someone’s been reading SMBC.

Curiously, Superman is given more latitude because he tries to find ways to best utilize his gifts, noting he’d still be doing his best to uphold good even if he was just a mortal journalist. Again, Batman could be directing Supes to deal with elite deviance (which would make a badass premise of a comic).

Bruce Wayne could absolutely be focusing his material assets towards creating a constructive network of programs towards a better society, but he just likes punching things too much.

Even with Batman as a tragic figure (Mom and Dad Wayne haunt his dreams and insist that he’s not a good son unless he’s punching people), the cost to the rest of society is (or would be in a realistic setting) untenable. To be fair, our real-world billionaires have really highlighted that they are the worst humanity has to offer, even more so than all the usual rogues gallery of petty criminals (so yeah, worse than Dahmer and Gacy).

Curiously, Deadpool was also deformed and traumatized brutally by a mutant trafficking / enslavement ring, but he takes it remarkably well. Fourth and fifth wall awareness certainly helps.

IRL, DP would probably be using his mercking to stay one step ahead of suicidal ideation; if he’s not on task, he suffers a psychotic break.

…and then are dealt with by punching them in the face. It doesn’t help.

The point is not that Bruce Wayne doesn’t spend money on charity. The point is it doesn’t matter that he does; his commercial interests cause more damage than all his Batmanning around and charity can compensate for, and his Batman shenanigans cause more harm (or would IRL, when you don’t have a dozen legal teams making all the adverse effects disappear).

Batman really is a story of rich dudes doing whatever they want, whether it’s punching poor people or taking rocket joyrides or fucking little girls, and then their fanboys trying to justify how their exploits are right and proper.

Just stop.

There are a ton of ways to make the Batman paradigm better. One would be just to have him go after his own kind: The Sacklers and Pfizer. The DeVosses and Constellis (formerly Academi, formerly Xe International, formerly Blackwater PMC), The Kochs and big oil and big automotive.

Batman doesn’t. He goes after street crime, even though elite deviance / white-collar crime causes more loss of life, more destruction and more cost than all the petty crime combined by multiple orders of magnitude.

So you’re not even effing trying. You’re making excuses for Detective Comics and should feel shame.

A curse is a cheap excuse. Even cursed Gotham without Batman would be better off than cursed Gotham featuring Batman. It’s a false product meant to treat a false ailment.

No. He doesn’t.

He thinks he does. And maybe even the DC writers are convinced he’s doing all he can. But his Batman budget is much better spent on civics and leaving closing hellmouths and fixing curses to the experts who fix such things.

ETA Then there’s the matter that large unilateral capitalist enterprises have a detrimental effect on society that is orders of magnitude greater than all the good that can come of its charitable works, even when no profit is spared.

I get it. Hard truths are hard, yet Batman cannot be justified as a moral good.

If it makes you feel better, neither can the Roman Catholic Church – nor any large religious ministry.

I’m pretty sure Bruce Wayne is Batman is an open secret of Gotham, because rich people get away with everything. And this is unrelated to Bruce beating up poor people rather than implementing civic projects that might reduce crime.

The only town with a higher crime rate than Gotham, New York is Cabot Cove, Maine, and that’s largely due to the population difference.