I probably did write for a half hour yesterday. I posted several comments on Ricochet and a few on a private Facebook group on various subjects. I argued my opinion that a willingness to kill is an essential part of heroism, and that the perfection of Superman demands he be willing to kill if the need is strong enough.
...Batman is, as we all know, a moral cripple. Thus him having being unable to take a life, even when not doing so means the the deaths of hundreds or thousands, makes sense. He's not a hero. He's a man working out his vengeance fantasies each night in lieu of therapy.
But Superman IS a hero. He's the best of us. So there has to be a line where Superman will kill. Because an unwillingness to make hard choices is about the most unheroic things one can possibly be. Comic book writers get away with having heroes who don't kill because they tend to write fairy tales where there is "always" another way. But we know that's not true. Having a lot of power at his disposal, there are very few situations where Superman would need to kill, and his unwillingness to do so when it's not absolutely necessary is part of what makes him a hero. But the unwillingness to forego the hard decision and let others deal with the consequences is ALSO what makes him a hero.
And I argued a bunch about libertarianism. I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian. I like our system of government as is mostly, but I believe that we have dangerously limited freedom in this country, and I'd like to see the state, especially the bureaucratic state, pared back. So I like libertarianism, and I tend to get my back up when people who ought to be fellow travelers on the road away from serfdom nitpick it for not being the perfect be-all, end-all political solution for everything. On the subject of drug legalization, I said that the libertarian case is weakest when it comes to heroin, for the obvious reason that its addictive nature distorts incentive, and it is damned dangerous. When Lemmy tells you "don't do heroin", you listen. But at the same time, a lot of prohibitionists act like, by winning the argument on heroin, they've won the argument on everything. And it's not too long before what you're allowed to do is what they think is okay for you to do.
One could argue that Man of Steel failed to accurately depict a situation where Superman would need to take a life, and I think I'd agree. But for Superman to be a truly moral figure, he needs the capacity to kill.
Personally, I'd rather err on the side of leaving people alone, even if that means they make bad decisions. We don't even know they are bad decisions. We certainly don't have as many facts about their lives at our disposal as they do. And some guy a thousand miles away has even less. As a former sufferer of depression, it's entirely possible I'm alive thanks to cigarettes. The twenty years I smoked may take ten years off my life at some point, but their anti depressant effect may very well have saved my life already. But the tobacco prohibitionists would have taken my cigarettes away "for my own good", and who knows, I might be dead now.
In response to some post or other about the rise of "social justice", I lamented my fear that despite for instance the backlash of #Gamergate and #Shirtstorm, we were going to lose in the long run. Yes, the politically correct will overreach. Yes, society will reach an equilibrium point where everyone sort of knows what the rules are. But whatever those rules are, they'll be more constrained than they were before. The tide of social justice isn't going to recede to the point that someone can write an old fashioned book with red blooded heroes and manly men and womanly women and expect to win an award. It's not going to recede to the point where trigger warnings won't reside alongside content warnings for and discussion above a third grade level. It's not going to recede to the point where someone can voice their opinion on a controversial political stance without fearing for their livelihood. We're going to live in a more sterile, stultifying, more Victorian world, And just like the rampant prostitution of the Victorian world, we'll have our seedy underbelly, where we gush forth our true opinions behind the anonymous walls of internet handles. It will be the only place where we'll find honesty.
And you can bet, the other side will still pretend they're victims.
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