I love the time travel ending to the original Superman. It had to end that way, in a world-altering sci-fi climax forcing Superman to choose between his identities; between obeying his Kryptonian father Jor-El by never interfering in human history or rescuing his favorite human.
Another: that movie in some ways turned its back on a character created by two Jews partly as a response to the rising global fascism and antisemitism of their time by ushering in the Christianized Superman we are still stuck with today.
Another: while "Superman might be an alienated cynic" is far too plastic a conception of the character, "Superman is always forgiving and friendly" is too rigid. Siegel and Shuster's Superman didn't hesitate to dole out karmic justice.
DCAU Superman also had a mean streak and wasn't always loved. He flipped out and destroyed shit when Darkseid murdered Dan Turpin. S:TAS ends on a sad note when he's turned against humanity and loses their trust. And in JLU he's deeply vengeful toward Darkseid for it all.
But this isn't at all a vindication of the DCEU Superman, who doesn't feel to me like an organic evolution of these features but a radical departure from the previous 75 years of Supermen and ultimately reflective of a strange obsession with turning the original superhero heel.
Superman was in many ways a social technology for enduring/resisting the alienation of modern city-life, urban crime, corrupt cops, large-scale anonymous interaction, & fractured community/intergenerational ties. He's the UN-ALIENATED alien. He's the stranger who's ALSO a friend.
Today is Milton (Bill) Finger's 107th birthday. He's the (until 2015, unaccredited) ghost writer/artist without whom Batman as we know him wouldn't exist. Thread:
Finger is solely responsible for many features of the Batman mythos, such as the hero's alter ego "Bruce Wayne."
Finger turned a mere vigilante into a scientist and detective.
Strong disagreements over the term "right" seem often riddled with miscommunication and misunderstanding. Fewer terms are subject to as much variation in meaning. You have moral rights, legal rights, natural rights, property rights, de jure rights, de facto rights, etc. etc.
In the sense that seems most common to political philosophy, which is a "morally enforceable claim" I think it makes sense to be a kind of monist and try to formulate compossible claims to free action rooted in both naturalistic and constructivist aspects of human society.
On this view I think there is really just a single right shared by all rational agents and which is compossibly realizable between them: the right not to be coerced i.e. the right to one's own sphere of justified free action that extends as far as their own autonomy.
I consider political labels mostly just shorthand signifiers rooted in pragmatic communication and "abolitionist" has increasingly become the shorthand most useful to me in discovering people with similar views, values, and priorities.
I quite like "abolitionist" because it 1) immediately draws parallels between slavery and modern day prisons/police/borders/armies and 2) emphasizes the immediate moral urgency of such opposition that reformist approaches often defang.
But I also worry that "abolitionist" can suggest a view of social change in which structural violence disappears overnight via top-down decree, which couldn't be more foreign to abolitionists who embrace direct action, mutual aid, & building the new world in the shell of the old.