Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.
Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, withdrew his introduction to a new Marvel comics collection after its publisher insisted he remove a description of Donald Trump as "Orange Skull," drawing a comparison between the president and Captain America's fascist enemy, the Red Skull.

In an introduction commissioned by publisher the Folio Society for its upcoming collection, Marvel: The Golden Age 1939-1949, Spiegelman described how dire threats like the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism inspired Jewish artists and writers to create the first superheroes, or godlike "secular saviors."

Spiegelman concluded his essay by drawing a parallel to the resurgence of far right politics in the modern era. "In today's all too real world, Captain America's most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America," Spiegelman wrote.

The Folio Society asked Spiegelman to remove the Orange Skull reference from the essay, claiming Marvel Comics was trying to remain "apolitical" and wouldn't allow its publications to take political stances. In response, Spiegelman pulled the introduction and will instead write on the subject in an essay to be published in The Guardian on Saturday.

"I didn't think of myself as especially political compared with some of my fellow travelers," Spiegelman wrote to The Guardian. "But when asked to kill a relatively anodyne reference to an Orange Skull, I realised that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with, and I withdrew my introduction."

In Maus, Spiegelman retells his father's account of surviving the Holocaust, from the lead-up to World War II through the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. He sees echoes of the era today.

"International fascism again looms large," Spiegelman wrote. "Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we're all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams."

Spiegelman points to the close connection between Marvel Entertainment Chairman Isaac Perlmutter as a possible motive for Marvel's desire to tamp down direct criticism of Trump. While not a part of the Trump administration, Perlmutter is a longtime friend of Trump, who frequently advises the president.

"Perlmutter and his wife have each recently donated $360,000 (the maximum allowed) to the Orange Skull's 'Trump Victory Joint Fundraising Committee for 2020," Spiegelman writes in The Guardian.

In 2018, ProPublica revealed how Perlmutter and other members of Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, act as "shadow rulers" of the Department of Veterans Affairs, dictating policy without any official position or public accountability.
The reason why Marvel are utter trash, honestly. Shying away from a potentially-controversial but entirely true political statement because it might offend the wrong people.
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Re: What's new with the big two: Marvel and DC Comics discussion thread.

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As a follow-up, the essay itself can be found here on the Guardian.
Back in the benighted 20th century comic books were seen as subliterate trash for kiddies and intellectually challenged adults – badly written, hastily drawn and execrably printed. Martin Goodman, the founder and publisher of what is now known as Marvel Comics, once told Stan Lee that there was no point in trying to make the stories literate or worry about character development: “Just give them a lot of action and don’t use too many words.” It’s a genuine marvel that this formula led to works that were so resonant and vital.

The comic book format can be credited to a printing salesman, Maxwell Gaines, looking for a way to keep newspaper supplement presses rolling in 1933 by reprinting collections of popular newspaper comic strips in a half-tabloid format. As an experiment, he slapped a 10 cents sticker on a handful of the free pamphlets and saw them quickly sell out at a local newsstand. Soon most of the famous funnies were being gathered into comic books by a handful of publishers – and new content was needed at cheap reprint rates. This new material was mostly made up of third-rate imitations of existing newspaper strips, or genre stories echoing adventure, detective, western or jungle pulps. As Marshall McLuhan once pointed out, every medium subsumes the content of the medium that precedes it before it finds its own voice.

Enter Jerry Siegel, an aspiring teenage writer, and Joe Shuster, a young would-be artist – both nerdy alienated Jewish misfits many decades before that was remotely cool. They dreamed of the fame, riches and admiring glances from girls that a syndicated strip might bring, and developed their idea of a superhuman alien from a dying planet who would fight for truth, justice and the values of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Barely out of childhood themselves, the boys’ idea was rejected by the newspaper syndicates as naive, juvenile and unskilled, before Gaines bought their 13 pages of Superman samples for Action Comics at 10 bucks a page – a fee that included all rights to the character. Not only was Siegel and Shuster’s creation the model for the brand new genre that came to define the medium, their lives were the tragic paradigm for creators bilked of the large rewards their creations brought their publishers.

It is generally agreed that Superman launched the golden age of comics in June 1938 with his debut in Action Comics #1, published by what is now known as DC Comics. Siegel and Shuster had created a new archetype – or perhaps, more accurately, a new stereotype – and by 1940, once the nascent genre had demonstrated that it could get kids to part with millions of dimes per month, swarms of imitators catapulted hordes of four-colour heroes into the skies, all chasing the gold in this golden age. The juvenile naivety of Superman was, it seems, actually part of its allure, inviting youngsters into a new especially kid-friendly kind of story whose fantasies were even more unfettered by logic than most prose pulp fiction, all presented with diagrammatic visuals in primary and secondary colours that could make every page a theatre curtain to be raised on to new eyeball kicks and … action.

Goodman, trend-surfing publisher of some lurid pulps, was one of the first to ride the superhero wave, immediately making a giant splash with his first issue of Marvel Comics in October 1939. (The first printing of 80,000 copies was followed by a reprint of 800,000 more.) The content was provided by Funnies, Inc, a comic book packager that could produce complete comics from concept to finished art for nascent publishers who wanted to keep their overheads low. These “shops” had something in common with the garment district sweatshops that many of the artists’ family members worked in. Usually done as piecework while punching a time clock with many hands (script-writers, pencillers, inkers and letterers) all attacking the original pages almost simultaneously, this was more a small industry than an art form.

It recruited green youngsters, washed up old hacks and even – when the second world war came along and drafted many of the young men who filled the growing demand for comics – women, people of colour and other interlopers. (Those interlopers, by the way, still had to provide the racist and sexist stereotypes that have long been a touchstone of the whole medium.)

At this point, it might be worth pointing out (not out of ethnic pride, but because it might shed some light on the rawness and the specific themes of the early comics) that the pioneers behind this embryonic medium based in New York were predominantly Jewish and from ethnic minority backgrounds. It wasn’t just Siegel and Shuster, but a whole generation of recent immigrants and their children – those most vulnerable to the ravages of the great depression – who were especially attuned to the rise of virulent antisemitism in Germany. They created the American Übermenschen who fought for a nation that would at least nominally welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … ”

To namecheck just a few of these secular Jews who had adopted Clark Kent-like secret identities: Gaines was born Max Ginzberg; Goodman’s parents immigrated from Vilnius, Lithuania; Jack Kirby (né Jacob Kurtzberg), the powerhouse who co-created Captain America with his landsman Joe Simon, was born in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side; and Stan Lee, who became the face of Marvel Comics, was Goodman’s wife’s cousin, nepotistically hired as a 17‑year-old office boy named Stanley Lieber. Though not welcome in the higher precincts of advertising and publishing, they were all able to find their niche at the bottom of the barrel.

The unseasoned artists in these comics factories discovered the possibilities of a new form while under do-or-die deadline pressures. They picked up their skills by copying each other and by stealing directly from the masters of the newspaper adventure comics: Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9), Hal Foster (Tarzan, Prince Valiant) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates). On the other hand, Carl Burgos (né Max Finkelstein), who created the lead feature in Marvel Comics #1, The Human Torch, proudly said: “If they wanted Raymond or Caniff they could look at Raymond or Caniff. The miserable drawing was all mine.” A writer-artist, his then rudimentary drawing skills were buttressed by an intuitive visual storytelling ability and were applied to an inspired character: The Human Torch. The character – an anthropomorphised streak of red and yellow flame – had a graphic intensity that burned its way into readers’ eyeballs and personified the raw crackling energy of the early comic books before they were domesticated.

William Blake “Bill” Everett, Burgos’s comrade at Funnies, Inc, was an oddity in comics. For one thing, he wasn’t Jewish. Everett came from a 300-year-old patrician Massachusetts family and he really was a direct descendant of his namesake. He came to the outsider status that drew him to comics via an addictive personality – he was a heavy drinker from the age of 12 and had a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit – or maybe it was an outsider’s sensibility that drove him to drink. He was one of the most gifted artists ever to work in comic books. He drew fluidly, was comfortable in many genres, and had a sense of page design that allowed the reader’s eye to find buried visual treasures while swimming effortlessly through a story.

His alienated antihero, Namor, the Sub-Mariner, was the forefather of a long line of troubled characters that would populate the Marvel universe a couple of decades later. In the 1940s the Sub-Mariner was singular – a marked contrast to the square and square-jawed vigilante do-gooders who lived in the less scruffy DC Comics neighbourhood. Never fully at home in the ocean or in the air, Namor was proud, arrogant and more volatile than the Human Torch, his complementary opposite. But water and fire combined to bring Marvel Comics to an elemental boil.

In late 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, while the Nazis were Blitzkrieging London, Simon, an entrepreneurial freelancer for Funnies, Inc, was hired by Goodman to write, draw and edit for him directly. Simon showed him the cover concept for a new superhero that he and Kirby had dreamed up – a hero dressed like an American flag with giant biceps and abs of steel has just burst into Nazi headquarters and knocked Hitler over with a haymaker to the jaw. Goodman began to tremble, knowing what an impact this book would make and remained anxious until the first issue of Captain America, dated March 1941, landed on the stands. Goodman had been terrified that someone might assassinate Hitler before the comic book came out!

Captain America was a recruiting poster, battling against the real Nazi super-villains while Superman was still fighting cheap gunsels, strike breakers, greedy landlords and Lex Luthor – and America was still equivocating about entering the conflict at all. No wonder Simon and Kirby’s comic book became an enormous hit, selling close to a million copies a month throughout the war. But not everyone was a fan in 1941 – according to Simon, the German American Bund and America Firsters bombarded the publisher’s offices with hate mail and obscene phone calls that screamed “Death to the Jews!” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a real-life superhero, called to reassure him, saying: “The city of New York will see that no harm comes to you.”

Kirby’s hyperkinetic figures with hypertrophied muscles left human anatomy in the dust. His characters were bellicose, humourless, single-minded and angry as they burst out of saw-toothed panels and widescreen spreads. His art set the tone for superheroic action, not just during the war years, but ever since.

I know that Kirby was a protean original as a comic book creator as well as a genuine war hero, but I confess that I have a blind spot when it comes to the superhero genre that grew out of the template he set. Even when I was 12, superheroes were my methadone – I was deeply addicted to satire magazines such as Mad, and the old newspaper comics I discovered in my public library’s bound volumes. I preferred more mature fare like Donald Duck and Little Lulu. You see, I love the form of comics – the pages full of co-mixed words and pictures butting up against each other, all those little boxes you have to compare and contrast to pry out the narrative juice; and I adore the weird idiosyncrasies of cartoon language in all its accents.

Those who find superheroes the alpha and omega of comics date the end of the golden age to some time in the postwar 1940s when interest in the genre faded.

Disenchanted GIs, no longer an eager and captive audience, may have realised that it wasn’t Captain America who won the war. Maybe it was the Russians! In any case, demobilised soldiers either grew out of the comic book habit or shifted their attention to other genres. Crime, cowboy, romance, horror and war-themed comics flourished, often with more mature – and even lurid – content designed for older readers.

I date the end of the golden age to 1954. A moral panic built on the false assumption that the medium was strictly for young kids and was turning them into juvenile delinquents had led to comic-book burnings and to US Senate hearings that ultimately put many publishers out of business and maimed the rest. Sanitised superheroes brought the medium off life support in 1956 (now hailed as the beginning of the silver age) but the medium never regained the ubiquity it had in its heyday – as comic books. As movies, they have conquered the world!

Back in the golden age, if you wanted to see some guy in a cape fly over a skyscraper or turn New York City into rubble, comic book panels were the most satisfying delivery system. In the 21st century, thanks to the miracle of CGI, many millions of people around the globe who have never read a comic or heard of graphic novels go to their multiplexes to worship the new deities that embody the DNA of comics.

The young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic – almost god-like – secular saviours to deal with the threatening economic dislocations that surrounded them in the great depression and gave shape to their premonitions of impending global war. Comics allowed readers to escape into fantasy by projecting themselves on to invulnerable heroes.

Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

While the content of comic books has hijacked our cinema, the form of comics – cleverly disguised as graphic novels – has infiltrated what’s left of our literary culture. When the Folio Society, venerable publisher of luxurious illustrated books since 1947, decided to plunge in with a deluxe compilation of golden age Marvel comics, they invited me, as a graphic novelist and comic book scholar, to write an introduction to the book. Perhaps they misguidedly figured that I might lend the endeavour a fig leaf of respectability.

I turned the essay in at the end of June, substantially the same as what appears here. A regretful Folio Society editor told me that Marvel Comics (evidently the co-publisher of the book) is trying to now stay “apolitical”, and is not allowing its publications to take a political stance. I was asked to alter or remove the sentence that refers to the Red Skull or the intro could not be published. I didn’t think of myself as especially political compared with some of my fellow travellers, but when asked to kill a relatively anodyne reference to an Orange Skull I realised that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with, and I withdrew my introduction.

A revealing story serendipitously showed up in my news feed this week. I learned that the billionaire chairman and former CEO of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, is a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s, an unofficial and influential adviser and a member of the president’s elite Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. And Perlmutter and his wife have each recently donated $360,000 (the maximum allowed) to the Orange Skull’s “Trump Victory Joint Fundraising Committee” for 2020. I’ve also had to learn, yet again, that everything is political... just like Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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I figured the subject matter and debate potential warranted it's own topic separate from the general Marvel/DC news, so here you go.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 3:38 am The reason why Marvel are utter trash, honestly. Shying away from a potentially-controversial but entirely true political statement because it might offend the wrong people.
But I don't understand! I thought Marvel was ruled by a shadowy cabal of communist soy-infused milkshake-hurling EssJayDoubleyous! How did Ike Perlmutter sneak this decision past his feminist overlords?
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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saint_matthew wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 9:49 am
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 3:38 amThe reason why Marvel are utter trash, honestly. Shying away from a potentially-controversial but entirely true political statement because it might offend the wrong people.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to side with Marvel on this one. This is the first time in a long time that Marvel has done the right thing as far as not being hyper partisan hacks.

Regardless of what you think about Trump on a personal level, it is clear that he isn't a nazi, or a fascist, or white supremacist, so utilising someone else's product to compare him to Red Skull is simply not suitable for a forward for this book. So no, it's not a true statement, it's TDS suffer trying to use Marvels reach to attack Marvels own costumer base.

And it should be noted that it wouldn't become more suitable if the forward had been taking shots at Hillary, Burnie, or AoC for exactly the same reasons.

Secondly, this stuff never ages well.

So yeah, I'm going to say Marvel is right to ask him to remove the reference & if he wants to take his bat & ball and go home, well then that's certainly his right to do so.
So Marvel's own customer base is Donald Trump?

As for whether or not Donald Trump is a Nazi or a fascist I'm not going to debate that because he actually pretty clearly is. The man is running a government that is running concentration camps at the border. And lest you buy into the idea that calling them concentration camps is disrespectful, actual real-world Jewish groups are currently protesting under the group Never Again Action, and holocaust survivors and experts upon historical concentration camps have openly labelled them as such.

If you look at a list of the fourteen signs of fascism, Trump fits most of them.

Art Spiegelman, who pretty damn obviously knows what fascism is, was calling it like he saw it. Like, if they didn't want the person writing their foreword to comment on the link between the Golden Age era protests against fascism and the current state of politics, don't hire Art Spiegelman to write the foreword to your Golden Age book.
Now if only Marvel would wake up, fire Sana Amanat & all the people penning books that have fallen below the cancellation point because they are writing for an imaginary audience who did not show up, maybe the western comic book industry will last longer than the next 4 years. :D
Apparently those books sell well enough digitally, with a pretty vocal online fanbase. The popular sales figures site Comichron only measures preorders of physical issues sold primarily through the direct market. The book Sana Amanat's most well-known for is also selling better than the current titles for the Hulk and Avengers even going by Comichron, so what do you even do with that?

Maybe making the books more accessible and widely sold with entry points to new readers, and actually marketing them in places that aren't comic-book shops, would help way more. Tying the health of the industry to an archaic form of print media distribution as it currently stands, and the Diamond monopoly in particular, is doing way more to kill comic-books than anyone's leftist politics.
RainOnTheSun wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:10 am
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 3:38 am The reason why Marvel are utter trash, honestly. Shying away from a potentially-controversial but entirely true political statement because it might offend the wrong people.
But I don't understand! I thought Marvel was ruled by a shadowy cabal of communist soy-infused milkshake-hurling EssJayDoubleyous! How did Ike Perlmutter sneak this decision past his feminist overlords?
It is a mystery for the ages how the ultra-wealthy CEO of a corporation was able to influence his own business that way!
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Really as a member of the Jewish faith, I've come to see that if If Israel is Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants, then guys like Perlmutter and Netanyahu are Fabian Cortez.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amSo Marvel's own customer base is Donald Trump?
Not Trump, but people who voted for Trump. So constantly using a product you want Trump voters to buy to take a shot at him discourages those people from buying your product. Also it should be noted it also has got pretty tedious to the people who did not vote for Trump & are sick of seeing a political squabble play out in unrelated media.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amArt Spiegelman, who pretty damn obviously knows what fascism is, was calling it like he saw it.
Appeal to authority.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amLike, if they didn't want the person writing their foreword to comment on the link between the Golden Age era protests against fascism and the current state of politics, don't hire Art Spiegelman to write the foreword to your Golden Age book.
There is no link, that link only exists in the minds of people who are suffering from TDS.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amApparently those books sell well enough digitally,
LOL, no. "it sells well digitally" is the "I have a girlfriend, she lives in Canada" of the comic book industry. It's the excuse people use when they want to pretend they secretly have great sales figures on a book that the actual sales figures show as having failed.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amwith a pretty vocal online fanbase.
Except of course people talking about a product they don't purchase doesn't actually net the company any money. Internet head pats don't actually convert in to actual dollars.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amThe popular sales figures site Comichron only measures preorders of physical issues sold primarily through the direct market.
No it shows sales figures for ALL comics & trades sold through the direct market ordering thru Diamond. And since the industry can't continue without that direct market anymore, those are the numbers that the industry lives & dies on.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amThe book Sana Amanat's most well-known for is also selling better than the current titles for the Hulk and Avengers even going by Comichron, so what do you even do with that?
Other way round: Avengers and Hulk are selling worse than the book Sana Amant is best known for. Which is even more reason to fire her & replace her & the people she hired on the basis of traits other than merit & replace them with ACTUAL writers, who actually want to be there & have demonstrated a track record of skill in the medium.

After all she's in charge of talent & IP development: She's failed at both. At this point you could replace her with a potato & the potato would do a better job. Oh sure it wouldn't do a good job, but at least it wouldn't actively be working against the companies best interests.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amMaybe making the books more accessible and widely sold with entry points to new readers, and actually marketing them in places that aren't comic-book shops, would help way more.
Sure it'd help to get the books in places kids go, but help in this case just means "extend the life span of the failing comic book industry by 6 weeks." Because the industry doesn't need help, it needs a cure for the disease that's currently killing it & that means getting rid of the rot, not just treating the symptoms. Because it doesn't matter how good your distribution system is if no one is interested in purchasing what you are selling.

You could have the best distribution in the world & if you are selling garbage, you now have the best distributed garbage no one is buying.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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It's weird how Marvel thinks digital sales are real when they aren't, isn't it? I guess they just hate money.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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RainOnTheSun wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 7:22 am It's weird how Marvel thinks digital sales are real when they aren't, isn't it? I guess they just hate money.
Nobody understands capitalism less than the right-wing who most commonly support it.

Marvel is a corporation. If the product they're selling wasn't making money, they would not be selling it.

Honestly, basically everyone I know uses Comixology or Marvel Unlimited for their books because physical comic-book stores are dying out, and Comichron doesn't actually count (or have access to) those sales figures.


Also I love how citing Art Spiegelman knowing what fascism is counts as an appeal to authority. I mean?

He's literally famous for a fucking holocaust memoir.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Citing Art Spiegelman is not an appeal to authority fallacy, as his knowledge of fascism comes from the accounts of his parents and their friends/family members who lived through the Nazi era in Germany, along with the research he did for Maus. This doesn't mean make Mr. Spiegelman's pronouncements on the issue definitive, as social-political issues are not as clear cut as technical/scientific ones, but he possesses genuine knowledge of the subject.

And while concentration camps has become a very emotionally charged term due to the Nazi slave labor/death camps (which they were not, initially), but certainly the term interment camps apply, as George Takei (who has first-hand knowledge of such) has stated.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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greycrusader wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 11:40 am Citing Art Spiegelman is not an appeal to authority fallacy, as his knowledge of fascism comes from the accounts of his parents and their friends/family members who lived through the Nazi era in Germany, along with the research he did for Maus. This doesn't mean make Mr. Spiegelman's pronouncements on the issue definitive, as social-political issues are not as clear cut as technical/scientific ones, but he possesses genuine knowledge of the subject.

And while concentration camps has become a very emotionally charged term due to the Nazi slave labor/death camps (which they were not, initially), but certainly the term interment camps apply, as George Takei (who has first-hand knowledge of such) has stated.
The internment camps were also considered concentration camps, and the terms are used interchangeably. The concept was not invented by Nazi Germany, nor is it unique to them (my own country, in fact, invented them during the Boer war IIRC), but refers to any instance of large-scale imprisonment under armed guard and internment.

The mass-internment of asylum seekers and refugees, which most of the people detained at the border qualify as, is in any case easily defined as a crime against humanity and the treatment of these people — who have committed no actual crime under the actual law, nor have they been convicted of such — is absolutely fucking barbaric. The family-separation, confiscation and destruction or disposal of personal effects, and denial of basic hygiene and food resources are pretty telling in themselves.

Image

People can talk 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' all you want, but the only derangement I see is the willful denial of a horrifying reality.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

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Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 am So Marvel's own customer base is Donald Trump?
An attack on Trump as a political figure is an attack on Trump supporters. You know this. You're being disingenuous.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amAs for whether or not Donald Trump is a Nazi or a fascist I'm not going to debate that because he actually pretty clearly is. The man is running a government that is running concentration camps at the border. And lest you buy into the idea that calling them concentration camps is disrespectful, actual real-world Jewish groups are currently protesting under the group Never Again Action, and holocaust survivors and experts upon historical concentration camps have openly labelled them as such.
Progressive: "These are literally concentration camps! Trump is a Nazi because he runs concentration camps on the border!"
Sane Person: "These detention centers are not Nazi death camps, and calling them such diminishes the actual horror of the Nazi death camps."
Progressive: "No, stupid! Nazi death camps aren't the only kind of concentration camps! They were a thing before the Nazi death camps!"
Sane Person: "So, if there is a distinction between Nazi death camps and more general concentration camps, how does operating them make one a Nazi?"
Progressive: "..."
Sane Person: "What about Bill Clinton, who ordered the creation of these camps and signed the legislation that detailed their original operation procedures? What about Obama, who revised them into their current form? Are those guys Nazis? What about FDR, who authorized Japanese internment? Nazi?"
Progressive: "..."

Unfortunately, until we manage to severely restrict illegal border crossing, there aren't many options for how to deal with them. We could let them wander alone in the desert some more, I guess, but I don't think that level of sadism is warranted. We could immediately ship them back home, I suppose, but someone has gone to these other countries and began a systematic education institution on how to exploit our asylum system. Even though they failed to follow asylum procedure at Step 1, and should be automatically ineligible under the law, they're currently treated as if they have a right to it anyway, and are allowed to stay in those detention centers for as long as the process takes. Which will be a while, as the human smugglers teach people to leave their IDs behind, making everything more complicated and awful for everyone except the smugglers. Assholes. What we can't do is simply release them into our country without screening for infectious diseases, criminal records, etc. And we certainly can't allow child trafficking to continue as it has, so screw the progressive "separating families at the border" narrative.

And no, I don't really give a shit what progressives have to say on the matter, because you lot are continually demonstrating your willingness to sell your souls to get revenge for losing an election.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amIf you look at a list of the fourteen signs of fascism, Trump fits most of them.
"Fourteen Signs" written by a socialist. Fascism doesn't need fourteen signs. It's a simple concept. It's an authoritarian socialist movement. All property is socialized, but citizens are allowed to maintain private control of property as long as they use it to better the common good, as determined by the government. If, for some reason, they are found insufficiently beneficial, the government has the right to seize the property back and redistribute it. In what way do you see this in our current government?

The cries of "Fascism!" are, suspiciously, coming from communist groups and their cooperative dupes. On the two-axis political compass, the communists sit JUST BARELY above fascism in the upper left corner of the top left quadrant. Some of them have forgotten that there's anything at all outside that little corner, while the others are just dishonest.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amArt Spiegelman, who pretty damn obviously knows what fascism is, was calling it like he saw it.
If he "knows" what fascism is, why is he wielding the label like a bludgeon against Western liberalism?
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amLike, if they didn't want the person writing their foreword to comment on the link between the Golden Age era protests against fascism and the current state of politics, don't hire Art Spiegelman to write the foreword to your Golden Age book.
I agree 100%! Not hiring ideologues to write for their books is EXACTLY the solution Marvel needs to implement. Thank you for proposing this remarkable strategy for the industry's future, SD. I'm glad that we can reach an agreement.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amApparently those books sell well enough digitally, with a pretty vocal online fanbase. The popular sales figures site Comichron only measures preorders of physical issues sold primarily through the direct market. The book Sana Amanat's most well-known for is also selling better than the current titles for the Hulk and Avengers even going by Comichron, so what do you even do with that?
Maybe Marvel should release the digital sales figures, reassure us that the industry is actually pretty healthy. I'll wait.

It's worth noting that the Hulk and Avengers titles are currently pathetic, because they don't meet the expectations of long-term fans. Ms Marvel doesn't HAVE long-term fans to disappoint, so there's that. And they don't have female minority characters headlining for librarian-bait.
Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:53 amMaybe making the books more accessible and widely sold with entry points to new readers, and actually marketing them in places that aren't comic-book shops, would help way more. Tying the health of the industry to an archaic form of print media distribution as it currently stands, and the Diamond monopoly in particular, is doing way more to kill comic-books than anyone's leftist politics.
Another point of agreement. Although I dispute "archaic." When comics were doing great, they were on racks in grocery stores. Kids could spot them passing by, beg their parents for them. It invited impulse buys. Now, you have to make a special trip to a comic store if you want a physical copy. No impulse buying. They're not right there to pick up and buy.

Scots Dragon wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2019 3:38 am The reason why Marvel are utter trash, honestly. Shying away from a potentially-controversial but entirely true political statement because it might offend the wrong people.
"Shying away from an entirely false and defamatory political statement that outrages a large chunk of potential buyers, drives off everyone looking for harmless entertainment, and exposes the company as the collection of far-left loons it truly is." Hell. It's About Time.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:30 am Nobody understands capitalism less than the right-wing who most commonly support it.
Hold that thought. I'ma get popcorn.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:30 amMarvel is a corporation.
Corporations are a legal fiction designed to insulate people from their own bad decisions. They can take advantage of a capitalist system, but any economic system that includes them is less capitalist by its very nature. Take notes. This will become relevant real quick.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:30 am If the product they're selling wasn't making money, they would not be selling it.
Unless they were a corporation, and thus insulated from their bad decisions. :o Unless they had motives other than profit, such as ideology. Unless they felt comfortable enough living off the residuals of their glory days, and felt the sacrifice of cultural activism was worth the hit to their bottom line. Unless their business strategy involved taking a loss up front in order to crowd out competitors via a "flood the shelves" campaign, securing a greater percentage of the market share. Unless they're being allowed to lose money deliberately by a parent company deliberately as a tax strategy. Unless the business is run by idiots who don't recognize that they're running their entire industry into the ground, because as yet, they're still Too Big to Fail. Unless they're actually attention-whores who think that the handful of weirdos who care to come see them at conventions make them famous and virtuous, and would sell their soul to the Robot Devil if they needed to in order to keep seeing themselves that way.

Y'know. Just tossing out alternate hypotheses. Because your statement here views capitalism as a stable system, not a dynamic system of meritocratic sorting, in which yesterday's successes can be tomorrow's failures if they try to lead the market instead of following it. But do go on to tell other people how THEY don't understand capitalism. Lots of companies make things that don't sell. Because businesses can make bad decisions.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:30 amHonestly, basically everyone I know uses Comixology or Marvel Unlimited for their books because physical comic-book stores are dying out, and Comichron doesn't actually count (or have access to) those sales figures.
I'm sure both of those people are fantastic, just wonderful individuals, but I'm pretty sure that the plural of "anecdote" still isn't "data."
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:30 amAlso I love how citing Art Spiegelman knowing what fascism is counts as an appeal to authority. I mean?

He's literally famous for a fucking holocaust memoir.
I disagree with his conclusions. See Section 1. I have tremendous sympathy for his parents for surviving such an ordeal, and him for having to grow up with traumatized parents. I also have zero respect for him trying to weaponize it in today's politics. Being a victim of a crime doesn't make you an expert on crime. I've been mugged. I haven't yet launched a political commentary career about how I know so much more about mugging than everybody else. CNN won't return my calls. Probably because of my skin color. Bigots. Having your parents be the victim of a crime is even LESS educational.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pm The internment camps were also considered concentration camps, and the terms are used interchangeably. The concept was not invented by Nazi Germany, nor is it unique to them (my own country, in fact, invented them during the Boer war IIRC), but refers to any instance of large-scale imprisonment under armed guard and internment.
:lol: See Section 1.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pmThe mass-internment of asylum seekers and refugees, which most of the people detained at the border qualify as,
What are they seeing asylum from? Is there a war or systematic persecution somewhere in Central or South America? No. No, there is not. Poverty and crime are not valid justifications for asylum under US or international law. My next-door neighbors HATE this conflation. They're ACTUAL refugees. The father spent years as a political prisoner under Castro. The whole family - and there's a few dozen of them living on my block - HATE the current abuse of the asylum system.

Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pmis in any case easily defined as a crime against humanity and the treatment of these people — who have committed no actual crime under the actual law, nor have they been convicted of such
They committed the crime of illegal border crossing, which has been a crime throughout the world for centuries. Millennia, in parts of it. They're being held until their paperwork is processed.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pm — is absolutely fucking barbaric. The family-separation,
Why are you in favor of child trafficking? 30% of children tested at the border were not related to the accompanying adults, according to DNA results. Of those remaining 70%, 95% have currently been reunited with their families. The remaining 5% are still in the process of being investigated for safety.

Being real, here. It is WELL documented that children are being trafficked across the border to be sold or used as slaves, either labor or sex. Separating any children from accompanying adults until it can be ascertained that the children are not being victimized is just the humane thing to do, and much as I dislike many of his policies, I applaud Obama for making that call. Kind of disgusted that Trump would end that policy, honestly, but the public pressure in support of child molesters was too great. Thanks for that, SD.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pmconfiscation and destruction or disposal of personal effects,
Unfortunate, but sometimes that happens when you're arrested. Especially when you're arrested crossing a border illegally. Drug smuggling is a real issue, and believe it or not, people tend to hide things in places they assume won't be searched.
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pmand denial of basic hygiene and food resources are pretty telling in themselves.
I agree. Write The Squad and tell them that denying funding necessary to provide these things is wrong. Even the freaking New York Times was willing to do that. Why aren't you?
Scots Dragon wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:43 pmPeople can talk 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' all you want, but the only derangement I see is the willful denial of a horrifying reality.
Gosh, look at us, agreeing again.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

Post by Scots Dragon »

BriarThrone wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2019 7:35 am *snip yikes*
Okay, I don't have the time or energy to unpack all of that, but I suppose we could just throw away the whole suitcase...

The fourteen signs of fascism were largely gathered by Umberto Eco, a man who lived and was raised in Fascist Italy and the information was composed by observing fascist dictatorships internationaly. Fascism has literally nothing to do with socialism and to say that it does is a woeful misrepresentation of the actual facts.

As for the democrat stuff and Bill Clinton? Fuck, dude. I'm not even American. I couldn't give two shits about the Democrats either way, but I'll save you the time; Yep. These issues are the end result of neoliberal responses to immigration and the centrist democrat establishment and capitalist ideology that governs 'both sides', not that there really is much of a difference, it is a huge contributing factor.

It doesn't make all of what you've said true, mind, but yeah the overall system is at fault far more than specific politicians. Trump is a symptom.

I'm an anarchist who thinks the whole system itself should be torn down and replaced, and I am not a member of any major political party. I also even think that the comic-book industry itself should be radically reshaped as well, along with most elements of society. You're really not going to get to me by going after the Democrats. Nor are you going to get to me by going after Labour or the Greens.
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Re: Marvel bows to poltical correctness and censors celebrated writer.

Post by BriarThrone »

Scots Dragon wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2019 8:26 am Okay, I don't have the time or energy to unpack all of that, but I suppose we could just throw away the whole suitcase...

The fourteen signs of fascism were largely gathered by Umberto Eco, a man who lived and was raised in Fascist Italy and the information was composed by observing fascist dictatorships internationaly. Fascism has literally nothing to do with socialism and to say that it does is a woeful misrepresentation of the actual facts.
Giovanni Gentile, father of Italian fascism, was a Leninist. He was frustrated by the lack of a proletariat revolution, and eventually identified the nation, rather than the proletariat, as the force that could move a nation into socialism. Literally, national socialism. This earned him praise from Lenin. Italy, and then Germany, implemented this brand of socialism. Personal property was formally revoked, but as they promised, it was not confiscated, as long as the owners used their wealth in a way approved by the government. This is actually how the Italian and German economies functioned at the time. Lenin called that socialism. So did Stalin, who viewed Hitler as a trustworthy fellow socialist. He personally executed the "lying" messenger who brought the news that Hitler had invaded. But hey, if you know more about socialism than leading communist intellectuals and tyrants, I'm glad I could learn something.
Scots Dragon wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2019 8:26 amAs for the democrat stuff and Bill Clinton? Fuck, dude. I'm not even American. I couldn't give two shits about the Democrats either way,
That's a shitload of water to carry for someone you don't care about. If you hate Nike, maybe don't have a wardrobe made up entirely of things with swooshes on them, and don't aggressively stamp the swoosh wherever you go. Just saying.
Scots Dragon wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2019 8:26 ambut I'll save you the time; Yep. These issues are the end result of neoliberal responses to immigration and the centrist democrat establishment and capitalist ideology that governs 'both sides', not that there really is much of a difference, it is a huge contributing factor.

It doesn't make all of what you've said true, mind, but yeah the overall system is at fault far more than specific politicians. Trump is a symptom.
Not allowing people to cross borders at a whim is what borders are for. They've existed since history began. I don't see what's particularly "neo" about them. Hell, almost all socialist scholarship until very recently insisted that borders were crucial, because paying out to people who hadn't paid in was suicide to the system. Socialism creates closed economic systems, and free flow across borders wrecks it even faster than its own innate inadequacies would otherwise do.
Scots Dragon wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2019 8:26 amI'm an anarchist who thinks the whole system itself should be torn down and replaced, and I am not a member of any major political party. I also even think that the comic-book industry itself should be radically reshaped as well, along with most elements of society. You're really not going to get to me by going after the Democrats. Nor are you going to get to me by going after Labour or the Greens.
I know that there's such a thing as anarcho-communists, but there's a phrase from fiction that describes them well - "the first against the wall when the revolution comes." If they ever succeed in tearing down the old order, a new order will inevitably rise to take its place, and the first order of business is rounding up those dangerous revolutionaries who upended the previous system and putting them down. It's the only way to calm the populace when their system just got torn down - ending the threat. There is no enduring anarcho-communist system that survives long-term larger than maybe a dozen people, because it turns out that we actually need to organize to survive. If, theoretically, there was a large-scale anarcho-communist community, it would immediately become an anarcho-capitalist society as people start to barter with each other to make up for the inefficiencies in distribution. It's a naive ideology for people who don't understand what production entails. Your entire worldview has been generated by smug intellectuals who thought that, if only THEY were in charge, they could organize everything so that people could all be relatively prosperous. Worked to the fucking bone, no art allowed that didn't preserve their power, but they'd all eat. Unfortunately, these assholes have soft hands and don't know or care about the "working man" that they claim to be championing. Socialism invariably leads to starvation and oppression.

Meanwhile, you seem to assume that capitalism is somehow oppressive, which is hilarious. If you're an anarchist, you want no government intervention. Capitalism - true capitalism, not the corporate half-socialist shit we've got today - is unique in that it thrives best without government.
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