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2022-10-10 02:04:36
uziq
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lmao it’s basically a dilbert bingo at this point.

vague appeal to ‘antiquity’. no, the surviving stories weren’t about superheroes. the gods were distant presences in the great surviving epics. odysseus is not a superhero. what makes him interesting, in fact, is that he’s a complex and many-shaded man. he is a liar and a cheat as often as he’s a noble captain of men. achilles is markedly not a superhero. he is a fallible man equally blessed and cursed by his association with the gods. hence their enduring appeal - they tell adult stories about adults, not two-bit comic operas about good vs. evil.

all of greek tragedy and comedy invokes or involves the gods, but they’re generally acknowledged as characters to stage left who affect the HUMAN actors’ fates. a chorus might voice the machinations of the gods and fate, what the jews call kismet, but they’re not characters in aeschylus or euripides. dipshit.

speaking of the jews! gotta mention the jews! it’s their fault that comics are dumb and dilbert can’t read an adult fiction!

christ man i really wish you would read a book.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 02:08:14)

2022-10-10 02:07:46
Dilbert_X
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https://www.clarksvilleonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea.jpg

Thats literally Gandalf.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-10 02:10:41
uziq
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you must be the first person in history to point out that tolkien’s modern fantasy is influenced by christian theology and anglo-saxon epics. it must be news even to him, the professor of literature at oxford.

lord of the rings is not an adult novel lmao. it was widely derided even by his own donnish peers as an adolescent intrigue.

still, i doubt tolkien would endorse your view that comic books are as serious and worthy as prose fiction. he was, after all, a committed literary scholar and philologist. derp.

genre fiction like fantasy relies on tropes taken from world religion and ancient myths! wow!!! you should write a book on it. this is surely breaking new ground.
2022-10-10 02:17:44
uziq
Member
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Supernatural superhero fantasies are literally the norm in literature and are timeless, stories about some berk wandering around trimming hedges, or waiting for an inheritance are the aberration and will be forgotten.
also you really can't have it both ways, dilbert. you rhetorically approve of and reject the premise in the same post.

'supernatural fantasies from antiquity are stupid: jews, christians and muslims are obsessed with hokey stories'.
'Homer was actually a comic book writer and wrote about superheroes, which is why my own childish tastes are credible, ackshually, and such stories will live on forever'.

so should human culture move on from supernatural thrillers about fake gods or not? are they a net social good or net social evil?

alan moore is himself saying that the religiose and reductive approach to comic fictions is what is driving the culture to a point of unreflective, unsophisticated inanition today. that's rather the point; call it nerd comic fundamentalists. people getting as vexed over star wars sequels or the lore of batman movies as theologians did over points of doctrine at councils in 400 AD. people expecting to find that real life and real human conduct should match their reductive texts about heroes and villains.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 04:02:00)

2022-10-10 02:31:55
Dilbert_X
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Whats stupid is centering your whole life around some fairy story.

You ridicule Star Wars nerds, medieval larpers etc, yet religion is OK because "it brings people together".
Fuck Israel
2022-10-10 02:48:40
uziq
Member
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he is literally complaining about the fact that comic books franchises occupy a huge place in our common culture now, that they're treated more importantly and with more seriousness than they ever deserve, that they're hypertrophied, basically. children's tales and light entertainments have nudged out the place of 'serious' and 'adult' art in our popular culture, so that adults spend their time agonizing over The Joker rather than engaging with more complex matters. that's his whole point. it's no different than if society's common culture were hijacked by religious fundamentalists who are forever agonizing over the codes and proscriptions in Leviticus.

then you pop up and, in some aimless defence of i don't know what, your pale little ego, you claim that comic books have the same proud and prestigious origins as ... ancient religious texts, which you profess to despise.

i've got as much time for religious fundamentalists or scriptural literalists as i do for comic book nerds. that said, there is far more literary and artistic merit in something like the KJV translation of the bible than there are in 100 skips full of pulpy comic fabulations. call it a special collaborative issue that took the combined efforts of 100s of people over 1000s of years to revise and perfect. the ultimate collector's edition!

you're a very confused guy methinks.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 02:50:16)

2022-10-10 02:50:08
Dilbert_X
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Lets hope the current religions die out, to be replaced by the church of Mar-Vel.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-10 02:51:56
uziq
Member
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but why would that be in any way preferable? as opposed to, uh, you know, just growing up?

most religious folks have a more nuanced and adult relationship with their faith than comic cons attendees, dilbert.

you on these dawkins-level diatribes is very weak piss.

why can't you engage with alan moore's argument about comic books without dragging in world religion and The Jewz? he's very specifically talking about a modern industry and pop-cultural phenomenon and comparing it to, you know, arts and culture that are adjacent to it, such as other movies and other literature. you really don't have to leap to citing jewish settlers and islamist radicals to debate this point, dilbert ...
2022-10-10 02:58:56
Dilbert_X
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Why can't religious people grow up? Santa Claus is not going to swoop down from the sky to save them.

Not sure what Alan Moore is on about, the superhero genre is unchanged from when he was involved in it and I'm sure I read more 2000AD than anyone else here.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-10 03:08:41
uziq
Member
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what does alan moore's comments have to do with religious people? seriously?

you cannot construct an argument. it's really piteous. 'yes but the jews'. 'tolkien knew about moses and old testament myths'.

2022-10-10 03:10:36
Dilbert_X
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I'm guessing Moore is old and irrelevant and has nothing better to say than "things were better in my day"

His work was nothing special, at the lower end of the imaginative scale.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-10 03:32:31
uziq
Member
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lmao oh right. dilbert the arch critic. 'the lower end of the imaginative scale'. i love the idea that you have an imaginative scale.

i've got no horse in this race, i couldn't care less about the comparative reputation of one comics writer or graphic novel artist over another; i don't read them and i'm not an avowed fan of any writer. but his influence and plaudits within the industry seem patently obvious enough. he is spoken about in the same reverence and regard as other writers like frank miller. that seems enough qualification for me.

time magazine ranked watchmen no. 1 of the best graphic novels of all time. in the same ranks as works by spiegelman, miller, sim, etc.
https://entertainment.time.com/2009/03/ … /watchmen/

irrelevant? wasn't the same property just optioned into a HBO tv series? the news media were full of thinkpieces and hot takes about 'woke watchmen' all of a year ago. having international media talking about your creations is a weird sort of 'irrelevance'.

HBO's Watchmen review: the show of the year - Vox
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/17/ … king-comic

the UK press have covered all of his recent literary forays and non-comics work. features, interviews, reviews, etc. you can read PR fluff pieces and career retrospectives in several major newspapers in the last few years. i don't think he's struggling for publicity, actually.

Goodbye, Alan Moore: the king of comics bows out
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ … s-bows-out

you do an awful lot of posturing and sweating to just deflect from the fact that you only engage with kid's media. writing long reviews here on wonder woman and then meanwhile putting on your pretentious monocle to declare alan moore 'a lesser talent'. lmao. my god man you are just so fucking funny.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 03:40:39)

2022-10-10 05:02:03
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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It's a well-known fact that the concepts of superheroes and furries, modern devices and phenomena they are, stretch back to antiquity and prehistory and the dawn of man. /s
2022-10-10 05:17:11
uziq
Member
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dilbert: the ultra-rationalist modern scientific man who likes to justify his creepy fixations on children's entertainments and sexualised animals by ... claiming ancient mythical pedigrees.

stories about some berk wandering around trimming hedges, or waiting for an inheritance are the aberration and will be forgotten.
except those incredibly boring tales, of peregrinations like chaucer's canterbury tales (1476) or bunyan's pilgrim's progress (1678), are still being read. and not a single superhero, magic power, evil villain, or wizard battle in either of them.

talk about berks trimming hedges: robinson crusoe (1719) and daniel defoe are still widely read, and they're 300 years old. entire chapters listing inventory on a desert island. the invention of prose realism and the novel in english. pages and pages of description without point. imagine! an antique predecessor to all those adventure movies, to be sure. there was even a tom hanks one! clearly a lot of people are very bored by tales of ordinary people. the book could be much improved if a nubile actress in hotpants turned up and started deflecting evil nazi bullets from her mythical bracers.

i guess you're talking about jane austen-style bourgeois novels re: 'waiting for inheritances'. well, people are still regularly LARPing around bath's royal crescents in austen costume and tuning in to watch lurid television adaptations of the same tales (see Bridgerton), 200 years after publication.

how long is it until these things are meant to be forgotten? books which took as their subject pedestrian, ordinary lives are justly celebrated in their national literatures. boccaccio's decameron was a prosy trundle through local folk intrigues and day-to-day happenings in the era of the black death. that's 650 years old. it's still considered one of the 3 or 4 'essential' pieces of italian literature, celebrated precisely, in fact, because it gave the italians a sense of themselves, it being the first work written in the vernacular italian and not clerical latin, and it being about 'berks trimming the hedges' and not the high fantasy superhero epic the church were stuffing down their throats.

even outside of the western perspective and canon, and our publishing history, in korea the most famous set of tales in their national history is literally about 'berks wandering around'. it's called the chunhyangjeon and tells the tale of a bunch of low-caste outsiders wandering around the countryside, reflecting on and satirising social mores, as well as the iniquities and hypocrisies of the confucian class system. these stories have been in circulation since at least the 1600s, and every literate schoolkid is familiar with them or the character archetypes (much like commedia dell'arte's stock characters, our dear pierrot).

how many of the MCU universe movies do you think are going to last for 500+ years, mate? can you even name me the top comic superheroes or -villains from 100 years ago? of the 1920s? are you intimately familiar with captain blood and count orlok? whatever happened to 'bumba the jungle boy' or 'moon maid', anyway? because a lot of people know who robinson crusoe is. a lot of people are still very passionate about dashing mr. darcy or young david copperfield. about the only old comic characters i can recall are tintin, popeye and bunch of sub-lovecraftian monsters.

i think, considering the material evidence in our common culture, that the pressure of 'surviving the test of time' is entirely on the pulpy and forgettable comic franchises, tbh. novels and tales of unfortunately ordinary people’s travails seem to be in rude health after half a millennium or more. it’s likely they would have always been perennial interests if there had actually been vernacular language printing presses to distribute them, not to mention literate audiences to receive them, derp.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 06:52:43)

2022-10-10 07:22:35
unnamednewbie13
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Dilbert would be disappointed to learn how many superheroes start out as ordinary humans. Boring. Green Lantern takes off his ring and he's just some guy. By the power of tax returns!
2022-10-10 07:32:07
uziq
Member
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the only truly 'aberrant' thing in any discussions of fantastical/mythical/speculative art versus comparatively realist/psychological/social types of art is that dilbert foreswears entirely off one type of them. most people consume both equally and have done throughout all of human history.

imagine immediately turning off or having no interest in any sort of film, prose, painting, drama, etc, that takes as its subject human problems or interpersonal relationships. with other human experiences and perspectives, on this all-too-mundane, unfortunately non-magical world. of stories that say something about people, or families, or society and the way the world turns.

dilbert is singularly uninterested in other human beings. that's the only really aberrant thing, here. there's terms for that in medical dictionaries. most well-adjusted people have no problem enjoying both lord of the rings and victor hugo.
2022-10-10 07:38:11
unnamednewbie13
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He has gone on record saying he's not even interested in why Power Girl made him shed a tear. The mechanisms of color, music, and shots that tug at your emotions. What they did right, what they got wrong, and generally why. Even within his own niche he seems rather disengaged. I honestly have no idea how to get such a person to expand their horizons.
2022-10-10 09:04:31
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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Spinning wildly off from the follow-up comment in that thread, Sims plays fast and loose with social norms and appropriateness. Like, "take a seat over there" levels of random sims just calling up a sim's kid on the phone. You have to install a mod to get them to stop. FBI, open up. What a storied franchise.
2022-10-11 01:38:36
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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unnamednewbie13 wrote:

He has gone on record saying he's not even interested in why Power Girl made him shed a tear. The mechanisms of color, music, and shots that tug at your emotions. What they did right, what they got wrong, and generally why. Even within his own niche he seems rather disengaged. I honestly have no idea how to get such a person to expand their horizons.
Think where we'd be if the average person in-depth analysed their own religiosity.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-11 02:35:49
uziq
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dilbert, doubt is a critical part of christian theology. you're basically not even a true christian in the main denominations (i.e. protestant) if you do not exercise spiritual doubt and tests of your faith. the idea that religious folks don't self-examine their beliefs or undergo 'crises of faith' is hilarious. faith is precisely held up for them as a higher force because it weathers these storms of intellectual and emotional uncertainty. that's the whole point, durr. 'blind faith' is seldom that, and only then in the most credulous and fundamentalist.

Doubt is a common feature in the Bible. Several key figures in Christianity experience doubts about God and his promises, and also about Jesus Christ. These included Abraham, Moses and one of Jesus’ closest followers, Thomas. He is even remembered as ‘Doubting Thomas’. Many Christians experience doubt about aspects of their faith at some point. But doubt is not the same as unbelief. It is not the opposite of faith. It is like being in two minds – the word doubt comes from the Latin word ‘dubitare’ and has it roots in the word for ‘two’. Someone who has doubts about their faith is not betraying it but raising questions about it. This can be a positive experience. The 4th century Christian theologian Augustine said a Christian ‘thinks in believing and believes in thinking’. The important issue for a Christian is that doubts don’t become a way of life. Instead they should be addressed and tackled head on. Doubt should not become a permanent state – it should push the doubter towards finding answers.
https://christianity.org.uk/article/doubt

this 'skeptical' attitude in christianity is actually at the roots of the more radical forms of skepticism that led western thinking towards science -> empiricism -> positivism. it's the questioning attitude 'that pushes the doubter towards finding answers' that spurred on so much individual thinking, first in protestantism and nonconformism, and eventually in the sciences and philosophy (it's no accident that one of the most significant thinkers in western enlightenment thought was bishop berkeley). doubt towards the nature of things is a part of christian thought.

your reading of world religions and theology is, again, dawkins level. it reminds me of those extremely cringe tv shows he did where he went up to faith leaders like the archbishop of canterbury, one of the most well-read theologians on the planet, and tried to say 'ha ha! you can't prove your god exists, so now what?' do you REALLY think that people of faith haven't thought these things through in their entire lives?

even at the dawn of darwinism and during the great revolution in thinking around the human species, some of the main advocates and proponents in those debates were church of england religious men and gentlemen scholars. many of darwin's contemporaries, who made immense contributions to the field, whether in biology or in adjacent fields like paleontology, actively practiced their faith. look up people like phillip gosse or t. h. huxley, aka 'darwin's bulldog', who was thoroughly well-versed in unitarian and nonconformist theology, took an active interest in christianity his whole life, and coined the term 'agnosticism'.

appealing to 'the average person' is a bit of a non-starter because your average agnostic or atheist, today, is about as unreflective and unexamined in this matter as any person who trundles along to church because their parents did, or out of habit. most people don't think deeply about these things, unlike the agnosticism, say, of victorians like huxley; ironically, atheism is a default article of faith today. most people aren't digging into the scientific material to validate it for themselves. but your take on religious people essentially all having low IQs and being ignorant is just hilarious, my guy.

do you think you have a higher IQ than kierkegaard or santayana, two professional philosophers who examined faith and doubt?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40320324

you are just arrogant, a narrowminded arrogant little man. sad!

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-11 02:56:43)

2022-10-11 02:43:48
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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I'm sure people sometimes wonder if furryism is the true path.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-11 02:53:11
uziq
Member
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sorry but 2500 years of metaphysical thinking in the western tradition, from the pre-socratics to modern theological thinking, is a more significant chunk of human thought and endeavour than 'people wondering about furrydom'. you need to grow up. very intelligent and well-read people have pondered the same questions as you and come out with different answers.

you punch down on religious people as if they're all just unthinking lemmings. but that really describes the great majority of all humanity, who take on the basic values of their time without much reflection and go through life, working and paying bills and starting families, without examining any great questions at all. what's your point that some religious folk go to church out of inertia? most atheists today don't have a clue about neither evolutionary biology nor christianity.

ironically your take on the 'real stuff', i.e. evolutionary biology, is frequently cod-scientific claptrap. race science and whatnot. for a man of science who abhors non-reflecting mongs, you sure do trot out a lot of stuff that has been thoroughly discredited in the scientific literature, my guy. if only you spent less time punching down on mennonites or southern baptists or whatever and actually READ A FUCKING BOOK.
2022-10-11 03:06:56
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Not really sure how anyone with any intelligence would take religion with any seriousness at all TBH.

I'd say most people go to church for family reasons and fear of death, there's no deep thinking involved.
Fuck Israel
2022-10-11 03:19:36
uziq
Member
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okay, so you haven't read any theology, unsurprisingly.

some of the most intelligent people i know have religious faith; many more do not, but still.

do you think western atheistic society doesn't have 'a fear of death' that is countered by a frankly totemic approach to science and medicine? advanced scientific societies spend infinite sums of money trying to ward off death, especially in the elderly, where disproportionate sums are wasted trying to senselessly extend life. do you think the scientific attitude and banishing of religion has really cured us of our fear of death? tucking it away into some dark corner of the mind, or hiding away the sick and infirm in homes, and ignoring it is not the same thing as enlightenment, dilbert. it's another sort of magical thinking. you can't tell me that societies where the gullible rich invest in cryogenics aren't afraid of death.

one of my best literature professors was religious. the guy could tear down a piece of text to its barebones and show brilliant gleams of light in its workings. a highly analytical mind and no doubt one of the most well-read people i have ever met. and yet he had a serious conviction in his faith, no doubt thanks to a continual re-examination of it. a literary scholar who examines texts, written by human beings, for a living isn't going to be approaching the Bible unthinkingly, dilbert.

that same guy, funnily enough, is an award-winning science fiction writer and one of the most respected people in the genre today. his understanding of the twinned philosophies and histories of science & religion, along with his capacity to consider contrasting viewpoints, probably runs rings around you with your 'i r engineer and i have answer to everything' attitude.

"i'd say" ... no one cares what you say. your thinking on this topic hasn't developed past a 14-year-old edgelord. i read dawkins once too and was convinced of his (and my own) genius. rightabout the same time as i thought everything hitchens said was witty and right-on, and that michael moore's or john pilger's documentaries were 'the truth'. grow the fuck up man. life is complex and many people's experiences are not your own.

couldn't you at least do us all a favour and begin to 'take seriously' what evolutionary biology and science has to stay about race? stick to your own lane and brush up on your own supposed area of expertise, first things first. you adopt the posture of a man of science but you're not very interested in any scientific data that contradicts your emotional prejudices. sad!

what's the difference between some poor victorian churchman in 1860 being confronted with a bit of dinosaur found in devon and you, the racist, being presented with actual scientific understanding on genetics today?

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-11 03:33:55)

 

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