I mean, yes, marketability is a big part of the reason that death is such a revolving door in comics, but another big part of it is that most comic writers are actual children. They’re all:
“I’m not interested in using these particular characters at this particular moment, so it’s inconceivable to me that anyone would want to use them ever. Let’s kill them all to prove that my pet villain means business!”
…or:
“I have a weird grudge against a fictional character, so I’m going to include them in this story even though their presence contributes nothing to the plot specifically so that I can shit all over their characterisation and then give them a pointless, humiliating death!“
… or even:
“I’m so egotistical that I think my interpretation of a character that’s been around for the better part of a century and has passed through dozens of writers’ hands should be the absolute last word, so when I’m finished with them I’m going to deliberately break my toys by killing them off and fucking up their supporting cast so badly that it will be completely impossible to use them in the future without totally rebooting the franchise!“
… and then the next writer is like “actually, that never happened”, and we start the whole business over again.
“wouldn’t you rather earn something than have it just handed to you?”
Yeah when it comes to actual awards and fancy goods, but when it comes to basic needs, basic human decency, and accomodations, those things should always be handed to people. No one should have to “earn” those things.Value people as people, not base it on how much they produce.
yeah but that creates a severe dependency that could be exploited easily, and creates a slippery slope @musical-clarity
Actually studies show that people who live in places with universal income (who are given money with no strings attached just for being citizens) do far better work than those who don’t and are more enthusiastic to do work.
This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.
Some people will always be lazy and take advantage of the system, but they are always a tiny percentage and it seems ridiculous to me to punish the majority and severly hamstring their abilities just because a handful of people will simply live of basic income rather than work.
Do you have sources? I’m trying to convince a friend
Policy Brief: Impacts of Unconditional Cash Transfers by Johannes Haushofery and Jeremy Shapiroz – A look at the new trend of charities just giving people in need money and letting them get on with it. (Case study is a charity called GiveDirectly)
Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods. A review of Global Evidence by the World Bank Policy Research Working Group – This study shows that poor people who are just given money do not spend any more than they usually would on luxury goods such as alcohol and tobacco and in some cases the spending on these items actually decreases.
“Emerging data from cash transfers, conditional or unconditional, largely dispel the counter arguments that these programs prevent adults from seeking work or create a dependency culture which perpetuates intergenerational poverty.”
The Town With No Poverty by Evelyn Forget – A look at the case study of Dauphin Manitoba that introduced “mincome” to the poorest citizens to bring everyone above the poverty line.
Why Not Guarantee Everyone a Job? Why Negative Income Tax Experiments of the 1970s Were Successful by Allan Sheahen (warning this link is a download link, not a webpage) – Study of a similar “mincome” experiment in Denver that found that when people did stop working as many hours as they had done before the money it was because they were furthering their education or working hours better suited to raising their children. One woman who had dropped out of High School to get a job in order to provide for her children went back into education and ended up with a psychology degree and a job as a researcher.
“Daniel Moynihan and President-Elect Nixon: How Charity Didn’t Begin at Home” by Peter Passell and Leonard Ross for The New York Times – This is a look at how President Richard Nixon (Yes, that Richard Nixon) wanted to introduce basic income to the USA and was defeated by ignorant congressmen and senators that trusted their gut over the clear evidence.
An Estimate of the cost of child poverty in 2013 by Donald Hirsch – This is a British study that estimates child poverty costs £29 billion (£44 Billion-ish). Basically child poverty is massively expensive for governments and Basic Income could essentially pay for itself by removing these expenses.
Rediscovering Poverty: How We Cured ‘The Culture of Poverty’ Not Poverty Itself by Barbara Ehrenreich – An article on how trying to improve the morals of the poor so they can work harder and get themselves out of poverty is a ridiculous waste of time and money and quite frankly an insult to the people we force into these programs. My favourite waste of money that Ehrenreich points out is the $250 million dollars that President Clinton set aside for ‘Chastity Training’ for impoverished single mothers, the US government in the 90s simply assuming that poor women were too stupid to understand where babies came from and that’s why they were poor, rather than, you know, having no money, no support structures and no affordable child care and healthcare.
In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law by Fred Block and Margaret Somers – Speenhamland was a town in the UK where a Universal Income was introduced at the end of the 18th Century. After a few years it was declared a terrible failure and proof that poor people are evil and lazy and should be punished for being poor not helped out of poverty. Speenhamland led to the creation of Workhouses and the abolition of the Poor Laws that had worked as a form of social welfare up to that point. For 150 years Speenhamland was used by politicians and academics all over the world as proof that poor people were almost pathologically incapable of being trusted with their own money. Except the whole thing was a lie. The man sent to study Speenhamland hated the project and was unable to correctly interpret the data or factor in cultural issues that were also affecting the town. Modern researchers almost unanimously agree that Speenhamland was a success but the damage that 150 years of ignorance has done is deep and long lasting.
All of these examples and hundreds more can be found in Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman which lays out the argument for this issue far better than I ever could and also discusses issues such as raising the minimum wage and drastically cutting working hours.
able-bodied people don’t seem to realise the nuances of disability, they look at it as such a black and white issue when it’s really not. like, i don’t need a wheelchair in the sense that i can’t physically use my legs and i don’t need a walking stick in the sense that i would fall over without one. but i do need a wheelchair in the sense that it could make the difference between my being bed-bound for a day and being bed-bound for a week and i do need a walking stick in the sense that using one today might enable me to do more tomorrow. disability and chronic illness aren’t black and white; using things out of necessity can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people.
All this goes for most other disabilities too. For example, many people don’t realize that many deaf people have at least a little hearing. And many blind people have at least a little vision. And so forth.
So if you’re deaf enough that you cannot understand speech just by listening alone (because there is too much of the sound missing) then you most likely really NEED captions to have any chance of understanding anything said in a video, TV program, movie, etc.
If you have enough hearing to hear SOME speech, well, hearing 10 percent of what is said still won’t help enough to do without captions. (Some of us might hear vowels without really hearing consonants, or may hear only certain consonants and not others, because some speech sounds are higher pitched than other speech sounds. For example, “s”, “sh”, “ch” are all higher in pitch than “m”, “n” or any of the vowels, etc. Some of us may hear lower pitch sounds better than high pitch sounds. So, yes, many of us hear SOME speech but not enough to understand.)
But suppose you are not deaf, but only hard of hearing, i.e. only a mild hearing loss? So that you can understand most speech by listening alone, without needing visual input? Well, if you’re hard of hearing (and not hearing) then you need completely PERFECT listening circumstances (everyone is speaking clearly, there is no background noise to distract you, etc.) because even minor problems that would only annoy a hearing person can completely disrupt your understanding speech. And even in absolutely perfect listening conditions, a hard of hearing person still needs to invest a LOT more concentration and physical energy into listening. That can make it harder to really process the content of what is being said simply because there’s no bandwidth left over after all that listening.
This is bad if you’re trying to learn really complicated new ideas because then you need to both listen AND do a lot of thinking simultaneously. It’s also harder to really relax and enjoy a movie if you have to work so hard just to understand. So all of this is why even people who can still understand most speech most of the time may still NEED captions.
This is so, so important for blindness and white canes, too. This concept applies so broadly to all of us.
Because you know what? I went 16 years without a cane.
The first 16 straight years of my life were spent without even the shortest singular lesson on using a cane and my vision was no better then than it is now. And you know, I survived. I never broke any bones or had a catastrophic fall down the school stairwell or got hit by a car, and if I wanted to go somewhere without my cane now I could probably live, if it was somewhere familiar and during the day and the weather was just right. I could probably make it to my school and back without any major issues and I would get home in one piece.
But you know what else? During those first 16 years I was terrified. Not actively shaking and consciously thinking about how afraid I was, but it was there, every time I avoided going somewhere new or going out at night or when I stared down at the sidewalk while walking down the street and wondered if people thought I was depressed about something. I didn’t explore, I didn’t try new things, I didn’t feel like it would be easy to go out and check out something new to handle unexpected changes or changes in plans. I stayed inside a lot, and in order to get around somewhere new I had to take a whole day and have a teacher or a parent walk me around it first so I could do it later myself. I didn’t like new places and I didn’t like going out, because there were too many poles and staircases that blended in and broken cracks in the sidewalk and trash on the ground and children running around.
When I got training and learned how to use a cane and gather information from my ears it was life-changing. Using a cane meant the difference between being careful and cautious and avoiding new things, and being out at any hour of the day and walking confidently and comfortably and exploring my neighborhood. It meant the difference between being worried about tripping down the steps at a new place and being able to decide on a whim and I feel like going to this new place because it’s cool and I can. It meant the difference between constantly overthinking and planning my whole day around how I was going to get around and being able to just be normal and just BE without even having to think about whether I’ll be able to get around. It meant the difference between waiting two weeks for somebody to finally be free enough to give me a ride and hold my arm throughout and being able to go where I wanted, when I wanted, without inconvenience to myself or others. It meant the difference between sheltering myself and being actually free.
So yes. I suppose you could try to argue that maybe a cane is not an absolute necessity for me to exist and do the absolute bare minimum, but you would be wrong, because life isn’t just about the absolute bare minimum. Thousands of blind people have this exact same journey with canes and realizing the difference it makes, blind people ranging from those who are completely blind to people who just barely crossed the threshold into legal blindness. So yes, I don’t need a cane in the sense that I am completely blind and entirely unable to do anything without it, but I absolutely need my cane in the sense that most of us do, the sense that that came makes the difference between a stressful experience that was avoided until it couldn’t be and an incredibly comfortable experience that allowed me to do way more, travel way farther, and get a whole shit ton more out of it.
Disability is never a black and white thing, and both abled and other disabled people alike would do well to remember that. and
Organized Chaos 