Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, August 17, 2025
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24 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
A reminder of what sort of “heritage” or “legacy” those Confederate statues represent, and why they were built.
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinmlevin/p/exposing-the-lie-of-a-confederate
Has anyone been following the Laura Loomer vs. Marjorie Taylor Greene slapfest involving accusations of Arby’s in MTG’s panties? And a completely gratuitous mention that Lindsay Graham is gay? I can’t find a print equivalent, but this is worth a watch.
ICE conducted a raid right next to Governor Newsom’s press conference at the Japanese American National Museum.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-14/border-patrol-conducts-immigration-operation-outside-gov-newsom-event
@Michael Reynolds: the depo Loomer sat for (with omfg Larry Klayman as her attorney) is surprising only in that it reveals she is truly nuts, not just playing one on Social Media to drive the dollars. Now that she’s targeting fellow travelers, it’s not unsatisfying, for sure.
Yesterday we passed a big banner on a huge empty lot along a well traveled road that read “We Stand With Massie!”. This is a very red suburban area so there are definitely hairline fractures to keep pressure on.
Apparently, Laura Loomer is setting US policy:
A day after conservative activist Laura Loomer posted videos on social media of children from Gaza arriving in the U.S. for medical treatment and questioning how they got visas, the State Department said it was halting all visitor visas for people from Gaza pending a review.
Did Loomer personally remove Marco Rubio’s balls, or did she have someone else do it? I expected people like RFK Jr., Bondi, and Patel to be RWNJs who would do anything, but I actually thought Rubio has a conscience. What a fool I was. He should rot in hell, he’s already sold his soul.
I just watched the new Superman movie, and I wonder if anyone else had this thought. The most popular Marvel character by a long way is and always has been, Spiderman. Why? Because Spiderman is relatable. He feels, he has weaknesses, he has money problems, he can be beat. The knock on Superman is that he was over-powered and un-relatable. James Gunn just re-imagined Superman as Spiderman.
It’s a brilliant move. You can build stories around this new, humanized Superman in a way no one could the ‘man of steel’. I don’t know if it will save DC, but it was canny and well-executed. Maybe a bit too much dog, but still very smart. Nothing humanizes a character like a good dog.*
The Fantastic Four movie was also very good, but the FF are not Spiderman, there’s no single point of focus or identification. I’m not sure ‘hero family’ works as well as ‘lone hero.’ And the 1960’s, alternate timeline thing while very effective, and absolutely right for the property, still pushes it away from the audience. It’s a hero family who live in a different world. That’s a couple of steps back.
*I had one dog in GONE. Readers made it very clear that I could do whatever I liked with the characters, but Patrick was not to be messed with.
@Michael Reynolds: The most popular Marvel character by a long way is and always has been, Spiderman. Why? Because Spiderman is relatable. He feels, he has weaknesses, he has money problems, he can be beat. The knock on Superman is that he was over-powered and un-relatable. James Gunn just re-imagined Superman as Spiderman.
@Michael Reynolds:
Jor-el should sue.
@Gustopher:
Not recognizable to movie fans. We got Christopher Reeves in increasingly forgettable sequels, and we got gloomy Superman from Snyder, plus various ‘guest star’ bits here and there. It was St. Superman followed by depressed, gray-scale Superman. Neither iteration lent itself to story.
I don’t know what’s happening in the comics, but then again, neither does anyone else. Marvel and DC’s sales and market shares are pretty small nowadays.
Gunn is a writer first, and it shows in genuine character development and a foundation for continued storytelling. And the Peacemaker show is great. Niche, but great. I’m a Gunn fan.
Oh, and in case there was any doubt, Marvel characters rule. DC’s got Batman, admittedly a great character. But that’s it.
@JohnSF:
I don’t know if Gunn got that from a comic book source or came up with it himself, but it was a good move. Nurture over nature, small ‘d’ democratic, humanistic, virtue over DNA, man-of-the-people stuff. And let’s not overlook turning Elon Luthor into a whiny, jealous twat. Not that that required much effort.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think it’s bit of a cheap move.
Part of the whole Superman backstory was the Jor-El vs Zod dynamic: does “the Superman” have the right to rule, or the duty to protect?
ymmv
(I have a sneaking suspicion that the concept of the Nietzschean “superman” was not wholly absent from the minds of the original writers back in the 1930’s.)
But I have to agree on this point: Marvel has the better characters.
As a kid back in the late 60’s/early 70’s, I always preferred Marvel to DC.
They somehow seemed more relatable, more human (for arbitrary values of “human”).
My favourite “super” film scene is, and always will be, Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsher in the bar in Argentina.
Fassbender could combine anguish and menace to a remarkable degree.
Even better than Ian McKellen, and that’s saying something.
@Michael Reynolds:
Lindsay Graham is gay?
Well, whoever would have guessed?
And is there any chance of of a Loomer vs MJT cage match in the new WWE White House arena?
“Two MAGA’s enter, one MAGA leaves.”
@JohnSF:
I tend to devalue canon and look at it in very pragmatic, writerly ways. Could I write the sequel? Does this character and this world have legs? Gunn has a basis for three, maybe four more Superman movies. He’s built a foundation. And his world feels right.
When I write series I sometimes have to guess how many books before we make a deal. For GONE I thought it should not be seven cuz that’s JK, and might want to be five but I figured I could stretch it to six. (And barely did it). It’s like there’s a calorie count, an energy count, in a concept. With ANIMORPHS we didn’t know it’d go 63 books, but we knew it had long legs. Of course, sometimes the market disagrees. I thought I had a good ten books in THE MAGNIFICENT 12, but the market said, no you don’t, you have four.
@Michael Reynolds:
There are, and have generally always been, television shows.
Movies have a higher profile, but people still watch television shows. If you compare the movie version of the character with the television versions, Snyder’s version is a vastly different character.
(And this has also been the basic comics iteration since the 80s or so, with previous iterations being more cavalier than stoic — you would really have to struggle to find something like the Snyder Superman before those movies.)
“Superman is too powerful/stoic/godlike” has always been the refrain of people who don’t know the character or don’t think it’s “realistic” that an invulnerable man who can fly, and who has super-breath would not turn evil on a dime if he had any kind of emotions.
People whose power fantasy isn’t making the world a better place, but grabbing what they can.
@Michael Reynolds: Gunn didn’t “re-invent” Superman. What you see on the screen is the same character that has been in the comics since the 1980s. Highly relatable, often fallible, boundlessly decent. Check out A Superman For All Seasons for a prime example.
Other great runs, like All Star Superman, are just as good, but you might need to know some of the earlier Superman stories to get the most out of them.
Snyder’s Superman was the real aberration, movie adaptation-wise.
@Michael Reynolds: The comics and television shows have been all over the place with Krypton, from it being a utopia to a falling empire.
I think Smallville went with an evil Jor-El (google, google… that was an AI based on Jor-El who wanted Clark to be a dictator of Earth and restore Krypton, with real Jor-El being a nice guy opposed to enslaving humanity).
There have been retcons one way and then the other in the comics (look a new message that changes everything! Oh, the message was from the Eradicator!)
I don’t love the Evil Jor-El thing, as a key part of Superman’s mythos is hope, and his parents sending him out into the universe in an act of hope. Also, he’s Moses, and I don’t recall Moses being sent down the river in a basket to rule over the Egyptians by force and have a massive harem.
Sure, you get a nice story about the Kent’s and nurture over nature, but you also get a problem with Supergirl. Since Supergirl was raised on Krypton, we have to wonder if she just went along with Clark glorifying his birth parents because she just didn’t see a reason to tell him the truth. “Hey, Clark, about your birth parents… they sucked. We would have them over for the holidays, and every year, they just sucked more. Honestly, you would have hated our entire culture. Everyone else did. Most of the galaxy is glad they’re dead. Milkshakes later?”
Anyway, there’s not only precedent for it, but there’s precedent for retconning it, if they choose to go that way.
Semi-random person on BlueSky
I really am impressed by our media’s inability to deal with this. I didn’t have a lot of faith in our media, and I think what little I did may have been misplaced.
@Michael Reynolds:
Anything that’s been running this long has so much contradictory canon that it’s a grab bag. Is it core to recognizing the characters? Is the story better if it includes, doesn’t mention or completely violates a bit of canon?
I don’t think a Superman story in any medium really has to address Valthos Island, where all the Black Kryptonians lived. But, if it does, it needs to be a necessary part of the story, whether they make it a plantation or Wakanda or anything in between.
Just don’t make a big sweeping change to anything without a good story. The Doctor being half-human on his mother’s side, and being a foundling from another universe are both canon. Neither were done to tell a story with that new status quo. They just happened.
And new writers on Doctor Who should probably just ignore both of them, unless they have a story that really needs it rather than just randomly changing it or acknowledging it because the writer loves or hates it.
(I think RTD was trying to acknowledge and then use the foundling bit as a core part of the Doctor’s identity and story with 15, but then fumbled it as actors left.)
@Gustopher:
I suppose it’s odd that I’ve created so much canon and yet discount it. I shy away from anything cultish or quasi-religious. Venerating ancient texts, that sort of thing. Any form of authority, really. And we forget a lot of our canon.
But, for example, I thought Peter Jackson was 100% right to cut Tom Bombadil, yet I despise that Amazon Rings atrocity. But that’s less about the letter of canon and much more about the mangled storytelling and dialog that should be taken up in the Hague as a crime against humanity. But also yes a disrespect of canon as something that should be taken seriously if not reverenced. Professor Tolkien did some great work, respect the work, not as a religion, but as a creation.
I’ve created quite a few super-powered characters and have always leaned pretty heavily into the downsides. Sometimes powers are useless, sometimes they kill the super-powered person, sometimes they’re painful physically or psychologically. Superman has always smacked of monarchy, somehow, of the revealed special one. The King Arthur, Harry Potter, Divergent school. I come from the Peter Parker school – random shit happens, the hero does his best to cope.
Had my first go-round with Portuguese bureaucracy trying for a long-term stay visa. Note to self: let’s take another run at Kafka.
@Michael Reynolds:
It apparently can take three weeks to set up a Portuguese bank account. Wells Fargo may be crooks, but they know their business is taking deposits and then loaning the money out at extortionate rates. What kind of bank tries to stop you depositing money?
@Michael Reynolds:
Jackson was completely unable to understand what Tolkein was on about.
Dropping Bombadil etc arguably made sense, movie-wise.
(Even though its a key part of the book, that people often miss: why was Bombadil able to treat the Ring like a piece of cheap jewellery? It was important.)
But he also dropped the “Scouring of the Shire”, which was what the whole story was originally centred on, as Tolkein stated.
And totally buggered the motivations and characters of Aragorn, Denethor, Faramir, and various others.
Not mention “I want to see mountains again” and a shot of mountains in the Shire shortly after.
ftlog
And the geographic f@ck up In the Two Towers,
And etc.
Jackson tasks me.
Though his sins were trivial compared to the utter disaster that was the Amazon Rings.
At least he made films that, in themselves, and ignoring the books, were more or less coherent.
The Rings of Power was a classic example of having a story sitting there, and just throwing it away, “because we know better”: ignoring the moral and philosophical points in order to get some sword-swinging action on.
And in particular, screwing up the character of Ar Pharazon, perhaps the only person in the entire legendarium capable of making Sauron and his entire Nazgul nine ring circus soil their ectoplasmic britches.
@Michael Reynolds:
The best ever version of Arthur is Artos/Arturios in Rosemary Sutcliffes’s “Sword at Sunset”
Second best is T.H. White's Arthur.
Perhaps because both are not about supemen, but about fallible people fighting a losing battle.
That’s also what Jackson missed in LOTR: Tolkein’s whole sensibility was based on a sense of loss, and regret, and how those who learnt and endured too much could not find peace.
(And why Celeborn had lost almost everything he had ever cared for, and did not sail off on the ship with Galdriel and Frodo.)
The real ending of LOTR was in the”Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”, the only appendix Tolkein insisted on being included in the cut-down version.
“… the loss, and the silence.”
Ok, to all of you citing the comic-book Superman: You have a point.
AND it’s meaningless in a movie. Moviegoers are not hard-core comic book readers, by and large.
The big problem with Superman – which has been addressed in comics, yes – is that he was a Mary Sue in the 60’s. Being arguably the first superhero means he got too many powers, and not enough weaknesses. So there had to be a reimagining of his powers – which there was.
But the film audience didn’t get let in on it. Particularly not emotionally.
In the first minute of Gunn’s film, we find out that A) Superman is getting thrashed by some unkown opponent and B) Superman has a dog that he doesn’t quite control, and makes most of the dog people in the audience kind of go, “really? You can’t do better than that with your dog?”
This is brilliant. It establishes his vulnerability. In the first minute of the film. This is so different from Man of Steel which maybe never does that, or my prior favorite Supes film Superman Returns, which established his vulnerability by showing Supes in the hospital, pretty much after a climactic scene where he rescues earth.
No, this is better. A lot better. I do not argue that it is against his character. I argue that it is so very well dramatized and communicated to the audience.
His interview with Lois also early in the film highlights this too. He has the simple, earnest answers that we long for, and yet to Lois they are foolish and naive and show him in a bad light.
Again that vulnerability.
Also, I absolutely love his speech to Lex near the end, about putting one foot in front of the other.
And, one other theme of this film, if perhaps buried a bit, is that families are made by choices, not by biology. The queer scene contrasts families of birth with families of choice (this showed up in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, too), and this is in that category.
And the USA is made by choices, not by birth, either. I feel that is a definite theme, and one which I am proud of.