That's generally true of luxury cars. People who can afford a 90k$ car typically don't like driving cars that are more than five years old. Since that's the period of greatest depreciation anyway, they are often better off leasing. This is part of the reason that BMWs and Mercs are such crap. They don't like to see people using their cars second hand after twenty years, because it hurts their brand image. That's why they have a low design life on many of their parts, and jack up the repair cost through the roof.

It's a weird cycle, driving a new Mercedes is seen as a sign of affluence so many doctors/dentists/etc lease luxury cars to bring in the wealthier clientele.

Except yours were the conflicting points of view!



I have no idea what this means.

That is weird. I mean, shouldn't someone driving a stupid expensive car with terrible resell and reliability adversely demonstrate their intellect?

!!!

And I didn't even die of cognitive dissonance!

I know, I know: it's like how I remember some Young Earth Creationists remarked about the THeory of evolution: one ought to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. In all "seriousness", though, I offer my apologies for humoring SMLiberator.



Oh man. I think I just dodged a bullet. I hadn't even stopped to remind myself that this is a public forum, too.

Just like how boxers agree to be punched in the head over and over, I think the point is that if you can take the hit, you're proven to possess something that makes your intelligence besides the point (whether we're talking about physical stamina or $$$ in the bank).

Lol people don't care about intellect, they care about appearances. Especially if you're a doctor in e.g. Los Angeles.

Neo: "Are you telling me that I can save 15% or more on car insurance?"

Morpheus: "No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to."

Even stranger. Wealthy people would choose a doctor based on appearance versus intelligence?

Wealthy people aren't any different from anyone else aside from the wealth, so yes.

i think we have to keep in mind that Reid is from California, where it's more difficult to pick out the stoopid doctors by seeing what skin color they are

Edit: in case this isn't totally transparent... /s

In California, going to the doctor entails driving thirty minutes to a nine story building and seeing a doctor you've never seen before and whose name you cannot pronounce.

After, of course, checking out what they have in the parking lot.

taco truck?

https://www.gofundme.com/captainmarvel

pffffbbtbtbfbbbttfft

****ing liberals, what does some crappy action flick have anything to do with the long-term self confidence of women?



Jesus Christ, maybe they should make a MCU film with a developmentally disabled lead so everyone can join in.

Clickbait activism is the worst.

Disney is pretty genius though. Trick people into thinking donating a million dollars to your corporation is inspirational & good? They've really done it.

I love how im supposed to be the sexist one for not wanting to see a dumb boring movie, but it’s fine that movie studios exclusively cast female leads for filler.

Speaking of virtue signaling, know what’s a super strong signal to short Disney? A PR campaign to paint criticism as sexist.

Unironically though these superhero films do have a problem with ableism. Think about it. Would it even make sense to have a superhero film featuring a person with any kind of severe disability? Especially one which would avoid punching down ever?

I doubt it. The very idea is pretty much antithetical. And when you think about it, this problem is just inherit to the format. How we relate to superheroes is how a person with life-limiting disabilities relates to normally abled people. So what kind of inspiration is it possibly to just shove in people's faces their lack of ability?

If we're to take intersectionality seriously, we have to agree it's kind of ****ing offensive for these films to portray these character's worth as a function of their abilities. But hey, that's realllly awkward right? I guess just sweep that one under the rug and pretend none of that's an issue.

The MCU brand seems strong, but I have my doubts. I think people are really sick of the brand despite some of the recent films being big hits. Reformatting the Avengers brand is a bad sign, too.

Honestly superheroes make more sense with "power level = $", rather than super-able.

They were all either born into it, or got it by accident. Sometimes it's entertaining to watch the "good" ones clobber the "bad" ones with their power level, but at the end of the day neither of them have any real stakes. They always go back to their mansions, and the masses are left in the wake of the battle, lying broken and dying in their ruined cities.

Then the most power level-est "good" ones have a big ol' fight over whether they should be allowed to do whatever they want because ~freedom~, or whether government should regulate them because they know they'll never choose to act responsibly on their own.

maybe the marvel universe would be a lot better if nobody had superpowers, good or bad?


LOL WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF SOCIALIST?

Yeah, when you get past the torches of freedom bs it's basically just bragging about how great it is to be rich. Brands like Ironman, Batman etc are just power level = money.

Reformatting, as in "format c:"?

Strangely inverted from the alt. right where power level is proportional to how homicidally racist you are, which seems more or less to be inversely correlated with success and wealth.

I don't know. Aren't billionaires homicidally racist?

Well I suppose in theory once you are independently wealthy, you no longer need to scapegoat other races to explain your poverty, but then if you're going to single out billionaires you also are talking about people who are probably not psychologically normal human beings.

No, it's money plus ability. Those stories have many wealthy people in them, what sets them apart is the ability and resolve to do incredible things with their wealth.

The plot of the first Iron Man movie was literally about how no amount of money could replicate what Tony Stark built in cave as a prisoner.

Batman begins started with Bruce Wane realizing that he'd never be able to achieve what he needed to do unless he first let go of his wealth.

Ok, but how else do you measure worth? I mean, I hope we can all agree that human life has a certain type of inherent value, but we don't choose are associations purely arbitrarily either. If people can't find a social niche by standing out in some way, they tend to get overlooked.

Well, to be honest I'm not fully sure. I've never been able to fully contend with the idea of ableism. There are certain ideas in the category which are easy to agree to, like that "ugly laws" are bad (that was a real thing, look it up).

But, you know, a person with a disability is literally less abled in some way than an otherwise person. So unlike racism, like, reality itself is basically ableist? I'm sure what people mean is that ableism is the socially constructed parts of disability, but it's definitely more complicated because it's not entirely reducible to what's socially constructed.

In any case, you're walking down a pretty unnerving path if you try and make any claim about the worth of a person based on their abilities. Which is weird, because, again, like we know positive economics will suggest people with disabilities cost more to hire, so they'll often have a hard time finding employment or will earn less. And I think most would want to think of this as ableist, but that seems unlikely to effect behavior without costly interventions.

I think most would say that everyone has equal worth in some metaphysical sense not tied to any function of reality.. it's just that this seems to bear almost no weight on how people objectively act in regards to ability. At best we have a few laws to help people with disability function in society, but I don't think we're ever going to see full fair treatment of disability unless we get fully automated communism or something.

In any case, I think it's pretty clear that superhero films don't really care about ableism much unless it's the overt kind people will get mad about, but the medium still has a kind of inherent ableism to it.

Like, there are liberal economists (shudder, I know) who argue that racist hiring practices are essentially self-harming, you're basically paying a tax to hire people of your preferred race and there is some evidence to suggest companies which do this are less profitable.

It's clear that some disabilities won't be work-disrupting, but some may be. A person who needs specialized controls may indeed be a fine driver, but if you have to install specialized controls in your vehicles it's inefficient, so a slightly less productive able-bodied employee might be preferred. It seems intuitive that we'd want a society where this wouldn't be the case, but it also seems like this kind of ableism isn't going to vanish just because we might prefer it to.

In aggregate this probably means people with disabilities suffer more unemployment, etc. which amounts to a kind of social discrimination. What's the answer? Genuine question, I don't really know what to make of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableism#Inspiration_porn

Also ^ yeah this is accurate. I find it extremely irritating when people try to dig inspiration out of a person's disabilities. Please stop, they are just a person, please learn to treat them like that and not an object of fascination.

It's why everyone's a ****head in the movie The Elephant Man, but you wouldn't realize how if you're the kind of person who embraces inspiration porn.

I think you have to make a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. That way we can recognize the intrinsic worth of human life, while also recognizing that people have different level of extrinsic value to different people. Really, a physical disability isn't always so bad in this respect. We need wide variety of skills and personalities, and most physical disabilities leave a wide variety of options open for a person to make themselves useful to society and their peer groups. Intellectual disabilities tend to be quite a bit worse in this regard.

Despite our disagreements, I think we can all agree that aborted babies have absolutely no intrinsic worth and thus deserve to die.

Aborted babies are already dead.

Yeah, Batman is a tragic figure, as are many superheroes. For that reason, I think analyzing them in terms of power level can be a little misleading. They often have a human element where what's driving them is often sense of absence that drives them to fight crime in order to fill the hole. They aren't generally well-adjusted people (at least in the past few decades), who are defined merely by their ability. Their abilities often accompany undesirable traits.

Thankfully.

These are interesting questions that I really haven't thought about before. I wonder to what extent it even makes sense to talk about "worth" as a social category in 20th/21st century society. I'm inclined to think it makes very little sense to say that the value of worth is at all associated with labor and what one is capable of producing, or at least that it makes little sense to think of that meaning of worth as the core-meaning. The language of worth seems very much related to the discourse of dignity; our modern notions of dignity largely come from the anti-aristocratic discourse of the 18th/19th centuries, that asserted that instead of their being a hierarchy of worth, where some are worth more, and others have none, all people have the exact same worth and dignity. If it doesn't make sense to talk about worth in modern societies, one reason would be because, if everyone is assumed to have the same equal worth, as a category it becomes totally meaningless and contentless.

I wonder if the way that most people think about worth in 21st century America (even if they aren't aware that that's how they think about it) is in terms of self-esteem: you have worth to the extent that you have self-esteem, regardless of any of the more external aspects of your life (such as relationships, work, education, wealth, etc.) I think that makes sense of why ableism is an issue that ought to be addressed. Those who have disabilities are faced with circumstances that can humiliate and violate their self-esteem.

True, in a modern society where physical labor is in much less demand then intellectual disabilities are the more weighty ones.

I accept your distinction of intrinsic vs extrinsic worth, and of course all people have the same intrinsic worth. I'm inclined to think that ultimately extrinsic worth is the one which "matters" more in terms of policy debates though. Intrinsic worth can motivate long-term moral solutions, and with e.g. the Lanterman Act in California can guide is in a better direction. What I see though is that extrinsic worth seems to be the one which actually effects people's lives the most.