I don’t want to put anyone on blast, but I’ve seen a few people saying, erroneously, that superhero comics sell more by the numbers, that they have the biggest sales overall and (most wrong of all) that they are the best selling comics globally. And, uh...Shounen Jump called. 📞

one of the things i like about Batman is that it's fundamentally about being orphaned, and being an orphan — how this guy stays tethered to the world in his own weird, abstract, extrajudicial way when he feels that his link to it has been violently severed

Batman does this by permanently recapitulating his own trauma: solving crimes for other people, protecting them. But that's actually just the beginning; he also recapitulates his own experience of orphanness by essentially raising several orphans

Dick is an orphan in the traditional sense: dead parents. Batman sees it happen. Jason, less so: missing dad, known mom who eventually dies. Tim, even less so: parents are around a while, and involved, before both dying. Carrie, even less than that: negligent parents.

Steph: evil father, who openly works against her. And then there's Damian, whose parents are both alive and yet both have identities that totally obliterate their role as his parents. He doesn't relate to them as a mother and father; he can't, and neither can they.

In all these different cases, Batman tries all these different ways of making orphanness for them not what it was for him: Either by trying to teach them the (arguably poor) coping skills early that he learned over a very long time, or by literally legally adopting them, etc.

This day was inevitable. Indian Muslims always lived in La La Land. They bad mouthed real well wishers & slept with the enemy who never considered them as part of them. In Gulf, Indian Muslims were busy with Javed Akhtar & Sonu Nigam. Never interacted with South Asian diaspora

Now when Indian Muslims are thrown to wolves it’s Pakistani & Bangladeshi Muslims with whom they kept distance are the only ones feeling their pain. None of the people who they invited for Eid Milan. Qawali & Mushaira are there for them. Such people invoke wrath upon themselves

Indian Muslims never spoke for Kashmiri Muslims. Distancing from separatist was understandable but we never even bothered to highlight their human rights violation & rapes carried out by forces. We could have sent them humanitarian help we didn’t. Our silence made us complicit.

When Sania Mirza married Shoaib Malik it was something legal. A Muslim married another Muslim. Entire Hindutva media went after her. They launched a witch-hunt for months. No Indian Muslim stood by her. All were silent. Now days come when Muslims are arrested for marrying a Hindu

Indian Muslims particularly the elite downplayed communalism in India by saying it will pass or Hindu majority is good. Fringe are bad. They misguiding others. Muslims were always others. Indians were happy to see Muslims sing & dance & eat their food but never considered as own

Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

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