Maybe the reason Joss Whedon ever seemed “feminist,”
the reason he was writing “feminist” stories that seemed visionary, is because his worst impulses sounded a lot better when Sarah Michelle Gellar said them.

— H Kapp-Klote (@pizza4justice) February 11, 2021

This is just a completetely ahistorical and ignorant take. The main difference is just cultural change. I’m no huge fan of Whedon, but what made Whedon seem feminist in the late 1990s and early 2000s is that he was completely channeling mainstream feminism at the time, and the method of storytelling that was prevalent then. He was more creative than most and a bettter dialog writer, but that’s essentially true.

Now that culture has shifted significantly, he has become some demonic figure who secretly hated women (despite having more of them in his shows than any person before him), and uniquely deserving of ridicule.

This more deeply is about who gets to control the narrative and if characters are allowed to be complex. These days, characters must parrot woke slogans like some robot, and if you’re a man who writes any young female character or anyone who is not exactly like you, it’s considered abuse. Whedon’s characters had convoluted motiviations, didn’t always do what was best for themselves or others, and didn’t necessarily hold all the latest (especially for now) bien-pensant opinions. And when they got power, they abused it, as people do, even if they were young and female.

Unlike now, all that was not a huge offense during the late 90s and early 2000s. Now that we’ve launched into re-segregation, except from the left direction, these are huge blunders to most. I do truly miss when characters could be complex and not woke-bots, though. Most art is now is dreadfully boring since the woke pseudo-revolution.

Better days will come – despite what the Covid doom-mongers say. I’m a cynic, and I agree with this.

The doomsters who say things like, “Even after the virus, you must still stay hiding under your bed, swathed in PPE, crying, until all your friends have forgotten you” really will greatly reduce vaccine uptake. Many liberals have made a weirdo fetish of staying indoors too, and it’s probably those same people now who are the doomsayers.

A significant number of people, including but not limited to influential voices on Twitter, have decided that there will be no “post-Covid” and that thinking we will ever return to a social life that looks like the one we left in March last year is laughable. If you mention that you’re looking forward to a summer holiday, a gig or a football game, they roll their eyes. Get real. The pandemic is here to stay and the old world is dead, idiot.

These are the same people who were proclaiming when the pandemic began that Zoom was just as good as being in person and probably the same ones who were saying back in February that not wanting to shake hands was racist.

Great article here by Zeynep about the pandemic.

Some conclusions (some go beyond exactly what she said in the piece):

1. Sweden is not a great example of anything either way.

2. The virus is overdispersed, meaning its spread is stochastic, making it hard to model and predict.

3. Cluster-busting and backward tracing are the way to contain the virus (absent vaccines).

4. Lockdowns don’t work well after a certain point of spread and many countries most successful at controlling Covid had no or little lockdown.

Most of the West, and the US in particular, took the worst part of every approach because our elites are incompetent and our societal institutions are sclerotic. Other than it greatly helping the plutes, I guess this is why the (mostly lib) worship of lockdown gestated: it seemed to be the only tool available, though it was not a particularly effective one.

Oh, the irony: about six months of my life was eaten up by trying to convince WHO that healthy people *should* wear masks and now Facebook will ban the following as misinformation. (Now, it is indeed false). Not so irony: we'll ban whatever WHO disputes for now not an ideal rule. pic.twitter.com/wHr8iYhFBn

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 8, 2021

Many events that demonstrably happened get memory-holed as “conspiracy theories,” often by the very people and orgs who had been pushing the opposite narrative only months or years before.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia….

This is bad but I miss the enthusiasm https://t.co/ao1yK0nHeY

— Jonathan Korman (@miniver) February 9, 2021

My partner and I were just discussing this the other day — reminiscing about when computers were trying to be more than bland consumption boxes.

Now that computers are a thousand times faster, we are told that everything must be completely locked down for “security,” even though computers (and here I include smartphones and tablets, etc.) are now so blazing fast we could more than easily have cutsomizability and security.

Of course everyone who is not a complete doofus knows the “security” excuse is just a lie to wrest control away from the user and give it to corporations, but most people are in fact doofuses so they are readily bamboozled by such simplistic sophistry.

We lost more than most people realize, and a lot of that history is being deliberately buried now and people who remember being gaslighted about it.