I know I’m not the only one that has heard this. I get comic book and Sci-fi/fantasy writers probably lean left for the most part but I seem to remember liberals of the past being big on free speech and against censorship. Also I’ve heard SJWs complain about the original Star Trek because they had moved beyond race and you know everything today has to talk about race.
Stan Lee and Kirby are white males so they wouldn’t last today and on and on.
So what is a good response to this?
"There's a difference between the show showing the writer's leanings within the plot and the main character going on a rant about how men/Trump/Republicans are bad which is literally inserted to pander to that politics.
Also, if it was always political, why are people just noticing now?
But they aren't.
Look at how they continue to claim there was a "fuss" over Kirk kissing Uhura. Meanwhile, the probable only "fuss" would have come from the content creators and the network themselves, arguing in their own little bubble. I have never heard anyone but media propagandists bring it up, ever, but they keep pointing to it as some sort of big "civil rights" victory, shoved in the face of rural white bigots (who didn't watch that kind of shit anyway, they'd have been watching something like Bonanza instead.)
Then you had Alan Alda/MASH and the Norman Lear shows. We noticed those, too.
But it's not so much that they were "progressive", it was just Hollywood playing catch-up with the rest of society.
Now it looks like they want to outpace society or some shit.
And the thing with "progress" is, well, it doesn't stop; it's like a shark, if it does, it no longer exists. But we used to use the word "progress" to mean technological progress, and simply assumed that sociological progress would naturally come hand-in-hand with it.
The shark analogy is brilliant, a perfect metaphor for a parasitic ideology. It grows & moves forward to new hosts or it dies.
The more and more I think about even technological progress, the more I am convinced that there is an optimal usage for technology, and that use of technology beyond that point merely hobbles the user-- just as using a crutch or pressure wrap is detrimental to the muscles and joints of a healthy person. Technology which makes life easier lulls us into complacency; we hobble ourselves by replacing morally necessary struggle with convenience & compromise. It's unnatural.
We need real, physical adversity to develop strength. Modern technology has robbed us of many of these adverse elements. Progressive Ideology wants to rob us of the rest. The conflict adverse, soy-addled future would not survive the conditions of nature which reigned prior to the technologies that have enabled our modern dystopia. This is "progress..."
I've been saying for a while now that human exceptionalism isn't what it seems to be - Man is just a technologically-adept ape, who has become addicted and too dependent upon his own technology.
Technology isn't magic, and doesn't break any natural rules. It exists because the laws of nature allow it to exist as just another possible survival path any preadapted animal can adopt, like flight, or gathering together and digging complex underground structures, or building dams, or running real fast to catch your food. And a lot of non-humans actually use very low levels of tech, from birds using sticks to scratch themselves, or to dig bugs out of holes (woodpecker finches), and yes, birds dropping shelled creatures onto rocks counts, just because they don't use things the same way 'round as humans .. it does take practice to get it right, lots of other examples out there. Pretty much every population of chimpanzee uses something, whether termite sticks, hammers and anvils, or the sharpened sticks of savannah chimps ... Think about it - is a beaver dam "natural" or "artificial"? A bird's nest? A city? Why should researchers doing the "Universe" studies be surprised that rats grouped together in little "cities" rather than spreading out? Should the castaways of, say, Gilligan's Island be expected to carve up the island and live every man for himself, too?
But humans are specialists, no different than the koala or the panda, and have put themselves in the same precarious position every super-specialist winds up in, especially since about 1800, and the beginning of a very slow population bomb (Man being a large mammal, it turns its generations over very slow, he only gets five or six generations per century. A rat can have that many in a year, a raccoon in a decade.
Yeah, something is eventually going to break, and in the meantime, it looks like rats, corvids and raccoons are evolving to make use of humans and their stuff for their own ends. Ever read Wolfen?
Are you talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolfen ?
It looks wicked interesting, I haven't read it, but plan on looking it up in my local library.
Agreed on the rest.