u/NothingWillImprove6

In this episode, Picard states the following:

>Captain's log, supplemental. I read about the achievements of the ancient Bajoran civilization in my fifth grade reader. They were architects and artists, builders and philosophers when humans were not yet standing erect. Now I see how history has rewarded them.

Problem is, Homo sapiens was already "standing erect" as a species when its anatomically modern form evolved about 100K years ago. One might argue that Picard was using "human" as an umbrella term for any species from Australopithecus onwards, but if that's the case, then the Bajorans would be something like four million years old as a civilization. Per Star Trek rules, shouldn't they be energy beings by now?

Assume George manages to successfully drink it each time.

To put things in perspective, Cairo lost about 200,000 people to the plague; it wasn't a uniquely European phenomenon. For all that Kim Stanley Robinson wanted to avert Eurocentrism, he was kind of guilty of it when it came to the POD he created.

I'm sure many or most people here are familiar with Ezekiel from The Boys. In the comics, his counterpart was Oh Father, and led a group of like-minded heroes. Pat Mills's Marshal Law had a similar group, the Jesus Society of America (a parody of the Justice Society of America), which was about as heroic and egalitarian as you'd expect.

As a take on Marvel/DC heroes, this is nonsensical. Let me list the reasons why:

1. Superheroes from Marvel and DC are for the most part secular. Probably less than half of them practice a religion outside of participating in funeral and wedding services.
2. Among the religious ones, very few observe Christianity, and the ones who do (i.e., Daredevil, Nightcrawler, Huntress) tend to be moderate in their religion.
3. Whenever fundamentalist types show up in Marvel or DC, they're pretty much always antagonistic, like the Purifiers.
4. Some might bring up Bibleman, but who in their right mind would consider that to be mainstream superhero media? (And in the case of Marshal Law, it didn't even exist yet.)

At least one other person asked about this on Reddit, to which the general response was "the critique is that superheroes are fascists, and fascism in Western civilization is often associated with Christian fundamentalism". But if you have to create a strawman that unlike the original, aren't you just damaging your own argument? Doesn't it just show how much Marvel/DC heroes aren't the fascists you're accusing them of being by contrast to one's parodies of them? If your critique involves characterization that divergent from the characters and genre you're trying to condemn, then maybe your argument, at least as far as the religion part is concerned, wasn't that good to begin with.

This question assumes that George was correct in thinking that the people ahead of him got free bread. Did the SN run low on bread and decide to engage in price gouging?