I don’t think that holds true quite as much today as it did back when Voltaire said it. He was calling out authoritarian structures like the christian church if I remember correctly. While certainly still true in totalitarian systems like dictatorships, it’s a somewhat different situation in democracies for example. In a democracy you are generally allowed to criticize anyone. However, powerful entities like big corporations and the very rich might still abuse the system to sue you into oblivion.
Also this quote gets misused quite often by people who do not understand the difference between hate speech and criticism and by people who think being called out and criticized for their words is the same as being “not allowed to criticized” or silenced.
“By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” - Umberto Eco
I don’t know, but we know plenty of things that are actively poisoning us that we are pretty casual about, like cars and cigarettes. Hell, a lot of people even romanticize them ¯_ (ツ)_/¯
Not necessarily, it is likely that a tourist is just not used to these specific pathogens. While the people living there are used to them. So their immune system isn’t better per se just more adapted to the environment.
Name-based jokes should definitely die. Especially if it’s from people you just met!
However, they are still above ethnicity-, body-, gender-based comedy for basically the same reasons.
I want to add that the box office income is simply one of the only objective metrics to compare the success of films.