The thing is Avatar, I see nothing wrong with enjoying movies that represent a moral code I don't advocate in real life. The fact of the matter is that liberal ideology usually makes for bad/boring entertainment. There's a reason most of the best action directors in history (John Mctiernan for instance) are conservatives. Similarly, James Cameron movies start getting progressively worse the more he tries to inject liberal ideology into them (though admittedly, this was mostly a one-data-point jump from True Lies/Titanic to Avatar, but with the stuff he's talked about for Avatar 2/3, I don't see things getting better).

For movies that I think are incredibly entertaining, but also morally acceptable, I say look no further than the works of Quentin Tarantino.

I think Inglourious Basterds both humanizes Nazi's as real people far more than Saving Private Ryan, and at the same time is a brilliant meta-critique on why we enjoy violent action propaganda in the first place.

Reservoir Dogs is taking what would be a typical "entertaining" gangster story, and showing what horrible violence those types of stories typically gloss over, how terrifying just a gunshot wound is.

Kill Bill is taking a typical revenge story and grounding the characters in a level of reality inside the revenge universe, to where the story ends up feeling tragic rather than triumphant at the end.

I find a bloody R-rated revenge flick as thrilling as the next dude. All I'm doing is pointing out how weird it is that us liberals get off on this (ostensibly right-wing fantasy) stuff.
It'd be just as weird as finding out that evangelical conservative Christians get their entertainment out of watching Soviet propaganda movies about the evils of the church, after which they'd shrug their shoulders when someone pointed out the irreconciliability between their beliefs and their entertainment, with 'It's just a fictional movie. I wouldn't want to actually live in the USSR'.

'Cuz it's super creepy to go to get your silver and see that it's gold instead.

It's a movie, that's an awesome device.

My objection isn't with the 2nd Magic Bean as a principle, it's that to me it seems totally pointless for telling this particular story. The moral argument of whether it's ok to kill someone who will do bad in the future does not require giving the kid super-powers. You could make the exact same movie and take out the TK stuff with some minor tweaks here and there. It's a clear case of putting something in that he thought looked cool when it doesn't really serve the story he's telling, just clutters it.

I hadn't thought about it that way....that's interesting.

I guess my question would be why does he have to be a threat NOW? Isn't it a more interesting dilemma if he seems just like a normal, innocent kid right now, but will grow up to be terrible later? I guess you'd more easily side with younger Joe if that was the case, but I'd say a better way to balance it would be to SHOW some of the terrible things this kid's done in the future. Right now the movie makes him dangerous in the present but tells you almost nothing about what he's done in the future, I think it would work better if he was innocent in the present but we saw some of the terrible things he's doing later.

This will be a fun one to re-watch with adjusted expectations.