Grrl Power #840 – Loopholio
I think Maxima ordered Steak Oscar, except instead of Bearnaise sauce, it came with a fancy Hollandaise sauce, and also a side of scallops. Because you know what goes well with Hollandaise sauce? Literally almost anything. It’s just a fuckton of butter with egg yolk and a drizzle of lemon. I’ll eat god damned toast slathered in Hollandaise sauce. Fortunately, I only make Hollandaise sauce 2 or 3 times a year, because it’s just a fuckton of butter, and I want to live past 55.
One of the reason Deus’s Galytn experiment is working as well as it is, is because, to the best of my knowledge, no impoverished, out of the way country like them has ever had a crazy billionaire come in and just start throwing a ton of money at a bunch of core problems, and do it responsibly. Sure, there have been plenty of government changeups in various third world countries, and every once in a while the new dictator will actually go full ham on infrastructure or something, but… as often as not, they’re involved in industrial grade drug trade to fund it, or are genociding some religious minority on the side, so whatever good they’re doing gets overshadowed by the other stuff.
Deus legitimately has no other agenda than improving the country… yes, so he can sort of become the Weyland Yutani of Galytn. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s repeatedly fucking himself with ill advised bio-weapon experiments, I mean it like he is THE employer in the country. He understands that a comfortable and well educated middle class is one of the best engines for economic growth. A great deal of that economic growth goes back into his coffers, yes, but he’s continuing to improve the country to continue to improve his return. But then he goes and says something like on this page, about annexing nearby cities in order to improve the lives of the citizens there. It’s suspiciously like he actually cares about the quality of life of people under his “rule.” Which in itself seems suspicious.
A billion dollars in America will buy you a bit of highway and a decent sized mixmaster. Imagine how much roadwork you cold get done in BFE with that kind of cash. Deus is a big believer in public transit though. He’s built some roads but also a lot of railway. He thinks that the infrastructure cost of maintaining a few hundred million miles of roads and highways can eventually become prohibitive, not to mention the burden of putting the cost of car ownership on up and coming but still poor citizens. Plus… if you sell someone a car, you make X dollars from them, and a well maintained car can be run for a decade or two. If you sell someone a bus or rail pass every week for the rest of their lives, it provides a steady and predictable source of revenue.
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Most people with the power to claim sovereign territory do so with the intention of making money, so yes. Deus has one of the best plans ever. The only problem most super rich people have is that they are limited by whatever state they and/or their infrastructure inhabits, and that they generally see everything as needing to be cheaper or more efficient to manage before they move said infrastructure. He’s literally becoming the new state in order to make everything cheaper and more efficient, plus he’s improving the lives of literally everyone he annexes. This translates to no rules except his rules, a fanatically loyal population that triples as consumers and integrated production force (Read: Wage slaves, which is a hell of a lot better than being uneducated and starving because your previous government was more interested in fast cash.) and all the space in the world to put down factories, laboratories, secret lairs and a dozen or so arcane libraries if you want to.
I reiterate: If I was a super living in this world, this is the guy I’d want signing my paychecks.
i’m uncomfortable with the view that citizens of African countries are always starving, and subject to vicious dictators who must be deposed. Or that the only thing they need is intervention by a bllionaire from the US.
It’s a racist view, although well-intentioned.
Aftrica is a very large continent, second only to Asia. It dwarfs the USA in size, although that’s obscured by the Mercator maps Americans use.
Like Asia, it contains rich and poor countries, and a large number of democracies. Most of them don’t need to be taken over to make them function, and they would fight bitterly to prevent it.
If Deus claims otherwise, he is lying, to justify conquest of innocent peoples.
No one said that, or anything even close to it. Even Deux isn’t trying to take over all of Africa, just the few select countries between the overthrown Dictator country he controls and the sea, which could very well be also run by Jerk*** Dictators.
Don’t ascribe the overthrowing of a few fascistic dictatorships to racism when you have no evidence, please.
No one said it in this forum, but the antiquated view of 1st vs 3rd-world countries is a surprisingly common misconception. People in the western ‘1st-world’ countries generally don’t even know where the countries are, let alone what they’re like.
This TED talk that visually demonstrates the standard of living around the world (presented by the daughter and associate of the researcher in the 1st link) is fantastically eye-opening, and the associated interactive tool Dollar Street is a great place to explore the data yourself.
Galytin was clearly not meant to be like the 20% of African nations that are modestly well off – it’s more like the 80 % that is impoverished. And I’m someone who DOES know where these countries are :)
DaveB’s already describeD Galytin before Deus arrived – it was a typical tinpot dictator-run nation, very prevalent in Africa and South America (and in some parts of Southeast Asia as well). So it makes sense that Deus would have gone there instead of somewhere like Angola or Nigeria or Algeria or Morocco. You go where you can create the most wealth for the populace compared to what there was, and that generally would be a nation either torn up by civil war or run by a despotic dictator. Deus chose the latter.
*eyes Pander suspiciously*
I hope you are not planning any invasions of sovereign nations, in order to spread capitalism are you? By any chance are you are not on retainer for that guy who allegedly planned to do a coup in Venezuela?
Not THIS week. I’m under a shelter in place order this week.
Maybe after the middle of June though. Not the guy who allegedly planned the takeout/arrest of Maduro though. Pretty sure he was just doing it for the 15 million dollar (I think, might be 10) reward.
That whole Latin overthrow thing can’t come off until after the invasion of the mole men in 3rd Q 2020. They’ve about worked out the branding and casting… CHUDs are out, lava men are out, and the mole men have been redesigned using a polar motif and ursine riffs so they can work in a “global warming” theme.
I am going to have to relabel so many spreadsheets if those CHUDs come out early.
…and failed, spectacularly.
capitalism or a variant of it is the system that every country on this planet uses and those who dont are north korea and venezuela, so you wouldnt really be spreading anything its already there most likely
Admittedly, the ‘first world/third world’ dynamic is a holdover from the Cold War. The general classifications were ‘America and its allies’ (First World), ‘Russia and its allies’ (Second World), and ‘everyone that doesn’t have a dog in the fight’ (Third World).
The idea that it was about economic prosperity is more coincidental than anything else.
Thank you! So many people forget that (or never bothered to learn in the first place), and just class ‘Developing Nations’ under ‘Third World’
I legitimately never knew that.
I had always wondered what “Second World” countries were. Thank you for expanding my knowledge.
Wow, thanks for the history brief.
Not coincidental at all, The US built up its allies post WWII. Russia did the same militarily with its own allies. Also some level of industrialisation was important to be an attractive ally for either side.
Which did lead to a memorable bit in the (British) comedy/quiz show Qi, when the contestants were asked what the closest Third World country was. [spoiler]It’s the Irish Republic. It’s made a point of staying neutral ever since its foundation, including during the Second World War.[spoiler] The effort some of them made to avoid saying that name, to avoid playing into stereotypes and/or incurring an ‘obvious but wrong answer’ forfeit, was rather amusing. I would include a link, but I can’t find a good one accessible.
Great links. Well done.
Well… Deus isn’t trying to take over all of Africa yet. But given the things Deus has said, his goals appear to be something along the lines of “own everything in the universe”. Which would include the rest of Africa.
DaveB literally described Galytin as a nation where the people WERE starving because of its corrupt, tinpot dictator. There was the little girl who made him the ashtray to thank him for ridding them of the evil dictator who was making them all starve and everything.
How you’re using that and saying racism is beyond me.
Btw, the richest countries in Africa are Nigeria, with a GDP of 397 billion, South Africa, with a GDP of 376 billion (although they’ve begun tanking recently), Egypt, with a GDP of 249 billion, and Algeria, with a GDP of 188 billion. Most countries in Africa are not particularly rich, especially by western standards, and the ones that are (comparatively to other African nations, tend to be either because of the oil sector or diamond mining, or because their trading partners are the United States, China, France, Italy, or Germany (the latter three usually from tourism).
These GDPs are INCREDIBLY small compared to most western countries though, which tend to be in the trillions (France – 2.778 trillon, UK – 2.855 trillion, Germany – 3.948 trillion, China – 13.61 trillion, and USA – 20.54 trillion). Compared to western countries, even the richest African countries are modestly poor and usually primarily get what wealth they do have through trade/tourism with the western world (and China). The nations more towards the center of the continent, on the other hand, are largely quite poor in comparison to even the richer African countries and usually do not have any of these benefits.
It has nothing to do with racism. Dictatorships tend to have a very large impoverished populace, and there are quite a lot of those in Africa. There are 54 nations that make up Africa, and of that, most of the poorest countries in the world ARE located in Africa because of the inefficient use of natural resources or the prevalences of dictatorships and warlords who squander these resources. The ten poorest countries in the world are Mozambique, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Chad, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Niger. The thing they all have in common – they are all located on the continent of Africa.
Not because of racism from western nations and Chinese though. Because of in-nation terrorism/dictatorships, poor use of abundant natural resources, civil wars, little or no supply chains and infrastructure, and pandemics (like Ebola, which ravaged Liberia). Mainly civil wars and dictatorships though.
I don’t think most Americans (and Canadians and western Europeans for that matter) realize just how rich they are in comparison with most non-western countries. Most nations do not have a particularly sizable middle class, unlike many western countries.
That’s what Deus is creating in Galytin. He’s creating a middle class, which is usually the best way for a nation to become economically viable on the world stage, not to mention letting them become better educated (it’s hard to get a good education when you have to choose between hard labor as a child) and have a longer life expectancy of the population.
The middle class, and bureaucracy, are sneered at these days, but major factors in creating a working, modern nation.
The British ran India for centuries, and when they pulled out there was a working native bureaucracy which was actually able to make the country work. In the various countries of Africa, the European colonial powers had only been in charge for several decades when they gained independence, and there was very little infrastructure or bureaucracy. In those circumstances, the only viable form of government was a dictatorship, with all the problems that conferred.
The “billionaire raising a country out of poverty and strife for his own economic agenda” is a recurrent trope in science fiction. Mostly, they’re set in Africa, which is a ripe seedbed for such stories. A few are set elsewhere: Hispaniola (the island which contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the Sea State (a huge collection of rafts, boats and ships, inhabited by Global Warming refugees and drifting around the Pacific Ocean at the mercy of the currents), and – in several stories by Neal Stephenson – England.
Racism is not the point. It’s about economics, and culture.
I like Deus. He may be a “villain”, but he’s a modern villain, and is nicer to his associates, subordinates, and even victims than most “heroes” of classical literature.
the middle class is seen that way mostly because most people lack that vision of just how good being middle class actually is, for most of human history you were either poor as balls (or a slave) or rich as fuck, no inbetween, it hasnt really been until relatively recently when you have a sizable middle class of people that can live confortable and relaxing lives without being necesarily hyper rich, and most people i believe think that if you dont have a house and two cars you are poor (when even just having electricity, water and internet already puts you above a vast mayority of the global population)
Looking at the current figures, the wealthiest African country, (PPP per capita basis, 2017) would be Equatorial Guinea, at about $35K, which puts it at somewhere between the Czech Republic and Slovenia in (Eastern) Europe. So, #1 in Africa would be number 20 in Europe.
Number 2 in Africa would be Seychelles, which would be #26 in Europe.
Number 3 in Africa would be Mauritius, which would be #33 in Europe.
It gets worse from there. Egypt, for instance, which you wouldn’t think a “poor” country from news reports, (Probably don’t think of it as an African country, either, unless you’re good at geography.) has a PPP per capita of about $13K, making it slightly wealthier than Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I could go on. Africa doesn’t contain, by 1st world standards, rich and poor countries. It contains poor, and desperately poor, countries. The majority of the countries there are poor compared to the poorest European countries.
I could add that the less poor countries in Africa tend to have horrible income inequality, too, so that you’re really talking about very poor countries with a few rich people in them.
“I could add that the less poor countries in Africa tend to have horrible income inequality, too, so that you’re really talking about very poor countries with a few rich people in them.”
Your #1, Equatorial Guinea is an excellent example of that. It has oil, but only an elite benefits from that.
More than half of the population has no access to clean water. It is counted as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Number 144 on the human development index. Most of the population would welcome a benevolent dictator like Deus.
And #2 and #3 are tiny island nations in the Indian sea. One could argue if they are really “African”.
I would currently only count Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Gabon, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa as fairly developed and mostly stable african countries. The first 4 are North African and the last 3 are South African.
That income inequality is why you really want to look at the median, not average income. That way, a few rich people don’t make a significant difference. (The same would be true for “a few poor people”, but if there really only are a small number, I’d argue that’s OK for this comparison.)
So Algeria has a GDP roughly that of Oklahoma. (30th state in the US), Egypt compares to Louisiana (24th), South Africa compares to Indiana and and Nigeria edges out Maryland (15th).
Underlining the fact that the word “State” in our republic’s name is not a synonym for “province” or “territory”, but means “country”.
russia has a smaller GDP than texas, there is a reason why the united states is the premiere global super power it has a shit ton of money
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteMansBurden
What I believe people are trying to say is that it’s basically that trope, it’s been worked to death over the years.
I submit that the US presently desperately needs to be taken over in order to function, but then the will of 90% of the population means jack shit. The only opinions that are taken into account by politicians, even a little, are those of the filthy rich who ‘donate’ to their ‘campaigns’. Deus would be a huge improvement in the states too, because he sees beyond being re-elected to long term improvement.
You don’t have the slightest clue of how to run things correctly.
You’ve intentionally ignored all the words he included that explained why IT NEVER HAPPENS. Thus, you are arguing not just with a straw man, but with a straw man that the last guy already set on fire.
As well as that, we saw ON SCREEN that this particular dictator was, in fact, made from the Idi Amin mold. (We could name 4-5 other historical examples just in the last 40 years. Your pretense that there are none of those is ludicrous, and an example of a different kind of racism, specifically white-knighting the pretense that Africans can’t be as corrupt as anyone else. That’s just a rebranded “happy savage” mythos.
Ever hear of Biafra?
I agree with One Eyed Mike here.
What a lot of the people arguing here seem to forget is that the reason many African nations are impoverished is BECAUSE of colonial nations like England, Belgium, and the US interfering with their governments through imperialism/colonialism, depleting their colonies resources for their own gain, then leaving the people who live in those countries to pick up the pieces of their shattered culture in the aftermath, thus leaving a power vacuum that led to the dictatorships and income quality that everyone is pointing out here.
Its racist to assume that African nations need a white person to solve the problems that white people created in the first place.
while imperialism fucked those countries bad and of course many of those problems still are present to this day that doesnt mean that part of the problem isnt in those regions, now a days all imperial control on those countries is gone and the effect of US companies while horrible isnt enough to make the entire region to fall into disaray, if africa keeps being as poor as unstable as it is is mostly because of africans, of warlords and dictators and the like, yeah those conditions proliferated in the first place thanks to european nation but there has been decades since all the colonies transformed into independent nations
Splendid! His Fordship requires that you to report to your post in the reactor, post haste.
For the record, I AM past 55 and I make Hollandaise Sauce as often as possible!
I honestly don’t think that argument would hold a single drop of water; it wouldn’t even constitute a mild hiccup in the legal proceedings against him. He’s basically saying that he is decreeing that he owns the land he illegally attacked by virtue of having illegally attacked it and therefor didn’t illegally attack it. If anything, attempting that argument would speed up actions against him because people will get MORE outraged that he had the gall to argue such a thing.
It is akin to saying “It is not illegal to mug somebody if they are carrying things I own, and once I have taken those from them, possession is 9/10ths of the law and thereby I own them”. Arguments like that have been tried by the dim witted before and so there is precedent to shoot them down, on top of common sense.
But the people making the calls are politicians, so all bets are off.
If it was in a court of law in US jurisdiction, I’d agree. But this would be using a UN resolution or accord instead, and it was a very poorly written resolution or accord, apparently.
Loopholes are meant to be used because they expose messy writing :) Plus like Deus said, there are quite a few hand-wringer in the UN, which itself is no exactly known for being bastions of anti-corruption to begin with.
PS – here’s a Yorpie Snax for you. Hi again!!!!
*waves paw, whilst munching Snax*
I’m getting the sense from Deus that the neighboring cities were in much the same spot as Galytn was before he showed up. Probably including the tinpot dictators. If that’s true – who is going to go to the UN to complain? Drug dealers usually don’t call the cops to complain if they’ve been robbed, dictators with human rights abuses similar to King Indinge won’t/can’t show their face to whine about (probably mostly-bloodless) city secessions.
This. This so much.
There was a whole “African World War” in the Congo and I didn’t even know about it until I was 27.
Here’s another one everyone really should read about – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(Liberian_politician)
Fomented by US.
The court of Kings is the Battlefield. Don’t see the U.N. forcing Russia out of Crimea…. America out of Guam, England out of Falklands, etc etc ect…. A “Single” Super intellectually deployed could destroy a civilization.
I’m not so familiar with the other cases you mention, but the Falklands have been brought up several times at the UN. Each time, it’s been shown that Argentina has no more right to their allegiance than Britain does, and polling of Falklanders is consistently and massively in favour of remaining a British territory. (Of course, having one claimant mount an invasion which the other then travels thousands of miles to evict is the sort of thing which tends to be remembered.)
Arguments don’t have to hold water when you bribe the people assessing them. He’s right, as long as he sticks to knocking over desperately poor police states, and improves them after the fact, and gives the right politicians guaranteed investment opportunities, he’s probably good to go.
See: The World Health Organization
Except if his supers enter territory owned and occupied by its current soon to be previous ruler then they aren’t yet in his territory. His supers would need to use ranged attacks to vacate an area so it isn’t contested / current owned by someone else before they enter it.
At what point does Deus go full Lex Luthor and is actively fighting the supers?
When he thinks he can win.
Don’t be foolish. He won’t take such action unless he KNOWS he’ll win.
Complete with guaranteed to work backup plans.
I think he’ll hold off on direct confrontation until he’s already won. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” -Sun Tsu
Sun Tsu: Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Deus is a businessman and businessmen (businesspersons?) make the best leaders (as President Trump has demonstrated). True. they’re not always successful (think Solyndra), but most politicians for life (or otherwise) are reasonable successes at best, terrible at the worst. That being said, having Deus “aiding” Galytin in it’s rise to success and prosperity is admirable in the extreme. So what if he makes a few bucks out of it? Since when is making a profit a bad thing if no one is exploited and everyone prospers. Free trade (or Capitalism … a Marxist terminology BTW) always assures prosperity and an equal chance for success if one is ambitious and clever.
Deus isn’t evil, he’s just clever.
“Drug dealers usually don’t call the cops to complain if they’ve been robbed, ”
Some have done exactly that.
I love hearing stories of when drug dealers do stuff like that. There was this one woman recently who called the police to find out if her heroin was ‘infected by the coronavirus.’ The police told her to come down to the station with the heroin and they’d do some tests to let her know if it was or wasn’t.
She did. And got arrested.
Fortunately her heroin was not infected by any type of coronavirus, so we can all rest easy about that.
“make the best leaders (as President Trump has demonstrated),
He demonstrates, everyday, that he is a moron! He is also looting the country, for his own greed.
Fox ‘news’ is one hell of a drug.
I wouldn’t know, my TV isn’t hooked up.
Yeah I just watch Netflix and don’t even own a television. After I move I’ll buy one, but only to use as a monitor for my Xbox.
ORANGE MAN BAD
Businesspeople reliably make horrible leaders in politics because to be a successful businessperson, you have to put your own interests ahead of those of the community, whereas in order to be a successful leader you have to put the community’s interests ahead of your own.
The psychologies are in fundamental opposition. Businesspeople don’t have it in them to be effective leaders. At best, they can con people into thinking they’re effective while they loot the public coffers.
No, no, you’re confusing demagogues with businessmen. Both businessmen and politicians can sell out their people. Demagogues pander to the masses while making a quick buck regardless of their profession.
Ford is lauded as one of the best businessmen in history because he recognized that the community WAS his interest.
“I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one…”
― Henry Ford, My Life And Work
The difference is that selling out your people is what marks a skilled businessman who will prosper in the cutthroat world of business, while at the same time marking a corrupt politician who needs to be removed from office.
Don’t be too quick to pat Ford on the back over his generosity, it’s really not what it first appears. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#40d8df05766d
Don’t a lot of politicians become businessmen once they hit the term limit?
I mean I could be wrong but it seems like most modern politicians either start as businessmen or become business men once they’re done with politics….
Yep, because we don’t have much in the way of good politicians in this country.
A lot of politicians become businessmen. Because they leverage their connections that they made during their political careers, which I honestly feel should be illegal. The Founding Fathers never intended for people to become rich from politics. They also never intended for it to be a lifetime job. It was supposed to be a civic duty, where you go into office, then after a short time, you return to being a citizen where you have to abide by the laws that you helped to pass.
Too many people go into politics and come out with as multi-millionaires, or become insanely rich due to so many exceptions made for Congress that everyone else is subject to – especially when dealing with the stock market, insider trading, and getting lucrative positions with lobbying firms and donators after they leave politics.
Which is why a lot of politicians become businessmen.
Far fewer businessmen become politicians though.
“Far fewer businessmen become politicians though”‘ The most often answer to the question, What is your profession, asked of politicians The most often answer, is Law.
I wasn’t lauding the $5 a day thing. Paying your employees a certain wage is ALWAYS a business consideration not a humanitarian one. If it does become humanitarian then usually the business goes bankrupt. He also built some ridiculous towns in the middle of Africa, Fordlandia being one of them, and they failed because of bad management. I was simply saying that his goals were nobler than most and he prospered based on those goals. You don’t have to be a greedy profitmonger to prosper.
You’re confusing means and ends. His goal was to make money. Any kind of benefit for other people was in service to his own profit… which DOES happen sometimes but isn’t near as common as one would think or hope for.
What benefitted the community more was a population of employees who felt that they had the right to advocate for themselves by walking away from a job that they didn’t feel was worth their time. Forcing Ford to combat turnover by paying better wages put his interest to serve himself in direct competition with the reality that other people exist and had the ability to undermine his profits.
The end result is that the community prospered not because Ford was so generous, but because the community felt empowered to make clear that the deal he was offering initially wasn’t good enough to buy the labor he needed. In the end, he was a greedy profitmonger, but the marketplace of labor was not without its own demands.
Yielding to market demands doesn’t make someone not greedy, nor not a profitmonger. It merely indicates that an individual is intelligent enough to analyze a problem and devise possible solutions.
There were plenty of businessmen in Ford’s era who didn’t give a shit about the community. The battle of Blair Mountain, an armed uprising of coal workers, occurred contemporaneously with Ford’s $5 wage. An actual battle with real guns over working conditions. The coal company won the battle.
Walmart in 2015 was forced to raise wages due to turnover (identical to Ford), and they accomplished this by piling the work of three people onto a single better-paid employee.
The idea that the community felt “empowered” is an absolutely idiotic claim. The decision was pure business logic. Again, I wasn’t lauding the $5 wage, so I request you shut the fuck up. Thank you.
But also look at Inn-N-Out’s treatment of its own employees. They win because they don’t do that.
Cheap food, high quality, made quickly, with happy employees paid well.
the fact that you literally said a draft dodging absolute joke that:
>mocks POWs and Gold Star Families (those who have lost a father or mother in the military)
>immediately set about putting in a transgender “Ban” that has been largely ignored by said military
>constantly tries to overreach his authority because he’s a wannabe fascist dictator (and fails to our checks and balances)
>literally didn’t get removed from office outright because the GOP majority congress sucked his cheetodick
>is directly responsible for tens, soon to be hundreds, of thousands of covid deaths, 70% of which are wholly preventable according to pandemic experts if we had acted a single week sooner, instead he called it a hoax and people have literally died following his advice on malaria drugs and injecting fucking disinfectants mostly because they were complete dumbfucks as is most of his support base
>in the same month his removal hearing (not impeachment: he will forever be 45* in the history books, as well as the most absolute miserable failure of a president we’ve ever had), he broke global laws of diplomatic immunity which combined with previous actions permanently installed one of Iran’s—to them— greatest heroes and the de-facto second-in-command of the entire country as a Martyr in a culture where those are worshiped, as well as pissing away 15+ years, trillions of dollars, and countless thousands of our military lives by completely invalidating all efforts in three major investments in the middle east. you can literally draw a line west to east from syria to iran.
Afghanistan gets a pass because that’s a clusterfuck that goes back to the soviet occupation in the mid 1900s, which we didn’t help by arming the same crazies we later fought against.
@Old Scribe, what you said has to be the most absolutely stupid thing I have ever heard, I award you no points and may Maxima have mercy on your soul.
Thank fucking god the president is Obama in the comic, otherwise this would be a clusterfuck.
I’m still trying to process that you said someone who did all of this, and literally locked up a shit ton of kids in cages, and SO, SO MUCH MORE is a good leader. you have got to be absolutely fucking kidding me. I need to get some of what you’re smoking, except I’m pretty sure by now you don’t have any braincells left to kill.
Just to chime in on the big O.
> Prosecuted whistle blowers AND reporters while doing nothing about the actual crimes reported
> Created presidential fiat to “take out” some undesirables with just a pen stroke
> Raised censorship so high it would make Hoover giddy with envy
> Created new powers for the office which his protege did not get to abuse
> Did nothing effective to relieve the poorest of the nation after any of those natural disasters
> Allowed the executives to pay themselves bonuses after giving those companies tax monies to bail them out
> Allowed the MPIA RIAA telecom et all to dictate policy and law
> Allowed / encouraged the three letter agencies to run wild
As an outsider with a non-enviable government, I look at the states and realize that it is for crazier there then where I am now, long before the Billionaire ran for president and surprised himself when he won.
I really don’t envy the states.
You can have my thoughts and prayers but keep your hands off our water.
Its been going on since at least the Victorian era with the British Empire too.
Every world superpower that has gotten involved in Afghanistan has soon had cause to regret it.
I mean, in order to play into the white savior trope, he’d have to actually think he was saving them, which while on some level he wears that cloak in order to mess with people, on another level, it’s just cold hard cash and feeding his massive ego (he appreciates the bracelet more because it’s a confirmation that he’s right about his world view rather than any kind of consideration that he saved anybody to begin with) that he’s really after to begin with. He’s just ruthlessly pragmatic on all those fronts.
I don’t think he considers himself a saint, but mostly because saints are just tools of the church to act like they’re better and more powerful than they actually are, and Deus knows that a church is pointless when the people under him already rely on him for everything, and that he wields an enormous amount of power already without any need for a god.
“… but mostly because saints are just tools of the church …”
Do you know why Fidel Castro could replace the Batista regime in Cuba, but Che Guevara failed miserably in South America?
The Church. Okay we are talking Roman Catholicism, but that counts for around 90% of Christianity in the region we’re talking about.
In Cuba, the Church was most noticeable by its absence from rural areas, and was struggling even in towns and cities. In South America, the Church is active, almost everywhere. To our eyes, the Church doesn’t seem to do much, but when you have very little, an organisation that even does a little for you is a great comfort.
In Galytn, we can assume there is no Church… “Along comes Deus…/ Slow walking, slow talkin’ Deus…”
Oh, and the “absorbing neighboring countries” tactic isn’t at all caring or quality of life or anything. The effect of his rising economic power at the borders of those other countries would basically rip out any kind of competition that those country’s economies would have because A) he has complete control over Galytin’s imports/exports and can pick and choose which neighbors get to benefit from it and B) anybody who doesn’t side with him could be easily driven into the ground by choking their economy out with his own, and he wouldn’t even have to lift a finger to do that if he didn’t care how long it took because just being that close to them geographically is going to pressure them. It’s basically extortion in the same way that gentrification wrecks lower income brackets, but with the added plan that he doesn’t intend to keep the victims impoverished under his thumb, but rather forcing them into a gilded cage.
Please help me out here. I’m trying to think of that little country just to the south-east of China (PRC), immediately south of Russia, and north of South Korea…
It doesn’t seem to be collapsing due to economic extortion. Dammee, I can’t think of its name :(
good grief. only one of the three powers in the area is trying to choke it. one is ignoring it as far as we can tell. the other is supporting it. we can admire the leadership of that country because it has mastered the art of playing one side against another. we will never choke it because one of its neighbors will not tolerate the US getting any closer- in fact it would prefer that the southern neighbor fell into its orbit too. (something that is starting to happen btw)
in short- reality is complicated and the purely economic arguments being made don’t apply as broadly as many would like.
Taiwan?
Hate to say it, but I’m really not seeing a lot of difference between what Deus is doing and what a lot of politicians WANT to do.
You think there are a lot of politicians that want to build a middle class and improve the lives of their constituents? If there are, they’re doing an awfully poor job of it.
Well, not all of them are smart or backed by an army of superhumans.
I would say none of them are actually smart because smart implies looking at the long term – I haven’t met or come across a modern business type that looked past the next quarters financials and their next bonus.
Hmm… Panel 4, that was Saddam Hussein’s excuse when he invaded his neighbors.
Why? Do you think Deus holds fair elections?
Nitpick – Deus is the power behind the throne, but not the leader. King Indinge (Junior) is still, presumably, king for life.
Where, did you hear that from?
From his own mouth, Hussein actually used that line. I’m old enough to remember the first Gulf War.
I’m old enough, to remember the Blockade of Cuba, and the bay of pigs.
No billionaire ever came into an underdeveloped country and started throwing money at the problems? Oh, my. Aren’t you a special snowflake.
This is a webcomic so it is okay but let’s just say that approach is not exactly new.
Historically speaking, colonialist interests offer patronage with one hand, while demanding fealty with the other.
So far, Deus hasn’t demanded fealty. His tactic seems to be to make himself so indispensable to the wellbeing of the developing country that its people offer fealty out of sheer gratitude and as long as the country is experiencing rising prosperity, and he’s able to maintain that narrative in their culture, that may well be enough.
Of course, Deus has read enough Machiavelli to know that it is better to be feared than loved, but above all one must not be hated. Eventually, the love of the people won’t be enough to maintain compliance to his agenda and when that happens he’s going to have to find some way to put the Galytn population in fear. Whether or not he can apply that with enough elegance that they don’t recontextualize him as an enemy is going to be be a make-or-break hurdle.
“Of course, Deus has read enough Machiavelli to know that it is better to be feared than loved, but above all one must not be hated.”
You have no idea how impressed I am with the fact that you said that. That was a brilliant sentence.
So, basically, he’s attempting Vetinari job security, making himself so needed that to remove him would only make things worse, no matter their feelings for him.
Fear? Deus already has that. Fear of loss. Fear of falling behind. Fear of poverty.
What do you think drives Capitalism so strongly compared to historical trade models?
He has that in his back pocket, ready to be deployed, but thus far he hasn’t been shown to have needed it. Currently, he seems to be doing perfectly well by simply making sure the schools teach the up and coming generation about what things were like BEFORE HIM, which is (as said) on an overt level less about creating fear than about cultivating love.
I’m saying that’s a passive feature of capitalism, not a tool Deus should actively exert. Are you pro-socialist?
You say that as if it was a dirty word.
Whose koolaide have you been drinking?
Socialism has given you roads, power, communication, clean water, as well as schools, healthcare and security.
They are dysfunctional thanks in no small part to the monetization of those services being of more important than the quality of the actual service.
it is ‘safer’, not ‘better’.
“it is safer to be feared…” etc, etc and IIRC he suggest to be both, if possible.
edit:
here the quote:
“And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
“I was going to make our flag [G $] but Vale threatened to take my remote.”
I think G-Money would have been a great flag. :)
So….. Deus *really* needs to hire a graphic designer for that flag…
Well, it does seem suspicious, because “The citizens want my benevolent leadership,” which Deus paraphrased here, has been weasel words justifying conquest for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Remember Russia claiming that citizens of Crimea spoke Russian and wanted to be citizens of Russia and not Belarus, thus justifying their illegal annexation? An annexation which the world has so far allowed to stand. Probably because Russia has nukes…
Reprinted from page 1…
Take a dekko in Wikipedia. I won’t go so far as to suggest it was a “village bicycle”, but yes it had rulers from many lands, including Russia. Ukraine shares a very similar history, and we might want to point out that it does have a tradition of Kievan Rus’ identity.
He’s both right and wrong. Car ownership is incredibly liberating, and those car owners are buying gasoline every week. So if you own the oil company, or if the oil company has to pay you to do business in your lucrative market, it’s probably a wash against the rail pass. And it promotes entrepreneurship, which speeds your way to a robust middle class.
What you don’t want to do, and Deus is probably too smart to do, is go the route of the US: Allow the oil company lobby/bribery machine to talk you into huge subsidies for an already incredibly profitable industry, which then makes your rail infrastructure unable to compete with diesel fuel operated tractor trailers. This both guts your rail infrastructure, which was going through a period of retreat as early as the 1980s (I had distant family members who did nothing but pull up miles of rail for years as their job) and crowds your highways with those tractor trailers, causing maintenance costs to skyrocket.
So again, we as a nation lose tax revenue, we lose our rail infrastructure which was installed at great cost, and we lose in maintenance costs on our interstate highways and other roadways. Plus of course the added pollution from a shit load of tractor trailers, added traffic fatalities from all those extra and very heavy duty vehicles sharing the road with citizens in their cars, and take a look along the side of the road anytime you drive an interstate, and pay attention to all the tons of retreads that blew off of some tractor trailer, possibly causing an accident or damage to someone’s vehicle because they blow off like a movie set explosion, just littering the ground.
It was and still is an utter lose/lose/lose/lose/lose/lose for the country, but I guess it helped and is still helping to bring in the donations/bribes that some politicians need to get and remain elected, so hey it all worked out in the end, right?
The one thing to keep in mind there is that rail *cannot* serve the “last mile”, and often can’t serve the “last ten miles”, and is also not great for all cargos. There will still be trucks on the road regardless.
(A lot of my work is tangentially logistics-related. I can also get into a discussion of why the idea of most truck drivers being replaced with autonomous trucks in the next 20 years, or even longer, is also a Muskian delusion.)
Good point BUT misses the wall the target is painted on.
Trucks do interstate and continental transport to everyone’s detriment.
In central Europe, last I was there mind, they still used rail to get goods to the cities and the trucks for in city delivery are much smaller. Mind size is limited due to the old road systems and nobody is bulldozing centuries old buildings to widen the roads for someone else’s profit margins. I only saw the big American style trucks moving goods from the east whose rail infrastructure was pathetic at the time. Someone who lives there can chime in on how things are now a decade or so latter.
China is a P5, and would really like a stable port in east Africa, so they probably really like Deus. They’ll veto any UN move that restricts his expansion.
What is a P5, define your terms, please!
I’d guess the reference was to the Permanent 5 seats on the UN Security council: USA, USSR/Russia, China, UK, and France. At the time it was set up, those were the major Powers coming out of the Second World War; they were subsequently also the five whose possession of nuclear weapons was accepted as fait accompli in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
As a chef I can honestly say I LOATHE Hollandaise sauce. It’s tasty but dear itty bitty children is it finicky nonsense. Maybe that’s what makes it so tasty
Wow, this is some sovereign citizen level of desperate belief that you can hack the rule of law by twisting the words of some random piece of legislation you heard about. To take a comparison close at hand, we let Putin annex various old Soviet territories because a) he can make an argument there are displaced Russians living there who want him to do it, b) most of the military power that can stand up to Russia’s is in bed with him and c) lots of nuclear missiles. But if Deus wants to fight a war of aggression against, apparently, several nations of Africa I imagine sanctions would be passed very quickly.
How hilarious would it be for him to wake up and find out all of his bank accounts are frozen?
Then there is “Qualified Immunity” which isn’t an actual law on the books [yet].
Something made up recently by the judiciary.
You may have heard of the term used on several occasions to extricate criminals from punishment for crimes that a normal person would go to prison for a very long time.
Aaaah hollandaise sauce is indeed delicious…but it is such a pain to make!
Something tells me I’ll regret making this parallel but whats scary is that this is the same logic Hitler used expanding his reich, marching into neighboring counties who sometimes only only fired a single shot in defiance. While Dues is not a Fascist, the logic is dangerous and why you see other countries make the same comparison every time another nation army marches across a line on the map.
Whats even scarier; while Dues is a bit cartoonish and so we can laugh at him, he is also a damn good example of how corporate empires can exert more influence in the world than actual nations. This is taken to the next extreme of course in a comic about supers vs conflict minerals but it is still a example of how a amoral man with enough means is sometimes dangerous than a hulk who feeds on violence or whatever.
Before Deus came along Gatyln’s people were starving, subject to the full range of human rights abuses, had a drastically shorter than average life expectancy and no hope for things to get better. After the arrival of Deus the people of Gatyln have food, safe water, health care, public schools, vastly improved rights and plenty of reason to believe that life is only going to keep getting better.
So how do you convince a citizen of Gatyln that Deus is amoral and dangerous? Currently we know of only one person’s death that can be directly attributed to Deus, and that was the country’s previous tyrannical dictator. Given that territories bordering Gatyln are practically begging Deus to annex them, he could quite possibly be expanding his territory without any bloodshed. Even if his troops are killing soldiers of the corrupt regimes he is taking territory from, condemning him for that is like condemning Allied soldiers in WWII for killing Nazi troops.
You’re not wrong, but this is the old analogy that there is no such thing as an evil form of government really, only forms of government that are more or less easily corrupted.
Facism, as practiced in the early/mid-1900s, is simply a reapplication of feudalistic ideology in a lot of ways. It also mixes in a ton of really terrible things based on divide and conquer ideologies, but it’s application varies. In Louisiana Huey Long was -absolutely- a fascist, but the identity split he exploited was rich-v-poor, and he used his political gains almost exactly as Dues is using it here.
Never =ever= trust a fascist, ever. In the same way you never trust a plutocrat or a monarchist. Their ideologies are intrinsically easily abused with almost no holds or bars. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator, and everyone beneath him in his hierarchy speaks with his absolute voice to all those below, with no true check on their abilities except those higher up in the hierarchy than they are, and.
Can we all just appreciate the fact that Dave devoted an entire paragraph to Hollandaise Sauce.
+1
“US Air Horse launches secretive spaaaaaace plane
The Atlas V rocket, carrying the X-37B spaaaaaace plane, launched from Cape Canaveral on Sunday.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52698133
“X-37B is a classified programme and very little is known about it. The Pentagon has revealed very few details about the dog’s missions and capabilities in the past.”
Honestly he just seems like a pragmatic villain, the feudal overlord type who actually has an eye towards improving his ‘tax’ revenue (whether he gets that through people buying things through his corporate constellation of a company store or through direct taxes doesn’t matter). He’s basing his actions on long term gains and building a name for himself that will outlast his life (assuming he’s not already been investing into alien life extension tech, in which case into the long term health of the metaphysical infrastructure he’s building).
Life extension isn’t pragmatic. You want your people to be happy, healthy, and have a life expectancy around the extent of their physical usefulness.
You want them educated enough to compete on the world stage, but their empowerment to be in balance with their gratitude. That way they don’t decide they can do things without you.
Operation: Cha-Ching sounds like what most entrepreneurial efforts are about once you start looking under the hood.
I’m thinking about the alari that Halo rescued. At this point, it’s too bad that they didn’t stay on Earth in the USA, since they’d be useful espionage units in Galtyn.
I’d say Deus is just this side of David Xanatos when it comes to style.
Oh man, imagine a throwaway bookcover on Deus’s shelf:
“David Xanatos guide to style and business practice”
Just wanted to let you know that Sauce Béarnaise IS a “fancy” Sauce Hollandaise, as it is basically the same sauce but based on vinegar or white wine and herbs.
I just realized Deus sounds a little like Dr. Doom and Latveria in the sense that they’re both villains that rule their own little country.
Doom is not a villain or terrorist in Latveria. In Latveria, it’s Reed Richards who occupies those roles.