Grrl Power #393 – Deus uses “Develop Country” It’s super effective
Alternative page title: Who will rid us of these turmulent living conditions?
I like the word turmulent. Sure you could say turbulent, but turmulent is perfectly cromulent.
It occurs to me only after posting this page that the main gag on it requires knowledge of this strip from 3 years ago, so for newer readers, there you go.
Deus may well be playing fast and lose with those statistics, it’s not like anyone was really doing a lot of census work before he took charge. Besides, what’s the expression, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics? A woman gets pregnant and has a girl. 50% chance of that. She gets pregnant a second time. Does she have a 50% chance to have a girl, or a 25% chance to have another girl, or a 50% chance to not have a girl, or a 75% chance to not have another girl?
Yes.
(Ignoring the possibility of twins, miscarriages, intersex and Kwisatz Haderachs* obviously.)
Of course it’s entirely possible he’s only massaging those numbers a little. You take a war torn strip of land like that, and one day all the warlords wake up next to their own heads, and any group that attempts to interfere with roads, power plants and hospitals being built gets taken apart by invisible assassins, and yeah, life expectancy is going to trend upwards.
I’ve updated the vote incentive, but it’s only partially colored unfortunately. I’m trying a new coloring style with it. The end result is only slightly different and it’s not really faster, but trying new things is the best way to learn. I’ll try and have it finished in time to swap it out for the Valentines Day one.
This page colored by Keith.
*Who had to be male since females couldn’t venture into a specific region of prescient knowledge after drinking the water of life.** A weird bit of cosmic sexism in that particular story.
** Yes, technically Paul was probably a proto-Kwizatz, and Leto II was the real one.
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No thunder – yet….
Or maybe he DON’T want thunder????
He wants it, we all know he does. He is just thinking no thunder works better.
No, he just knows that the thunder and the laugh will look really really bad!
At least, when he eventually does want it, it will be on time! Since they have clearly added that power switch.
He has just decided, for now, to give the straight answer instead of the maniacal cackle.
The trick is knowing when to bring the thunder.
Zack Tilly!
Plus, he said he was “torn between…” which means he hasn’t decided to laugh maniacally (which is also not the straight nor correct response)
He’s describing the realistic alternative. Folks here may not like, say, the clothing factories in Bangladesh. But it is not realistic with that nation’s level of development to obtain better conditions. Imposing rules from the outside will likely result in those factories closing, leaving the population with the best realistic alternative – toiling away in manual labor as subsistence farmers in a hot, disease filled environment.
Gotta work the way up the chain. It takes generations going through things we find unpleasant to get where we are. Our ancestors had to do it. Think of it as the reason behind the Star Trek Prime Directive. Attempting to jump a society effectively multiple centuries into the future overnight will cause more problems than it can ever hope to fix.
Or, the Stargate example: the Asgard come across a primitive species, decide to help them advance. Then the Goa’uld decide to conquer the galaxy.
When humans come along, the Asgard are understandably rather restrained in their approach, and build the species up slowly, with troublemakers like NID being curtailed where possible.
Which is why we have so many problems now. People on either side of the fence are too concerned about instant gratification.
Immediate profits on one side, immediate social change on the other, and few people are willing to put in the work, or understand that it’ll probably not become how they wish until several generations from now. So no one ever gets the ball rolling.
The chief thing to keep in mind about this, though, is that there’s always inertia resisting the next micro-step going forward, too. Sure, Deus is mostly using his private army of supers to put down potential sources of violent uprising–but I suspect that in recent years, more than a few popular union leaders who were agitating for better working conditions also found themselves looking at their own severed heads in the morning. People will always be looking for more, and not always just for themselves, but for their families and peers, as well.
He’ll be able to undermine some, and co-opt others (sometimes legitimately, sometimes with methods pretty close to outright bribery), but eventually he’s going to run headlong into someone who is sincere in their desire for a different way of life for their country, unwilling to compromise on some fine point, and resistant to any inducement or threat that he’s got up his sleeve, so the only option is for either him to re-calibrate and accept their demands (not a result that’s very likely in a megalomaniac) or have them taken care of in a fashion that justifies background lightning.
If he’s never had to do this–if no one in the nation opposes him unless they’re people who ‘need killing’, then I suggest that the nation is actually just populated by AIs that fail to properly emulate human ambition.
Depends on if those ‘demands for better working conditions’ really are for the people, or the to make a name for (or line the pockets of) the one making the demands, if they are legit, fairly sure Deus would approve (and then go find out why it needed to be changed, and dealing with the ‘problem’ accordingly)
Solid economic growth buys a LOT of support as long as it’s there. One union leader isn’t going to overthrow the 10%-a-year growth gravy train. Having said that, you have a real point. Does he tolerate the dissidents or just kill them?
… assuming we’re not looking at a super-humanly charismatic leader who literally can co-opt anything less that total opposition.
There is a third option. It’s fairly difficult to unionize when, if you try, the pro-union workers can be simply fired and replaced from the nation’s nigh-limitless supply of poor and unemployed workers who are quite eager to get a job in the new Apple plant. After the first time, the organizers are far more likely to be facing an angry crowd than a sympathetic proletariat.
to be fair, that’s not 100% true. Part of the reason for shitty conditions historically was because the technology hadn’t been invented to make the job easier. It certainly is encouraging that it sounds like the factory workers have leisure time. (in a true sweatshop, you work more-or-less as many hours as possible, with basically no leisure time)
If I had to guess, while I don’t trust Deus, I don’t think he is being evil in his actions in Galtyn. Plus, you DO have to remember that while he might well pay shitty wages, in a country where there is an average annual income of about $20, all paying someone $7.50 per hour will do is make them targets for criminals. Provided the workers are paid enough to live on, with a little extra, it doesn’t actually matter if they are paid as much as they would in the developed world. Where sweatshops are an actual problem is because they don’t pay their workers enough to only work a reasonable # of hours, and the conditions suck.
That, and to a limited extent, as long as conditions are an improvement over what was there before…
In short, he may be motivated by wanting cheap labour, but provided Galtynians get an actually better life out of it, so what?
Dat facial expression tho. Cracked me up good and proper.
Wait, he has portable thunder?
I was gonna ask about that. I thought the clicker activated something in his office, not that it did everything all by itself. Maybe this would have just been the sound effect without the light show?
Well he IS a brilliant, possible super powered, extremely rich guy who likes background thunder strikes.
So he probably had something like that made
Well, the main difference between “eccentric” & being a “nutcase” has to do with money…Deus is certainly “eccentric.”
Or he had a Ninja (always expect them!) sneak in and install it before-hand.
Possibly the signal is routed to pre-installed Thunder equipment, where available, or an electro/VFX-based super on the payroll that can be Vorped in on cue.
Although, the clicker should really be labelled ‘The Thunder’ – ‘Bring the Thunder’ will cause awkwardness, Deus would never stand for having to ask someone to ‘bring Bring The Thunder’.
I imagine it might be something that broadcasts to available monitors- that background is probably projected on there, either a superlarge TV screen or an old-school back-projector. Figure out a way to override the signal for a few seconds, and you can get instant thunder anywhere you want!
He is evil, but he gets the job done and does it in style. Which is the worst kind of evil, because such people make evil look acceptable.
If you call me “Evil”… and I prove myself objectively right, and you objectively wrong… I’m EVEN MORE evil?
This guy runs factories. The First World has spent since the early ’50s trying to “improve” the Third World its way. Go take a look at how things have turned out and tell me which way you’d like to live under.
I think we tried a slightly different approach during the early 50s than Deus is doing now.
For one, he seems to be using less genocide and racism
” less genocide and racism”
Actually Third World genocides have not been about race itself. One each of Anti Communist, Pro communist, Tribal, and the rest are about Islam.
REF Wiki Genocides-
he Indonesian Genocide, the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, and more recently the Rwandan Genocide, the Bosnian Genocide, the Al-Anfal Campaign, and the Persecution of Yazidis by ISIL.
/And the problem with third world countries is not race but Corruption and Moronic Intelligence, both endemic to Third World.
Okay, what is the difference between ‘tribal’ and ‘racial’? Nothing but Seaman Ticks!!
“Corruption and Moronic Intelligence” are not just ‘endemic’ in Third World countries, they are highly endemic in ‘First’ World countries as well, specially the USA (which is also riddled with hypocrisy and arrogance)
A tribe or clan is basically an extended family (or small group of families) which generally includes people that marry into it and people that move in and choose to join.
two tribes are one group that split 100’s of years ago, two races are one group that split (by enough distance to cause genetic differences) 1000’s of years ago.
The big difference between First World democracies and third world dictatorships, though, is that the first world countries have structures in place for dealing with that corruption- a free press helps to expose corruption, elections help push out corrupt leaders, and so on. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the dictatorships, where your primary means of pushing out corrupt officials is by force.
Actually, ‘third world’ countries (personally loath that term, specially if you know its true origins) are better handled to deal with corruption: eliminate the corrupt
The ‘first world’ solution is simply swapping one face of corruption with another, without anything really changing
” ‘third world’ countries (personally loath that term”
Really you have a problem with NATO? Because that term came out of the Western or Soviet Alignment of the Cold War.
/just where did you think it orignated I wonder since you understanding of corruption and its effects is also incorrect
“Third World” countries were simply those who did not ally themselves with either the West or the Soviets, but ever since the end of the Cold War that term has been used to describe ‘Developing Nations’ (not all “Third World” countries during the Cold War era were developing nations)
In ‘First World’ countries (like the US for example) the way they deal with corruption is by getting someone else to come in and replace the ‘corrupt’ individual(s), usually for a hefty fee and you are shortly right back where you started with: with a new face who is still corrupt
How can you have elections to oust corrupt leaders if the election process is corrupt or flawed? o_O
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”
Apparently, Winston Churchill
I’m not sure ‘eliminate the corrupt’ would solve much problems when the eliminator is also corrupt
Exactly !
meet the new boss same as the old boss and just as corrupt is still a problem in too many Third World countries.
/The only shift has been away from communist patronage until recently when China made it lucrative to suck up to their modified communism(yeah not true communism I get it).
Just as big a problem in “First World” countries as well
by replacing the corrupt leader with another corrupt leader from the same team of professional corrupt leaders.
It’s not a matter of third world or first world. It’s not a matter of wealth or poverty. It’s a matter of religion. Wherever that terrible disease festers there is bigotry and persecution, laid down in the lines of the “holy books” and so, according to the myths the idiot masses believe, codified by a higher power. This allows the feeble minded to disconnect from their own responsibility to be an actual human being instead of a hate-filled monster.
We need an inoculation.
My nickel on religion. (Yes, I know it’s supposed to be “two cents”. Inflation, remember?)
I really wish that people, including atheists, would honestly STFU about telling people what they should be believing (or not believing). Doesn’t matter if it’s arbitrary or capricious; as long as the actions a person is taking are ethical, it shouldn’t matter to anyone what anyone else believes. In the U.S., we like to say “it’s a free country”. The moment we start telling people how to think and what to believe (or what to not believe), it isn’t a free country anymore.
Christianity doesn’t evangelize, Atheism doesn’t evangelize, people (even atheists) do… and I really wish they’d stop. (The ones that evangelize on street corners are hypocrites, even according to the Bible.)
By the way, Oberon, I think you… like a lot of people, even some people who call themselves “Christian”… have a misunderstanding of what Christianity is supposed to mean. It’s supposed to mean “someone who follows the teachings of Christ”. Christ sought to throw out the soulless traditions and hollow practices of a religion wrought with bloodlust and retaliation, and replace it with a living faith known for patience, understanding, and above all else, love.
So he picked and chose the teachings of love, while invalidating the hateful aspects that people loved to lord over others. Hate, intolerance, and persecution were never on his agenda. The problem is not religion; it’s fundamentalists of any stripe, by which I mean those who would dare to call themselves “Christian”, that ignore the rules and regulations that would inconvenience their existence, but demand the strictest adherence to the ones that afford them free license to persecute others.
There’s a song that the conservative fundamentalists sing, probably to reassure themselves that their spitefulness towards their fellow man is what a loving god would want to befall his children. I believe it goes something like “And they’ll know that we were Christian by our love.” How nice it would be to see the day when that was a truism, instead of a laughable self-deception. As it is, people know they’re Christian not by their love, but by their fervent bigotry and passionate hypocrisy. (I’m looking directly at you, “Westboro Baptist Church”, and anyone like you. You’re not Christian, you’re just Bible-thumping hypocrites.)
The sheer hypocrisy of it all fills me with the urge to defecate (or maybe that’s the pancakes I ate for breakfast this morning). Something created to show one how to love and guide one to personal betterment, perverted into an instrument of closed-minded hatred.
Anyway, there’s my nickel, and it’s going to be my only comment on the subject. For what it’s worth, I do believe in God, but I also believe that he’s more of a scientist than anything else. He set up the conditions that govern our universe, then sat back and said “Let’s see what happens.”
Either that, or he’s a land developer. Seriously, think about it. Only a land developer would put a septic line right through the middle of an amusement park. (That’s a penis joke, in case anyone missed it.)
This is a very common misconception, clung to desperately by Christians when their faith is challenged. Unfortunately, the facts speak volumes in a very different way.
If you are to follow the teachings of Christ, all of them and not just the ones you decide to pick and choose as conforming to your comfortable view of what you’d like it to be like instead of what it actually is, then you must follow Christ when he says that not one word of the prophets will be changed, and that the law must be followed until the end of heaven and earth. Which means, and I know that this is a hard thing for supposed Christians to understand, that every horrible and hate filled verse in the Old Testament is completely validated and supported by the god you think is all about love and peace.
Kill your neighbor for working on Sunday. Own slaves, but only beat them lightly. Stone your wife to death for disobedience. Kill your kids for disobedience. Go to war for any number of frivolous reasons. The litany is endless, and since it is completely supported by the gospel you cannot argue against it. Best to throw it all out and start fresh if you really want peace and love, because sooner or later someone will come along who actually reads your holy book and decides that some of those horrible things are really good ideas, seeing as how they are fully endorsed by “god.”
I say, let myths remain myths. Interesting tales which do not apply to real life any more than the Lord of the Rings or any other fantasy novel applies to real life. Adults who profess to believe in fairy tales deserve nothing more than the mockery of their peers.
THAT only applied to those who lived under the laws of the Gentiles. I don’t live under those laws, you don’t live under them, and even modern Jewish people don’t think this applies to them anymore. Also, the command never says that you should deliver justice yourself. The Israelites had a procedure in place for dealing with law-breaking. What’s more, there’s no record that this punishment was actually ever given to anyone. The point was in making sure that the importance of the Sabbath was remembered.
Now you’re inventing things. The bible does not condone slavery. Unfortunately, it doesn’t outlaw slavery either. What many fail to understand is that slavery in biblical times was very different from the slavery that was practiced in the past few centuries in many parts of the world. Slavery in the Bible was not based on race. People were not enslaved because of their nationality or the color of their skin. In Bible times, slavery was based on economics. People sold themselves as slaves when they could not pay their debts or provide for their families. In New Testament times, sometimes doctors, lawyers, and even politicians were slaves of someone else. Some people actually chose to be slaves so as to have all their needs provided for by their masters.
Both the Old and New Testaments condemn the practice of “man-stealing,” which is what happened in Africa in the 19th century. Africans were rounded up by slave-hunters, who sold them to slave-traders, who brought them to the New World to work on plantations and farms. In fact, the penalty for such a crime in the Mosaic Law was death: “Anyone who kidnaps another and either sells him or still has him when he is caught must be put to death” (Exodus 21:16).
Even back in those times, there was a significant difference between the law and practice. In fact, it seems that even God didn’t view capital punishment in a good light. For example, in 2 Kings 10:18-28, Jehu gathers servants, priests and prophets of Baal and executes them for worshipping other gods (idolatry)…
God’s response? He wasn’t happy with Jehu. “. . . I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel.” (Hosea 1:4) Basically, most of the “horrible and hate-filled” things you mention is due to a disconnect between what ancient Israelites thought God wanted, versus what he really requested of them. God inspired the Bible, but he didn’t write it… humans did, and humans are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
I mean, we’re talking about people who believed snakes and donkeys can talk, who believed in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft. They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. We’re talking about people who thought that rabbits chewed cud, that bats are birds, and that whales are fish. These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would give birth to striped calves.
In addition to that, the Bible started out as an oral history, passed down from father to son, father to son, for dozens of generations, until someone wrote it down on sheepskin. But sheepskin decays, so copies had to be made… a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an oral history, passed down from father to son, father to son, for dozens of generations until someone got it down on sheepskin.
Then it was translated. From Hebrew to Aramaic, from Aramaic to Greek, from Greek to some old form of English nobody uses anymore, until you end up with a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an oral history, passed down from father to son for dozens of generations until someone wrote it down on sheepskin.
And that’s before we even get into all the revisions… King James version, New King James Version, New International Version, American Standard Bible, New American Standard Bible, Revised Standard Version, Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, and so on and so forth.
You simply can not make that many revisions, translations, and copies of a grocery list and not expect some serious changes in the dinner menu when the kids get back from Kroger’s; why should the Bible be any different? It’s pretty thoroughly documented that the bible has been changed over time, whether due to human error or deliberate alteration; I can look up a list of examples if you really want me to. (Entire chapters missing, stories moved, stories added… like the “let he who is without sin throw the first stone” one, that one was a feel-good story that was not in the original scripture… take your pick.)
All this goes back to what I said about “the problem is not religion“… believing in a higher power is all well and good; in fact, scientific research has proven that the human brain is wired to believe in a higher power. (Which may be the reason for all the “Near Death Experiences” that have been described. Sorry, I don’t have a link to the article; it was in a pre-Internet issue of Discover. So if you have trouble believing that without a link to the article, that’s fair. I don’t have a problem with that.)
The problem is with fundamentalists who want to take a revised, translated, copy of an oral history, written thousands of years ago by people who believed that bats were birds, and apply its rules literally to modern society, except for the verses that would inconvenience them personally. Some of these fundamentalists even believe that the King James Version is the only true Bible. While I don’t think that people who choose to believe in God “deserve nothing but mockery”, I do think that anyone who believes that the KJV is the “only true Bible” definitely deserves mockery. If they want a “true Bible”, then they’d have to find the original copy written down on sheepskin. That’s as close to a “true Bible” as anyone’s ever gonna get.
I’m still not 100% sure I believe in god (though I tell people I do); and if there there is, he’s probably a passive observer and the entire universe is just a lab experiment of his. The main reason I know the Bible as well as I do is because I was raised in a Missionary Baptist family, but I was never personally that faithful and haven’t actually set foot in a church in over 25 years. Also, I’ve seen statistics that as far as I’m concerned, prove that we need to separate church and state completely, and go to a completely secular government, which is why I do not support Ted Cruz as a candidate. (Although, if he won the presidency, it would at least get him off the Congressional Science Advisory Council, where he has no business being.)
Good grief, what a wall of text. If you don’t read the whole thing, I don’t blame you. I started off writing a rebuttal, I ended up writing practically an essay.
I’m not the one inventing things.
Old Testament: Exodus 21:20 – If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished.
New Testament: Corinthians 7:21-23 – Were you called while a slave? Do not worry about it; but if you are able also to become free, rather do that. For he who was called in the Lord while a slave, is the Lord’s freedman; likewise he who was called while free, is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men.
Laying down the rules for the treatment of slaves is condoning the practice of slavery. Telling a slave “Hey, if you can’t be free, don’t fret about it too much” condones the practice of slavery.
There are, by the way, a whole host of other citations about slavery in the Bible that could be made. I only chose to use one from each testament in order to make my point, and so that the tired old false argument that Christ made the Old Testament somehow obsolete can’t be used to refute the facts of the matter.
That belief is a common myth about the Bible and/or the historical times. One no doubt invented as a way to try to fend off the justified attacks against biblical practices.
Entire peoples were made slaves because they lost a war. If that does not count as slavery based on nationality or looking different then not much does. In what is probably one of the widest known biblical stories even amongst non-practicers, the Hebrew peoples were the slaves of the Egyptians. If you were born the child of a Hebrew slave you were a slave yourself from birth until death. This is a far cry from your attempt to soften chattel slavery into some kind of indentured servitude, willingly chosen by the slave.
The Deuteronomic Code lays out the law on the practice of slavery, and it only recommends death for those who enslave Israelites. Anyone else is fair game.
The three keys to understanding ANY religious or historical text:
1) Linguistical context: the language it was written in. Some things translate weird. Some things don’t translate from one language to another. (Bats being called birds, the wrist being included in the Aramaic, Ancient Hebrew, and Ancient Arabic words for “hand”, “tanyin” being translated as dragon, etc)
2) Cultural context: cultural sayings, celebrations, slang, conventional wisdom of the time, etc. (the number 7 also meaning “enough” or “sufficient” in the Jewish culture)
3) Historical context: Heavily tied to both linguistical context and cultural context. Also helps establish a timeline.
Sorry, the failed and murderous uplift attempts in the 20th century were by people who shared your opinion on ‘racism’… which should tell you something.
The methods that worked and endured were all earlier, and by people you’d call ‘racist’.
There has been plenty of grotesquely murderous “Uplift” in the 20th century which was not even slightly about race. E.G: Stalin advancing the Russian peasantry 500 years in a decade at gunpoint.
The fundamental problem with the Deus approach is legitimacy. Since the basis of his takeover was assassination and a justification that “It’s okay to use force because that guy’s a dick.”then you have legitimized any attempt to replace you by force. This is why coups tend to lead to a cyclical bloodbath without some kind of external (to the coup) figurehead who legitimizes of the new regime (E.G: Thailand’s monarchy.) The ONLY way that Galytn will become stabilized in the long term is if Deus establishes a civil government which is both accepted by the people and publicly capable of resisting his demands if needed. Otherwise the second he dies, or is visibly weakened the whole thing collapses back into chaos. That is why his is an evil approach. If he lives long enough, and actually does establish civic traditions then perhaps he will achieve good. But he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who gives a toss about what happens to the world in his absence (or that other peoples opinions about how they should live their lives matter) so I doubt that’s part of his plan.
But you’re claiming evilness based on an outcome that hasn’t arrived yet. And more than that, the ONLY way that Galytn stabilises enough to generate a civil government to stand up to dictators like Deus is to have the stability and wealth that only an effective dictator can bring to Galytn. Else your legitimacy is just bowing to the vested interests and destructive prejudices that are already keeping the country poor.
Organic development moves slowly, with progress only visible when averaged over generations. Galytn is more-or-less-stable feudalism, at best, we left that behind 600 years ago. The wealth they can access through access to our technological knowledge will shorten that, but they still need stability to sustain the infrastructure all but the simplest tech levels require.
That’s why he has Indinge JR on the throne. That man is heir to the man that carved out the nation. Closest thing coming to a legitimate ruler in this new country
Deus is just a minister chosen by the ruler.
And a healthy infrastructure is a good first step towards setting up a legitimate government. Educate the peasants before you give them power. Assuming Deus is truthful in wanting to shape the country into a good place, he’ll have some plans towards setting that up, but those will be very long term.
Probably something with a traditional monarch (Indinge), in the style of some European countries
Deus is not a minister chosen by the ruler.
He is the minster who chose the ruler.
also, as I have said, providing Deus really is improving the place, there’s nothing inherently wrong with deriving some benefit from it.
He’s the textbook example of D&D’s lawful evil. Greed control and occasional murder are all fine as long as you keep things running smoothly. He obviously knows that rules need to be followed to guarantee the best results… He’s just powerful enough to make the rules.
I love how eager he looks in the bottom left panel, like a giddy school girl, and how smug he looks while he ‘holds’ the thunder.
–
Very nice and more importantly fitting time jump on the poor slave girl in a cage, from a dead end, to going to school, working, and even ending with a little bundle of joy.
Bravo.
I’m starting to think that Deus is what Lex Luthor is supposed to be.
So basically David Xanatos then?
Maybe somewhat more benevolent version of him. Although I fully agree that it looks like that Deus did master the “Xanatos Gambit”. (look it up on TV Tropes, if you dare; I will not link it here, for the sake of humanity and all species that feed off of our internet(s).)
Yup, I’ve also made the comparison to Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, and David Xanatos. Deus is a mad genius with an answer for every conceivable plan.
Deus is what Lex might have been if Superman hadn’t shown up. Of course, there’s no indication that Deus has Lex’s intense zenophobia, and the one Superman analog, Max, is working well within the law as a government agent. She is effectively working within the same system that Deus exploits. Lex Luthor’s biggest problem with Superman was that he was insanely powerful (more powerful than Lex) and pretty much only answered to himself and his own conscience. Given that Lex knew what HE would have done with that power, he both hated and feared Superman.
Actually, about the only difference between Maxi and Soups, is that Soups came from different planet, oh, and Soups was bound to just protecting one country but every country
I’m curious how Maxima is responding to this. Is she nodding her head in approval of a man who’s taken over a country using fear and murder, or is she shaking her head in hypocritical disapproval?
Because she’s also demonstrated a penchant for violence, callous ruthlessness, and intimidation.
The important differences include a respect for law, civilian authority, and self determination.
You do remember that, prior to Deus, Galtyn had none of those?
Which applies to whom?
Maxima has implied that she’s assassinated “supers,” and with joy. She also performed actions akin to General MacArthur during the press conference. Nobody gave her authority to set off a small nuke, and then proceeded to monologue to the world that she has the power to kill, and is not afraid to use it.
Imagine if George Bush Jr. held a press conference in the desert, set off a nuke, and declared that he’s more than willing to use this power liberally to kill anyone who opposed him. That should hopefully put things in perspective.
I’m really, really looking forward to the day when Maxima becomes a supervillain.
Imagine if George W. Bush held a press conference at a federal bomb range, set off a daisycutter, and then declared that he’s more than willing to use this power as necessary to incapacitate, imprison, or if necessary kill anyone who threatened the citizenry of the United States.
The only thing that would be newsworthy about it would be the fact that he felt the demonstration was necessary because in society it has been assumed and understood that such things were what that power was FOR. It would make him look weaker to HAVE to say these things because that was the established precedent
That’s what Maxima did. I’m paraphrasing a little, but my paraphrasing is closer to the literal actual words out of her mouth than your outright straw man. The only reason her action was appropriate is the fact that Archon, publically, is a new power, a new institution, and precedent has to bet set about what that power is FOR.
Better an explosion at a bomb range with witnesses protected than a surge of super-criminals fighting to continue their abuse with increasing desperation and increasing willingness to kill innocent bystanders because they don’t have a sense of the scope of what they’re opposing.
Maxima’s display preemptively saved lives, by making sure the people she would have to bring in knew from the outset whether or not they had the ability to make a contest of it.
You’re not likely to get a villain out of this.
As third-world tinhorn dictators go, Deus took over that country in a relatively nice fashion. Third-world tinhorn dictators are not a dime a dozen, they are a dime a hundred – taking them out would be a full-time career with no prospect of retirement.
And since taking over, unless he is COMPLETELY misrepresenting things (I’ve no doubt he’s exaggerating how much good he’s doing), he has proven far better than most.
Plus it looks like he may be well on the way to establishing a respected monarchy – which can lead to a respectable constitutional monarchy. Granted that his primary motive for doing so is that if the people consider their government legitimate and basically decent there are fewer dissidents and the real troublemakers among them are easier to deal with; still, it has to potential of being a stable and decent government across multiple generations. (Also, it provides at least some constraint on random abuses by Deus himself. He won’t be overly willing to undermine the government he’s trying to legitimize.)
Life expectancy in DR Congo a.k.a Zaire is listed as 52 years.
Now factor in the area being discussed was a contested area and the expectancy was probably 30.
So a jump to 60 is not to far fetched when you bring in good food, water, decent medical capacity, and keep the peace as it were.
Same goes for infant mortality.
“Relatively nice” is a form of minimization. You’re dismissing murder, intimidation, and coercion by implying it could have been worse.
No. That’s saying that murder, intimidation, and coercion can be dismissed because it’s not as bad as it could have been.
to be blunt, as an alternative to mass murder, it probably IS. Nobody is saying Deus is entirely moral. However, it took a LONG time for the average man-on-the-street to get a true say in how the country was run, even in the First World- and some people would say we still aren’t there- and in some ways, it took WW2 to make them talk instead of fight. Going from a more-or-less tribal society to a true democracy basically never works directly.
Or what Lex would have been had he had a crush on Superman.
If you haven’t yet, I recommend reading “The Metropolitan Man” by alexanderwales on ff.net. It’s a fantastic story from the pov of Luthor himself, in a world where people realize how terrifying someone with that level of power is.
Lex just went mad due to the chemicals which also caused his hair to fall out. And his madness just focused on Superman. But he was already rich, and the rich are allowed to be mad in our society.
Deus Lex Machina.
BRING THE THUNDER! :D
Sorry, but I still find the idea that he invented, or had invented, a device that causes lightning/thunder on command just so he can have it as a dramatic backdrop when laughing maniacally to be kind of asesome.
kind of awesome. I can spell. Really.
I thought you were mixing asinine and awesome into a single word. :P
the internet to you for that one
The variants on the phrase being:
“Lies, damned lies and statistics”
“Lies, damned lies and government statistics”
“Lies, damned lies and global warming statistics” *
*Climate change is happening, there’s no denying that. However, using two entirely different means of measurement and plotting them in the same line (the “hockey stick” graph), poor sampling (“global” average temperature accounts for 10-20% of Earth), and some of the other shenanigans being used by climate alarmists are just plain unacceptable and unscientific.
And because I’ve likely opened up a can of worms with that last one. Remember the NOAA’s 15 year falsifiability claim? The global warming “pause” has gone on for 18 years and 3 months.
Have some links:
*Source of final variation
https://www.corbettreport.com/lies-damned-lies-and-global-warming-statistics/ – also includes ‘A History Of Dishonest Fox Charts’
*The Global warming “pause” explained
https://www.corbettreport.com/the-global-warming-pause-explained/
There is no such thing as “global warming pause”
You really should break out of your echo chamber.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/september/global-warming-hiatus-091715.html
They found the heat… it is in the atlantic ocean. The cooler that was the atlantic has lost considerable efficiency… The planet is warming but this is all new, so figuring out how how the planetary systems will adapt is all unknown, but it doesn’t make it not so. What happens when the atlantic cooler fails completely… dead zones are increasing in size in the pacific, The pacific has gained at least enough of a temp shift to allow invasive species to invade… the research is deep… Not to mention there is the exxon study from the 70s-80s that showed global warming then they hired the Tabaco scientists who said it doesn’t cause lung cancer…
seriously read dude… there is no echo chamber I have read this myself.
The ironic thing is he’s using the Colbert Report, which was a satire of conservative talking points, as a reference.
And the irony is on me, because I didn’t click on the link first.
Corbett Report, not Colbert Report.
Oops.
Personaly, I would take the Corbett Report with a very large pinch of salt. I mean, just check the “about” section…
Using just temperature indicators is not sufficient enough to show that “climate change hypothesis is wrong” – there are multiple ways how inputing energy into a complex system can have results different than just temperature increase. For example, a considerable amount of energy is required to get 0 centigrade ice to 0 centigrade water – 334kJ per kilogram of it. To give you an idea how much that is, the same amount of heat will increase the melt water from 0 centigrade to nearly 80 centigrade. Coincidentaly, the years of the supposed hiatus, we saw a LOT of arctic ice loss and destabilisation of west antarctic ice sheet. Secondly, the weather kept on getting more extreme over the years; what global warming also is, isn’t just a flat increase in temperature; it means that a lot of the energy trapped via the greenhouse effect will case, in layman’s terms, “the air to move more, faster and further”. Do notice that polar vortex became quite apparent in North America recently; ironicaly, to get colder weather in the continental US, you need MORE energy to transport cold arctic air further south (that, obviously, has to be offset by it being warmer somewhere else – do check the recent abnormaly mild or outright nonexistent winters in Europe, much further north than continental US).
And so on.
You touch on the single thing that most climate change deniers simply cannot understand: It’s all about the energy. When people talk about another degree or two of temperature it seems trivial, because they do not understand the context.
It takes one calorie of energy to heat one gram of water by a degree Celsius. Multiply that gram by all the waters of the world and you can then begin to understand the enormous amounts of energy involved in heating the oceans by but a single degree. And that energy doesn’t just sit there and do nothing, energy is the ability to do work, including moving large air masses at fast speeds.
And here is question that no proponent of climate change has answered for me.
Where are we supposed to be in the great massively complex cyclical thing we call our “climate”?
“Where are we supposed to be” is probably as tough to answer as “what is the meaning of life”. The global climate is an incredibly complex and evolving system – it is going to be changing whether we want it or not. The thing that we do affect is HOW it will change, and how quickly. Currently, we are putting loads of gasses into the atmosphere that increase its energy retention capacity. That doesn’t mean just “greenhouse effect”, that means that the entirety of world’s climate has more energy to “do stuff”. That means, carry more water in the air. Move air masses faster. Create larger weather systems. Etc. In other words, it allows weather to be more extreme.
Where we are supposed to be is tough to say, but we currently are quite certain that “where we are” is not “where we are supposed to be”. If you want an answer regardless…
“We” should be much less of a factor than we are.
Also, there is nothing really cyclical about climate. It evolves, but not around a specified mean system of values. It just reacts to how the conditions affecting it change. (if you wish to state that there is a “cycle” of seasons, or “cycle” of ice ages, etc.; the first one I REALLY hope I don’t have to explain; as for the other, the cycle of ice ages is actually just one current ice age, just with periods of warmer weather; we should at this point be actually moving to COLDER climate, however, “something” threw a wrench in that cogwork).
I’m not going to take a side in the “climate change” debate one way or the other, but I do have this to say (and this is going to be my only post on the matter)… What the “climate change” deniers consistently fail to realize is this:
If they’re right, and the scientists are wrong, and we spend millions of dollars installing new pollution devices to reduce carbon dioxide emissions… then no harm done; we took a short economic loss to install devices to mitigate a non-existent threat.
If they’re wrong, and the scientists are right, and we do nothing… then we’re all FUBAR’ed. Isn’t it better to have those pollution controls and not need them, than to need them and not have them?
I don’t understand how this can be a hard question for you. Where we are supposed to be is where we can continue to live and prosper as a species.
If the question is “should we ignore the evidence and continue to bring ourselves harm?” then the answer should be an easy one.
Has wiped the face of the Earth nigh clean of life many times before. We may be the first species on the planet which has the power to prevent this from happening again. The question is then, will we do so, or will we allow it to happen yet again? Do we allow the cycle to recur, or do we halt it? The only thing at stake is the very existence of our species.
I’m not denying climate change is happening. I flat out said that it is. Just at a slower pace than what many experts claim.
I’m saying that the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change claims stem deliberately distorted data (remember the climategate emails?) and are being blown out of proportion by the very people causing the brunt of the pollution to begin with solely so they can make more money.
Additionally, might I introduce all of you to Karl Popper’s famous conclusions about scientific theories and hypotheses (most notably #s 4 and 7), from his essay ‘Science as Falsification’. Relax, the essay effectively sets a line of demarcation between what is science and what is pseudoscience.
1) It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3) Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5) Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6) Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
7) Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”)
The essay is explained a bit more here: https://explorable.com/falsifiability
I was so sure he was Evil but now I just don’t know…. maybe he’s that rare kind of Evil that is “Evil but not illegal or immoral so you can’t do Dick! HAH!”
I mean I’ve heard of it in theory but it can’t really exist right?
What Dues is doing is committing acts of evil against those who are already far more evil…And then building the majority of people upwards from there.
Of course, it never hurts to get rich doing that…
Yeah, but unknown orbs that give people superpowers don’t really exist, either.
I really do think that Deus is self-medicating himself here on mega-villainy. He’s got a whole bunch of stuff in place to keep his craving under control normally, and when it gets too strong he goes and does something like Galytn. I mean, really: everybody knows that the dude had that ‘king’ killed. Nobody powerful said or did anything about it, because no big loss there. And that’s what Deus was counting on. Toppling a warlord in full I Am Gloriously Evil Mode probably kept Deus’ super-villain urge in check for *years*.
I support this fully. He’s not Evil, he just has a variation of Science-Related Memetic Disorder- Megalomania-Related Memetic Disorder, and is intelligent enough to moderate it.
How would you even define “evil”?
Is it because Deus had a murderer killed in cold blood? That decision is consistently taken by US presidents, other western rulers and military commanders all the time. If they aren’t “evil” how could Deus be?
Is it because he prospers from the act? So does every politician in existence and it’s a very rare power holder who calls for action unless they specifically stand to gain from it as well. “Evil” is a word which is very hard to actually apply properly.
There are any number of people through history who have been self-sacrificing, humble, kind to a fault, and yet the fruits of their labor has been suffering on an untold scale – Mother Theresa was a saint – and her preachings against family planning in already overpopulated areas may have resulted in the suffering of hundreds of thousands. George Bush was convinced he was doing the right thing. And yet half a million Iraqis are dead and that area is now in the hands of warlords, religious fanatics, and in more turmoil than ever.
Ingvar Kamprad – the founder of IKEA – is a ruthless bastard by any account and yet the legacy he’s left behind aside from his personal fortune is a massive improvement to the living sandards of lower-middle class people in dozens of countries thanks to his idea of “cheap and elegant furniture, some assembly required”. Say what you like about Apple, they did bring the smartphone – and the revolution that brought – to everyone. Yet Steve Jobs was, by any account, an autocratic avaricious tyrant and a horror to work for.
You CAN be a successfully self-serving egotistical megalomaniac pulling up to the top 100 richest men in the world without being illegal. Is that immoral? By whose standards?
A soldier may be lauded as a hero in his own nation and reviled as the most loathsome of villains in others. Good or Evil?
“Is it because he prospers from the act? So does every politician in existence and it’s a very rare power holder who calls for action unless they specifically stand to gain from it as well. “Evil” is a word which is very hard to actually apply properly.”
please don’t try the tired excuse of moral relativism. Deus personally prospered from that man’s death with his own fortunes gaining control of a country.
When Eisenhower okay-ed the deaths of multiple foreign leaders while president, he personally gained nothing from those acts, even the Dulles brothers did not get richer directly from actually executing those acts (and yes this includes Operation Ajax). As for most other occasions, there was actually a state of War, and killing the enemy leader is only common sense then.
Yes but lets consider what Deus actually did here. He killed a tyrant. Why? Because he thought he could run the country better. People do that ALL the time. Its called Revolution. Is revolution immoral? My answer? When you actually DO run it better, such as what Deus did, then no its not. Its actually commendable. And that’s the bitter question this entire scene has proposed. IS he a villain? Thematically he’s doing everything a villain would do. But is he doing any harm? To one man, yes. That guy is SO dead. But to everyone else in the country, no, he’s a hero.
Oh, so you are the reason got a “503 error” when attempting to reply to VultureTX :P
But yeah, that little country (that didn’t even have a name yet at the time) had just had it’s own little revolution to place Indignant Senior in power, and IS was Evil
To be fair I wouldn’t even place revolution on the same scale as Good-Evil. Its like comparing apples and oranges, to use the old adage. Revolution is a decidedly Chaotic act and belongs on the Law-Chaos spectrum. Problems like this are the reason D&D and other table top games of multifaceted alignment systems.
To describe revolution as a chaotic act is incorrect.
In and of itself it is a prime example of survival of the fittest.
If a government fails it’s people to where they successfully rebel.
Then it has shown that it deserved to fall.
Now the aftermath has the capacity to be come quite chaotic.
It’s not so much relativism as it is a difference in philosophy- are you Universalist, Objectivist, or (huh, I guess it is Relativism).
What’s interesting is that Deus, depending on how honest he’s being with his given reasons (to help those poor people!) is either Objectivist (do what’s best for yourself first- if everyone does, it balances out and everyone is happy!) or Universalist (the Greater Good, basically).
Thoguh it’s been a while since my philosophy classes- I might be conflating ethics and motivation here…
“please don’t try the tired excuse of moral relativism. Deus personally prospered from that man’s death with his own fortunes gaining control of a country.”
I’m not. I’m saying that “Evil” and “Good” are, by definition, highly relative terms. So is morality because it’s a personal issue. It’s not a tired excuse but a simple fact. What you are looking for if you want something more absolute is ethics.
If you were, say, an Iraqi in 2002 which scenario would you rather have happen?
1) Saddam still in power.
2) The US takes over and things pan out as they did historically.
3) Deus walks in with a gambit similar to the one presented in the comic.
Some Iraqis might have preferred Saddam. Most would have loved Deus. With the fact sheet in hand not a single one would have preferred option 2. The US invasion alone cost Iraq more deaths than Saddam ever caused – and a nigh-permanent state of civil unrest and religious fanaticism on top of it. At the end of 2010 when the scenarios have played out for ten years how would you morally rate Saddam, GWB, or Deus as compared to in 2001? Most people, facts in hand, would now make a different moral judgment.
I’m not advocating “means to an end”. I’m saying that the word “Evil” is being used in strange ways here. Especially so when at least in the US “Kill the Bad Guy” has, for a generation, been the most ironic hypocrisy pushed by common media and entertainment alike.
Would you consider Jack Bauer “Evil”? Any of the iconic action heroes? Does it really matter what a torturer and murderer uses for motivation?
Deus killed a man. He did it for no other reason than his own personal judgment. If you want to call him “evil” that’s where the reason.
Even Hitler was convinced he was doing the right thing. The guys piloting airplanes into the world trade center died with a clean conscience, believing firmly that they were striking back at an inhuman enemy which itself refused to fight fairly and cared not a damn for the lives of innocents. Many of the guards at Auschwitz were, if history is to be believed, good fathers and great neighbors who simply happened to believe, with all their might, that the unfortunate duty they had was a “good thing”. ISIS is a revolting abomination condemned by even the most fundamentalist mullah…and yet their grunts are firmly convinced they are doing “good”.
The fundamental difference between the above mentioned examples and Deus is that he appears to be extremely beneficial to the causes he puts his hand to. In that he also has a big leg up on every politician throughout history. My case is that Deus is ethically bankrupt. Also a criminal (murder by proxy). Not immoral and evil because those two terms are, by definition, relative.
What Deus is doing here is a form of Pragmatic Villainy.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PragmaticVillainy
He very carefully avoids becomming a public menace while still reaping loads of profits.
There’s only so much wealth any one person can use in their lifetime for personal enjoyment (before diminishing returns kicks in atleast), so instead he opts for power and influence by improving the lives of those below him and giving them a reason to be loyal (or atleast not oppose him).
Personally I’d say Deus is an antivillain. Haven’t had any reason to change that judgement yet.
Dave, “turmulent” isn’t a word. I think you’re conflating “turbulent” and “tumultuous.”
I thought C.C. had misspoken too, but then found turmulent in the Urban Dictionary. Yes, it’s a made up word, but it’s a portmanteau of the words turbulent and turmoil.
Huh, I didn’t find “turmolent”, then immediately thought of a portmanteau of “turbulent” and “turmoilant”, only to find that “turmoilant” also isn’t a word. Whyyyyyyyyyy not???
A similar word that I did find in the dictionary is “tremulant.”
Definition is: tremulous, trembling
Well, I suppose when you’re ruled over by a militaristic despot & surrounded by other nearly-identical militaristic despots, the general population would have good reason to be tremulant…
Funny thing though, even as I was trying to look up “turmulent,” I could also find nothing in the dictionary for “cromulent” either. Not even a decent substitute.
Cromulent is a reference to a Simpsons episode where a character uses a made-up word to justify the use of another made-up word. https://mentalfloss.com/article/58647/10-words-simpsons-made-famous
Love the little on-off switch on the Thunder-bringer. Seems R&D added it :-)
Ha, found the link:
Heheh yeh, I caught that too :)
Glad I’m not the only one.
I love how she had the button at the ready. I’d also like to point out that it now has a power switch. :P
Ha, ninja’d :P Seems great minds think alike :-)
“Does she have a 50% chance to have a girl, or a 25% chance to have another girl, or a 50% chance to not have a girl, or a 75% chance to not have another girl?”
What a weird thing to say. The 25% and the 75% option don’t apply since the first girl is a given, it has already happened so the probability of it happening doesn’t matter anymore.
True, the probability of having a girl is always 50%, no matter if you call it “having a girl” or “having another girl”
Exactly: it is always a 50/50 chance if it is a chance between two options, no matter how many times it comes up (see if you can find copies of a series in old “2000AD” comic called “Bad Company”, one of the characters has a device with needles, half dispense poison, every morning he spins the device and jabs himself, he has been doing it thousands of times and yet the odds remain 50/50 {obviously he has yet to spin a poisoned needle, except when he showed another character the odds by injecting some native wildlife and it promptly getting poisoned})
To have “a girl” is the chance of that single pregnancy producing female offspring, to have “another girl” is taking both pregnancies as a set. Both values are true.
Incorrect. At the point in time referred to, the first girl is not a probabilistic event – it’s an established fact. So there is no difference between the second child being “a girl” and “another girl”. The probabilities are identical and 50%. (To the precision typical of non-technical internet discussions.)
Now before the first one was born, there was a difference between “a girl” and “a girl, and then another girl”. The chance of the first is 50%, and of the second only 25%.
The funny thing is, you’re both right in your own perspective
It can be successfully argued that the statistics themselves are right. And that’s the whole point of the… point
To go off on a semi-relevant tangent to tie together the morality and statistics threads, there was (maybe still is) an American fertility that was promising to guarantee prospective parents that they could chose the gender of their child with the help of his clinic or their money back.
Since there is a 50/50 chance, this is the equivalent of me going up to a hundred people and offering them the bet “You put a dollar on the table and flip a coin. Heads I keep it and tails you get your money back.” At the end I wind up with around 50 dollars with no work from me. The doctor had the cost of keeping the clinic open and for the ‘treatments’, but as long as this was less than half of the price he was changing he was guaranteed to come out ahead.
I take it that the comment about lies, damned lies, and statistics passed over your head?
Damn, that Vale is hot . . .
Anyway, when we first see her on this page, she’s standing behind C.C. as the interviewer expresses a little annoyance with Deus. I wondered if she was there in case C.C. knew too much and tried to reveal things on the air that Deus wanted kept secret a while longer. It could still happen, I suppose.
We get the briefest glimpse of Vale jumping C.C. from behind, then smash cut to one of those signs – Technical Difficulties: Please Stand By!
Nah, Deus is more subtle than that. He’d just have someone hack in the technical difficulties
No, Vale is behind Deus for just the reason shown in panel six: so they can ‘communicate’ without being obvious (it wouldn’t work if she was standing behind Deus)
Deus, more-than-likely, would have an invisible ‘assistant’ incase something needs to happen, like he had ten years ago, only difference being they would remain invisible when they do what needs to be done (or, as RobK pointed out, have his own ‘Leon’ ready to technical difficulty the show)
This is actually very familiar. I have tried to write a smart evil guy in the past. They always ended up not evil from the perspective of anyone who knew him.
Sure he might be selfish in that all of this makes him super filthy rich, but he looked at how colonial europe did it, and took lessons on how to do it properly.
There are at least two classes of evil – there’s the evil that actually wants to cause suffering to others (“some people just want to watch the world burn”) which always looks evil; and then there’s the evil that is merely indifferent to the suffering of others, which can end up looking a lot like good in the person of someone smart enough to understand that you can get a lot more out of people if you give them positive reasons to want you to succeed than if you try using fear and pain as motivators.
The Joker is always going to look evil because his goals are chaos, mayhem and widespread suffering; someone who merely wants personal power can appear evil or good, depending on the approach they take to achieving that goal, and how good they are at adopting socially acceptable attitudes. And then there’s the Knight Templar – the Well-Intentioned Extremist – the guy whose aim is to save the world, by any means necessary. He may even be right in some cases – one of the threads of Watchmen is the question of how you can tell whether the world’s smartest man (by a sufficient margin) is crazy, or just operating based on insights you lack – and it’s left deliberately open at the end whether his “evil” plan ends up working or not…
Ozymandias in Watchmen was a tragic case. The most intelligent man in the world ended up alone with the guilt of tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths, and he could never claim any of the glory of bringing world peace or it would all have been for nothing. On top of that he betrayed and killed or lost all of those he at one time or another had called friends. He even killed the cat!
I doubt Deus is going that route…
Whatever that symbol on the back of her phone is, I’m assuming that’s Machina Industrie’s logo.
That’s not a phone. That’s Deus’ remote control to “Bring the Thunder” to accompany his bouts of maniacal laughter.
…It’s just a “condition” he has…
Notice panel four and the mother who’s apparently taking a selfie with her baby.
Yeah, the sorta arrow-like insignia.
See, you cannot overuse the thunder, it would grow stale.
As for the state of the country, I picture it as latvaria, with deus as the dr doom behind the throne. After all, you cannot tell me he doesn’t have at least one cape in his closet.
No, it’s simply not the right time: he will actually give the straight answer, not the answer that will bring down the Wrath of Maxi upon his gloriously luxurious head :P
Of course he does.
He wears it when he goes to the opera.
I for one am very happy with my Dipwad on the internet free time
Only if you use that time for good, not evil
Not to be contrarian, but the probability of having another girl is also .5. Once an independent event is determined it can not be associated with other independent events. So the probability of having 2 girls in a row is ~.25 but if you already had a girl that uncertainty is lost and the probability of having another girl is .5.
Right. What is the probability that a past event occurred exactly the way it did? Always 1. Once it’s fact, its past probability or lack thereof is of very limited relevance.
(Please note though, I did not say “exactly the way WE THINK it did”.)
What is the remaining relevance? Validating the probability estimates.
Seriously. Huge Handsome Jack vibe here, not that I’m complaining.
what if he turns out to have a base on the Moon?
I wonder if it’s linked or connected with Dracula’s base on the moon?..
With the Nazis on the other side of the crater by the alien monolith.
The moon is getting crowded
Always liked the idea that the back side of the moon was a huge resting spot for all the world’s conspiracy theories and alien fantasies covered over by a holographic veil of craters and moon dust. I guess the TVTrope 2001’s black monolith on the moon covers that.
That does raise the question. Are all those different conspiracies happy neighbours? Or do they all look outside, shake their head and mumble about how the conspiracy neighbourhood has gone to hell since those new guys moved in?
No they are not.
There is continual assassination attempts, cross crater raids, spying, hacking and other general misbehavior.
Pisses me off lots when it interferes with my down time leisure activities.
Love interest in this comic. Xuriel, Vale and Deus
For you? Or between those three in a threesome? o_O
For me. All of them. Only me
The sad thing about Leto II is he’s actually Leto II v2. How insane is that to name your second son after your first son who was killed? Leto II the Elder and Leto II the Younger… both sons of Paul Atredies.
if this is how Deus does villainy, i hate to admit this, but i would welcome our new Overlord Deus
Adolf Hitler’s 3rd Reich would have been amazingly beneficial to the world. Unless you were Jewish, Black, or otherwise not Aryan.
True. It’s unfortunate that that anti-anti-Aryanism was the only reason that Hitler was able to rise to his position of power in the first place, and the biggest thing uniting people.
” It’s unfortunate that that anti-anti-Aryanism was the only reason that Hitler was able to rise to his position of power in the first place, and the biggest thing uniting people.”
That’s a common misconception. Millenarianism lent itself well to Hitler the same way it had lent itself to the Jacobins in France, to catholic kings calling crusades…or, for that matter, ANY political meme through history which carries the tired old formula of “Once upon a time in a golden age we were great and noble but now we are decrepit and corrupt save for a chosen few who will suffer until after a glorious götterdämmerung-style war we few will rise again as pure and noble beings. And it’s all THEIR fault we’re in this mess (points at chosen minority scapegoat)”.
Hitler rode to power on a toxic cocktail of massive widespread poverty, a nation doomed to perpetual ruin (the versailles treaty), a solid half-century of piss-poor political leaders (who were stupid, insane, avaricious, or all three combined), well-designed and extensive propaganda, a lot of roman-style panem et circenses and a scapegoat philosophy.
Antisemitism was ripe in austria and germany but it was the nazi movement which successfully portrayed the jewish people and the slavs as the sole reason Germany was in such a sad state. Antisemitism just served as the linchpin around which hitler could build a mythos with which he could unite the rather fractured city-states of the german republic.
The terrifying thing is that Hitler, by any means a ridiculous figure, was able to control the nazi movement let alone the nation just by controlling the narrative.
Everything SDM said is absolutely correct. Charisma might have been a factor too. I mean, he said the perfect human was tall, blond haired, and blue eyed. Hitler was none of those (short, brown hair, brown eyes), and yet people hung on his every word. If it hadn’t been for that toxic cocktail, Hitler would probably never have amounted to more than a painter and frustrated artist.
He had postencephalitic Parkinson’s (and possibly syphilis), to boot. A lot of people still don’t realize just how strung out Hitler actually was. His private physician, Theodor Morell, was administering up to 74 different substances (in 28 different mixtures) via pill or injection, up to 20 times per day. I’m not going to post the complete list, but it included meth, heroin, cocaine (via eyedrops), oxycodone, and morphine… as well as some compounds recognized as toxic, such as strychnine. It’s reasonably safe to assume that Morell inadvertently was directly responsible for Hitler’s rapidly declining health and sanity.
That, and hitler, despite all his shortcomings, had one very selective genius – he was able to judge people accurately, ensuring he rode to power in the nazi party (and later on) on an edifice built of failed and bitter haters who went along with him mainly because without him the structure would collapse. His early cadre was derided as “the pederast gang” by his political adversary – with some truth.
And once he actually managed to get political accreditation he instantly cleaned up, getting rid of politically incorrect thugs like Röhm and his SA-brigades. Same way a lot of current european neo-nazi parties are doing it today.
The real danger of Hitler lay in his ability to judge people, assign even hating savants to task they could manage, and play the game of politics like a harp.
Theodor Morell’s little cocktails no doubt served to catapult a bitter and hateful man into outright insanity, but i’m not sure whether we should be grateful that Hitler went bonkers or not. To be sure, the holocaust would still have happened since it was invented and driven by quite “sane” career psychopaths then circling the Führer (Himmler was the architect and visionary of the “endlösung” and Heydrich the most involved executor). A saner hitler might have avoided the three-front war which in the end was what broke Germany’s back, allowing the third reich to totter through the inevitable financial collapse building up through their permanent state of wartime economy.
Hitler rode hate and bitterness all the way to the top and by the time he was falling apart he served more as a figurehead and engine for the abominations which the cadre of monsters he’d surrounded himself with came up with. Given his daily doses of Morell’s “treatment” I wouldn’t be surprised if from 1940 and onwards you’d have had difficulty getting the accurate time of day out of Hitler.
Not a problem though, since the various fiefdoms he’d constructed for his aides and collaborators were quite capable of both pushing his original agenda and their own.
That brilliant bastard. Even taking into account that, yeah, he’s likely fudging those numbers, you can’t deny he’s helped the country’s infrastructure. Just like how Julius Caesar built roads, Deus has laid the foundation for Galtyn.
And that’s how tyrants become legends. Either that, or they live long enough to see themselves become the villain. A hostile, bloody takeover that uses violence and fear is still a bloody takeover.
I’m really, REALLY curious what Maxima thinks of Deus. They’re very much alike. They’re both ruthless, use intimidation and fear to control others, and enjoy using violence to solve their problems. Does she look at Deus and nod approvingly, or does she shake her head in disgust in hypocritical disapproval?
Admiration+deep suspicion, is my guess. They have similar understanding of using a mix of practical tactics and theatrics to drive people in the direction they have decided on. Max will *have* to find a way to get some leverage over Deus, and vice versa, in case their visions are not compatible.
Which may be Deus’ ultimate goal, tbh – he can’t need anything material, and he’s clearly restrained enough to not go unacceptably supervillain through abuse of power. But every Joker is looking for a Batman to entertain himself with, so maybe he’s engineering events to encourage someone like Maxima to come up an match wits with him, in a superpowered Cold War?
Faulty comparison. Maxima uses targeted intimidation to restrict or limit threats to the public. Deus uses intimidation for his own advancement and enrichment. This is like saying that two people who use a hammer are alike, even if one of those people is a carpenter and the other of those people is a legbreaker for the mob. Intimidation is a tool. The purpose that a person puts that tool to matters at least as much as the fact that they chose to use that tool.
It’s also grotesque mischaracterization to call Maxima ‘ruthless’. Ruthless people don’t give their enemies opportunities to surrender, or consider the potential for civilian casualties or bystanders. They don’t slowly scale up their use of force to limit casualties among their opposition. These are things that we have both seen Maxima do, and seen her advocate for her subordinates to do. Arguably, it is this reasoned and deliberate NON-ruthlessness that is at the core of Maxima’s willingness to ‘scare villains straight’. Every villain that’s scared straight is a bad guy she doesn’t have to fight, a risk of civilian casualties she doesn’t have to take. A person she doesn’t have to measure force to avoid killing in a direct confrontation. In short, every villain she scared straight with that display is a lot of danger she doesn’t have to see helpless people in.
You act like that doesn’t matter, or is an invalid choice, but you’re wrong. It may not be the right choice, but it’s the right GOAL, and she at least gets credit for that.
+1
Every update with Deus I love him a little more.
I mean, you’re a super genius who can think circles around the next-smartest guy, you have a personal fortune to make your plans come into fruition unilaterally, and even IF you’re going to ultimately turn Galtyn into your personal powerbase, you do so with the full support of the people because you have, objectively in the short run anyway, made their lives wealthier, more secure, and more healthy.
Drop a self-aware sense of humor for your megalomania (which you may/may not deserve) and a support staff of supers that not only understand your “condition” but actively encourage it? Priceless.
Once a woman has had a girl, the odds of having a girl next and having “another girl” are identical – 50%. When you say “another girl” you have already defined that the first child is a girl – hence 100% odds of that after the fact. The odds of boy/girl is 50% for each birth (neglecting that individually the biochemistry of an woman and the man providing the fertilization will skew the odds slightly one way or the other). Correctly calculated, the odds of having “another girl” are 100% x 50%, not 50% x 50% because the gender of the first child is already established. The odds of having 2 girls consecutively BEFORE they are conceived is 50% x 50%. Your description above has conflated 2 very different questions. Of course that sort of makes your point about misapplied statistics.
Yeah, I understand your point, and even though I watch a lot of science and math videos online (Numberphile on youtube is great) I am pretty far removed from being a math knower guy. I suppose I should rephrase my blurb a little, but ultimately my point was someone can change one little word or omit one piece of information and still spin the picture they want without actually lying. I think most pundits online don’t even bother with that these days though.
“Our new drug has 100% greater efficacy!” What they don’t tell you is the old drug had .01% efficacy, the new one has .02%. That is in fact a 100% increase.
You got it Dave. :-)
Statistics are often used in a manner that falls under the category of “Everything I said is accurate, but none of it is true…” i.e. a bunch of facts are strung together in such a way as to imply a conclusion which if false. One of my favorite examples is the two sides of the debate about “global warming” or “global climate change”. The “pro” side takes a lot of statistics from the past to infer the future, making catastrophic predictions to justify additional funding for their favorite theories or political agendas. The “con” side loves to take the failure of some of their predictions to infer that their science is entirely wrong. The truth is somewhere between the two extremes. Current models have failed repeatedly to accurately predict the global climate we now observe – but they have gotten a lot right. Some of the predictions, if they are correct suggest that by the time the worst effects are observed, it will be too late to do anything about them – so if we want to prevent them, now is the time to act. Unfortunately there are actually competing recommendations on what the best way is to act. Should we shift to more aquaculture? Should we stimulate the production of more algae in the oceans to boost conversion of CO2 to O2? What about stopping deforestation – which developing countries with large forests should we tell not to develop their natural resources? Who should take how much of a hit in their industrial production if we want to reduce CO2 emissions? Who pays for all of it? By the way – although models for predicting global climate change have been improving, they are still a bit shaky as a basis for making sweeping policy decisions since they still have limited efficacy in predicting the effects that those policies would have – i.e. determining which policies would have a major impact, which would have only modest impact and which would be a waste of our non-infinite resources. As a result, there is a tendency for folks to latch onto the sets of statistics that support their political agendas on who should pay, how the money should be spent and who gets to control things instead of working together to get the best answers. Sound bites and demagoguery are a lot easier than self-education and open-minded research.
How many of these ‘armchair analysts-slash-dipwads’ are lounging around in their underwear, using a smart phone, both of which were manufactured in Galtyn? (still loving the fact characters in this webic actually pronounce ‘slash’ :D )
Panel four is a nice progression of time: the woman holding the baby and taking a selfie is the same scared little girl right next to Deus :D
Panel 4 hints that Deus is manufacturing Machina brand phones in Galytn (the mPhone?)
Personally, I think the probability of them containing his own special version of user tracking software is about 99.99%
We also see the school kid with an apple on her desk. Apples are temperate, not tropical fruits. So:
1) The middle class has advanced enough to import foreign foods
2) Deus has genetically engineered some temperate crops to grow in tropical settings
3) I am totally over-analyzing an image in a panel of a web comic.
Maybe even all three, Juan. :) But most likely, they have advanced enough economically to import foreign foods.
We could probably engineer the apple to grow in a tropical setting without resorting to genetic engineering (of the kind most people think of when you say “genetic engineering”). It might only take a few years of artificial selection. But you also have to wonder what kind of drawbacks you might accidentally introduce to the new variety of apple.
For example, the wild banana is mostly inedible. Through artificial selection, we ended up with the cultivated banana, BUT, it is incapable of sexually reproducing (it is an asexual clone), and that introduces the possibility of crop failure due to a single disease wiping out the entire population due to lack of genetic diversity. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to the Gros Michel variety back in the 50s due to Panama disease (caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum; you can Wiki it if you want to); these days, the bananas in the store are the Cavendish variety, and those are now threatened by Fusarium as well. Scientists, researchers, and genetic engineers are furiously working to create a new variety of banana that is resistant to disease.
Galytn. …Gallatin?
Is this an obscure reference to the works of L. Neil Smith, or just a coincidence?
My theory is that:
1) DaveB has admitted to living in the Dallas area
2) There is a section of the city called Galatyn Park that he may be familiar with, or a resident
https://www.visitdallas.com/listings/Galatyn-Park/7394/
3) Other web comic writers may now have a spot to target their tactical nukes in order to boost their own comic’s rankings.
Deus: “I shouldn’t have to explain that when we’re doing an interview to improve my standing in the public eye, the Bring the Thunder button is a NO-GO by default.”
Vale: “Sorry, it’s just… You do that lean-in-and-grin thing and it looks like you really, REALLY want the thunder…”
Deus: “…I have a lean-in-and-grin thing?”
…So, I’m guessing Vale is from Deus’ country- possibly someone loyal to him because he helped bring her family out of poverty?
You beat me to it! I was just wondering to myself if one of the reasons why Deus chose to go into that particular piece of Africa was because his assistant was from there. Of course, Galytn didn’t exist as a nation until Indinge carved it out with blood and bombs, but maybe she’s from the country it used to be part of, Zaire.
Sorry, that should have been maybe she’s from the country it used to be part of, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire.
And what country do you believe Deus is from? o_O
If you mean the country they are now talking of, then no.
Because she was working for Deus (and holding giant mirrors to get the lighting just right) before he took over.
Or are you suggesting that Deus has taken over two countries?
That bit about the giant mirrors? Just a gag, did not really happen
They brought that to the interview!?
They bring it everywhere.
Deus spin-off series.
Obvious title would be Deus ex Machina.
Better title? Deus and the Wonder Pals
Imagine that campy Super Friends feel as Deus explains the objective need for the villain to die.
He falls over clutching chest Gaelic Ninja or Deadpool-hench makes a pun.
Heros laugh as theme song plays over credits.
Wooosh “WONDER PALS!”
Showing that they can afford the stuff they are producing is a nice touch.
ROTFLMAO!! I like Deus! odd for a villain though. does something that seems bad then goes around kills an evil dictator and then helps dictators son whos apparently a way kinder/moral person turn the country into a better place than it was before….
i think hes neutral. neither villain nor hero. even though it seems hes acting like a villain on purpose… maybe just to screw with pple?
also he works with archon? a contractor for them i think it was.
Yup. He’s quite the interesting character.
Remember that his motivations are still unknown. He might not even be a villain
Oh, I havve *got* to see this..
Why would Deus fudge the numbers? Galtyn was explicitly a shithole *by African standards* when Deus took it over, so by using that as a standard for comparison Deus has made these miraculous gains compared to a civil-war-torn country where the winning side was run by a shortsighted corrupt sadist. No additional fudging should be required. That said, it is an interesting question how much better off the average person in Galtyn is compared to how well off the average person in the part of Zaire which became Galtyn was ten or twenty years before Deus took over.
I’d guess there’s another ten or twenty years left during which Galtyn’s prosperity and Machina Industries’ interests coincide, after which the new generation is going to want its own country and probably isn’t going to want to buy back its own infrastructure from Westerners.
If Deus is really *really* smart he’ll have already sold most of the infrastructure back to the government before that’s happened, and Machina Industries will be nothing more than the Galtyn’s biggest employer. Don’t like them? Don’t work for them — by that point, if Deus is willing to do things like sell back the infrastructure, there will be both government jobs and small business jobs.
With his proven track record and a few years to shop around, Deus can probably buy another small country for the assembly-line jobs that by then will be expensive to hire in Galtyn, without needing to murder the warlord this time.
I doubt he’ll sell the infrastructure, but no doubt it’ll be local sister companies, staffed from top to bottom with locals.
If you look at how much the big oil companies own in the oil producing countries, I doubt the Galtyners would have much to complain
By keeping all his holdings as a local company (Gal-Tech?) he also avoids paying U.S. income taxes. He may also be able to offset taxes in his other other companies by claiming his investment costs as deductions against earnings elsewhere.
I was going to suggest he name his electronics company Galtron, but it sounds too much like a giant robot.
That’s all the MORE reason to name it Galtron.
You’d be surprised how much the big oil companies are owned or controlled BY the oil producing countries.
The three biggest oil-producing companies (by volume of oil) are, in descending order, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and NIOC – owned respectively by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Iran.
PetroChina is the #4 producer some years, #5 (behind Exxon Mobil) other years. The majority of its crude production is in other countries, but roughly a quarter is in China.
Petroleos Mexicanos and Kuwait Petroleum Company are also in the top-ten of oil producing companies.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/280705/leading-oil-companies-worldwide-based-on-daily-oil-production-2012/
Conciser me corrected. Though there’s probably some small country with oil out there who’s entire oil infrastructure is owned by some outside company