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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Also, while the reporter’s expression after Deus’s assurance that his facilities have air conditioning is priceless, that air conditioning is a huge plus in the quality-of-life for those facilities’ workers. That particular defense of his factories may be a cheap shot, but it actually makes a good point. When I was a preteen I did nine days of heavily mechanized agricultural labor, and I’d much rather work in an air conditioned factory than do that again, let alone do the third world equivalent.
Anyone who things air conditioning is a joke hasn’t had to work without air conditioning,
Word up. Even just working with BAD air conditioning is easily unbearable.
I said it on another message board but im going to say it here. Deus is Pragmatic Evil. He has his goals and will do whatever it takes to get there, but he doesnt kick puppies for fun and he doesnt grind the populace under his heel to feed his ego. He understands that a relatively happy populace is far less trouble than one trapped under grinding misrule. Yeah you dont exactly have to worry about farm implement wielding peasants, but all it takes is a slip up and a moment of weakness for an entire country that hates you to rise up and cause massive issues. He isnt improving their lives because he cares about the people, he is improving their lives because it earns him their loyalty, increases their ability to provide whatever he is after, and allows him to portray himself as the good guy on an international front.
And most of them will probably die at some point not knowing that he is that way. They’ll instead be thankful to him
They should be. Does it really matter WHY he is improving their lives? Unless he plans to sacrifice them later he is making their lives better, it doesnt matter much to them why.
This thought, right here? This is how evil overlords stay in power.
The morons who grind their own people under their heel? Some rebel uprising, brave underground, or rag-tag band of freedom fighters comes along to topple them sooner or later, or their whole government unspools when entropy does what no one else can. Those guys are idiots who make themselves targets.
The evil overlords who stay in power, the smart ones, treat their own people well, and oppress the hell out of someone else. The people need an enemy, or a threat, after all. Why kill the goose when it’ll keep laying golden eggs forever?
Oppressing someone else makes no more pragmatic sense than oppressing your own populace.
Shachar
“Oppressing someone else makes no more pragmatic sense than oppressing your own populace.”
Unfortunately it does, in realpolitik.
Can you imagine how in the US Patriot Act I & II would have gone over without the Oval Office beating on the fear drum every day for months?
Gaius Marius in ancient rome managed to convert the Legions into a career move for the common citizenry and empoverished rather than just for landed noblemen – the single thing which catapulted Rome into the position of becoming a world power rather than a provincial one. If Rome hadn’t been scared senseless by a million hungry germans that would never have happened.
From a purely pragmatic sense having your citizenry in permanent fear of a foreign power – terrorists, the nation next door, catholics, etc – allows you as a ruler to run legislation through which the nation as a whole would wholeheartedly reject in saner times.
You say that, but he’s not oppressing anyone except objectively evil tyrants. How now, brown cow?
What do they care why he’s making their lives great? He’s still making their lives great, that’s what’s important here
He also needs to keep the people loyal and happy while he spends his time looking for the the lost temple of Aba-Daba-Do where he will find the three mystic stones of ultimate power that will let him rule the world! MWA-HA-HA! (click…click…silence) Dang, this thing never works.
Yeah I’m still waiting for the other sore to drop on WHY Deus picked this place to take over. There has to be an ulterior motive.
small enough that he could afford to build infrastructure, new enough that there was little to no established power structure to oppose him, decent location to establish trade routes to other more civilized nations (need to get those cellphones and tee shirts to stores somehow) and a dictator easily replaced with few to no people who would miss him.
Plus he had a good replacement for the dictator, as the kid seemed pretty smart and not evil.
All of this, plus with the dictator in his pocket and the infrastructure paid out of it, the corporate and tax laws (among others) there are probably whatever Deus wants them to be. No extradition treaties for his employees with “reputations” in other parts of the world, no laws about what is or isn’t legal to ship or store there, no part of the nosy international let’s-police-all-the-supers crowd.
Those are answers to “why take over a country?” not “why this country?”
Good points though.
Not this again!!
*ahem* “A few billion in, a few dozen billion out over time.”
Why does there need to be an ulterior motive? Are billions of dollars not enough motivation on their own?
This is something that many writers have pointed out in both the past and present. George RR Martin’s Joffrey is actually a portrayal why it being an evil, mad, sadistic king actually is not productive to political stability.
The real reason why writers write terrible, horrible, sadistic leaders is because it makes the story less morally ambiguous, the hero more glorious and the villains more threatening.
In practice, mad, bloodthirsty rulers tend to get involved in wars that don’t turn out so well for them (*cough* a certain German *cough*). Sadists don’t make many friends and rulers need friends. Being mad means you have a tenuous grip on reality which means either your government reflects that or the government decides to work around you. And so on.
Deus here? I think he’s genuinely not lying here, or at least not everything he says or how he says it. If nothing else, I think it genuinely smooths his ego to help a country out of war-ridden poverty, even if he has ulterior motives for the country in question.
Agreed.
Most of the time when i read a story with a mad bloodthirsty or otherwise corrupt ruler as a bad guy, i can’t help but think “why hasn’t anyone killed this guy yet?”.
Though lot of fantasy writers can cheat by giving the ruler enough power to stay in power, but even then the question often arises.
Just look at Warhammer 40K, Chaos and Dark Eldar specifically, both had to eventually be given pragmatic villain tropes to explain why they keep surviving, and being able to remain a threat.
Except that never happened with Dark Eldar, far as I know. Chaos was slightly sympathetic from the get go (okay, 2nd edition) if only because of the massive amounts of daddy issues the Traitor Legions posses, but those crazy shits from Commorragh are absolutely fucking disgusting in every way. They’re the most evil race in 40k, and that takes some doing.
The Eldar society was so decadent and debased that they were personally responsible for birthing Slaanesh, the Prince of Excess. They watched their bullshit create a new Chaos god and destroy their entire civilization. They watched trillions of their fellow Eldar get eaten from the inside out. A hole in space gets torn open due to their actions that starts to pour out demons into the real world, probably forever. All of this has put the entire material plane perilously close to being swallowed whole by the Warp, destroying all of reality, and this event reduces their entire species to a few farflung colony ships, desperately trying to outrun their extinction.
The Dark Eldar looked at all of this and, as a group, unanimously decided that this was insufficient reason to maybe not be so fucking high all the time. They didn’t get dragged down by a crapsack-universe. They are directly responsible for shitting things up for everyone forever.
Where, exactly, did they get even an iota of pragmatism in that madness?
Preach, brother, preach!
Nobody has nor ever will wipe out the Dark Eldar. I don’t say this as a Dark Eldar player (I play Wolves and Tau. It is just they are not enough of a persistant threat to warrant extermination. The Dark Eldar don’t take territory or destroy mass production, they are raiders. They show up to a planet, take some slaves, kill some folk, then leave. At worst they occasionally go pirate on some shipping lanes. The Imperium doesn’t care, hI’m an resources are not something they lack, they care more about production and territory. Other races either have no means of fighting them (Tau and probably Orks) or have persistant reasons not to (Craft world Eldar)
Yeah, I agree that nobody will ever wipe them out, but not for lack of trying. It’s because it’s impossible to find the entrance to Commorragh for anyone who isn’t an Eldar, and even if (by some miracle) you found your way there, it would be impossible to navigate. It’s one of those eldritch locations that start with parallel lines that intersect, and just goes nuts from there.
Of course, the Tau will never be wiped out either, despite the fact that they should’ve been exterminated long ago. Whenever it looks like the Tau are going to lose, Games Workshop conveniently comes up with something more important for the Imperium to fight somewhere else, like Hive Fleet Behemoth, the 2nd Armageddon War, or Failbaddon’s 13th Black Crusade. It got really hard to swallow in that latest War Zone: Damocles book, which offers no explanation of any kind as to why the Imperial Fleet – a small force which outnumbers the ENTIRE Tau navy by a considerable margin – doesn’t just go to T’au and glass the planet.
Frankly, nobody is ever going to be wiped out, because Status Quo is the name of the 40k game.
I never said DA or Chaos are likeable.
Just that, by necessity, they need to have some form of functional society behind them.
And not all pants on head crazy sadists who do nothing but torture, maim and destroy and stab each other in the back at drop of a hat.
I mean, they will do all of that, they just are able to not do that when it’s necessary not to.
… except being pants-on-head crazy sadists who do nothing but torture, maim, destroy, and stab people in the back at the drop of a hat is exactly one-half of everything the dark eldar do. Of course, you also forgot rape, that’s pretty important to Asdrubael “Ladies it is this big point to a hole for it or I will make one myself” Vect. The other half of what they do consists entirely of getting high on drugs made up of ground-up children. There is absolutely nothing pragmatic about the dark eldar at all, that’s kind of the whole point of the dark eldar. They’re pre-tolkein elves just set in space, fucking with everyone and fucking up everything just for shits and giggles, and the only thing keeping them from being wiped out entirely is that it’s impossible to find the fuckers unless they’re outside Commorragh. That, and they have guns that essentially fling incandescent dark matter and miniature stars around.
Maybe it’s because even “the good guys” are utter shits in that game universe. The Empire is led by an undead, psionic godling who rules a ruthless, utterly totalitarian regime. The Space Marines are in various states of being werewolves or vampires or just raising up babies to implant with cybernetics and combat drug kits so they can fight for their entire lives with no hope for mustering out or a peaceful retirement somewhere behind the lines.
Not as if that was his intention, mind you. He wanted to abolish all belief in gods, because he knew that belief actually would make the Chaos Gods stronger. He didn’t even want them to worship him as a god… that happened after his death. He isn’t actually undead, either… if the Golden Throne ever fails, he’s dead for good. He’s on terminal life support, and that life support is starting to fail (and the Adeptus Mechanicus don’t know how to fix it). And when it does fail, the Imperium will fall due to lack of FTL travel, though there may still be some clusters of worlds connected by the handful of safe passages through the Warp, created by the Ancients.
(The Emperor is the source of the Astronomican, which can be thought of as a “psychic lighthouse” that makes it possible to navigate the Warp. Without it, only the safe passages I talked about, will be usable. The rest of the human worlds will be limited to sublight, and a lot of those worlds are NOT self-sustaining. Most of the “Hive Worlds” are almost completely reliant on imported food from Agri-Worlds, who in turn are almost completely reliant on Hive Worlds for their technology.)
The other thing that he was trying to do was to build the human equivalent of the Eldar Webway, so that humanity would have a safe method of FTL travel (even with the Astronomican, ships can end up thousands of light years off course, or arrive decades later than they should, because travel through the Warp is that unpredictable. In some cases, they can arrive before they left… sometimes by millenia. And that’s assuming they’re not simply torn apart and lost forever.)
Um, no. The werewolves thing applies only to the Space Wolves chapter. And not really werewolves; a select few of their recruits do transform into “Wulven”, which are usually killed when found. (It’s a one-way transformation, btw. They can never be human again.)
The “vampires” thing applies only to the Blood Angels, Blood Drinkers, and Flesh Tearers chapters, and any other chapters descended from the Blood Angels geneseed (such as the Angels Encarmine and Angels Numinous). They’re not “vampires”, by the way; due to a mutation in about 50% of their geneseed (see my comments on the geneseed below), they have a bloodlust (the Red Thirst) that eventually locks them into a violent rage (the “Black Rage”). And yes, the Blood Drinkers have an actual thirst for blood, which is how they get their name. But they don’t run around biting people.
The grand total of “werewolves” and “vampires” is less than 5,000 troops out of about a million. After the Horus Heresy, they were broken into “One thousand chapters of one thousand Space Marines each”, so that no one person can ever wield as much power over the Space Marines as Horus did.
There are NO cybernetics or combat drug kits involved in the creation of the Space Marines, except for the Iron Hands chapter, who replace one of their hands with a bionic one (and add more bionics over the course of their lifetime). It’s all genetically-engineered organs (the geneseed), which the Emperor originally designed. Unfortunately, the geneseed in some of the chapters has mutated, and nobody knows how to fix it. For example, about 90% of the Salamanders have black skin and red eyes due to a mutation in the Melanchromic Organ. Other Chapters have glands that have mutated to the point they’re totally non-functional, such as the Imperial Fists, whose Betcher’s Glands and Sus-An Membrane do not function.
(The “Melanchromic Organ” causes the skin to darken when exposed to solar radiation… think of it as having a built-in tanning booth. The Betcher’s Glands allows them to spit a blinding contact poison and eventually burn through metals. The Sus-An Membrane allows them to enter a state of suspended animation, able to keep the Space Marine alive for years even if they’ve suffered mortal wounds. However, they cannot EXIT suspended animation without chemical therapy. There are a grand total of 19 implanted organs.)
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that the above comment is all about how things aren’t exactly like how I laid it out, except for the multiple cases where it is exactly like how I laid it out?
“They aren’t werewolves!” Except for the ones who are *wink wink* “wolven.”
“They aren’t vampires!” Except for the ones who have a *wink wink* “red thirst.”
“They don’t use cybernetics!” Except in the cases where they do use cybernetics.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
#1: I am not a lady. :)
#2: The “Red Thirst” is their name for the berserker rage. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of people “getting so angry they could only see red”. There’s two chapters that drink blood (and one of those is non-canonical, and actually were founded from the Ultramarine geneseed, not the Blood Angels.) And they only drink their own blood, not other people’s. Which makes them very much not vampires, in the sense that you were implying.
#3: The entire Emperium uses bionics (cloned parts are available but very uncommon). But only the Iron Fists use it as part of their creation process. So it’s not like all the Space Marines do it, which is what you were implying.
Sorry… “getting so angry they saw red”, not “could only see red”. My mistake.
Also, not only am I not a lady, I’m not even female. Let me double-check just to be sure. (Looks in pants) Yep, that is very much a penis down there.
Heh. I like the idea that he’s targetting his villainy positively like that.
“Those fools! They said it couldn’t be done, they said it was IMPOSSIBLE! Nobody could single-handedly raise a war-torn African country to First World status in a single decade, but I showed them- I SHOWED THEM ALL!”
It’s actually ridiculous to assume they’d use their powers negatively to start with, unless they are really grade-a asshole to begin with. If you had incredible powers of genetic engineering to create a creatures to serve you, it would surely occur to you to make something like a cure for cancer along the way for any number of reasons.
The other thing is that doing great, positive deeds is as much food for the ego as anything else. Deus probably also gives away to charity not just as a duty of a billionaire, but because the knowledge that he made a difference also fuels his ego. Hell, there are probably non-supervillain billionaries and other rich folk who devote themselves to this if they can. Making a good difference to the world can be a very positive experience.
Thats why I hate jurassic park. Why? Because these people hold the secret to cloning extinct species and yet they havent made all the money on earth doing everything else first before opening a dino park. They could erase all congenital defects and genetic diseases. They could clone organs thus erasing the waiting list for transplants and greatly reducing the odds of rejection, burn victims getting new skin, paraplegics getting a functional spinal cord, amputees getting their limbs back. Thats just scratching the surface in the medical field, let alone virtually every other field in existence. Clone food means never having to say “sorry, we ran out of that” Cloned species means never having to say, “Sorry, we shot the last one of that” A dino park should be the last step in the career of a ceo who has so many digits in his bank account they had to create new numbers just to name it. Hammond shouldnt need backers, he should be building and funding the park with the spare change in his sofa. T-rex getting out of hand? Bury it under his scrooge mcduck level of cash till it smothers.
Depends on which Hammond you’re talking about. The one in the novel was far more interested in profit. He was frequently upset with his employees, and cared more about the safety of his expensive animals. He was a hustler whose true talent lay in raising money, hence all the backers.
He was also an industrialist, not a naturalist or a humanitarian. He wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart, he was doing it for money. He also had a Machiavellian desire to control his creations (as Ellie pointed out in the movie, he never really had control, he just thought he did), and an incredible amount of overconfidence… he was absolutely sure that his parks in Europe and Japan would be successful in five years, earning an annual revenue of more than $20 billion a year.
The events of Jurassic Park left his corporation on the verge of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and Hammond was already an old man when he started the project… he died four years later, bedridden, on life support. Obviously, the movie version was a far more sympathetic character.
In any case, the events of the movie are impossible anyway. DNA degrades rapidly… it has a half-life of around 520 years. The University of Manchester has actually tried to extract DNA from insects preserved in copal (copal is the intermediate stage between tree resin and amber). Even if they could find specimens of insects that had originally fed on dinosaurs, they wouldn’t be able to extract DNA at all. (In fact, Manchester wasn’t even able to find DNA in blood that was just 60 years old, much less thousands of years old.) And the whole thing about using frog DNA to fill in the gaps? Applied Phlebotinum to make the whole idea about some of the female dinosaurs changing sex work.
As far as “erasing all congenital defects and genetic diseases”… you’d have to have a very humanitarian CEO and/or government to even want to do such a thing. Why? One simple reason: Treating a disease is far more profitable (and provides more jobs) than curing it.
If it’s better to treat the disease then cure it, explain antibiotics and vaccines then. One is a cure and the other is a preventative cure. They are the greatest successes in medicine and what allow modern, human society possible. Both are made in large quantities every day and great efforts are made to make more varieties of them.
The logic is stupid and the rallying cry of people who “WHY HAVEN’T YOU CURED CANCER YET?!” as if there was some guarantee that there is one. The universe did not write you a warranty form that promises that every malady can be cured if you throw enough money at it. There are lots of stuff that we don’t have a straight-up cure because that’s the limitations of our age’s medicine. But hey, if you actually look at medical history, you’d note that the number of stuff we can handle seems to be only increasing.
Do you know what makes the logic especially stupid? Cures actually sell very, very well. Treatments that don’t cure will always produce a dead body, but a healthy person can always get sick again to be cured yet again. What’s more, many of the richest countries have socialized healthcare where the government is footing a bill and would rather like it if a cheaper cure would be around. The same goes for insurance companies.
But even if for some ridiculous reason they wouldn’t sell well, here’s a fact: rich and powerful people get stuff like cancer too. They want to be cured and they’ll have the resources and power to get that cure if there is one. So even if you are a crazy, supervillain living safely in their paradise-fortress, not giving a fuck about the world or anyone else… they’d look into it once they or their love-slaves get an incurable disease.
Or, you know, they can get a paradise fortress because they made a cure that makes them incredible amount of money, all of it honestly earned and everyone will let you get away with having love-slaves because you cured a lots of people’s grannies.
And even if not, here’s another thing: doing it will give you unlimited bragging rights for decades if not for the rest of your life. You have not only shown them all how awesome you are but most of them will heartily agree that you are awesome. Your name will be written into history books. They’ll make statues of you. You can ask the number of almost any supermodel, actress, celebrity you want and a good deal of them would probably fight each other to your door just to bask at your fame.
I never said it was BETTER to treat the disease. I said it was MORE PROFITABLE to treat the disease. At least, if the disease is something that won’t kill you as long as you remember to take the extremely expensive pills they sell you.
A good example, by the way, is the zombie disease in Dead Rising. As long as you have your overpriced Zombrex once a day, you won’t turn into a zombie. Of course, Phenotrans has a cure, but they haven’t revealed it to the public. Why would they, when they’re making $300 a dose?
Or the Gray Death in Deus Ex… as long as you get your dose of Ambrosia vaccine once a month, you won’t catch the Gray Death. (Though in this case, the disease is not a natural one in the first place, it’s nanotechnology, and the same company… a front for Majestic 12… manufactures both the disease AND the vaccine.)
Granted, these are fictional diseases, and both are examples of the “Evil corporation” or “evil conspiracy group” stereotypes, but there are real-world diseases that still have no cure, and in some cases no vaccine either.
Fortunately, I can give you one real-world example: The common cold! There’s more than 200 different viruses that can cause the symptoms; some of them still haven’t been identified! (Most colds are caused by some strain of the rhinovirus, coronavirus, or parainfluenza, but some 20-30% of all colds are caused by unknown viruses.) It’s impractical to vaccinate someone against 200 different viruses, and there’s no cure other than to let it run its course. There are an estimated one billion colds every year, in America alone! Don’t you think the pharmaceutical companies are making big money on selling products that provide symptom relief?
P.S., It does make you wonder if there’s some sort of job requirement to have some sort of mental disorder to be an employee of Umbrella (Resident Evil, obviously) or Phenotrans (Dead Rising) or the GRE (Dying Light). Take a look at Birkin, who developed the G-virus in Resident Evil. He’s psychotic, his wife’s neurotic, and we won’t even go into Wesker… is there a field on the job application that says “What form of insanity do you have?”
It is telling that you bring up fictional examples to try and support your argument. It is abundantly clear that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and confusing reality with fiction.
Here is your problem: you think that the reason there is no cure is because someone is hiding one for the sake of money.
The reality is that there isn’t a cure because our knowledge of biology and medicine is simply lacking. Scientific research isn’t a candy-shop where you can get anything if you throw enough money at it. Biological research is especially complicated because the systems in question have systems within system that are enclosed in even bigger, interconnected systems that affect systems on multiple levels.
When medical researchers say “science is hard” they don’t mean that doing it is exhausting. It means that, no matter how much effort, money and brilliance is spent, research is a slow, semi-blind waddling towards promising noises in a dark cave. The universe does not bend over itself and spread its buttcheeks just because we can do a little science. It’s the other way around and we can only hope that our desperate, methodical search might discover some hidden bit in the vast, complex functioning of the universe that we could make use of.
What makes you think that there is a cure for a disease available to us? Imagine you are a doctor in 1665. The cure would be antibiotics that weren’t discovered until 1928. What makes you think that the cure for, say, common cold isn’t locked into some technology or science we will only discover a hundred years from now? If you were a doctor like this you would try everything you know, every drug, poultice, trick and things you can. You might even make money off of it. It doesn’t change the fact that you do not have antibiotics, that the majority of your patients will die and most of all, you can get infected and die too.
Christ, I’m NOT saying that there’s “not a cure because someone is hiding one for the sake of money”. I’m saying that someone COULD hide one for the sake of money… the motivation is there. Get that through your thick skull!
Here is YOUR problem: You are assuming that what I said about someone’s comments about Jurassic Park, has anything to do with what I believe in the real world!
For example, I very specifically said that the reason there is no cure for the common cold is because some of the viruses that cause the symptoms haven’t been identified yet, and because it’s simply not practical to vaccinate someone against that many viruses (especially when the symptoms are non-lethal. If they were lethal, I guarantee someone would be actively working on a cure.)
YOU, of course, decided to assume that I meant “the reason there’s no cure for the common cold is because someone is hiding it”. Do yourself a favor and stop putting words in my mouth.
(Jeez, once again I wish I had an Edit button so I could combine these three posts into one. And so I could delete that “get that through your thick skull” line. That’s slightly offensive; I apologize for that one. It just bugs me when people start putting words in my mouth.)
The POINT is this: The original poster said, paraphrased, “I hate Jurassic Park, because anyone who had that kind of knowledge about genetic engineering to clone dinosaurs should have done that as a ‘crowning achievement’ after he had developed cures for all congenital defects and genetic diseases”
and my reply, paraphrased, was: “Yes, but Hammond… the one in the books, not the one in the movies… was an industrialist, not a humanitarian. He is exactly the kind of person who would develop both a treatment and a cure, and then sit on the cure because he made more money treating the disease.”
YOU… and ONLY you… are the one who took my reply, misinterpreted it, made assumptions about what you thought I meant, and decided that I’m one of those conspiracy nutcases that thinks there’s some big pharma conspiracy to withhold cures for lethal diseases.
I understood you perfectly. It is simply you are not reading anything I’m saying, and just keep saying the same thing over and over again: greed is all-powerful and people would create conspiracies to hide a cure just for the sake of profits you also blindly keep insisting must also exist by citing fictional examples.
I’ve addressed this in my first reply: cures sell very well. Antibiotics are the most, if not then one of the most, made medicines in the world. Exclusive patents keep many big pharmaceutical companies afloat. Zithromax alone made 2 billion dollars in 2005 for its company Pfizer.
And if the cure is indeed cheaper to produce than treatment, then there is a perfectly valid, even legal option to fix that: sell the cure for more than the treatment. People would still buy it or pressure their insurance/governments to buy it for them. Viola, lost profits regained.
This is not to mention the researchers involved. For most researchers, personal glory and recognition far outweigh any amount of money involved. A good deal of them probably entered the field in the first place precisely to find such a cure.
If one of them discovered said cure and their boss told them to shut about it, they’d leak it the first opportunity they get. Who doesn’t want to win a Nobel prize and world-wide glory? Even if there was a risk to their health, they’d still do it.
And even if you shoot the researcher and confiscate everything, you still want to keep the cure for yourself or your fantasy conspiracy that you insist must exist based on your childish understanding of the economics of medicine. The problem is that now it is a secret for something that a good deal of people want. Someone who knows about the cure will get sick with the appropriate disease or have a loved one who is. So they are going to use it and thus the conspiracy widens with every sick case. Sooner or later someone is going to leak it by accident or design. This is not even getting to all the possible journalists, hackers and just straight up moral people.
And there will be plenty of people to listen: many governments ,who pay for their citizens’ healthcare, would be interested in a cure that is cheaper than treatment for a disease its citizens suffer from. Dead citizens pay no taxes. They also fund researchers that will not be part of the conspiracy and would investigate if the cure made sense. And if they discover do discover that a cure was hidden, they can do things to destroy your hypothetical conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies and their profits.
So no, in matter of fact, they COULDN’T keep it a secret. In the modern, interconnected world it is actually very, very hard to keep a secret. Government and military secrets of the most powerful nations are leaked regularly.
The line “they’d hide the cure because they get more money out selling treatments” is the line of charlatans trying to explain why their untested, unregulated “cures” are not known world-wide. Usually to people with fatal diseases like cancer, doing harm by making people pursue bullshit snake-oil over real medicine and giving them false hope.
The line is bullshit, you are sprouting bullshit and I’m calling you out on it.
Alright, you know what? At no point did I *ever* say that this kind of thing happens in real life. No, seriously. Go back and re-read *everything* I said. Show me at what point I said “people in real life would hide the cure.”
Can’t find it? Didn’t think so. Because I said no such thing. I was talking about John Hammond, a fictional character, and YOU decided that I must be saying “this happens in real life”.
Nor did I ever, at any point, say “greed is all powerful.” You’re making up bullshit and saying that I said that, and I’m calling YOU out on it. More or less, what I’m saying is, “if they could get away with hiding a cure, greed is one possible motivation.” You can make more money by repeatedly selling a remedy than you can by selling one dose of cure.
All I’ve said… All I’ve EVER said (or at least what I was trying to say)… is that John Hammond, a fictional character, in the Jurassic Park novels, was exactly the kind of asshole who would do such a thing if he could. (And even then, after the events on Isla Nubla, he changed.) It’s YOU who stubbornly keep repeating your bullshit about how “You must be one of those idiots who don’t know the difference between fiction and reality.”
Oh, and I’m talking specifically about diseases for which a cure would only have to be taken ONCE. Using your example of antibiotics, if you got infected with the same bacteria again, you’d have to take the cure again. That’s not the kind of disease I was talking about.
Cancer doesn’t qualify either. As far as we know with our current medical knowledge, even if there was a cure that remedies one kind of cancer, it doesn’t guarantee that you can’t get another form of cancer, or that you can’t have same form of cancer spontaneously occur somewhere else in your body.
MSpears never asserted that. I concur with his assessment and I’m not claiming any conspiracy either.
The practice behind vaccine and penicillin were not discovered through for-profit investigation. Very few, if any, cures, are. It’s that simple.
See, pharmaceutical companies, when they decide to invest in research, above all look at how well the treatment will sell over the twenty years covered by the medical patent. Therefore they invest in what will sell and keep selling. Almost every actual cure is funded by government money.
There’s no conspiracy needed to explain why a profit-driven corporation invests in whatever will bring the biggest long-term payoff.
Case in point: We’ve known for the last twenty years that there are microbials now resistant to every antibiotic we possess. It takes twenty years to research a new antibiotic from scratch. The only ones to currently work on that are government-funded researchers. Corporations will step in only once the groundwork’s been done – the core antibiotic – and they can spin a variant or three of their own to brand and patent.
When Martin Shkreli hiked the price of AIDS medication from USD 13,50 to 750 a dose he did what every corporate CEO is obligated to do, and what they learn to do. He calculated how much profit he could squeeze from a treatment which afflicted needed in order to live. Most pharmaceutical CEO’s aren’t that obvious but they all run a similar game.
There’s no coverup or conspiracy. The people with money and a lab simply won’t spend that money on the less profitable research of “cures”.
Creating a single cell (an egg is a single cell) with new genetics based on known information is not the same as modifying existing genetics. Modifying an existing organism’s genetics is much harder. And people creating new non-sapient life can deal with multiple failures – it is OK if the first 100 or 1000 so come out dead or horribly mutated. Jurassic Park admittedly only showed the successes, but the failures are implicit. But try that with people and there will be massive backlash.
I personally see Deus as being Chaotic Good, “I’m gonna make things better for myself and everyone here and I don’t care how many people i have to kill to do so”
Ummm… but THAT isn’t Chaotic GOOD, that’s Chaotic Evil…
I’d say lawful evil instead. Chaotic good is more of “I’ll save the world, but I need to steal a few things.”
Or as I’ve discovered in the game Infamous. I’m more absentminded chaotic good. When I test my abilities, I accidentally harm a crowd a people. Then I freak out and try to heal the survivors
It’s i have a personal moral code but damn the laws if they get in the way
The difference is intentions. Chaotic good does bad things for good reasons and good things for betterreasons Lawful(Pragmatic?True?) Evil does good things for bad reasons and bad things for worse reasons.
There we go, that’s what i was trying to say
Good people, even of a chaotic bent, generally do care how many people they have to kill to achieve a goal. Even neutral people care how many people they have to kill. Once you say “…and I don’t care how many people I have to kill to do it!” you’re solidly in Evil Country, where other people and their lives are merely a means to an end.
tell me, does a chaotic good ranger care about how many ogres or trolls, whom are objectively people and are fully sentient, he has to kill in order to protect his village? or does the harper care how many Zhentarim she has to kill in order to further the organization’s goals? as long as the people you are killing are objectively evil it is still a good or neutral action to kill them without remorse.
And this is why D&D philosophy breaks down outside of that reality… :)
Considering the Ogres, Trolls, etc. are the ones attacking the village in the first place, and the Zhentarim are Always Chaotic Evil, I’d say he shouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Now, if the Ogres, Trolls, etc were trying to live in peace, and co-exist with the village (instead of trying to snack on the inhabitants) and the villagers were attacking them for no good reason, our Chaotic Good ranger should have a problem with that.
And yet, in D&D it’s considered perfectly okay to travel to unknown regions, find communities of things that aren’t in conflict with any ‘peaceful settlements’ to one’s knowledge, kill them all, and take their stuff. Because they happen to be of an evil race, or radiate evil.
It’s called ‘adventuring’ or ‘exploring’.
Let’s face it, “alignment” is a pretty outdated concept. I can only think of a few RPGs (that are still being published, and/or have new material being written for them) that even bother with alignments anymore. Obviously it was a lot more common in the “old-school” RPGs. Good and evil are both words that are relative to the person observing the events, and even the most “evil” person can do good things, even if it’s for selfish reasons. (And just for the sake of being inclusive, good people can do evil things for selfish reasons too. Being selfish is not something that’s limited only to “evil” people.)
No disagreement here.
Yet we still have people using it in serious discussions, trying to pigeonhole people into the D&D alignments, etc, etc.
…..
God, it’s a far nerdier world than when I was young and playing more. This is, mostly, not a bad thing. :D
So, all three Galytn people (the baby not included) have some strange markings on their arms.
First guess: Deus is trying to make a country full of supers, or at least figure out what *causes* them. And if he has an entire population to do it with, research goes a lot faster.
That is the author trying to find a way for the reader to recognize the girl as the same person. She is seen injured in the first panel and has a scar on that arm in the following panels. (It was probably easier to make out before it was shrunk down to web display size)
Heh, yeah that makes a lot more sense.
Actually mentioned that on the first page :P
Actually, I like that theory. We know supers come from developed, advanced nations more often than not. What if Deus is trying to farm a Supers military devoted and loyal to only him? We talk many times about motivations of people and loyalties. Obligation is a great one. “You raised my mother from squalor, you fed her, educated her, kept her healthy. Then you did that for me. And you will do that for my children. You ended a madman’s reign of destruction. What can I do for you?”
50 Shades of Morality. For some you just can tell until the final tally where they lie along the Morality Spectrum.
Still, surprised he;d even use the phrase “cackling manically” on a television program. Though I’ve heard people say worse things in public and still hive high approval ratings. Maybe he figured the viewers woudl think it’s funny, or maybe he doesn’t care.
If that Thunderbox had been set off, it might have been a shock to Ms. St. Croix.
Speaking of which, C.C. St. Croix reminds me of someone, but I can’t remember who. Another female host of a business/economics news and interview program.
Maria Bartiromo?
That is the person I was thinking about.
She doesn’t really look anything like C.C. St. Croix.
I think Deus believes no one will take a statement like that seriously. Security through Audacity?
I imagine the King of the country setting aside a certain percentage of the national income for a fund to have Deus assassinated.
I also imagine Deus taking this as a complement and allowing it.
Why would he? Deus and his company are the entire reason he HAS that money, and he’s also the entire reason that money is still growing.
Remember that part about ‘would you like to be the richest man in africa’? He doesn’t even have to do anything for it, Deus runs the country.
Being a powerless figurehead sounds amazing, I’d be down
Being a powerless black king in forced servitude to a pompous white asshole who killed your father right in front of you. Lots of reasons for the locals to want Deus killed. Besides, with Deus dead they could nationalize the industries he built and now all that money goes to them.
Being a SUPER RICH king, living a life of ultimate luxury, in servitude to a white guy, who killed your warlord father who you had little connection with, and who turned out to be a cartoon villain.
And why would the locals want him dead? Their lives have improved exponentially, and that trend is probably still climbing.
A poor ruler might want to kick Deus out and nationalize his infrastructure, but such a thing doesn’t exist here. The country is rich. Taking over all foreign assets is a great way to lose ALL credibility on the international market, turning your export based infrastructure worthless.
Why risk that when they are already becoming rich off of it.
Remember how Deus takes a portion of the GDP as salary? That means he has a vested interest in making the country itself as rich as possible. You are suggesting they kill their golden goose here
You’re also falling into America-centric thinking- He’s not someone who’s come from a history of slavery- though there’s been race issues in Africa, that sort of institutionalized servility hasn’t been one of them, and so Deus being white wouldn’t really factor in to any sort of anger or resentment towards him, aside from him being an ‘outsider’.
Unless it’s near to South Africa which has a history of a little thing called Apartheid, which did indeed foster a great deal of resentment between whites and blacks, by design.
Sure, but those white people did sortoff the exact opposite to what Deus is doing now.
The history of slavery spans nearly every culture, nationality and religion, from ancient times to present day.
Just as some constructive criticism, id like to point out that the black faces, mostly of background characters, look much worse than white faces in the background.
In terms of drawing*
The smaller I draw something, the worse it tends to look. I think that’s just an artifact of how I draw stuff though. I was actually pretty pleased with how the timeline character turned out, even if her neck is probably too long in the school picture.
School-girl neck seems about the same length as working-girl neck, just working-girl’s head is turned slightly to the right and you can’t see all of her neck
I’d argue that the difference between being a sweatshop and honest manufacturing is two-part. One, what are the conditions like in the the workplace? Two, are the workers able to improve their lot? Whether by collective bargaining i.e. unions or something as simple as being payed well enough that they can save up over long enough time so as to open options otherwise not available.
Does the sudden existence of a hospital and school count as improving their lot?
It’s a good start, better then in many countries.
Three, do they employ children? If they do, then yeah, it’s a sweatshop.
So, each and every school is basically a sweatshop, ergo education is evil and should be wiped from the face of Earth for the final triumph of Freedom and American Dream.
Seems legit.
Students aren’t employees. They’re students. They don’t earn the schools a profit by their actions in them, they just learn stuff.
right the kids are the product of the factory worker factory called public education. they are downloaded information to regurgitate later as they perform prespecified tasks at the time they are instructed without questioning or seeking to understand the reason for it.
Define “children”.
The U.S. defines adulthood at roughly 18. However, even within the U.S., there are states that put it lower for certain aspects of adulthood. There is also the drinking age which has been 21 (except during that period in our country when we couldn’t look ourselves in the mirror and still deny an 18-year-old who was going to be sent off to Vietnam the right to drink). However, 18 is not a universal rule for all countries. Eyeballing the third stage of that girl, she looks to be somewhere around 15-16 which could be considered an adult.
purchase age, every state has differing legal drinking ages it’s the purchase age that is national for alcohol
Erinovauch is correct. The legal purchase age for alcohol in the U.S. is 21. Only about 15 states make it illegal for anyone under 21 to drink alcohol, though.
17 more states don’t ban underage consumption at all, and the remaining 18 have family member or location exemptions to their consumption laws. (For example, Washington and Wisconsin allows the consumption of alcohol in the presence of parents.)
Fair enough
Is the worker allowed to walk away?
As an engineer who understands how useless stats can be in the wrong hands and a lover of Dune. This just made my day!
I love that he has that option though.
has anyone noticed you can vote twenty four times for twokinds comic ?
Some information on Cici. That is the slang word for breast in hungarian. My baby loves “cici”.
It’s more of a childish word for it. I somehow doubt that’s what the author intended here. I think it’s some American thing rather, they can have rather ridiculous names by accident.
It works both ways. I used to have a co-worker from China at my office who had the name Wang Dong. Both of which are perfectly fine names in Chinese. In English it can lead to much juvenile humor.
In DS9 the O’Brian’s were discussing names for their upcoming child and at the mention of one (I forget) Kira basically did a spit take with her coffee and said ‘Do you know what that means in Bajoran?”
Her name is actually C.C., which means she has two names starting with the letter ‘c’, so her real name could something like “Charlotte Claire” or “Catherine Constance”
How about the unfortunate name of “Lo Fat Dong”
Oh, hadn’t read her “Whos Who” blurb :(
The ‘X’ on Deus’s face has morphed a bit since page 131. It’s much more symmetrical now, and it looks thicker.
Evolution in drawing style, or is something else going on?
Just inconsistency in my art. I think his chin has about doubled in width too.
@DaveB
ACTUALLY *nerds up glasses*
1) the Women of the Dune-verse *could* pass that memory point, hence the later Honoured Maitres… They could pass the memory imprint, but it was extremely painfull for them…
2) while Paul may have been the proto-Kwisatz, it was Duncan Idaho who became the eventual True Kwisatz Haderach…
sorry for nerding out there :p
I like that Deus declines the “Thunderer”, it implies that he has a certain grip on his, what was the term, “Villainous Hyenism”?
I currently live in Sierra Leone, and the majority of the people here would kill their leaders for him, if he offered that kind of life. The corruption is so endemic at ALL levels and only they government has the weapons to force their will. The only group that seems to have any respect at all is the military, who kept the borders clear of people coming into the country with Ebola.
But that is it. They would gladly kill, or turn the buggers out, for what Galytn’s people have.
Honestly, I don’t really get why so many people are saying Deus is evil. He hasn’t really done all that much in the way of villainy, he just seems to have is own nebulous goals and really, really enjoys the trappings of evil masterminds(manic laughter, foreboding speeches, ominous lighting). I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s good necessarily, he’s probably more Lawful Neutral, but I can’t really say he’s done anything all that malevolent-maybe with the exception of supporting a warlord but he did that with the intention of deposing the git in the first place and it seemed more like a means to an end to me. From what I can tell I’d say he probably honestly has a good vision in mind for everyone, he’s just more than willing to get his hands(or more accurately, his minions’ hands) dirty to achieve it and sees nothing wrong with putting himself on top in the process.
I think the thing is that people want to put him in a category within the super hero genre.
Since he looks most like Lex Luthor or Dr Doom, that’s what people identify him as: such a villain. And he might be, but this comic is very good in turning tropes upside down, so Deus is never going to fit in such a role.
He has power through politics, so he has no reason to act as a super villain and build a death ray. He’s an actual evil mastermind, one that has read the Evil Overlord List
Funny you should mention Dr. Doom. Victor von Doom was the ruler of Latveria and, very much like Deus, most of his citizens were very happy with his rule. Of course, if you weren’t happy with his rule, you tended to disappear. It’s easy to be a benevolent ruler when everyone is happy with you. Despotism is revealed when someone disagrees with you.
He has amassed enough information on a person to personally determine that person to be an asshole, therefore kills him but only after determining that person to be an obstacle to his goals. It’s pretty obvious that he had the option to walk away instead. Or use his supers to depose the king in a nonlethal manner.
The actions of Deus in the country appear benevolent but kindly remember that we’ve been shown a man who believes, with all his heart, that he has the option to kill people who do not agree with him.
I’ll take exception with the frivolous use of the word “evil” since that’s always going to be a relative term, but I must say I’m a bit astonished at the way you’ve managed to conveniently gloss over the part where he calmly orders a murder.
Deus, here, is actually living up to an older archetype of “hero” than our usual modern Western (and Comics-oriented) mindset: the Conquering Hero.
It’s a phrase we hear periodically, but we rarely really examine what it means. The Conquering Hero is the Hero-King who did, yes, take over his kingdom with violence. But he does so not ONLY for his own sake, but because the pre-existing conditions were intolerable. Whether he’s an outsider coming in and seeking something he must rectify, or a member of that nation who can no longer stand the injustice of its leadership, the Conquering Hero overthrows the government, usually via what would today be termed assassination (though in the past was considered “honorable combat”), and takes over. He then makes it a better place.
Deus is really not acting the villain HERE. Though, IIRC, he had something to do with getting Vehemence together with his little posse, which WAS a villainous act (since it got people who were not violent to act violent, caused property damage, and injured innocents – the heroes of our story were in this case largely innocent, since they didn’t pick this fight). But if the worst he did was make the “Bring the Thunder” device and violently conquer a third-world nation run by monsters in order to improve the freedoms and lives of its people (who had no choice BEFORE he came in, anyway), even if it increases his own wealth and power? That’s heroic. In the classical sense, if nothing else.
Nothing has actually been said about Vehemence’s motivations, other than what Vehemence himself said (and he said ‘because all that violence is like christmas). So we don’t know anything about Deus having a hand in it.
The only clue would be the presence of Vekter in both the brawl and Deus’s service, but there’s 10 years between that. He could have moved on. And if he does work for Deus, Vehemence’s aura’s could have won him over without permission from his boss.
It’s totally possible Deus had a hand in the brawl, but that’s pure speculation at this point. Deus’ ultimate motivations are still completely unknown to us
You are right about the conquering hero part though, and I hadn’t even considered that before. Well said
I thought a hero-king is what you get when his country is invaded, so he forms a small army from his friends in the country he’s exiled to, recruits a few sympathetic soldiers from opposing armies, finds the sacred blade of light and the emblem required to wield it, so that he’s able to kill the evil priest and the shadow dragon?
Nah, that’s just how the stories are told a few hundred years later
(It’s literally the plot to the first Fire Emblem game)
Hi, Segev!
Liberty and Freedom must be earned periodically to be truly appreciated. If taken for granted, it soon disappears and is first replaced by apathy, indifference, ignorance and contempt, then by absolute power vested in the hands of a few.
Deus’ ‘subjects’ are happy now, but what will happen when they become more educated and aware and ‘happiness’ no longer satisfies them?
It depends on what Deus truly wants from his Galytn project. He might even make concessions for the populace. It might even be his plan. The figurehead he installed? What you are proposing may involve getting rid of him eventually anyway.
This is a guy who has plans within plans. For all we know he is using Galytn as a stepping stone for something bigger.
The thing is, that if what we see here is mostly true, Deus is actually responsible for ALLOWING the people to get more educated and aware in a country that has stability and development. That may be more than what the previous guy gave them.
My guess would be: That something bigger is turning Galytn in a major economic player, with him owning the majority of the infrastructure. It’d give him major influence in whoever rules the country, and, once the country is rich enough, way more influence on world politics than any amount of wealth could directly give you.
All of that works best if not just the country is happy with him, but the entire world acknowledges his contributions. It will be sneaky, but he’ll get the most power through being loved
the devil is never so seductive as when it wears the form of an angel type quote? but that fails to address that the devil in theology is an angel and demons are fallen angels that follow it.
Yes, I think that this is a very likely possibility. He is going for world domination and for that you kind of have to make the world willing to do that. I’m sure that a lot of viewers are thinking “Hey, if he could turn a war-torn, poor country into a stable and prosperous one. Man, I wish he would be President and not that *insert party-appropriate rhetoric here* doofus”.
There’s also the fact that you can’t just give a bunch of uneducated peasants the power to run a country. They are running that little experiment in the rest of Africa, and we can see how it’s turning out.
So at the very least they’ll need an entire generation of proper education in order to bring out the potential to form a functional government. Until then, Deus seems to be doing a damn fine job.
He’s smart. He probably knows that eventually, they’ll want to rule their own country. That’s why his control doesn’t rely on being part of the government. He owns the majority of the economy in that country, much like Shell and the like owning most of the oil production in the world. He’ll probably happily turn over control to a legitimate government, knowing how much influence he can still influence through the economy.
And that government will be happy to work with him as they are already, because he brings them so much money.
Deus doesn’t need to control anyone. By now, they already need him
>what will happen when they become more educated and aware and ‘happiness’ no longer satisfies them?
People that live under the effect of benevolent dictators (i.e. Saddam, or Gaddafi) actually understand what the alternatives are (as we can see in Iraq and Syria) – and thus they enjoy overwhelming support. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
>what will happen when they become more educated and aware and ‘happiness’ no longer satisfies them?
That could be 50 years in the future. 10% economic growth a year buys “happiness” for a LONG time and he could maintain that for decades given where he started from.
*Y chromosome is only in males.
Doctor Doom meets Tony Stark. Not Iron Man, Tony Stark.
Anyone else notice the Trinity knot on Deus’s tie?
Yeah. He is exactly the sort of jerkwad who would have his tie like that.
You mean, someone who likes to dress fashionably and respectfully, and not like a Kardash-whore?
“Gives Guesticus the medal of class for his statement.”
Double Windsor is better though
I think C.C. in panel 3 is giving serious competition against Cthillia for the best ‘if looks could kill’ stare.
Isn’t that thing just a remote? Unless he had the projector set up in the studio ahead of time it shouldn’t do anything.
And you don’t think he would?
Most TV stations use computer screen for backrounds so they can show pictures, diagrams, and such.
Deus being Deus probably had the shows hacked and the remote will trigger the display for him.
If desired.
If that imaginary African country straddled the equator…
SPACE ELEVATOR!!!
How many Billions would THAT be worth?
** Yes, technically Paul was probably a proto-Kwizatz, and Leto II was the real one.
From what I read in “Sandworms of Dune” (the last book in the series)…it was Duncan Idaho, or rather his thirteenth ghola who was the true Kwitzatz-Haderach.
what is he doing in the last panel? It is quite awkward.
He’s waving off the dramatic thunder.
What we should be asking is…
How does Vale pronounce “?” ?
It’s in a dialog bubble, so it’s spoken.
Holding the remote ( with speed lines to indicate she raised it) and a thought bubble with the ? makes more sense.
I kind of hear “?” as ‘urrr?’ like when Tim Taylor does his questioning monkey grunt.
Speech bubble = communication with others.
Thought bubble = communication with self.
As we don’t have a universal symbology for facial expression and body language, and the comic is not animated, I am quite comfortable with a speech bubble with punctuation marks as shorthand for non-verbal cues.
If you are interested in concepts of language and communication, I highly recommend a short course in sign language – language expressed as gesture and facial expression is mind-expanding.
ACDC: Air Conditioned Deus Corp.
Thunder (not) Struck!! \m/
stop before the run AMC …….(band was run DMC)…………………….. not even a cricket?
Was going to comment on the “turmult” word until I saw your post. Well, played, DaveB, well played…
Ah, yes, the ultimate protection for the savvy supervillain… make an entire nation’s prosperity dependent on your own. It worked pretty well for Doctor Doom over the years. Guarantees longevity, because the heroes have to waste loads of time trying to think around the moral issues before they make an honest stab at taking you down.
Deus is kind of great. I’m in no hurry to get back to ARC-Swat. This interlude can go as long as you want!
I think Deus might be like Monkey D. Luffey. A hero who loves playing the bad guy.
while we can argue over whether or not Deus is evil, I think he would be genuinely insulted if you said he wasn’t a supervillan. The man has a worrying amount of style.
I’ve been entertaining a thought on Deus being toward the good end of the alignment spectrum. While his methods are certainly…let’s say unconventional, he seems to be doing significantly more good than harm.
He also comes off as being fully willing to accept the appearance of being evil, which tends to be something that actual villains stray away from, when going for high profile agendas (when they’re not Joker level insane).
He could just be a really odd-ball chaotic good that is going for a legacy impact on the world that will immortalize him in history; at present he could almost be viewed as a sort of monster, but with current trend could be seen as a hero who changed the world for the better.
We know he can plan ahead and think fast, but not to what extent, so in as simple a way I can put it, he could be….
A hero, appearing as a top villain to be in charge of other villains, so that he can manipulate them into minimally destructive activity that also keeps the “heroes” busy and the government dumping resources where he wants them, so he can further his goals of helping the common people without as much pressure from government entities.
Now that IS moral relativism. I don’t like the use of the word “evil” anymore than I like to employ the word “good” – they’re both relative. One man’s hero is another man’s terrorist.
But if there’s a spectrum like that, Deus isn’t in it. He cheerfully murders another man based on his own judgment and that person being in his way.
If you were in his way he’d remove you also by the most expedient route. Smiling cheerfully and presenting a good, logical explanation as to why it makes good sense for him to ruin you.
Deus may be a great boon for galytn since they basically get life, education, health care and a future out of it. They get a murder-happy warlord replaced by one who only kills if you get in his way.
But I’m amazed at the number of people who can read about a guy who decides to kill people in cold blood and decides “eh, he’s a good guy, really”. He’s not.
He’s ethically bankrupt and completely amoral. He believes himself better than everyone else which is one thing – but he’s also decided that means he gets to decide other peoples future and fates.
Think about this. If instead of indinge senior it had been a 5 year old kid standing between him and his goal. Do you believe, all other venues to achieve the goal exhausted, he would have hesitated one second in snapping the child’s neck? I don’t. He might have called it “unfortunate”.
*addendum
If you have several decades of planning and plots already in motion, why not have some fun and throw people off their games, right?
I like that between Deus and Vehemence, your “villains” are really, really wacky.
And the Heroes aren’t?
tuche’
and you wait till I hit submit to let me know it was wrong way to spell it
“That part of the world has been turmulent for decades…”
Turmulent?
I love how Deus slammed C.C. and she doesn’t even know it
I’m probably not the first one to see this, but it just showed up on my yahoo news feed…
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/meet-richest-man-africa-only-163800404.html
And that list of the world’s richest people was compiled by a company called “Wealth-X’. Who do we know that would use an ‘X’ as a logo for a business?
You see, war-torn countries tend to show incredibly high rates of growth after the war actually ends. The trick is two-fold: first, the reason for that is that literally any improvement is a dramatic improvement. Second, the *rate* of growth is high, yes, but the starting point is so low, that restoring the production to pre-war levels still takes a decade.
You still need some kind of catalyst to drag the country kicking and screaming out of that war and into the improvements to get anywhere stable though