Grrl Power #1049 – Proposing better worlds
I came up with Deus’s comment that “Evil always has the advantage of being more proactive” as I wrote this page and I think it’s probably true, because I think there’s a limit to how proactive ‘good’ can be. I don’t think ‘evil’ has a limit, really. All of the tortures Deus mentions are utterly horrific – the Blood Eagle, where someone skins your back, then cuts away all the muscles, then breaks your ribs and pulls your lungs out so you suffocate while in bowel evacuating agony is by far the kindest one on that list. (Crucifixion doesn’t sound that bad, but it takes days to die from it. I imagine the Blood Eagle could be drawn out to some degree, but… look, torture is bad, m’kay?) The Holocaust, all the shit Japan did to China during and before WWII, even just 90% of what happens during any war. There’s no limit. Actual demons have probably never invaded Earth cause there’s nothing left to teach us.
But for ‘good?’ You can lock your door at night, making it slightly harder for someone to rob you. If we assume they try your door, then immediately give up and go home, then you’ve proactively prevented 1 unit of bad. It doesn’t increase the units of good, but arguably, preventing an increase in bad is, in itself, good. Chances are the burglar doesn’t stop at the first locked door, so they go to your neighbor’s house and find an unlocked window and rob them. So you start a neighborhood watch. That’s proactive. But it’s a big neighborhood and you only have 12 volunteers and the robberies continue unabated. So you buckle down and eventually figure out who it is, but you don’t have proof and the cops can’t get a warrant to check out his house so you… confront him? Break into his house and try and steal back everything he stole? Break his hands with a hammer? Set his house on fire? Kill him?
Obviously most of those are wild overreactions, but for the sake of brevity, you can imagine an escalation that leads to a level of proactivity that crosses the line from ‘good’ to ‘not so good.’ But that’s my point, I think good has limits. Preventative medical checkups are good. The world of GATTACA? Probably not great? Especially as it was presented segregating humans into the GATTACAs and the GATTACAn’ts.
‘Good,’ in my opinion, also requires more work. If you want to walk across the hall to another apartment and beat up your neighbor, that’s pretty straightforward. If you want to prevent your neighbors from beating each other up, you’re stuck patrolling your entire apartment complex/neighborhood.
I think a lot of supervillains can be categorized as individuals who cross the line into proactive goodness. Ecoterrorists like Poison Ivy or Sam Jackson’s character from Kingsman. Humans are killing the Earth so kill a significant percentage of the humans. Problem solved. Humans have proven time and again they can’t govern themselves without descending into corruption and abuse, therefore I will govern them whether they want me to or not. Problem solved. Etc.
Of course, while some behaviors are pretty clearly good or evil, there’s a mass of complexity in between. If you really want to prevent that guy from robbing his neighbors, you could achieve that by eliminating desire. Arguably bad. You could also eliminate or at least minimize poverty. That’s almost definitely good as the majority of crime is in some ways motivated by poverty. But then what are we really talking about, communism? And how do you prevent the pigs from being more equal than everyone else, leading immediately back to haves and have nots. Maybe you eliminate scarcity. That’s… probably good? Right? But that involves an overhaul of economics entirely, as well as tech and resources we don’t have yet. Who knows what new problems could arise from such a dramatic paradigm shift?
Ultimately, Deus’s point is that super powers are likely going to magnify humanity’s… humanity. Sitting back and hoping the world won’t become a lot worse is negligent.
On a serious note, “Curse words based on female genitalia” would be the bluest of blue chip stock ever.
The May Vote Incentive is up! This month it’s Warsyl, from Tamer: Enhancer 2! I’d say “spoilers,” but the book has been available for 5 months now. Anyway, this pic doesn’t have a zillion outfit variations, partially because her armor took longer to draw than I thought it would, but mostly because she just has an armored form, and an unarmored form. The latter being available over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Why accelerate it? Well I imagine Deus isn’t going to make supers out of rapists. He’s giving the good guys a head start.
It also helps to prevent the kind of “replacement theory”/anti-mutant scenario that can erupt when there’s a group that feels threatened in some way and focuses on the “other” with fear-driven violence. If access to super abilities comparable to what some people are born with is open to other people who aren’t born with it, that partially defuses the “otherness” in the equation.
That said, there would presumably still be people who wouldn’t qualify to get powers (criminal record, psychological profile indicating high likelihood of violence/delusion/etc.). That group could still be radicalized by someone with an agenda, but it wouldn’t be a case of easily rallying mass support against the people who want to make most of the people on the planet superhuman.
that is a good take, skipping over the X-men/Needles/S Cry Ed, etc…phase of an increasing super human population.
I would cite Marvel on being able to have mutants and mutates and how to make superhumans known and still have these problems but…that’s a Marvel status quo issue and not a factor in trying to be realistic or reasonable in in development *same reason marvel Earth doesn’t have space ships and regular alien trade or tech from Stark and Richards everywhere even though realistically all three of those plus proliferation of superhumans to the point being born a Mutant or Inhuman is irrelevant.
I suspect from the test of a man’s character remark Deus may believe the Architects of the Superion are also testing humanity on how humans use this power and he’d like to hedge the bets over to *uses for betterment of the species* and not *chaotic self destruction*.
I would counter that with Mutants having two horrible leaders; 1 being a jewish nazi and the other being a psychotic leftist professor, both of whom agree and preach mutant supremacy, but disagree on the means by which humans should be pushed aside.
If there had been a third major faction who was either reasonable, or were built of artificial mutants, that would probably have changed things quite significantly.
Also, Deus stock-board is a bit sus. All of those measures have been going down pretty steadily over the last century, and I’m a bit doubtful supers would change that. In particular, his evil supers argument is contested by how patterns in crime follow rates of gun ownership. Wherever civilians have guns, crime of every sort decreases in direct proportion to how many guns are in the neighborhood. Wherever guns are heavily controlled, only the badguys have them and all forms of crime are sky high. Deus arming all the normies with superpowers would do the same.
Possible exception for Milgrim prison experiment lunacy as the “good guys” are given powers before “the badguys”, but I’m pretty sure that could be mitigated and even prevented by focusing the new supers on small business creation rather than being “crime fighters” or soldiers.
my problem with Marvel always was that the X-men and their plight and even future time line and such stories only make sense in a world where its only humans and mutants.
Like the Sentinel future doesn’t seem possible when you also have, Avengers, Wakanda, Dr. Doom, Atlantis, Inhumans, Hulks, super soldier programs, Kree and Skrull fighting over Earth among other aliens, the Celestials, Galactus, Under ground civilizations and giant monsters, like six pantheons of gods confirmed to be real, vampires, cthulhu like entities, etc…
In fact I know the writers are often discouraged from pointing out the discrepencies, like how in an X-title someone with a new power shows up *costume or not* and people on the street act like NPCs programmed to hate them on sight and call them “muties”. But jump to a Blade comic or Howling Commandos, same people yell out “monster”, likewise with alien themed comics the background people assume aliens, or superhero or villain for all others.
-wasn’t till just a few years ago (maybe 2015 or so) that some writers noticed how common this was and tried to mix it up a little. But just acknowledging all these other variables and how easy it is clearly to just make super humans in this world, really messes up the metaphors.
like I said status quo, Marvel should be full of superhumans, power armors, Stark and Richards tech everywhere and Earth regularly and openly interacting with aliens. But then it wouldn’t be a contemporary setting anymore.
I’m betting Deus thinks if he knows how to do it, he can figure out how to prevent or remove it, to keep power out of the hands of those who abuse it.
Money says Deus is working on a power blocker, arm braces or collars. Maybe an implant.
I think it is further reaching than that. He is trying to build a positive, beneficial society that integrates and motivates supers from the word go, alongside normal humans. And provides a strong drive to be a beneficial part of that society.
He can create supers. This is an ability he can lend out.
This implies he is not the thing creating supers. He was just on a diatribe about super geniuses.
This implies his creation method stems from super genius that exists in someone other than himself.
One thing he left out about super geniuses… trying to control them would be like herding cats, as they would see any control attempt for everything it was, and constantly pursue their own projects.
So, considering he’s willing to part with super-creating super genius, my suspicion is he finds them insufferably annoying.
the thing creating supers is that Superion field and the genetic decryption key naturally (or Nth tech causing it so still naturally for all intents and purposes as far as most are concerned or can perceive).
he (and maybe his team) have just found out what triggers it and can use some gene modding methods to flip that internal switch in all humans over to “have super powers”. he didn’t start all this, but has found a way to ezploit it.
“Evil always has the advantage of being more proactive” is more a fictional thing than a real one. Crime/immoral behavior doesn’t occur from a vacuum.
Good can proactively aid those in a situation where they might be forced into crime, avoid criminalizing aspects of a person they have no control over, support mental health and getting treatment to maintain said mental health, etc.
Of course, in practice most of this is held up by the “morality” many people hold, built upon the mind’s basic desire to simplify things and how good feeling angry is. “Righteous anger” and watching criminals be punished feels better than “coddling” people, and vilifying people with some aspect you find icky is more satisfying than acknowledging that ickiness =/= evil and/or that something someone didn’t choose to have can’t tell you about their character.
I think you’re wrong, Somdudewillson, Evil IS proactive, because its root is selfishness, even when the evil is being done for an ideal that is otherwise admirable, it’s still fundamentally selfish-just not enlightened selfish. Watch the aisle of your local store where lots of people from all walks shop (say, Fred Meyer or Walmart in the middle of the day) and count the tempertantrums, observe the unattended kids, watch for shoplifters (the average shoplifter is NOT, surprisingly, poor by the common definition.)
little evils stack up. Insecure men beat their wives and kids when they think they’re not observed, Mothers drown their kids to get with a new man, friends hook friends on shit like Heroin (Sometimes family members do it, even) to get a discount on their next high, knowing full well that Heroin turns you into a dog before it kills you. Doctors, sworn to do no harm, give addictive psychoactives to kids and teenagers because the drug company will give ’em a kickback, Regulators fast-track ‘vaccines’ that are about as effective as mainlining deionized water, and drug companies push it out because it’s good for the stock price.
Ever heard of Thalidomide?? look it up.
Human Beings are ASSHOLES in groups, every one of them thinks what they’re doing isn’t ‘all that harmful’ even the serial killers, they think they’re RIGHT, that guy who wrapped the neighbour kid in a Semtex vest with ball bearings to blow up a marketplace? he thinks he’s doing it for a loving god, same for the guy who walks into a women’s clinic with a shotgun and an AKS that’s had the sear filed down. The Boulder shooter took weeks to plan his operation in the name of yet another loving god and high ideal.
And we’re not even touching on the teenagers who show up to class with weapons they’re not supposed to have, to ‘get famous’ just like the guys at Columbine, or the guy who burns down a medical center full of people to ‘save the unborn’, and don’t forget the other side either; 30 people in 2020 were killed as a direct result of protests claiming to be about lives and justice, mostly people unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place.
How about them Holy wars, eh? Sunni kills Shi’ite, but they weren’t the first out the gate-the Reformation sparked wars that destroyed whole REGIONS and collapsed nations in Europe while wrestling over who gets to speak for a merciful, loving god that sacrificed his only son to save humanity (at least, according to all sides of the 30 year’s war, the Great Northern War, the English Civil War, the Jacobite Rebellion(s), etc. etc. etc.)
and hey, who can remember Buddhists purging Christians in: Japan, Vietnam, Myanmar, China (multiple times), or how ‘christian’ the ‘army of the lord’ in Africa was? you know, some good old fashioned mass murder campaigns, all rooted in causes the perpetrators BELIEVED were good. Hell, the Nazis didn’t think what they were doing was evil, nor did Stalin (or his followers) or Mao and HIS followers.
Deus has a point: An armed society is more polite, but Evil is more proactive-it attacks, rather than defends, and often cloaks those attacks by claiming to ‘protect’ (because the verb ‘Protect’ is a hell of a lot broader and more encompassing than to ‘defend’-you can proactively protect by killing or jailing all POTENTIAL threats, depending how paranoid you are, that can mean everybody.)
Man, I just wanna say, you hit the nail on the head with this post, people constantly talk about how “good” humanity is, when in reality the only reason human beings are even remotely benevolent ever, is because it’s still self-serving, or because there is a terrifying threat looming over them, the actions of the benevolent are very few, and very fair between.
I personally think human beings are inherently self-serving and evil creatures (From birth) because like any other animal, we will fight and kill for our own survival, the difference is we have the sentience required to understand that it’s wrong to kill and that trying to find a solution to save everyone is harder, so most people don’t do it. As of 2018, about 43% of Americans were obese, meanwhile there are still people starving to death in the same exact country.
Drive through LA County, and realize that both the richest, and most crime ridden, poverty stricken parts of CA are in the same County, there are people who own multi million dollar homes, drive cars worth six figures, while someone just miles away is starving to death, and sleeping outside. It isn’t even an “eat the rich!” problem, it’s just human beings are selfish creatures and don’t care about the suffering of others.
People will get on social media and say “I stand with Ukraine” “I care about X” then continue to support companies that brutalize the same countries, that are happily in bed with governments that are still to this day putting people in internment camps, and the same exact people who right all this benevolent bullshit, will go watch that company’s movies, devour their products, and say what a great and loving company they are. People are easily led, and want to live in their own little box, they don’t want to think about the horrors of the world.
You want to say “Well that just proves that good can prevent these things!” Except it can’t, human beings have been shit to each other, since we have existed, people will HAPPILY come up with an excuse and reasoning as to why what they are doing isn’t a tragedy of life, and it’s actually the right thing, it’s totally ok that I just bought my 7th brand new 1,000$ phone in the past 3 years, it’s my money after all I can do what I want. Then turn around and flip shit when some super rich person buys a company, and talk about eating the rich. At a net worth of 5,000 USD you are richer than half of the world’s population. Half the time you are the rich to the rest of the world.
Slight correction, humans in echo chambers / cults suck. Which is why things like social programs, oversight and peer review are important. Keep in mind, the anti-vaxers also came from stupid self interest. Look into the absolute horror show Andrew Wakefield and Hugh Fudenberg put on sometime. People’s motivations aren’t always pure but it’s reductive to paint everyone as equally selfish and self interest driven and you have to be careful not to stray into the trap of the gullible cynic. Also don’t be too quick to blame individuals for systemic issues, like RegalKain who seems to blame obese people for the fact that our society fails to feed people it easily could. But yes in genera I agree with the “evil attacks” sentiment even in the case of things like social murder, or what when somedude says “vilify people” is describing a proactive mental groundwork attack.
Larel, your ‘oversight’ and ‘social programs’ are every inch the same echo chamber as the delusions of a mass murderer killing in the name of god.
Transparency-the practice of being open and honest, rooting in consent instead of compulsion works better than using government force to ‘make you do it for your own good’.
Why? because those are PASSIVE controls on behavior-most people, as individuals, do it in their daily lives (We are, after all, social animals and pack hunters, not hives and swarms.) One of the major enablers of outright atrocity, is the ability to offload the responsibility from the individual, to the group. This is whether it’s Religious motivated ‘honor killings’ or using statzpolizei to round up people for firing squads and gas chambers (or work camps, or to bring about ‘utopia’ through reverting to ‘year zero’, or Cultural Revolutions).
Fundamentally, ANY system can be corrupted, and the more top-down that system is, the greater the probability that it will become corrupt. You see this with top-down management in corporations, and in religions, and in governments. Inevitably, “Those who keep everyone equal are more equal than everyone else”.
a lot of it is based on establishing a monopoly on the use of power. (funny, this goes to what Deus is doing, versus what ARC is doing.)
The more monopolistic the access to power is, the greater the chance that the crimes will go from retail events, to wholesale cataclysms. If a criminal doesn’t know whether or not their proposed victim can hurt or kill them, they’re much less likely to offend. (thus explaining the crime rate in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles) The more active (and actively violent your criminals are) the more your police will respond with militarized force (thus explaining the proportionally huge number of incidents of police killing kids for holding a cell phone wrong in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, etc. etc. etc.)
The basic divisor might be laid out like thus:
“The Ends don’t justify the Means, the Means decide what Ends you get to choose from.”
first off, recent actions of various governments shows us that fighting corruption must go contrary to freedom and democracy. it isn’t just that fight against corruption is getting abused for establishing an authoritarian regime (neither is poland an authoritarian regime, nor can you call zelinski’s martial law rulership “authoritarian”, even though they both tend into that direction), but rather the other way around the concept of a law-based republic must get abolished in order to prevent corrupt people from twisting those laws to their own advantage. in other words, in order to break the power-monopoly of one person some other person must create their own competitive power-monopoly.
for example in poland one needed to remove the appointment of judges from the democratic process and replace it with a top-down appointment, so that the established powers lose their influence. one might even argue that keeping the corruption along with the democracy might have been the smarter move. not to mention zelinski and putin provoking eachother into an all-out war for their private crusade against corruption — definitely not worth it!
anyway, my point is, deregulation is sold to us as the best solution to solve corruption but in reality only concentration of power in a single benelovent ruler can do the trick. both might be extremely similar and nearly indistinguishable, but from the private company’s side it really does not make much difference if the government is singling them out with the help of laws or if they can do whatever they want, in both circumstances corruption is their friend! but if a dictator has set their eyes on a particularly corrupt organization, no money in the world can protect them…
as for everybody being born evil naturally due to selfishness, that’s a completely flawed argument. every living being wants to survive, and every living being strives to conserve energy. does that mean all biological lifeforms are selfish and lazy? maybe! but evil is something completely different! some argue that humans are more evil than animals. and indeed human possesses a lot more self-reflection and self-introspection than animals do, allowing us to improve in efficiency and reach. we self-reflect about things way beyond our horizon. some person on tv, a great distance away from us, could say a single word and we would feel as offended as if that person had attacked us physically. another person also on another continent might pursue us on tv to donate to some organization because their suffering feels like our own. it even works with inanimate objects and completely alien minds like those of plants: we anthropomorphize and experience compassion with the nature on a global scale. this ability is far from being a purely evil trait of humanity! neither is it evil to optimize our efforts for the sake of efficiency, even if laziness is the motivation we consciously attribute as the cause.
I’d even go so far as to say that humans are completely incapable of being evil, of causing suffering, especially because of our self-reflection and self-centered-ness. whatever suffering we cause, once we notice what we have done we feel compassion to the suffering being we feel as if being in their shoes. and even those few who really are so sociopathic as to not feel any compassion or being unable to relate to sufferings of others because for them the same situation wouldn’t have caused suffering, even those are still bound to our social norms because they depend on other humans for their own survival. so maybe it’s true that evil is more proactive than good, but being proactive definitely wont make you evil! what makes people evil is to refuse thinking ahead about consequences of their actions just because the future being so full of unknown variables. what makes people evil is refusing to be proactive enough to actually help when seeing people in need. what makes people evil is to excess in their actions, exaggerating every aspect of influence they have over the world, as if trapped in a vicious circle of addiction. what makes people evil is to rush into the frey without any kind of indication from the outside world that their actions will have any kind of useful effect. but even those 4 things are imho not yet something I’d call evil since any kind of inhuman alien could do way worse than we are!
personally I think that level of cynicism is in itself harmful
and just as an FYI Thalidomide was an accident with no malice intended anywhere
the stuff was tested on animals, men and women, kids with no dangerous side effects
and was believed by all to be safe and effective… and it was… unless you were pregnant.
The only reason it wasn’t a bigger disaster than it was was the head of the American drug safety
agency was a bit paranoid about testing procedures in Europe and dragged her feet for six months
on approval… and then the first babies were born. No evil, just an accident
Heroine has a similar sad back story, a French research team was looking for a way to make morphine
nonaddictive after the problem of addicts after the American Civil War, and they came up with something
they thought would work, after animal testing looked promising they asked for volunteers who were given injections of the new variant drug for a week and then cut off cold turkey to see if they have withdraw symptoms
(19th Century remember) and there were no cravings or withdrawal symptoms, so they published
expecting all sorts of accolades for their discovery, only to later discover that a certain small percentage of people
don’t experience any of the addictive affects of morphine class drugs,for them it’s just a good painkiller.
And by sheer terrible luck each of the(3) volunteers fell into that small group.
things happen that you Don’t know how to allow for or Predict
Good isn’t forced to be reactive. But by and large, proactive good isn’t something that people even know how to look for, so you don’t see it happening ever.
Proactive good looks for existential issues that affect everyone and look for solutions to those problems that can be scaled to everyone, but only provides options rather than forcing anyone to actually take advantage of it.
There’s two other reasons why proactive good is rarely witnessed in the wild:
1. There are so many Evil brand problems in the world that need fixing, who has time for proactive goodness?
2. What proactive goodness seeks to produce can generally be stolen to make an advantage for the few by reactive evil. This usually happens before the morality or lack thereof of the inventor of the good is sufficiently clear to truly judge them to be good. I mean, they may *say* they’re looking to benefit everyone, but are they really? Or are they just out to make a quick buck? How would the world be different if Johann Fust hadn’t decided he’d rather have a printing press rather than wait for Johannes Gutenberg to be able to pay him back? To be clear, I’m not saying Gutenberg was necessarily a candidate. He’s just a historical figure I don’t know enough about to say that he definitely wasn’t and I know at least one fact about his life that could potentially keep anyone from knowing enough to be able to say that he definitely was one. There probably exist people who know enough about him to categorically state that he wasn’t one, but I’m not one of them.
So, to completely sidestep the political discussion: Are the gemstones on his coat sleeve in panel 5 (not buttons and cuff links shouldn’t pierce the coat) supposed to represent the Triforce? Red for Power, Green for Courage, Blue for Wisdom, right? If so, that is some excellently hidden nerdy-ass flair, and also his kind of weird flex.
If not, it’s my head cannon now that Deus sometimes flies his nerd flag subtly to relish that moment when someone finally notices, and if they don’t, he gets to feel superior.
(pasted from the first comment page) On one version of his suit, they were top tier gems from Diablo 3, but those are complicated to draw and everyone thought they were infinity stones anyway. They never got a good closeup to differentiate them so I just kind of got lazy and started putting three plus his cufflink. No idea what the orange gem is supposed to be though.
“Maybe you eliminate scarcity.”
Utterly impossible.
At the very, very, very far end of technology, where you can create infinite stuff and duplicate people, there is still the *exclusivity*. “I own *every single copy* of Bob Smith.”
Some people will always seek something that is limited, even if they have to *create* those limits, simply as a means of establishing (even if only to themselves) that they are better than other people.
Now, “post scarcity” in terms of “everyone has as much food as they could possibly eat” kinds of things, yes, that’s possible, it would indeed help with some things.
But truly eliminate scarcity? *Logically* impossible. No amount of tech or magic can do it.
The imposed scarcity doesn’t really work though. It’s been tried, with NFT, and it’s gone pretty poorly. Lambasted since the very start, hyped up for some, but now it is crashing. The people who bought into it at the start aren’t buying anymore.
And to be honest, you are taking the idea of post scarcity to a hyperbolic extreme, saying that version of post scarcity is impossible, and then calling post scarcity impossible based on that, at least in your opening line.
NFT is a bad and dumb example because NFT was ***AMAZINGLY*** stupid, both in concept and execution.
But you want the same thing, done well? It’s been around for millennia: art.
Online, I can buy a life-size, photo-realistic print of the Mona Lisa (or any other piece of art). The *artistic value* is not scarce – nearly anyone can put up beautiful works of art for a pittance in their home.
(And incredibly good hand-made copies of such works haven’t been functionally difficult or all that expensive to make for many centuries – any upper class person could have them long before modern printing made it super cheap.)
Yet the **original** Mona Lisa is valued at… how many $million?
The “imposed” scarcity will be of things like that – NFTs are a very poor attempt to *legally* impose scarcity. The “imposed” scarcity I’m talking about will be *logical* scarcity – there is logically only one “original”, so it is logically and inherently “scarce”.
That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. And actually, Garrulous makes a really, really good point about it, below:
“But yeah people will find ways to fight over something. If it isn’t food, it will be land, if not land it will be control.”
Yep. People will *always* find something to have that others don’t, for status or a feeling of power, or whatever, even if they have to use force to keep those other people from having it.
“NFT was” – if only we could truly discuss them purely in the past tense.
I would say land is the best example against elimination of all scarcity. Even if we eliminate most material forms of scarcity we are likely to still see scarcity in land. Even if we are star faring spanning multiple galaxies certain space rocks are likely to be more desirable than others and all it will take for scarcity to occur is for the population to be large enough that every single individual desiring such a space rock out numbers the number of such space rocks within a civilization’s reach. Even if at some point scarcity is held at bay, you would also have to insure that the population doesn’t grow faster than your civilization’s acquisition of said space rocks. And removing land ownership doesn’t truly remove land scarcity, it mostly just changes who is in charge of the land.
That said land is usually not included when talking about post scarcity. But yeah people will find ways to fight over something. If it isn’t food, it will be land, if not land it will be control. How many people can rule over all the other people, that position would itself be a form of scarcity and would be fought over.
I feel like some people are exactly as disagreeable as you suggest, but others aren’t. We’re not all the same and trying to say that we are just causes one to end up being wrong.
Thinking that we’re all just as selfish and quarrelsome as each other may not cause problems that will be immediately evident to you, but like most false assumptions it’s likely to cause problems at some point. Maybe the problems it causes will be for other people rather than you, however.
“I feel like some people are exactly as disagreeable as you suggest, but others aren’t.”
You’re absolutely correct, of course, and I agree!
Unfortunately, “some” is enough for all the problems.
The desire for exclusive control may be the only barrier to completely eliminating scarcity. Or rather, I would cast it as the desire to deny other people getting what they want. We could theoretically reach the point where we can give everyone everything they want, as much as they want, but as long as what people want is to specifically take something away from someone else, we’ll have conflict.
If we ever find a way to eliminate scarcity what I think is going to happen is the elite will use it for untold power and riches and delights while making accessible resources even more scarce for everyone else, with vast resources to put down any form of rebellion.
If everyone’s super, no-one will be.
Slow progression of supers could lead to genocidal reactions, think X-Men, Needless, and those like that. As humanity is fearful and prone to panic and aggression. But make this change happen rapidly and you can tear that bandage off quickly, make the change the norm and in a few generations no one thinks anything of it. Also yeah if you have a galaxy full of not equiped to handle this than the habituation for both sides and entangling humanity ahead of time with alien diplomacy would be a good idea. Humans are less inclined to attack those they have established trade with and learn it’s easier to trade than take.
Would Deus happen to be a significant participant in United Aerospace Corporation too? Because the feeling I get from him is: “Safer worlds through superior firepower.”
Its more like he sees that guns are going on the rise, and theres literally nothing anyone can do about it. So hes getting ahead of the curve and making even *more* guns, but making sure the good people have access to them first before the upcoming glut saturates the criminal market
And making sure that he profits along the way
I think I am seeing what Deus is alluding to.
I don’t the name of the trope off the top of my head but in my own settings we’d call it “The Great Power Gambit”
the premise being, find a world whose species has potential but either is being held back by or keeps regressing due to social problems and test their character by placing upon the world one or more “great powers”.
in general you see this “test” done for various reasons (although will suspect the one claiming what those reasons were for either lying or trying not to go to “it was just a prank pro” ending), but in the end its a *I wanted to test the character of your species/mortals/beings of this lower dimension, etc…
so I placed upon this world, in this dimension, etc..a source of *great power*, *unlimited power*, “infinite resources*, *great knowledge* etc… and then spread awareness of it and waited to see how the life forms would react to it and how they would use it.
like magic stones, magic cards, magic granting towers, a cosmic library, wish granting artifact, a mirror in a cave that grants the heart’s desires,
in generally it is usually some limited supply/easy to limit access to artifact or artifacts. Even if it could be shared easily and be a boon for the entire world, system, galaxy.
we generally see this in a McGuffin plot though and the source of ultimate power goes unused, or due to mankind’s corruption sets off a doomsday trigger (although to be fair if some uber advanced species put something like this on a planet and if misused too much then kills the species I would question the actual motive of the aliens in question and how advanced they really were…like dressing up a molecular assembler with enough layers that the locals thing its a Sampo/pot of plenty and then trigger the thing to explode if used to manufacture too many weapons or poisons or an AI discovers it is being hoarder.
vs
I a cosmic scale entity, tier 4 or above being, put these stones of power/library of infinite knowledge, wish granting triangle, etc.into the hands of mortals to test them, see how they’d use this power; map their potential when the days come when they may ascend…or find someone worthy of joining our ranks/replace me at this job as I had to find someone to take my place before I could quit (which that part always also feels like a test and even wanting the job could be a wrong answer, a test of hubris as it were).
we do see the super power granting artifact as well, not as frequently though as the source of power/wish granter types, but you never see it on a large scale…at least not as a test.
I mean we’ve had *we are making humans into weapons, enhancing humans so we can interact with them without harming them and the powers were a byproduct of that enhancement*
or the subversions of the trope and its *oh this wasn’t a test, we dropped some toy/tool/piece of equipment and your species reacted weirdly to it or used it as a weapon*, (or)…oh we just set up a data relay tower in your planet…we had no idea the sub-space radiation would start giving your species super powers…huh, weird.
-this usually ends with like a villain who was seeking ultimate power and/or hero thinking they were winning the test for humanity getting this comedic end as the superbeing(s) from beyond space and time just *shrug* and are like…uh..no…what? Why would we test you? That’s just a *child’s toy, dropped tool, equivalent of a radio tower, piece of an engine someone recklessly discarded on your planet*.
yeah, if humans could find and convince another type 4 or above to intervene on their behalf.
unless this is a case of the artificial field has a physical generator (which is more a type 2 or type 3 thing to do), and the powering up of humanity was an unintentional side effect of the generator (like the aliens were making a communication relay between realities and the field it generated granted super powers for whatever reason)…like..oops, better send a tech out to fix that.
as is it seems humans would lack the necessary skill and power to even try to turn it off, other than to maybe prevent their own genomes from decrypting it. Which is the key here. If you can tweak people to get the power, then it stands it may be possible to tweak people to no longer be able to access the field.
why smash the radio tower when its easier to turn off the radio.
(although that in of its self is a dangerous prospect and it may not actually be possible to put that lock back on once the door is broken down, the unknown hyper advanced aliens may have accounted for this possibility and prevented anyone from being able to hoard/restrict access to this power once it was opened up beyond killing those who have it.
this was a response to someone on page one saying if the field is bespoke why can’t we turn it off at its source…it didn’t post right as a response and got sent floating off on its own.
Kudos for the _Animal Farm_ reference!
I think Deus means natural selection. Give everyone super powers BEFORE we figure out the best way to use them against each other, and all the unreasonable and uncooperative people will eliminate themselves. I don’t think it will work, but I’m pretty sure Deus considers himself a survivor who can remain in control in any situation, so if he can cause enough chaos in his everyone else, he’ll come out on top. What’s good for Deus is good for the world.
Evil has the advantage of looking for opportunities or making them. It’s easier for the criminal to choose which crimes to commit than it is for the non-criminals to predict what the criminal will choose, so they have to put more work into preparing for as many problems as possible and hope they don’t overlook something.
There’s both the first-mover advantage that you’ve listed, and there’s also the asymmetry of attack versus defense: the defender has to defend against every single attack, or they lose. The attacker only needs to succeed once to win. Some failed attacks result in a loss, but it is possible to fail an attack without losing, and have future opportunities to attack and win. The consequences for losing on defense are bigger, and winning on defense just means you don’t lose.
I will withhold judgement until I hear his answer to that last question.
It will probably mark the difference between his actions being ill-advised but admirable instead of just, you know, bad.
Blue chip? I think you mean blue *waffle* stock. I’ll see myself out.
get your butt back here and try again. its too gloomy in here.
Good can be as proactive as evil. However, there is a limit to how proactive they can be at stopping the other.
Evil being proactive is robbing a bank.
Good being proactive is helping people in need.
Evil being proactive against good is making it illegal to give money to homeless people on the side of the road.
Good being proactive against evil is a neighborhood watch.
Good is feeding the homeless.
Evil is banning feeding the homeless because “you don’t have a permit to handle food” and “you can’t use the park for that” and then banning feeding the homeless on the excuse “rules were broken”.
Good would be following up “you need to follow these rules” with “and here are options for how you can feed the homeless while following the rules.”
(Yes, it’s vaguely based on a real case, in Florida some years ago. The mayor got a lot of flack for paragraph two.)
I’m very amused that Deus listed off four horrific torments but somehow blanked on “that one with the boats” actually being called _The Boats_. (Or in its native language, “Scaphism”)
I was kinda liking Deux, but now I realize he might not be the smiling evil overlord I thought he is.
I’m starting to realize he’s the good guy who knows “good” doesn’t sell.
Wrap actual good intentions in a thick layer of profitable evil is the only way you get people to swallow what you’re offering.
Perhaps, but you have to admit, he relishes playing the role of the smiling evil overlord. . .and he’s so entertaining when he does it!
Also, if he wasn’t a super, he’d be an out of shape nerd. But since he is a super, he’s a huge nerd in almost every sense. One might even say he’s a super nerd.
… That actually could be another way of saying what his real power is, since it clearly isn’t the super intelligence he seems to think it is, but rather something adjacent to super intelligence.
… You claiming that nerds can’t be fit?
Vin Diesel would like a word with you…
So would Dwayne Johnson.
Pretty sad that to sell people on collective risk management, we have to structure it in such a way that someone is scraping a bunch off the top. That’s what insurance really is at the bottom: a collective emergency bank account. We build a bunch of stuff on top, make them negotiate prices, invest the money in the account so it doesn’t just sit there, and manage the money to try to ensure that it’s only used for necessities, rather than it becoming a tragedy of the commons, but it could be structured more like a credit union than a bank, to serve the needs of the people in the pool, rather than the people managing it. But our society does seem conditioned to believe that if something’s not evil on the surface, it must be something worse underneath.
Sometimes the best way to lead people is to convince them that they’re chasing you.
Like what Sam does in Freefall :D
Yes, the old “An Armed society is a Polite society” philosophy.
Similar to the M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) military strategy. If everyone has Nuclear arms, then no one will be willing to use them.
Untrue. There will always be madmen willing to start something, right? The Joker is just a trope for those kind of people. Someone will want to see what happens, or be famous about failing grandly…
We are seeing that MAD has a draw back, someone willing to push a third party without direct alliance but with good relations with those other parties. Seeing how far they can go, what the other nuclear powers will surrender, a very risky gamble that they can get away with a lot so long as they don’t directly attack the other nuclear powers, and push their threats in the gamble that they other side will back down…and yes I am obviously talking about Russia with Ukraine right now.
Historically, armed societies were *more* violent. The thing about societies where you can get stabbed for being impolite is that they involve people being very willing to stab each other over petty insults, which is not exactly a stabilizing situation. If someone insults you, you *have* to be willing to respond to that with violence, or people will think you’re weak, or that maybe the insult is true. Duelist cultures weren’t a looming MAD threat that never actually escalated to combat, duels happened pretty often, and they resulted in bright young men dying for incredibly stupid reasons. How many deaths is politeness worth?
(MAD works with nuclear warfare because it’s impossible to win a nuclear war, and everyone knows that. But it’s quite possible to win a gunfight, or a superpowered punch-up. Which means that some people are going to think “Yeah, I know I’m picking a fight, but it’s a fight I’ll win” and then do something very impolite.)
I imagine the line of thought Dues is having is similar “what happens when you give everyone a gun”, and the knee-jerk anti-gun reaction would be very similar to what Max’s conniptions about the whole supers thing. But I’d have to remind everyone that guns are used to save vastly more lives then the guns even involved in crime in general. So what happens when you give Joe Shmoe super powers? I bet the same thing that’ll happen if you give him a gun. Probably nothing, but he’ll be likely to do good then bad.
But the people who are inclined to do bad, given power, will be able to cause more damage than they would have otherwise.
“Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.”
He furthers it along so Maxima isn’t the one considered top of the list of supers.
Was that meant to be “the one with the _goats_, the milk and the honey”? (I’m probably late with this one, but I just couldn’t see how “boats” fits in that sentence…)
this will answer the question and possibly entertain at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IDQZXRM3WI
Yes, I’ve seen that episode too. Freaky, horrific AND sweet, like daiquiris made with honey.
I am pleasantly surprised to see the story go here, considering the optimism presented early on about society operating on trust. Morality must precede power, or self-destruction is inevitable.
“Villains are more proactive” has a trope name; it’s called “Villains Act, Heroes React”.
Which is fairly apt in most stories.
Oo, hard to respect someone who, in 2022, still thinks women constitute more than 50% of the victims of domestic violence.
My assumption is he’s going to try to do for superpowers what Samuel Colt did for guns. Evil acts are often in part a function/exploit of an imbalance in power to do harm.
Remove the imbalance, and the ability to do evil is greatly reduced in scope and opportunity.
I feel I am in the minority here as not reading that as his argument. if anything what Deus says feels like the opposite, and is only the first part of what he is saying *to be continued next strip*, as he is pointing out how bad it would be for everyone, and given humanity’s history, to have powers.
Like he wants to set up a better world BEFORE super powers are common place, or make them part of the building of the better world to establish a precedence on their use.
But if everybody is super nobody does and there are unbalance between super, so what change?
if everyone continues to cooperate as a collective species and not devolve into a world of destruction of a X-men genocide future scenario
then as Deus seems to imply with the *test of a man’s character* humanity will continue on and not be erased from existence by these Architects of the Superion.
think Celestials from Marvel blowing up a planet for failing their evolutionary test, Or something less dramatic but equally bad if this turns out to be some experiment or test and humans are the subjects.
“When everyone’s special… *Nobody* will be.” -Syndrome (The Incredibles)
“So you see Lone Star, Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.” -Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I disagree with “gluten free donuts”. I agree with “hipsters”. (I’m not aware of any donut maker going “only gluten free”. Nor am I aware of some producer of “only gluten-free” goods undercutting every baked goods competitor. I am aware of hipsters being treated as the sole authority in an area that hipsters, literary artists^, professors, and editors are typical experts.)
My view is conditioned on whether a thing is forced upon others (negative human condition effect), causes unwanted(!) physical/mental harm (also negative), promotes mutual benefit (positive), or (sans self-harm) promotes the well-being of others. Willing BDSM (all partners are willing participants, and safe words/safe acts are respected) is wanted physical/mental harm, and thus, weirdly, positive. The forcing of others to use toilets was, initially, a negative human condition effect (this broke comfortable tradition), but a long-term positive effect (sanitation, waste-hole replacement efforts, your health, neighbor health, often downstream/downslope health, etc.).
^ – Poets, writers, text advertisers, some graphic artists, etc. In this case, poets (haiku/sonnet/limerick/etc), prose writers (iambic pentameter/short-short/novella/etc), and songwriters.
“Evil wins because it is more proactive” is part of Machiavelli’s message in The Prince. Let’s assume Deus read it and understood it, because of course he did.
He may or may not agree with Machiavelli’s main takeaway, that got simplified into “the ends justify the means”: since evil wins because of its tools, you need to be ready to fight it with its own tools, you need to be able to assign a higher priority to “beat evil” than to whatever makes you not-evil, because otherwise whatever makes you not-evil is useless: you will lose and evil will win anyway.
Another way would be to efficiently “solve all situations”. Evil wants diamonds? Make diamonds so commonplace it’s useless to get more (in other words, destroy systemic inequalities/barriers because they’re venues for exploitation).
Of course, this is Deus – a plan that requires him to sacrifice nothing, concede nothing, just show up and look good and come out on top is expected at this point. But we’ve seen in the past that he’s at least super utilitarian and isn’t past some efficient murdering. For all he says war is bad, he’s certainly funding and waging a lot of it. He has got to have other goals than “end atrocities” and “get rich”.
He’s already made that clear.
He plans to conquer the galaxy under himself.
Hipsters +2.12
Truly, the golden standard of progress.
The first to strike always has the advantage.
Dave there is no clear evidence if the blood eagle has ever been used and it’s not just a literary invention. Scaphism was used and its more horrific as death came rather slowly through septic shock, dehydration, and exposure
You’re only looking at reactive goodness in any case. Proactive goodness is doing good things, not preventing bad things (or at least not preventing bad actions). Feed the hungry, heal the sick, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked. You know, all the things Christians are supposed to do instead of policing uteruses and shooting up African-American grocery stores.
And the big problem is, you very rarely get seen being proactively good, but the moment you stop? That’s when people notice, and they always bring up that bullshit “What have you done recently?” (and by ‘recently’, they mean that day)
Maxima continues to look cross-eyed from that particular angle.
By preventing humanity from unleashing itself upon said universe? I only foreseen self destruction. For the greater good.
Although about the thing with the boats: it’s likely that was made up as an apocryphal story about the one person supposedly subjected to it by the guy writing about it over a century after the guy died. Similar for the blood eagle but drawing and quartering was a similarly torturous execution. So was that hangman’s cage thing where you’re fed to birds. The uron maiden is entirely fictional though.
I have always known that as the Persian Boats, because supposedly it was first done due to insult to a Persian ruler. Will Durrant, The Story of Civilization, Our Oriental Heritage. Forgot the page number.
Didn’t read comments first this time.
I assume Deus is doing this because instead of allowing random people develop random powers, some of which might be world-ending on their own unintentionally, he can make sure the powers that develop are ones that can be controlled.
Why allow people to maybe randomly develop Asteroid Storm Summoning or Planet Core Rising, when they could have Firebreath, Superstrength or Wolf Buffing instead?
Plus, people are not only willing but excitedly interested, and also he gets more money.
Nothing indicates he can control what powers someone gets only that he can awaken them. It has been indicated before people have a pre disposition to certain powers, via Varia. His whole thing here seems less power selling or everyone with guns and more rip off the bandage quickly so humanity can adjust to the new status quo sooner to give less chance of global scale screwing this up. And with the test of a man’s character line implying he may think something is also testing humanity.
“Evil is more proactive” can be seen in that most laws are reactive -they’re put in place after people have proven they can’t be good neighbors and abide by the Golden and Platinum rules.
On a side note, my computer ethics textbook said that laws are formalized ethics. As part of a very long section on how ethics and morals often outstrip laws in their development since ethics don’t have to wait for human governments to catch up.
As for the world that Deus is trying to prevent… he probably read DC’s Kingdom Come. Anyone with any sanity would want to prevent that world. Even if the only reason is it’s bad for their business interests.
Earth will need alien tech just to deal with their rogue supers.
(It’s kind of scary how closely DB’s comments on this strip mirror my own. There’s some times you don’t want to be thinking alike, and the terror man can bring is one of them.)