Grrl Power

I have a hard time conceiving of a person with super-intelligence who doesn't have a superiority complex...

The one with the list. Definitely read the rant below.

Again, the problem with Deus is that it's hard to find a problem with him. His plan seems decent, but when it comes right down to it countless conquerors throughout history have tried what he's doing. Sure his Super-Intelligence can justify a lot, but it still seems bad from the outside.

His plan is only good if you think you can trust him and his word and the only evidence 100% in favour of him having super intelligence right now is his ability to replicate powers.

Everything else is just him abusing his money, power and privilege to get everything he wants and his small army of superpowered henchmen and status to dodge any possible consequences.

If he succeeds, the lesson is let Elon Musk run the world.

If he fails, the lesson is never try to change the status quo for the better.

And if he's lying, the lesson is never trust anyone trying to help you, they're going to fleece you and believing in altruism is a sucker's game.

Of course, the other flipside that has been seen throughout history is that, no matter how good of a ruler (or dictator) you are, your successor can still royally screw it all up, particularly if they inherit your great power without the great wisdom.

I honestly suspect that it's going to come down to that his efforts will be found to have helped, but that they do still have fatal flaws that will require our heroes intervening, with an aesop that you can't go it alone, no matter how smart and powerful you are.

His plan certainy makes me think he has means to become immortal.

Or at least ludicrously long lived.

Edited by Whowho on May 19th 2022 at 9:33:37 AM

There needed to be one final line with The Rant, where Deus turns "you exhaust me" into "...and that's a bad thing?"

x4 No, Deus actually displays very high general intelligence. Musk is just a very good engineering manager with a tendency to sequential obsessions and rich parents.

There's very little difference between rich white geniuses and rich white pretend geniuses in the aesop and public consciousness department.

Deus and Musk are both fictional geniuses.

Edited by God_of_Awesome on May 20th 2022 at 10:35:40 AM

No offense, but can we maybe keep Musk out of this thread? The guy's already infesting enough conversations over in On-Topic.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 20th 2022 at 8:37:24 PM

Deus has a plan, but Outside Context Problems are always fun with those

Right. The real point about “No plan survives contact with the enemy” was always that you should have good, well-trained field officers who you could brief on your objectives, so that they could adapt to unexpected events. Deus hasn’t got any of those (unless he’s trying to employ Max as one).

So far, he's been very good at predicting those. The aliens are one thing—he's got off world connections and "let's not be racist to the refugees with lots of technology" is not a hard plan to figure out. But he also showed up the freaking minute that an impregnable treasure vault was breached. I think he might have at least some ability to see the future. Maybe one of his non-combat supers.

Sure. Instead I'll say that the possible aesop of Deus's story is, "You should let rich white men run the world. Clearly, they're smarter than everyone else."

And the other aesops are also equally unpalatable.

You're assuming that the story is intended to have a moral, or that every story must have one, intended or not.

Oh, an unintended one, I'm sure.

Alternative morals:

If he succeeds, the lesson is that an imaginary superintelligent supervillain might actually be more successful than most or all real-world leaders.

If he fails, the lesson is that change is hard and perhaps that it should be accomplished by consensus rather than by dictat, even if your dictator is a superintelligent supervillain.

And if he's lying, the lesson is that people sometimes lie, and caution is rational, even or especially when dealing with someone who attempts to confuse the issue by openly playing the superintelligent supervillain. Gift horses do sometimes have dental issues.

I think the fantasy here is that world leaders could make the world a better place if they had more alteristic motives.

Lectures and Death

The comments section suggests that the first bit Vale is reading comes from a manifesto from the mercenaries, but it sure reads like that Deus is partly executing these men for trying to educate people about condoms...

About the evils of condoms. Basically, they're sexual predators who also convince their victims not to use condoms (for their own personal satisfaction), spreading STDs and leaving their victims pregnant on top of everything else. And that's assuming those are a separate category from the rapists.

My biggest problem with Deus' actions here is the extrajudicial killing bit. When he first started, maybe this sort of thing was necessary. But now? He's the unquestioned, beloved dictator of the nation in all but name. If he doesn't have courts to handle this sort of thing, he is doing something VERY wrong. He doesn't even have to worry about vigilantes corrupting the chain of evidence, because he can put his team of supers on the book as legal officers of the law, with as much obfuscation of their identity as they prefer!

This is just Deus deciding it would be easier to murder people he doesn't like rather than put them through a legal system HE CONTROLS.

I read that as they were lecturing about how condoms themselves are evil - the phrasing definitely needed some work, though, as "Teaching young girls about the evils of condoms" is Ambiguous Syntax at its finest.

Also, the strip put him firmly in the Utopia Justifies the Means category, if his murder of Indinge Sr. didn't already.

Seems like the courts are working fine for Galytn citizens - "As far as the legal system in Galytn goes, citizens are in pretty good shape. The entire legal system is free, because as soon as it’s not free, IMO, it stops being about justice and becomes hugely dependent on who has more money. There’s no death penalty for Galytn citizens except for extreme circumstances, like war criminals, but at the moment, if you’re caught doing some big no-no’s and you’re not a citizen? For instance if you’re a mercenary hired by a foreign power to blow up hospitals or something, welllllll… Then you get to see Vale, and she’s been armed with long winded speeches about why you’ve been a naughty boy."

And given the real life history of mercs escaping punishment for literal war crimes (the shit Blackwater pulled in Iraq springs readily to mind)... I can't help but say that Jerkass Has a Point.

Edited by ironballs16 on May 23rd 2022 at 9:44:28 AM

{nods} For me, it was the ambiguity between whether Vale was quoting something they said (for which they were being condemned) or if the rant about condoms was Deus's words, which she was quoting and then skimming over because she was bored at having to proclaim their doom.

Overall, I see Deus as the sort of person who would espouse condom usage to avoid paternity suits and disease (and for others to curtail their efforts to add to the gene pool), but might have a personal vendetta against them for the feel and/or some line about "they're always too small for me" to fit his huge ego. Or I could see him simply being against them for one reason or another. He, too, is human, and therefore prone to funny quirks and prejudices.

Which again, brings me back to him being too impatient to run them through the legal system. It's apparently a good system, I'm sure the corrupt judges have been purged, and the death penalty does exist so if he really wants these people dead presumably their crimes are some of the ones that get the death penalty. If that's all true, then what possible reason could there be for extrajudicial killings other than "I can't be bothered running them through the legal system"?

I could also see a possibility that these people have been through the legal system, and this is the "death penalty chamber". He just isn't properly describing how exactly it works.

I assume that this approach keeps Vale happy and lets Cthillia recharge that dagger. We don't actually know what either of those two are, but Cthillia is a fairly casual killer at minimum, and Vale has sometimes been shown as creepy in ways that we don't get from the hammy-evil demons in the setting. Max referring to her as a psycho seems on point.

(It seems pretty clear to me that the point here is that the condemned have been promoting a morality that includes opposition to contraception. You get seriously poisonous Christian sects operating in Africa whose functional positions on contraception and abortion make the typical USA religious right look downright cuddly.)