"Ivy, you know who I am at this point. Let me attest that most of these people don't actually do shit. There are layers of layers of management and shareholders that allow the average generational wealth billionaire to extract extreme amounts of wealth without doing shit. That's honestly a good thing in your case, because anyone who actually has the ability to make obscene money in this universe is either a superhero or supervillain, and you would have just walked into their secret hideout.
If you do kill him, the best case scenario is a collection of hedge funds you never heard of divy up his controlling shares and keep business as usual flowing. The worst case is Luthor buys the company and makes everything a million times worse as step one in a convoluted plan to kill superman via kryptonite laced micro plastics. The most likely thing is one of those technically secret society orgs seizing control because at this point they just need some win. My money is on the Owls. They've been humiliated so many times they've been officially downgraded to "community advisory committee".
I honestly don't even understand where this is coming from. You and Freeze both have blank checks from both WayneTech and Star Labs to continue your research. Either of you alone could reverse large portions of climate change. If you really wanted to go the vigilante route, you could have just mind controlled him. Darksied is planning an invasion, there are no less than three evil AIs rolling around, I'm dealing with two separate split personalities, and I haven't heard from the Joker in a while which means we're all probably fucked. Even if I did notice, it would take me literal years to get around to actually fixing it. It feels like you are doing this because on some level you want to fail, because that's easier than doing the hard work required to fix the systemic abuses of our system "
"...So I take it the Therapy's working, huh Bruce?"
"Sort of. It's Batman".
"Actually technically right now you're Nightwing. Care to explain that?"
"It's a long story. The short of it is that I'm pulling double duty because Dick somehow forgot how to fucking Jump and Jason took Damien out for "Beer and Cigarettes", which I can only hope is literal because anything it would be a metaphor for would involve no less than two dozen corpses.".
"Jesus Christ and Harley said I was carrying too much stress. I'll come back next week, get some rest Bruce"
If Lemmy had the feature to tip with gold, instance operators would pop out of the ground like weeds and do anything to grow. It could lead to a flourishing of the fediverse.
Batman fundamentally embodies social justice as an individual violent power fantasy. He's the ultimate reactionary: use violence to fix individual people's problems, never address (or even acknowledge) the violence inherent to the social system. (Some authors' occasional deviations from this core characterization do not make up for it).
At best Batman is enjoyable because anti-heroes are enjoyable (I've heard there are some self-aware issues of Batman). At worst it's painfully unaware, mask-off copaganda (such as the one and-and-a-half Nolan movies I slugged through).
The top comment is a fanfic about Batman explaining social systems to Poison Ivy. Great idea, except that such wokeness is antithetical to his entire worldview. He's basically a Republican who happens to be against the death penalty for personal/religious reasons.
The great thing about the earth is that it has a seemingly boundless capacity to renew itself.
The bad thing is that renewal takes time and often results in a radically different biosphere with organisms best suited to predate on prior iterations of life.
I'm less worried about how the earth will look in 10,000 years than I am worried about how humans will survive in the next 100.
We can fix it in the future has been an argument for decades at this point and we still haven't found that magical fix while barreling towards ecological desaster. All data points so far show that this magical technology will not arrive before we all suffer permanent and irreperable damage.
Batman would rather beat up and cripple poor people who fell into crime from their situation, instead of actually doing something about it. After decades, Gotham ends up worse than when he got in, and the criminals just got crazier. He made it worse.
this could have been a great thread to talk about what we should really be doing to these billionaires and their companies, and you nerds just descended into batman lore.
Ivy has been vegan and vegetarian and an omnivore depending on the author.
But the best take I have seen was in a comic she points out that she just respects how nature works. Animals and plants kill each other all the time. It's only natural. But feeling entitled cause you use agave that a forest was burned down to grow en masse only as your sweetener makes you a hypocrite and part of her prey.
ACAB includes batman. Pretty much all masked vigilantes are worse, in fact. Batman is at no risk of losing his job over police brutality. Batman brutality is just... Expected. And the police just let him do it!
Any time Spider-Man is accused of committing a crime, Jameson puts a bounty on his head and the cops start shooting him on sight. Care to explain how Spider-Man is worse than cops?
This portrayal of Poison Ivy isn't accurate to the comics. The actual Poison Ivy doesn't care about saving humanity from climate change, she only cares about saving the plants. She murders vegetarians in retaliation for eating plants. She thinks plants have feelings, and she's wrong. She's not an environmentalist, she's a plant supremacist.
Poison Ivy would kill all off all the birds that eat berries, and drive the berry producing trees to extinction from lack of pollination in the process. She's not a rational thinker.
everything gotta have some weird nuance these days though. Can't just have the green lanterns either, gotta have red, blue, yellow, white, black, etc. Can't just have the speed force, gotta have a whole cosmology there too. It's a fuckin mess.
These stats about the 100 largest companies get posted a lot, and once again, it's not meaningful because those companies exist to provide goods for other people. It's like saying just 100 entities (who all happen to be water utilities) consume 90% of the world's water so individual attempts to reduce water usage are meaningless.
People aren't going to like the reality that we need BOTH people to change their habits AND we need companies to follow suite.
I mean, needed. Past-tense. We're in it now, it's too late to stop, maybe we can still prevent the worst case if people all get over themselves really fast and are willing to change the way they do things.
People aren’t going to like the reality that we need BOTH people to change their habits AND we need companies to follow suite.
Jon Stewart said it best.
"The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail **** job, day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart, and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues till they get a positive result. And even then, have to stay on to make sure that result holds."
Yeah. I mean I agree that focusing on change at the systemic level is more effective than changing individual habits, but what people don't realize is that the systemic change we need is the kind that will force those individual changes.
Taxing or regulating the oil companies will help, but it will help by making energy more expensive so people are forced to make do with less.
You do though? There's a ton of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Eliminate? No. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good, or even the enemy of "less bad than doing nothing"
And here we are buying all their shit. Another dress, yes sure, why not? Another gadget with rounded corners at a premium price, yes of course, take my money! More chocolate harvested by children won't hurt me, GIVE IT TO ME! You mean to say this waste of material will make me popular? I want 10 of them! I can buy 100 of these and waste them in a video for clout, well that's right up my alley. I'll take 1000!
BTW, don't forget, I can't help out here, it's the billionaires to blame for providing me access to all this.