• [email protected]
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    2026 months ago

    No. Unequivocally no. This might make sense on its face but it misunderstands Batman at a fundamental level- Batman is a hero who cannot make sense. He is severely mentally ill and craves change physically and instantly wrought by his own two hands.

    If a CEO were doing something outlandishly and visibly evil then they might find themselves on Batman’s radar, but exacerbating wealth inequality is just not something Batman usually cares about. Would it make sense for Batman to do something about it? Yes. Absolutely. Would the crazy 100 kg gymnast dressed like a giant bat, who has made a nightly ritual of shattering the spines of impoverished criminal dockworkers do that? No.

    Now daredevil, daredevil might find himself beating the ass off a shady Manhattan CEO. But daredevil is sane, reasonable, and goal oriented and Batman is just not.

    • Carighan Maconar
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      306 months ago

      but exacerbating wealth inequality is just not something Batman usually cares about

      In fact, being a mega-rich himself, he’s probably best buddies with those CEOs so long as they don’t do something so outlandishly evil that he has to go after them for publicity reasons.

    • @leftzero
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      36 months ago

      Yeah, dude’s the night, not the IRS or the better business bureau.

    • sunzu
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      356 months ago

      Yeah but he is on “our team” though!

      People can’t spot corpo propaganda, a lot of educating to be done.

      • @[email protected]
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        196 months ago

        The joker isn’t the disease in Gotham, he’s the symptom. In a world where the effort of an individual results in proportional gains, where people have a home, family, and attachments to their community, there is no joker. The populace is innoculated against his desire to tear it all down, because they have a stake in “it all”. The few that are vulnerable to his views, are getting the support and care they need from trained staff, and the people around them are keeping the joker away. Batman isn’t in Gotham because of the Joker; the Joker can exist in Gotham because of Batman, a billionaire who spent his efforts and resource on violence, instead of outreach.

        Plus, giving OSHA some teeth, and forcing corporations to compensate fairly for workplace accidents, and regulations requiring the inspection and certification of toxic chemical plants would have stopped the joker, and countless other tragedies, at a fraction of the cost.

        • sunzu
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          66 months ago

          Treating people with dignity and respect creates a functional society…

          Doing the opposite …

          Until we start naming people who are doing this nothing will change but NPC normies worship their dear daddies

      • @[email protected]
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        6 months ago

        At first I thought you were insinuating this post was corpo propaganda, but then it clicked that you were talking about Batman himself lol. I’d like to say that many if not most versions of batman is more gentle and forgiving than the police, his goals are simply to take an impossible problem to fix and reduce harm from it as much as possible, without all the sophistry of purely hypothetical philanthropy and political reform.

        • sunzu
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          36 months ago

          his goals are simply to take an impossible problem to fix and reduce harm from it as much as possible

          Corpo propaganda

          Nothing can be done, nobody to blame, cope peasant

  • @[email protected]
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    1046 months ago

    Yes the billionaire that spent a shit ton on money on gadgets to beat up poor people would definitely be a champion of the people

    • @[email protected]
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      6 months ago

      He also beats up rich people, like the Penguin. The Joker and Riddler and all those guys get their crazy gadgets and hordes of minions somehow. They must be rich af

      • @leftzero
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        6 months ago

        Upper middle class. They’ve got the kind of money Al Capone had, not the kind of money Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos have.

        Batman generally leaves Lex Luthor, who does have that kind of money, alone. (And I don’t usually read DC, so I may be wrong, but I don’t think he tends to get physical with the court of owls much either…),

      • @[email protected]
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        26 months ago

        But all those are poor people who got rich via crime since they didn’t really have other avenues.

        The Batman lore has a lot of hidden messages about social class and hierarchy which doesn’t translate well to today.

  • @[email protected]
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    736 months ago

    No he won’t, batman fulfills every billionaires fantasy of dressing up in a costume and beating up poor people.

    • @[email protected]
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      146 months ago

      Yes. Not one really questions why Gotham has such a high crime rate, but where there’s poverty there’s crime. I think we need a working man’s batman.

      Someone whose super power isn’t having infinite resources.

    • @[email protected]
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      76 months ago

      That’s the internet pop-psychologist interpretation, but the people actually writing him often have him doing his best to better the Gotham around him. A lot of the petty thugs he catches are given chances to redeem themselves via Wayne based welfare programs.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      The former richest man in the world gave away much of his fortune and continues to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Wealth_and_philanthropy

      Bruce Wayne is not like that at all though. He’s in a position where he could actually do something about the problems of Gotham City and decides to go LARPing instead.

      To be fair, he beats up a bunch of rich criminals too but he whole thing is really more about his ego than about doing good.

      • Dark Arc
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        106 months ago

        Depends on the particular telling I think. DC has IIRC gone both ways with that.

      • @[email protected]
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        26 months ago

        Huh, maybe. Although my point was more batman is part of that class (albeit begrudgingly) so expecting batman in a position of great power and influence to actively take that from other people is just very hypocritical. Not that he shouldn’t (or someone shouldn’t). Just a very weird position.

        • @[email protected]
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          26 months ago

          In Batman Beyond, Batman’s nemesis is a CEO. He’s a villain called Blight, who killed Batman’s father.

            • @[email protected]
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              16 months ago

              He’s still Batman. He does detective stuff, doesn’t have superpowers, Gotham is appropriately grimdark, etc. Terry doesn’t have to learn that with great power comes great responsibility like Peter does. The only similarity is that he’s a working class wisecracking teenager with a somewhat agility based fighting style. Peter Parker was never a burly hoodlum before he got his powers, and he doesn’t see being a superhero as a way to make up for mistakes he made as a normal. He also didn’t steal his powers. Terry is a much more mature and slightly darker character than Peter at the start of his journey. He’s not an academically minded geek, he’s someone who’s experienced the real world and understands it. He’s got street smarts, he can fight, and he can lie.

  • @[email protected]
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    426 months ago

    Batman is a CEO, right?

    He just goes after the ones he can beat without much backlash from the public/system.

    Imagine if he takes down a CEO. He’d not be able to play batman. Gordon and batman sympathisers would be affected, so Batman’s human connection in the police would be lost. He can hack stuff, but might not always be enough.

    He can do other stuff, but he can only do it gradually and much more tactfully.

      • @[email protected]
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        46 months ago

        Lau laundered money for the mob and also was Chinese.

        I don’t think the public/mainstream would have issues there, where he goes after the non-native guy who laundered money for the mob.

  • Stern
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    406 months ago

    Like Lex Luthor, who hes fought on several occasions? Or more like the Court of Owls, one of his recurring set of villains?

  • @[email protected]
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    316 months ago

    I think more Superman.

    He is just a working class guy, both his wife and his own job are probably getting replaced by AI, his mother pension keeps getting lower and his dad died because he couldn’t afford proper healthcare.

    Also his arch nemesis is already a Billionaire.

    • @[email protected]
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      76 months ago

      Martha and Pa both got hooked on Oxy in the 00s, nothing Superman can do about it. He tries writing a big expose as Clark Kent but the Planet kills the story because Perdue buys a lot of ad space with them.

      Public got too weird about Supergirl, forcing her to retire as incels kept jumping off of buildings so they could grope her when she saved them.

  • @[email protected]
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    286 months ago

    If Batman was real today, he’d be Donald Trump.

    That’s what these (alleged) “super heroes” really are… idealized, ubermensch-esque metaphors for the actual power wielded by the rich and privileged.

    In fact, I’d say that Batman is the ultimate Objectivist wet dream - he perfectly personifies the fascist (as Batman) and the capitalist (as Bruce Wayne) in one person. Even Ayn Rand’s creepazoid ancap sugar-daddy “heroes” didn’t manage that.

    • @[email protected]
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      116 months ago

      I would like you to explain how Captain America and Superman are reactionary.

      Captain America is an artificial warrior created by a Jewish scientist to fight the Nazis, and Superman is a baby sent away in a basket to be raised by not-dead parents who chose to use his privilege to help people.

      Zack Snyder is an Objectivist and that’s why his Superman movies stink. He doesn’t understand the core themes of superheroes, he only understands the spectacle and surface theatrics.

      • @[email protected]
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        26 months ago

        I like Superman Returns, and I don’t care who knows it. Brandon Routh did a fine job imo.

        I know it’s unrelated but your comment made me think of it.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        I would like you to explain how Captain America and Superman are reactionary.

        I mean… c’mon. Captain America is low-hanging fruit - the correlation between Captain America and actual US behavior in the world essentially writes itself.

        Superman is a far more sophisticated representation of US-style liberalism - but, just like liberalism itself, that doesn’t make Super Cheese any less of a reactionary.

        However… we can talk about the individual politics of these characters all day long - and we’d be missing the entire point of the metaphor in it’s entirety.

        The problem with the “super hero” genre is not the individual politics of the characters concerned - it’s with how they normalize and justify the concentration of power in the hands of these exalted individuals.

        In other words - the problem is fundamental.

        He doesn’t understand the core themes of superheroes,

        I think he understand them perfectly, because…

        Zack Snyder is an Objectivist

        • @[email protected]
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          36 months ago

          Okay do fucking Spider-Man and tell me how “with great power comes great responsibility” is Objectivist. Rand wanted all the talented people to fuck off and leave the stupid poors to die! Spider-Man’s first arc is realising that his powers shouldn’t be used for self enrichment.

          • @[email protected]
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            16 months ago

            If you actually read the early comics, it takes Peter a good long while to learn that lesson and he still forgot it pretty frequently. Still, his journey toward learning that lesson was a core part of his character until the writers decided to just make him a flawless Mary-Sue.

            • @[email protected]
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              16 months ago

              I don’t think the writers have made him perfect. His most recent movie, No Way Home, is about Peter trying to use superpowers to help his friends get out of trouble. Which backfires and causes a bunch of problems, and Aunt May dies saying “with great power there must also come great responsibility.” Seems like a pretty on-theme story.

            • @[email protected]
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              16 months ago

              it takes Peter a good long while to learn that lesson

              That’s called a Character Arc. He’s a kid in the beginning.

  • @[email protected]
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    Superman was already going after CEOs when Batman was first created. Batman was always a hero for the right wing.