This is literally the entire Avengers, Iron Man, and Captain America plot.
You did not watch any of the movies if that’s your takeway. Iron Man 1 has Tony stop selling weapons, investing all of his money into clean energy, solving every war in the Middle East, and he kills a rich corrupt CEO.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Sorry, by “this”, I meant what Karl is asking for, not the message of the comic.
More like the plot of The Boys. Especially the comic series :)
Holy ham fist Batman
Well, no. In Iron Man (2008), Iron Man decides that Stark Industries will no longer be selling weapons to the government, and will instead be investing all of its money in clean energy. Then he solves all the wars in the middle east and kills a CEO.
I’m not joshing you, folks, that’s literally the plot of the movie. I rewatched it recently, that’s exactly what happens.
In the second one he gets drunk and fights a bunch of Russian bots
Hey! Stop that! You’re destroying my revolutionary sentiment against fictional superheroes!!
And we know that this is fiction because fiduciary duty means he’d immediately get fired and sued for turning around the company
He immediately got fired and sued. Have you watched the movie?
No he doesn’t? He gets sidelined for a while, which he doesn’t fight because he’s dostracted. Never gets sued. The second movie starts with a hearing where the gov is trying to acquire his new weapons, but it’s not a lawsuit and has nothing to do with the company.
He gets sidelined for a while
So, tell me how he gets sidelined.
Because he’s busy building Iron Man armors and locked on his basement/garage and not doing anything CEO related?
At one point I believe the dude tells him that the board has locked him out. So it’s not quite as happenstance as you’re suggesting.
Are we forgetting Stane was orchestrating the whole thing? Like, the entire movie is him just scheming to take over Stark Industries because he wants to continue selling weapons. I wouldn’t put it past him to essentially strongarm or manipulate the other stockholders into locking Stark out, especially given that the entire movie sets him up as someone who can and WILL use violence to get what he wants.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if he essentially threatened the other shareholders into locking Tony out, perhaps not directly though.
Fiduciary Duty is a lie created in the 80s to make corporate raiders more appealing.
Look up Dodge v Ford. This case set the precedent for what is now known as fiduciary duty.
They discuss it in the wiki article:
Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn’t that interesting.
Actually, Tony, Pepper, and Obadiah together owned more than half of the company’s stock. Obadiah would have needed virtually ALL of the other shareholders to agree to such a lawsuit, and he decided to use violence instead of bothering with the headache that would have been. After he died, anyone trying to do the same would have needed to get Ezekiel Stane on board, while Tony and Pepper were consolidating their control over shares and offering a lot of money for anyone who wanted to cash out of SIA while it was still worth something. So yeah, Tony stopped that from happening by being good at business, it wasn’t just plot armour.
The 3 Iron Man’s, 1 spider-man’s, and 1 avenger’s villain are still direct results of Toni Stark either being a mad scientist or an oligarch.
Most of that isn’t related at all to his superheroics.
Stane and Killian became problems for the world long before Tony became a superhero. Hammer was inspired by Stark’s superheroics, but Tony’s whole goal for that entire situation was to keep the Iron Man technology out of the hands of people like Hammer. With Toomes, it the federal government stepped in to take over the job and the city didn’t properly compensate him. He should have had a better cancellation clause in his contract with the city, Tony isn’t responsible for that contract. And Mysterio was exactly what Tony believed him to be. Seems like most of Mysterio’s goons were people mad they weren’t allowed to design weapons anymore. Quitting evil makes assholes angry, that’s not news.
The only supervillain I attribute to Tony’s actions as Iron Man is Ultron, and Ultron definitely isn’t a manifestation of Capitalism and the current world order. This comic is arguing that superheroes enforce the status quo, but I don’t believe Iron Man has acted to enforce the status quo through his superheroics. Your argument that he created those supervillains doesn’t convince Me either.
Superheroes can’t permanently solve stuff because then they’d have nothing left to fight and the comic would end.
In the real world the Joker would have ‘accidentally’ died in custody a long time ago, Mr. Fantastic would have us all driving cheap electric cars powered by arc reactors made by Tony Stark, and we’d be livimg a life of gay space communism.
I mean you’re basically describing star trek. It’s not like you can’t write stories like that.
We almost never actually see the “gay space communism” aspect of the Star Trek universe. The stories are mostly set on military vessels exploring space outside the Federation. Their supposedly superior society is only alluded to occasionally in dialogue.
Hancock is literally a bum(sorry for posting Will🤢Smith)
Damn, I thought this artist was getting better with pacing. Guess not.
Only needed panels are 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and I feel like panel 2 could easily be merged with another one.
This is a tell-don’t-show type of comic
What would be an honest system look like? any real world examples?
Closest would probably be something like Rojava or Chiapas. Sadly the capitalists control the world and until enough people turn on them and their system we won’t see much else.
Both examples represent only a state or autonomous region within a country.
I understand capitalism is the dominant these days but I was ask more about the entire history of humanity.
Was there a whole country [ not a city or state ] at any point in written history that prospered on a more fair system?
What shakes me to my core is that any attempt to establish a fair system is immediately bombarded by countless external and internal malicious actors looking to either exploit any loophole they can find for their own benefit or sabotage the system to prevent it from gaining any traction because it threatens their power.
I don’t think capitalism or any of the similarly exploitative systems that came before it are superior solutions to proposed fairer alternatives, but the wealth disparity they have created and the perverse incentive structure they push on society leave us ill equipped to transition away from them. Right now, our economies are all so interconnected and interdependent that it’s impossible to exist outside of the influence of capitalism or it’s awful predecessors.
I agree with all what you said.
The one thing we might disagree on is that you believe a fairer system is possible whereas I look at all countries in all of the known history and conclude that its not possible to have a fair system where everyone is truly equal.
I could be wrong of course. I am not a historian and surely there is a lot for me to learn and hence my question about any historic evidence of a successful fair system.
I come from Egypt and we went through communism period. The president back then decided to take big chunk of land from the ultra rich and divide it among the farmers. Factories were nationalized, big chains and businesses were taken away.
Result:
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When a land lord owned vast amount of land, he had enough money to buy most advanced equipments and most talented and experienced engineers in agriculture but when the land got divided among many poor farmers, they couldn’t afford any of that and productivity went down fast and the effect is lasting until now.
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Nationalized factories and businesses were given to people who - at best - didn’t worry too much if they’d succeed or not and at worse wanted to make as much cash as possible. Add to that people feared of succeeding too much least their possessions get confiscated.
Egypt used to produce TVs, Radios, cassettes, Cars, .and many others and now it produces pretty much nothing.
Even China didn’t starts to succeed until it gave in a little to Capitalism (not that Communist China was any fairer anyway)
Communism, socialism, and the theoretically fairer alternatives I speak of have a number of possible implementations and, for the reasons I mentioned above, virtually no untainted historical examples for us to cleanly learn from. Every time someone takes a crack at it, the circumstances are unique and the powers looking to sabotage the system or seize it for themselves are different. It usually gets dismantled or becomes so corrupted as to be nothing more than another attempt.
I know nothing about what happened in Egypt and I’m commenting solely on my general knowledge and the words you have provided me.
The president back then decided to take a big chunk of land from the ultra rich and divide it among the farmers. Factories were nationalized, big chains and businesses were taken away.
When a land lord owned vast amount of land, he had enough money to buy most advanced equipments and most talented and experienced engineers in agriculture but when the land got divided among many poor farmers, they couldn’t afford any of that and productivity went down fast and the effect is lasting until now.
So the farmers had no assistance and no plan to implement this massive change? Land was just taken from a large owner and haphazardly distributed to poor farmers?
While I don’t doubt that the loss of productivity has had a detrimental effect and caused harm, how were conditions for the laborers and those in poverty before this happened, when “productivity” was great? I’m not sure what the greater “good” conditions would be since I’m not familiar with the situation, the region, or its struggles. It is just notable that your description focuses on productivity.
Nationalized factories and businesses were given to people who - at best - didn’t worry too much if they’d succeed or not and at worse wanted to make as much cash as possible. Add to that people feared of succeeding too much least their possessions get confiscated.
Nationalized tends to mean state ownership rather than distributed or worker ownership. Who were the factories “given to” and what does that mean? Again, was there a plan or were they just seized and handed off without serious consideration for how they should be managed and maintained?
Perhaps there is a reason I’ve never heard of the Egyptian communism you speak of. It sounds like it was not implemented with any kind of long term plan and, unsurprisingly, didn’t achieve very much. Or it might just be that it received little attention because it wasn’t a country of “white” people.
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We had 60,000 years of communism here in Australia
I am not very familiar with Australian history.
Did the native Australians write their history or only have stories that is passed from one generation to the next?
Australian oral histories are the most accurate and consistent in the world. While the Library of Alexandria was burning down, Aboriginal Australians were preserving knowledge from tens of thousands of years ago. If you want to know what life was like 10,000 years ago, all you have to do is go talk to an Aboriginal elder.
And who had a part in building this? Perhaps the average voter not voting?
Perhaps expressing apathy and complacency every chance you got while it happened around you?
Once again the average American is asking an outside force to fix something they themselves keep getting themselves into by voting stupid or not voting at all, sitting on their hands when something is terrible happening right in front of them and keep buying the shit that will hurt them in the end. I mean here we all are on the net with one type of device or another. Possibly engaging with tech that is only propping these giants up further.
Be the hero you wanted to come save you.
