Political Memes

Men will LITERALLY construct an entire persona based around their phobias as a result of trauma over witnessing the murder of their parents during a mugging orchestrated by crime bosses and spend millions of dollars on toys and gadgets to act out revenge fantasies and calling it vigilante justice rather than go to therapy.

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I haven't even read Batman, but I've seen this same thread pop up enough times to know that:

1. Gotham is literally cursed

2. Gotham is extremely corrupt. Tax money wouldn't go where it needs to

3. Bruce Wayne bankrolls tons of social programs

We are assuming that somehow if Wayn pays large sums of wealth to the government, the government wouldn't just be their usual wasteful, corrupt, self serving self with said money. You get every current billionaire in the USA to pay a fair tax. Where do you think the money goes? Funding for food stamps or Lockeed-Martin?

isn't a big part of the whole setup that this would not help much? like Gotham is just too corrupt, whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they're mostly just stolen from.

Wayne is a philanthropist who gives a ton of money back through his own programs, right? presumably better overseen than the government ones.

I don't know how much money of Wayne's is actually used for philanthropy, but he can't just give the city all his wealth because it's too corrupt for it to be used well, right?

Tax wealth not work

In the Batman Year 1 comic the thing that makes the police believe there really is a 'Bat-Man' is when he attacks a fancy dinner party and warns Gotham's movers and shakers that justice is coming for them, too.

Here is a short list of shit going on in Gotham at any given time, not including the wide array of psychopaths and supervillains doing shit at any given time:

1. The insane asylum with the portal to hell (Depending on if you consider Living Hell canon or not.)
2. The Lazarus pit in the city spewing chemicals into the water supply.
3. All the other chemicals likely in the water supply from a wide array of sources, including regular pollution and goofy shit.
4. The remnants of the evil warlock who was sealed under the city for centuries.
5. The massive mafia presence and general corruption.
6. The Illuminati that uses zombie soldiers.

That is not shit proper taxation is going to resolve. You can't protected bike lane away the zombie controlling Illuminati.

Gotham is extremely corrupt, from the police departments being riddled with officers on any of the several mob payrolls. Same for the politicians. Feeding more tax dollars into that won't mean that money is going to the poor people who would benefit from it

What bugs me is this is a controversial opinion about Batman. That there's still objection to the notion that Batman is fulfilling his own violent jollies in the color of seeking justice, rather than using his massive fortunes to serve good.

I think my most controversial Batman opinion is that his code vs. killing is bunk. Even if he just punches goons, he does so enough that goons would die often enough to give Batman a substantial body count. I'm sure his press crew and legal team are occupied continuously with the task of cleaning up his messes.

In fact, there's not enough dramatic crime (like bank heists, contrast domestic violence or check-cashing fraud, which not even regular police care much about) to support a superhero career¹

Curiously, Batman could make a career going after elite deviance / white collar crime, going after the Sacklers for pushing opioids and starting the current opioid crisis, going after companies that lobby governments to deregulate so they can pollute or push false products (e.g. cars as opposed to public transit; ETA A new video popped up about the wellness industry that pushes mostly pure quackery, and has captured the HHS, so we're in a bit of a need of this kind of vig.); Or the DeVos family who use MLMs and PMCs to make their millions; Or the private equity companies like Bain Capital and Blackrock who get rich by creating massive bankruptcy sinkholes leveraging the brand reputations of aging companies and foreclosing commodities for their own personal gain. If Wayne wanted to go after the very sorts of things he, his company and his parents did / do to amass their fortunes, he could prevent a lot of cost, destruction and loss of life by orders of magnitude more than all the petty crime put together.

Funny DC doesn't want to do that, though. Maybe Detective Comics is just state and law enforcement propaganda and they like it that way.

1. ( ¹ ) Batman is not just a mountain of a man and master martial artist, but also has the academic capacity of several doctorates, assuming he -- and not a secret task force of backup investigators -- does all his detective-work and implements all his backup plans. Personally, I like the idea of Batman as a sophisticated justice and detective agency.

Gotham is so corrupt that it would make Russia blush. If you taxed Bruce Wayne at 99%, nothing would change except the cops would all suspiciously have new supercars.

Well. Part of batman mythos is that no amount of money is enough to save the city from itself.

I don't think this person ever read batman.

I should stop coming to these threads. At the end of the day, Batman is rich by day and personally fights crime at night. Everything else is just added on to make that premise work. It feels like a bit of a Thermian argument ("she's naked because she breathes through her skin")

Edit: there's also something interesting to say about why "comic book" means "superheroes" in the US but "Donald Duck/Tintin/Astérix" in Western Europe

Gotham city has a prison that is corrupt like hell. The joker stays in it just for fun. He seems to be able to leave at any time.

Next Gotham city has a crime spawner. For no reason at all crimes seem to happen.

Badman should first fight the corrupt officials and raise a new administration for the city before he fights the low criminals.

"Gotham is so corrupt all the money would be wasted."

That's fine. Wealth inequality on that scale is evil and corrosive to society. It would be better to do something productive with it, but setting the money on fire would still be better than letting billionaires like Wayne hoard it.

The joker was totally based with his cash pyre in Dark Knight.

It only works when that money goes to the right place. With all the corruption in Gotham, that money probably goes straight into the politicians bank accounts.

‘Wayne foundation’

…

It doesn’t look like a lot of people even read the comic books before forming these opinions about his storyline.

In Batman's defence, he doesn't decide the tax policies and I'm pretty sure he is already an avid philanthropist and political donator for anti-poverty policy.