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.
Do his taxes have plot armor?
I haven’t even read Batman, but I’ve seen this same thread pop up enough times to know that:
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Gotham is literally cursed
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Gotham is extremely corrupt. Tax money wouldn’t go where it needs to
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Bruce Wayne bankrolls tons of social programs
This ^^
It’s cursed because comic writers couldn’t come up with a better way to explain why the city can’t be fixed by the world’s smartest billionaire.
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Im gonna say that this is why Batman Forever is my favorite Batman movie. There is this scene where the badguys rip a bank vault out of the wall, and by the end of the scene batman uses an explosive to have fly back into place. My point is, Batman needs to take place in a pulpy hyper reality, or he goes from a Doc Savage in a cool costume to a mentally insane Billionaire karate chopping poor people because as punishment.
Also, in that movie, they took pains to portray him as a “Good” ceo.
I just think this is an issue of tone and presentation.
that is why i love the gothic tone of Tim Burton, it is a Hallucinogenic reality with grotesque characters
For that you need to first receive the income and book the capital gains. If you ever filed your taxes you would know. A 3% wealth tax on non cash assets would be more effective and productive. There are provisions where if you take out a home loan, you can deduct its interest from your salary or income to reduce your tax liability. Billionaires (or even the middle class) do that often. This builds assets as well as allows for a lower tax liability.
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
Gotham being corrupt should make it even easier for a billionaire like Wayne to control things, because as we see in real life, it doesn’t take all that much money to influence politicians. There’s nothing stopping Wayne from bribing the shit out of everyone to do non-evil things, then once Gotham is in a more stable place, bankroll campaigns for politicians that aren’t corrupt. He could literally drain the swamp by backfilling it with money, but instead he decides to run around at night in his little gimp suit punching poor people
Part of the point of so many of Batman’s villains is that, to quote joker, it’s not about the money but about sending a message. Or holding power in many cases. Many of the most corrupt villains are not only bankrolling bribes, they are also blackmailing tons of people and many more live under threat to loved ones. Wayne just waltzing in and saying “I’ll pay you triple to be good” does nothing. Because if they don’t do the villain’s biding they will get murdered and their family will be slaughtered. Hence the need for a vigilante to disrupt the corrupt system with direct action. That’s the whole arc of Harvey Dent, for example. The system took him down in the worst possible way to shape him into another morally bankrupt psycho.
Isn’t that a massive indictment of Batman’s entire modus operandi though? That there can be a terrifying lunatic who will beat you up with his little finger if you even think of doing a crime, and yet crime and corruption is worse than in every other city?
I do think there’s some merit to paying those kids of people enough via the state that they’re less likely to need or want to be corrupt in order to make ends meet.
Of course there are people who would still use that to live their life in luxury at the expense of others but I believe that’d generally be a minority
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.
This person is arguing for higher taxation of the wealthy in the real world, not necessarily engaging in detailed analysis of the fictional world of Batman
I would be surprised if they did any more studying of real government systems and economies than they did of the batman lore.
So many people going around the internet just spouting whatever superficial shit they heard in their group.
Sure, why they landed specifically on a 90 per cent marginal tax at that specific threshold isn’t really clear (though that might be from Zucman, Piketty, etc?)
Again though, the tax system is here mostly a placeholder for the political idea that society would derive more good from redistributing wealthy people’s resources for collective use than it does from their individual contributions. It’s just a main tenet for socialism, not som deep cut idea you’d have to research.
See also Taylor Swift.
Pay some goddamn taxes.
She’s pretty far down on the list of parasites but yeah, I mean if she’s not being taxed, tax her.
3% wealth tax would be better still
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?
whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they’re mostly just stolen from.
I’m reminded of the time Walgreens reported they were raising prices and closing stores because of rampant crime, but later admitted they made it the fuck up.
Where does Wayne’s money come from?
How many hours does Wayne’s day have that he can do millions or billions of dollars worth of actual work while still playing dress-up at night?
Or does his money come from short-changing and underpaying his employees, while hiking the prices for his customers? Or does it come from using speculation and investment to make sure he gets rich off other people being underpaid and overcharged?
How can he be a philanthropist when all his money comes from fleecing other people?
Wayne Enterprises is essentially Lockheed-Martin, so yes, short changing his customers (that is, the US Government) figures largely into his business model. So does promoting military adventurism and forever wars.
And that also means assuring that kids in the slums don’t have access to opportunities other than the military.
presumably better overseen than the government ones
That’s a particularly post-Reagan presumption, and is the product of the kind of deregulation that the Reagan administration spearheaded. In fact, government programs are especially good at fulfilling their roles, since the Pournelle motivation of survival of the department is actually a weaker diversion than the motivation of profit.
We’ve seen plenty of examples, how California regions that had public power fared better during the Enron crisis in the aughts or how Medicare was stronger and yielded a higher rate of positive outcomes before it was privatized by the George W. Bush administration. A similar thing happened in UK in which the NHS got privatized and reshaped for efficiency over redundancy, creating long lines and more poor outcomes.
Wayne has exactly the same kinds of right-wing biases that Andrew Carnegie did, and Bill Gates does, preferring to make decisions based on his own anecdotal experiences than based on data sets. Sure, he saved a kid from crime, and in the meantime more kids suffer from food precarity, from family precarity, from housing precarity than are getting pushed drugs and bullied by gangs. In fact, the gangsters are coming from the precarious environments of the first group.
Batman is ultimately a fantasy of personal responsibility, that we should each be strong enough to bootstrap our fortunes, even though actual data shows most don’t, especially when there are extenuating factors like not being a non-disabled white dude with at least middle-class backing by family. Batman is glad to let everyone else that doesn’t fit into that category suffer.
Granted DC can write what they want, which is why Batman can have a code vs. killing while still smashing the faces of half of Gotham. IRL bare-knuckle fisticuffs will actually kill, and Batman doesn’t pull punches.
Rubber Bullets. Honest. – Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, 1986
Batman was created as the reverse of Superman: light vs darkness, superpowers vs a human being, just a journalist vs a billionaire, …
That’s why were Superman is an ideal of everything that’s good in humanity, Batman is the vision of the humanity not as a hero but as a vigilante.
it was like that since the O`Neil days if not earlier.
So why isn’t Batman beating up corrupt politicians and judges instead of crippling poor people who have no other opportunity to make money than to work for a villain?
This thread is full of people who have never read Batman comics.
Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.
Batman is effectively sisyphus in that regard.
That’s worse. You see how that’s worse, right?
The entire premise of this accursed property is “structural change is definitionally impossible and evil-natured people cannot be helped so let’s see how Batman brutally maims victims of this system to defeat the villain-of-the-day”. This is such a profoundly repulsive ideology to me. It’s not about the in-universe justifications, it’s about the horrible, awful, despicable themes of the stories that glorify hyper-individualism and completely discredit democracy, civic institutions, and community.
The in-universe explanations were just tacked on to those core reactionary ideals. The writers didn’t stumble on a cursed city, they invented a cursed city to justify their need for vigilantism and violence to be the only rational answers to society’s ills.
Gothman has syphillis?
Lmao, im gonna leave it.
Gothman is a meme in my friend group. He is effectively sad batman, a regular goth guy, and a visigoth all at the same time or which he ever needs to be at the time.
He may not be the meme we deserve, but he is the one that we need to burn Rome.
Now we need a Gothman comic!
Not only that, most fully realized versions of the character channel both the vigilante AND playboy personas to fight crime, using Wayne Enterprises to create welfare programs and jobs so Gothamites need not resort to crime to put food on the table.
There’s a scene where Batman pacifies a room of Black Mask goons without lifting a FINGER - he hacks the projector screen simply shows them a Wayne Foundation advertisement for better, safer jobs. One by one, every man simply drops their weapons and walks out the door as their crime boss irately yells at them to come back.
Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.
It’s more like, this post is full of people describing why the only way the storyline can stay realistic is by introducing supernatural evil.
If it were not a cursed city and if Batman was really a hero who wanted to help people, he would do the social programs and investment in community, but that would be a pretty lousy monthly comic book for kids to read and buy batman merchandise.
He already does all that on top of being batman.
He does do those though?
There are better places for superheroes. As I note above, there’s a lot of elite deviance / white collar crime that Batman’s amazing detective powers could easily be turned on. Heck, the US has been occupied and is controlled by a dangerous religious cult with a rogues gallery of masterminds vying for power, and they’re behaving conspicuously like comic-book villains.
On the street level, a mega-corporation fighting a labor organization for control over the workforce would be a great venue for vigilantes with extraordinary powers. Eventually they’d higher a PMC task force (possibly with a cadre of G. I. Joe like specialists) as the Guy of Gisbourne to our protagonists’ Merry Men.
There are a lot of directions that can be taken that pit vigilante justice-seekers against sociopolitical bullies with wealth and power. DC needs to just do a bit of brainstorming, but no they’d rather Batman fight the Joker for One More Time. 🥱
Supernatural evil is not realistic. And when we encounter unearthly natural evils (which we do!), they tend to have solutions that are not a flying vigilante putting out street-crime level fires.
Deep geological repositories for storing vitrified nuclear waste, for instance. We have those.
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.
Doesn’t he do both?
Bruce Wayne goes to therapy, not Batman, it’s different (canonically).
So uh … his therapist must suck for not treating that borderline Personality Disorder and uncovering his dissociative identity disorder
Given that the most successful therapists in Gotham are people like Dr. Harleen Quinzel, I’m not confident they can overlook their own issues.
Batman IS the primary personality and he’s never gone to therapy, so theres really nothing the Therapist can do about it at that point.
No it’s fine, Batman is the real person. Bruce Wayne is the fake and that’s why he needs therapy.
Every time he talks to a therapist they end up becoming a villain.
“Heroes In Crisis” There’s a top secret therapist for the heroes to consult with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_in_Crisis
Batman goes to the therapist in his cowl.
I remember in some of the animated series that he would go to therapy but was not open and putting up his playboy billionaire persona. Honestly it seemed like a waste of a time for him if he wasn’t being honest, unless it was to keep up appearances. Closest I think he gets to actual therapy is talking to Alfred.
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); 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 ) 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.
It’s a controversial opinion because it’s ill-informed. Bruce Wayne does give the majority of his money to charity. Even Superman, the goodest person on earth, looks up to him. But no amount of funding food banks or building low-income housing is going to uncurse the cursed land that Gotham is built on
Yeah I recall half the issue being that Gotham is so corrupt, any money is going to be wasted, which is why the Wayne family has to have its own charities to accomplish anythign at all.
Atleast in reality, a lot of the time corruption happens is because people don’t get paid enough to have the luxury of principles/integrity.
So it’s a case of self fulfilling prophecy
Clarence totes needed that lux RV
Fair point, but that’s also why every branch of government also needs to be beholden to another which did not sign them in the first place.
The fact that they are assigned for life is a glaring potential for abuse.
Also every person in every governmental position from county to federal needs a no confidence/recall method.
I agree with you in the realm of reality. But I think thats why they tried to bring the idea that “some people just want to watch the world burn” to the forefront with Joker. If he wanted to redistribute the wealth to have a better society he wouldn’t burn it all, or he’d use it to counter anti social program rhetoric or something. Try to make some kind of change, but he doesn’t want change, he wants the wealth gap. The bigger the gap, the more desperate the people who he can manipulate into causing more crime and chaos.
Some people just want to watch the world burn is good cause not to deal with such people. The mafia / crime syndicate in an effort to get to Batman hired Joker as a Guy of Gisborne to Batman’s Robin Hood, only they got more than they bargained for.
Considering our billionaires hired Trump to keep their taxes low and are now dealing with a tanking economy, this seems to be the kind of play that tracks IRL. Especially since now Trump is lame duck and Miller, Vought and Thiel/Vance (Mandate, Marbro Man and Lifepod might be their villain names) are now vying for power while Trump is still alive.
Heck, this would make a great comic book.
If the system allows it, someone will have that lack of integrity you speak of to fill that hole. The system’s the issue and money helps to gather power in a capitalistic system.
ill informed
And this is where I ask if I even give you the time of day. I don’t think you understand the failures of modern charity in contrast to, say, the general fund of an actually-democratic society.
In fact, Oakland, California IRL is doing a lot of the things that Gotham should be doing including food banks and low-income housing projects, but also extending the list of 911 responders to provide alternatives to a police force that is eager to escalate to violence and can’t handle mental health crises, kids programs, school breakfast and lunch programs. You know, the kinds of things that an actual society might do.
Unless you’re arguing there’s a literal magical curse on the city of Gotham, in which case no amount of face-punching thugs is going to help either, and DC’s writing is proving as consistent as ever.
I posted below in more depth regarding the serious failure of the Batman paradigm, and would argue the fantasy is as much utopianism as Starship Troopers.
Unless you’re arguing there’s a literal magical curse on the city of Gotham, in which case no amount of face-punching thugs is going to help either, and DC’s writing is proving as consistent as ever.
There literally is lmfao
Did this guy forget that we’re talking about comics?
It’s so on the nose, it almost feels like bait.
He could go after alpha agencies that are the biggest source of illicit dope, and also other kinds of trafficking.
