“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.
‘Wayne foundation’
…
It doesn’t look like a lot of people even read the comic books before forming these opinions about his storyline.
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.
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
True. That is indeed very interesting. Although not limited to comic books. You can spot a similar pattern in movies too. Somehow, in America, the films to become the most popular (or most successful) mostly featured themes portraying powerful people in a positive light, directly or indirectly. While in Europe this trend never really took root.
In a classic, underdeveloped autocracy, the answer would surely be blatant censorship and prosecution of authors portraying different views. However, the American mechanisms for accomplishing the same goals are considerably more complex and intricate. That is, assuming there was or still is such a mechanism, as I’m not sure we can say that definitely. Perhaps it was all just a natural process of people preferring the easier, more convenient narratives?
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
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.
The city can’t be fixed because then there wouldn’t be any more stories for them to write.
This ^^
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Do his taxes have plot armor?
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.
Absolutely this. Ever since Nolan, we’ve been getting grimmer, darker, more “realistic” reboots of the character as directors try to figure out what Batman would look like in the real world. Burton and Schumacher asked the much funner question of, “What kind of crazy nonsense world worships a vigilante in a furry suit?”
that is why i love the gothic tone of Tim Burton, it is a Hallucinogenic reality with grotesque characters
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
And yet here we are.
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.
Except the idea of capitalism is, that society can benefit more from allowing people to invest their excess money into growing industry rather then having them put the money under a pillow or immediately spend them on unnecessary luxuries. More industry usually means some return on investment for the investors but also more taxes being paid (taxes being a percentage meaning they scale with industry size). So capital investment is supposed to be win-win for investors and society. Just the current (mainly US) system is so corrupt and mismanaged this does not reflect into practice due to tax loopholes and consolidation. So punishing the investors instead of fixing the system is hardly uncontroversial and informed take.
Also, with the specific batman example, if you really want to help people, doing charity and publicly beneficial work yourself will almost always be more effective than giving the money to a government to use. A government has to have strict anti corruption measures that are publicly auditable to minimise corruption (or loose a lot of money to said corruption), but these make government very inefficient. Just look at the USPS truck procurement for perfect example. You don’t have this issue when you have one owner of the money who can make unquestionable decisions (because it is his money). That is not to say we should rely on billionaire charity, absolutely not. But it just shows how underdeveloped the take in the post is.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
God forbid a man has hobbies
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.
