With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[theaceoffire]

a shit-show of a situation.

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I've seen this phrase before, but I still wonder what exactly inspired it.

Logically, it refers to a disliked production... but I imagine a literal episode about fecal matter.

 

[Buggy123]

He's helping them because they have a hostage situation here, with both sides using hostages. Power Ring and Olympia could do a lot of damage before they were stopped. Like he said, both sides have metaphorical nukes. Maybe power ring wouldn't blow up the world, but he could probably easily destroy a major city in revenge. Or get the Zatanna mafia to do it. Sure, Ultraman has specific weaknesses making him easy to kill, but the people left over are better generalists. Olympia vs Medea seems like a fair enough fight, and Power Ring could probably cause literal nuclear Armageddon if he wanted to.

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Also, as Zoat said, "retaw si alobe".

 

[Mquz]

I've seen this phrase before, but I still wonder what exactly inspired it.

Logically, it refers to a disliked production... but I imagine a literal episode about fecal matter.

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... Here is the result of a google search.
Shit-show
It claims murky origins, possibly either from something German, or from a magazine review an art exhibition/ show where the artist (whose goal, being part of the No Art movement, was to mock art) made bad statues out of mammalian fecal matter.

 

[SirKaid]

Paul... You need to stop helping the mass murdering psychopaths just because they look like people you know...

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That has no bearing on the situation. If anything it would make him less eager to help them - after all, their existence spits in the face of the genuine heroism that their Earth 16 counterparts display on a daily basis. It'd be like if someone was drawing Hitler 'staches on pictures of Norman Borlaug, it's genuinely insulting.

He's working on getting a peace treaty because the war will kill at best thousands of innocent people, cause millions if not billions of dollars of damage, and further erode civil liberties. It (the war) also can't work, not without turning the USA into a police state.

That's the high-minded reason to work on getting a peace treaty. The more prosaic reason is that he can't go home unless he does it. If the Syndicate was demanding that he do something terrible in exchange for the way home he'd tell them to fuck themselves and take the time to reinvent whatever it was they used to kidnap him in the first place, but this is generally speaking the sort of thing he approves of on general principles anyway so it's not a huge problem to just go ahead and do it.

 

[Mr Zoat]

The Story Only thread is finally up to date!

 

[Lazurman]

Paul... You need to stop helping the mass murdering psychopaths just because they look like people you know...

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Alright... Your gripes have become a fixture here, yes... But could you like...stop using ellipses all the time? It's a weird thing to bug me... But it does...

Also...you're generalizing again... Paul will kill the mass murdering psychopaths if he can't reform or imprison them... And the Syndicate is 90% low tier dumb thugs and toughs... Not all of them deserve death row...which is what they'll get if President Wilson gets his way... You seem a little unnecessarily bloodthirsty...

I...think...I've made my point?

...

 

[Maelgwyn]

Alright... Your gripes have become a fixture here, yes... But could you like...stop using ellipses all the time? It's a weird thing to bug me... But it does...

Also...you're generalizing again... Paul will kill the mass murdering psychopaths if he can't reform or imprison them... And the Syndicate is 90% low tier dumb thugs and toughs... Not all of them deserve death row...which is what they'll get if President Wilson gets his way... You seem a little unnecessarily bloodthirsty...

I...think...I've made my point?

...

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Damn, you must hate anything written by Theirishdreamer.

 

[Coda]

The thing to remember is that the Japanese cult of the warrior at the time took death before dishonor VERY, VERY seriously being quite willing to die in near pointless attacks to avoid capture and from what I have heard near the end school children were training in melee weapon use in order to kill soldiers

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Unfortunately, this isn't actually true. It was propaganda, on both sides.

On the American side, this idea was promoted first to make the battle seem more desperate to the American public, then afterward as a way to explain why it was okay to make friends with the Japanese afterward even though we stayed embittered with most of our other enemies.

On the Japanese side... The Japanese army was in desperate straits. They were running out of weapons. The soldiers were terrified and didn't actually want to keep fighting. The Japanese military leadership spread the propaganda that dishonor was worse than death, drumming up conservative values among the people in order to shame the soldiers into staying at their posts. Kamikaze pilots weren't always volunteers even though that's what the Japanese government told the citizens -- sometimes, the pilots didn't even know they were being sent on a kamikaze mission until they got there, and then they were shamed into "volunteering" by threatening to spread stories about their cowardice. (The possibility of being summarily executed for treason if they hadn't obeyed may have also played a role. And if you're going to be dead either way...)

What you heard about schoolchildren wasn't quite accurate. It's not exactly false, but it misrepresents what actually happened. It was as a non-combat program, training in disaster services like firefighting and evacuation. But because they feared a land invasion, the government turned the program into conscription -- every male between the ages of 15 and 60 and every unmarried female between 17 and 40 could be forced to join the militia, and were assumed to be combat capable. The training still primarily stuck with support tasks, although they included basic weapon drills. And even if it had come down to combat, the armaments supposedly given to the militia didn't actually exist. Most of them would have ended up using bamboo spears. So like the bomb drills in the US that would never have actually done anything to protect people if there WAS an attack, it appears to have been about making the people feel like they had a chance to do something if the worst-case scenario happened.

 

[Vaermina]

Paul doesn't care much about the psychopaths on either side; as far as I can tell he's on the side of the tens of millions of civilians who will die if the Syndicate and President Wilson get into a total war situation.

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Then Paul should make sure those Civilians don't by killing the small number of Syndicate people who would cause the damage.

The simple fact is this is very much a "Korean War" type choice where it's between a significant number of people dying now or a much much larger number of people suffering fates worse then death for generations to come.

 

[Silverias]

fates worse then death for generations to come.

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This seems hyperbolic in the face of what is actually going on.

 

[Gantradies]

I don't know if that actually happened, I do remember that the Emperor at the time did want to for while before the bombs were dropped but was pushed out of official power by the top military brass. The thing to remember is that the Japanese cult of the warrior at the time took death before dishonor VERY, VERY seriously being quite willing to die in near pointless attacks to avoid capture and from what I have heard near the end school children were training in melee weapon use in order to kill soldiers, members of the military leadership wanted plans from Scientists for the population to live under ground and basically eat rocks in order avoid having to surrender in the face of a enemy that had Atomic bombs. The Japanese leadership also convinced women and civilians on some of the last islands we captured during WWII that American soldiers were so horrible that basically all those Japanese killed them selves or each other rather than surrender.



Or go with the classic movie Bridge on the River Kwai which, despite depicting torture and ending with the death all the main characters, is a light and fluffy version of the building of the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, by the Japanese between '42 and '43. Which still isn't nearly as bad as some of the things the Japanese did in China and Korea around that time.
That said I think the Unconditional surrender was more about the need to demilitarize Japanese society and remove the emperor from power as not only was he the subject of a cult of personality Japan's emperors were seen more or less as gods in native Shinto Religion.

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And the worst thing is the entire "warrior culture" they were operating under was an almost-total fabrication based off a series of badly botched translations of old texts by an incompetent historian that the people in power cynically seized as a tool for social manipulation.
"the way of the warrior is to die" my fucking ass.

throw in the random, systematic beatings of military recruits in training for no reason other the the trainers literally getting off on it AND common use of amphetamines as combat stimulants,not to mention the toxicity xenophobic climate the younger generation had grown up in, and it's disturbing easy to see how a a large chunk of Japan's military degenerated from the disciplined units that crushed tsarist Russia in their nation's previous major conflict into an animalistic,howling mob of lunatics in China over a few decades...

 

[Mr Zoat]

This seems hyperbolic in the face of what is actually going on.

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The Transuranic Men can quite literally generate nuclear explosions at will.

 

[Vaermina]

This seems hyperbolic in the face of what is actually going on.

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The two "alternatives" that Paul thought up amounted to the Cartels and Mafia...

The Transuranic Men can quite literally generate nuclear explosions at will.

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And due to the rules of the Crime universe, he is a good guy.

 

[Steelplaza]

Something I've been wondering about.

OL got his orange lantern back at the very beginning of the story when he used his ring to force-transform Alan's green lantern into an orange lantern. The Paul of this universe, a Blue Lantern, has been struggling because he doesn't have a personal lantern. OL as we've seen has plenty of orange lanterns; in fact he can make an orange lantern through sheer ring power (even if it's very crude).

If OL gave BL an orange lanterns as a "wedding present", could BL use his blue power ring to turn it into a blue power battery and eliminate his greatest weakness?

Also,it sure is nice of OL to do all this rather than drag BL back from his honeymoon (something he could do very quickly) and say, "This is your problem."

 

[Mr Zoat]

Something I've been wondering about.

OL got his orange lantern back at the very beginning of the story when he used his ring to force-transform Alan's green lantern into an orange lantern. The Paul of this universe, a Blue Lantern, has been struggling because he doesn't have a personal lantern. OL as we've seen has plenty of orange lanterns; in fact he can make an orange lantern through sheer ring power (even if it's very crude).

If OL gave BL an orange lanterns as a "wedding present", could BL use his blue power ring to turn it into a blue power battery and eliminate his greatest weakness?

Also,it sure is nice of OL to do all this rather than drag BL back from his honeymoon (something he could do very quickly) and say, "This is your problem."

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Sadly, blue rings don't come with an assimilation function. He could get Kalmin to make him one, but he's not actually all that keen on his blue alter ego and probably won't.

 

[Buggy123]

Then Paul should make sure those Civilians don't by killing the small number of Syndicate people who would cause the damage.

The simple fact is this is very much a "Korean War" type choice where it's between a significant number of people dying now or a much much larger number of people suffering fates worse then death for generations to come.

Click to shrink...

You're kidding, right? Just kill them, sure. Take on half a dozen or more Supers bent on killing as many people as possible, some of whom have the ability to teleport or fly very fast. And two of them aren't even on the planet, and one of those two is capable of "retaw si alobe" by Word of Zoat.

And those are just the upper management. What happens when the hundreds of mid-tier thugs decide to play along? Including the dozens of people who can also Ebolize all of the water?


Yeah, sure. Kill them all. Easy.


You normally think rather poorly of the SI's capabilities. Why the sudden change of heart?

 

[Ct613hulu]

I would say that there is also the question of what precedent you will be establishing for new super-villains. If you create a system in which the penalty for any super-villainy is death, than you are creating an incredibly dangerous situation where new Super-villains who would otherwise be a relatively minor nuisance are given a strong incentive to seek to destroy the current civilization and behave in a massively more destructive manner.

 

[Maxx Crowley]

God....not the wanky "if you do this, than THIS will clearly happen." proclamations.

 

[Mquz]

God....not the wanky "if you do this, than THIS will clearly happen." proclamations.

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But... JoJo is built on those.

 

[Cuchulin]

Unfortunately, this isn't actually true. It was propaganda, on both sides.
On the American side, this idea was promoted first to make the battle seem more desperate to the American public, then afterward as a way to explain why it was okay to make friends with the Japanese afterward even though we stayed embittered with most of our other enemies.
On the Japanese side... The Japanese army was in desperate straits. They were running out of weapons. The soldiers were terrified and didn't actually want to keep fighting. The Japanese military leadership spread the propaganda that dishonor was worse than death, drumming up conservative values among the people in order to shame the soldiers into staying at their posts. Kamikaze pilots weren't always volunteers even though that's what the Japanese government told the citizens -- sometimes, the pilots didn't even know they were being sent on a kamikaze mission until they got there, and then they were shamed into "volunteering" by threatening to spread stories about their cowardice. (The possibility of being summarily executed for treason if they hadn't obeyed may have also played a role. And if you're going to be dead either way...)
What you heard about schoolchildren wasn't quite accurate. It's not exactly false, but it misrepresents what actually happened. It was as a non-combat program, training in disaster services like firefighting and evacuation. But because they feared a land invasion, the government turned the program into conscription -- every male between the ages of 15 and 60 and every unmarried female between 17 and 40 could be forced to join the militia, and were assumed to be combat capable. The training still primarily stuck with support tasks, although they included basic weapon drills. And even if it had come down to combat, the armaments supposedly given to the militia didn't actually exist. Most of them would have ended up using bamboo spears. So like the bomb drills in the US that would never have actually done anything to protect people if there WAS an attack, it appears to have been about making the people feel like they had a chance to do something if the worst-case scenario happened.

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The point is that the Japanese leadership took it seriously and so their propaganda reflected it, which intern meant that many soldiers did and surrender was so hard to consider that very few did as well as some soldiers spending decades hiding in the jungle after the war before giving up. So Japanese actually did do not very effective to near pointless suicide attacks or other wise died rather than surrender (which more or less is a part of traditional Bushido and part of why POWs were so badly treated by Japan). Also that if the USA had tried to invade the home islands we would most likely have had to fight and kill thousands of civilians armed with archaic weapons trying to ambush them. Lastly i said "cult of the warrior" as in what the "official partly line" was rather than what people actually felt/thought.

And the worst thing is the entire "warrior culture" they were operating under was an almost-total fabrication based off a series of badly botched translations of old texts by an incompetent historian that the people in power cynically seized as a tool for social manipulation.
"the way of the warrior is to die" my fucking ass.
Throw in the random, systematic beatings of military recruits in training for no reason other the the trainers literally getting off on it AND common use of amphetamines as combat stimulants,not to mention the toxicity xenophobic climate the younger generation has grown up in, and it's disturbing easy to see how a a large chunk of Japan's military degenerated from the disciplined units that crushed tsarist Russia in their nation's previous major conflict into an animalistic, howling mob of lunatics in China over a few decades...

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Agreed! I am some thing of a Japanophile (I've watched every ep of the Begin-Japanology series on youtube I could find more than once) as well as a big fan of Anime/Manga so I know that the "Bushido" pushed by Japanese leadership during WWII was more or less a inaccurate over hyped load of cow manure. I don't know about Japan using amphetamines as combat stimulants (I know Germany did so at least a little) or beatings, but I do know that at least partly due to that toxic xenophobia a guy who struck out the Sultan of Swat Babe Ruth as a kid gave up baseball and i'm pretty sure died on a submarine during the war. Although i'd hardly call them a "animalistic, howling mob of lunatics" as the did so well in China partly because they were better/more disciplined soldiers.

 

[Mastigos2]

"I-. Hm." She thinks for a moment. "I don't… Think so. He reacts like a totalitarian dictator to anything relating to the Syndicate, but no one who questions his foreign policy or healthcare policy gets treated in the same way. And totalitarians are total. It's all about them, their ego. I spent enough time in the Middle East and South America to recognise the psychology. For President Wilson, it's all about the Syndicate."

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Being unfamiliar with this setting, I'm left wondering if Owlman brainwashed him to give a reason for his bomb to be made and used

 

[Stsword]

The Transuranic Men can quite literally generate nuclear explosions at will.

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Seems that you were going for something along the lines of the Death-Metal Men, a group of radioactive metal men- Uranium, Strontium, Thorium, Radium, Lithium, Polonium, and Fermium.

The Robots of Terror would also work as evil Metal Men, since that's what they are, and they included Plutonium, but Sodium fizzing people to death is probably going to be harder sell when it comes to menace than radiation.

 

[Vaermina]

Sadly, blue rings don't come with an assimilation function. He could get Kalmin to make him one, but he's not actually all that keen on his blue alter ego and probably won't.

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Also there's the whole bit with Blue shutting down Orange which would probably make Baul's soul incompatible with an Orange ring.

You're kidding, right? Just kill them, sure. Take on half a dozen or more Supers bent on killing as many people as possible, some of whom have the ability to teleport or fly very fast. And two of them aren't even on the planet, and one of those two is capable of "retaw si alobe" by Word of Zoat.

And those are just the upper management. What happens when the hundreds of mid-tier thugs decide to play along? Including the dozens of people who can also Ebolize all of the water?

Yeah, sure. Kill them all. Easy.

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If we are playing things straight to the "Crime World" rules the only real heavy hitters the Syndicate have left at this point are Power Ring Yellow and Olympia.

Olympia can be dealt with in five seconds via transitioning her into space, and Orange makes Yellow it's bitch.

Once those two are gone it would be relatively simple to pick the others off 1 by 1 over the course of a day or so without any of them discovering something was going on.

You normally think rather poorly of the SI's capabilities. Why the sudden change of heart?

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They are low level criminals and have pretty much nothing going for them threat wise.

 

[infinityDivided]

Also there's the whole bit with Blue shutting down Orange which would probably make Baul's soul incompatible with an Orange ring.

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First, he was talking about hypothetically getting Kalmin to make another Blue Personal Lantern. Second, the "Hope shutting down Avarice" thing was exclusive to Larfleeze, I think. It had to do with the fact he hoped to one day be free of his ring.

 

[Taliesin]

As far as I can tell the whole 'the Japanese tried to surrender before the bombs but the U.S. wouldn't accept a conditional surrender' thing is from a Mises Institute piece. The U.S. didn't receive any official offer of conditional surrender until after the Nagasaki bombing and the Soviets entering the war, on August 9th. There was some back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, and Truman ultimately accepted the condition that the Emperor remain in exchange for some language that he would be subject to the supreme commander of the allied powers.

Despite the U.S. acceptance of the conditional surrender some hardliners in the Japanese military still couldn't accept giving up and attempted a coup against the Emperor that was unsuccessful.

According to the Mises piece backchannel communications had taken place in May and June from the Japanese suggesting that a conditional surrender might be possible. The piece cites some sources that seem reasonably credible, but it seems to be so eager to prove that the bombs were unnecessary that it misses that the earlier communications were never an an actual offer of surrender and the attempted coup even after the bombs and the Soviet entry into the war shows that a significant portion of the Japanese military command were unwilling to surrender. A surrender before the bombs and the Soviets may have been a political impossibility for the Japanese even though elements of the government were attempting to lobby the Americans for one, likely with the goal of seeking generous terms in the hopes that they could convince the hardliners to accept.

---

Anyway, it was an interesting bit of reading looking all that up. For anyone who isn't aware, The Mises Institute is not generally regarded as a trustworthy or unbiased source. They're a very right-wing libertarian think tank, the sort of people who think the Cato Institute are too left-wing. Most of what they peddle is an unscientific 'narrative' approach to economics that eschews mathematics or testability, but they also dip into conspiracy theories (climate change is a myth perpetrated by scientists for grant funding, vaccines cause autism, and others) and deeply weird political positions like advocating monarchy, extreme views of private property rights, and the legalization of such things as bribery, blackmail, and drunk driving.

They're a weird crowd.

 

[Bramble Thorn]

The Story Only thread is finally up to date!

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So... Having the finished episodes still posted as daily ~1,000 word chunks is actually not that great an idea. It makes the archive and unnecessary huge slog of pages, and also makes it even harder to find a specific part instead of easier, because all those individual episode parts? You never actually bothered to label them with part 1, part 2, etc in the archive for easy identification of which part you were reading, instead just having a random number of unlabeled similar posts in a row.

You do realize the individual post limits are large enough to handle endure episodes, right? Because I have seen others stories post 10-20k or more chapters in one post.

If you posted each complete episode in one or two posts, with the part numbers of daily installments actually in the next for reference, you could have saved yourself a load of hassle and made the archive thread much more manageable.

 

[Mquz]

Seems that you were going for something along the lines of the Death-Metal Men, a group of radioactive metal men- Uranium, Strontium, Thorium, Radium, Lithium, Polonium, and Fermium.

The Robots of Terror would also work as evil Metal Men, since that's what they are, and they included Plutonium, but Sodium fizzing people to death is probably going to be harder sell when it comes to menace than radiation.

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Sodium is a highly reactive soft metal. You can cut it like putty. It makes a preety large explosion when exposed to water. It doesn't just "fizz".

 

[Mquz]

As far as I can tell the whole 'the Japanese tried to surrender before the bombs but the U.S. wouldn't accept a conditional surrender' thing is from a Mises Institute piece. The U.S. didn't receive any official offer of conditional surrender until after the Nagasaki bombing and the Soviets entering the war, on August 9th. There was some back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, and Truman ultimately accepted the condition that the Emperor remain in exchange for some language that he would be subject to the supreme commander of the allied powers.

Despite the U.S. acceptance of the conditional surrender some hardliners in the Japanese military still couldn't accept giving up and attempted a coup against the Emperor that was unsuccessful.

According to the Mises piece backchannel communications had taken place in May and June from the Japanese suggesting that a conditional surrender might be possible. The piece cites some sources that seem reasonably credible, but it seems to be so eager to prove that the bombs were unnecessary that it misses that the earlier communications were never an an actual offer of surrender and the attempted coup even after the bombs and the Soviet entry into the war shows that a significant portion of the Japanese military command were unwilling to surrender. A surrender before the bombs and the Soviets may have been a political impossibility for the Japanese even though elements of the government were attempting to lobby the Americans for one, likely with the goal of seeking generous terms in the hopes that they could convince the hardliners to accept.

---

Anyway, it was an interesting bit of reading looking all that up. For anyone who isn't aware, The Mises Institute is not generally regarded as a trustworthy or unbiased source. They're a very right-wing libertarian think tank, the sort of people who think the Cato Institute are too left-wing. Most of what they peddle is an unscientific 'narrative' approach to economics that eschews mathematics or testability, but they also dip into conspiracy theories (climate change is a myth perpetrated by scientists for grant funding, vaccines cause autism, and others) and deeply weird political positions like advocating monarchy, extreme views of private property rights, and the legalization of such things as bribery, blackmail, and drunk driving.

They're a weird crowd.

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I heard that there was an offer to surrender after the first bomb, but it got lost in translation (maybe on purpose), so they dropped the second one. Don't remember where I heard this though, so I might be wrong.

 

[Mquz]

Also there's the whole bit with Blue shutting down Orange which would probably make Baul's soul incompatible with an Orange ring.




If we are playing things straight to the "Crime World" rules the only real heavy hitters the Syndicate have left at this point are Power Ring Yellow and Olympia.

Olympia can be dealt with in five seconds via transitioning her into space, and Orange makes Yellow it's bitch.

Once those two are gone it would be relatively simple to pick the others off 1 by 1 over the course of a day or so without any of them discovering something was going on.


They are low level criminals and have pretty much nothing going for them threat wise.

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We have no guarantee that Olympia's magic and ability to hold her breath won't hold out in space long enough for her to come back to Earth. Also, fairly sure Orange doesn't explicitly make Yellow it's bitch. Hasn't happened with Grayven so far. And he can't transition the entire Zatanna mafia family at once. It's hard to identify the threat.

 

[Buggy123]

We have no guarantee that Olympia's magic and ability to hold her breath won't hold out in space long enough for her to come back to Earth. Also, fairly sure Orange doesn't explicitly make Yellow it's bitch. Hasn't happened with Grayven so far. And he can't transition the entire Zatanna mafia family at once. It's hard to identify the threat.

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Also, if I was the evil leadership of a crime syndicate with access to substantial technological and magical resources, and I was worried about being ousted, I'd leave some parting presents lying around.

Nothing says "Back off." like a dirty bomb going off in the middle of a populated city. One, to show that you have them, two, to show that you have more, and a third if they decide to keep giving you lip about it.