Billionaire Island #4

[history79]

Comments

[beoweasel]

IT'S JUST SO GODDAMNED SUBTLE!

[lonewolf23k]

Sadly, for a LOT of people, this still wouldn't get the message across.

[silverhammerman]

Listen, you have to cut satirists some slack these days, it's very difficult to do satire when your targets are just openly contemptuous of human life. Once businesses actually started saying that people should sacrifice their lives for the economy in a pandemic there weren't a lot of subtle places left for writers to go.

[locuatico]

I think someone joked that, as it turned out, Captain Planet villains are not nearly as cartoonish as we once believed.

[zachbeacon]

Yep, Scott Pruitt - who used to run the EPA for Trump - is more than qualified to be a Captain Planet villain.

Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker should really be in prison just for the patent scam company.

[nyadnar17]

I would have a lot more sympathy for the "satirist" if they weren't pushing the fucking disgrace of a political theory that is The Population Bomb.

Just flat out say you admire the CCP "making the hard choice" to enforce population controls already. Between this and supposedly anti-torture authors who depict torture as always providing good Intel I am pretty done.

[sadoeuphemist]

They're not talking about The Population Bomb, they literally have the accountant say that raising taxes on billionaires would be enough to build self-sustaining cities for everyone. C'mon.

[nyadnar17]

The complete agricultural collapse in 20 years?

The idea that a smaller population is cheaper to sustain than a larger one?

If the answer to the problem is sterilization how is it not a "population bomb" scenario?

[sadoeuphemist]

The answer to the problem is not sterilization! The accountant literally says that a tax on billionaires would be enough to comfortably sustain the entire human population. The joke is that the billionaires are all murderous sociopaths who are more comfortable with mass genocide than with redistributing some of their stockpiled wealth, and thus they would rather pretend it's a population control problem.

Like, every other comment here is how unsubtle this comic is, how are you not getting it.

[nyadnar17]

Sterilization is literally the first option presented. Its like the second panel.

Yes billionaires are all murderous sociopath. lol, haha, look at my insight. I total "get" that part.

Why aren't you getting that 1) sterilization is the first option presented and the only reason they don't go with it is because of the side effects making the President lose an election. 2) the entire premises is that smaller population require less resources to maintain than larger ones. That taxing billionaires allows them to provide the resources for more people doesn't change the fact that "higher populations are less sustainable than small population" is the core premise here. That's the entire theory behind population control. Each extra human is another mouth to feed and a drain on limited resources so your options are get more resources from "somewhere" or kill off the population to keep it manageable.

[jlbarnett]

the population bomb idea is that resources cannot be expanded so you have to decrease populations, right? This says the resources can be expanded.

So if it is a population bomb, it is an artificial one created by the wealthy, while the people who actually believe it, simply believe it to be the reality of the world

[sadoeuphemist]

??? They do go with sterilization, the president says outright in the last panel that they're going with the sterility virus! Are you even reading the comic?

Look, I don't know how to make this any simpler. The billionaires are the bad guys in the comic. You are not supposed to think the bad guys are correct. When the Red Skull lays out his plan to bomb the world or whatever, do you think you're supposed to agree and sympathize with what he's saying? Are you supposed to think bombing the world is a perfectly viable solution? Do you complain every time the Red Skull speaks in a comic because they're 'pushing his Nazi political theories'?

For god's sake, they literally have an author mouthpiece bob up in the last page to say, 'uh hey, that's all sociopathic nonsense, you could totally feed those four hundred million Americans by just taxing the wealthy instead.' And yet you're still not getting it!

One question...

[roguefankc]

Will the lottery "winners" be contributing to the cities as labor?

Or are the billionaires seriously implying the winners will be used as a food source via cannibalism?

Because despite what horror movies show, doesn't a cannibalism diet lead to prion diseases which ultimately shortens the lifespan of the cannibal? I don't see billionaires being eager to subject themselves to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

Re: One question...

[donnblake]

I believe the losers of the lottery are implied to be killed and processed into food for the winners, yes. Now, cannibalism can serve as a transmission vector for prion disorders (most famously in the case of Kuru in Papua New Guinea), but I don't believe I've ever heard of it spontaneously causing them- as long as the person you're eating doesn't have Creutzfeldt-Jakob they can't pass it to you.

That being said, I doubt the billionaires are planning on living on Aggrocorp Canned Meat themselves.

Re: One question...

[poshmerchant]

1 in 100 will continue living (presumably labouring) and 99 in 100 will be used as a food source via cannibalism. Specifically, it is the non-winners who would be used as a food source via cannibalism.

[cypherfdp]

In another time I would've had complained about how blunt this is, but in 2020 reality is less subtle than fiction

[jaxjyls]

Subtlety is for cowards

[super_fly]

This is basically that boardroom comic meme with the guy getting tossed out the window for having a good idea but they're expecting you to pay money for it https://imgur.com/iSPpjg0