Time thieves, aka people who waste time when more pressing matters are at hand, aka our dashing heroes confronting HT when they can’t stop him from leaving.
That’s the obvious, figurative interpretation. But between some unresolved threads from “Purple Waves,” some odd narrative-jumping about earlier this arc, and perhaps a few other things that elude me right now, one wonders if it has a double-meaning.
I feel like he’s an awful villain, because every bit of his success is predicated on the Skin Horse team being stupid and not lifting a finger to stop him.
For some reason, whenever H.T. is involved, they basically run around like idiots “investigating”, his evil plans get revealed, he monologues about it, and then they all go “Well shucks! If only we were as smart as this amazing villain who we can’t stop because: reasons!”
Excuse me, but – WHAT? Why the heck don’t they just sick UNITY on him and turn him into a rug? Or have her mind control him and order the turtles to NOT obey him? Or, well… do basically ANYTHING AT ALL to stop him?
I mean, It’s not like Skin Horse is adverse to taking drastic, morally dubious, frequently illegal actions to achieve their own ends. They do it all the time!
Great example: UNITY once forcibly invaded and mind controlled Dr. Lee in order to defeat Tigerlily Jones and her army of robots using a magical oversized notarial paperwork stamp.
What were the stakes? UNITY wanted to become a notary public because Moustachio was down for maintenance, and a married couple didn’t want to face the inconvenience of taking their paperwork to a different notary public because they were busy going on their honeymoon. So basically…. none.
But here they’re facing mass voter fraud in the name of furthering the agenda of a dangerous radical who is trying to start a war between species! And they just fucking let him get away with it for some unfathomable reason!
H.T. is a horrible villain, because the only reason he ever suceeds is that the heroes are inexplicably and inconsistantly stupid when dealing with him.
Skin Horse doesn’t pre-emptively murder, and any control Unity had of H. T. would vanish after only a few hours.
Like, the only solution you seem to have in mind is an extra-judicial hit squad, which would be both highly illegal and immoral, and while Skin Horse has accidentally done terrible things, they don’t set out to do so. There is, in fact, a difference between those.
H. T.’s plots are, universally, ones of legal maneuvering. Turns out Skin Horse, who doesn’t have any lawyers on their team and who have been repeatedly shown to not even get along with each other, never mind make themselves likeable to others, isn’t very good at that.
It’s not a case of sudden, inexplicable, incompetence. It’s the SH team doing what they always do, but it’s not the right tool for the job, so it fails. It’s not like others don’t see through H. T,’s schemes, Artie has no problem reading him like a book, it’s that our protagonists are out of their depth.
“Like, the only solution you seem to have in mind is an extra-judicial hit squad”
Did you miss the part where I suggested “mind control him and order the turtles to NOT obey him”?
This was literally the solution to prior Skin Horse problems, which I directly mentioned.
Also, I left the door wide open for -literally anything else-. They don’t lack for options here. They’re just sitting around doing NOTHING for no good reason.
The biggest problem is that HT is very good at working within the gray areas of the law. As an NHS, he has no official status in the US and so the federal government can’t really charge him with anything. Similarly, until this measure passes he has no real status in Vermont either.
That’s why the one time he got caught was when there was still a court that had jurisdiction over him. It’s also why he’s not in California, because if he tried this there he’d end up doing 3-10 for some form of electoral fraud or campaign finance violation.
Also, H.T.’s primary power is charismatic manipulation, against which which most of the team range from “no particular resistance” to “pushover”.
And regarding the “Temple of the Notaries” arc, IIRC that was basically Dr. Lee’s dance, with her guiding Unity through the steps. (“Hey Unity, I need to drain out all your blood”. “Okay!”.) That culminated in her “possession” of Dr. Lee, which gave both of them a few surprises.
Credit where credit is due, this strip certainly makes me remember Winston Churchill: “The strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
You can fight for somebody’s right to vote, but then you have to live with it when they end up voting for something you don’t like.
Anyway, Skin Horse are supposed to be civil servants. Becoming activists in a campaign to give certain groups the vote (or force a political change in any other way) isn’t what they’re supposed to do anyway.
Just making sure I’m following right, but the suffrage bill is something Skin Horse AND H.T both want passed, yes? So the anger isn’t that he will win the vote but HOW he’s winning it?
They’re angry at what he plans to do with the rights it will grant. He’s more concerned with consolidating power than with equality under the law. He intends to abuse the franchise.
Yeeaaah, that plan of yours has problems, H.T. The downside of creating controllable voters is someone else will figure out how to control at least some of them. The turtles are going to get reprogrammed.
Now what mad scientist has the potential to exploit the turtles? I’m thinking of someone with a track record of meddling in biology, particularly involving intelligent animals. Granted, she usually works with mammals, but this is a wonderful cameo opportunity. Shanneon, Jeff, whadda ya say?
He’s created a set of voters who, if the suffrage bill is passed, will do whatever he tells them to (or so he hopes). Essentially, the bill will, at best, give him the ability to create enough voters loyal to him to win any future vote he cares to, and at worst, start an arms race of madmen 3D-printing sapients with the same intention in mind.
Does it need to be pointed out that this is pretty much what the Republican party did back in the 1860s? Sure; they had (in many cases) noble motives, but they also calculated that the new voters would be loyal to them forever. (LBJ made the same calculation a hundred years later.) Forever isn’t what it used to be.
Something tells me that it would take H.T. far less than a hundred years to cause all the damage he wants to. Besides, it isn’t like the Republicans created black folks, they were already around and the Republicans just got them the vote. Creating brand new voters would be closer to bringing people into the country from outside.
HT isn’t actually concerned with NHS rights. He’s concerned with consolidating his own power and nothing more. So if his carefully curated voter bloc only exists for his lifetime and then splinters, he still achieves his goal.
Looks like Skin Horse may have to reverse themselves and oppose the bill which would also play into H.T.’s plans. Either that or else work out a way to make the turtle more intelligent and independent or/opposed to H.T. ^_^
It’s likely that the only way they would be able to stop the referendum passing is to expose H.T.’s plot with the turtles to the public. While the writers make a big deal about these things, the chances of something like that failing to pass in the 21st century without a really good counterargument is pretty much nonexistent.
Good thing the real-world analogue (who, IIRC, showed up long after H.T. was introduced to the strip) doesn’t have a fraction of H.T.’s sublety, planning, or self-restraint.
Yup. “D.T. is a horrible villain, because the only reason he ever suceeds is that the heroes are inexplicably and inconsistantly stupid when dealing with him.”
A strange usage of the word “heroes”… I reserve the term for those fighting for Good. I agree he is no good as a villain; he is nearly always a hero, even if all they let him accomplish is pointing out RINOs in need of replacement…
HT isn’t really the problem here. The problem is that giving all intelligent life a vote means giving any mad scientist worth mentioning the tools to create millions of voters with a biology very different to humans. This means the way they physically react to some stimuli may be very different, and this colours all aspects of their behaviour in a distinctive way, including their political views.
It’s probably a lesser issue that the mad scientist (who probably wants to rule the world or something) has a degree of control over the sort of outlook on life the newly created voters have.
The Skin Horse ‘verse has AIs, and *artificially intelligent corporations*.
But consider: corporate influence in *real world* politics; that a corporation is virtually immortal; and that it has cultural/bureaucratic “thought patterns” that can outlast any single employee or CEO… What makes you think it’s not already an issue?
(And is it less of an issue that our corporations are presumably non-sentient, or that they can only vote through proxies?)
Corporate influence in politics is a real issue at present. Corporations literally creating voters is not. The power offered by the latter could greatly eclipse the former. Why bother with lobbying when you can make millions of androids programmed to vote your way, then spin their biases as logical thinking?
If they’re created for a particular purpose and have no recognizable intelligence outside of their voting preference then they’re not really NHS’s and would therefore have no voting rights. And if they are sapient but are enslaved then the corporation pretty massively violated the 13th Amendment.
1. Corporate influence in real world politics exists but merely competes with all the other influences rather than truly dominating.
2. Corporations are people in the sense that they are *groups* of people. Such groups are seldom that monolithic. The thought pattern changes with each generation.
3. Virtual immortality is hardly the same as actual immortality. The graveyard of history is full of corporations that fell by the wayside and I have no doubt that some of today’s that seem the most indestructible will also fall as time marches on. ^_^
So with H.T.’s sinister plan in effect, he’ll easily be able to control both state senators from Caledonia County if not the government of Vermont itself.
Tying fish to an ICBM is problem #1. Not easily done, and even though there is an aquatic equivalence going on, I don’t think duck tape is the appropriate tool. Getting ’em to survive reentry: problem #2. Now, assuming you have a good working ablative reentry vehicle, then you could substitute the nuclear package for a load of fugu hosted INSIDE the missile (which might give you more range), that’d take care of what Unity was suggesting with only moderate modification, but you still have the problem of accurate guidance and I don’t know (but seriously doubt) that fish handle high G-forces very well. And THEN you’re left with a bunch of smooshed poisonous fish at a missile crash site, which would mainly be a threat to scavenger species, like my poodles.
That brings up an interesting question. If the bill passes, would the legal voting age depend upon the species in question? In humans, the US has more or less determined that 18 years is when we achieve “adulthood,” whatever that means. Now, of course, the various genetically-altered or artificially-created sentients we’re talking about quite probably have longer lifespans than their wild or natural cousins, but surely some or even many of them will have drastically shorter (or longer!) lifespans than humans.
Possums, for instance, only live for 2-4 years. Even if these possums’ alterations let them live 5 times longer, that’s still only about 20 years max. Should they be allowed to start voting at, say, 4 years old? What about sentients that are created fully mature and developed, like AIs could be? Should they be able to vote immediately?
I can’t tell if he’s being figurative, literal, or both.
Such is Skin Horse…
As regards time thieves, that is.
Time thieves, aka people who waste time when more pressing matters are at hand, aka our dashing heroes confronting HT when they can’t stop him from leaving.
That’s the obvious, figurative interpretation. But between some unresolved threads from “Purple Waves,” some odd narrative-jumping about earlier this arc, and perhaps a few other things that elude me right now, one wonders if it has a double-meaning.
That’s what makes h.t. the very best of villains.
I feel like he’s an awful villain, because every bit of his success is predicated on the Skin Horse team being stupid and not lifting a finger to stop him.
For some reason, whenever H.T. is involved, they basically run around like idiots “investigating”, his evil plans get revealed, he monologues about it, and then they all go “Well shucks! If only we were as smart as this amazing villain who we can’t stop because: reasons!”
Excuse me, but – WHAT? Why the heck don’t they just sick UNITY on him and turn him into a rug? Or have her mind control him and order the turtles to NOT obey him? Or, well… do basically ANYTHING AT ALL to stop him?
I mean, It’s not like Skin Horse is adverse to taking drastic, morally dubious, frequently illegal actions to achieve their own ends. They do it all the time!
Great example: UNITY once forcibly invaded and mind controlled Dr. Lee in order to defeat Tigerlily Jones and her army of robots using a magical oversized notarial paperwork stamp.
What were the stakes? UNITY wanted to become a notary public because Moustachio was down for maintenance, and a married couple didn’t want to face the inconvenience of taking their paperwork to a different notary public because they were busy going on their honeymoon. So basically…. none.
But here they’re facing mass voter fraud in the name of furthering the agenda of a dangerous radical who is trying to start a war between species! And they just fucking let him get away with it for some unfathomable reason!
H.T. is a horrible villain, because the only reason he ever suceeds is that the heroes are inexplicably and inconsistantly stupid when dealing with him.
Skin Horse doesn’t pre-emptively murder, and any control Unity had of H. T. would vanish after only a few hours.
Like, the only solution you seem to have in mind is an extra-judicial hit squad, which would be both highly illegal and immoral, and while Skin Horse has accidentally done terrible things, they don’t set out to do so. There is, in fact, a difference between those.
H. T.’s plots are, universally, ones of legal maneuvering. Turns out Skin Horse, who doesn’t have any lawyers on their team and who have been repeatedly shown to not even get along with each other, never mind make themselves likeable to others, isn’t very good at that.
It’s not a case of sudden, inexplicable, incompetence. It’s the SH team doing what they always do, but it’s not the right tool for the job, so it fails. It’s not like others don’t see through H. T,’s schemes, Artie has no problem reading him like a book, it’s that our protagonists are out of their depth.
“Like, the only solution you seem to have in mind is an extra-judicial hit squad”
Did you miss the part where I suggested “mind control him and order the turtles to NOT obey him”?
This was literally the solution to prior Skin Horse problems, which I directly mentioned.
Also, I left the door wide open for -literally anything else-. They don’t lack for options here. They’re just sitting around doing NOTHING for no good reason.
The biggest problem is that HT is very good at working within the gray areas of the law. As an NHS, he has no official status in the US and so the federal government can’t really charge him with anything. Similarly, until this measure passes he has no real status in Vermont either.
That’s why the one time he got caught was when there was still a court that had jurisdiction over him. It’s also why he’s not in California, because if he tried this there he’d end up doing 3-10 for some form of electoral fraud or campaign finance violation.
Also, H.T.’s primary power is charismatic manipulation, against which which most of the team range from “no particular resistance” to “pushover”.
And regarding the “Temple of the Notaries” arc, IIRC that was basically Dr. Lee’s dance, with her guiding Unity through the steps. (“Hey Unity, I need to drain out all your blood”. “Okay!”.) That culminated in her “possession” of Dr. Lee, which gave both of them a few surprises.
Credit where credit is due, this strip certainly makes me remember Winston Churchill: “The strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
You can fight for somebody’s right to vote, but then you have to live with it when they end up voting for something you don’t like.
Anyway, Skin Horse are supposed to be civil servants. Becoming activists in a campaign to give certain groups the vote (or force a political change in any other way) isn’t what they’re supposed to do anyway.
Just making sure I’m following right, but the suffrage bill is something Skin Horse AND H.T both want passed, yes? So the anger isn’t that he will win the vote but HOW he’s winning it?
They’re angry at what he plans to do with the rights it will grant. He’s more concerned with consolidating power than with equality under the law. He intends to abuse the franchise.
Yeeaaah, that plan of yours has problems, H.T. The downside of creating controllable voters is someone else will figure out how to control at least some of them. The turtles are going to get reprogrammed.
Now what mad scientist has the potential to exploit the turtles? I’m thinking of someone with a track record of meddling in biology, particularly involving intelligent animals. Granted, she usually works with mammals, but this is a wonderful cameo opportunity. Shanneon, Jeff, whadda ya say?
Turtles? Reprogrammed? And my brain goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
Be wary of any mad comp-sic toddlers in Vermont.
So, he’s making his own political party so he can LEGALLY gain power? He seems to have learned much from human society.
He’s created a set of voters who, if the suffrage bill is passed, will do whatever he tells them to (or so he hopes). Essentially, the bill will, at best, give him the ability to create enough voters loyal to him to win any future vote he cares to, and at worst, start an arms race of madmen 3D-printing sapients with the same intention in mind.
Does it need to be pointed out that this is pretty much what the Republican party did back in the 1860s? Sure; they had (in many cases) noble motives, but they also calculated that the new voters would be loyal to them forever. (LBJ made the same calculation a hundred years later.) Forever isn’t what it used to be.
Something tells me that it would take H.T. far less than a hundred years to cause all the damage he wants to. Besides, it isn’t like the Republicans created black folks, they were already around and the Republicans just got them the vote. Creating brand new voters would be closer to bringing people into the country from outside.
HT isn’t actually concerned with NHS rights. He’s concerned with consolidating his own power and nothing more. So if his carefully curated voter bloc only exists for his lifetime and then splinters, he still achieves his goal.
Well, it has to pass before they can vote, doesn’t it?
Looks like Skin Horse may have to reverse themselves and oppose the bill which would also play into H.T.’s plans. Either that or else work out a way to make the turtle more intelligent and independent or/opposed to H.T. ^_^
It’s likely that the only way they would be able to stop the referendum passing is to expose H.T.’s plot with the turtles to the public. While the writers make a big deal about these things, the chances of something like that failing to pass in the 21st century without a really good counterargument is pretty much nonexistent.
I’m starting to get worried about the political machinations of this malign orange narcissist
*Golf clap*
Good thing the real-world analogue (who, IIRC, showed up long after H.T. was introduced to the strip) doesn’t have a fraction of H.T.’s sublety, planning, or self-restraint.
Yup. “D.T. is a horrible villain, because the only reason he ever suceeds is that the heroes are inexplicably and inconsistantly stupid when dealing with him.”
A strange usage of the word “heroes”… I reserve the term for those fighting for Good. I agree he is no good as a villain; he is nearly always a hero, even if all they let him accomplish is pointing out RINOs in need of replacement…
HT isn’t really the problem here. The problem is that giving all intelligent life a vote means giving any mad scientist worth mentioning the tools to create millions of voters with a biology very different to humans. This means the way they physically react to some stimuli may be very different, and this colours all aspects of their behaviour in a distinctive way, including their political views.
It’s probably a lesser issue that the mad scientist (who probably wants to rule the world or something) has a degree of control over the sort of outlook on life the newly created voters have.
“No! I am your creator! You must obey me!”
One imagines this will be an issue in real life, come the advent of artificial intelligence.
The Skin Horse ‘verse has AIs, and *artificially intelligent corporations*.
But consider: corporate influence in *real world* politics; that a corporation is virtually immortal; and that it has cultural/bureaucratic “thought patterns” that can outlast any single employee or CEO… What makes you think it’s not already an issue?
(And is it less of an issue that our corporations are presumably non-sentient, or that they can only vote through proxies?)
Corporate influence in politics is a real issue at present. Corporations literally creating voters is not. The power offered by the latter could greatly eclipse the former. Why bother with lobbying when you can make millions of androids programmed to vote your way, then spin their biases as logical thinking?
If they’re created for a particular purpose and have no recognizable intelligence outside of their voting preference then they’re not really NHS’s and would therefore have no voting rights. And if they are sapient but are enslaved then the corporation pretty massively violated the 13th Amendment.
3 things:
1. Corporate influence in real world politics exists but merely competes with all the other influences rather than truly dominating.
2. Corporations are people in the sense that they are *groups* of people. Such groups are seldom that monolithic. The thought pattern changes with each generation.
3. Virtual immortality is hardly the same as actual immortality. The graveyard of history is full of corporations that fell by the wayside and I have no doubt that some of today’s that seem the most indestructible will also fall as time marches on. ^_^
3
So with H.T.’s sinister plan in effect, he’ll easily be able to control both state senators from Caledonia County if not the government of Vermont itself.
(dramatic music sting)
(ominous roll of thunder)
Are they just voting the way H. T. wants, or is he contracting that out? ‘Cause I could put him in touch with a couple of offers…
I like Unity’s thinking. Maybe that’s all North Korea has been trying to do?
Tying fish to an ICBM is problem #1. Not easily done, and even though there is an aquatic equivalence going on, I don’t think duck tape is the appropriate tool. Getting ’em to survive reentry: problem #2. Now, assuming you have a good working ablative reentry vehicle, then you could substitute the nuclear package for a load of fugu hosted INSIDE the missile (which might give you more range), that’d take care of what Unity was suggesting with only moderate modification, but you still have the problem of accurate guidance and I don’t know (but seriously doubt) that fish handle high G-forces very well. And THEN you’re left with a bunch of smooshed poisonous fish at a missile crash site, which would mainly be a threat to scavenger species, like my poodles.
And in seventeen years and change when those turtles reach voting age, this might actually be a problem.
Not really.
Just where will the turtles be in November?
That brings up an interesting question. If the bill passes, would the legal voting age depend upon the species in question? In humans, the US has more or less determined that 18 years is when we achieve “adulthood,” whatever that means. Now, of course, the various genetically-altered or artificially-created sentients we’re talking about quite probably have longer lifespans than their wild or natural cousins, but surely some or even many of them will have drastically shorter (or longer!) lifespans than humans.
Possums, for instance, only live for 2-4 years. Even if these possums’ alterations let them live 5 times longer, that’s still only about 20 years max. Should they be allowed to start voting at, say, 4 years old? What about sentients that are created fully mature and developed, like AIs could be? Should they be able to vote immediately?