What does a world with supers look like?

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 9:05 am

If there are enough metahumans to create that kind of stability, then the setting will effectively look nothing like our culture. It would look like Xavier's School from Grant Morrison's New X-Men or The City in Transmetropolitan.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 9:06 am

I mean, think about it; right now everyone is afraid of the idea of an evil Flash zipping into a bank, killing everyone, stealing the money, and running back to his hideout across the country.

But in a world where the police force has three superspeedsters on it and also has a psychometrist and a teleporter on it then he'd never get away with it. Even if he was faster than the police force, it's just a phone call away for the police chief to call up the National Guard, who has dozens of superspeedsters on the team. And if you manage to outwit them, then they call the military on your ass who can up the ante to the thousands.

It's like being a troll armed with a minigun in full body armor in Shadowrun. You might be able to take on the local police force and even hold your own against the National Guard, but sooner or later you're going down. And the faster you increase the body count or the more crimes you commit, the sooner you're going to meet your violent end.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 9:12 am

If there are enough metahumans to create that kind of stability, then the setting will effectively look nothing like our culture. It would look like Xavier's School from Grant Morrison's New X-Men or The City in Transmetropolitan.

It depends on the array of powers.

I mean, look at the Justice League of America right now. They have extremely powerful asskickers on their team, but they can't actually build a society. Superman can probably dig up a bunch of ore like crazy, but he can't actually make computers or air conditioners or any of that shit. The only mutant whose powers would be essential to the running of modern society I've ever seen is Forge, and even then hundreds of him couldn't keep a modern army going.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 12:38 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:You know what's weird? If there's a lot of superheroes, the world falls apart, but if there's a LOT of superheroes, as in one out of every ten people were superheroes, society wouldn't fall apart.

The biggest problem with Dr. Manhattan or Evil Superman is that there's no one to stop them if they go crazy. However, if you decide to use your flying brick powers to flatten the White House then if every other person was a superhero then you would just get jumped and gangbanged --unless you were able to complete your crime before the retaliation.

So your contention is... if 1 in 10 people had the power to flatten the White House, that the world would be a more stable place than if just a handful could do such a thing?

I imagine that if 10% of the population had their finger on the button, so-to-speak, the end of the world would be one bad bout of depression away.

I actually want to write at least 3 "super" type story settings. Might be a bit off-topic, but it's a bit on-topic too, so what the hey.

1) Modern day, supers are a relatively rare and new phenomenon, and certain groups of them are keeping a low profile (and preventing news of their existence from getting out via mind control and removal of unruly supers... something like the camarilla I suppose). Setting is in an academy where discovered supers are pretty much required (by other supers) to go to master their powers and not be a threat to their secret. Point of view from a "mundane" who is given a pity invitation to the academy.

X-Men meets Guess Who's Coming to Dinner meets Dazed and Confused
(supers under wraps, and a relatively new phenomenon)

2) Very large numbers of people are starting going crazy to varying degrees. All over the place. Nobody knows what is causing it, Mad Cow Disease, chemicals in the water, plastics, HD TV, God, everyone blames something. Points of view from a poor schmuck apparently digressing into a deep state of paranoid schizophrenia and from the FBI agent in charge of catching him.

A Beautiful Mind meets Enemy of the State.
(supers under wraps, and a very isolated and new phenomenon)

3) Alien supers/possessing entities have existed for a very long time on Earth, attempting to control our development, and in the last few hundred years, we are getting out of control due to greater population and technology, and to top it off certain genetic breeding programs to create new supers are all finally coming to a head. Point of view from an unlucky guy who gets caught in the middle of things between some of the aliens and some of the breeding experimental results gone amok.

I don't know what movie blending would even describe this.
(supers under wraps, long-held status quo finally being upset)

I'm not disposed against writing something where the world is already phenomenally different due to super-influences. It's just a lot easier to lose a reader when everything is different and needs explaining.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 6:13 pm

So your contention is... if 1 in 10 people had the power to flatten the White House, that the world would be a more stable place than if just a handful could do such a thing?

I imagine that if 10% of the population had their finger on the button, so-to-speak, the end of the world would be one bad bout of depression away.

Here's a question for you; how often do acts of terrorism or shooting sprees happen in real life?

In a world where a lot of people have superpowers, crimes can only 'really' be committed by people who have the initiative, because they can't just go into a knock-down fight with society. But this happens in the real world, too; after all, guns and bombs give the attacker a pretty big advantage but how common are bank robberies or town hall blowing-ups?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 6:38 pm

clikml wrote:So your contention is... if 1 in 10 people had the power to flatten the White House, that the world would be a more stable place than if just a handful could do such a thing?

You do realize that something like 99% of the people you ever meet posses the ability to kill you at pretty much any time right?

Heath Robinson · Post by **Heath Robinson** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 8:27 pm

If there's one person who can flatten the White House then the White House stands at their abettance. If there are 700 000 000 people capable of flattening said White House, then some of them are probably susceptible to the same incentives that ensure the White Houses continued existance in our world. So long as the people who don't want the White House to exist can't really communicate all that well (or even actively sabotage each other) then the defenders of the building have a quite reasonable goal.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 8:28 pm

Yeah, the physical ability, but the mental?

If I remember rightly based off one publicised study, 90% of the soldiers in WW1 shot to miss because they couldn't bring themselves to actually kill another person. Which sort of meant that all the soldiers with medals and so on were a bit sociopathic. This caused the armies of the world to more heavily indoctrinate soldiers into being willing to kill.

If thats true, then only 10% of the general population have the physical and mental ability to kill you at any time. They just don't have a reason to.

So, if you have however many murders going on each day with 10% of the population willing to kill at roughly equal level of power, then if 10% of the population have super powers then 1% have the willingness to kill and can easily brutalise those without super powers... Yeah, I'm going to go with smouldering wasteland now.

I mean, try this:

A stratified 10% of the population suddenly gets Superman level powers. Semi-indestructability, speed, flight, laser eyes. That means that 10% of the prison population get super powers. Looking just at the UK (since I quickly found numbers for that), there were about 75,000 prisoners in 2003. Probably gone up a bit, so lets say 80,000 prisoners minimum. However, there were about 170,000 police officers in the UK in 2006.

So, there are suddenly 8,000 superman level criminals who break out of jail. This also lets out most of the rest of the prison population. Meanwhile, there are 17,000 police officers with the same level of power. Can anyone not see this causing huge amounts of devastation?

(simplified, I know, and it ignores all the other powered population, and all those who won't break out and so on. But as a basic situation, it shows what I'm talking about)

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 8:58 pm

There are more firearms in Canada than there are people.

Think about that for a moment. It means that given some time to prepare, basically every single man, woman, and child in Canada can garner powers roughly equivalent to Gambit. And yet, Canada does not collapse into anarchy and destruction. If people were walking around with powers of that magnitude on a regular basis, things would become scarier and generally worse. People who got into minor confrontations would reach for their "guns" because they would always have them. Always have them loaded. With the safety off.

But civilization in the Wild West continued to exist. Even though there were people running around with pistols and dynamite. Heck, Texas is a worse place because of all the concealed firearms, but people still build buildings.

If a certain percentage of the population can breathe fire, or whatever, then there will be more crime. And there will be more fatalities in the crimes that there are. But as long as there are enough of these metahumans that no super powered dude can fight society as a whole, then society as a whole will stagger on the same way it has staggered on despite machine guns and dynamite.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 9:25 pm

A stratified 10% of the population suddenly gets Superman level powers. Semi-indestructability, speed, flight, laser eyes. That means that 10% of the prison population get super powers. Looking just at the UK (since I quickly found numbers for that), there were about 75,000 prisoners in 2003. Probably gone up a bit, so lets say 80,000 prisoners minimum. However, there were about 170,000 police officers in the UK in 2006.

So, there are suddenly 8,000 superman level criminals who break out of jail. This also lets out most of the rest of the prison population. Meanwhile, there are 17,000 police officers with the same level of power. Can anyone not see this causing huge amounts of devastation?

Why would it? Why would anyone assume that the first thing Evil Superman would do once he busted out of prison would be to go on a killing rampage until he was brought down?

Yes, there are going to be a number of people who would try to go out with a bang and because they had superpowers the confrontation would be a lot more destructive. But a couple of factors prevent them from doing this. 1) Is because they should be afraid of getting their face lasered off, too. If you actually managed to escape from jail and evade the police, would you risk blowing your cover to go on a killing spree? and 2) Most criminals aren't actually that homicidal. The Batman trope of insane people just itching for a chance to kill and destroy is actually an aberration. If there was a prison break and the prisoners knew that an army of Supermen were after them, most of them wouldn't actually try to fight too hard. Partly because they know that they can't win but also because even most criminals aren't actually interested in mass murder.

I mean, look at the figure you cited for criminals. It's intentionally misleading, lumping in larcenists with serial killers and then trying to present this number as 8000 madmen just waiting to wreck havoc on the population. I'd be surprised if even a tenth of them had the desire to go out with a bang and if more than a dozen of them actually acted on that impulse.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 9:28 pm

That said, in a future like this there would probably be a lot lower tolerance for super-powered criminals. They would probably get their faces lasered off afhter a trial. Another facet of life that comic books are completely unrealistic about--someone like the Green Goblin or Clayface would've been executed after their first murder spree, rather than stuck in a cardboard prison to come back repeatedly over the next twenty years.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:01 pm

On the other hand, consider that for most of the 2nd millennium it was irtually impossible for an aristocrat to suffer much at the hands of the law. Why? Because a lot of aristocrats had a lot of power - and if they could agree on nothing else it would be that aristocrats shouldn't get hung. Just, in general.

If the government starts executing mutants, both Professor X and Magneto are going to consider toppling the government. Even if they can agree on nothing else, the disparate factions of mutants can agree that normals killing mutants is "bad." So until the mundane authorities get themselves the kind of sentinel program that can take on the massed might of the muties, or powers become ubiquitous enough that being a mutie is no longer a defining portion of someone's identity - you can expect that Trials By the House of Peers bullshit is going to look pretty enticing.

If Quill goes and rapes someone, you will not only see Quill back on the street within weeks, you'll be lucky if she does time at all. Yes, the razor spines she shoots out of her body aren't a big deal in a world where people have knowledge of gunpowder, but the fact is that she's a mutant. And that means that any legal action taken against her is politically sensitive.

It's really difficult to get powerful classes of people to be subject to the laws of mortals. Super criminals don't get the revolving door treatment from jail because they are a force majeur, they get it because metahumans collectively are.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:10 pm

If the government starts executing mutants, both Professor X and Magneto are going to consider toppling the government. Even if they can agree on nothing else, the disparate factions of mutants can agree that normals killing mutants is "bad." So until the mundane authorities get themselves the kind of sentinel program that can take on the massed might of the muties, or powers become ubiquitous enough that being a mutie is no longer a defining portion of someone's identity - you can expect that Trials By the House of Peers bullshit is going to look pretty enticing.

The question then of course becomes what gives Professor X and Magneto the right to decide that mutants shouldn't be punished for any reason or that 'high risk' ones like the Scarlet Witch should be given just as much slack as Joe Blow the arsonist who blow his hands off during his last arson attempt.

I imagine that if people like Quill and Green Goblin got away with their crime even once if nothing else there would be vigilante squads of mutants or people who built robots in their backyard wanting to take them down. Only someone with a completely godawful view of morality--like Hitler--would think that being able to shoot fire out of your ass should give you some sort of extralegal power.

Now I could see something like that arising if superpowers existed longer than modern society, but most stories have superpowers appearing sometime around World War II; I don't even think you'd be able to find 5% of mutants who would agree that when Sylar goes around eating brains and it's proven that he did it he shouldn't be killed by the first person who can reach him.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:24 pm

Lago wrote:The question then of course becomes what gives Professor X and Magneto the right to decide that mutants shouldn't be punished for any reason or that 'high risk' ones like the Scarlet Witch should be given just as much slack as Joe Blow the arsonist who blow his hands off during his last arson attempt.

Right? The same thing that gives the Earl of Essex the "right" to set fire to London if Parliament chops the head off a Marquis. They have power. As a class. They aren't losing that power without serious class warfare.

If Quill, or any other mutant, stops getting the preferential legal treatment, then you're in for The Terror. Mutants running through the streets skinning normals. Mobs of angry normals butchering mutant children at school. Bad times. The government changing seven times in as many years. Civilization possibly not surviving. It's not that Magneto and Xavier have the right to do this, it's that no one can stop them from doing this without taking unacceptable casualties.

Oh sure, sometimes a mutie will do something so horrible that the rest of the mutants will agree to throw them to the wolves just to keep human rage from building to the point that they become willing to risk an all-out class war in the streets. And as civilization continues to advance the relative advantages will fade away until eventually their privileges can be stripped away by a contemptuous nation. But unless you're positing some sort of hellscape world or far future eutopia, chances are mutants can rub their genitals on the law pretty openly and not have that come back to harm them. Very much. At least, directly.

-Username17

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:28 pm

Okay, so maybe the world doesn't end, and yeah, its simplified and probably misleading, but in the example the police will be trying to bring every single prisoner back into prison. And the likelihood is that not all of them will come in quietly. Now, the worst that can happen today is that they get hold of a gun and either start shooting at the cops or they take hostages. Horrible, but on a small scale.

But, with super powers, even a small fight will likely cause huge devastation. A while back on this forum someone posted a youtube video where superman gets punched through several buildings, causing huge devastation. It would all be like that. Even if several officers surround an escapee and quickly bring him down, the building is likely to not be there at the end of the arrest. In the middle of a city it could cause huge amounts of damage.

I think my point is that if there are enough supers able to cause more devastation than it is feasible to rebuild in a reasonable time, then society as a whole will be drastically affected in a huge way.

Simple case: a meta-fight occurs and a couple of tower apartments are destroyed. During the day so most people are out. Now, a huge amount of housing needs to be built very quickly before the next fight occurs, and with all the building times and building regulations, let alone finding clear building sites, it will probably take longer to rebuild than it will for the next fight to happen. If it takes a couple of months to rebuild, then if you have 1 fight per month you cannot have a sustainable amount of housing.

Other thoughts:

The construction industry in Metropolis is probably the largest industry in the multiverse.
Relationships between supers and non-supers are likely to be limited. First of all because of completely different frames of reference, then because of risk to spouses.
Prisons for supers are going to be impossible to build. If powers vary a lot then you can't know all the powers someone has, so you need every cell to basically be able to hold anyone in. Is there even a cell that can hold Captain Marvel or Thor?
Supers can have much more movement. If a flying super commits a crime, they can fly to other countries without needing boats or planes. This means that either borders need to be upheld a lot more or extradition laws need to be changed.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:37 pm

It's likely that, instead of stealing shit, the metahuman just walks into a store, says, "I want that that and that." flashes a "I am a Mutant" badge takes it and leaves without paying just like feudal nobility could.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:47 pm

Well, what about settings where you have a class of people who get phenomenal cosmic power through accident of birth and another class of people who can deliberately get superpowers if they train or pray hard enough?

I'd think superhumans having extralegal privileges would fade away, partly because if things got too shitty you'd have teams of muggles training their butts off to rise against their oppressors, but mostly because of the fact that having a protected social class is worthless if most people can get into it if they take six months off to do nonstop situps.

Like in the Marvel-verse, even if Magneto and friends did declare a new world order, all this would do is just have people making nonstop deals with the devil or Tony Stark cranking out Iron Man suits for mass use or Iron Fist starting underground training camps. For the House of M storyline, the authors had to break out a plot device that would be ridiculous even for Dragonball and pretend that non-mutant superpowers just didn't exist in order for it to work.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 10:51 pm

If you rocked ass enough you could be promoted to the nobility either by the sword or by the robe. The nobility still held on to their privilege for eight hundred years.

This is the third millennium, and things move faster. But that's still no guaranty that the law would end up applying evenly to you and to Juggernaut within your lifetime or the lifetime of your children.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 11:12 pm

Yes, but those are really specific, really deliberate, and really difficult ways of entering the nobility.

There are literally dozens of ways to get superpowers. Most people don't bother doing it because it generally ends up making their life worse. But in a world where not having superpowers means that some asshole in a yellow suit can have sex with your children all night long then a lot more people are going to be trying to deliberately get them; right now people don't do it because having superpowers perversely makes this more likely to happen.

For example, here are a laundry list of ways to get superpowers:

- Make a deal with the devil. Seriously, Mephisto would love to give you superpowers for 10 years in exchange for getting your soul for all eternity.
- Good old fashioned lightning.
- Good old fashioned radiation.
- Unlocking the power of your soul at its most desperate moment.
- Stumbling onto an artifact of power.
- Loving animals so much that you forge some kind of bullshit psychic connection to them. Sometimes this gives you power over squirrels, sometimes this gives you the power of a squirrel.
- Did you know that spellbooks are actually real in the Marvel and DC-verse? And if you study them enough you can get Real Ultimate Power?
- Build something that gives you superpowers in your garage. If Steel and Syndrome can do it, you can, too.
- Or you can just wave around enough cash until someone gives you their old gear.
- You can of course always just die. Most of the time this just makes you rot in the ground but in some settings you come back as a ghost.
- Get your ass on the floor and start doing some situps. I mean a lot of them. No one knows the exact number, but do enough of them and you start flying.
- See some weird alien lifeform on the ground? Stick it onto your crotch and start humping it. There's a really good chance you'll develop superpowers. Or it'll take over your body and make you a monster. Same thing.
- Buy a chemistry set and a bunch of swirly tubes. Mix the shit together and drink the frothy mixture. If you don't die then you'll probably get some superpowers.
- Go insane. I mean really fucking batshit nuts. You might unlock some kind of hidden psychic powers. This works really well in conjunction with one of the other methods.
- Hang around a bunch of people who already have superpowers. It might be contagious. Characters like Jimmy Olsen can't go one week without getting them.
- Dig up graves and start eating the bodies of superpowered people who have died. It's just crazy enough to work.
- Get a guardian angel. You might be lucky enough to get one by accident because an angel switched up your male heart with a female one, or you might randomly get one while you're in a bar and get into a fight with four guys (one of whom is a trained boxer).
- Go on a spirit journey to some bullshit realm and stay longer than necessary. Weird things start happening when people hang around bad places longer than they're supposed to.
- Find some discredited pseudo- or proto-science and start humping its leg. Alchemy and acupuncture are really popular choices but there was seriously a supervillain who got their powers from phrenology. Ling Wei, Fist of the Blue Sky. For serious.

And so on.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 12:08 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
clik wrote:So your contention is... if 1 in 10 people had the power to flatten the White House, that the world would be a more stable place than if just a handful could do such a thing?

I imagine that if 10% of the population had their finger on the button, so-to-speak, the end of the world would be one bad bout of depression away.
Here's a question for you; how often do acts of terrorism or shooting sprees happen in real life?

I dunno about the frequency of terrorism and shooting sprees, but I do know of plenty people are murdered near where I live and I have to believe that a great many of the murders are due to the ease in accessibility of deadly weapons. There are other factors at work, but that factor cannot be ignored. It would surely be even more dangerous if people were carrying around concealed bazookas instead of concealed hand guns.

I don't think my original question was specious. Do people seriously believe that society would be more stable if more people were walking around with concealed heavy weapons at all times?

What if 10% of the population literally had the power to launch nukes. Sure, almost nobody would use it, but for those people already so inclined to be crazy or what have you, it would raise the bar for how much damage they do. I don't see how having more destructive power makes for a more stable society.

Kaelik wrote: You do realize that something like 99% of the people you ever meet posses the ability to kill you at pretty much any time right?

You do realize 100% of your post was irrelevant, right?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 12:26 am

I don't think my original question was specious. Do people seriously believe that society would be more stable if more people were walking around with concealed heavy weapons at all times?

What if 10% of the population literally had the power to launch nukes. Sure, almost nobody would use it, but for those people already so inclined to be crazy or what have you, it would raise the bar for how much damage they do. I don't see how having more destructive power makes for a more stable society.

It's a sliding scale, obviously. While having every country on the planet having nukes is more dangerous than our current setup, ten countries that had nukes would be far more stable than one country that had a monopoly on them.

The question you need to ask yourself is why Superman deciding to go Nazi dictator on us something more to worry about than a thousand guys with guns deciding to do so. My answer is because no one can stop him, while any country could organize a force to oppose the thousand guys. Having a hundred superheroes appear at random won't make things any better either; but when you have billions of people at Superman-level then most people are just going to laugh at him if he tries. Things liket evil repressive governments are only going to happen if a movement actually gets enough Superman-like people to support them--in which case things pretty much work like they do now.

Now you've noticed the flip-side to this situation with nukes. Yes, if everyone had nukes then things would be different but that's because NO ONE CAN STAND UP TO NUKES. The best thing we've come up with so far is MAD which doesn't actually do jack shit once one goes off. But we're not talking about nukes, we're talking about Superman; part of the package deal is that you're opposed only by other Supermen and while you might get in a few shots against Superman society you will eventually lose.

Again, when a Superman flips out and decides to destroy buildings he'll be stopped by some other Superman. But despite the impression you might get from media people actually flipping out and destroying society at random is really rare, especially in stable countries. Yes, things like 9/11 look really frightening and terrifying and in a world with superpowers they would be more common. But not all that more common; unless you lived in a shithole like North Korea life will probably just go on.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:10 am

I'll just say this for the record before Kaelik gets confused by my annoyance at his post:

I am well aware that if it wasn't an incredibly rare occurrence of people flipping out to kill as many people as possible, the world society at large would pretty well collapse. It seriously takes only a tiny bit of chemical or biological know-how to kill thousands, if not millions of people. That this doesn't happen is a very heartening fact to me.

I don't think that tid-bit is relevant to my notion that having more destructive potential makes for a less stable society.

Carry on, y'all =-)

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 1:25 am

I don't think that tid-bit is relevant to my notion that having more destructive potential makes for a less stable society.

Oh, yeah, it would definitely be less stable, but it probably wouldn't really change society all that much.

Imagine for example if, controlling for everything else, the murder rate in Japan went up tenfold right now--more crimes became lethal, more people flipped out to the point of killing, so on.

Would this be extremely frightening? Yes, but it wouldn't actually change much over in that country.

Now countries that are already on the brink like Iran would probably collapse under this new model. We'd see several new revolutions, not all of them good. But as far as the whitebread first-world countries go? Who gives a care?

Absentminded_Wizard · Post by **Absentminded_Wizard** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 4:19 am

FrankTrollman wrote:If you rocked ass enough you could be promoted to the nobility either by the sword or by the robe. The nobility still held on to their privilege for eight hundred years.

This is the third millennium, and things move faster. But that's still no guaranty that the law would end up applying evenly to you and to Juggernaut within your lifetime or the lifetime of your children.

-Username17

I think it's telling that your example involves the mutants of the X-Men comics. Your logic might apply in a world where all metahumans get their power the same way, thus creating a shared identity among all supers. But in a world where people get their powers in various ways, often through one-in-a-million events (the most common superhero origin trope), this doesn't necessarily happen. Getting bitten by a radioactive spider doesn't necessarily make you feel a common bond with somebody who found an Egyptian sorcerer's helmet and amulet.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 5:50 am

FrankTrollman wrote:If you rocked ass enough you could be promoted to the nobility either by the sword or by the robe. The nobility still held on to their privilege for eight hundred years.

This is the third millennium, and things move faster.

Not so much.

At least here in the US, prosecutors working for the DA's office still make notably more than public defenders. Since lawyers with higher win rates tend to cost more, this means that people who cannot afford their own attorneys tend to be at a statistical disadvantage in the court system compared to those who can.

This means that in general the wealthy are convicted of crimes less often than the poor.

And since inheritance and parental contribution to education are still very major determinants of income, we pretty much still have an aristocracy that is less accountable in the eyes of the law.

At least we've made enough progress since the Magna Carta to pretend that it doesn't really work that way instead of justifying it with moral theories about "divine right" and "noblesse oblige".