ITT: Megalomaniacs
In addition to a number of extremely harmful world leaders, CEOs, billionaires, rightwing “thought leaders”, and politicians… I definitely would be tempted to go scorched earth.
I probably would settle to just make the leaders of certain movements shame themselves publicly and so thoroughly before their death that those movements end from sheer embarrassment.
This reminds me of Galadriel’s speech when Frodo offered her the ring.
Politicians already have that, but instead of a heart attack its just a special service member shoot someone.
I’ve got the hubris to think I’d be cool about it. Starts with billionaires and Republican leadership. Ends with “people who park in bike lanes”.
I learned from hardcore history that everyone gets corrupted by power. I truly believe that i would ice people that would only benefit the rest of the world. But i assume i eventually will also reach the point of: “dit that motherfucker just cut me off?!”
And thats where you write yourself and uncle ben tour way onto a better future
I wonder how long it would take for me to start straight up killing rival sports teams.
I absolutely could not be trusted with such a book. That being said, I should absolutely have it,
hhmm… sounds trustworthy!
I think a lot of people ignore the main issue with Death Note. I don’t view it as depicting how anyone would be corrupted by power.
Light Yagami started out with an overinflated ego and impaired self control by virtue of being a teenager with good grades. He likely was also already a psychopath (though you can’t give that diagnosis to a minor). He’s effectively the male Japanese version of Elizabeth Holmes. That’s what led to him becoming a megalomaniac.
Not everyone starts off with that set of circumstances, and conversely not everyone would go down the same route. But that’s not the story the author wanted to write nor the story the audience wanted to consume. A good person using the Death Note to fix the world would get old really fast because there’s little tension and intrigue. But someone being correpted by power down a path of evil? That’s a story that can be interesting
There are two extra stories that show what could happen. One is of a good person trying to do ‘good’, they killed themselves as soon as they were challenged.
If the story started with Light killing government figures and business moguls world wide, it would have to answer a lot of questions. It was a tighter story keeping it local.
Light Yagami started out with an overinflated ego and impaired self control by virtue of being a teenager with good grades. He likely was also already a psychopath (though you can’t give that diagnosis to a minor). He’s effectively the male Japanese version of Elizabeth Holmes. That’s what led to him becoming a megalomaniac.
Should be noted how Misa Amane isn’t really corrupted, just gulled into Light’s cult of celebrity and used up by his machinations.
I think a few more characters with a hand on the Death Note would have made the story better, to play out it’s influence on the user.
our university had a book that actually killed a person via falling on their head. it was encased in this bulky jacket with metal edges. and for whatever reason it was relatively high up the bookshelf and the bookshelf was quite old and falling apart. So one day some dude decided to pull out a book from this bookshelf and it buckled and that bulky jacket book cracked his head open.
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I mean, killing those that want others dead for the crime of existing seems pretty water tight on morals and corruption. Don’t stray from that rule and you should be fine.
yah, was gonna say. as long as you don’t start a cult and start drinking your own coolaid, you’ll probubly be fine. but then we wouldn’t have as much of a story would we.
yeah, light literally monologes about becoming god of the world like…5m after confirming the book is real. dude clearly had issues
What about people who make fun of my farts
They already ded, they just still walking.
Looks like you just made the list.
That doesn’t solve the issue of you not having perfect information, which the post alludes to.
List of KKK members, done. List of proud boy members, done. They don’t exactly make it difficult to deduce.
Do we really need perfect information for the likes of Trump, Putin, et al?
Ah so you’d kill all of the members of Hamas then. That’s what you obviously meant, because you everyone agrees on which people you mean when you say “those that want others dead for the crime of existing.” Completely water tight! Definitely not at all dependent on the arbitrariness of which information you’ve been exposed to.
I dunno. You sound kinda like hamas over there.
I’m just on a list because I was raving about our local hummus guy and apparently I smoked too much and had a lisp.
So you want others who want others dead for the crime of existing, dead for the crime of existing?
Edit: clearly I should have used /s for the obvious joking wordplay on a meme community
No dumbass, you literally just listed their crime, its not “existing”. If they were just existing they wouldn’t be targeted, they wouldn’t be guilty of genocide.
It isn’t a difficult concept. x wants nightlily dead for being German. y wants x dead for wanting Germans to be dead.
It isn’t recursive.
Exactly. You get it ! You have to be intolerant of the intolerant.
If you gave me the Death Note no one would ever see it again. Not even me.
god that’s dangerous and cosy
∗falls to death∗
Honestly in the right hands that book could do a lot of good very quickly
Seriously. Also, I can’t imagine what good people I would write down after being corrupted by power that would outweigh the first three names I would choose immediately after getting the book.
Same as the death penalty IRL. You can’t know that person x is guilty and that person x not existing will make things better.
Counterpoint - you can know if leader of country x is guilty of killing others if they say they’ve done it quite openly and want to do more of it.
Then the replacement uses it as justification to further that endeavor.
Deathnote can kill in any way you want as long as it’s realistic. Not sure how they’d figure it out. Which means that at some point people will start to think divine intervention, especially if ending the war stops the heart attacks / eagle attacks / flag poles falling on said leader, or whatever other symbolism you’d choose.
So many corrupt preachers are gonna get struck by lighting…
Perhaps, but then you kill that person and the power vacuum that is now created is likely to attract someone so much worse. There is no guarantee the next person will be better than the current one, and if the next one is worse, it would be your doing.
So? You have a death note. You can give every new entrant a 1 month trail run. Eventually people will figure out a pattern. Humans aren’t that dumb.
Then just get rid of the next monster. Eventually the hierarchy will learn and reform, if by no other means than by the individuals corrupting the structure being eliminated
Killing a leader doesn’t get rid of the position of power that enabled their misdeeds.
Killing people who keep abusing that position of power within an exact amount of time however would either get rid of the position or stop the abuse eventually.
There’s only so many times a person in a very specific position can be struck by lightning or have a heart attack before everyone sees that position as cursed or becomes superstitious about it.
I mean, dictators have historically often met with a rather grisly end (Mussolini shot and hung upside down by his toes, Hitler blowing his own brains out, Gaddafi sodomized with a bayonet) and that doesn’t seem to stop people from pursuing the same power.
We’re talking year long consequences, after being in power for years. And then the next leader doesn’t meet said fate.
Every month though? Different story. Especially if it’s something like getting struck by lightning
If all that happened in the same month I bet it would get some people talking tho.
No, the position is occupied by the next monster. And so on. And so on. Dang, that’s such a nifty way of getting rid of sociopaths!
The entire theme of Death Note is that power turns people into sociopaths and that no matter how many “bad people” you kill you will never actually succeed in cleansing the world of evil, but I guess no matter how ham-fisted you make it people will still miss the point. It’s funny that a lot of people complain that Light has an unrealistically naive view of morality and yet this comment section seems to be teeming with people who are equally immature.
See the problem is Light didn’t use the thing correctly. He could have written, “while suffering from a massive stroke, Senator ___ voted to pass nationalized school lunch.” Sure, the killing people sounds fun, but it’s what they do while dying that could make the world a better place.
Problem is he completely lacked a systemic critique of society and fixated on crime, which he took for granted as the cause of all problems. For Light, all evil in the world comes down to individual moral failings, and by getting rid of the criminals he was eradicating evil.
I’m built different.
Never watched it.
Eventually you run out of monsters to fill the position (and the supporting positions below). At that point you now have people willing to make positive changes in the world in positions of power
That is not how it works at all, and it’s actually a very childish way of thinking. There is not some finite pool of monsters these positions of power draw from, the positions of power make the monsters. “Power corrupts” is the most common trope in fiction since the advent of fiction for a reason and it’s baffling that so many people still don’t get it.
Insisting that tropes are universally true just because they’re repeated is absurd. It’s something a child would think up.
Go look at history. There’s plenty of examples of people who do the right thing when in positions of power. This is because power doesn’t corrupt - it reveals who people truly are. It’s just that selfish people are more likely to seek out power for personal gain.
Question. If someone autographs that book would it be considered suicide? I am seriously curious about the legal implications here.
I’m pretty sure i’d be fine with it. Not because I’m special with perfect morals or sneaky and good at keeping below the radar, but because already nobody cares I exist, and only a handful even know. I’m invisible, and not interested in fame or whatever contrived nonsense, and my sleep schedule is a disaster, so nothing would point to me.
But if the worst people on earth start committing suicide at the end of a video of them divulging their deepest darkest secrets in great detail, you’ll know it was me.
