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

[RichardWhereat]

What was that song that either Paragon or Renegade sang about Liberia?

 

[Chaoswind]

A few years ago, I went looking for the most interesting people I could find on Social Media.

I found a few no-shit, Mein Kamph reading, Adolf Did Nothing Wrong Nazi's.




They were much more reasonable than the Communists.


Sure, they said the Holocoust didn't happen, and their idea's about economics were, hum, shortsighted. But, they honestly didn't think genocide was part of their philosophy. Delusional? Yes. Monsters? Not so much.


Hitler and crew, back in WW2, were loonie monsters. However, there are people today who took the cover story of those long dead monsters, and beleve.

Don't hate them for being wrong.

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That is part of the recruitment mask.

They are "reasonable" to the people they want to recruit, if you are in their undesirable list (a list that has slight variations depending on the local brand of Nazisn) they want you and people like you to not exist, and there is absolutely nothing "reasonable" about that... So no, communist aren't worse, not by a long shot.

 

[Mr Zoat]

What was that song that either Paragon or Renegade sang about Liberia?

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Somalia?

 

[ForeverShogo]

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. On the one hand, it's someone she knows and cares enough about to call Auntie. On the other, she's still going to be someone born and raised in a world that teaches Nazis are the scum of the Earth. It's an easy defense mechanism to fall back on.

I'm also not sure what would actually change about Earth 10 even if he gets through to her. I imagine she would still help fight the Freedom Fighters given the kinds of things the FF is seen to do. Maybe her still being alive indirectly prevents the destruction of the Eagle's Nest and Metropolis.

 

[RichardWhereat]

Somalia?

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Yeah, that's the bunny. Cheers.

 

[Sockmonkey]

"This is a flammenwerfer. It werfs flammens."

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Heh, I know that reference.

 

[Maelgwyn]

Now looking at Donner's article in the link, I think it's odd that she is a former neo-nazi and also gay, makes me wonder if Donner back in Earth 10 has some proclivities. Also, is it just a weird coincidence that Donner's girlfriend is named Blitzen when there's also a Blitzen on the New Reichsmen? Or is this alternate-reality shenanigans for saying that Earth 10 Blitzen has some skeletons in her closet?

 

[Siskulous]

The crime of being a Nazi in The first degree.

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Unfortunately merely holding Nazi ideology is not a crime. Nor should someone who's never been exposed to any other ideology necessarily be judged for it. Normally I'd add that it's just stupidity, but in her case, where she's never had any reason to question the ideology held (or, at least, espoused for fear of legal consequences) by literally everyone she's ever interacted with, it's not. Try thinking of her less as a Nazi and more as a victim of brainwashing. It would be closer to the truth.

With the secondary crime of annoying me with her Nazi bullshit.

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Annoying you is not and never will be a crime. Sorry.

Now looking at Donner's article in the link, I think it's odd that she is a former neo-nazi and also gay, makes me wonder if Donner back in Earth 10 has some proclivities. Also, is it just a weird coincidence that Donner's girlfriend is named Blitzen when there's also a Blitzen on the New Reichsmen? Or is this alternate-reality shenanigans for saying that Earth 10 Blitzen has some skeletons in her closet?

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Since sexual orientation is mostly an epigenetic trait (that is to say biological but not necessarily inherited) and gays were on the Nazi's list of undesirables, that seems likely.

 

[ForeverShogo]

I dunno. It'd be kind of dumb to say a person must be secretly gay just because their superhero name is the same as that of a completely different person.

Blitzen is literally just one of the German words for Flash.

===

Also, I can't help but wonder why Paul is assuming the Earth 10 Nazis never discovered the Danner formula. Especially when Earth 10 Gerri was considered suitable for providing Overgirl with combat training.

Kind of sounds like the kind of thing you'd want someone with super strength and toughness to do.

 

[Darko]

Shogo does have a point.
Earth 10 Blitzen could be a completely diffrent person that happens to share the same superhero name.
Still it would be really funny if she discovers Donners romantic life, as well as helping her see that the world is quite diffrent than what she thinks it is.

 

[Maelgwyn]

I dunno. It'd be kind of dumb to say a person must be secretly gay just because their superhero name is the same as that of a completely different person.

Blitzen is literally just one of the German words for Flash.

===

Also, I can't help but wonder why Paul is assuming the Earth 10 Nazis never discovered the Danner formula. Especially when Earth 10 Gerri was considered suitable for providing Overgirl with combat training.

Kind of sounds like the kind of thing you'd want someone with super strength and toughness to do.

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That's likely the case, Though it could also just be an alternate version of them, so who knows. I mean there's Calvin Ellis, African-American Superman, but we'd still call him Superman, so why not an alternate ethnicity Blitzen in Earth-10? Either way just baseless speculation, probably just a coincidence.

 

[TheMidnightRook]

Not necessarily. The probability of a Nazi Earth could be zero, which means that out of an infinite number of possibilities only at most a finite number of them meet the selection criteria.

After all, there are infinitely many even numbers, and infinitely many prime numbers, but the probability of a prime number being even is zero -- yet 2 is prime.

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"The probability of a prime number being even is zero" Do you mean say, "the probability of grabbing a random number out of a set of all prime numbers and have it also be an even number"? Because if you do, the probability isn't zero, it's one out of infinity. If you instead mean that say... "the probability of having an even number included in a set of all prime numbers", then it also isn't zero, because 2 is both even and prime, therefore making it's inclusion a guarantee, not a zero-probability.

The usual interpretation of the idea of an infinite multiverse, is that everytime there's an event with multiple potential outcomes, new universes are generated wherin each individual outcome is the one that occurred. Assuming this to be the model that the multiverse operates under, than one Nazi Earth will spawn an infinite number of other universes, mostly with minute differences between them.

 

[Coda]

"The probability of a prime number being even is zero" Do you mean say, "the probability of grabbing a random number out of a set of all prime numbers and have it also be an even number"?

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Correct, that's what I meant.

Because if you do, the probability isn't zero, it's one out of infinity.

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This is incorrect. Your argument is exactly equivalent to claiming that .999999... is not equal to 1, and it suffers from the same flaw. In the real numbers, the reciprocal of infinity is identical to zero.

The usual interpretation of the idea of an infinite multiverse, is that everytime there's an event with multiple potential outcomes, new universes are generated wherin each individual outcome is the one that occurred. Assuming this to be the model that the multiverse operates under, than one Nazi Earth will spawn an infinite number of other universes, mostly with minute differences between them.

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Again: That's not strictly true. Consider a Weeble. There are an infinite number of points on the Weeble's surface. If you pick one of those points and place it in contact with a table and release it with some defined velocity, the Weeble will follow a chaotic trajectory. Each possible point and each possible initial velocity results in a different trajectory. However, when it comes to rest, the Weeble will, with probability 1.0, have been pulled into its most stable configuration, with the broad heavy end on the bottom and the narrow light end on the top.

Despite this being probability 1.0, there still exists a set of initial conditions that results in a different equilibrium state. That initial condition is unique: the Weeble must be placed precisely upside-down, with precisely zero initial velocity. This is an unstable equilibrium: any deviation whatsoever will cause it to roll over into its stable equilibrium position. But it IS an equilibrium position. The probability of choosing these initial conditions randomly is zero, but those conditions do exist.

The finite number doesn't have to be 1. Imagine trying to balance a stellated regular polyhedron on one of its points -- each point corresponds to an unstable equilibrium, and you can have as many of these as you want but there will always be a finite number of them.

So, hypothetically speaking, long-term Nazi success could be so unstable that there are only a finite number of conditions starting from a Nazi victory in WW2 that don't lead to a chaotic cascade resulting in the Nazis' downfall.

 

[Siskulous]

Not necessarily. The probability of a Nazi Earth could be zero, which means that out of an infinite number of possibilities only at most a finite number of them meet the selection criteria.

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Sadly on infinite Earths I don't think the probability of Nazis winning WW2 would be anywhere near 0. The Nazis lost in large part because Hitler was an incompetent micro-manager. And he got more micro-managy as the war went on. It's possible that they still would have lost if Hitler had let his generals do their jobs, but the fight for the allies would have been much more difficult. And as bad as Hitler was most of the people who could have possibly taken over had any of those sixty-someodd assassination attempts succeeded were both both worse people and more competent.

No, unfortunately Nazi Earth is probably a fairly high probability in infinite Earths. I'd guess somewhere around 20-30%.

 

[Coda]

No, unfortunately Nazi Earth is probably a fairly high probability in infinite Earths. I'd guess somewhere around 20-30%.

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It's possible. I wasn't going to assert any particular probability. (Though I think it's a little bit lower than that, because different outcomes from World War I would change the initial conditions leading into WW2. Preventing the rise of the Nazis in the first place would have only required a little bit of foresight by the drafters of the Treaty of Versailles.) My point was only that an infinite multiverse doesn't necessarily imply that every variation occurs infinitely often. It PROBABLY does for anything realistic, but it's not a fundamental guarantee.

 

[DAT_NOOB]

Unfortunately merely holding Nazi ideology is not a crime. Nor should someone who's never been exposed to any other ideology necessarily be judged for it. Normally I'd add that it's just stupidity, but in her case, where she's never had any reason to question the ideology held (or, at least, espoused for fear of legal consequences) by literally everyone she's ever interacted with, it's not. Try thinking of her less as a Nazi and more as a victim of brainwashing. It would be closer to the truth.



Annoying you is not and never will be a crime. Sorry.



Since sexual orientation is mostly an epigenetic trait (that is to say biological but not necessarily inherited) and gays were on the Nazi's list of undesirables, that seems likely.

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Annoying Maxx is a crime and the penalty is death

 

[TheMidnightRook]

So, hypothetically speaking, long-term Nazi success could be so unstable that there are only a finite number of conditions starting from a Nazi victory in WW2 that don't lead to a chaotic cascade resulting in the Nazis' downfall.

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There are also countless points of deviation that would spin off new universes without having any impact at all on the stability of a victorious Nazi government. For example... a person's food choices at breakfast: in one universe they have pancakes, waffles in another, bacon and eggs in a third, etcetera. Multiply that by every person in the world, each meal they eat in a day, and every day they're alive. That's trillions of new universes a week, distinguishable only by peoples meal choices, and that's before you begin to factor in things like the actions of wild animals and other random occurrences, or what beings on other planets like Mars, Tamaran, or Thanagar are also doing

 

[Steelplaza]

Sadly on infinite Earths I don't think the probability of Nazis winning WW2 would be anywhere near 0. The Nazis lost in large part because Hitler was an incompetent micro-manager. And he got more micro-managy as the war went on. It's possible that they still would have lost if Hitler had let his generals do their jobs, but the fight for the allies would have been much more difficult. And as bad as Hitler was most of the people who could have possibly taken over had any of those sixty-someodd assassination attempts succeeded were both both worse people and more competent.

No, unfortunately Nazi Earth is probably a fairly high probability in infinite Earths. I'd guess somewhere around 20-30%.

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"Nazi Earth"?

I always thought the weirdest thing about most "Nazis win WWII" timelines is that most of them seem to assume that they'd go on and conquer the United States. I mean, come on... they encountered huge problems getting an invasion force across the English Channel but they're going to send a conquering army across the Atlantic and then subdue a nation that stretches across a continent? Much more likely we get an alt-Cold War with the US and allies versus the fascist power block.

I suppose in Overgirl's timeline it's "explained" by having Kryptonian Technology + Superman on their side and because it's comics.

Unfortunately merely holding Nazi ideology is not a crime. Nor should someone who's never been exposed to any other ideology necessarily be judged for it. Normally I'd add that it's just stupidity, but in her case, where she's never had any reason to question the ideology held (or, at least, espoused for fear of legal consequences) by literally everyone she's ever interacted with, it's not. Try thinking of her less as a Nazi and more as a victim of brainwashing. It would be closer to the truth.

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Let me be a little bit of a contrarian here. This is a women in her forties who for most of her adult life has held a position of enormous power and privilege in her society, as well as having genuine super-senses and the ability to travel anywhere in the world under her own power. She has had the ability to hear whatever contrarian ideas might exist without fear of retribution, to see in person the injustices and failures of nazi ideology, and to visit whatever parts of the world aren't under their rule (like Atlantis, presumably). We're not talking about a poor peasant in her village who never has a chance to see or hear anything her local authorities don't allow. She doesn't need other people to "expose" her to things... she can expose herself. She can use her x-ray vision to see the mass graves underground. If she's curious about history, she can read whatever documents she wants to read, either from legitimate access or simply because few have the power to stop her.

If she can't see the problems with nazi ideology then it's because on some level she has chosen to blind herself to them. If there's any people on nazi earth who should be able to work out why it's evil without needing be told, the enormously powerful and privileged Overgirl (again, a grown-ass woman in her forties) is surely among them!

 

[Maxx Crowley]

Unfortunately merely holding Nazi ideology is not a crime. Nor should someone who's never been exposed to any other ideology necessarily be judged for it. Normally I'd add that it's just stupidity, but in her case, where she's never had any reason to question the ideology held (or, at least, espoused for fear of legal consequences) by literally everyone she's ever interacted with, it's not. Try thinking of her less as a Nazi and more as a victim of brainwashing. It would be closer to the truth.

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Nah.

When OL wiped out the space nazi's of the citadel I was all in despite them being literally created that way and never having another choice. I can't really change my position now with an actual scum sucking nazi.

Beyond the personal reasons that would only set me off and derail the thread, I'm really not going to budge friend. Sorry.

I could try to see it from your side...but then.....

Yeah...Nah.

Annoying you is not and never will be a crime. Sorry.

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No, no. Annoying me with Nazi bullshit. Big difference.

And doing so in a world where I would have super powers? Oh man...

Besides, canonically, Batman literally tortures low level mooks with extreme pain, fear of death, and broken bones for the crime of annoying him by not giving him an answer to a question he only believes you have. So...yeah.

Annoying Maxx is a crime and the penalty is death

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That's annoying Super powered Maxx with Nazi bullshit Noob.

For the moment, I lack the Power ring.

 

[LazySloth13]

Well opinions on how you should treat nazis or people who buy into the propaganda aside at least there's proof that in the DC universe Heaven, Hell, and the other afterlifes exist.

So chances are if the requirements to get into Heaven are as strict on one version of Earth maybe rings true for another.

Hey Mr. Zoat quick question are there any plans or ideas that involve a younger version of Paul whose in his teens than the standard SIs being in their mid 20s or 30s?

 

[ForeverShogo]

There are basically two areas for a believable Nazi victory.

One would be that the Kriegsmarine solves its torpedo problems before October 30th, 1939. Churchill and the Admiralty Board were aboard the HMS Nelson on that date. A German submarine was able to fire off three torpedoes at the Nelson. All three of them hit. All three of them failed to detonate.

If the torpedoes had actually worked as intended, and Churchill had been killed, the British would have sought terms in the aftermath of Dunkirk. They almost did historically, and Churchill only just barely convinced the government not to throw in the towel.

The other would be for Hitler to be willing to dismantle the Soviets in multiple wars instead of trying to do it all in one go. When the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa, Stalin almost immediately tried to offer up terms to get Hitler to stop the war. With Stalin trying to use contacts in Bulgaria as intermediaries. Hitler ignored the offers because he was convinced Germany was powerful enough to take everything in one big war.

If Hitler had accepted the terms Stalin had offered, it would have essentially been a second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. With Stalin being prepared to throw the rest of Poland, the Baltics, Belarus, and even the Ukraine under the bus. This would be kind of a big fucking deal given that the Ukraine was the Soviet breadbasket.

Then the Nazis could just build up for another round of fighting. Lay down new rail lines. Etc. Etc. Be in a better starting position for a second Barbarossa. And with the British out of the war you'd be hard pressed for the United States to be bothered with something like Lend-Lease to prop up a Communist state when they don't have a shared enemy.

==============

Anyways . . . Maxx . . . I know what that picture is supposed to be, but I'm pretty sure that's fake. The Auschwitz Memorial has publicly stated that those scratch marks are the result of vandalism by tourists. Because I guess tourists are stupid assholes no matter where they go.

 

[RagnarokAscendant]

Sadly on infinite Earths I don't think the probability of Nazis winning WW2 would be anywhere near 0. The Nazis lost in large part because Hitler was an incompetent micro-manager. And he got more micro-managy as the war went on. It's possible that they still would have lost if Hitler had let his generals do their jobs, but the fight for the allies would have been much more difficult. And as bad as Hitler was most of the people who could have possibly taken over had any of those sixty-someodd assassination attempts succeeded were both both worse people and more competent.

No, unfortunately Nazi Earth is probably a fairly high probability in infinite Earths. I'd guess somewhere around 20-30%.

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This is not true. It's a fabrication created by the surviving Nazi generals who wanted to blame Hitler for their failures, since he was conveniently dead.

Watch the below.

 

[hkim]

Spacebattles Law Number 492: If an alternate version of world war 2 is mentioned, the next ten pages minimum of the thread are given over to armchair historians re-litigating the entire thing. There are no exceptions, even if the thread topic was originally unrelated. Bonus points for Hearts of Iron screenshots.

 

[Someguy Somewhere]

I think there was an Elseworld were the USA government got Superman's spaceship and studied it soon after it crashed. Now add pre WWII mentality to it.

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There was 'The Nail' Storyline, for an Elseworld comic run.

Spoiler: The Nail

Short version, The Kent family run over a nail, blowing a tire on that fateful day, and never discover the young Kal-El.
Lexcorp ends up with an empty kryptonian pod, and experiment with grafting the cell samples found inside to humans, as well as poking around the technical and historical data in the pod.

Flash forward a few years and the JLA have formed sans the iconic hero of Metropolis. Things start going rather badly when it turns out that there is a anti-metahuman conspiracy run by Mayor Lex Luthor and his army of bizzaro clones. But it turns out it's really his experiment a kryptonian/human hybrid Jimmy Olsen that's running the show, trying to remake Krypton on earth in his own image.

Jimmy takes on the League leading to a punch up on a farm field...a young amish family comes out only to get fried by jimmy....save for the Amish Kal-El, who rather takes issue with Jimmy. They Fight, Jimmy's DNA unravels and he goes poof, and Superman joins the League as it's newst member.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Hey Mr. Zoat quick question are there any plans or ideas that involve a younger version of Paul whose in his teens than the standard SIs being in their mid 20s or 30s?

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No. I don't think I could get back into my own teenaged head.

There are basically two areas for a believable Nazi victory.

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How about making a pact with all the people who hated the Soviet Union and only fighting them?

 

[Coda]

There are also countless points of deviation that would spin off new universes without having any impact at all on the stability of a victorious Nazi government. For example... a person's food choices at breakfast: in one universe they have pancakes, waffles in another, bacon and eggs in a third, etcetera. Multiply that by every person in the world, each meal they eat in a day, and every day they're alive. That's trillions of new universes a week, distinguishable only by peoples meal choices, and that's before you begin to factor in things like the actions of wild animals and other random occurrences, or what beings on other planets like Mars, Tamaran, or Thanagar are also doing

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If you're looking only at discrete branch points, it's not technically countless at all. Very very large, yes, but individual branches with a finite number of resolutions results in a finite multiverse -- a number doesn't become infinite just because you multiply it a lot. If there truly are an infinite number of universes out there, then the universes that branched off of a finite number of original universes defined by Nazi victory are still so sparse that there's a zero probability of randomly picking one of them from the list of all possible universes. (You might still encounter one -- probability zero doesn't mean that something is ACTUALLY impossible, only that you shouldn't expect to ever encounter a specific example by random chance unless you have a way of controlling the outcome in some way.)

Complicating matters is the fact that DC's cosmology considers a lot of things that your model would enumerate as separate universes as NOT creating separate universes. We know that time travel doesn't automatically make a new numbered universe. We know that quantum physics works within DC universes, which means that all of the possibilities represented in the wavefunction are still considered part of the same universe.

If we take New 52's cosmology as an indication of the underlying behavior of the DC multiverse, then it would appear that branches that are close enough to being the same have some sense of shared identity. If this is true, then the kinds of trivial variations you describe would get lost in the broader trajectory of the universe rather than always creating new ones.

In short, my point is that you can't actually assume infinity. Infinity is a mind-screw even if you DON'T bring cosmology into it, and it doesn't behave the way most people think it does. Proving that something is infinite -- even if you're working with sets that you already know are infinite -- can be very difficult.

 

[ForeverShogo]

Well, there were a few problems with making a purely anti-Soviet pact and only going after the Soviets. A big part would be that even if the Nazis didn't plan on destroying Poland, the Poles weren't exactly playing ball. Which is kind of a problem when they're between you and the Soviets.

The Nazis were also hoping that they could get Japan and China to cooperate in the strike against the Soviets. Even if only temporarily. Though that was pretty decisively ruined by Japan's inability to control its own army. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and pretty much all of the events in its immediate aftermath were basically the government trying to de-escalate and the Kwantung Army going, "lol, no. We're going to keep attacking anyways."

Hitler was actually pretty pissed about it, but Japan looked like the more useful ally due to China's warlord problem so he backed Japan and threw away quite a bit of Sino-German cooperation.

 

[DAT_NOOB]

Spacebattles Law Number 492: If an alternate version of world war 2 is mentioned, the next ten pages minimum of the thread are given over to armchair historians re-litigating the entire thing. There are no exceptions, even if the thread topic was originally unrelated. Bonus points for Hearts of Iron screenshots.

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Pretty sure this is a law of the internet and not just spacebattles

 

[Pinklestia]

There was 'The Nail' Storyline, for an Elseworld comic run.

Spoiler: The Nail

Short version, The Kent family run over a nail, blowing a tire on that fateful day, and never discover the young Kal-El.
Lexcorp ends up with an empty kryptonian pod, and experiment with grafting the cell samples found inside to humans, as well as poking around the technical and historical data in the pod.

Flash forward a few years and the JLA have formed sans the iconic hero of Metropolis. Things start going rather badly when it turns out that there is a anti-metahuman conspiracy run by Mayor Lex Luthor and his army of bizzaro clones. But it turns out it's really his experiment a kryptonian/human hybrid Jimmy Olsen that's running the show, trying to remake Krypton on earth in his own image.

Jimmy takes on the League leading to a punch up on a farm field...a young amish family comes out only to get fried by jimmy....save for the Amish Kal-El, who rather takes issue with Jimmy. They Fight, Jimmy's DNA unravels and he goes poof, and Superman joins the League as it's newst member.

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The Nail started well but then suffered from lazy writing and a stupid ending.

Even Superman being raised by the Luthors is better writing than the nail ended being.

Heck even Lex Luthor using

Spoiler

an undead baby as a power generator

is better writing.

If you are do a world without Superman then do a world without Superman, not stick him making a surprise appearance at the end and fixing everything.

 

[hkim]

Pretty sure this is a law of the internet and not just spacebattles

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It always generates discussion on the internet, but SpaceBattles is where this particular form of it is universally true - ten pages, regardless of anything else, etc. Check out how many posts the pre-Overgirl chapters had between them in this arc. Then the second someone said "universe where the Nazis won" everyone and their dog trot out their pet theories.