#95 thesis

[trutown-the-bard]

And who said the 95 Theses aren’t relevant today?

#95 thesis #95 theses #martin luther #the pope

[snyderssoapbox]

Martin Luther's 95 Thesis.

Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis.

Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgencesby Dr. Martin Luther, 1517OCTOBER 31, 1517Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place.…

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#95 Thesis #Martin Luther

[f0point5]

Doing this completely anon cause I'm genuinely scared of the backlash that may occur - This is controversial and also contradictory so im willing to be shat on for this hot take.

Charles cannot seriously be hoping to win races and be a world champion. I've got no proof just my own absurd theories but I seriously cannot see him becoming a wc. Lando is the same. They both are so alike. One bad race or bad moment and they shit on themselves and lose control and take a week to bounce back from it. I as much as I have love for them and am starting to think they genuinely believe they will win a dc. Oscar and Carlos are the only ones who could on either team as it currently stands. Unlike merc where George could in the team even tho he is lewis' teamate he actually could. But Charles and lando can't unless they change their mindset and team. And tbh to some extent I see both Charles and lando not nearly serious enough about f1 at the moment. And I know 'social media is fake and only shows so much blah blah blah we dont know them personally' but if they gave a fuck they'd risk the money and try and get into redbull. They'd risk thier paychecks and get the money invested into the team. And again I know I don't know what is happening behind the scenes and I'm whatever for saying this but Charles won't win a dc and neither will lando. Max is by far the most authentic, marketable, talented and most relatable driver and I'm a lewis girl (well more lance than lewis but just showing my bias that typically happens with lewis fans).

- Charles isn't dedicated (I believe)

- lando isn't either

- neither will win a wdc

- this celebrity branding thats going on is fucking ridiculous, lewis and max (although he's not nearly as willing to want the title) are the only ones who truly deserve it

- Daniel while yes is charismatic isn't all that talented anymore and would do better in another series. (I included Daniel cause I thought of the celeb status and him)

- and also drivers can only be so relatable and likeable as long as they stay grounded and don't seem so big for their boots and tbh again as a lewis fan (initally) I'm just not really caring for him and the va va voom of him anymore (that was wierd admitting) and when Charles is getting more 'celeb-like' he becomes more unlikable same with lando...

This was long and I apologise 😭🫶🏻

WOAH. Okay we about to get trashed for this but ya know what, idc, I partially agree with you.

I don’t think Charles, or Lando, will ever win a WDC. I think of the two of them Charles is the one with the real shot, because I think he has a much stronger mentality than Lando. I don’t think the pressure gets to him for pressure’s sake the way it does with Lando. I think where Charles knows he doesn’t have the equipment he gets desperate, and mistakes happen. Whereas Lando just can’t seem to hold it together over a weekend, and I think a lot of what affects Lando happens outside the car, which is why he would crumble in a title fight. That said, I think time will run out for Charles, George, Carlos, Lando, etc. Those teams won’t catch up to Red Bull before ‘26 and by then Oscar, and whoever else has come in from the next generation will be younger and hungrier, and the next cycle will start. For me, they will miss their window. I won’t say for sure but that’s my feeling, and if by the end of next season the Ferrari team is not operating like Red Bull (meaning they have a clear #1 driver, and their strategy and pit stops are where they need to be) it will be clear that not even Fred can change the tide and they are an unserious team where Charles will waste his talent.

I disagree that it would be a smart idea to get into Red Bull. Tbh I don’t think Red Bull would want Charles, but that’s another issue. That team is Max’s and it will be until he leaves (or suddenly can’t drive a car anymore but that won’t happen). As a driver, you have to think you’re the best driver, but I don’t think either Charles or Lando is delulu enough to think that they could beat Max in Max’s Red Bull (and this is not me saying they build the car for Max, I’m saying that when Newey hands you a car and Max is saying “make it faster” and everything you do to the car to make it driveable only makes it slower…you are fighting a losing battle). Red Bull would not only be a waste of time for them, but yes, probably a big financial loss, because they both benefit from marketing themselves as #1 drivers at the moment.

I have to say, I agree that it doesn’t seem to me that Charles is as committed to being WDC as he could be. Disclaimer - this is purely based off vibes, I don’t know the guy. I’m not saying he’s not doing his job, he absolutely is, but the self promotion levels, at a time when the results are not resulting…signals to me he’s branching out. I talked a lot last season about how I think he’s transitioning out of the “Il Predestinato” image, and how I felt part of that is because it is becoming less likely that he will win a WDC. I think it’s clever of him to think about doing other things though, because so much of what it takes to get a dc is out of his control, and he doesn’t even have the bare bones of a team or a car that will let him challenge for a title. There is no point in him waiting around for Ferrari to get it together, if they get it together he can revisit but right now…I think it’s in his best interest to get his bag.

I don’t think there’s many similarities between Charles and Lando’s path here, Lando is a wholeeee other essay 😂

But I disagree that the branding is ridiculous, I think it’s a logical thing to do. Yes these guys make good money from their teams but that won’t last forever, they have pretty short careers. It’s good for them to use their platform to build income streams for themselves that will go beyond their F1 career. Charles previously hadn’t been able to do that and now he is, which is definitely a positive. I will give Max and his team props here because I think he’s sneakily got the best alternative income streams of anyone. Verstappen.com must absolutely be raking it in with those grandstand deals, the merch is consistent, his brand deals are minimal but they’re big and they stick with him. My point is, drivers do need alternative income streams, especially when their brand can’t just be “I win”.

Lewis a master at this, I will admit, I just don’t like his brand. But it is consistent and he has managed to transcend F1 as his own brand which will keep him comfortable for the rest of his life, so good for him. I don’t buy into the brand but the brand is branding, I have to recognise.

I don’t really get Charles’s brand identity yet lol so I can’t tell if how likeable it will be. I mean, currently he is very liked, it’s possible it will stay that way. I really couldn’t say. I think Lando is about to have an unlikeable season but I also think his “babygirl brat” thing is pretty amusing and won’t ultimately alienate his fan base.

It was long but it was fun. The villagers will come for us with pitchforks for this opinion though.

#it’s a piping hot take #i said what I said #it’s not that deep don’t come in here with a 95 thesis of bitter complaints #we love a chat but keep it chill #f1 #formula 1 #charles leclerc #lando norris

[americiumam]

have you guys heard of being nice to people? sound of the summer

#im so sleepy and i think this deserves to blow up #95 #thesis statement

[ventiswampwater]

so. there’s this character named bo sinclair, I think he’s in a movie or smthn idk

#my thesis statement after one (1) glass of white wine #I cannot handle the fact that 95% of my ao3 is for this man. I just clicked in and #girl..................................................................GIRL

[rahabs]

#but Captain that’s impossible because you’ve spent the last theee years undermining me and making sure no one trusts you and now we’re in#the shit and I’m overwhelmed and you just casually threatened to lash me for questioning orders oh#shit we’re kind of fucked aren’t we#the terror#edward little#francis crozier (@allez-argeiphontes)

Thank you I have been saying this for years. Like, Crozier spends almost the entire show undermining Edward at every turn (who is supposed to be his second, mind), even when he's the one who asked Edward to do something or put him in certain positions. It's amazing Edward was loyal to him until the very end. That man took so much shit from both Crozier and Fitzjames.

#Conveniently ignored by the fandom of course but the fandom has bad takes on Edward 95% of the time #Anyway insert my thesis on why Jopson and Little are the narrative bookends for much of Crozier's arc #And when they at last falter is when everything truly hits the point of no return #Etc etc I care about those two and little else

[cephy-the-squid]

Things I expected from Blaze:

- An increase in shitposts

- Some advertising by artists and other small creators

Things I was not prepared for from Blaze:

- A repeat of the reformation

#i just saw a blaze post that was a transcribed version of the 95 thesis #and oh wow the Catholics are angry about it #too soon i suppose #its only been 505 years #i understand why these blaze posts could be frustrating or perhaps even triggering for some people #but as a Jew this is very entertaining #tumblr blaze #religion #tw religion #religion tw #shitpost

[aztrosist666]

93 ON MY RESEARCH PAPER RAGGHHHHHHHH ‼️‼️‼️🗣️🗣️🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🗣️‼️‼️‼️🗣️😭🦅🦅📢📢📢🦅‼️🦅‼️‼️‼️‼️

#LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO IM SO HAPPY ITS OVER #plus that’ll bring my grade up like. two whole points #it was one of those assignments where i either got a 95 or a 60 with no in between AND I GOT THE GOOD ENDING #my only issues were documentation and a little bit of stuff about proving the thesis #but since my topic (ruby ridge and waco) was so niche my contextualization kinda also worked as analysis 💪💪💪 #🐋

[bcofl0ve]

that's a long-ass way to say you're a hypocrite, lmao

(as is the privacy-except-when-we're-strolling-for-paps-to-shill-purses-or-shoes-or-daddy's-tequila couple

i mean, stroll and shill away, my friends, but don't pretend like you're above it all - that's the dumb part)

yesterday was the first pap photos we've gotten of them since they came back from cabo *over a month ago* but yes, they're jumping in front of pap cameras every chance they get! clearly!

sounds like a whole lot of cope because having it thrown in their face that they were wrong about something feels icky. and i say cheers to her saying it's only austin career talk from here on out since i don't think focusing so much on an aspect of his life you hate is a healthy way to engage with fandom. no one is forcing you to make shaky predictions based on nothing and have it thrown in your face every other month. be freee! fandom is supposed to be fun!

#xoxo your overlord #LMFAO #for someone who says i'm a narcissist who only 'thinks' i have any influence in the fandom they sure do like to give me the power they #think i don't have #ah c'est la vie #too much content to sit on here and play tit for tat all day so ill leave the 95 thesis talk at this

[ceram1cfish]

when you email every single library in the large city that you live adjacent to you a) realize how many fucking libraries that really is and b) that 2 hours can be a very long time

#i did an analysis at one point berlin has 95 public libraries #some districts use collective email addresses so i would say i sent .. 60 emails ? #work #thesis tag

[orangerosebush]

RE: the discourse on that one author who is doing a 'retelling' of the Odyssey -- I agree that broadly speaking, her response in the interview is part of the greater culture of arrogance in creative fields (e.g., we must "fix" other people's work in our own, we must always profess to be experts without having done the research to back up that claim of expertise, etc). However, man... I just think a lot of the replies to the Tweet that put her interview on blast also have some of that exact same intellectual arrogance. Is she *really* 'emblematic of the death of art'? It's one of those things where like… the appropriate response is to go 'huh… that's annoying' and then move on after snarking mentally for a few seconds. Not to mention we need not always broadcast our pettiest thoughts to the public forum that is Twitter lol. If a smaller artist* is likely using a platform and you mention them by name there -- ehhhh, again I have to think that sometimes kvetching about such relatively banal problems need not be shared on that platform specifically. IDK.

*i.e. Aggressively dunking on the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is a completely different ballpark because that is a huge media corporation.

#However again I am merely one fool online so my word is not intended to be like Luther nailing his 95 thesis to the church wall #And I'm specifically speaking about Twitter replies here because although I saw the interview shared here I thought the critiques in the po #post were like... actual critiques and not just calling some random woman a fucking idiot #As with most things in life y'know -- just don't be more of a dick than you have to be

[americiumam]

eepy guys should get thirty billion dollars for being so brave

#95 #thesis statement

[jennelikejennay]

Nobody asked for this but it's time for an essay on Spock's body temperature.

Some people say Spock would have a hot body temperature because he is from a hot planet.

Others say he would have a cold body temperature because he is from a hot planet.

It seemed to me that we could test this thesis! Do animals from hot climates have a hotter or colder body temperature than animals from cold climates?

Humans have a roughly average temperature for mammals, 98.6 F (37 C).

Penguins have a core temperature of 100-102 F. Polar bears have a temperature of 98-99 just like we do. They can maintain this temp even in 40 below zero temps!

What about hot weather animals? The camel can vary from 93-104 F—a huge range, but on average around the same as ours. The elephant also has a large range, 95-99 F.

The coldest-blooded mammal is the echidna, at 89 F. The hottest is the hummingbird, at 107. Neither of these is from an extreme environment. It's more about the metabolism: the echidna's is slow and the hummingbird's is fast.

And yet, you see the range is not very great among mammals. This is because many enzymes work efficiently at these temperatures. Above about 104 F, some start breaking down. By 131 F, there's not much enzyme activity that can happen.

Okay, so: Vulcans. We know that they will not have an especially warm or cool body temperature because of the climate. Since they're warm blooded (an assumption, I admit! But I will defend it later) they will have an ideal core temperature their body will function best at and have features to maintain that despite the heat.

Note: Vulcans can also survive more extreme cold than humans; that's why Spock has to help Bones in a blizzard in All Our Yesterdays. This makes sense to me, because desert climates like Vulcan are prone to extremes. It might get very cold there at night with little moisture to trap the heat. This is one reason I think Vulcans are warm-blooded—a cold-blooded creature would have been useless in a blizzard. The other reason is that cold blooded creatures have a slower metabolism in general, and Spock could not possibly be described as slow moving or slow thinking.

Okay, so what is the Vulcan metabolism? Is it faster or slower than humans? My guess is faster, because of their fast heart rate, strength, and quick thinking. That said, we don't have solid proof either way. It might make sense for them to have a slower metabolism so that their body produces less heat and is less likely to get into the enzyme denaturing zone on a hot Vulcan day.

Which brings us to another question: how do they beat the heat? They seem perfectly comfortable in their climate, they're not using behavioral practices to stay cool as humans from hot climates do. They must have ways to efficiently radiate heat from their core. Those ears, for instance. Remember elephants? Their huge, flappy ears are a major cooling mechanism for them. They are able to push more blood through the small capillaries of their ears in hot weather and restrict it when the temperature drops at night. This is called vasodilation—controlling blood flow to either shed or retain heat. We do it too, though not as much. When you're hot, your ears will be hotter. Out in the cold, your fingers and toes will get much colder than your core.

Like camels, elephants can maintain a larger range of body temperatures than humans can. That's another coping technique they have. Other ways to shed heat include sweat and panting.

I never really imagined Vulcans as very sweaty. In a desert climate, methods of cooling that involve water loss wouldn't be ideal.

Here's my guess: they are extremely efficient at regulating core temperature by controlling blood flow. In hot temperatures, their skin and especially their ears would be hot, but their insides would be maybe 100 degrees. When it cools down, their skin would be very cool to the touch, but they would keep a core temperature in the 90s. They might also be able to speed up and slow down their metabolism somewhat to control their temperature.

So. On the Enterprise, which is kept at a comfortable temperature for humans...I think Spock would be a little chilly to cuddle. If you want a warm cuddle with Spock, go to his quarters, where he keeps it nice and toasty.

This has been my xenobiology deep dive for today.

#star trek #spock #spirk #vulcans #biology #vulcan biology

[jaegersdevil]

cw: little suggestive

"how are you wearing jeans right now?"

you look down at your criss-crossed legs and shrug, focusing back on your laptop.

"no, seriously," eren rolls around on your bed next to you as you type. sighing, you look over at him. eren lays on his side with his head on his bicep, green eyes sparkling.

"haven't really thought about it since i got home," you mumble, clicking around for the journal article you were in desperate need of to finish writing part of your thesis.

your boyfriend groans and rolls toward you, smooshing his face into your thigh. "can't you stop writing for like 5 minutes and give me a head scratch?"

you shake your head, even though you know he can't see, and continue pressing the keys.

he lifts his head up, his freshly cut hair flopping over his eyes. bringing a hand up, eren tucks the strands behind his ear and sits up.

"take these off," he pinches the fabric of your jeans.

"what?" your head snaps up at his sentence. "take what off?"

eren nods at your lower half, and you feel your face warm. "why?"

"you need to be comfy, and i will not allow you to wear your outside clothes in my bed."

"later."

"la-" eren rolls his eyes. "later? no."

"please," you glance at him. you're hunched over your laptop and eren is 95% sure it's not good for your posture, but he knows better than to pester you right now (except for those damn jeans).

"baby," eren whines.

"why are you being a child?" you giggle, mindlessly scrolling through a paper.

"mi mi mi," eren imitates before he scoffs and turns his back to you, tucking his right arm under his head and using it as a pillow.

you shake your head to try and stop yourself from laughing. "eren."

your boyfriend hums flatly. "sleeping."

rolling your eyes, you save your work and close your laptop quietly. eren hears you moving around but says nothing.

"not giving you a kiss until you-"

"fine!" you yell, standing on his sheets in your t-shirt and underwear, jeans in your hand.

eren turns over, cheeks pink and smile wide. "you are so-"

you throw your jeans at him, the pants slapping against his head and staying there as you jump and sit back down on his bed.

"damn," eren laughs, throwing them onto the floor. "if you wanted me to get in your pants so bad, you should've just said so."

"fuck you."

"please."

#im laughing at myself for thinking of this #who gave me a brain #found this in the drafts so here you go #eren jaeger x reader #eren jaeger #attack on titan #attack on titan x reader #eren jeager imagines #eren jeager x reader #aot x reader

[birdsareblooming]

im so tired of having to defend myself on both sides

like. ok. i'm queer right. bi, demigender, aro, etc. also you know a girl, demi or not. all the time i have to defend myself from american christians who via mistranslations and misinterpretations spread by horrible leaders for generations have been led into a cult-like hierarchy that tells them to hate me when hate for us isn't in their book or supposed to be in their ways.

i'm also "christian". i hesitate to use the full term because of how bad american christianity has gotten. but i believe in the same god nontheless. every day i feel i have to defend myself from queer people as well

like. i so get it. as i have just established american and european christianity has gotten so fucked up and literally off-script that i'm shocked we haven't gotten another 95 thesis and a completely new branch. it's awful horrible and people who believe in such ideas should not be in power. to the point where calling myself a christian feels wrong. at least in america.

i need ya'll to have some nuance.

firstly the understanding that those who hate queer people, non-white people in any form, women, whatever else. isn't even in the text they follow. people have misused it since it was written. preaching just the verse saying wives should care for their husbands and not the one right after saying husbands should love their wives. taking out verses referring to god's "womb." about adam might not even being a man, as in, more likely nonbinary, the verse about david getting an errection when hugging johnathan. changing verses about cleanliness into women and men not wearing the same cloths. changing verses about cultural codes and allowing a world where people have to resort to prositution into verses condemning homosexuality. [X]

like. you know the matrix. was written as a trans metaphor. then a bunch of alpha sigma grindset rich white boys took it and appropriated it, misinterpreted it, used it to boost themselves and hurt women. it's like that. those people don't make the matrix a bad movie, they just don't know it's a trans metaphor. and trans people who enjoy the matrix are like. normal and cool.

as you can see i am passionate about this. i have all this stuff memorized not only to defend my queerness but my christianity as im doing now.

there are queer christians. there are certainly poc christians as right now, south america and south africa have the highest christian populations, to the point where they're sending missionaries to america.

again i'm asking for some nuance. when i see posts basically saying "the christian god is dumb" or "satan was right actually" and blantent misinformation about what the bible says. like those kind of posts hurt my heart. my god made me queer and loves me for it, i believe in a kind god, most good christians do. i feel like other religions don't get this treatment and it's just to spiritually piss off your catholic parents.

speaking of, in doing so you seem to forget about other abrahamic religions.

i once saw a post criticizing something directly from the old testament, out of context of course. saying god was cruel and the belives were flawed and all this due to one verse. people tend to forget, or not know, that the "old testament" is the tenoch. slightly different book order, same writings.

christians, muslims, jewish people, worship the same god. different names for god, some god, same base. if you make jokes about christianty willy-nilly, you're going to accidentally hit someone else. and even if you don't, you may hurt someone still.

it doesn't hurt because i think it's "sacrilegious" or i think you're going to hell. it hurts because my community doesn't care. my community doesn't see the nuance in people and decided a specific religion is the enemy. a specific group of people is the enemy. ive been marked as the enemy

it's casual jokes to you, to me it's making fun of my god

listen, by all means make fun of the assholes. i make fun of them every day. millionaires who use privet jets than preach and love to overlook the many verses condemning the rich and saying rich people don't go to heaven. people saying that as a woman of god you shouldn't enjoy sex. weirdos online and irl that seem to think patorizing random people will get them to church. dumb white people. it's great. fuckn. mormons and jehovah's witness leaders who are straight up running a cult based on a thread of the original intention. and it's funny because they're the assholes.

but don't attack the base religion itself. understand that the religion isn't inherently harmful, certain branches, beliefs, misinterpretations, and leaders certainly are. but please be kind to the people who are normal

before you make a post saying you're gonna. i dont know 'kill the uncaring god' that you're hurting people like me, any abrahamic religion, anyone who believes in a god possibly. also that's basically my parent, it's like you're insulting my awesome mom to my face bc my older sibling sucks. like thats just mean to her for no reason.

i'm just. tired. im stuck in the middle and i hate that i have to make this post because like. this is my home and my people and im tired of seeing this shit from my peers and family. just. have nuance. care about people. don't just say shit about a religion if you don't know its true.

im tired.

[sineala]

Superheroes and ethics

I realized that I wrote this last month on Patreon and forgot to post it here. I got asked to write meta about superhero ethics with regard to Steve and Tony. I ended up writing mostly about how Captain America's Plot Armor interacts with his principles.

I have been asked to talk about ethics and philosophy with respect to Steve and Tony. Unfortunately, the only philosophy-adjacent disciplines that I know well enough to speak about with any confidence are formal semantics and pragmatics, which isn't really all that useful in daily life unless you'd really like to learn about the differences between entailment, presupposition, and implicature, and also the Gricean maxims of conversation, which are great if you want to completely ruin conversations by violating them as many times as you possibly can.

So I'm not a philosopher, sorry.

But! I can talk more informally about Steve and Tony and ethics.

And I know there's been a lot of meta -- and actual books -- written about their differing views. I have a book here, A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics' Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, by Mark White, which I have not read yet but it sounds like this is probably the book you want to read if you want an actual philosophical analysis of this stuff. Judging by the reviews, the author decides to associate Tony with utilitarianism and Steve with deontology. That is probably fun. I am in no way qualified to talk about it. On an informal level, the thing I find fascinating about them is that, when it comes down to it, Steve and Tony are really not all that different.

I have been thinking about this for a while, because the last time I left anonymous asks open on Tumblr, the final ask I got before I decided that this wasn't a good idea was someone who wanted to pick a fight with me by asserting that Steve/Tony was a bad pairing because "they don't think alike, have different morals, different interests, and different emotional issues that the other is not capable of helping out with." This is one of the reasons why I don't have anon asks on anymore. But I thought it was honestly an interesting thing to think about.

So I have been pondering this on and off for a while, and I realized that the thing that really bugged me about it was that their general thesis was that Steve and Tony were bad for each other because they have nothing in common. See, I don't think that's true. I think they have a whole lot in common. But I am also willing to acknowledge that canon likes to put them in situations where they're at odds with each other and it seems fairly easy to come up with circumstances that will cause them to want to beat the stuffing out of each other. But, crucially, this doesn't mean they have nothing in common.

(I also think they actually have a lot of similar interests and are actually very capable of helping each other with their emotional issues, which canon demonstrates multiple times. But that'd be a different essay.)

For me, one of the reasons why Steve/Tony are so compelling as a pairing is because they are so similar. Let's call it, like, 95% similar. They are remarkably like-minded when it comes to their values and how they view the world. It's just that then they can fight, bitterly, over the remaining 5% of differences.

They work well together most of the time and it's just the bits where they almost work together that are so agonizing and provide so much material for fandom. Because it's not like they don't understand where the other one is coming from, what they want, or why they want it. They do. They just don't understand how the other person can come up with a different path to the answer given their shared goal and shared values. Steve doesn't understand how Tony is willing to do something that Steve thinks is wrong, and Tony thinks, I don't know, that Steve's ideals are too naive for the real world. Tony thinks Steve's plans are unrealistic and Steve thinks Tony's plans are unacceptable.

There's also an additional complication, which is that Steve as a character has a lot of plot armor that Tony doesn't. Steve decides what he thinks is moral and what he thinks is immoral, and he simply does not do the immoral thing. And the thing is that the narrative helps Steve out with this. It's fine if he's idealistic! It's even okay if his ideals are naive! He almost never has to go against them. I am saying this as a big fan of Steve. The story really helps him out.

For example, Steve thinks that killing is wrong, so he doesn't kill anyone, generally speaking. (Depending on the retcon you believe in, he may have in fact killed zero people in World War II, which is kind of ridiculous.) But in situations where the best of the options involves killing someone, someone pretty much always ends up dead. It's just that someone else does the dirty work. Steve surrounds himself with a lot of spies and assassins (Bucky, Sharon, Natasha) and those people kill the people who need killing.

In Civil War, Steve believes Registration is wrong, and he never has to change his mind. He probably still believes it's wrong. Instead of going on trial, he dies; he never has to face the consequences of any of his actions. The narrative shields him from that. When he comes back to life, Registration is gone and he gets a pardon from the president. It's all taken care of. He causes a lot of damage, and he doesn't even have to say he's sorry for trying to bash Tony's face in, in public, with witnesses, after having destroyed what looks like several city blocks.

So Steve never compromises his principles, because he has the luxury afforded to him by the plot so that he almost never has to be in a situation where he'd have to decide whether he should compromise his principles, say, for the sake of the greater good. He doesn't have to make that choice, because Marvel's not interested in writing stories where Steve has to make that choice. So it just… doesn't come up. He almost never has to put his ethics to an actual test. If you hand Steve the trolley problem, he'd just say, well, I'd save everyone. That's not an actual option in the trolley problem. But he's pretty much always going to be in a plot where he gets to do the right thing and save everyone.

Tony, though? Tony has to do terrible things for the sake of the greater good all the time. He doesn't get to opt out of the decisions. Even on a personal level, he has to do terrible things to himself. He has to decide probably at least half a dozen times whether he should wear the armor even if wearing the armor is hurting him -- say, when he decides to take on the LMD in the arc where he gets his first artificial heart, or in Armor Wars II, or in that storyline in the middle of Busiek's run after he gets beaten up by the Mandarin. And he always decides to wear the armor no matter what the personal cost is to his body. He ends up in a lot of fights where he has to take pretty bad damage to save the world -- and while Steve would also make that decision, Steve's going to heal up and be fine, like in his recent run where Bucky shoots him in the shoulder. He has a healing factor and he's fine in a couple weeks. Tony breaks his back in order to save civilians and then gets addicted to morphine and ruins his life for a good long while. That kind of stuff, with lasting physical consequences, just doesn't happen to Steve. Let's not talk about Streets of Poison.

It's pretty obvious when you look at their biggest fights (say, Civil War and the incursions) that Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and Steve doesn't. However, Steve doesn't exactly have usable alternate suggestions. The plot armor helps him out there. Steve espouses extremely noble ideas, life and liberty and all that… that are not actually workable plans.

And because of how the narrative treats him, he doesn't really need to have workable plans, either. It's not like he actually uses them. Because he's just going to be fine. (Except in the incursions, but everyone came back to life afterward so it's all fine.)

Steve doesn't like the SHRA. Okay. Fine. He believes it's an unjust law. His plan is apparently to just… keep fighting Tony and anyone else who tries to take him into custody for not registering. What's his endgame? Does he have one? His plan appears to be "be on the run from the government forever." As far as I can remember, he would prefer the situation to go back to the way it was but he does not, to my knowledge, ever propose a way of achieving that. He's not out there saying the law itself should be found unconstitutional or anything.

Similarly, with the incursions, after the Gauntlet breaks, the Illuminati have no solution for an incursion that isn't building bombs and destroying the other Earth in the incursion. Either they act to destroy the other Earth, or through inaction, both Earths are destroyed. Big ol' trolley problem. Steve refuses to play. Steve says he can't countenance that. Excellent moral stance. It's very him. He says, "I believe we'll find a way to stop it." He doesn't have any ideas besides "not the thing Tony is doing," which appears to also be his stance about the SHRA. If they'd let Steve stay in the Illuminati… what would he have done? I suppose the possibility exists that if he managed to flip one of the scientists to his side he'd get them to think up an alternate answer. He could have suggested that everyone evacuate Earth. But he doesn't actually have an idea, personally for what to do. Other than "nobody should die."

(That isn't even what happens, in the end. Of course, by the end, Steve is trying to hunt Tony down and kill him, so you could argue that he's not really behaving much like himself there, and neither is Tony.)

Anyway. When you think about it, what Steve wants and what Tony wants, in both scenarios, is pretty much the same thing. They have the same values and the same goals; it's just that the paths they're willing to take are different. But when it comes down to it, they both actually want the exact same thing. Like they do most of the time. They both want to save the world. Except now they're fighting about how to get what they want. The fights are about the details. At least in 616.

We can contrast 616 Civil War with MCU Civil War. I have actually only watched CACW once, so this is going to be fun and possibly inaccurate. The 616 SHRA and the MCU Accords are, very broadly speaking, about the same general topic: government oversight of superheroes. In the MCU, after the disaster in Lagos, the UN decides that they can't just have the Avengers running around wherever they want, exploding things and getting people killed. Tony agrees with the need for UN oversight. Steve does not; he feels that the Avengers should be able to go wherever they need to go without getting caught up in red tape. Here in the MCU, Steve and Tony not only disagree on what the right thing to do is, they disagree on what the right outcome should be, and the reasons for that. Steve wants things the way they were. Tony would be okay with some amount of oversight. They both have different visions of the way the Avengers would look and operate, because they value different things; Steve wants autonomy and Tony wants accountability. The fight isn't just about the details. The fight is about everything.

This isn't the case in 616 Civil War. No one is fighting for (or against) "I, a superhero, should be able to go wherever I want for superhero reasons." UN oversight is one of those things that all the Avengers, including Steve, have agreed about for years; there are panels of Steve asking to get UN clearance before the Avengers zip off to Russia to save Tony. What happens in 616 is that an inexperienced superhero team gets into a fight they can't control, destroying a school in Stamford, CT, with massive casualties. The SHRA is a US bill saying that all American superhumans (which is probably thousands of people) should register with the government, receive training if they want to be heroes, and provide the government with their real names.

Both Steve and Tony are opposed to this, before Stamford. Then, when Stamford happens, Tony realizes the SHRA is happening no matter what and decides to support it. Even with the SHRA in effect, both Steve and Tony think there should be superhuman oversight; Steve just thinks it should be the teams training people up, the same way as they've always done. They don't even disagree about that; Tony also thinks they should be in charge of oversight, but he means himself (and Steve if Steve would ever join him). The people training superheroes would in fact still be them, both of them, no matter which side wins the war. Neither of them trust the government to handle Registration well. Steve's answer is to object to the very idea of Registration and to stay away from the government, and Tony's answer is to get in there and keep the superhero database in his own head so that Gyrich won't get the list of names and start sending Sentinels after everyone.

So they both massively distrust the government's presumed right and/or ability to safely do this, and want to protect superheroes from government oversight as much as possible. That's basically the same stance. Steve just thinks no one should get anywhere near the government, and Tony thinks if he gets in there he can make it less bad. He can be the guy doing the oversight. People who don't register might get arrested but at least they won't be killed by Sentinels, because he can stop that from happening. Steve isn't willing to imprison his friends at all, probably because he doesn't believe Tony when Tony says the only other option is death (i.e., they can't go back to the way things were -- although of course that's eventually what ends up happening, albeit long after Civil War is over). He probably thinks there's a secret third option, because for him there usually is. But what they basically want is the same thing. Tony's just willing to go a little farther than Steve is to get there.

Sure, Tony's plans aren't perfect. But he does have them. Sometimes they're really lousy, because sometimes there is no good solution. I acknowledge that he does a lot of things in Civil War that are actually pretty rotten. I am saying this as a fan of Tony. He does some bad things. He starts a war with Atlantis. He manipulates Peter Parker into unmasking, which has terrible consequences. He builds a prison. He imprisons a lot of his friends. But none of these things involve the government massacring superhumans. The one really, really bad future he's afraid of doesn't happen. (And we know, thanks to that one What If issue, that that's exactly what would happen if he weren't running Registration.) Other bad things happen, yes. But not that, which is the worst.

Steve doesn't want anything bad to happen. Steve just wants the good solutions, with no moral or ethical compromise on his part. and he usually gets them eventually by narrative fiat. Sometimes he has to die first -- which is, of course, what happens in Civil War -- but, eh, whatever, it's comics. That's not really a major drawback for superheroes. And eventually he gets what he wants, because comics return to the status quo. Everything goes back to the way it was.

It's the same thing with the incursions. Neither Steve nor Tony want their Earth to be destroyed, obviously, but Tony is willing to build bombs to destroy the other Earths in case they can't find any other solution. Steve says he thinks there will be another way. And neither of them want to use the bombs! Tony doesn't want to use them at all! The Illuminati don't actually find themselves in a situation where they have to decide whether to bomb a populated Earth until the Great Society incursion, and Tony refuses to be the one to do it. After Namor does it, Tony is distraught and says he thought they'd find another way -- which is the exact same thing Steve said to him except nobody kicked Tony off the Illuminati for saying it. They both have the same attitude. They want the same outcome. They don't want to use the bombs. It's just that Tony's willing to build them. They're pretty much on the same side here about everything (including the desire to not bomb other planets) except the lengths to which Tony is willing to go to have a backup plan. Just like Civil War.

I suppose I would say that, overall, comparing Steve and Tony's relative ethics seems hard to do in a way that is fair to both of them because Steve is so often given the ability to stick to his beliefs in a way that Tony isn't. "What does Steve do when he actually can't do the right thing" is one of those questions that doesn't seem to get explored all that much, except possibly at the end of Hickman's Avengers run, in which everything was going to hell anyway, and it wasn't like he got to be in Secret Wars to try to fix it. He does also tend to quit being Captain America when he doesn't like the government, although I think in that case that's more that doing the right thing at that time is Not Being Captain America.

(Secret Avengers is also a pretty good look at a Steve who has to do bad things and really, really doesn't like the things he's doing. He doesn't handle compromising his own values all that well. I think that would be a whole other essay.)

But anyway, yeah -- I think 616 Steve and Tony are on the same side when they fight, more than you might think they are given how many panels we have of them dramatically punching each other. Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and essentially, a lot of their fights are because Steve disagrees with Tony's means -- but he is very often 100% on board with Tony's actual motives, which I think is a fact that often gets lost when we start talking about their conflicts, because at that point we… want to talk about their conflicts. But I think they really do agree with each other a lot, which is what makes their conflicts so interesting and painful.

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