Grrl Power #1051 – Crime and monologuing
And just when some of you started coming around on Deus. Of course, some of you might like him more now as well.
BTW the conversation in the post beneath the previous comic was totally canon.
I started off this post with some thoughts on the death penalty in general, but there’s just no way to talk about that without it turning into a political shitstorm. I’ll just say that while I think some crimes completely deserve it, I’m personally against it because the legal system in the US is incredibly, incredibly flawed. People* are lazy, biased and racist, and our legal system does very little to mitigate that. The number of convictions being overturned due to DNA evidence that they didn’t have the tech to test for a few decades ago is really embarrassing, and should tell you that we haven’t figured this shit out yet. I mean, honestly, if I had to give aliens a tour of the US and they started asking questions about our legal system, I would be really embarrassed to describe the current state of it.
As far as the legal system in Galytn goes, citizens are in pretty good shape. The entire legal system is free, because as soon as it’s not free, IMO, it stops being about justice and becomes hugely dependent on who has more money. There’s no death penalty for Galytn citizens except for extreme circumstances, like war criminals, but at the moment, if you’re caught doing some big no-no’s and you’re not a citizen? For instance if you’re a mercenary hired by a foreign power to blow up hospitals or something, welllllll… Then you get to see Vale, and she’s been armed with long winded speeches about why you’ve been a naughty boy.
*”Some to most,” depending on how cynical** you are.
**And/or realistic.
I recommended “The Vixen War Bride” a few weeks back, and the fourqual is out. The, uh… 4th book. Repatriation. I follow the author on Amazon, but Amazon has yet to fire off an email informing me of the fact, even though it’s been out for several weeks now. But it’s been a long time since Amazon was thirsty, so it’s not really reasonable to expect them to care about being good at what they do. But I digress. Anyway, the book is good, go get it.
The May Vote Incentive is up! This month it’s Warsyl, from Tamer: Enhancer 2! I’d say “spoilers,” but the book has been available for 5 months now. Anyway, this pic doesn’t have a zillion outfit variations, partially because her armor took longer to draw than I thought it would, but mostly because she just has an armored form, and an unarmored form. The latter being available over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Scary, Cthulu-esque mercenary bodyguard has hello kitty on her phone.
I thought it was kinda fitting, but she likes what she likes.
there’s evidence that she likes Teen Titans Go. I suspect she is trying to reach lethal levels of cute. One more way to kill.
Teen Titans GO?! She truly IS an eldritch abomination!
and now I totally want to see a Chibi Vale
She’d be deadlier and more dangerous. In my experience the cuter and more harmless someone seems the more likely they’ll slip a knife between your ribs.
exactly why! *evil chipmunk-esque laughter*
Given her human form is a shell, she COULD make one Chibi. Theoretically..
just….Google Hello Cthulu, will you?
OMG, it’s a thing … and it’s got merch. Ooh nice shirt … ungh … must … buy … tees.
The power of Lovecraft compels me.
Of course, she’ll tell Deus that she READ the speech.
She just won’t mention that she only read it with her eyes, she didn’t read it out loud to her captives.
Seriously, though. Monologuing? That’s a good way to let your captives escape while you’re distracted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8qTjTpV1Fg
And that’s why Vale’s only reading it with her eyes while Cthillia stands guard with the means of execution ready for action.
But honestly, the best way to implement what Deus *wanted* would be to have the phone set to do text to speech with a voice sufficiently similar to… whomever Deus really wanted to be reading it. That way, the monologuing gets done by something not integral to having caught the captives and keeping them captive.
At least it looks like there’s no death trap. It’s just Cthillia recharging the epimorph, and I assume that also happens if someone attempts to escape prematurely. So really, why *not* try to escape? It may not save your life, but at least it saves you from the lecture.
I’d guess that means they’ve found less than 198 individuals to exact capital punishment on before this. (I mean, Cthillia’s obviously planning on using it as soon as she has it charged up, and it’s stupid not to charge it again after that, assuming one doesn’t object to the charging cost. We’ve not really seen her here, so I can’t say whether this is before or after the first 99, but I’m guessing based on what we do see that it’s *probably* after the first 99.) That either seems like a surprisingly low number, given where they are, or they’re being very selective and only going after those they catch in the act and were clearly not being pressured into going along with it by the others in the group.
While we’ve only seen Sciona and Cthillia that have expressed a desire to use it, I’m positive there’s no shortage of people off-screen who have both the desire to do so and the means to attract Deus’ attention. As Deus is also nothing if not pragmatic, I’m positive that he would have no issue “renting” the services of the Epimorph to interested parties, so there’s no reason not to just use it on everyone he wants removed in this fashion.
Also, the Epimorph requires 99 lives to recharge, but nothing in the text says that they need to be *sapient* lives. Take it down to a slaughterhouse and use it instead of a boltgun to kill the cows; problem solved.
magic usually has some point value to life programmed in. But be murky with the terms and like a badly programmed bit of software you can get some unexpected results.
for instance if it just says something alive being killed by it, then they could be smashing bugs with it,
-I would say cutting up grass, but even in magic “alive” in relation to plants is difficult to determine.
Assuming there is some life energy requirement to gather and not just a point system for number of kills;
So maybe not sapient life, but worth checking out using it on animals the size of humans and see if it works there.
I think he put all that in just to mess with her.
I agree Tjk, Deus would see it as a challenge and light entertainment to do so
I personally think he puts it in to build support for his later conquests.
He started off with genocidal maniacs, and now he’s onto religious fanatics. He’s slowly working his way up the international social ladder of “people okay to kill”. Next will be Middle-Eastern Muslims. Then Communists and South Americans. Then EU and US will look up and go, “Wait… what?” at the Gatlyn Empire that controls 3/4ths of the globe.
Not if you break each ones left knee and right sholder (they wont be able to help each other that way)
It was clear what he was from the beginning. It’s also clear that what we see is only the beginning of the evil
Apparently Deus is someone who is not friendly to mercenaries-turned-rapists.
Truly evil. By which I mean the mercenaries-turned-rapists, not Deus.
Yeah the very idea of arguing concessions, psychological warfare and the like and history…makes me feel ill. So not playing devil’s advocate beyond we should really have a trial at least…but if you catch your own soldiers and mercenaries raping the soldiers, civilians, prisoners and so on of the places you are invading, and your own of course, well regardless of if your motivation is keeping face with the population or genuine morality, nothing incites resistance against your empire than the enforcers and local politicians for that matter that the people most often interact with and thus are seen as the face and standard of the empire, being complete sociopathic asshats. So if caught in the act then by all means remove them. This also goes back to the test of a man’s character by giving them power, corrupt law enforcement, soldiers, mercenaries, and politicians who oversee these local laws.
Or missonaries aparently
I very much don’t think they are missionaries.
Apparently one of them IS a missionary so I’m wrong. And this is wildly problematic and discouraging.
Agreed. Mercenaries-turned-rapists I can understand. (Even then I would very much prefer a public trial and public execution, but… I can understand.) But missionaries? No. Just, no.
What about Missionaries-turned-rapists? Because there’s no lack of examples to support that as a plausible concern here. Or Peacekeepers-turned-rapists. Or priests-turned-rapists. etc.
Predators of all stripes go where they have access to prey.
Anything-turned-rapists I could understand. Missionaries that are just missionaries I cannot, regardless of what they preach.
Unless they preach raping people by demonstration.
there is a long history of missionaries dehumanizing people, and even preaching that it is okay to abuse, enslave, and otherwise look down upon anyone that doesn’t adopt their doctrine; including demonizing others with speeches about anyone that refuses to convert is evil, serving satan, and needs purged from the society. spreading hate, intolerance, and encouraging violence in all forms against their fellow humans for not converting to their faith.
some missionaries like mercenaries take advantage of being so far away from home and their nation’s laws to go extreme; and some volunteer to be missionaries just for this reason; to be away from the “stifling woke culture” so they can spread their own version of “what is right” and feel accomplished for it, to lift themselves up as “making a change somewhere in the world”. Basically they’d love to be a cult leader and this is their opportunity. their delusional self entitlement as the voice of God spurring them to encourage even if keeping their own hands clean so to speak, violence against all those they consider evil that they could never get away with else where.
I can see the argument that you’re trying to make, and it might be a good argument if it were based on the things you’re mentioning, like ‘preaching for other people to kill the wrongthinkers’ because that would be more like an action than just speech (incitement to commit imminent harm is not considered free speech) but from DaveB’s description, it’s just him preaching that wearing condoms is evil and that’s all. Which is wrong but it’s not something that’s creating imminent harm on par with ‘you, my follower, take this bomb and go blow up that hospital over there.’
The former ‘Condoms are evil, don’t use them.’ is speech, which can be combatted by other speech if you truly want their message opposed.
The latter ‘Loyal follower, go kill that person standing there, giving out condoms, for giving out condoms is evil’ is incitement to commit an imminent criminal action.
So….. if the missionary was doing THAT… preaching ‘Condoms are evil, and I stand here in front of this EVIL hospital where they are giving condoms to girls to corrupt their souls and make them engage in fornication. Burn this place to the ground!’ and then people did, based on being his loyal followers, I’d see more of an argument, akin go a mafia don ordering a hit on a witness that’s testifying against him.
But as described so far from DaveB’s explanation, that doesnt seem to be what happened. If it is, I’d change my opinion and think it’s justified and more in line with Deus’s past actions. As it currently stands, I’m not convinced of that unless there was further elaboration from DaveB on that, or if more info comes out in the comic to show that.
Ah, I see. I missed that there was an earlier comment from DaveB about the circumstances of the Missionary. It would appear that Deus is being written as a somewhat extreme Consequentialist.
While I generally agree with the idea that speech shouldn’t be punishable by death, I find that my stance waivers when considering certain examples: Thomas Midgley Jr., anyone who spread any of various AIDS virgin cleansing myths, SWATters like Tyler Burris …
“Thomas Midgley Jr., anyone who spread any of various AIDS virgin cleansing myths, SWATters like Tyler Burris …”
I think Tyler Burris isnt quite the same, because that’s not JUST speech. That’s a direct action that is more than just speech, just like a mafia boss ordering a hit on a person is not ‘speech’ because there’s also a direct action connected to that speech, and there’s a proximate cause in the harm that results.
But just preaching that condoms are evil on its own? That’s just an opinion. A dumb opinion, but an opinion. And one that can be combatted with education, which Deus has already given Galytn in the way of infrastructure, which includes schools and training. It’s not worthy of death.
Speech has consequences. That’s… often the point of speaking, because you want to affect other people’s behavior. If you take an action that you know will harm others, you should be held responsible for those consequences. It doesn’t matter that it’s “just speech”, if you have reason to believe other people will act on it.
“Speech has consequences. That’s… often the point of speaking, because you want to affect other people’s behavior.”
Speech has consequences, yes. But speech should be allowed without fear of death from that speech. The only thing a person should fear from speech is someone else’s speech making their own speech look misinformed or stupid. Not that they are going to die as a result of it.
If you (not you in particular Torabi, just a generalized ‘you’) are so scared of another person ‘just speaking’ that you have to kill them, then maybe what they’re saying has validity, if you’re incapable of combatting it in the arena of ideas instead?
And if you think other people will act on it, there are a few reasons WHY someone else will act on that speech:
1) The speaker has a point.
2) The person being spoken to has no one telling him or her anything different.
There is a difference between speech and ‘incitement to commit an imminent violent act’ in the law btw. The only acceptable limits on free speech are:
1) Incitement to commit an imminent unlawful act
2) Defamation
3) Fraud
4) “Fighting words” – speech that is likely to incite immediate violence or retaliation by the recipients of the words
5) Threats that are more than mere puffery, usually backed up by the imminent attempt to carry out that threat.
6) Obscenity. Although the definition of obscenity has been massively reduced since this definition first was written because of the inherent flaws in saying that ‘obscenity is not free speech’ due to the subjective nature of ‘what is obscene.’ Originally obscenity was defined as ‘a thing which is prurient in nature, completely devoid of any scientific, political, or social value, AND violates the local community standards.’ As a result, pretty much the only thing still considered to be obscenity would be child pornography.
I cannot fathom any situation in which preaching the evils of condoms by itself would result in any sort of imminent unlawful acts (incitement), immediate violence intentionally based on those words, etc. Unless it’s backed up with something more that we have not seen in the comic so far.
Trust me, I’d love to have a reason to defend Deus so if something like that becomes apparent that the missionary did more than just preach about what he considers evil, then I would obviously defend Deus’s actions via Vale and Cthilla. :)
As it currently stands, those reasons do not seem to be shown in the comic OR by DaveB’s posts, so I can’t use them as a defense.
Maybe I’ve just got a better idea of what DaveB is talking about, from spending too much time outside the US. There’s some very evil people that put forth their evil with a dose of “these are just my thoughts” sprinkled on top, but intend fully to enforce those “ideas” with violence.
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-020-00942-7
https://geh.ucsd.edu/understanding-women-and-girls-experiences-of-reproductive-coercion/
That’s probably the gentle introduction to the subject. I doubt you want the rough one.
Truth has no inherent power over people. It doesn’t necessarily make an argument more persuasive. People will believe lies that benefit them over truth that doesn’t. Logic is only effective on people who are conditioned to accept it.
Meh. In nation building there are always a few, or many, broken eggs before the omelet is completed. Galytn is new enough that it’s pretty much inevitable for neighboring nations and other nosy types to try to disrupt it and keep it unstable.
If I were Deus, and despite his name, I’d be especially vigilant and unforgiving against those mercenaries-turned-rapists and also anyone peddling the lie that is religion. Both are especially vile and worthy of having harsh lessons applied vigorously.
Vale and Cthillia would be kept very busy.
He read the evil overlord list it seems…also goddamnnit he delegated his monologue!
At least Vale is sensible enough not to do it.
Honestly? If you are using evil to fight evil, then you better have some contingency speeches
Plus you never know who is recording; someone seeing that even his death squad have a moral streak would be amazing for local diplomacy (doubly so because you’re fighting factions, not true organized militaries, so the ‘we kill bad people and offer jobs to usefulpeople’ argument has a lot of potential to get both willing and conscripted soldiers to swap to your side)
I would guess that *this* is the main reason for the whole speech. But a recording of Deus giving the speech, so that Vale and Cthillia just needed to wait for it to finish, would’ve probably had more likelihood of actually getting the full speech. I mean, assuming it’s delivered in some way that doesn’t provide any estimate for the length of the speech still remaining.
Yeah, I realize it would probably just get *more* of the speech, rather than all of it, because even if it was just an MP3 on a device that didn’t show the length of each piece, Vale and Cthillia both have a certain amount of patience and when one of those runs out of patience for the speech, the epimorph feeds.
That argument is made hollow by the fact that nothing is purely good.
To be fair, you just stated the primary reason Canada got rid of Capital punishment… Reading some of the old debates for and against was both enlightening, and terrifying.
The people should never give the state the right to kill the people.
Yeah. They should just do like Canada does, and constantly let them out again so they can re-victimize ppl and kill them again. And then give them a bulk-rate discount on their crimes and give them the same sentence they’d get for 5- crimes as they would for one. And call things a ‘life sentence’ but let them out in 25 years, cause that’s ‘life’ in Canada. Let them rack up a record of terror on their victims a mile long and still pat them on the bum when their sentence is up and let them out into the public. Again.
Cause letting scum re-victimize ppl repeatedly is JuStIcE.
To they point they let serial rapists, of even children, out into the public, with an oRdEr to stay away from their preferred victims. And a warning to the public that this trash, that should be dead, is walking among them AGAIN, because jUsTiCe.
so how many innocents are you happy to kill to exact revenge on some of the guilty?
because last i checked at least 25% of people executed in the US have later been found innocent
Really? You must have checked a year ago instead of this year. Last I checked it was 80%! No wait, 90% actually innocent later! I remember Dave made a post about 90%
[quote]I mean, honestly, if I had to give aliens a tour of the US and they started asking questions about our legal system, I would be really embarrassed to describe the current state of it.[/quote]
They HAVE a legal system there?
…
Honestly, from across the pond all we can see is the police killing innocents without trials; nobody persecuting police for those crimes; teenage psychopaths running amok and being rewarded with their own TV show after found not guilty… and meanwhile powerful people were found rebelling against the government without any legal ramifications; and they even invent new “crimes” like teaching students or not wanting to be pregnant. Rampant barbarism all around.
Excuuuse me for saying that is not a legal system I would trust. (Not that I would want horrible dictators like Putin or Deus in power, either.)
Of course from across the pond that’s all you see. The countless times police give a polite warning and let a person go on with their day don’t make the local news, much less national or international news. You hear about it every day when a police officer shoots and kills somoene, but when you break down the statistics it changes the entire picture very rapidly.
To begin with, there are on average about 1k deaths per year by police. In a population of 300+ million people in this nation and 800 thousand police officers. The most recent statistic I can find for number of arrests in total was in 2019 which had just over 10 million arrests made in that year.
Consider the scope of all of these numbers. Statistically, 0.125% of police officers kill people each year. .01% of arrests result in a non-officer death, and the percentage of the population killed by police per year is so small, that my computer’s calculator automatically converts the number into an exponential notation because it can’t display a decimal with that many zeroes.
Each death is a tragedy, of course, and we should never stop striving to make improvements, but the numbers do not lie. Deaths by police are a statistical anomaly not the norm here. And sure, someplace like the UK might have fewer deaths per year by police, only 2. Which sounds like the UK’s system is amazing until you realize one other major difference between the US and many other countries.
Our criminals are WAY more dangerous here. If you look at how many police officers die in the UK, they didn’t even have any deaths in 2021. And in 2020 only one officer in the UK was killed in the line of duty. Meanwhile over here in the US 472 officers were killed in 2021 and 373 killed in 2020. In fact, since anti-cop propaganda claiming police are legalized murderers, police deaths have been skyrocketting. It was hovering randomly between 150-250 deaths per year before the last couple years have flown off the charts.
Yet, while easily twice as many police are being killed now than before, people are not being killed BY police at any significantly higher rate than before. Which means, our police are not responding to the increased aggression against them with aggression in kind, they are still trying to do their best not to kill anyone.
Sometimes, you have to turn off the propaganda networks and actually look at the facts.
I ironically love how you provide ALL KINDS of context for why cops murdering innocent citizens isn’t really a big deal, but then throw out this statistic while conveniently neglecting to mention the very real context that being a pizza delivery person is more dangerous in the US than being a police officer.
In the list of the top 25 most dangerous jobs in the US, being a cop is 22nd.
And in that list of the 25 most dangerous jobs, being a cop is the only profession which deliberately murders unarmed people. And why do they do this? From all evidence it appears that the reason is because despite being equipped with a firearm they are also apparently quite easily made so afraid by some unarmed individual that murdering them is their only recourse in order to keep themselves feeling safe.
And no other profession, on that list or off it, has SCOTUS precedents which provide them with qualified immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit while on the job.
Sometimes, you have to turn off the propaganda networks and actually look at the facts.
Also, “Cop deaths in line of duty” for the last few years have included COVID deaths. And by “included”, I mean, “Of the 472 active duty deaths of officers in 2021, 301 came from COVID believed to be contracted while on the job.” Do I need to point out that police unions have been staunchly anti-mask- and anti-vaccine-mandate, and have organized protests and walkouts over such policies?
If you are in a job that constantly exposes you to the general public, and you refuse masks and vaccines for non-medical reasons, your death shouldn’t be ruled an active duty death; it should be ruled suicide by stupidity.
SOURCE: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072411820/law-enforcement-deaths-2021-covid
how many of those COvid deaths were actually Covid, and not signed off as “It’s covid, the bullet hole is irrelevant…”? Because we had a BUNCH of that actually admitted to in 2021-every death wehre there was a positive test result became Covid, even if it was congestive heart failure, liver failure, or automobile accident. “Why no, Nurse, it wasn’t the sucking chest wound, it was a trace of cold virus in his nose that did him in-the NIH doesn’t pay for the sucking chest wound, but they’ll give us forty grand for our budget for Covid Deaths!”
Please provide sourcing for the claim that NIH paid for COVID cause of deaths even when it was obvious that, to use your example, a gunshot would was the actual cause of death.
On the flip side of your baseless conspiracy theory, red counties did lower the actual COVID ascribed death toll by refusing to acknowledge deaths caused by COVID.
“In Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, coroner Wavis Jordan said his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” Jordan does not investigate deaths himself. He requires families to provide proof of a positive coronavirus test before including it on a death certificate.
In 2021, he hasn’t pronounced a single person dead from COVID-19 in the 80,000-person county.”
Comparing between professions is an apples to oranges comparison. Comparing police in one nation to another nation is apples to apples. A pizza delivery driver drives all over the place with a bit sign on their car that says “I have plenty of food on me, and probably cash too”. As well, they are incentivized to drive recklessly as faster delivery times usually mean better tips.
I would say it’s a safe bet though that far far fewer pizza delivery drivers get murdered at a much lower rate in the UK than in the US. Because again, the UK’s criminals are not nearly as lethal as the US’s criminals.
I notice as well that you confuse correlation and causation. You suggest that police are low on the list of most dangerous jobs, and conclude that they don’t need protection. But likely the opposite is true; they place relatively low on the *most dangerous jobs* list BECAUSE they can defend themselves.
I did not suggest that police are low on the list of the most dangerous jobs. I provided a factual list of the most dangerous jobs and pointed out that cops are 22nd out of 25. That isn’t a suggestion, it is a statement of fact.
I also did not conclude that cops do not need protection. I didn’t say anything that could even be confused as being close to that conclusion.
You either have a major issue with reading comprehension, or you are making a miserable attempt to straw man me.
I do not accept your assertion that by providing a list of the top 25 most dangerous jobs in the US that I am making an apples to oranges comparison. The ‘fruit’ here is danger. And the danger being measured is the exact same for each job: Death while on the job, while performing in that job in the United States. Apples to apples.
No, that is an apples to oranges comparison, because you’re dragging in the social dynamics of every other nation you include in your comparison. Their police per capita, their number of firearms armed citizens, their police training, their brutality or lack thereof towards the people they are policing, their legal system, their percentage of violent crimes, their ethnic breakdown, etc. etc. etc. So many differences make your comparison completely valueless. Your ‘fruit’ is not the same, because it is the danger of death on the job for cops in many different countries across the world. Apples to oranges.
It really doesn’t matter how many people the police kill, whether as an absolute number, or a percentage of the population, or a percentage of interactions. What matters, in terms of evaluating the police themselves, and not the society in which they operate, is how many of those killings are unjustified.
A high rate of death may reflect either a troubled society, high crime rate, or police misconduct. But police killing innocent, harmless, or subdued people undermines trust in the police. If people aren’t confident that the police will respect their rights, they are more likely to fight back, or attempt to kill the police, rather than take the risk of being killed themselves by cooperating with the police.
“Meanwhile over here in the US 472 officers were killed in 2021 and 373 killed in 2020. In fact, since anti-cop propaganda claiming police are legalized murderers, police deaths have been skyrocketting. It was hovering randomly between 150-250 deaths per year before the last couple years have flown off the charts. ”
This is extremely misleading: 338 of those deaths were due to COVID-19. They were killed by a virus not by an increase in violence against police.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-police-deaths-reach-record-high-in-2021-report-says/6393968.html
The problem there is the assumption that incarceration is rehabilitative on its own, or that “serving time” for a crime has any meaning. There are more options than “Capital punishment”, “Permanent incarceration”, and “Revolving door prison”.
Serving time does have some meaning actually. The meaning is ‘they offending criminal is not among the public while they are incarcerated’ – ie, protection of the public from the criminal. Also as a punishment in general (the adult version of telling a child to stand in the corner until they understand why what they did was bad and feel remorse).
Plus while incarceration is not rehabilitative on its own in a vacuum, incarceration of a prisoner is NOT in a vacuum (at least in most western nations). There are work and educational programs in prison specifically designed for rehabilitation of those who are being incarcerated.
Sure, but our recidivism rate is about 50% because we go out of our way to make former prisoners’ lives difficult once they are set loose. For one simple example, felons are required to tick the ‘yes, I committed a crime’ box, which makes it nearly impossible for them to get a decent job.
It’s not just their treatment and options after they get out. The US has a staggeringly high per capita incarceration rate. Which translates into massive overcrowding and a lower guard-per-inmate ratio as well as staff-per-prisoner. The staff which could be helping prisoners serve their time in a way that translates into greater opportunities once they serve their sentence.
Which translates into a prison experience which is far more likely to take a petty criminal and convert them into a lifelong criminal.
I have no personal experience with life in prison, thank the nonexistent gods, but I had two high school friends who were incarcerated for serious crimes right after we all graduated. One died in prison, shanked to death. The other came out a raging racist who was constantly looking to make his issues someone else’s fault. He had been trained to hate minorities and was also trained to ‘work the system’ in any way he could. Which meant that despite earning a BS in Chemical Engineering while in prison he was constantly in disputes with his employers, unions, and governments over this and that petty violation of ‘his rights.’ He had lawsuits going 3 or more at a time. He had every tool at his disposal to make a success out of his life despite his one massive mistake, but he got himself bogged down in these frivolous disputes instead of working towards a better future for himself.
He ended up dying of a heart attack while living in his parents home as a 40+ year old man due to broken health that he at least partially inflicted on himself via stunts such as hunger strikes in the pursuit of one of his lawsuits, a heavy smoking habit, and very likely an addiction to prescription pain killers.
Pander, you’re clearly not talking about the US. Here, only about 25% of the prisons offer college-level educational programs, and less than half offer vocational training. A lot DO use prison populations as cheap labor sources for corporations with sufficient clout to get the contracts, but generally, chain gangs have very little use as rehabilitation efforts.
Fact is, the US has been largely ignoring rehabilitation as a goal since the inception of the nation. Reformers who try to introduce such efforts are decried for wasting taxpayer money on bleeding-heart programs.
Oh, and a minor correction to A Guy’s note about recidivism; it’s actually closer to 75% of first-time felons getting re-incarcerated within 5 years.
SOURCE for the statistics: http://uchicagogate.com/articles/2020/3/24/updating-prison-system-rehabilitation-reform/
“Pander, you’re clearly not talking about the US. Here, only about 25% of the prisons offer college-level educational programs, and less than half offer vocational training.”
I checked the article from which you got your numbers and it seems a bit sparse on actual sources of the statistics. Plus apparently the author of the article did not seem to use some the statistics she cited, since when I check one of those statistics from the Vera Institute of Justice and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, the actual number of prisoners who are eligible for enrolling in a college prison program is 64%, not 25%. ( https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/01/16/report-shows-benefit-prison-education ) So i’m a little confused on the numbers the initial article, which was apparently written by a third year chemistry and political science major. Not that that would dismiss the validity of the article. I’m just not willing to put complete weight on it, given it seems to be heavily weighted on opinion rather than stats.
In any case, I agree that rehabilitation is not high on the list of reasons that prisons are funded, but they still are available at a good number of prisons if we take into account the 64% number (I’m assuming that the highest security prisons are less likely to have these rehabilitative programs at all, and the prisoners cannot be forced into these programs if they do qualify. Also, not all rehabilitative programs are about college educations while in prison. I’m more talking about court-mandated psychological counselling, work release programs, etc, in addition to the programs you mentioned.
“Fact is, the US has been largely ignoring rehabilitation as a goal since the inception of the nation. Reformers who try to introduce such efforts are decried for wasting taxpayer money on bleeding-heart programs.”
I agree that rehabilitation is typically viewed as the least important of the functions of prisons by the public, which sometimes can be a problem since not focusing on rehabilitation does increase the chances of recidivism.
“Oh, and a minor correction to A Guy’s note about recidivism; it’s actually closer to 75% of first-time felons getting re-incarcerated within 5 years.”
It’s a little more complicated than that, since there are different types of crimes, with different levels of recidivism for each type of crime. So both of you could be correct and are just looking at different statistics for different data sets of prisoners.
One question that comes up with a free legal system, how do you deal with malicious litigators?
The kind that’d love to have a professional lawyer as their full-time therapist and person to rant about everyone around them to? Who determines when they’re no longer entitled to more of the lawyer’s time?
Also, where do you get the enormous quantity of lawyers and police to enforce all this?
Me? I wouldn’t have any way to handle it, I’m not that clever.
Deus, on the other hand, would probably use his super power to identify the first malicious litigator, find the proof that they were a malicious litigator needed to convince everyone, show them, and end said malicious litigator in a very spectacular fashion. Then announce amnesty for all other malicious litigation that had been completed, while insisting that any malicious litigation in process needed to cease *immediately*.
The rest of the malicious litigators (none of whom would’ve actually stopped their malicious litigation) would then be summarily executed out of the public eye. Over time, a few people would get the gumption to try malicious litigation each year, but they just sort of disappear, and the reports that they vanished because they tried prosecuting cases they knew were wrong would keep that number low.
Of course, this solution hinges on Deus being infallible at this and having mercenaries or soldiers who can take out the toughest malicious litigators. Though, to be fair, I’m not sure that any malicious litigator who was actually tough enough to even attempt to go toe to toe with Vale would ever exist. I mean, if they had the kind of super powers they’d need to be that tough, why would they bother with litigation?
For malicious and frivolous litigators, especially repeat offenses, you can fine them or ban them from filing without jumping through certain hoops. Say, they get one or two freebies/passes, then have to pay fines and fees if they keep it up, when people who use the system properly get to keep using it for free. And if they could provide a spoken/written statement why they genuinely believed it was a valid case, they might get away with it.
For an example, in the US there’s (supposed to be) a way for the poor and otherwise financially strapped people to file cases in the courts for free. The idea is to keep legal redress within the reach of everyone. (Because many humans suck, far too often it doesn’t work out in practice.)
I read a case from back in the late 1980s where a woman filed eighty-three frivolous lawsuits over less than three years, using the file for free system in her jurisdiction every time. Every. single. case. was tossed at the first hearing.
Finally, the court system tired of it, and hauled her in on abusing the free filing. The judge handed down that she either had to get a psychiatric screening proving she was sane and competent, or pay the damn fee every time she filed. (I file this under nice job breaking it, since this woman is the kind of person who ruins rights and privileges for everyone else.)
From what I’ve seen of Deus, the screening would be free under his health care system. So no excuse.
As for enforcement, I suspect that’s one reason Deus is so interested in supers. Mr. Strong Guy we say earlier is probably worth a few standard human cops in his own right. Although he still needs a team backing him. (Ben on Ben 10 did, and he could handle literally anything once he got Master Control.)
Dealing with malicious litigators is easy once you’ve caught a lawyer breaking the law. It is now that lawyer’s job to litigate for the known mass litigators.
Or on a more reasonable note, there’s the option of contempt of court, and/or a yearly limit on the allowed frequency.
I see the issue. In a system where both sides must pay for their own legal representation, a penalty for a frivolous lawsuit can be to pay the legal fees of the person you frivolously sued. But if there are no legal fees, that penalty is moot.
Perhaps a straight up fee or fine, proportional to the wealth of the person who was found to have been frivolously suing, might be an answer. The proportional penalty is so that a wealthy person cannot treat the expense as a trivial price for inconveniencing another with their lawsuits.
“One question that comes up with a free legal system, how do you deal with malicious litigators?”
Certification requirements and making sure that if they do not abide by rules of ethics, they can lose that certification which would prevent them from being able to legally practice law. Also malicious litigators can be sued. Some nations also have a ‘loser pays’ system in place if you’re talking about frivolous lawsuits. Which is something the US REALLY should implement as well.
“Who determines when they’re no longer entitled to more of the lawyer’s time?”
In most circumstances, a lawyer is under no obligation to take on a client, although once they DO take the client on, they have a lot of ethical duties to zealously advocate for that client. If you’re asking who determines they are no longer entitled to more of the lawyer’s time? Generally the answer is ‘the lawyer.’ Or if there’s a loser pays system in place to defend against frivolous lawsuits, then the answer can also be ‘their checking account.’
“Also, where do you get the enormous quantity of lawyers and police to enforce all this?”
Probably the same way that free legal services are provided in the US. By a combination of government-hired attorneys (prosecutors, public defenders, JAG officers I suppose fit that definition I suppose, etc) and compelling the private sector attorneys to donate a portion of their time for pro bono work, as a condition of their bar certification each year.
Also, “the same place where you’re getting all those left-handed pitchers!“
I recall being raised on the notion that our legal system incorporated the doctrine that it was better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent to be wrongly punished. Apparently, that’s not the practice as I repeatedly hear about people who’ve been convicted but later found innocent and are not IMMEDIATELY released. This remains unfathomable to me. There should be no legal technicality great enough to justify such situations. That they persist only scratches the surface of problems with the legal system in this country of ours.
Yeah, best I can tell it’s very much a matter of the courts dragging their feet because they refuse to admit that they screwed the pooch. Doubly so if the innocent getting convicted was due to the cops/prosecutor/judge being lazy, incompetent, racist, politically motivated or otherwise malicious rather than just honestly mistaken. They’re very much like the Catholic church that way, so desperate to maintain the appearance of justice/virtue/infallibility that they’d sacrifice innocents. Hell, IIRC there have been cases where the court outright argued that an innocent man should not be freed, compensated for having been wrongfully convicted or have his name cleared because doing so would harm confidence in the legal system…. You can’t make that [fecal matter] up!
Because confidence in the legal system is more important to stability than justice. Whether that’s a good tradeoff depends on whether you value stability more than justice.
Why would you have confidence in a legal system that does not produce justice?
I wouldn’t, and can’t fathom why other people might. But people have made that explicit argument.
The people who implement the system clearly don’t have the same concerns as the people who designed the system.
I suspect that the system never actually worked the way it was intended.
– People not interested in abusing the system are on average less interested participating in the system.
– Police officers risk their lives every day, signing up to do that job requires a lot of motivation. Sure, some people are motivated by a hero complex, but very few are just motivated by the amount of pay police get. The bulk of the difference is probably people who want the power the job provides.
– Identifying people who are actually *good* at judging people who are suspected of being involved in a crime is very hard. Our legal system completely handwaves this difficulty away, since we let nigh anyone be on a jury. But even if you do test people on their judgements before you give them the power to really serve as judges or jurors, you can’t really rule out that they were giving the answers they thought you wanted to hear, rather than how they really feel.
– Even absent prejudice, people are very prone to being vulnerable to bias and logical fallacies.
We don’t put suspected witches on trial anymore, but those trials happened early enough in they country’s history to suggest that at any point since the Constitution was first ratified in a state, we’ve had at least one court that was doing things very improperly.
To be clear, I’m not taking a stance either for or against witches. I’ve seen enough of the records of the witch trials to feel confident in asserting that the judges and juries involved in those trials were almost certainly also egregiously bad regarding their ordinary criminal trials.
got a little caveat to your list there – police officers dont risk their lives every day… thats a myth that has contributed to a lot of police violence in the US
when you look at the statistics, police officer is one of the safest jobs you can have… you want real dangerous risk your life stuff? try mining, construction or factory workers… or window cleaners for that matter – a lot of them work in really dangerous environments with far too few protections in place… and police doesnt even make the top 10 list
most of policework is fairly mundane – traffic stops, office work, noise complaints – and for the parts that actually are dangerous, they usually go in with overwhelming force and lots of protective equipment
You want to know why cops go in with overwhelming force and lots of protective equipment? Do ya? Do ya really wanta know?
IT’S BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING DANGEROUS AND THE CRIMINALS ARE ARMED AND WILLING TO KILL THE COPS AND ANYONE ELSE AROUND THEM!!!
I haven’t really started liking Deus, so this doesn’t change my opinion of him much. His plans seem awfully self-centered, and as a result short-sighted, but the fact that he apparently gets Maxima to tacitly accept the numerous violations of international law he’s committing by having her stop arguing and start sort-of-flirting with him seems to imply that, dramatically, he’s supposed to come off as being in the right.
It also irritates me that it seems like one of Maxima’s roles in the story at this point is to get angry at someone for something (including blatant criminal actions/violations of procedure/etc.), then have someone “smarter” talk her down. It doesn’t paint her in a good light.
Regarding Vale and stuff… I mean, whatever. If these guys were caught in the act of trying to blow up a hospital, they could just as easily have been shot right there. I’d expect a developing but still at the moment third-world country to have looseness in its legal code as things transition. It isn’t a surprise.
Deus is the smooth talking friendly figure to the public guy that Lex Luthor would have been if he didn’t hate Superman. and tried to work around him politely instead. Half of lex’s plans were to destroy clark after all. He was still evil to an extent.
Maxima is a military officer. She is absolutely NOT authorized to do a damn thing outside the US except *maybe* by express invitation of the nation she’s in at the time. Hell, as long as she remains military she’s not even allowed out of the country due to the Supers treaty that was referenced a while back. So of course she tacitly accepts various things because she doesnt have the authority to do otherwise. The best she can do is keep the conversation going to see what she can learn, and then brief the people who DO have the authority to order things to be done.
She can get angry, and she does, but she’s not allowed to act on it, BY LAW, and she has sufficient self control that she doesnt act on it.
You’ve got that mostly wrong.
Maxima is a military officer. That’s about all you got right.
This means that she is expressly forbidden by US federal law, regardless of any orders she may receive, from acting to enforce domestic policies on US soil. She could run down someone trespassing on a military base, but once they were off the base, off of federal property, she’d have to stop her pursuit and leave it to the local law enforcement who have jurisdiction. Chasing down people like Sciona all over the place, fighting with aliens in NY City, these things are all illegal for the US military.
This comic’s author has invented some reason why posse comitatus doesn’t apply to ARCHON, but it’s just bullshit. Were ARCHON real, it would not be a new military branch. It would be either a part of the FBI or it would be a new federal law enforcement organization similar to the FBI. A law enforcement organization, not a military organization.
Maxima is allowed to do whatever her orders tell her to do (within the bounds of legal orders) while on the soil of some other nation. No ‘express invitation’ from that nation is needed, no ‘maybe’ applies. Most nations the US invades do not invite us in or give us permission to do so, after all. Rest assured that her orders are not going to include doing anything that would piss off an allied nation. Again, she could apprehend a criminal who was on US soil within that nation (a base or an embassy). But just as in the US, if they passed out of US soil/jurisdiction she would have to let local law enforcement take over or risk a diplomatic incident.
You are forgetting the Comatose Possum
ARCHON is it’s own branch of the US Military, but acts similar to the National Guard or the Coast Guard
I don’t think that this is correct. Archon is specified as not subject to posse comitatus, and has “Internal Defense Against Extraordinary Threats” listed as its primary function in its Charter. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-147-flying-not-allowed-in-the-super-high-jump/
You can’t just ‘specify’ that you don’t need to follow the law…
And neither does a charter make an organization immune to the law.
ARCHON could not exist as a military unit. It would have to be a civilian organization.
I agree that “Archon was formed after the rules banning specifically-named branches from operating domestically” is dumb, you can’t just pick a different name and walk around legislation like that.
And yet the Coast Guard and National Guard both operate domestically in spite of being military organizations. And legislation forming a new military branch isn’t specifying “you don’t need to follow the law”, it’s literally a new law that makes new rules. Whether or not the act founding Archon is constitutional is a different question, and no doubt being highly debated (if not litigated) by the various states, lobbyists, etc. But given that they have a federal charter and it says they a) are military and b) can operate domestically, then they can do so.
The Posse Comitatus Act spells out the specific branches of the military that it covers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
Oh hey it was updated last year to specifically include the other ‘main’ branches (originally was just the Army, Air Force added 1956). Still doesn’t include National Guard or Coast Guar, and doesn’t even mention Archon so they must be good to go. :D
If we’re going to be REALLY nitpicky about applying the real world to the comic – the comic is still taking place around 2014(ish?). So the recent updates to the act still don’t apply here.
Did you say that Max can do whatever her orders tell her outside of the U.S. without authorization from the country she’s in? And then use military invasions as an example of the process in action? Wow. No, she has to take the other country into consideration.
If Britain allows a U.S. soldier onto its soil with the understanding that the soldier is pursuing a criminal, then the soldier can pursue that criminal. If a U.S. soldier pursues a criminal into Britain without permission, then apprehending that criminal could cause a diplomatic incident and would definitely cause some tension. Nobody would allow another nation to send soldiers in and allow them to act without regard for the host country’s sovereignty.
If Max has been sent with the express order to apprehend Deus and probably start a war, then yes she should arrest him. Otherwise she would be grossly over-stepping her duties by abducting a high-ranking official from a country that has been establishing peaceful relations with the U.S. on the grounds that he is invading other countries. Deus has clearly invited Max as a gesture of good faith. To abuse that invitation would make every other country in the world hesitate to allow U.S. soldiers into their borders. It would also cripple the relationship that the U.S. is trying to form with this new arms manufacturing nation which is clearly going to become a key player in space travel.
I think Maxima’s role in the story is to be the best at violence, and the point of the story being to explore reasons why being the best at violence won’t or shouldn’t always be the path to victory.
So many people come into the comments and say, more or less, “He’s the designated villain, she’s the designated hero, she should just punch his head off and be done with it!” But the comic, as much as it rides on superhero tropes, and genre-savvy characters, is an attempt to ask some serious questions about those tropes, to challenge them, and explore the moral implications. Maxima killing Deus just because he’s obviously a villain would be morally, ethically, and legally wrong. She is not the “Goddess of Ash”, no matter what Suzy may think, and without that self-restraint, the choice to follow the law, the whole world falls apart. Which is pretty much Deus’ point, that you’ve got to find some way to maintain order that doesn’t just rely on strength.
I still don’t consider Deus to be a villain, although I do have to admit that killing a missionary who’s only crime is preaching about the evils of condoms (assuming he didnt also like… blow up a hospital like in DaveB’s blurb) is the first example of an actually evil thing I’ve ever seen Deus involved in within the comic where it’s not able to be argued that it’s not evil. Killing a person who JUST spoke about an opinion is an evil act.
I’m very much hoping that’s not the entirety of what he did – that the whole ‘blowing up hospitals’ thing that DaveB mentioned in his blurb was involved, because then THAT I can see as being a death penalty-worthy action which would make Deus no longer guilty of an evil act.
Up until that point, everything Deus has ever done seems to have always been directed at truly evil or corrupt people who do actual bad things to others, and he always has tried to minimize the amount of deaths to the absolute minimum. This would run counter to that narrative if it’s just ‘he said things I don’t like.’ Especially when Deus has better alternatives within Galytn like the school system he has set up to provide a highly educated population, necessary for a strong middle class and upper middle class.
DaveB’s reasoning was based on something he read about catholic missionaries preaching at the height of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which could result in more people dying from AIDS theoretically, because there were no alternative education options. Which is NOT something that would be happening in Galytn in the first place, since there are not only ‘alternative education options’ – those education options would be the STANDARD for the nation. It hurts the entire characterization of Deus.
I can’t speak for Deus but within *certain* empires, missionaries like that would be subject to re-education and possible confinement for endangering public interests.
the rapists on the other hand would be swiftly executed *physically or mentally* as they have violated citizens and *prospective citizens* as well as inciting dissidence for the empire as they would be the public interaction face of the empire.
-enforcers should always be held to these laws. the all powerful overlord should instill a sense of fear in their magistrates (or obedience may be better) to enforce that their enforcers be seen as protectors and kind aids to the people, not brutes and monsters lording over them.
the kind cop, they are mu neighbor watching out for us. is the general vibe so to speak you want when the public looks at your guards, soldiers and officers. and mercenaries should be seen as these heroes chosen by the leaders to protect them, like adventurers or guardian guilds to cover up the negative terminology that goes with mercenary.
all that said, this is much easier on the small scale. Deus wants to do this globally, he will have to set up some system that vets leaders and established culturally the same vetting for officers and so forth, a high standard and pride in that standard…which its really hard to keep the corruption of the office out, especially after a few generations and the issues with trying to micro-manage an empire (too little and corruption sneaks in, too much and you are seen as oppressive).
in the end only a madman would want to rule a world, especially doing so by establishing a new system of rulership.
“I can’t speak for Deus but within *certain* empires, missionaries like that would be subject to re-education and possible confinement for endangering public interests.”
While I would not be comfortable with defending ‘re-education camps’ – waaay too 1984 or Brave New World or We Happy Few to me, both of which are examples of evil attempts at utopias that wind up being dystopic authoritarian hellholes of no freedom at all – I’d at least be able to TRY to make an argument in defense of Deus, as him doing it as an absolute last resort since murdering the person is wrong, and if they keep coming back into the nation after repeated warnings, that was the only choice.
But killing the missionary without every other step being taken first (and there are a lot of steps that have NOT been taken in this example, considering Galytn has a good infrastructure with education and propaganda of its own to combat the missionary’s wrongheaded propaganda) just doesn’t be in line with his past actions.
Yes, if he considers a missionary on the same level as a mercenary rapist and knowingly has them executed, my opinion of him WILL take a nose-dive. No matter what people may think of them, missionaries have done a lot of good in many parts of the world. I do notice that this execution seems to take place in secret which does not bode well for Galytn. It suggests that Deus has more in common with Indinge than he wants us to believe. And I was really beginning to like him, too!
“Yes, if he considers a missionary on the same level as a mercenary rapist and knowingly has them executed, my opinion of him WILL take a nose-dive.”
Yeah plus it would be wildly inconsistent with his past behavior. From what I’m surmising, DaveB read something about missionaries who preached the evils of condoms which worsened the AIDS epidemic in Africa, where there was no alternative education to argue against their teachings, but seems to have ignored that Galytn would not have this sort of problem since Galytn has a lot of infrastructure for education, thanks to Deus himself. It feels like a major mistake made by DaveB, imho. :(
It’s literally the first time I can’t argue in favor of Deus, unless DaveB happens to have made a mistake by forgetting the Galytn is not what much of Africa was at the time of the article he read. But even so…. I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of combating speech with executions. It’s very difficult to defend a person who has that sort of thought process.
Yes, and for me it’s a real curve-ball because Deus seemed so very reasonable and even likable. I read a comment once that their was another comic in Grrrlpower, which could be called ‘Deus and Friends’ and honestly, until now I would have loved that as a spin-off. Now… I can only hope things aren’t as they seem.
santa to supervillain. A good sign of a devious villain is one that can play their cards so everyone thinks they’re the good guy till its time to lift the mask and eat the guests.
*term from this*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB9N9IvK8iE
when first introduced (while the audience was given clues he is not a good guy, kid’s show after all have to spell it out with not so subtle hints so kids think they are clever when they figure it out), he came across as this super nice guy who just wanted to help everyone, rather than as just the pawn of the true final boss out to destroy and conquer.
So far the best and only real defense I’ve seen that has ANY chance of being consistent with how Deus has been in the past is something Rhuen argued elsewhere, which would be an EXCELLENT argument if the details were as Rhuen described. That the missionary was not just preaching – he was directing follows to commit imminent criminal actions.
But as it currently stands, there isnt enough to assume that, based on what DaveB did say in one of his responses in the forum. Which would be a shame because it feels like a first step on turning a well crafted character into a shell of that character (sort of like what happened to Luke Skywalker in the Last Jedi).
I’m hoping, like VGer, that ‘things are not a they seem’ and that Rhuen’s argument elsewhere – not the response to Vger here) is actually accurate.
Yes. Put down the pom-poms and join us Pander. Open your eyes to the truth that is SmugD!
Pom-poms are down for today unfortunately. Although I still think he’s generally always done the right thing. EXCEPT for today.
This is the one exception though where he did not, and I still feel this was something based on a mistake on DaveB’s part in general, from what DaveB’s blurb response was about where he got the idea, since Galytn would NOT be an equivalent to what he described.
But yes, in the future when I say that Deus has never done anything evil, I will have to make a qualifier since he DID do something evil here, which I legitimately cannot dispute. Usually, any arguments made against Deus, I’m able to dispute because the arguments made are not very good. My opponents argue things like killing Indinge (a murderous ruthless monster who killed and tortured men, women and children and was going to have Deus murdered as well), or invading Mozambique (literally one of the most corrupt nations on the planet, where the people of the region were BEGGING Deus to come into the area to improve their infrastructure and lives), or making a business arrangement with Tom (who they claim is trying to conquer Earth but by EVERY example in the comic is NOT trying to conquer Earth and just is a Fiend where they got off on the wrong foot). But this… yeah I can’t actually come up with a defense to this. So I’d concede that here, Deus done wrong. No pom poms. No rah rah.
Here, the only person arguing that what Deus did could be good is Torabi (who does a decent job on the argument so props to him) but I disagree with the idea Torabi was proposing on a fundamental level, that words are violence, since I do not think speech alone should ever be responded to with violence, and ESPECIALLY not with death. Aside from that you make a martyr of the person and its hows a fundamental WEAKNESS in your argument when you can’t argue something logically and have to resort to either insults or violence, it’s just morally indefensible on a general level of freedom, which is something Deus claims to respect. Deus should NOT be considering the concept of words being violence, because it’s one of those things that explains why Maxima would not punch Deus into fine salsa the second he says something that she does not like. Because he and Maxima both know on a fundamental level that words are NOT violence. So …. Deus is being a hypocrite, which is annoying for me to acknowledge because it feels like a flaw on the part of the author and wildly inconsistent with Deus everywhere else in the story.
Basically, here, Deus is being stupid and showing that he is incapable of making a good debate against someone who says that condoms are evil. Which means he is intellectually incapable of adequately arguing something which is SIMPLE to argue against, or it’s such an irrational trigger for him that he forgets to actually THINK logically. Which is pretty much the only defense I can think of for Deus – that Deus has a hair trigger when it comes to missionaries preaching against safe sex. Which is not a convincing thing for me to defend because it’s wrong-headed as it relates to freedom of speech.
Going to disagree specifically with your last paragraph. I didn’t read the rest of it. Deus did not demonstrate any kind of inability to debate against these missionaries. Just as other nations do not prove their own inability to debate when they punish criminals for breaking the law, Deus’s had no obligation to debate these people. The severity of the punishment certainly has plenty of room for discussion, but since we are only seeing the end result it is possible (though unlikely) that these missionaries were out-debated.
Also, this is not a hair trigger response. One of the few verifiable facts that we actually do have about these supposed missionaries is that they were actually warned repeatedly. Vale states it in panel 3.
Furthermore, in regards to your mention of freedom of speech: the laws of this imaginary country may not have as many allowances as other countries (which is itself another discussion about how kind Deus is or isn’t) but even in America, where it is heavily defended, freedom of speech does not allow you to endanger others. And Vale’s mention of “the spread of several…” would suggest that these missionaries have been directly tied to the spread of several diseases. Which would mean that they are actively harming people. This, combined with the aforementioned “repeated warnings” suggests that they are causing a health crisis and are completely unrepentant despite the government warning them to stop.
So what does he mean, “the evils of condoms”? Is that code for something or just anti-contraception wank?
From what I’ve heard from people who have lived or visited parts of Africa near there, especially those trying to deal with the AIDs epidemic there, asshats claiming that condoms are in some way actual evil is apparently common. Some of the claims I’ve heard related sound very much like someone started out by making sarcastic statements in support of the Catholic Church’s ban on contraceptives and someone else heard them and either missed the sarcasm, or decided it was too plausible to not use as an excuse. Either way, they ran with it, and by that I mean many Marathons’ worth of running.
Oh, that changes the context a bit I thought Duece was actively trying to get people to not use them.
Probably some religious whackjob that’s perpetuating the AIDS epidemic by trying to force their stupid religious sensibilities on people.
Despite the very real AIDS epidemic, the Catholic Church and others insist on preaching that condom use is somehow “against God’s plan.” It is disinformation which gets people killed and spreads both AIDS and other diseases. It isn’t an ‘opinion’ because an inanimate object such as a condom cannot be good or evil. It is a lie. And apparently Deus doesn’t like people lying to his citizens about things that can have highly deleterious effects upon their health.
To be fair. Who hasn’t wanted to shank a rapist?
Also, completely legal as I am assuming that the King of Galytn has given Dues the authority to conduct such “reeducation programs”. (because all future mercs and radicals have now learned that Galytn does not tolerate such type of behavior.)
Dues for Galactic Emperor 2024!
Assuming Deus motives aren’t ethical but political,
the fastest way to incite rebellion against your empire, to have heroes rise up against you, is to have sociopathic asshats at the ranks that most frequently interact with the public…also a good idea to remove those from magistrate, congress, and other political positions that may affect local laws and enforcement of said laws and thus the image these people have of the empire.
Just pointing out that the merc about to get shanked is probably Russian.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wagner-group-mercenaries-accused-of-raping-new-moms-on-maternity-ward-in-central-african-republic
Deus is clearly worse than Putin: In just the short time he has been in power of Galytn, he has lost ground connection and already staged a war against another sovereign nation.
Mozambique and Ukraine are very similar in land and population size – yet people are cheering on Deus for unleashing hell’s demons on the one, while they are abhorred by Putin’s war crimes in the other.
This comic reads like a propaganda leaflet for authoritarianism – “for the ultimately greater good”, because “Strong Man knows best”.
Not to mention “White Man knows best”? Because I’ve noticed that a lot that has happened in Ukraine that has people up in arms against mr. Putin has been happening in other parts of the world for a LONG time (like Yemen, for instance) and nobody really cared about it. But now that it’s happened in a white country to white people suddenly it’s a big deal?
More that it’s happening on the border of Europe, thus threatening their security directly, or so I’d think.
While this story arc’s timing is unfortunate, note it did start before the real world events did, and to be fair on the propaganda thing of might makes right that has been an issue and criticism of the super hero genre since the 1940s or 1950s at least pointing it out.
It is worth noting on comparing or applauding Deus over Putin that Deus is a fictional character, Putin is a real person. This is like crying hypocrite to fans of Kaiju movies for applauding when Godzilla destroys a city and being sad when a real natural disaster hits. Or how Juggernaut once attacked the world trade center but after the real world attack the comics had heroes and villains alike as part of a PR sell denounce such an evil act, when in universe they have done much worse. This is because the writers and the readers need to remember that fiction is one thing, it is make believe, and should not be emulated or applauded when it happens in real life
I’d say there are some exceptions to the obviously a murderer/killer, and when the proof is there for 100% then death penalty can be applies. However, I only ever felt death penalty applies to murderers/killers and not any other crime that may leave someone devastated.
Though, are mercenaries really going on about teaching girls that condom are evil?
Not just mercenaries. The misogyny is very very strong in that part of the world. Of course, so is the need to breed more soldiers for this or that warlords armies. 10 years old or so is strong enough to use an AK or pistol after all.
There’s some, cough, men, who think that getting women pregnant shows their virility and how manly they are.
Plus what Brad said.
Does it say something about the justice system in general, or are you perhaps suggesting that since Justice is supposed to be blind that there were people who could slip her a roofie and do her like a prom date?
Because I can think of it possibly being some judge having to toe the line legally speaking when the prosecution is taking it on the lam, money wise. What about the possible stereotypes there? However, if there are people who were going to subvert the legal system at the time, we also know about people who worked against it because of the goodness in their hearts. I really want to think that Robin Hood would be a possible historical figure. But I’m also think that there could also be the possibility of a story named Enos Strate being in the employ of said sheriff.
But in American history, we have the underground railroad. And the republican party. And Abraham Lincoln.
What the hell is this responding to?
A little put on edge by the extrajudicial part of this, honestly.
Lol. Who says that this is exrajudicial? Deus might have given himself judicial powers and summarily sentenced these people to execution. Maybe it’s just being done in a secret warehouse because they don’t want people to know about that knife being used for the execution. It looks like it’s the one he stole from the Black Reliquary. The one that needs to be “recharged”.
I dunno; Throat slitting in a damp, dark room while they all look freshly beaten up doesn’t scream transparency.
It’s clearly not transparent. The execution itself is obviously being done in a clandestine manner. But that doesn’t mean that it’s extrajudicial. Extrajudicial just means that something is being done without approval of a court or judge. So if these people were just kidnapped and whisked off to this warehouse then yeah, it’s extrajudicial. But if they were arrested by police, tried, found guilty, sentenced to execution, and then whisked off to this warehouse, it is a bit debatable. Deus seems like he runs a pretty tight ship and these people are certainly guilty of actions that he deems to be criminal, so I am sure that they are convicted criminals in that country. Furthermore, it is likely that they were sentenced to execution through the legitimate legal channels (because, as I mentioned, Deus runs a tight ship and he would certainly have given himself the power to do that and these people have done things he doesn’t like). So the only question is whether or not this is the standard form of execution. I know it seems like it wouldn’t be but Deus has his weird dramatic flair so this might legitimately be a special placed designed to look like an abandoned warehouse because he felt like doing things that way. Alternatively, this could be a secret execution solely to hide that knife. So maybe the paperwork says that these people were executed humanely but instead they were sacrificed to recharge that knife in a hidden area so the Twilight Council doesn’t find out that Deus has it.
Everything I was going to say, Zippy already said, even though I disagree with Deus on the concept that the missionary should have been found guilty of doing anything criminal worthy of a death sentence. Zippy’s post is a reasonable description that this execution was still likely done in a judicial manner, not extrajudicial, and the main reason for the secrecy is to prevent conflict with the Twilight Council for the use of the Epimorph, which would be attention he doesnt need which could start a war on an additional front which is not necessary and just would make things more difficult for his plans.
How has no one yet mentioned that that is clearly Leon in panel 4? lol
Was going to mention that as well, and the bald guy looks like one of the Space Marines
I was going to comment on Leon’s fall from grace as well, until the explanation about the missionary unfolded and took any remaining humor out of the page.
Thought it was more that SmugD had captured Leon and a couple of the Space Marines and came up with some fairy tail about why he had them executed
Well, if he had done THAT, his days would have been numbered. I imagine Maxima would react VERY badly to Deus kidnapping and executing people under her protection, and that’s before SYDNEY finds out! After all, Leon’s someone she has strong feelings for.
From context, I take it “teaching young girls about the evils of condoms” means “we don’t want to use them, so we’ll con our victims into thinking they’re bad”?
I also suspect their victims of being well below any reasonable age of consent. If they bother with consent in any form. That first panel in the last row makes me think not.
That’s not “got drunk/high/other, did something really stupid, genuinely regret it and am willing to pay the cost of the foulness of the act they did.” That’s incorrigible and the world’s better off without them.
I interpreted it as them being missionaries, specifically from the Mormon church. The comments by dave though implies that they were mercenaries hired to blow up a hospital.
Different situations
If they were mercenaries hired to blow up a hospital who were ALSO missionaries preaching against condoms, then I don’t think what Deus is doing is evil because I’d be tying the death penalty to ‘blowing up hospitals.’ If they were just mercenaries preaching against condoms, while they are doing something wrong, killing them would be evil. A morally OR ethically (regardless of the semantic definition used) good regime does not kill people over mere speech alone.
Especially when Galytn has sophisticated infrastructure put in place which includes education to combat those opinions in the arena of ideas.
Like nearly every practice I’ve ever seen attributed to the Mormon church, I can’t understand the reasoning here other than it being a popular target. Some extremely rudimentary research (Wikipedia) reveals that while yes, up until half a century ago a handful of leaders were publicly opposed to contraception (as was most of Christianity up to and including that era), there was never an actual ban. Apparently a single official statement stated it was discouraged, and even that mentioned the need for considering women’s health in considering how many children to have.
The same internet search also revealed that the Catholic church is the only Christian sect with an official ban on contraceptives (though usage is still extremely high among its members), and also was involved in a situation in Africa with condoms supposedly not protecting against HIV.
Yeah…I kinda feel like Galytn is edging toward Mary Suetopia territory. In the real world, persecuting missionaries for preaching against condoms is the sort of thing that causes popular rebellions.
I don’t think the preaching really is the sin here, I’d guess it was the rape that has them persecuted.
Highest rate of rape in the world is South Africa. Given the figure is per year, it may be more common some places than consensual sex outside marriage.
https://theconversation.com/we-looked-at-the-link-between-sexual-violence-and-unintended-pregnancy-in-south-africa-146436
It might very well be more common than consensual sex within marriage.
It appears that the tied up people include both missionaries and mercenaries-turned-rapists. No idea why she’s dealing with all of them together, but the fact that there are two speeches seems to indicate there are two distinct groups represented.
Oh good it wasn’t just me who thought they were missionaries.
I hate that I have to agree about this :/
“I want you to lecture the rapists”
Actual result, a quick castration. And “don’t do it again!”
that just leads to angry ex-rapists who are now into other forms of assault and murder.
*assuming as mercenaries we don’t have the drunk, drugged, type excuses.
we should go straight to execution to remove the threat to the whole entirely, or since magic and psychics are an option memory erase and personality shifting so someone more productive can inhabit that body.
and failing that you could still execute them an either turn the body into a flesh golem with their muscle memories, possessed by a spirit, or a fresh new anima soul to inhabit the shell
(end results are about the same skill memories intact, interpersonal memories erased)
The most common legal defense for the US overall is the public defender, overworked and underpaid.
The most common legal defense for the wealthy is “infinite lawyers lead to infinite delay”, while threatening and/or buying off the person who filed the complaint.
That the system permits this, shows it’s broken.
Not gonna lie, this definitely puts me in the “like him more now” camp. Murdering missionaries is pretty harsh but I support it for 2 reasons. First: these ones were apparently warned but came back. Second: that bit about the difference between morals and ethics resonates with me. There is a real problem right now with people taking stands against issues because that is the morally correct thing for them, but then not caring about the bigger issues that are made worse by their actions. So ignoring the real world issue and looking solely at the issue this comic presents: condoms may or may not lead to sexual promiscuity but they also help stop the spread of diseases. These people focused solely on the promiscuity “problem” (there’s a whole discussion to be had about whether or not it is a problem) and completely ignored the disease issue. That is the difference between ethics and morality, and frankly selfish. They only care about an issue that they feel is repugnant and give no consideration to any other aspect of the lives that they are impacting.
Whether Deus’ vision is good or evil, he is putting in the effort to comprehensively improve people’s lives in accordance with that vision. he is completely justified to kick out people who undermine that vision because they want to selectively change particular parts without any intention to help anybody. And if those people come back after they’ve been kicked out, then they have committed a crime. His punishment of that crime is a bit harsh but he’s already executing people for crimes, so it really falls on the individuals to not test his patience with their particular crimes.
–> Mercenaries <–
Nah, the mercenary one is clear cut. If former mercenaries are running around raping people, kill em. The moral gray area is the first part. The speech Vale is skipping through seems to imply that one or more of the people being executed have been travelling around spreading “information” about condoms being evil because of their own moral beliefs. That weird hatred of condoms would suggest that the person is acting on religious beliefs (I would guess Christian or Muslim) and therefore a missionary (being told they aren’t welcome makes me think that they are an outsider but I could be wrong).
are they executing those or just the rapist. they are all bound and gagged for a secret police interrogation for repeat offense, but it seems the killing doesn’t start till the rapists, so maybe they are just killing those. It is a bit murky on the page.
No, they are clearly executing all of them. There are just different speeches for each criminal offense. Vale got sick of it and decided to just skip straight to the execution part. Also, this doesn’t seem like a “secret police interrogation” to me. Deus doesn’t need any info from them. He has decided to kill them and the only reason they’re still alive is because he wants them to know why they are about to die because he’s obnoxious like that. Also, it is possible that this is only being done secretly in order to hide that knife (he took it from the Black Reliquary and things will get annoying if the Twilight Council finds out that he has it). It sounds like there is no need to secretly kill the rapists. Their crime is obvious and they could easily be sentenced to death. It’s not clear if the missionaries(?) would have been sentenced to death though.
Obviously we can’t know the truth until the author tells us but keep in mind that this is a country that Deus has essentially built from the ground up and that he’s a super genius who loves to be in control. The judicial system would almost certainly be different from the one in the U.S. and Deus would definitely have ways to legally sentence people to death. The only question is whether or not he would abuse that power and honestly, at this point I don’t think that he would. Eventually he will be corrupted by all of this power but right now he’s still at that sweet spot where he’s still building a better future and his actions are legitimately helping people. So he is still optimistic and his moral compass is still functioning. Inevitably he will fall from grace, either due to his efforts being stymied or due to being so successful that he becomes jaded and loses sight of who he once was. Either way, we are still at a happy part of his character arc and the people being executed are legitimately acting against the development of his country, so I imagine he openly had them sentenced to death.
>”His punishment of that crime is a bit harsh but he’s already executing people for crimes, so it really falls on the individuals to not test his patience with their particular crimes.”
This is not only horrifying but a logical fallacy – there is no justification for punishment so far in excess of the magnitude of the crime, at least not if you’re even pretending to care about the citizenry. “It’s your fault for making them angry” is the realm of abusers and murderous tyrants throughout history, and finding a way to justify absolute control and maximum punishment is a common theme of many a dystopian story (generally ending with an uprising among the populace).
Horrifying? Certainly. Logical fallacy? I think not.
First of all, who are you to say the punishment is in excess of the magnitude of the crime? We literally have no way to know the magnitude of the crime. All we know is that it involves young girls, the “evils of condoms”, “spread of several…”, and a clear disregard for the law despite repeated warnings from the government to stop their actions. So we are assuming that they are missionaries preaching abstinence and that their actions have directly led to the spread of several diseases. The spread of a single disease involves multiple people and so several diseases would probably have a large number of victims.
This brings us to the second contention. Is ANYBODY capable of truly measuring the magnitude of ANY crime? How do you measure severity or ratios? Beating one person to death could probably be argued to be a crime of greater magnitude than beating one person to a state of unconsciousness. But is it a greater magnitude than beating two different people into unconsciousness? How much of an impact on magnitude would we assign to a permanent disability from the beating? And what about nonviolent versus violent? Which crime has a greater magnitude: beating someone to unconsciousness with no permanent damage or stealing all of their wealth and rendering it irrecoverable, permanently damaging their financial stability and leaving them unable to ever retire? And that is with small numbers of victims. How do you approach a crime that impacts hundreds or even thousands of people? Is punching one person one hundred times a greater or lesser magnitude than punching one hundred people a single time? The one person is clearly going to have more severe injuries but having one hundred victims clearly implies that the criminal is a threat to society.
So that brings us back to the crime and punishment in the comic. We have what appears to be a person being executed for the crime of spreading multiple diseases after the government has already warned them that they are committing a crime and need to stop. Is that appropriate punishment? It’s debatable. On the one hand, execution is a very extreme punishment. On the other hand, if the person is truly guilty of the crime they are accused of then they are a clear danger to public health and completely unrepentant and unwilling to stop harming people. If they are indeed missionaries then we can assume that they believe their actions are morally just, but should religious belief be an acceptable defense when you are being punished for harming large numbers of people? Certainly the method of execution is unnecessarily unpleasant, but what method of execution is “good”?
Now while I don’t think that my stance is a logical fallacy, I certainly wouldn’t say that his actions aren’t the actions of a tyrant. But I’m also not saying I take the stance of >“It’s your fault for making them angry” as you put it. I am saying that these people are criminals who are committing their crimes in a dictatorship where the previous dictator was murdered by the current dictator and everyone knows it. While Deus told some B.S. about an unfortunate death in his television interview, the flashback where he is telling Max how he got an ashtray shows a child from this country running up to thank him for “killing the evil tyrant” in #413 so clearly it is common knowledge. It is very likely that they were warned about what would happen when they received their repeated warnings to stop what they were doing. Their decision to continue led to this outcome. Putting aside whether or not the outcome was appropriate, it was definitely predictable and so these people were either intentional martyrs for their cause or they assumed that they would not truly be executed.
Vale only reading part of the speech makes it hard to tell the circumstances. The agreement seems to be that the first part of it is directed at a missionary ranting about condoms, but then the whole mercenary turn rapist doesn’t really fit with the first. I would believe missionary turn rapist, as apparently it is common for missionaries to include sexual tourism of children during their mission, but mercenary doesn’t really fit in with that.
So here is my proposal for what is happening, one of them is a missionary who ranted about condoms too much, and the other two are mercenaries turned rapists. It fits since rape and mercenary action doesn’t seem like the type of thing you could get off with a warning for the first offences.
And specifically the line “And there’s a whole separate speech for the mercenaries-turned-rapists” kinda implies that it is at least two groups of people, and the groups get separate speeches.
Some of us have never come around to SmugD, and never will
I for one have no problem with executing enemy invaders. And that’s what both foreign mercenaries and missionaries are. Mercs hired by locals for defense is one thing, and arguably defensable… but certainly not ones being hired to carry out terror attacks or ones who have gone so far as to commit sex-crimes against the local population. Missionaires are just plain evil. What they do is essentially the exact same thing as an agent provocatuer does. They’re foreign agents promulgating alien doctrines in an attempt to manipulate the populace.
Even locals educated (or usually indoctrinated) in foreign “schools” are suspect to some degree. What crosses the line is when they’re trying to force people to act against their own best interests in the name of a foreign ideology.
A justice system which is not effected by wealth or influence… I’ll grant, that’s an interesting idea.
Completely impossible so long as the judge, lawyers, and probably the jury, are humans though. A completely impartial person is likely hopelessly psychotic from inability to choose even simple things (no one stable is without SOME preferences). And a society which tried to enforce this on a sufficiently large scale (48,000 judges, over a million lawyers, nearly 2 million jury members annually in the US) would be brutally totalitarian.
And, in addition to fairness and equality, you’d also need to inculcate some form of mercy and caps for scaling offenses. Otherwise you get executions for serial jaywalkers, people temporarily unable to pay their car insurance losing their jobs, and other blatant miscarriages of justice.
Honestly, the summery execution of Mercenaries turned rapeists when the situation is somewhat unstable is morally grey. A nation-state having a policy of summary execution for illegal combatants when they are in a part of the world where that is a major issue is understandable. The wars of conquest are a bigger morality issue.
Wow, biased *and* racist, that’s very impactful and impressive.
Well, I’m reminded of a point that Death Battle went over on Dr Doom: that he says he’s the right person to rule the world, and that, most likely; he’s right.
So, I say the right counter question is, then: “is it right to rule the world?”
To which, my response is: nobody in their right mind wants to rule the world.
I dunno. Power is pretty alluring. And honestly, plenty of people with knowledge and confidence tend to fall into that train of thought of “If I just had more authority, I could solve these problems.” 9 times out of 10 they are wrong, but Deus might be smart enough to pull it off. More importantly, you should modify your counter question to “Is it right to rule THIS world?” Because there are fundamental differences between the real world and the world of this comic. Right now, the Grrlverse is in a state of transition into a huge change. It is unclear whether or not the existing governments can handle it, and so Deus wants to fix things because he is confident that he can. As for what could go wrong if the governments can’t handle it, just look at DC comics. Super villains, demons, aliens, and all kinds of threats constantly threatening the populace and the government is completely unable to handle these threats in terms of combat. Fortunately, a group of Good Samaritan volunteers handle the combat and then hand the perpetrators over to the government. But then the government also fails to handle the aftermath, with villains constantly escaping and captured alien tech making its way into the hands of the highest bidder. The world is a dystopia.
Honestly this is an issue that never seems to get properly addressed in American comics, which I think Dave Barrack is trying to tackle in his own comic. The real world plus super powers would face some major growing pains. Marvel and DC (especially DC) both have those growing pains evolve into massive issues because they want the heroes to be the movers and shakers, so they have the government be ineffectual. The problem is that those worlds have devolved into messes where the status quo clearly isn’t working. So the villain bent on world domination would be terrible for the real world but in a world where super villains are constantly getting out of jail and alien invasions happen every other week, with the government powerless to handle either, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to let somebody else try their hand at leadership. Unfortunately, people like Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, Vandall Savage, and others are just too crazy to be trusted with that kind of power. But Deus seems like he could legitimately do a good job. So we have a proper question of whether or not to shake up the status quo. And it is made more difficult by the fact that things are properly in control at this point in the story. Honestly, I would want to see Deus succeed in Marvel or DC because he would be a necessary evil. But in this universe I don’t know if he really is necessary.
Well, it reminds me of a point Death Battle went over with Dr Doom: that he says he’s the right person to rule the world, and that most likely: he’s right.
So, my counter question to that is “Is it right to rule the world?”
In which the answer is: Nobody in their right mind would want to rule the world.
Tears For Fears
Will she going to mention rapists-murderer?
That * is* what usually happens to male victims in the Congo.
And often, not even with an apendage.
For certain things, screw the monologue.
It’s best to just move on to the wood chipper…
“How is your legal system?” – “Shoot me!one11”
Vale upon returning: ‘TLDL’
Deus: ‘too long, didn’t read?’
Vale: ‘Too long, didn’t Live.’
So Vale will just click “Accept Terms of Execution” at the end and not read the whole speech.
The Shego to hos Draken. She ain’t gonna monologue. It’s also kinda pointless if they won’t be waking up tomorrow to appreciate the monologue.
I’m glad to see Deus keeps fitting the ‘rationality bro’ stereotype more and more, now with the double-whammy of a consequentialism bit and a morality is distinct from ethics bit. Kinda makes him seem more like a dumbass but I guess not every rationality bro is arrogantly ignorant.
> I mean, honestly, if I had to give aliens a tour of the US and they started asking questions about our legal system, I would be really embarrassed to describe the current state of it.
Forget aliens, try explaining it to humans from outside the USA. Here’s a Scottish court that disallowed extradition because Texas prisons might be international human rights violations, and the European Court of Human Rights agreeing: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/03/17/do-texas-prison-conditions-violate-human-rights-standards-one-scottish-court-says-yes That’s just one example that I was able to dig up quickly, but look at the links inside — the records of sexual abuse by guards, turning off water as a punishment, cells hot enough to kill, denial of basic amenities, etc etc. For heaven’s sake, our prisons are often *for-profit entities*! The justice system is motivated to lock people up in order to gain access to their labor without needing to pay them (or pay them more than a pittance, in some cases). How is that different from slavery? And yes, the 13th Amendment allows slavery:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
That’s the “involuntary servitude” exception, not slavery. It just means serving, i.e. working, involuntarily.
I don’t know about any other state, but Michigan prisons operate at a cost of billions of dollars a year in health care for prisoners alone. That’s just one part of the expense. Corrections is the single largest budget item. It’s absolutely not a for-profit system.
No, that can literally mean slavery. If a person is locked up against their will and forced to work for inadequate compensation, that is slavery. We are just kind of used to it in the U.S. but our prison conditions are ripe for abuse. I’m sure that there are plenty of institutions that don’t abuse the system but there are countless cases of institutions that do abuse their prisoners and those cases go back decades. Is it right for a person to decide that prisoners should be denied air conditioning in 100 degree heat because they committed a crime? Because we had Joe Arpaio in Texas do just that. Doesn’t matter what the crime was, anyone prisoners on his watch could be subjected to that on his whim. Then you have the history of black people in the South being arrested on trumped up charges and forced to work as slaves directly after the civil war specifically because of that amendment. Arrest them for vagrancy or carrying a razor blade, convict them in a racist court, send them to prison, and then sell them to farms or mines to work. They were prisoners, so obviously you also had to chain them up at night to stop them from escaping. And there was no need to pay them because they were working as part of their punishment. Literally slavery with extra steps.
I suppose that’s a fairly effective means of avoiding war crimes tribunals. Send in a minion with all the proper materials for handling interrogation and processing of war prisoners appropriately, with *direct orders* to do so correctly to the letter.
…all while knowing full well that the person he sent by no means has the personal moral inclination *or even capacity* to follow such orders without losing her @$%^ and outright murdering the worst of the lot regardless.
A series of four books can be called a quartet, five parts is a quintet, and so on, just so you know Dave. lol
I will agree with you _almost_ completely regarding the death penalty. But despite the gaping flaws in our system, there are some very few cases (sadly, more all the time) wherein the offender’s guilt is so abundantly clear and the crime so horrific that death is what they deserve, beyond a doubt. If only to stop them lingering on in prison, getting a fan club of sick misguided and twisted individuals (Charles Manson and Ted Bundy, to name two, got _marriage proposals_ in prison).
Mutiple murders are one of the few cases where I think the death penalty is appropriate.
“Wait, you’re a what?? Nah, screw the speech, cut his head off and send it to his boss.”
So is Vale going off script, or did Deus anticipate her reaction?
After all, you can be super-intelligent, but a lot of the problems with implementation come down to getting subordinates that will actually carry out your program without embellishing it in ways that nullify it.