Grrl Power #913 – The purge
Yes, the clean spot was in an adjacent room.
Honestly I think this page is grosser than the previous one. Especially the mid-sentence burps, and the non-pictured (you’re welcome) strings of gorgy drool that follow them.
So yeah, as I predicted, there were some differing opinions on Cora’s handling of the situation. Honestly I just thought it was funny, both the extreme overkill and Sydney sitting there covered in human jam with one eye twitching. This comic isn’t Judge Dredd, but it’s not My Little Pony either. I guess it’s closer to the latter really, but eh, sometimes bad guys explode.
For those of you wondering, Sydney was not allowed to inject herself with a syringe of Fuggedaboutit (that’s the trademarked drug name) that was covered in viscera.
To answer Sydney’s question, I can tell you that she’s mostly throwing up due to stress. Despite playing it surprisingly cool, she was actually really scared there, especially after the drugs and that asshole pointing a gun at her face. The gore storm put her over the top, but she probably would have eventually panic barfed even without that.
Check the vote incentive to see Sydney not naked. And then there’s the Patreon version.
(. )( .) & ( ! )
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
“Arrest the giblets! Arrest the giblets!”*
*said while teabagging the giblets
A number of people here are saying Cora was justified because she’s an alien and her culture is different from our own, ergo she should not be held to the same standard.
Well… no. For two reasons. One: she’s a guest on Earth. That means she needs to show a respect for Earth culture. You don’t barge into someone else’s home and then demand they do things the way you’re used to back home in Podunk.
Two: What makes you so certain that she’s an average representative of her own culture? She’s supposed to be an archetype, the space cowboy. Well, Han Solo and Malcom Reynolds weren’t exactly average representatives. Both were far more casual about killing, and far more recklessly impulsive, than the typical Corellian or Borderworlder.
That’s not what I said at all. What I said was in response to Concretia’s “What’s WRONG with you?” Please read it in that context. Being raised in a culture that is OK with over the top violence does NOT mean you shouldn’t hold them to our standards when they’re on our planet.
Not to mention the fact that she was shown to use excessive force even by alien standards, back on the station…
Yeah for these two pages seen a lot of it. Even my own comments explaining it are hit like they think I am trying to condemn her. Leading me to think several people are trying more to convince themselves of it, thinking in a black and white good or bad manner believing the character has to adhere to some specific moral ground or come up with some explanation why they are defying their expectations of her *contrary to evidence in the comic this is fully in character*
Which has confused me as to me she is basically a hybrid of Major Motoko Kusanagi and Gene Starwind. With a lean more towards space cowboy. I called her a Cyberpunk Space Outlaw Action Hero.
Cyberpunk being the aesthetic, Space Outlaw what she is, and Action hero her approach to dealing with “bad guys” and those who hurt those she cares about.
you don’t have to agree with, approve, or regard a character’s actions as ethically and morally pure or even legal to still like them; and they don’t have to a villain to fall off of those. Anti-hero is a thing (a vague thing that changes with different times, but still).
I’m saying that Cora was justified because a criminal was waving a handgun in her friend’s face and had stated his intent to murder her and try to steal her orbs.
Anyone walking in on that situation would be justified in using deadly force.
Not really. In those types of situations, officers of the law are required to at least TRY to take the offender in question alive.
I not going to try to claim a familiarity with the different sets of rules under which the many different police forces across the nation are operating, but I’d have a hard time believing that a cop is supposed to “try” to keep a criminal alive who is pointing a gun at someone’s head and who has already stated their intent to murder that person.
When i was taught the standard in my CCL class, the standard is whenever you genuinely believe there is going to be loss of life.
It might be slightly different in police training, but that’s likely a good place to start.
A man waving a gun and threatening to shoot is plenty for an average citizen to decide things and still be justified, for a police officer likely the same or less.
Charges still get brought if they die either way, and are decided in a court of law. We shall see whether Cora is held to that standard or not.
Prosecutor: “It is true, is it not, that you fired a round that caused the victim’s body to explode, when you had access to rounds that would merely stun him, is that not true?”
Cora: “Concretia was the biggest threat. I had loaded rounds sufficient to disable (not kill) her. When I got there, someone else became the immediate threat. I did not have time to reload.”
Any such trial would be ample grounds for humor, as the defense laid more and more reasons to let Cora walk free. That’s not even considering the unlikelihood (fair or not) of any Prosecutor even indicting the rescuer of America’s Cutest Super.
Assuming a DA would even try to prosecute this at all (which is soooo unlikely), that is definitely a way this could play out. :)
I do not believe that this is accurate, or “the standard.” Charges are only brought if the DA believes that they have a reason to pursue criminal charges. And there’s nothing to decide in a court of law if no charges are ever brought.
A private citizen preventing a murder by killing the guy who intended to commit that murder is not someone you typically have murder charges brought against. Cowl-man kidnapped Sydney (and yes, Concretia committed the act but cowl-man is guilty of the crime both because of criminal conspiracy and because he first kidnapped Concretia and forced her to obey him), drugged her, and then verbally threatened to kill her followed up by pulling out a pistol and pointing it at Sydney’s face. At that point any one acting to prevent felony murder is almost certainly not going to be charged with a crime.
Not murder, manslaughter, and usually only if it is unclear what happened. Yes, in situations where there is clear video and audio evidence of the whole encounter, usually if the person is in the right no charges get filed, but more often it is less clear and they are required to testify in court of law. Same happens with police killings, either it’s clear enough nobody cares, or they get suspended pending a full investigation.
Most of the deaths in police shootings end up being “full investigations” i have no way of knowing how often self defence or “shooting a guy to save someone else” gets charges brought.
Immediate lethal force was clearly appropriate here, and to be fair Cora did only kill the one who was posing the immanent threat. She just did it in an excessively flashy, gory, and messy way.
You’re going to make me agree with someone who repeatedly claims I’m not an attorney, arent you? :)
Okay. Oberon is correct. In a hostage situation, the cop is legally allowed to shoot to kill. They are NOT required, even by police administrative rules, to ‘shoot to wound.’ In fact, they are taught to always aim for center mass if you aim a gun at someone, and in a situation where a person is ABOUT to shoot another person, if you don’t shoot that person first, you wind up with a dead victim (or in this case, a dead officer of the law, which Sydney is).
So yes, Cora is legally justified, even as a non-police officer, to use deadly force. If she was to be for some reason arrested for it (aside from the obvious jurisdictional problems of arresting her), the main problem is she has a very clear cut affirmative defense – ‘defense of others.’
For comparison’s sake on the gore factor…. you and your ex-wife are on top of a building, trying to rekindle that old spark and get back together, but her loan shark (she has a gambling problem which was the cause of your break-up, you see) tracks her to the rooftop and points a gun at her, telling you to back away. Then he approaches her aiming the gun at her and saying how ‘If I can’t get my money that you owe me, I’ll still send a message to all other deadbeats out there not to mess with Vinny Caruzano!’ You remember that you have a pocketknife in your pocket, but instead of using it, as he is about to shoot her, you rush to the rescue and shove him off the building. He splatters on the ground far below.
You’re completely justified and, in the event that you get arrested for murder (assuming a DA bothered to actually charge you), you can raise the affirmative defense of ‘Defense of Others’ – even if it was a more gory way to stop or kill Vinny, who also had a history of kicking small innocent animals, because Vinny was a real jerk in general on top of being a criminal who was about to murder your ex-wife and hopefully future wife again.
Jokes aside, a cop is under no obligation to try to not kill the suspect who is in the imminent process of attempting to murder another person. Nor is a non-police officer under any similar obligation.
No one made you agree with me. If you’re agreeing with me I’ll assume it is because you believe that something I’ve said is accurate, and not that you’re being coerced.
And to be clear, I’ve said that I doubt you’re an actual lawyer because I’ve caught you making obviously false statements about the law. Error which a lawyer should not be making. I’ve also allowed that you may be a lawyer but just not a very good one, given those several errors.
“No one made you agree with me. If you’re agreeing with me I’ll assume it is because you believe that something I’ve said is accurate, and not that you’re being coerced.”
Wow… you really have no sense of humor, do you? Clearly my first sentence was humor. And astonishment that, for a change, you said something about the law which was correct and that I could agree with you on, instead of having to refute you and read you namecalling.
“And to be clear, I’ve said that I doubt you’re an actual lawyer because I’ve caught you making obviously false statements about the law.”
I figured you probably need some proof, and since I don’t have a youtube channel, which you think is the requirement for proving being an attorney, I thought I’d just take a picture of the diplomas on my office wall. Hope you don’t mind that I blocked out my name so someone like you doesn’t try something crazy. But if you want I can put up a piece of paper saying ‘Hey read this, Oberon’ if you need more proof. :)
https://i.postimg.cc/xdV5v133/IMG-6747.jpg
First document (top left) is my Certificate in Good Standing to practice law.
Second document (bottom left) is my undergraduate diploma but that doesnt matter much.
Third document (center) is my Juris Doctorate from law school
Fourth document (right) is my bar certification by the Second Department in New York.
Now I admit these documents are not as prestigious as a youtube channel, but it’s pretty good proof. :)
“I’ve caught you making obviously false statements about the law. ”
No, you’ve caught me making completely accurate statements that you are too stubborn to understand are correct.
“Error which a lawyer should not be making.”
Just as I would not argue with a doctor about how to perform an appendectomy, maybe you should get certified by one of the state bars or a federal sponsorship with good standing to practice law before telling me what is and is not actual law, based on your watching a youtuber who has spent most of his life NOT practicing law, but instead having a youtube channel. :) At the very least, compare me to a youtuber who has had more years in an actual practice than I have, like Robert Barnes or Viva Frei or Nick Rekieta (of Rekieta Law).
But hey I didnt make a youtube channel, so he’s got seniority on me about that, at least. :)
“I’ve also allowed that you may be a lawyer but just not a very good one, given those several errors.”
Again, no. Everything I ever post as info is EASILY googled, if you would only bother to do so, is BASIC first year legal education (which I learned in school rather than from Youtube), or I give the actual legal case precedents or statutes or definitions, which themselves are easily googled, or found on Lexis-Nexis or a search on Westlaw. You’re just stubborn and double down when you’re wrong, Oberon. You can stop now.
Apparently you are unable to read the documents i just showed you. And you have yet to show anything that I have said that is wrong, since everything that I have aaid is, like I keep telling you, easily googled.
You are a layman though, as you said. With a barely youtube-based understanding. And a stubborn one at that, unable to admit being wrong on anything. It is sort of sad, really, that you double down on being so obviously wrong on so many things, because it really limits your ability to learn OR argue constructively.
Youve pointed out nothing “many times.”. You just make declarations without the underlying basis of anything to support your declaration usually. You are far too anxious to fight and namecall, which is different than an argument. I doubt you will change, since you arent even willing to check a link or type into a search engine for the few seconds it would take to learn anything about these topics. It doesnt make anyone think you have valid points unfortunately.
Oh well.
No, Pander! He’ll see reason any moment, don’t give up now! :D
Haha :)
Pull up the receipts I guess, can you identify a page on this forum where you made a correct claim and Pander was wrong?
The quick answer to that question will be ‘no.’ :)
The slightly longer answer will be he just will repeat his declaration, and call me (or whoever he’s arguing with) stupid, or with me in particular that I’m not an attorney (or now, his new approach, that IF I am an attorney, I’m a lousy one).
But nah, he can’t point to any page where I said anything wrong, because everything I’ve ever said legally was not only correct, but INCREDIBLY basic information that anyone can learn from googling. Most information I bother to post is taught in the first year of law school, and sometimes in pre-law courses as well. Or he could get a few of those Geyer Quick Study Guides (it’s something used to study for the bar sometimes – basically laminated bar review notes on different courses).
:)
The quick answer to that question is “Yes.”
But since anyone who really cares has access to every one of these cases, I’m not going to do the homework of sifting through past pages to pull out citations where Pander has said obviously inaccurate things concerning the law.
Pander has made her choice: She wants to continue to insist that she is a lawyer, so her option is to be a lousy lawyer.
And yes, I’m only assuming the pronoun. If she wants to select one she prefers I’ll use that on in the future.
Oberon, I think you’ll find that the law is often not “obvious”, and that it is often contrary to what the average person might expect or find reasonable, because it is often created by people motivated to use it to their own ends.
Without any reference, your objections come across as nothing more than “I don’t like it, so it must not be true.” I, at least, am more inclined to believe a polite person with credentials than someone with nothing better than personal attacks and their own gut instinct.
A modern cop does not have access to a range of space-magic weapons that almost assuredly include the ability to stun or immobilize a target…as is going on in the general melee on the street.
Many black people are killed by police, just for being black. Doing so, without a crime committed, or even hinted at!
*citation needed
So, so many are available to you, if you only choose to look for them. But if you choose instead to live with your head in the sand you’ll never find or believe them, so pointing you at them as if you were a dull child will have no value.
While true, on a per capita basis many more Whites and especially Hispanics are killed by police. Hispanics got the raw end of the deal by a longshot. Police violence is a perennial problem – but making it all about blacks is the actual racism.
What the black community should be focusing on is unfair prison sentencing. But apparently that isn’t sensational enough. Gotta make drug addicts hyped up on 10x the lethal dose (George Floyd) into folk heroes, I guess.
Here’s yet another form of racism, perfectly illustrated by Wzaerreazw: The rush to smear any black person who suffers during police handling.
The issue isn’t that some kid smoked a joint 5 years ago, or shoplifted a $10 item. The issue is the mistreatment at the hands of the cops. But let’s talk about every small offense a person has ever committed in order to throw up a smoke screen and try to change the subject away from the fact that the cops just killed another unarmed person who was no threat to them or anyone else.
Because let’s be clear here: Regardless of Floyd’s drug use, he simply would not have died if he hadn’t had a knee on his neck for 9 minutes. The man was in cuffs, on the ground, and was no longer in any position to offer a threat to the cops or anyone else. Kneeling the full weight of a man on his neck was not required. Kneeling on him for 9 minutes, making zero attempts to resuscitate him, and instead maintaining the knee on the neck even after he had stopped breathing was a crime. Crimes for which his killer has been charged. And as discussed in other posts in this comments section, DAs don’t bring charges if they do not believe a crime has been committed.
Your “victim” george floyd is a great example of why many people don’t believe your narrative.
He did not just ” smoke a joint 5 years ago ” or ” shoplift a $ 10 item “. He held a gun to a pregnant woman’s belly threatening to kill her while his accomplices robbed her house , along with a slew of other robbery and drug charges. Police where called in because he committed yet another crime , where he then strenuously resisted arrest and prevented the officers from placing him in the car for his own safety . After a multiple attempts to put him in the car they then simply kept him on the ground and he died mostly because he had a pre-existing heart condition plus ( critically ) he was loaded up with 11 ng/mL of fentanyl which is a fatal level under normal circumstances. The officers are facing criminal charges for not following proper procedures that contributed to his death but the main culprit was george floyd himself.
This is just more smear campaign trying to justify a murder after the fact. It’s just more attempts to justify murder by making the victim out to be the bad man.
Whether or not he was guilty of these charges, they had nothing to do with the day of his death. Do you believe that his murderer was fully informed of Floyd’s priors? LOLOLOLOL. His murderer kneeled on Floyd’s neck because he wanted to kneel on the neck of a black man. His priors didn’t justify that action.
Again, DAs do not press charges where they do not believe that a crime has been committed. And they very often side with cops over citizens due to their close working relationship with the cops and their political aspirations. And still the criminal who kneeled on Floyd’s neck was charged with that crime.
So you can protest all you like, but the facts of the matter show that Floyd was murdered, and his killer is under indictment.
Am I trying to claim that Floyd was a model citizen who was unjustly killed? Nope.
Am I trying to claim that Floyd was innocent of any crimes? Nope.
Am I saying that kneeling on a man’s neck for 9 minutes resulting in his death was an unnecessary act? Damn skippy. That was murder by a cop.
Call the facts a smear campaign if you want does not change any of them.
D.A.’s press charges for political reasons all the time. They should have charged them with manslaughter but the publicity and rioting meant they went for the charge they know will fail to calm things down. When the not guilty verdict comes in then the useful fools will riot and loot and complain about how unfair things are. You won’t win as long as you keep playing the role they want you to.
“Regardless of George Floyd’s drug use…”
No, you don’t get to do that.
He was a drug user and that is WHY he was in conflict with the police to begin with. That is WHY they held him down. That is WHY he suffered a heart attack which an autopsy suggested contributed to his suffocation.
He didn’t deserve to die, BUT, had he not done fatal levels of drugs, there would be no police.
And what the police did was still wrong. And would have been wrong even if George Floyd hadn’t died.
Floyd being drugged doesn’t mean the police can do what they want. It is not a reason to keep sitting on him while he’s handcuffed.
My grandfather was a marine in WWII. You know how the Japanese took out U.S. machinegun nests? They’d hype ’em up on weaker drugs than Fentanyl. The Japs would be shot 20-30 times before they’d finally go down.
There’s no question laws need reform, but handcuffing the police is merely a political fantasy that will get a lot more people killed than it’ll save.
I was making a funny and accurate comment in reply to hyperbole and propaganda. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Needless to say, since I have already seen “all the evidence” and have come to a completely different conclusion than the commenter i replied to (seeing as how being black is not a crime) telling me to just heck off and educate myself isn’t going to change anyone’s opinions.
So to sum up, freedom of speech means freedom of ridicule, freedom of rebuttal, freedom to reply, etc. They said something, i said two words that somehow caused someone’s entire worldview to require defending. Sounds like if it can be defeated so easily with words it’s not that big a deal.
What Oberon said.
But also with a caveat of “Mother of God, how do you FUNCTION?”
Is it like a blinker, where you just tune out and forget it? Or a foil hat, where you assume that all the times it happened were just paid actors? Or is it something worse, where you just figure they deserved it, somehow, just need to look hard enough for a reason?
There is no excuse for just pretending it doesn’t happen.
Perhaps you could back that up with ACTUAL FACTS, rather than just Lefty rhetoric (I mean, you cant, since it’s patently and objectively false, but watching the mental gymnastics should at least be entertaining).
Otherwise, you’re just another racist spouting gibberish and nonsense.
The rhetoric’s all coming out of your side, and Sasha’s objectively in the right. Police have murdered people just for being black. Black guy has car trouble, calls for help, police show up treat him like a criminal and gun him down because ‘I feared for my life.’ Black guy stops an actual criminal police show up and shoot the black guy because ‘he was obviously a criminal.’ The mental gymnastics you people engage in to deny objective reality is not entertaining in the slightest, as you defend your own racism in making excuses for murderers.
The rhetoric coming from the left is just as bad , ” defund the police ” , ” all blacks are permanent victims ” , ect . Black people are not helped more by having a smaller police presence in poor neighborhoods than any other group , all you do is enable more crime and make things harder for the people living there. Labeling an entire race as a ” victim ” is the racism of lower expectations and hurts everyone.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/12/06/anti-racism-lowering-expectations-education-just-form-soft-bigotry-column/6410954002/
That isn’t rhetoric. And you clearly never bothered to look up the actual idea of Defund the police, just read the name and assumed.
Having different groups to respond to suicidal people, domestic abuse, traffic violations, armed robberies…by taking money away from the one group and instead split it into multiple departments.
So that the same “I got this job to feel like john wayne and shoot BAD GUYS!” isn’t getting bored, going to warrior training and itching to be a hero.
And yes, that would help EVERYONE. No-one is labelling their entire race as a victim, they are recognizing that systemic racism still exists. Or how do you explain your correlation between poor neighborhoods are mostly black people?
I have no problem with spending MORE funds to ADD additional response units for non violent situations , but removing funding from the police will mean they stop patrolling more dangerous areas and the alternative units will not go there if they do not feel safe.
As to systemic racism : https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/no_america_is_not_plagued_with_systemic_racism.html
No, you’re just completely wrong here. Right now cops are responding to many non-criminal calls, calls which they are not trained to handle. Taking funding away from a police force to establish a group which can respond to these non-criminal calls does not reduce the coverage of cops responding to criminal calls at all.
I’m not going to read the article you linked, because the title alone is enough to let anyone with a mind know that it contains nothing of any value. America is indeed plagued with systemic racism, and has been since the nation was created. First with legal slavery, later with Jim Crow, segregation, miscegenation laws, the absence of civil rights such as voting, corporate racism such as the well documented discrimination against blacks by banks and realtors, Federal discrimination such as the similarly well documented disparity of treatment of black soldiers with regards to their GI Bill benefits, the list goes on and on and only a fool would try to claim that “no America is not plagued with systemic racism.” Only a fool, a racist, or someone with some other agenda such as finding political or financial favor for expressing racist views amongst people with similar racist views.
“Oh, but that’s all in the past,” claim the idiots who want to believe that systemic racism is a switch flipped by granting blacks the right to vote, or by ending slavery, or by electing a mixed race black man President, or whatever other example they might hold up as their favorite “switch.” Nope. Take a look at the US Army: Blacks are over represented in the enlisted ranks and under represented in the officer ranks.
You want equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity and you have closed your mind to all other concepts and opinions. Enjoy your bubble.
“Defund the Police” doesn’t actually mean taking money from them. It means using some money that would be INFLATING their budget to work on Mental Health and Counselling.
That, and it also stands for Police actually getting proper training so their first action isn’t “He’s not white/straight/neurotypical, I should shoot him.”
@Pendrake
If it’s not about defunding; rename it. Don’t call it “defund the police.” Problem solved.
You won’t, because your argument is merely meant to distract from the actual agenda.
I have looked up the “defund the police” idea. “Therapists” as “community responders” really? Go look what Hitler did before establishing the Brown Shirts. Go friggin’ look it up. They were the “gymnastics and sports division.” Yeah. Ya’ll should be ashamed of your blatant racism.
Stop trying to undermine the legal system.
When a mentally ill person is having an episode, cops are not really trained to deal with it. Why would they be? It takes years. This is no dis on cops, just being realistic: controlling a riot or responding to a shooting or even ticketing a speeder takes way different skills than talking down someone who’s not responding to their meds.
Don’t be a tool. Therapists are not automatically “Brown Shirts” just because you’ve had a bad experience with them.
Grow the fuck up. Your experiences are your own, but they do not apply universally to every situation.
one of the problems that has to be dealt with is Many police departments
strongly push the idea of us versus them in training and that any perceived threat
should be responded to with force.
There was a case A couple of years ago were a lone officer responded to a call
On a man having a breakdown in his front yard
The man was belligerent, Incoherent and stumbling.
He kept approaching the officer.
The officer kept his cool, calmly backed away until he could get the man to settle down
Get him in handcuffs and call for medical support. he did not draw his gun.
The officer was censured, and threatened with Demotion for-
‘Risking the life of a police officer'( his own) for not pulling his gun and shooting the man out of hand.
there is currently a case in court were a woman is suing the police
Who, on pulling over a vehicle that matched the make and model of reported stolen car
Are alleged to have Removed the occupants at gunpoint, handcuffed them, and kept them lying facedown Next to the vehicle for two hours.
the occupants were a mother and her children ranging from 16 to 6.
Yes, they handcuffed at gunpoint a six-year-old, and yes they were black, the officers white.
the woman repeatedly told them that her vehicle registration and insurance card were in
The glove compartment. they never Bothered to check.
this was all documented by people recording it on their cell phones.
I was born in the South, and I’m old enough to remember Jim Crow, and the marches,
And segregated schools, and water fountains, and having to call out the National Guard
so little black girl Could go to school.
a lot Has improved over the intervening decades but there’s still a hell of a Long way to go.
Defund The Police-
The contemporary idea began with the Black Panther Party’s push to replace state-operated police with a community-based enforcement model in the late 1960s and early 1970s. as inspired by the writings of Angela Davis.
/I see this problem of people being Woke Marxists in that they tried to reuse terms claiming that’s not what they really meant when they realize that society does not instantly join their bandwagon.
I believe I said “back that up with ACTUAL FACTS”, not more screeching.
Breonna Taylor was killed for the crime of being in her own bed while black.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/11/family-seeks-answers-fatal-police-shooting-louisville-woman-her-apartment/
A single case proves nothing I can do that too.
https://townhall.com/columnists/marinamedvin/2020/08/11/phoenix-police-shot-and-killed-a-white-man-in-may-have-you-heard-about-it-n2574088
1. That doesn’t disprove the prior case. It provides evidence and reason that it isn’t just black communities or those that care about them that should call for the the police to be defunded and reformed. That even out of selfishness, you should want it too.
2. That article is a hilarious hot mess to anyone not already wanting to believe what it says.
For a start, notice them stressing the “whites are statistically higher to be shot”…which they then can’t cite the data for, because it’d reveal it isn’t proportional. The article itself almost accidentally points this out “More white people are killed”, but, “black people are more likely to be killed”.
And oh no, it took it a whole week to start TRENDING. Truly oppressed. How many deaths happened in the US this last year? Were they all on mainstream media?
Well, the article is wrong. https://i.postimg.cc/vHdWTHdz/fb-img-1468866408260.jpg
Well, the image is wrong. It would have us believe that (assuming that the sources are accurate) that the statistics of who kills who is the totality of “systemic racism.”
Since this is not the case, the conclusion the image wants us to derive is not accurate.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure baseless rhetoric doesn’t defeat hard numbers, but keep at it Oberon.
Much as I don’t want to post in this thread because it’s an awful, flame-baiting tangent, just going to say that the image Wzaerreazw (no idea how to pronounce that but just realized it’s a palindrome) posted is based on the fbi crime report from 2013, expanded homicide data table 6 (although I have no idea where he got the simplified picture/chart, but the link below is where the data in that chart is from).
Here’s the official link:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls
Can we move on to comic-peripheral arguments now, guys? This isnt a remotely fun argument to read on the forum, and I have no idea what any of this has to do with if Cora was or was not justified in shooting Cowlie McSplatterbody.
@Pander
The chart is long gone; removed for being “fake news.” I have it saved in my “charts” folder.
I know posting more statistics doesn’t change these guy’s minds about the actual facts of the situation. But hard facts may dissuade silent readers from following the more vocal idiots.
As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle: police and the justice system DEFINITELY need reform. Just one look at the U.S. incarceration rate will tell you that.
https://loevy-content-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2015/12/incarceration-rates-nato-600×385.png
(I like this chart because it’s cheeky.)
But the facts remain: we cannot bow to the “reasoning” of popular terrorist groups. That is simply madness. So long as their views remain uncontested I will respond in kind. I feel it is my duty as an upstanding American to use Free Speech for its intended purpose; freely presenting arguments and counterarguments to a hotly contested issue.
NP. I was just giving context to people as to where your chart came from originally (the FBI Crime Report – it’s actually listed at the bottom of your picture as a link that I checked to make sure it’s accurate, which it is), since Oberon was disputing it being real or correct.
> A single case proves nothing [about whether or not systemic racism exists] I can do that too.
How many cases would you like us to cite in order to be convinced? If you provide a number that is reasonable to quote on a message board then we can meet it.
Here’s a few to start you off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PK8t8vtSM&bpctr=1611778148&t=27s (Shows a cop shooting a black man 7 times as he tries to get in a car)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqBAOX6Qegk (Doesn’t show the moment of shooting but shows the autistic man on the ground, hands raised, and then him dead and testimony from the therapist with him.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J9w8KKeJ9M (Black man in his own garage walks towards cop with a cell phone in hand. Cop tells him to put his hands out, he does not comply, cop shoots him and leaves him with no care for 6 minutes until he dies.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V94Lphx6z6Y (Philando Castille politely advises a cop that he has a firearm in the car. Cop tells him “don’t pull it out”, Philando says “I’m not pulling it out”, cop shoots him a lot.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUtwCHNDto4 Black man holding a steak knife walks towards a cop. Cop says “Eh, I’ve got a taser but let’s go with the gun instead” and shoots him 9 times.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZtK31DIElw 509 times a cop killed someone, 24% were black despite 13% of the population being black.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGeiiJWejNc (Cops hassle black man, he tries to drive away, they shoot him a lot.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc7vnFPtWJo (Two cops are holding a black man down, one of them decides to shoot him.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKQqgVlk0NQ (Black man jogs away from cop, cop shoots him in the back multiple times.)
Here’s a search so you can find more: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blacks+shot+by+cops
Out of aprox 61 million police interactions in 2019 – 15 black and 25 whites ( unarmed ) were killed by police. That’s about 0.000006 % of the time. As mentioned before that’s not a pattern it’s a statistical anomaly. By the way during that same year over 7,000 blacks were killed by other blacks , but I guess that does not matter.
No, she was killed accidentally, because she was in the line of fire when her boyfriend had a shootout with the police because he thought they were burglars.
An all around horrible accident, but an accident. No one wanted to shoot her.
It wasn’t an accident. The cops lied to the judge in order to obtain their warrant from that judge. They committed a crime in order to commit another crime. And you’re calling it an accident…
The shooting was an accident, not predicted by anyone, that police misbehaviour had happened several steps before doesn’t change that.
That misbehaviour might have been due to racism – but that’s it. It’s not an example for “shot for being black.”
Yes, it absolutely is. The warrant was obtained only because of lies and under false pretenses. The cops could not have entered the residence without that warrant, again only obtained via criminal lies.
When you have a situation where the police should not have obtained permission to be present, but committed crimes to justify their presence, any acts that happen as a result of those crimes are also crimes.
For example: If four people conspire to rob a bank, but in the commission of that crime someone is killed by one person who kills someone, all>/i> of the bank robbers are guilty of criminal conspiracy to kill, because they are all involved in the overall crime. The other three cannot claim that they had no intention to murder anyone and therefore they are innocent, because the crime was committed under the auspices of their conspiracy to commit another crime.
When a cop lies to a judge to obtain a warrant, any crimes committed by those cops shall apply to all of the cops. Regardless of whether they “pulled the trigger” or not. They are all criminal conspirators by the simple fact of being present during the commission of a crime.
“Shot for being black” implies direct intent. That they might be legally culpable doesn’t mean intent, anymore than a negligence charge does.
As an aside, the felony murder concept isn’t really justice.
Breonna Taylor was killed because the police have been abusing no-knock warrants for the past 10 years, and no one’s cared because most of the victims have either been criminals, or white. Of the 6 casualties of a no-knock warrant I could find in the 12 month period surrounding Breonna Taylor’s death, 5 were white, and one was a police officer.
The earliest “warning” I could find came from a 2011 report on no-knock warrants that basically said they’re unreliable, they result in too many deaths, and they’re frequently served on the wrong house.
Hers is one of the few cases in 2020 that wasn’t a result of racism. And if she hadn’t been black, female, and an EMT… no one would have cared about her either.
Maybe we can agree that no-knock warrants delivered at night are a bad idea, even when the cops get the right address and the informant hasn’t just been telling stories.
Maybe drugs are bad but catching Yet Another Pusher (who will be replaced the next day because of the economics of drugs) is worth how many innocent deaths?
I venture to say: none.
I can’t respond to your other comment so I’ll respond here.
A. No-knock warrants are greatly abused. But also mostly ignored by BLM et. al.
B. I suffered immensely at the hands of the psychiatric community. I was waterboarded, beaten, and nearly murdered several times by my parents. The psychiatric community was convinced I was crazy and repeatedly tried to medicate away my “issues” while ignoring my testimony of literal torture. I’m talking the kind of torture they do in Gitmo. My parents were able to call the cops on me when I tried to run because of “therapists.” Yeah, “therapists” made that all possible.
C. Prior to Hitler’s Brown Shirts they were organized under the “Gymnastics and Sports” division. What do you think these “therapists” are going to do? Think about my case! Let’s just… not?
D. Government of China completely collapsed because of opium. We’re not talking stronger drugs like heroin or crack. Just opium. Do you have any idea how many MILLIONS died? See: “Opium Wars” and “The Great Leap Forward”
very briefly,and leaving out a hell of a lot of details,
the Chinese opium wars occurred because the British East Indian company
Was making a huge profit funneling opium into China,
And the Chinese government was trying to crack down on drug addiction.
Upset by this the East Indian company called Upon the British government and military
To support of the drug dealers and their profits.
war eventually resulted, and the Chinese lost, having to give concessions to the British.
This is how they ended up in control of Hong Kong.
@JamesH
Yes, that is correct.
China before the Opium Wars was bar none the richest nation in the world. Just a few decades later they were starving to death by the tens of millions.
The lesson? DON’T EVER minimize the risk of drugs. They’re literally more dangerous than Nazis.
The real lesson (that people have been ignoring for the past hundred years) is: don’t give control of drugs to criminals aka car-fucking-tells!!
Not only do you allow those cartels more power than some countries, you also prevent users from getting the treatment they need because you have now declared them to be criminals for the sole reason of smoking a joint or snorting a line
@Guesticules
Well, Amsterdam tried the legalization thing. Result:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/20/netherlands-becoming-a-narco-state-warn-dutch-police
Great…a singular example from a highly politicized case with much that is still unclear, written by “journalists” who have a clear bias, for a rag that’s not even worth using to wipe the mud off my feet.
Hmmmm…How about an exhaustive analysis from the National Institute of Health, with ACTUAL FACTS AND FIGURES: https://www.ajpmonline.org/action/showPdf?pii=S0749-3797%2816%2930384-1
Now, that’s from about 8 years ago, during that *magical* time when Obambi was El Jefe, and everybody loved everybody else and life was wonderful…HWARF…yeah…nope…couldn’t continue that line of bullcrap even in sarcasm…However, it’s also the most exhaustive and complete study I found in a quick (like, literally just a minute or two) Googling. I’m sure if I actually cared enough to spend more than five minutes answering your ignorant ass, I could find even more such reports.
Note that the *entirety* of all non-hu-white people fatally shot by the Po Po during that time period doesn’t even add up to the number of us crackers capped by those vicious, EBULLLLLLL cops.
For those of you incapable of doing basic math (which I’m guessing is most of you Lefties, since you all seem to have the collective IQ of goldfish…by which I mean the crackers, not the actual fish)…allow me to help:
Number of Evil Whiteys killed: 424 (or 52.2% of total)
Number of poor, downtrodden, abused, put upon, held down by THE MAN and his “systemic racism” (another nonsense term (Read: LIE) that you people just slurp up because your pundits scream it constantly, and none of you are clever enough to realize you’re being used and discarded by them every damn election cycle so you gobble that turkey shit up with a ladle), “victims”: 386 (47.5%…And note that this is ALL of the Non-Hu-White deaths, not just black folks…they only account for 263, or 32.4% of overall fatalities)
Now, I’m not TEH GENYUSS, like some of you clearly *think* you are, but even a dumbass redneck cracker like me understands that 424 > 386.
B-B-But Arklyte, you screech, What about more recent info? I mean, SURELY, during the time when all y’all Lefties were SO HORRIBLY REPRESSED under the homotransaislamabrownpeopleaphobicracistREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE thumb of Orange Man Bad, SURELY it must have been SO MUCH WORSE!!
Nope: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/
Since you’re SOOOOOOO enamored of that ICON of journalistic integrity, the WaPo, here’s their own listing (from 2016. Of the 962 people fatally shot by the EVILFACISTSCUMPIGKKKOPS, a staggering 469 were Hu-WhiteRacistFacistHomoTransaIslamistaphobes…again, just about half. 433 were those poor, oppressed masses of Brown Folks (and as for all those ‘Other’ types…Hey, dont blame me for that particular ‘microaggression’…I didn’t make the damn chart…blame those “enlightened minds” at the WaPo).
Are ya getting the point Sparky? All you and your Lefty screechers have is just that…screeching and nonsense, that you cannot, in fact, BACK UP WITH FACTS! Even your own Icons of Enlightenment, when they are forced to admit THE FACTS, agree that Black Folks are NOT, in FACT, disproportionately targeted by the police.
Facts dont give a shit about your FEEWINGS!
Go cry somewhere else.
Wow, so if we were to rate these numbers based off of various race’s percentage of the population then does anything change, say us evil whitey’s are 60.1% of the United State’s of A’s population then in a post racism color blind world we’d make up 60% of deaths by popo. Yet somehow we’re only 50%, gosh the inescapable conclusion is the police should kill more of us.
Numbers don’t lie. I however do, extensively.
You mean like the ACTUAL FACT that President Trump tried to murder off and/or kidnap the mahority US Government on the 6th?
Bullshit Rhetoric and actual fact aren’t limited to one party.
And FYI, any party who claims any media they don’t own is “Fake news” is no better than the third-world Dictators who do the same damn thing. I don’t give a rat’s ass what side of the aisle you’re on.
Majority of the*
actually,no evidence (yet) the Trump actually intended for his mob of diluted
sycophants To murder Congressman or overthrow the government,
But his stream of consciousness narcissistic bullishit and lies as well as those
of his political Toadies provably led to a mob assaulting the capital resulting in five deaths
As well as many injuries, (one police officer is apparently going to lose a eye)
I personally think that in his twisted little mind he thought just having a mob chant outside
Would be enough to intimidate The vice president to throw out the election
and give Him at LEAST four more years.
the fact that The VP had no constitutional authority to do that probably Barely registered
On his gigantic ego.
it’s still Incitement to sedition regardless of his intent.
Which is what he’s being impeached for.
Also, the death total is up to 7. Two Capitol Police officers committed suicide due to the events of the sixth.
Also, I consider the fact he deliberately blocked the deployment of the National Guard when it was asked for by both the Mayor and Capitol Police AFTER he knew it had gone violent as a shining statement of his intentions that day. As well as the fact he @#$%ed off to the White House to watch it on TV and celebrated.
Funny thing is, regardless of whether the impeachment goes through or not, he’ll be considered tied with Andrew Jackson for “Worst US President Ever,” and Jackson had to commit genocide on Native Americans for that label. Well, assuming he doesn’t go down in history as Jefferson Davis’s successor.
Just FYI, the capitol police are a separate unit from the Washington D.C. police. Why didn’t the mayor send in the D.C. police? Oh, because he voted to make that impossible in June 2020.
So he blocked deployment of the national guard because the left had been trying to force him to deploy the national guard for his entire presidency. Seriously, search “Trump” “national guard” and see how many times it comes up. It’s absurd.
This time he was legally handcuffed and left with a choice. Be forced to watch his capitol invaded by a crazed mob or call in the military and probably have them shoot “innocent civilians.” Because, A) the military is not well-trained in nonlethal tactics And B) that crowd definitely had people ready to open fire and start a skirmish.
So. He made the decision that would cost less lives.
This was a long-planned setup intended to get Trump impeached regardless of his choice. If you couldn’t tell by the fact they’d already been trying to get him impeached for literally 3 and a half years, then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
There are things Trump has legitimately done wrong. This wasn’t one of them.
Just to let you know more about the period prior to the Opium Wars;
The reason England did started those wars is because China was draining the English economy. They were, sometimes forcibly, buying up all the silver backing the British pound. It was a very blatant attempt to destabilize the English Empire – and it virtually recreated the way the Roman Empire had collapsed.
Despite all of England’s attempts to reason with the Chinese government, they absolutely refused to compromise. England got so desperate they even offered China whole-manufactured and then even blueprints of England’s proprietary high-tech (at the time) armaments. England offered absolutely everything they could to make China stop destroying their economy.
China still refused to compromise. England couldn’t beat China in head-on warfare so they did the only thing left: beat China at their own game. They didn’t just get the Chinese addicted to opium; they destabilized the very structure of the government by gradually corrupting and eventually puppeting leaders who would accept bribes in return for distributing opium.
The battles between China and England prior to the Opium Wars were a kind of warfare that no nation at that time was equipped to defend against. These were the first large-scale use of what we now call “soft power.” Nations thusly affected could only go on the offensive – and that is what England did. That’s why it did such vast damage to the Chinese economy and government.
And, this series of economic battles is likewise why the English Empire collapsed not long thereafter. First, England caused severe collateral damage to India, which was previously one of England’s most profitable colonies. Second, the economic squeeze led to England’s inability to focus on suppressing nearby European powers (WWI & WWII). Third, England had already royally pissed off the U.S. and the U.S. was all too happy to help England dismantle its empire.
In short, China was not the victim. They were originally the aggressor. The result of their blithe stubbornness was that ultimately nobody won.
Oh, and these two techniques are today called “debt trap diplomacy” and “drug warfare.” Guess who’s still doing those today? China! Sigh. Some people never learn.
*shakes head* Wow…the TDS is strong with you, isn’t it? So sad.
I’d love to enlighten your tiny little mind with the truth about that situation, but A) Lefties and Truth tend to go together like the human body and bleach, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any fatalities, and B) I just spent all of the time I’m willing to waste educating morons on the idiot above you, so why dont you toddle back to Twitter, Facebook, or one of your other Safe Spaces™ and leave the conversations to us adults, yeah?
2016 FBI data, black men commit murder 572.8% more than white men. Rapes are committed at a level of 146.1% greater, robbery at 617.9% greater, aggravated assault at 203.3% greater and violent crime in total at 263.6% greater. Police interactions increase with criminal activity.
What you are forgetting, is that it is Whitey who is making the po’ Black man do those things
All Black’s are innocent victims of Whitey
Well, fuck you guys, seriously.
I mean that’s literally the argument put forth by BLM.
No, it literally is not.
And here I have used the word ‘literally,’ accurately, while your use was incorrect.
Here’s an argument against BLM. She’s a black woman so don’t be racist.
https://youtu.be/3vf7yX9ESRc?t=177
No, it is used by a LOT of people.
Skin color has very little to do with it.
After all, who CARES about systemic injustice against anyone (skin color, disability, religion, choice of bed partner or whatever) as long as we can spout our crap to anyone who will listen?
MAKE AMERICA HATE AGAIN! Well done, Mr Trump. Good job in erasing almost a century of progress in 4 years.
Fair point, but at the same time this was a problem long before Trump. I would know. The current state of society slowly turned my loving mother into a horrifically abusive person who eventually performed actual Gitmo-style torture. I was in severe denial, as was she. When I finally confronted her about it she broke down and hasn’t recovered since.
Looking back, I can see the signs. I can see where everything went wrong. So I don’t entirely blame her. I also blame the selfish assholes who decided their pet politics were more important than the life and well-being of the people around them. That mindset is infectious; it infected my own family. It makes me very, very angry.
First off. wtf is wrong with you guys?
second. Throw aside the racially biased demographs and look at social income and other ACTUALLY MEANINGFUL demographs and you’ll see that white and black folks who share the same social status and poverty issues also share the same statistics that you cited.
If that is true then why the claime that blacks are being targeted by the police ? If the rate of violent crime is the same across races then the story that blacks are specifically targeted by the police is false.
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?546839-Twice-as-many-unarmed-whites-were-shot-dead-by-police-in-2019-than-blacks
You two are arguing at cross purposes and making the falseness of your claims too obvious.
One of you is using proportional percentages, the other is using numbers. Try switching, see what happens?
I still see blacks being amazingly good at committing murder?
Now, Now, don’t confuse them with facts. It’s unsporting to have a battle of wits with unarmed opponents, you know. Some people just love to live in a south park world, where the police gun down a black kid and claim it’s a Covid death, no matter how fictional that may be. Just look at Treyvon Martin, a teenaged thug who assaulted an armed security guard, bashed his head into the pavement, then tried to take his gun, and how that was magically transformed by the press into a cop randomly shooting a black kid. The facts don’t matter, only the message.
TLDR: Haters gonna hate.
Strap them down “A Clockwork Orange” style and make them watch the Star Trek TOS episode “Let that be your last battlefield” over and over until they understand that judging everything by skin color is the wrong way to look at the world.
Trayvon Martin didn’t do that either. That whole episode was so blown up by the news media nobody even knows the real story. Both sides were to blame but legally it was self-defense so the shooter was (properly) acquitted. That said, it definitely wasn’t an open-and-shut case.
Um, that would be because blacks are being targeted by the police.
Look up the case of the cop whistleblower who revealed that he was encouraged to seek his ticket/arrest quotas in neighboring, largely black, communities from the largely white one one he was supposed to be patrolling. Because the police force knew that poor blacks were far less likely to get a fair shake in court than were whites. Thus resulting in more convictions, more revenues from tickets and fines, etc.
This is not a single, isolated circumstance. It is a revenue driven case of systemic racism.
.
.
Also: It’s “claim.” And there’s no space between the end of a sentence and the punctuation mark, such as your question mark in the quoted portion above. We all typo, but if you intend to be taken seriously you might want to step up your game, because people who can’t spell or grammar also can’t expect to be given much credibility.
Oberon, it’s an open secret that in areas where you don’t have specific ethnic neighbourhoods? the police do that in whatever happens to be the poorest neighbourhood available. It’s not a matter of race, it’s a matter of money-for-lawyers or free time to attend the hearing and contest. IOW what you’re really talking about isn’t race-warfare, it’s class-warfare.
Washington post used to have a site where you could search police fatalities by a bunch of different factors, and it’s a left leaning publication. They’ve strangely moved away from that to blend it all together and make the details not so searchable but the 2019 Fatal Force page is still up.
Put in “Black” and “Unarmed” and how many cases do you think you will find?
The answer is twelve.
Out of millions of police interactions that year, involving hundreds of thousands of officers working across the nation, an unarmed black person was killed twelve times in 2019. Black people being killed for no reason isn’t a trend, it’s an anomaly.
Out of curiosity, you got that stat for unarmed whites, Hispanics, and so on?
Just for comparative analysis.
Actually that’s a correct statistic, at least according to the FBI National Use of Force Data Collection for 2019.
It’s available at http://www.fbi.gov, but you’ll need to do a search on the website for it under the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and plug in what you’re looking for to get the applicable data. This was also reported in the Washington Post, although the post said 13 – https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ – which I believe used the FBI database as their source. It also admittedly did not include deaths of unarmed black men by off-duty police and by non-shooting deaths, but those are even smaller in number and usually make the news as national headlines when they do occur, or there the criminal cases or investigations show the police to have not been at fault a significant amount of that time, hence it doesnt get added to the FBI database obviously.
But in general it is a very small number like Changer said. Again, to reiterate, the FBI database also has stats for unarmed whites, hispanics, men, women, age-dependent categories, etc as well but you have to plug in the info to get the data.
All this is sort of a moot point in the comic’s scenario though – it was a clear case of defense of others, regardless of the race of Mr Chunky Salsa, Cora’s status as a non-police officer, or even the gory nature of the killing, so not really sure why people are arguing about that.
Also I think this is whole unnecessarily political argument everyone is getting into about unarmed people being shot is irrelevant here since Spackle McOnthewall the Third WAS armed and was actively about to murder Sydney.
Yeah there is a time and place for political discussion. I think it would be best if we avoid politics in this forum. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a topic that should be discussed but it doesn’t have to be discussed here.
I am in general in favor of political discussion. But there are trolls in this thread; I suspect ‘Shasha Whitefur’ threw out a intentionally inflammatory comment just to see what would happen. Other commentators seemed to stick around, which suggests to me that they actually hold their opinions.
Trolls are villains, like the Weeping Angels, but rather than time energy they somehow feed off discord. Therefore they create it.
The policy questions of policing, residual racism, preventing and prosecuting violent crime, are serious questions. They deserve serious contemplation. I don’t think we have the right solutions in place right now.
But the first problem is that we don’t even have the right data – I’ll point everybody to this statement, “Participating agencies throughout the country voluntarily provide reports on crimes known to the police and on persons arrested” ~https://ucr.fbi.gov/cjis/ucr/data-quality-guidelines-new
Voluntarily.
Imagine, for a moment, the problem of COVID if medical providers did not have to report respiratory illnesses for agencies to analyze for trends. We would have no idea how bad the problem is; and would probably see deaths on par with the Spanish Flu. Luckily, “Under federal and state statutes, healthcare facilities must report to various data banks certain disease conditions and medical events, such as the treatment of gunshot wounds…”
~https://library.ahima.org/doc?oid=58309#.YBFz1haRW00
and the history of how that became a mandate shows how government can learn and improve over time. Good skim, or full read if you’ve got the time.
So here’s an interesting question. Digging into the CDC data, under legally mandated reporting, we see 14,415 gunshot murders in 2016. FBI data, under optional reporting shows 11,004.
~https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html and
~https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-4.xls
That’s a significant difference, 3411 murders that the FBI isn’t tracking.
We can’t even have a reasonable discussion with that poor quality of data. If you want to take a stance; the best one to take would be to call your various representatives and tell them to pass a law that will mandate reporting, raw data and lots of it. Then we can slice and dice the data, and like we did in the last century, learn from it and make changes to ‘establish Justice’ and ‘secure domestic tranquility’.
Small police departments don’t report because they’re small. Compiling reports for the FBI is an expense they simply cannot afford. Your “mandated reporting” would basically drive thousands of police departments into debt. Mandated reporting is partly why many small towns have police but do not have or have recently lost their medical treatment facilities.
So, if your goal is to kill rural America and drive up the murder rate, then it’s an excellent idea.
BEST! BADGUY! NICKNAME! EVAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anything to bring some levity to this particular incredibly off-topic thread :)
That claim is thoroughly debunked (in the US) by the sheer number of police encounters involving *UNARMED* people which result in police utilizing lethal force within 2 seconds of making first contact. Often while still in the process of announcing that they are, in fact, police officers (assuming they even bother with that) and then being let off with the ‘punishment’ of a paid vacation.
^^THIS^^
If your friend was kidnapped and you’re there to rescue them, and you see someone waving a gun in their face, you dont politely ask them to stop, you put said gun waver down, HARD, and you dont hesitate, otherwise your friend, and possibly yourself, could just as easily wind up dead.
Was what Cora did overkill…yeah, probably…I mean, she could have just as easily NOT reduced them to meaty chunks and traumatized poor Sydney. But AFA whether deadly force was justified, it absolutely was.
To quote Ingsol the vampire, when it comes to the reactions of members of the Council:
“Clearly it vasn’t enough kill!”
:)
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-560-questions-of-security/
I know that’s not entirely on point but I wanted an excuse to say that as a response to ‘overkill.’
She’s justified in using deadly force to stop the threat. But she used it in way that didn’t help with that, due to the delay.
Her shot broke enough bones and ligaments to compel Mr. Misogyny drop his gun. That is heroically skillful shooting (maybe with a targeting assist like Sydney has. Why not?)
It is his personal misfortunate that the force she had most immediately was lethal. Remember, she was going up against Concretia, who just a few pages ago we saw take 10 to the head and merely grimace. Who could blame her for loading up?
Now – maybe she had a SpaceTazer that she just didn’t use, because of her personal philosophy that if you kill a boss in an ugly way, it scares the others straight.
There is no point in using that ammo against Concretia either. It doesn’t do more than disable her momentarily, which a high-powered slug can do, too, but without that weird and impractical delay. (and that’s assuming it’s neither programmable nor remote-controlled fuze.)
Also, her gun has multiple barrels, so being loaded for Concretia is no reason not to be loaded for human.
To be fair, Cora was probably mainly carrying ammo to prepare for superhuman and extraterrestrial threats, not normal human threats.
If you go hunting bear and a badger attacks you, you’ll still probably use the ammo you loaded for the bear instead of changing to a smaller caliber, right?
(forgive me for any errors here in the analogy, I don’t hunt so I don’t know if you actually use different calibers for hunting, and I have not yet purchased a gun, but I’m planning on doing so)
This analogy doesn’t quite work because(can’t really comment on hunting details) the delayed round involves tradeoffs. You should load it if you can’t stop your enemy otherwise, so the delay is acceptable. But when dealing with something where the overkill isn’t needed, so the delay becomes a liability.
Maybe imagine a very powerful but inaccurate bear round. Bears are big enough the inaccuracy doesn’t matter, but you can’t hit a badger with it. Then you might want different ammo for badgers.
Additionally, she likely has loadouts that are plenty of kill without the delay. Like railgun slugs for example.
You are only justified in using overwhelming force if there is danger (tick) and there is no other reasonable way (not tick).
Obviously we can’t know for sure but it seems likely to me that Cora has both the ability and the tech to easily have disabled the enemy had she wanted. She just didn’t want to.
You’re making an assumption. And one which is not likely to be able to be tested. Cora is no more likely to allow puny Earth humans to examine her tech than is Dabbler. And if Cora simply states that she did what she thought was necessary to prevent the felony murder of Sydney, it really doesn’t matter if Cora had non-lethal options at her disposal. She was the person on the spot, she took action to prevent a felony, and she was successful. Any questions about her other potential options would be limited to a court, which she will almost certainly not face since there’s no reason to charge her with a crime.
But to many people, there always has to be a way to resolve problems without killing. Often there is, and that is a good thing, but sometimes, there are no good answers. When there is no time to think, only to react, often mistakes get made and then people who were not there and were not involved get to question, get to complain. Get to armchair quarterback.
We do not know all of what makes Cora tick. We do not know much about her at all except that she is Dabbler’s friend, the mercenary captain of a spacecraft and a very dangerous person to cross. She is being nice to Sydney, but is that altruism or something else?
Cora seems to like Sydney but to be brutally honest, she probably is keeping an eye on Sydney because of the orbs. Such technology is a problem and she knows it. When ‘Daddy’ pointed the gun at Sydney, Cora took action, not just because Sydney was in danger, but because NO ONE KNOWS what will happen if/when Sydney dies. Yes, what Cora did was over the top messy, but any hostage rescue person likely would have fired on seeing a gun pointed at a hostage’s face like that.
But frankly? I think Cora has the BIG picture in mind here. She couldn’t care less about shredding some goon when Nth tech is involved. I do wonder when/if the Xenovarchy will show up and what they will do. Will they show as much restraint?
I mean, think about it. All those aliens went nuts over Max singlehandedly taking out a Fel battle carrier. What would anyone with any brains in the galaxy do if suddenly a big red ‘UNKNOWN TECH HERE!’ sign flashed after Sydney got axed?
Can you say ‘feeding frenzy’? The sheer chaos that would result would not be good for anyone, let alone independent mercenary captains.
Whether she likes Sydney or not, Cora has bigger worries than one human girl’s life. Certainly bigger problems than one stupid goon’s life.
Valid point. What if that borked teleport Sydney was tempted to click was actually a completely different planet – or worse, star system / galaxy – that was erased from existence when the orbs’ previous owner was killed? That could explain the weird behavior on technology that shouldn’t be possible to damage by normal means.
I mean, we saw all those “universal cogwheels.” What happens when they all get set to zero?
You’re clearly not English!
We have a very strong tradition of barging into other countries and demanding that they do things our way.
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]”
sure it happens all the time. it’s called “diplomatic immunity” and when you own a starship that can transverse solar systems like most folk travel to states, you can damn well bet she has it. it’s pretty much a given that if you have the power to exceed the lightspeed limit you also have the power to destroy the biosphere of a world. I don’t think she will be standing trial.
Cora most definitely does not have diplomatic immunity unless the US specifically has granted her diplomatic immunity. Judging from how they had threatened to impound her ship during the Fel Ship arguments, it’s unlikely that she has diplomatic immunity. Probably the only alien who DOES have diplomatic immunity is Irradon, who is legally recognized by the US government as the Representative of Extra-terrestrials on Earth for the Council, since the Council and the US government have a legal, albeit secret, treaty which has been in effect for quite some time, and now is recognized in public, based on how he was at the UN for the arguments over the FTL starter spaceship the US is getting in trade for the Fel ship.
There is legal and then there is de facto. Cora has de facto immunity (call it diplomatic if you like) because as Shane Powell has pointed out she has at her fingertips the power to destroy our biosphere. She also has at her fingertips the power to refuse to allow her ship to be impounded.
Other than forcing a confrontation with Archon’s supers, her ship is probably immune to any attempts to access/breach it or destroy it that Earth has available. Sydney has already stated that she opts out of any such proposed actions, without any apparent consequences to her status as a member of Archon. That pretty much leaves it in Maxima’s hands to decide to obey any such orders or not.
“as Shane Powell has pointed out she has at her fingertips the power to destroy our biosphere.”
I think Maxima might disagree with that statement.
“She also has at her fingertips the power to refuse to allow her ship to be impounded.”
I again think that if Maxima was ordered to by her commanding officer or her Commander-in-Chief, she would obey orders if Cora was becoming a threat to the US. Sydney wouldnt, but she’s been military for under a week at that point in time, at least from her perspective. Maxima’s career military and is a Lieutenant Colonel. If she doesn’t obey a direct order, she’s pretty much like Vehemence thinking her power allows her to put the law in her own hands instead of the chain of command.
If Cora started saying how she is immune from the laws of us puny earthlings, Maxima would probably have to explain that ‘that reasoning don’t fly in the USA.’ Also remember, the US government does have at least SOME sort of agreement with aliens via the Council and Irradon, who represents extraterrestrials, and the Council are happy with and want to remain on good terms with the US Government and Archon, as Crimson said. At the VERY least, Cora would have to answer to the Council, who DOES have some sort of authority over her while on Earth, as they do with Dabbler.
In any case, I’m mainly saying that she has no diplomatic immunity to a host country’s laws unless the host country gives it first, or unless there’s some previous agreement to how diplomatic immunity is granted. Could she try to be an enemy to the US? Sure. But that’s like saying Sciona has diplomatic immunity.
look guys they are merks or freelancers, NOT police, not even deputies Cora is basically a edge-runner (alien flavor) …. she told you guys herself https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-725-phenomenal-cosmic-knowledge/ asking her to be a cop or equating her actions to those of ArcSwat is a bit much, yes, she is a “guest” of the planet and country, but she is still someone with a completely different set of priorities, actions, and reactions ….
Sydney is reacting how a normal person should.
Indeed she is. Even so I can’t blame Cora fully. there’s the chance that some of her ammo is less effective on non humans so even though she meant to use lethal she may not have meant to use blenderized ammo on them
Quite the opposite. When dealing with various life-forms, what might be a fatal shot to one species, might just be an irritation to another.
Cora’s weapon is just plain lethal to most carbon-based lifeforms, I would imagine.
In the situation Sydney was in there are are scared people and seriously insane people, and most kinds of insanity would still leave you scared. Courage is the mastery of fear, not its absence. “To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.” ( Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped.) Sydney kept it together beautifully until the danger was past, then had a perfectly normal reaction. She’s heroic.
She will have much to discuss with Dr. Frost when she gets back to base!
‘Courage is not the absence of fear, it is doing what needs to be done despite the fear.’ – General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster USA Retired.
I know he was quoting someone else, but I am not sure who. Many have said similar things over the centuries humans have been writing things down.
The sentiment is very true. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a survival instinct and hard coded into any living creature. Even the most simple single celled creatures feel it, if not in the same way that a human would.
Now, as to what you DO with the fear? That can cause shame or pride depending on the situation.
“Fear is a superpower. Fear can make you faster, and cleverer, and stronger.” – The Doctor (technically Clara paraphrasing The Doctor for the pedants out there).
Cora has got to learn to understand that Earthlings don’t have a cavalier attitude to gore, and even the most hardcore gore enthusiast usually at least RECOGNISES that not everyone thinks the way they do.
I mean I hate to look a gift rescue in the mouth but this is nauseating…
To be fair to Cora, she comes from what is a society that, in many places, is a frontier or high seas environment. This breeds certain habits, among other things a do-it-yourself approach to justice. This can get out of hand; remember her method of dealing with muggers back on the STATION. Now, muggers on the station may have developed a reputation for being lying liars about the “Do as we say and nobody gets hurt.” thing. But even the officer on the scene there, after yelling at Cora for “wildly excessive use of force” (despite her having saved the station once or twice), ticketed her for littering.
If I had to guess what’s wrong with Cora, I’d say that she’s seen a few too many victims (living, dead, dismembered) of pirates, slavers, genocidal maniacs, etc., and has developed a very basic “tag them and frag them” response pattern. As far as she’s concerned, by making themselves monsters, they’ve removed themselves from the consideration due to sentients.
The fracture cop seemed to have had a personal ‘issue’ with Cora (jealousy that Cora is hailed as a hero by Fracturites because she saved the place twice? envy that she has all those neat ‘toys’ and can come and go as she pleases? hatred because the local cop is overlooked beside the flashy out-of-towner?) and the only thing she could charge her with is littering (and not because she has been afforded leniency due to saving the station, twice)
Officer Gills has probably been after that gang for awhile but, for what ever reason, has never been able to catch them
The “issue” officer Gills had could’ve clearly be just that SHE will be the one filling all the paperwork for that incident.
Where’s all that coming from? Nothing at all indicates any of that gibberish.
The cop had an issue because its implied Cora has a habit of toeing or crossing the line in a gloriously (goriously) spectacular way whenever she can without getting charged or arrested for it and does so within the cop’s jurisdiction.
You… do know what ‘toeing the line’ means, right? Obviously not if you conflate it to be the same as ‘crossing the line’
It comes from the same place as every fucking thing else: from rampant speculation and personal bias
The only one who truly knows, is DaveB
When Cora toes the line, she uses the separated toe of one of her enemies.
Brilliantly said.
I would like to think the space police officer’s name was not just Officer Gills.
Remember, all police are Irish in Maxima’s mind. And probably from the 1920s.
So the officer was probably named Officer McGILLicutty.
*listens to crickets chirp at her joke amidst the silence*
It’s not, just couldn’t remember what it was, have a bad habit of using a descriptive nicknames for those who either don’t have a name or can’t remember what it was :(
Well she wasn’t given a name so either works :) I was just makin’ a joke because of the Maxima imagination about police on the last panel of:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-79-a-history-of-violence/
Yes, was just agreeing that it wasn’t ‘Officer Gills’
Wait, she really wasn’t named? Didn’t she have a Who’s Who entry? o_O
Nope. I checked. The one comic strip space cop was not named and didn’t have a Who’s Who entry :)
Not surprising. :)
Now I want an entire spinoff strip about Officer McGillicutty, who goes by the nickname Gills, and her older, more grizzled partner, Sargeant Lungstrom.
Together, they are Gills and Lungs. Coming this Fall on ABC.
Petitioning that the panel 5 “yarp” be changed to “yorp”
Seconded.
Will the Chair call the Roll?
AYE!
White or Wholemeal?
Brioche
Not sure Yorp would appreciate being associated with gagging due to nausea induced reaction to human-gibbing.
Depends on how fast he gobbles up the Yorpie Snax.
Hopefully someone saved the torture remote. ARC-SWAT should be able to trace the signal and find Concretia’s body.
Likely concretia can return to her regular body and break out unaided, now that the electro-stim is no longer controlled by bad actors.
What’s been stopping Concretia from killing him and taking the remote from his dead hands before then? It’s likely that:
-Concretia can’t return to her body as long as it’s sedated, or at least can’t do anything useful with it.
-There are other people to help control her. At the very least a nurse to take care of her body, who could use the shocker to make sure she keeps reporting in.
I’d be shocked if “Splatter McSplatterface”‘s remote was the only way to trigger her shock collar. Multiple other remotes at the very least.
Unless it’s routed over the phone network or the internet – which sounds like the smart thing to do to increase range.
Cora could not let the space balls fall into another’s hands. It would result in the destruction of the earth.
I’m not sure if destruction of the earth is the worst case for the balls getting to bad hands.
Pat didn’t say that the destruction of the Earth was necessarily the end of the story…
“but sometimes bad guys explode”…
yeah.
“People die at the fair.”
+1 million internet points for A Million Ways to Die in the West reference.
You win any argument now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcNORM9toI0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZM5B-Fn5eU
Remind me of the quote from he who fights with monsters.
…
When you start considering yourself the weekly 1-hour entertainment show for your doctor and are worried about rehashing on old things and needing to come up with new material…
I love cartoon violence.
Everyone trying to moralize this is being ridiculous.
It’s a friggin’ cartoon. Is it grotesque & over-the-top? Is it beyond any reasonable scope of juris bellum? Is it something any sane, reasonable, moderately well socialized adult human being would immediately condemn on ethical & moral grounds.
Yes, it is.
It is, in point of fact, so thoroughly beyond the pale, as to be – say it with me now – >[CARTOONISH]<.
Which is the point!
Calm down, get ‘em out of a knot, and just allow yourself an opportunity to scratch the old lizard-brain, and enjoy some utterly nonsensical, absurd fictional violence, for what it is…a sight gag.
And before anyone starts in on me, no, I do not give a single Platonic #$&@ about arguing about it in the abstract. This is no more a material question about ethics than is Hansel & Gretel (not their real names) shoving Frau Totenkinder into her own oven, or the Woodsman disemboweling an endangered species and torturing it to death. These are fictions wherein the violence is, ultimately, not the damn point.
So stop arguing! Just laugh at the fact that the villain of this particular moment got his comeuppance, and was ultimately hoist on his own arrogance.
I actually wanna see the panel in which they get gibbed. Why? It’s cartoon/fantasy violence. I’ve been watching stuff like that since I was a kid. It isn’t real, and I know it isn’t. Real gibbing rarely even resembles it. I’m still squeamish about actual human gore, but not much since I’ve been watching deep surgery and science programs on PBS since I was a kid, but the faceless accident victim they show to discourage drinking and driving. I’m sure my gullet would rise if I saw an actual person gibbed, but cartoon/fantasy/horror violence ranges from viscerally interesting to laughably humorous. XD
>I do not give a single Platonic #$&@ about arguing about it in the abstract.
If you don’t like it, don’t participate. But other people get to discuss the comic the way they like.
An important part of what I like about this comic is the attempt at thinking out consequences and building a consistent world. This facilitates in-depth discussion and unterstanding, which I value. That also means that anything that’s shown on page is fair game for analysis.
And no, the issue isn’t cartoonishly exaggerated- the very reason it got so much discussion is that it’s, in fact, _controversial_. Many people have said Cora’s violence was justified, and I’m only disagreeing because of in-depth analysis.
And I enjoyed that page. And then I started analyzing the scene, and it was quite fruitful. Cora’s motivation, the tactical implications, the mechanics of her weapon.
No one complains about cartoon violence. We’re analyzing a character, an intriguing character.
Jerry was a psychopath and is guilty of Crimes against Humanity that he perpetrated against Tom. Sometimes when that poor cat wasnt even trying to eat him or chase him out of Granny’s house that the mouse was illegally slumming in.
Jokes aside, I don’t see a problem with people arguing about this stuff or analyzing character actions on the forum. It’s fun. :) Same for arguing about actions done by people on TV show (Rick was NOT justified to kill Shane when Shane had decided NOT to kill Rick on the show, although Carl WAS justified in the comic to kill Shane because he did not know that and was acting in defense of Rick. Walking Dead in case anyone was wondering. Also Carol Danvers should be in prison after Marvel’s Civil War II for what she did).
And I’d totally love an argument about the ethics of Hansel and Gretel pushing the witch into the oven if it came up in a comic I was reading with a discussion forum :)
But seriously, screw Jerry, he was a total jerk.
Wasn’t the witch attempting to cook the little brats? After fattening one of them up
And, no arguments, just ‘heated, lively, discussions’ thank you munchly :P
And yeah, Tom was just doing his job, and often ended up getting literally beaten by his employer in the process
“Wasn’t the witch attempting to cook the little brats? After fattening one of them up
And, no arguments, just ‘heated, lively, discussions’ thank you munchly :P”
You won’t get an argument from me on that, G. I agree with you. The witch had it comin’. :)
“And yeah, Tom was just doing his job, and often ended up getting literally beaten by his employer in the process”
Poor unappreciated Tom!
I remember someone doing a series of art showing Bugs Bunny actually murdering Daffy Duck.
Their logic was, “Kids don’t understand that these weapons cause real damage. They need to be taught that these are dangerous weapons, not toys.”
Kids understand. It’s called “slapstick“.
NIAGARA FALLS!
SLOWWWWWWWWWWWWWLY I TURNED.
AND STEP BY STEP.
INCH…. BY…. INCH…..
I SMASHED HIM! I HIT HIM! I POPPED HIM! I FLATTENED HIM! I TORE HIM TO PIECES AND I KNOCKED HIM OUT!
BLOOD! RIVERS OF BLOOD! POOLS OF BLOOD! HAHAHAHA! THE BLOOD! THE BLOOD!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYP1OBZfFK0
I for one enjoy a good badguy splattering. Never apoligize for making the story the way YOU like to make it.
To quote Kurt Vonnegut: Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Completely random thought, because i am reading 2 things at once that this occurred to me… With Sydney’s Air orb, and the PPO, Sydney has the makeup for a massive Fuel Air Explosion device… just a packet of concentrated fuel, add air orb to disperse, and stir with PPO. … the Shield Orb
Yeah, but that’s one of the _safer_ things she could do with her power set…
Sydney could also open an aetherium causeway to a black hole, since she now knows how to actually bypass the safety features that would normally prevent that.
Probably foreshadowing.
Heave Ho!
I get that she formed a new body, but… how did her clothes get clean? Are they also made of stone?
Yes, if she can form the stone into a shape, she can also form a
a clothes shaped texture as an outer finish. You’ll notice it’s still just shades of gray. Presumably she can manipulate impurities in the stone to make some parts lighter or darker and add patterns. A few pages ago she was talking about she can make her concrete boobs bounce if she wants to dedicate the extra mental effort to it. So, she just has a lot of power over her stoneform
Her previous bodies seem to have had the clothes as standard when produced, which implies that they’re a colour created in the concrete rather than a separate item that she puts on.
Not to completely excuse Cora’s use of overkill force here, but a point I wanted to make that I hadn’t seen yet (might’ve missed if someone did- I didn’t read much of last page’s comments and only read two tabs of this one’s), but she might have used excessive force ordinance here because she didn’t have the chance to safely ascertain if the others were supers with invulnerability powers, or protective items, yet. She had just come from a battle where there were several supers with durability, on whom it had been established “High-caliber bullets are just a nuisance,” and the ones in this room were standing right next to another obvious super (ironically, the SAME one used to establish that line back in the restaurant battle), indicating the likelihood of at least one of the targets possessing some defensive power to be high. If the leader with the gun pointed at Sydney had the benefit of such a power, using a lower-caliber round “just to be safe and/or non-lethal” could’ve resulted in them just getting angry and pulling the trigger before she could scale up to stop the threat properly.
It turned out they didn’t, so… *Sploosh*
She _might_ have been thinking that, yeah. But given that she’s already been established as the kind of person who casually slaughters petty criminals who don’t know better than to try mugging her, then laughs at the authorities telling her off… do you _really_ believe that she was thinking about all that tactical stuff?
Or is it more likely that her thought process was something like “bad guy, boom, splatter, ha ha!”. We know she doesn’t think twice about using lethal force, appropriate or not.
The choice of ammo doesn’t make sense for that either. Using a railgun to take his head off to be safe, sure.
But what she chose had low power, just a nasty delayed effect. A man with seemingly regular durability was just wounded by the initial hit. If he had been super tough, that bullet might just have bounced off and done nothing to stop him, and in any case, if the initial impact hadn’t worked, the gibbing would have come too late.
Well, she wanted to keep him from shooting Sydney. What movies and TV shows do not tell you is that the shoulder is a highly complex mass of moving parts. If any of said parts break, the whole thing can stop working. Joints are vulnerable even on supers.
What a lot of people seem to forget is that Cora is not human. How can she know how tough or squishy a guy who has a concrete golem under his thumb (literally) is until she hits him? She will only get one shot before he can react and potentially hurt/kill Sydney, so Cora better make it count.
Yes, what she did was grandstanding. She should have shot all the goons from cover, starting with the one menacing Sydney. Then again, her tech advantage makes things much easier for her but still…
She is going into a hostage situation with only limited intel. The only information she has is whatever Sydney passed on to her and whatever Arc has told her. (Probably not much. Mercenaries and top flight military spec ops do not always get along) So, there is one super who is being controlled by someone who she has no idea if he is a super or not. He HAS to be the primary target. Take him out and Concretia has no reason to fight.
But how tough is he? Can she know? Whatever ultra tech sensors she has can be fooled. Hell, Sydney’s orbs fool them, so they are not perfect. Cora has to make a choice and she does. She uses over the top lethal ammunition on someone who turns out to be way squishier than he thinks he is. And then when she realizes that he is not a super, well, he has a ticking thing in his shoulder and she wants to keep his attention on her.
So, a dramatic entrance.
Lots of people have second guessed Cora about that. Lots more will. I won’t second guess her shooting him even with such nasty ammo. Talking, maybe, but not shooting.
Missing the point entirely. The delayed round isn’t a good choice _under the reasoning you describe_ (as well as an other tactical reasoning.)
If you aren’t sure how tough he is, but want to make sure to stop him for good, use something that is sure to kill him _immediately_. Railgun to the head, for example.
The delayed round means he has some time to react before it kills him. If you use that, it wasn’t to make sure to stop him.
So, you distract him.
With ‘Oops’.
If she’s confident in that, she didn’t need to kill him. And then it was murder.
You know what would be HILARIOUS?
What if whatever rounds she put in her weapon kill messily, but allow the person to be put back together after? Maybe whatever ‘incarceration’ she puts him into makes a mess of his body, but leaves his mind alive somehow? (Store it, confine it, whatever while the body gets shredded)
THAT would be poetic.
Kill him as many times as you want, as messily as you want and he isn’t gone!
Except Cora didn’t commit a murder. She committed a homicide. There’s a legal difference.
Murder is an unlawful (unlawful here meaning not legally justified) killing of a human being, committed with malice aforethought. Homicide is just defined as ‘killing a human being.’ The former is a crime, the latter is just an element of a crime which requires more to be a crime.
I’ll get to the unlawful part second, but start with the malice aforethought part first.
Malice aforethought means that the defendant intended to kill someone without legal justification or excuse. It actually has nothing to do with the way the killer felt about the victim, and doesnt require there to be any sort of hate or spite or anger involved even. It just means killing without a justifiable excuse. And Cora has a pretty good excuse. The victim was about to murder Sydney, and would have is she had not acted.
As for the first part – unlawful killing. Cora did not commit an ‘unlawful killing.’ She committed a killing. A homicide. Homicide by itself is not unlawful. Murder and manslaughter are. Homicide is just an element OF murder and manslaughter, but also requires it to be unlawful, which requires the malice aforethought that I explained above if you want to call it murder.
Even if she got charged with murder (ie, if she was in California and got charged under Cal Penal Code sec 189 (2018) for using an explosive to do the killing), she still has the affirmative defense of Defense of Others that she could use at her trial.
Technically speaking, the people who could ACTUALLY get charged with murder are the other two hooded guys, for felony murder (he died while they were all committing a felony). Technically maybe Concretia too, but she has a defense against it since she was not committing the underlying felony under her own free will (ie, she lacked mens rea).
I’m not really arguing any specific law, but abstract justice. As far as the law is concerned, Cora will walk, because no court will have the information required to deduce her motivation.
>Murder is an unlawful (unlawful here meaning not legally justified) killing of a human being, committed with malice aforethought.
Which I’m saying she did.
She isn’t justified because she didn’t consider Sydney threatened enough to use lethal force. Because otherwise she wouldn’t have messed around with delayed effects. The deadly part of her actions was the one unrelated to stopping him, which is why it isn’t justified by defense of others.
And godammit, this isn’t a trial, and you’re not Cora’s defence attorney. There’s no need to twist words like that.
Well, okay. You have a right to your opinion.
Feel free to argue with Cora about her tactics.
I am not going to.
MY opinion is that Cora decided she didn’t have time to switch ammo to a less than lethal option when Sydney was menaced. She used what she had and yes, it was extreme. In my opinion, distracting the guy from his target while the timer counted down was a tactical choice that worked.
The hostage is safe. Screw the hostage taker and all of his goons.
>MY opinion is that Cora decided she didn’t have time to switch ammo to a less than lethal option when Sydney was menaced.
a) How wbout switching to something effective?
b) There’s no reason for her to have loaded that going in
c) Her gun has multiple barrels, so she doesn’t even need to switch ammo.
d) Why bother with risking a response? He was doomed to death already, so killing him sooner is much safer.
And if you want to leave the discussion, do it. Don’t try to delegitimize it, then continue arguing in the next paragraph.
“a) How about switching to something effective?”
I think the new paint job on the wall, ceiling, and floor shows that Cora’s choice of ammo was quite effective.
“b) There’s no reason for her to have loaded that going in”
She just left an ongoing battle with supers with high levels of invulnerability, after a fight with mercs with high tech force fields and other abilities and weaponry. Why would she assume she doesn’t need the same level of weaponry?
“Her gun has multiple barrels, so she doesn’t even need to switch ammo.”
Where did you get that from? Her gun didnt look like it has different barrels last page. It looked like a single barrel.
“Why bother with risking a response? He was doomed to death already, so killing him sooner is much safer.”
Because it was already a death sentence for him as soon as it hit him, so what did it matter at that point what she said (except as a way to intimidate the others who she had NOT shot yet), and Cora’s cheeky.
@Pander – for reference, both multi-barrel and selectable lethality are referenced here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-880-variable-lethality/
>I think the new paint job on the wall, ceiling, and floor shows that Cora’s choice of ammo was quite effective.
No, the issue being time. It’s less effective because of the delay, in a time-critical situation.
>She just left an ongoing battle with supers with high levels of invulnerability, after a fight with mercs with high tech force fields and other abilities and weaponry. Why would she assume she doesn’t need the same level of weaponry?
Because it’s a bad tactical choice due to the delay. She should have switched to (or loaded to begin with) something with instant effect to clear a hostage situation. If she doesn’t have time to switch ammo, she doesn’t have time to wait for the blender to go off. If it had been Concretia pointing a gun at Sydney, the impact wouldn’t have stopped, then when the blender destroyed her body, it would have been to late for Sydney.
“Where did you get that from? Her gun didnt look like it has different barrels last page. It looked like a single barrel.”
Like Tahnru linked, it can be seen in #880, panel 2. She definitely should load different shit to be prepared for everything.
>Because it was already a death sentence for him as soon as it hit him, so what did it matter at that point what she said
She shouldn’t have said anything. Since his life is already lost, she can just finish him off with another shot. This was in reference to kalenath calling the distracting a tactical choice that worked.
@Tahru and Voyager: Ok I just read the actual dialog. Yep, the gun has the possibility of variable lethality.
Still doesnt mean Cora is required to use non-lethal force (generally you shoot to kill, period, even if you have access to a taser as well), but good eye guys! I completely missed that.
“She shouldn’t have said anything.”
She’s cheeky. Plus it’s tactical to make sure he doesnt try anything before he exploded. But it’s still not murder.
“Since his life is already lost, she can just finish him off with another shot.”
She could have, but the second shot would not be self-defense anymore. He was disarmed by that point, and like you said – he was already said. He just didnt realize it yet.
> Still doesnt mean Cora is required to use non-lethal force
Not, directly but it means she didn’t “use what she had”, but one of several options she had, which means the ammo used was actually her choice – a choice which we can analyze. And that analysis implies that she was confident she could save Sydney with less-lethal, hence didn’t consider Sydney threatened enough to use lethal force.
“She isn’t justified because she didn’t consider Sydney threatened enough to use lethal force.”
Well … I mean she obviously did consider Sydney threatened enough to use lethal force, because… Sydney was legitimately threatened, and she used lethal force.
“Because otherwise she wouldn’t have messed around with delayed effects.”
Assuming she messed around with delayed effects and didnt just already have those bullets in her gun. Which is a good possibility since she was just in a battle situation with heavily shielded aliens then supers with HIGH levels of invulnerability.
“The deadly part of her actions was the one unrelated to stopping him,”
Like I said earlier, yes, the deadly part of Cora’s actions are COMPLETELY related to stopping him. They are all part of one action, just as pushing someone off a building rooftop is completely related to when they die from hitting the pavement below.
“And godammit, this isn’t a trial,”
It’s worse than a trial. It’s a comic book debate. MUHAHAHA. It’s like when people argue about who would win in a fight – Goku or Superman. But using the law. :)
“and you’re not Cora’s defence attorney.”
I’m playing that part actually, since I am stating my opinion that Cora has a legitimate defense. Which she would if this was real, or if I was an attorney within the Grrlpower universe.
“There’s no need to twist words like that.”
I haven’t twisted anyone’s words. I’m using your words verbatim, then explaining why I disagree with you and why I’m legally correct. :) I’ve kept your statements completely in context and havent changed around anything you’ve said.
>Well … I mean she obviously did consider Sydney threatened enough to use lethal force, because… Sydney was legitimately threatened, and she used lethal force.
Those aren’t the same thing – she used lethal force unrelatedly, not to save Sydney.
>Assuming she messed around with delayed effects and didnt just already have those bullets in her gun. Which is a good possibility since she was just in a battle situation with heavily shielded aliens then supers with HIGH levels of invulnerability.
Instead of repeating myself, I’ll refer to the other post.
>Like I said earlier, yes, the deadly part of Cora’s actions are COMPLETELY related to stopping him. They are all part of one action, just as pushing someone off a building rooftop is completely related to when they die from hitting the pavement below.
Except it isn’t an automatic consequence. It’s influenced by her choice. You only have a point if Cora didn’t have a choice of ammo, which as argued above is false.
>I’m playing that part actually, since I am stating my opinion that Cora has a legitimate defense.
As the defense attorney what you think about her guilt wouldn’t matter. You’re supposed to do whatever you can to get him acquitted. Truth is secondary, and rhetoric suited to convince the jury takes precedence over a clean argument.
>I haven’t twisted anyone’s words
You’re twisting your own words, and the words of the law. For example when you’re presenting “unlawful” and “malice aforethought” as separate requirements, but then stealthily admit one follows from the other. And after you argued it wasn’t murder because she was acting in defense of others you say even if it was murder she would have the defense of ‘defense of others’ like it was a new argument.
And the charge would absolutely be murder, since she acted with intent.
You did not try to misrepresent me, true, and I appreciate that.
“Those aren’t the same thing – she used lethal force unrelatedly, not to save Sydney.”
The man was aiming the gun at Sydney and saying how he was going to ‘retire’ her. She shot ONLY the person who was aiming the gun at Sydney. How is that ‘unrlelated’ to saving Sydney? She didnt shoot any of the people who were not about to kill Sydney. I think you’re reaching a bit in your argument.
“Instead of repeating myself, I’ll refer to the other post.”
Your previous post didnt answer how I said both the shot and the explosion are part of the same action, just like pushing a person off a building and them hitting the ground are part of the same action. You can’t argue ‘I didnt kill him when I pushed him off the building, the impact with the ground did.’ Regardless of how the joke goes or Batman Begins’ logic works. :)
“As the defense attorney what you think about her guilt wouldn’t matter.”
Yes. And?
“You’re supposed to do whatever you can to get him acquitted.”
Anything you can within the boundaries of the law. You can’t let them perjure themselves, for example. You can’t destroy evidence. You can’t hide evidence.
“Truth is secondary, and rhetoric suited to convince the jury takes precedence over a clean argument.”
That ‘rhetoric’ is requiring the other side to actually have evidence and a fact pattern which proves the truth. And the burden of proof to show what the truth is is on the side of the prosecution.
Although that’s a moot point here. I’ve been already showing the truth about Cora’s actions.
“You’re twisting your own words, and the words of the law.”
No. I’m giving you the legal definitions and elements for crimes, and that’s how proving that someone committed a crime works.
“For example when you’re presenting “unlawful” and “malice aforethought” as separate requirements,”
Because they are separate requirements. You can have malice aforethought to do something that isnt unlawful, and you can do something unlawful without malice aforethought (like vehicular homicide). In the case of murder, one builds upon the other and you need both to show that murder happened instead of just homicide.
“but then stealthily admit one follows from the other.”
There’s nothing stealthy about it. I’m pretty precise in what I’m saying and not hiding anything with clever wordplay.
“And after you argued it wasn’t murder because she was acting in defense of others you say even if it was murder she would have the defense of ‘defense of others’ like it was a new argument.”
I don’t think you understand. There are several ways to defend someone about a criminal act.
First, you can show that she did not possess either a guilty mind or guilty act (mens rea and actus reus). Cora did possess both of those, hwoever.
Second, you can show that they did not fit all the elements of a crime.
Third, you can show they had what is known as an ‘affirmative defense’ or a ‘limited defense.’
Cora meets BOTH second and third examples. She both does not meet the elements of the crime, plus even if she did, she would still be able to use an affirmative defense of ‘Defense of Others’ even if a prosecutor was trying to argue that she met all the elements.
“And the charge would absolutely be murder, since she acted with intent.”
Intent alone does not mean murder. When a police officer shoots someone to protect a civilian from dying, that is not murder, despite the intent to shoot. When a soldier shoots someone during a war, that is also not murder, even though there is intent to kill. You are again confusing homicide with murder. The former is just an element, the latter is a crime.
“You did not try to misrepresent me, true, and I appreciate that.”
No problem. I sometimes agree with your posts on some things (quite a few actually). It’s just here, you’re clearly wrong. It’s not personal or anything – you’re just incorrect about saying that Cora committed murder because murder has a specific definition in a legal context. Even if she was tried under human laws, it would be extremely unlikely that she would be found guilty of murder because of the fact pattern presented.
Okay, since this is getting exhausting I’m gonna cut out the sideshows and focues on what seems to be the core parts of our disagreement.
>The man was aiming the gun at Sydney and saying how he was going to ‘retire’ her. She shot ONLY the person who was aiming the gun at Sydney. How is that ‘unrlelated’ to saving Sydney? She didnt shoot any of the people who were not about to kill Sydney.
Would you consider shooting him with a poisoned blowdart that only stings enough to make him drop the gun at first but makes him drop dead two days later a killing in defense of others? If a non-poisoned blowdart was available with no drawbacks?
Shooting him was defense of Sydney. The choice of ammo was not defense of Sydney, because it was worse at defending Sydney than a number of other choices.
>Your previous post didnt answer how I said both the shot and the explosion are part of the same action
No, I answered that in the same post, which seems to have gotten lost in your reply. For reference, what I said:
“Except it isn’t an automatic consequence. It’s influenced by her choice. You only have a point if Cora didn’t have a choice of ammo, which as argued above is false.”
If pushing him off the roof with a slightly different angle result in landing on another roof after 5m fall – then pushing him off the roof in abstract didn’t kill him, pushing him off the roof in that specific direction did. So if you’re forced to push him off the roof, you still have to explain why you killed him.
>Even if she was tried under human laws, it would be extremely unlikely that she would be found guilty of murder because of the fact pattern presented.
Ironically I agree that an actual in-story court wouldn’t have the evidence to convict her.
I think we’d agree that it would be murder (even by the legal definition) if it wasn’t defense of others, the only disagreement is whether it was defense of others.
“Okay, since this is getting exhausting I’m gonna cut out the sideshows and focues on what seems to be the core parts of our disagreement.”
I actually find it incredibly entertaining. Plus you don’t use ad hominem attacks when arguing, which is a huge plus.
“Would you consider shooting him with a poisoned blowdart that only stings enough to make him drop the gun at first but makes him drop dead two days later a killing in defense of others?”
Maybe – maybe not. It usually depends on the time between the action and the result, and if it’s possible to alter the result after the danger has passed. In your scenario, it would probably be two different actions, since there’s a 2 day window in between the actions, UNLESS there is no possible cure for the poison, in which case it could be argued as one action. If the poison took… roughly the same amount of time it took for him to explode after being shot, then it’s the same action.
“If a non-poisoned blowdart was available with no drawbacks?”
It’s irrelevant whether there’s a non-lethal option that MIGHT be possible. When you’re using defense of others, and using a weapon, there’s nothing that says you have to go with the non-lethal option if someone else’s life is hanging in the balance. It’s like when people who have no clue about police procedures come down on the cops for shooting a person in self defense, when they say something very dumb like “He could have just shot them in the arm to make them drop the gun” or “he could have shot the person charging at them with the knife in the leg instead of in the chest.”
“Shooting him was defense of Sydney. The choice of ammo was not defense of Sydney, because it was worse at defending Sydney than a number of other choices.”
Again, it’s literally irrelevant if there were other possible actions, when the best and safest option for Sydney to survive was to shoot to kill him.
Take Harambe for example. Much as I wish that poor gorilla was not killed, the reasoning given by the zookeepers was if they shot with a tranq, the gorilla still might have killed the very stupid child of that very negligent mother who went into the gorilla pen.
Poor Harambe, but I don’t blame the zookeepers for their choice, though.
“So if you’re forced to push him off the roof, you still have to explain why you killed him.”
My point, though, is that the pushing him off the roof IS what kills him – not the ‘hitting the ground’ as if it’s something separate from pushing him off the roof.
“Ironically I agree that an actual in-story court wouldn’t have the evidence to convict her.”
Hooray! We end the thread on an agreement! Great thread :) I look forward to more in the future, or better yet, ones where we both are on the same side of the argument. :)
> Plus you don’t use ad hominem attacks when arguing, which is a huge plus.
I always try to be respectful in debates, it’s nice to see it appreciated. :)
> then it’s the same action
That wasn’t the question. The question was whether it’s justified. I’m not sure why “the same action” would be a relevant category. “Shooting him in a way that kills him later” is one action, yes. Just not a justified one, when “shooting him in a way that is sure to stop the threat” and “shooting him in a way that doesn’t kill him” are just as available.
> It’s irrelevant whether there’s a non-lethal option that MIGHT be possible.
The relevant part is that the non-lethal option is guaranteed to be just as effective as the lethal one. Usually the less-lethal option has a higher risk of failure to stop, therefore it’s justified to go for the lethal one. But in this case the lethal option offers no such benefit. NY law says:
“A person may […] use physical force upon another person when and to the extent he or she reasonably believes such to be necessary to defend himself” (NY Penal Code 35.15)
If it’s not necessary, it’s not allowed. And one can hardly argue it was necessary when it wasn’t even any better at stopping than the less-lethal alternative.
> Again, it’s literally irrelevant if there were other possible actions, when the best and safest option for Sydney to survive was to shoot to kill him.
Wrong, which is the entire point. The best and safest option was to shoot to immediately kill him, which is not what Cora did. Taking off his head with a railgun round or something is what she should have done if she wanted to be safe. But Cora shot him in the arm, which doesn’t kill him either until after the threat is removed or it’s too late.
> Great thread :) I look forward to more in the future, or better yet, ones where we both are on the same side of the argument. :)
Heh. Cheers to that. :)
@Tahnru:
Checked the page you linked to. I see how there are a few holes on the gun but I clearly do not know much about firearms. Does that mean it has multiple barrels for different types of ordinance?
Also I don’t see where the ‘selectible lethality’ is on that page. Could you point out the panel? Thanks
Assuming there’s something I missed, I’m also still not sure that proves that she had non-lethal rounds. Could have been ALL lethal rounds. We’ve already seen with Dabbler that they tend to only carry mainly lethal stuff into a fight.
Which makes sense. Guns are usually lethal.
I just re-read the dialog. Yep. Variable. Good catch.
Doesn’t change that it’s not murder, but it’s one less argument in Cora’s favor.
Yes, the gun is variable, but all of it lethal, also to be noting how she compared it to Dabbles’ sword
Not targeting or arguing with you, just, this is the end of the Thread-cascade and easier to read it down here :D
The thread is like the hydra. Cut off one sub-thread and 2 more will appear.
“What a lot of people seem to forget is that Cora is not human.”
Well… technically she is human. She’s just not a Terran human. :)
Only about two-thirds human.
Close enough. Round up to the nearest whole number. :)
She’s also something other than human, perhaps several other somethings. I imagine that to some people, any percentage of human would qualify a person as human, while to others, any percentage of non-human would disqualify a person as “human”. There’s some… interesting precedent for those kind of distinctions.
That dude’s got a record on the police blotter, fer sure. They gonna have trouble with the booking process because they can’t get any fingerprints…
Meh, there’s probably at least one whole fingertip left. Don’t forget the entire ear that landed on Sydney. XD
Lots of readily available genetic material though.
That dude IS a blotter now.
God I hate to be the guy who has to come into work the next morning to see that and mostly have to clean it up
Here is hoping Cora or Dabbler have something to ‘fix’ that or the cleaning bill is gonna be insane!
‘What do you mean our cleaners need a therapist?????’
It’s all bare concrete. It’ll power wash out easily enough.
There’s *always* something left, Sydney. Having had the norovirus (or something closely resembling it) multiple times, it just never seems to end. X(
God, norovirus. Until you’ve puked (and crapped) out your bones, there’s still something in the tank.
Had it so bad at one point (thankfully a friday) that I was down for the count for the whole weekend (prolly shoulda gone to the hospital) and for the next week, I could barely stand, I was so tired.
One of the many reasons I’m glad I left that job – haven’t gotten a case of it since, and that job was the only change in my lifestyle that occurred. Moral of the story probably is, if you check bags for a living (security, but not the TSA), wear disposable gloves. Hand sanitizer and handwashing just doesn’t cut it.
I understand where the folks commenting on the excessive force are coming from,
But at the end of the day, literally the only thing that stopped him from putting a bullet in Sydney’s brain about 15 seconds ago was both of his minions, coerced and unknown, drawing the line at executing an unresisting, disarmed and immobilised pseudo-super like 2/3 or half his age for talking to much-
I’ll fully agree this charge was overkill, but given what she’d seen since arriving on this borderline death world of an underdeveloped planet, for all she knew he could have laughed something with less pen/a smaller change off-
Hell, “he” could even have been a projection like Concretea for all she knew at the time of firing/literally borderline invulnerable like archillies…
“firing/literally borderline invulnerable like Achilles…” His invulnerability, is absolute!
Except Cora didn’t think so, because she used ammo that wouldn’t have stopped him in time in that case.
The force wasn’t excessive because it was gory, but because the choice of the delayed round proved Cora didn’t consider him enough of a threat to use something deadly to stop him. She used the less-lethal impact to stop him.
Achilles’ invulnerability is not borderline. :)
It’s complete invincibility. Or as the cast page describes it: “Invincibility. Proper, aggravating invincibility.”
…. though the delay is a bit odd-
Would that have been by intention (maybe something intended for psychological effect on the battlefield?) or was it a hangfire/defective impact/or iteration fuse or something
I would say intentional. If the enemy knows you got expoding ammo, you can hit em – and then they got the choice between Exploding or Surrendering. Usually it takes only one exploded guy to get hat point across.
I guess she just did not want to risk him having any ranged powers or any way to kill Sydney, so she detonate at the first sign of not surrendering.
Then she should have blown him up immediately. What if his first sign of not surrendering would have been Sydney turning to ash?
“If the enemy knows you got exploding ammo, you can hit ’em – and then they got the choice – Christopher
That’s true, but the usefulness depends very much on that ‘if’. If the enemy doesn’t know they’ve been hit with a delayed-action round, they’ve no reason to act differently in the time the delay gives them.
In this case, nobody apart from Cora knew that there even was a delayed action in the mincer round, let alone what its effect would be. She didn’t even bother to explain the options to ‘Daddy’ once the mincer was in his shoulder, but just grandstanded until it detonated.
That scenario also assumes that the mincer detonates only on a signal, rather than on a timer. If there’s no hope of stopping it once it hits you, there’s not really any point in surrendering.
When were the last few appearances of Dr Frost?
When was the last time she and Ms. Scoville appeared together?
I can’t even confirm she’s Sydney’s pshrink!
The last meeting was after Sydney got stuck on the Alarai homeworld.
And got prescription mittens.
Thanks!
#749 thru #777,
July 2019 thru October 2019,
Right?
….
I thought Dr Frost appeared in a meeting about Sydney/Halo, but maybe it was just some other character quoting her.
OK now I want (need?) to know who is Dr Chevy and where else does she appear?
Dr. Chevy’s Archon’s Medical Doctor. She has the power to heal people.
She showed up to heal Sydney’s eye after she hotsauced it, and fixed as much as she could of Jigg’s shattered eardrums from the Restaurant fight.
Thanks!
Cereally? Peoples’ primary complaint is about the delay feature of the round, not the puree setting?
For cereals? That is the problem they have with what Cora did?
Not sure what breakfast has to do with this?
G is channeling South Park Al Gore. :)
Finally someone gets it! You know how long have been waiting for someone to figure that out? :D
My only areas of expertise are the law, comic books, and South Park references. :)
Because the delay can never be justified.
If she had immediately killed him, that would have seemed justified by him being a threat, and we wouldn’t know that she didn’t consider him that much of a threat. The delay is an important source of information about her motivations.
Or an important source of information about the structure of the tech. That stasis field from a few chapters ago wasn’t instant, wasn’t absolute, and it had a friggin’ battery that could be drained. You’re assuming this tech is perfect. It’s plenty possible the ammo is just ridiculously OP to head off any possible resistance from the criminal BUT this power requires a time delay. Perhaps her haughty act is meant to buy time until it detonates. We know she prefers overkill but that doesn’t necessarily mean she LIKES being a sadist. It could just as well mean she’s traumatized from a past event and now always uses the max “kill” setting reasonably available.
When reading into the intent of a person’s actions you must consider all possible angles. Not just the ones that make sense to you and your personal preferences. I have a lot of practice with this and can quite literally predict what both fictional and real people will say and do once I have enough data.
Right now? We don’t have enough data.
The details of the tech don’t matter, only the actual performance, because was still Cora’s choice to use that specific ammo.
And there doesn’t seem to be any tactical angle that could explain that choice. If she wanted maximum effectiveness, she’d use something that works quicker, even if it’s just pumping him full of lead.
The delay means we can discard the “she wants to make sure” angle.
The tactical angle is that she doesn’t know the guy’s powers. Someone like Hiro or Concretia – the latter standing right next to mr. splatter might I add – could easily shrug off being pumped full of lead.
You just don’t want to admit that.
As I understand Voyager, the objection is not to the use of a messily lethal round per se. There are potential threats in the area that are much tougher than Baseline Humans, so you pick your ammunition accordingly and accept that it will be overkill for most targets. The primary objection is to using a delayed-action round rather than one which activates on impact, the secondary objection is to using that delay time for self-gratifying grandstanding rather than anything more constructive.
The delay between the mincer round hitting ‘Daddy’ and it activating gives him an opportunity to react. In this case, he reacted by mouthing off at Cora; other potential options include attacking (or ordering an attack on) Cora, Sydney, or any other target. Some claim that it doesn’t matter, that he’s dead as soon as the mincer round hits. That may be true philosophically, but not practically: it’s the difference between a fighter plane that’s blown to shrapnel, and one that’s going down with enough control to kamikaze a picked target on the ground, if that analogy helps.
The one plausible reason for using a round with delayed activation* is that it gives the target a chance to surrender. This would require that its activation is remote-controlled rather than on an automatic timer, so that surrendered targets have a stay of execution; based on on-page information, we don’t know whether it’s remote or automatic. But if the target is expected to surrender under threat of mincing, he needs to know that he’s under threat of mincing in the first place. Cora’s grandstanding kept the attention on her, but she uses it for showing off rather than making that threat and inviting compliance.
*Assuming that it is an anti-personnel round in the first place, and not a mis-loaded demolition round or similar.
I got the context, but thank you anyway. My counterargument is (as above) that the delay may not have been a choice but a technical limitation. We’ve seen the aliens’ tech is far from perfect.
So, Voyager’s reasoning is valid, but we don’t have enough information to verify it. Voyager is trying to say it’s definitely correct and then draw motives from that assumption. Simply put? You can’t do that.
A mincer round is massive overkill for a Baseline Human target, true. But Cora can reasonably argue that there are much tougher targets, potentially in the area, that will need much more kill before they go down and stay down. A delayed-action round could be legitimate, if she’d used the delay time to make ‘Daddy’ aware of his extremely limited options and shown willingness (or even ability) to cancel the detonation if he co-operated. Instead, she chose to ignore the running timer and show off, gambling with Sydney’s life that he wouldn’t harm his hostage out of spite.
Cora, I am just workshopping here. But maybe next time you just tell archon? They can save people without traumatizing them!
Yeah, the non-stop dry heaves are the worst.
Yep, had food poisoning one time and the first few hurls actually felt pretty good in their own way, the following dozen dry heaves just fucking hurt and were the ones that made me wish for death.
I don’t care what your opinions are.
This was hilarious!
Uk Police shoot to stop if you die you die if you dont they have a big bag of medical gear to save your life.
Would never be allowed to use that weapon.
Uk Military Rules of engagement vary basically shoot till you are no longer a threat. Might be allowed to use that weapon if it is ruled it doesn’t inflict unnecessary suffering and it is not to expensive. Doesn’t inflict too much collateral damage. Brought a thermobaric rocket launcher as they were using too many javelin guided missles. Turned out far too destructive.
UK is kinda fucked right now. The parliamentary system is corrupt and broken, and from what I’ve read many Brits are not having a good ‘ole time, moreso than even the U.S. where we got all this COVID crap. I mean, look, Boris Johnson went around shaking hands with pandemic victims. That says about all you need to know. The U.K. may have established the common law system but they are surely not the world’s frontrunners in terms of rules of engagement and use of force right now. (The U.S. isn’t either. Don’t go there.)
So what about the other guys in the room?
I can see concretia not being hurt but the others( including Sydney) were probably in the blast range.
what will the guys who are watching Concretias body do after losing contact with Mr Explody.?
There was no ‘blast range’, it was a ‘splatter range’, completely different
Actually I enjoyed the well-deserved results of the ketchup round, and who’s going to say “boo” to the genemod human woman with access to Galtech and likely willing to trade under the table if the original Earth-breed humans are nice to her about any “Misunderstandings”?…
I cant wait to see if the 2 mooks are sufficiently willing to talk after spilling their guts in other ways along with Sidney. :3
I can easily think of over 50 weapons that would kill the guy much more efficiently, I can also think of 50 that would kill him much more horrifically. But for the sake of not posting a long rant. here are 10 random weapons that would have killed the guy in about the same amount of time that also could have lead to even more psychological trauma.
in no particular order.
1: De-boner: the round once embedded in the target sends out nano-bot needle threads that seek out and wrap around the skeletal structure. The immediate area of the wound would be immobile in mere seconds, however it continues to wrap around the entire skeletal structure *the needle threads piercing muscle, tendon, and fat with no real resistance. Once this is done the wires expand and send out slicing threads to neatly remove the meat from the bones.
(an added element to the de-boner for greater psychological warfare is the skeleton slave system: where the expanded wire then latches onto the removed skeleton and extends more wires to use the skeleton as a lattice lifting it up like a new cyborg slave to turn and attack their once allies).
*the magic version of that is much quicker, but looking at tech here*
2: The personal microwave: A duel function round, first emitting a personal forcefield around the target, a true forcefield blocking specific forces from entering or leaving; in this case high intensity microwaves emitted by the round to cook the target.
3: Grey Goo gun: shoots nanite into the target with the single job to rapidly replicate and turn all in contact bio-matter into more nanites, thus dissolving the target into a screaming mass of grey goo.
4: Self Propogating acid pellets: the round unleashes micro pellets that modify nearby bio-chemicals into acidic compounds as well as self replicating to make more pellets. Its like the grey goo gun only bigger parts and more painful, the pellets rapidly travel through the body burning little trails all through out. The amount of agony would be unwatchable.
5: Nerve Overloader: energy weapon, targets the nervous system to increase pain to such a level that it causes a total system shut down.
6: The Crunch: A forcefield is generated around the target and then decreases in size crushing the target inside it. Traditionally spheres and cubes are the most common versions of this. Also has a magic counter part. But imagine if Sydney saw a floating sphere or box with the guy’s remains just crushed up inside; there may still even be enough nerve response to make an eye blink or muscles twitch and squirm.
7: Mecha Enslaver: think weaponized borg. Another nanite weapon that first targets the nervous system to gain control then constructs external structures like metal looking plates and what not, turning the target into a weapon to use against their allies.
8: Organ Harvisters: a swarm of tiny bots that slice into the body, or a mechanical frame that forms around the target like a fold out lawn chair of pure nightmares, that uses wires and claws to slice into the body to neatly remove and store target organs. Naturally a medical device that has had its “they are still alive” safety features removed.
9: Target protein denature ray: a fun one from our friends in the less friendly corners of the Ju-el empire. Meant to be used for butcher shops, but modified as a weapon. Basically this weapon targets and denatures specified bio-molecular chains. Meant to tenderize and separate parts of the animal during the butchering process. For instance use the weaponized version to target connective skin tissue and the target’s skin is now separated from the muscle tissue and sloshing about and off, aim this weapon at certain other connective membrane internal tissues, ligaments, and so on and you have well…more pain than one can reasonable imagine and a crippled target.
10: Micro-Implosion rounds: pseudo-singularities for half a second pulling in all matter in a fixed distance; usually a few inches. Basically making small holes in the target, not neatly though, this is a forced suction ripping apart body tissues into that point. Even if the damage looks minimal at the point of the impact that pull on the circulatory system alone is going to equal death by shock and blood loss pretty damn quick. This is a weapon that was designed by cybernetic and astral beings as a way to disable and drain their strength respectively…against flesh and blood it is a lot more horrific.
“3: Grey Goo gun: shoots nanite into the target with the single job to rapidly replicate and turn all in contact bio-matter into more nanites, thus dissolving the target into a screaming mass of grey goo.”
That reminds me of some of the guns in Fallout games.
there is a ton of variety for this weapon, various molecular reassemblers shot into the target. Some more disturbing than others, such as a food replicator weapon that rearranges the molecules of the target into food products, converting their mass quickly into chocolate pudding for examples, the pain and shock combined with the smells of someone’s inside being exposed while fresh chocolate pudding is being made.
Also the calcification gun is basically the same thing only converting the mass to a messy stone or sand like consistency. So many options for shooting nanites capable or rearranging available materials into other materials being mis-used as ammo.
“the pain and shock combined with the smells of someone’s inside being exposed while fresh chocolate pudding is being made.”
On one hand, this is horrific.
On the other hand, chocolate pudding
It would help me staying on my diet if there was a possibility that chocolate pudding was made from humans, even evil ones like Splatty McDuochebag.
Soylent Green All Natural Chocolate Pudding.
Made for Humans.
Made by Humans.
Made from….
Anyone notice Sydney’s got her orbs back?
that’s what the hole and Concretia being able to stand there and talk is all about.
That suggests that either Concretia ‘spiked’ him herself and not Cora, or that somehow the orbs did it when released despite being limited in power when not in Sydney’s grasp. On the other hand, the hole is too rough-edged to have been Concretia’s work, considering the level of control she has on the material, even if she was the one who splattered the bad guy(s). (I notice the other two bad guys are out of the picture, too. Did they survive?)
the hole is being assumed to be unrelated to the guy being shredded but just where Sydney’s orbs were beneath the floor and let out.
Obviously an assumption I did not make, due to the quality of the hole and the location of the gore next to the hole. Keep in mind that the orbs were trapped BEHIND Sydney by at least ten feet, which makes the location of hole/gore suspect for releasing the orbs, not even considering the shape of the hole.
Note: While I’m not always the most observant of people, I do tend to pick up on continuity errors more than most, being a writer myself.
the gore splatter is uneven around the hole like it was some distance away, rather than ground zero.
it being some distance behind Sydney means there probably should be less gore but all we see is blood around it.
However due to how close up the panel is the exact relation of where this hole is to anything else in the space can’t be determined. I like some others concluded it was where the orbs were simply due to the context of this page, we see talking, we see hole, then we see Sydney with an orb floating about. Assumption, the orbs were let out by making a hole.
there probably could have been a page between these two showing the orbs being let out, the consequence of the other two goons, Cora giving Sydney a counter agent, and ending with Sydney barfing, but as this comic is two pages a week, for pacing issues some moments in time will end up being skipped. its not like a whole team at Marvel or DC working together to make an 8-12 page issue a month.
Added note: My comments are not a criticism of the comic, merely an observation based on the way I saw this episode and related it to previous pages. Doesn’t mean I’m necessarily right, only that this is the way I read them.
How, is that different?
I’m not saying the writer is right or wrong with how they wrote and drew it; I was only describing how I interpreted what I saw. Rhuen described it as he saw it. Our viewpoints are different and the only one who knows the true answer is the writer/artist themself. I don’t know whether Rhuen is the writer or not, though I will assume not since the username is not the same as the writer’s. As such, I can only take Rhuen’s statements as that person’s viewpoint in the same way that my statements are my viewpoint. Neither is necessarily wrong; neither is necessarily right. The truth could be either or both or somewhere in-between.
Truth, by the way, is almost never one-sided.
Q: Why did you shoot him with a shotgun at point blank range when a pistol would have worked?
A: I was holding a shotgun.
I think that is probably Cora’s excuse.
It would almost certainly be more effort than it’s worth to charge Cora with anything in this situation.
Well, since Sydney was a hostage and under immediate threat against her life, I don’t see Archon in general being jerks about this. Yes, what Cora did was extreme. But again, I will say it-
The hostage is safe. I don’t CARE what happened to the hostage taker. Even if he hadn’t been such a evil jerk, I STILL wouldn’t care. He pointed a gun at a helpless girl who he had already drugged and hit. I have seen such things happen far too many times in real life to have ANY sympathy for someone who acts like that. Whatever reasons he had for being such an evil scum are irrelevant to me. His life ended when he pointed a gun at Sydney with intent to use said gun.
Cora’s methods are not what most would call ‘civilized’ and they most definitely are not for the faint of heart, but they ARE effective.
’nuff said.
Cora behaves like – and is armed like – someone who has a lot of rage likely originating with ill-treatment early in life, and looks for excuses to unleash bloody retribution on … well, on anybody handy, really. You can see this with people who seem permanently belligerent, and you can see it with people who are normally calm, nice, cooperative, people but then absolutely rain down hell on someone who crosses them or breaks a code of honor.
It’s possible that getting some therapy and getting at the root of all that rage might make her a very different person.
She could also admittedly be a high-functioning sociopath, from how she reacted with the muggers with extreme overkill. Or she’s just naturally a ‘if someone is about to attack me or my friends, kill them first, kill them second, then maybe talk things out third.’ But she doesnt just kill without a reason or kill someone who has not first threatened her or her friends with death.
Random thought: Concretia wouldn’t have had much trouble with the Archive. Her ghostform bypasses ocean depths and doors. She can make new bodies until the guardian is dealt with. Traps go off, make new body… The force field death traps wouldn’t be an issue. Even the creepy dolls wouldn’t pose much threat…
The vault is heavily warded against teleportation. I imagine it has some defenses against various forms of astral projection, but it’s possible Concretia wouldn’t have been affected.
and now concreteia can armor up with stone or diamond or what ever. with a shell and then with training have golems like a necromancer or so on. AND her body wont be helpless.
One should remember that back in the day, violent boys cartoons like GI Joe and Transformers bent over backwards to avoid even significant injuries.
My Little Pony was the show where they killed many of the villains.
They sold toys of the villains in GI Joe and Transformers. Characters without associated toys didn’t have that kind of plot armor.
Until their toys weren’t selling and they wanted to make new toys for the line so killed off the characters. Transformers the movie. Hasbro got a lot of flak for this, why the GI Joe movie edited it’s death to be a coma.
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[b]Receiving you, loud and bold.[/b]
HTML, got it.
there are now 666 comments. that was my only goal with this