Grrl Power #920 – Hench ‘ya later!
I guess HenchWench vividly described her plans to Maxima during the side-flash to Super-super max, otherwise how did Max know she was assuming it would be co-ed?
Okay, so here’s a question. If Henchwench’s powers only work with supervillains, her ability to gain powers from someone makes her a reliable supervillain detector, right? That wouldn’t give you prosecutable evidence, but it’d be like warrantless wiretapping. Once you know you’ve got the right guy, you start working backwards until you have something admissible, or at least know to increase surveillance on them.
This all assumes you’d trust Henchwench not to suddenly abuse “Mind Controlling Teleport Guy’s” powerset the instant she receives it. Which I wouldn’t. It also hinges heavily on exactly how her powers determine what constitutes a “Supervillain” and if that matches a legal definition.
By “every science fiction movie ever” Maxima is referring specifically to Deadpool 2 and The Chronicles of Riddick, both of which have mixed gender common areas in their prisons. I’m sure there are other examples, but those two stick in my mind. I don’t know why they do that in movies. I assume it’s for casting diversity maybe? Or in Riddick’s case, it was so they could reunite him with a character he’d previously met, played by a different actress and who looked and acted totally different, and all that so Riddick wouldn’t have to worry about opening 1 extra gate that separated the boy’s side of the prison from the girl’s side during the escape scene.
Not to be indelicate, but wouldn’t mixed gender prisons be like locking Chris Nolan’s Joker up in a vault full of money, handing him a lighter and hoping he doesn’t do something inappropriate? Like the prison guards don’t already have enough to do. Oh by the way, we’ve locked a bunch of axe murderers up in an AXE WAREHOUSE which is also hosting the National Sorority Slumber Party Championships. So, you know, be on alert.
Well, heck, now I’m stuck imagining what the NSSPC would be like. I assume it would be televised. (Secretly televised, so it matches the uncomfortable creep factor of old R-rated college movies like Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds.) It’d be all the stuff from slasher and party movies condensed into formalized competitions, like Truth or Dare that immediately escalates to kissing, pillow fights, tickle fights, super-soakers full of baby oil fights, making the peeping virgin mess his pants with industrial strength shower fraternization, etc. Not sure how you’d judge most of that. It’d probably be mostly capricious, like bodybuilding competitions, instead of a rigorous point system.
FYI, I’m in the north Dallas area, and it’s been between about 6 degrees and 19 (F) since Sunday, and we’ve gotten something like 8” of snow that’s actually stuck to the ground instead of instantly melting. While that sounds pretty mild to some of you, Texas simply isn’t equipped for that, especially one or more of the power providers, who have known for over a decade that sub-freezing temperatures would severely fuck them up. So since Sunday evening, a good deal of North Texas has been dealing with managed blackouts. 30 to 60 minutes without power, 30-90 with. It’s better than having no power at all, but it’s a heck of a time to discover that the battery in my UPS is dead. So I’ve been working on the next two pages on my iPad, which is not ideal, but it technically works. At least for penciling. Not sure the iPad can handle all the layers I use when I get to coloring. Hopefully power will be back soon, as will my replacement UPS. If not, then brace yourself for some flat colored art a few pages from now.
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Nap time! *Chop.
closer to nighty, night squeeze. neck chop could take the head right off or even break her neck. (though squeeze could pop her head off but all you need is to disrupt blood flow to the brain a one-handed chokehold if you will)
though max should want to remind wench that archon has an alive *Or Dead* policy and she’s toeing the or dead part of the line (and that the or dead part is entirely up to the discretion of the archon agents on the field) that if she pulls anything to escape success or not, max will settle for using her an example (after she fails, or when max finds her.)
What Hench Wench should have done is have Concretia and the portal opener on the secondary contract, so she could be all ghosty.
Wouldn’t she have had to ditch her body?
She merged her body with the ghost form, remember? She presumably would have been able to maintain that state when the LLC went down if Concretia was on the backup contract.
Actually, no. Concretia was signed-on to the LLC under duress which was what caused the ethical questions that allowed Ariana to suspend it in the first place, Concretia on the sub-charter would’ve allowed the LLC to continue but the sub-charter would be bupkis.
No, that was not what cause the ethical questions (which a real lawyer debunked last page as a reason), it was the fact it was formed for illegal porpoises (ie, to commit crimes, like that bullsht ever stopped the Mafia or the Triad from operating on US soil)
The text does not make clear what the ethical issue would be (or why “ethics” would be a reason to “suspend” a contract under New York State law). That’s not my state so it may be different there, but where I’m licensed you would refer to an “illegal” contract not an “unethical” one. The only ethical issue Arianna refers to is the oppressive terms signed by nonrepresented parties, but the issue could have been the criminal intent of the parties or duress (but that would not go to Brut’s signature) or … and this is a key point … Arianna may have the power to “suspend” the contract and her justification may be the purest b.s. …. HW gets her due process rights by contesting the suspension in court – by which time the NY SoS has taken its turn,mooting Arianna’s action.
yes, but she didn’t know she could do it until the middle of the battle
I love this page.
I thought that was referencing Guardians of the Galaxy given they escaped using a riot.
Be surprised how common that is in escape from prison scenes in movies.
Real riots nowadays they just shoot the rioters. Calms them right the $#@% down.
Ah yes, because “the comments section for a webcomic about superheroes” is the place to spout off about how you don’t mind violence being used against a group that – in the so-called United States of America, anyway – disproportionally consists of racial minorities.
Yes, because there are no whites in the US penal system, at all
Well done Alexis, you made it a racial issue rather than simply a criminal one, :golf-clap:
Sure, the rioters in the capital building were SOOO lopsidedly non-white, too. NOT.
given the context I was assuming Steven was referring to (Prison riots). Not street riots.
The word “disproportionally” is important here. It’s not all or nothing, black or white, and so many problems are hidden by people pretending that if they can find a single counterexample, then there’s no problem at all.
Really should have held that power on the DL until you were alone in an underground cell or something.
She moved too soon.she could be a slippery one indeed. She could also have other contracts as well.
Kepping her incarcerated would be tricky. She can receive legal mail, aka contracts etc. Legal mail can be inspected for contraband, but not read. (First amendment rights)
That’s not how the first amendment works at all. Nothing in the first amendment grants convicted prisoners the right to carry out illegal activities through mail while incarcerated. You *might* mean to say the Fourth amendment, which protects “against unreasonable searches and seizures”; however, that too does not apply to inmates who have already been convicted, as it is reasonable to inspect and read their mail.
I can guarantee you that all mail sent to prisoners may be monitored, especially long emails and emails that have attachments, and emails that contain certain keywords.
Keeping Hench Wench incarcerated would be really easy, because we’ve already seen that her powers are beaten by the legal system. She needed the villains to form an LLC to make it work, and when the LLC was revoked, it stopped her powers. If her job isn’t legal, it doesn’t work. Prisoners may not legally hold jobs without express permission from the jail, so if Arianna was able to shut down her powers by stamping a form, all they have to do is convict her and as a part of her sentence clarify that she is stripped of her right to hold a job for the duration of her sentence. And even if someone did find a way to send her a contract through the mail, standard monitoring of stuff sent to prisoners already in use for real life prisoners would catch it.
ahhh, but what if her job is with a foreign company? it may be impossible to have an American job, but she can still be legally employed by a foreign company. maybe some African country, where US hegemony may have less sway
They would still need approval to operate within the US. Which would be revoked.
She’s especially fond of working with Nigerian princes and intercepting their outgoing wire transfers to helpful outsiders.
If you’ve never seen a video from James Veitch, I very much recommend you search for his name on Youtube. :)
Love his stuff – stringing the scammer along is fantastic, but my favorite is either the fake renovation or the ducks. :D
Auuuggghhh, The DUCKS!
Now I -have- to provide a link since two people have mentioned the ducks.
Otherwise everyone will think we’re talking nonsense and I just cannot let that stand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZB_EBsnc8c
I had seen the scammer one before but not this duck one, now I am choking with laughter
Thank you for that Pander. I, like Rhuen, had not seen that one before, thank you.
D’oh, now I’m watching lots of James Veitch videos.
It’s a bottomless pit of hilarity.
Keeping Hench Wench incarcerated would be really easy, because we’ve already seen that her powers are beaten by the legal system. She needed the villains to form an LLC to make it work, and when the LLC was revoked, it stopped her powers. If her job isn’t legal, it doesn’t work.
We don’t know that yet. We’ve only seen that her contract loophole could be beaten by the legal system. Not only was the contract invalid, Evil Inc. already wanted to fire her, and the legal intervention was only to complete the firing.
It’s entirely possible that HW only used the contract to trap her employers and stop herself from getting fired, and if that’s not a concern, she only needs the ongoing consent of her employer.
HW expecting to be able to be hired by Vehemence just like with a verbal deal slightly supports that, and also it would be strange for an explicitly supervillain-themed power to be contingent on legality – not a classical domain of villains, after all.
Your assumption is proven wrong by the daydream. Just the verbal agreement to work for someone is enough… it does not have to be a “legal” contract. Which we already know, because the Evil Inc LLC agreement was made for an illegal purpose and therefore was legally void at creation. It was just a parlor trick whereby she could make her power work to add a group effect.
Legal main in prison is protected by the 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendments. All guards can do is check to make sure there is no contraband in the envelope and can only open it in front of the prisoner. The prison staff may NOT read the contents of legal mail. I’m an ACLU volunteer and I have given lectures to laws students on on Constitutional law from time to time.
I meant legal MAIL not legal “main”. Been a long day and missed that typo before sending. This forum doesn’t allow edits. :(
With great respect, this from the ACLU disagrees somewhat:
** PRIVILEGED MAIL (from your lawyer) cannot be read and can be opened in front of you
** NON-PRIVILEGED MAIL (from your employer) can be read outside your presence without a warran
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/prisoners-rights/
Whether this is good or bad I can’t say..
Richard, sorry but you’re incorrect. In prison, all communications, except for attorney client visits and outgoing mail, are subject to warrantless monitoring. This include:
1) Mail
2) Telephone calls
3) Email
4) Visitation (except for attorney visitation)
They (custody staff, with approval of the prison facility’s commander) can also read all non-privileged outgoing mail as well, in order to ensure that inmate communications do not pose a threat to the safety of staff, other inmates the security of the facility, or that the correspondence will be used in furtherance of criminal activity.
I also did a quick look at the ACLU’s website since I know for a fact that prison mail staff, the facility operator, and anyone the facility operator signs off on, can read prisoner incoming and outgoing mail, search incoming and outgoing packages, etc.
I think you may have misunderstood what the ACLU was saying about the First Amendment.
The First Amendment entitles prisoners to be able to send and receive mail. It does not prevent prison facility operators from reading it first, or even from preventing the mail from going through if there is reasonable suspicion. The only mail that the prison facility may NOT read is privileged communications. For that mail, they must first obtain a warrant. THEN they can read it if they get the warrant. Even with incoming privileged mail, they CAN open it, without a warrant, but have to be in the prisoner’s presence when they do.
Here, I’ll give you what even the ACLU says about it, so you don’t have to take my word for it:
I want to send and receive mail in prison
Your rights:
The First Amendment of the Constitution entitles prisoners to send and receive mail, but the prison or jail may inspect and sometimes censor it to protect security, using appropriate procedures.
Prison officials’ ability to inspect and censor mail depends on whether the mail is privileged or not. Officials may open non-privileged mail, which includes letters from relatives, friends, and businesses, outside your presence.
They can read this mail for security or other reasons without probable cause or a warrant.
Incoming or outgoing non-privileged mail may be censored for legitimate security reasons. However, mail may not be censored simply because it is critical of prison officials or because prison officials disagree with its content.
Prisons may not ban mail simply because it contains material downloaded from the Internet. You may not be punished for posting material on the Internet with the help of others outside of prison.
Clearly marked privileged mail, which includes communications to and from attorneys and legal organizations like the ACLU, gets more protection. Officials may open incoming privileged mail to check it for contraband, but must do so in your presence. They are not allowed to open outgoing privileged mail. Privileged mail ordinarily cannot be read unless prison officials obtain a warrant allowing them to do so.
If your incoming mail is censored, both you and the sender are entitled to notice. The notice must explain the reasons for the censorship in enough detail to allow you to challenge it.
maybe not precice enough. mail from attorneys is protected it can be inspected for contraband but not read.
How you just thought those were first amendment rights is pretty much why everyone with half a brain and some knowledge of the constitution in actuality knows that a certain someone’s lawyers during someone’s recent impeachment were lying through their teeth.
It roughly, but quite bluntly states that bit about “Unless said speech leading to immediate violent and/or criminal action.” Something Henchie is guilty of here repeatedly. Which is why she’s a paralegal, and why those three RL lawyers are likely to be suspended and/or disbarred in the coming months for lying under oath.
Incorrect not First Amendment it is the Attorney Client Privilege. Totally different cat to skin, there are ways around it easiest would be requiring all contacts between her and her attorney to be in person. Doesn’t get around it fully but it does make it more difficult for her attorney to slip her new powers. Also would encourage the attorney to keep it clean really sucks to be disbarred and winding up in jail for helping your client escape.
First Amendment covers speech, freedom of the press, religion, right to assembly and petition the goverment. Doesn’t cover anything dealing with attorney client privilege, nor does it cover private actors regulating speech IE companies. Only deals with government and how it can or can’t regulate this things, yes speech can be regulated and is in limited ways like with advertising or yelling fire in a theater. Oh companies like Facebook and Twitter are not public spaces they are not required too follow the First Amendment, public space is the sidewalk street front of your house park and any common area that the public gathers that is not private property owned by a company. If you live in a gated community you may not have an actual public street it is owned by the HOA and there for considered private, check the HOA guidelines.
This is all assuming as well that anyone in super-super max prison is granted any rights at all in this case. they set up a new system. who is to say that the rights of these prisoners isn’t revoked to the same point that a terrorist would have? terrorists enjoy no rights under our constitutional laws. or they may have negotiated a new system of rights to avoid such snags. this is arianna we are talking about and as they are using pot to subdue one and have pressurized the cell of another. I think it’s safe to assume that the set up for this prison isn’t going to be following the same rules. but they will probably cut off any unmonitored conversations and have a way to end the conversation if it goes towards something that could give her more powers. they’ll probably also pressurize her cell the same as they did for the other girl that could use portals.
As I understand it, only correspondence from her lawyer would be consider “privileged” and not read.
However, given the unique circumstances of her power, they ‘might’ be able to get around that by having a neutral 3rd party (someone not associated with the US government, the government’s lawyers, Hench, or her legal team) read all correspondence to ensure she is not using privilege to bypass security.
It would be a tricky legal battle though, one worthy of the greatest lawyer superhero, the She-Hulk. (sadly, she is in the DC universe.)
See https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=fdc90687-758e-44d2-a233-fdd04f747bb3 The review can be done by a “special master” appointed by the judge. The special master is often a retired judge. The main requirement is that there be a “Chinese wall” between the people involved in the case and the special master. Before you say that nobody really respects “Chinese wall” arrangements, these are strongly enforced and there are severe penalties for violating them. I’m sure that one of the requirements will be that the “special master” is trusted by both sides. Both my father and myself have done work under such arrangements and we took it very seriously. In my case, we were building plants for people who were our competitors in other product lines, and I was quite clearly told that I (and other people in my group) would be fired if we communicated any of the competitor’s information to people in our company who did not have a “need to know” and a “right to know”.
Am I the only one finding Henchwench’s look to be getting more and more awesome and adorable every page? We need pinups of her being cutesy!
I endorse this. Maybe a HenchWench Pinup? “Baby, looking this good is a crime!”
She’s based on an actual person. Dave doing a pinup of her might be a little creepy.
But with permission, maybe then.
Oh hey! Hench Wench’s teeth are back. I wonder if that’s a healing power thing or the LLC’s dental plan.
Spectral restoration. She fused with her astral form which symbolizes the self image. So wounds removed.
Maybe, maybe not. There was panels earlier when her teeth was back, but that may or may not have been artistic expression.
Do you mean the flash back to the signing of the contract that some somehow mistook for the current time?
I like this theory. I hope her ability to use borrowed powers in strange/new ways is further explored later. Somehow. She’s cute. I mean, she’s interesting.
LMAO, Henchwench is Villain Sydney. XD To a tee, hahaha
I mean. in defense of co-ed super super prisons, its ALOT money and resources in contain a very small amount of people. id makes sense to try and pool resources to ensure containment instead of deciding them by 2. And there’s nothing that men and women shouldn’t be doing that could also be happening in single-sex prison.
And both attractiveness and the ability to defend yourself are barely related to gender in a super-super-max prison.
Example:
Guy with super strength: “lets rape that babe.”
“babe”: “Yeah, actually I’m a super that can transform.” “transforms into gundam and crushes guy with super strength.”
In the non-grrlpower verse you also have serious chances to be a female super villain that looks like the swamp thing or something.
“there’s nothing that men and women shouldn’t be doing that could also be happening in single-sex prison”
– and every American prison film/drama ever.
“The Bad Things we’re doing stuff to prevent are happening anyway so we might as well not try to prevent them so hard” is a terrible take. Especially when said Bad Things is prison rape.
If anything, it should be a wakeup call. We ARE okay with prison rape, as long as it’s homosexual in nature. Hell, we even treat it as part of the judicial system: “You got convicted! Hahah, wait until you meet your new cellmate, Bubba!”
WHY are we okay with that? Why do we think that throwing them in a cell with Bubba should be acceptable? Why do we believe there’s anything acceptable about turning some convicted criminals into Bubbas so that they can carry out punitive rape-by-proxy on others?
I’m not, ironicaly it’s been my stance since before one of my my pro Bono clients put it bluntly when she tried to explain to a baby lawyer* about reality. The cleaned up version is, that her abuser was treated as a **** **** by her(the abuser’s) parents, it’s how she (her abuser) think things work, and she gets off on it either way.
The good incarceration systems do there best to separate the sex offenders from both the general pop and each other.
*No offense to anyone going into any part of the legal profession or any part of the criminal justice system, but until you go through the 40+page depositions and written statements of a someone who knows there guilty, is proud of it, and thinks that the process is a violation of *there* rights, then yes your a baby.
It’s even scarier when your dealing with someone who knows they deserve being locked up. One literaly told the BPP that the only regret he had in all the time he was in prison was the party was over because no one would ever be stupid enough to release him on parole.
Sorry I did not realize I needed to vent
Nice to see SOMEONE understands reality. It is not pretty. It is not clean and it most certainly is not politically correct. Yes, we need to be fair. Yes, we need to be just.
But I once sat in jury duty on a man whose ONLY reaction on getting caught for all his crimes? (Which were many and bad.) ‘I could, so I did. There is no death penalty anymore, so bite me!’
If we ignore the problem, if DOES NOT go away. If we coddle people who have proven to be anti-social monsters, then all we get is pain. That said? Not everyone is guilty of that. Many people are in the wrong place at the wrong time and do the wrong thing. Telling those two groups apart can be hard, so many don’t bother.
I have known ex-convicts who never broke their word, who went to church and stopped at every stoplight.
And I have known people who never saw the inside of a cell who I would never give a pet to, because they would hurt it and laugh. Don’t ask me about their kids, please.
I got to the point where I don’t trust ANYONE. Safer that way.
There are some people you can trust with your wife, some people you can trust with your money, and some people you can trust to water your plants…. and they are NOT the same people.
But you can always trust people to be themselves.
If you were ever angry with someone for doing something that you told them not to do, that they agreed not to do, but that they did anyway, and you knew they were going to do anyway even though they had promised, then you were angry at them for being themselves.
Once you understand that, you can change your own behavior as needed.
Because most people practice what I tend to call “target-based morality”: they don’t believe any particular actions are right or wrong, just that it’s right or wrong to do them to certain people.
For some people, the goal is to reduce the total harm in the universe. For others, the goal is to make sure that the right people get hurt.
https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/about/prison-rape-elimination-act
I’m retired military, and was on Okinawa when Supertyphoon Nari? hit…twice. I currently live in Colorado, and I’ve got nothing but sympathy for you folks in Texas. Being equipped to *handle* weather makes it far easier to live with, and this is something Texas was *not* ready for, despite lots of warning to your rulers. (With the way your system is gerrymandered, the title seems appropriate)
And it’s not like this never happens, it’s just usually a long time between. The last time it was this bad (or worse) was 1989 right after we moved here. My little car still didn’t have AC but it had a heater that would drive you out of the car even in sub-zero F temperatures.
The funniest part is the guys trying to claim “Wind Power doesn’t work in cold temperatures.” Folks in Denmark, Norway, Canada and bases in Antarctica do just fine, because they weren’t too cheap to get the winterized stuff.
The vast majority of Texas Blackouts are actually Natural Gas related.
Am Canadian, can confirm. Then again with our weather we can’t really afford to be cheap (or at least if we were it would bite us in the ass about once a year instead of once every 30).
Well, in the sense that the gas turbines weren’t in a position to make up for the loss of wind power, sure. But only in that sense, most of the wind power DID go away.
Which guys, specifically?
The wind power generation systems in northwest Texas were designed for their normal temperature ranges, and have an engineered limit to how high temperatures and how low temperatures they will operate under. No one engineered them to run at -20, because we never GET -20 temperatures. Remember, cars have different oil to use in New Hampshire winter than they do in California year-round.
I have no idea what the lowest design operating temperature might be for these babies here, but it will not be the same as the ones deployed in the North Sea… and the ones in the North Sea would not be likely to stay functional in a Texas summer.
except, Pendrake, that the failure was because the natural gas systems were overloaded when 12% of the grid went down at one time, because the old backups had been dismantled as part of the conditions for the federal subsidies. Also, might wanna check up on the more closely related European example: Germany, because those other nations still have plenty of dirty infrastructure still in place along with hydroelectric.
Germany went all renewables and has rolling blackouts so often it’s become regular.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-power-supply-insight/does-renewables-pioneer-germany-risk-running-out-of-power-idUSKCN1UD0GZ
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germanys-stressed-grid-is-causing-trouble-across-europe
https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-germanys-power-grid/a-47730394
https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/germany-and-energiewende-a-dispassionate-assessment.pdf
https://dailycaller.com/2017/02/28/germany-facing-mass-blackouts-because-the-wind-and-sun-wont-cooperate/
IOW the issue in Texas was predictable, given that Germany’s program is what the Federal Government was looking to here at home when they set up the subsidies under the Obama administration.
It was also predictable because roughly the same damn thing happened 10 years ago.
Just because it “might not happen again” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take precautions.
If there is ever some sort of live action adaptation of this comic, Gina Carano should play Maxima.
Doubt it, she’s basically a leper to any half-credible acting firm now. Mostly for that comment comparing current-day American Republicans to “Jews during the Holocaust.”
There are a few other actresses who’d work, like Lexa Doig (Michael Shanks’ wife, she played the Warship Avatar Rommy, and the ship herself on Andromeda, as well as bit parts on SG-1 alongside him).
Half-credible acting firms don’t exist in HolyWeird, none of them are credible anymore
Yep, it’s definitely beyond the pale these days to point out the obvious parallels.
A few years from now it might be an obvious parallel, (I sure hope not!) right now it’s more like right after the Reichstag fire, not during the Holocaust.
The problem being, if you have any audience share at all, and you point it out, they immediately declare you to be a white-supremacist-nazi, blackball you from your industry and try to memory-hole everything you’ve done.
aka, what the actual Nazis did right after the Reichstag fire to their opponents.
which goes to show, the ‘anti fascist’ activists don’t oppose it because the methodology is evil and oppressive, but because they disagreed with the targets of that methodology. Which kinda shows where it’s gotten on the ethical/moral scale and suggests what direction things are going in, along with what outcomes are most likely to occur if it keeps going.
Yet the Pedro Pascal also made a far more direct comparison but left leaning; posting a picture of “kids in cages” and comparing them to Jewish kids locked up in Nazi Germany. Except the picture was not even taken in America.
I can’t help but notice that the left is free to compare the right to Nazis all day every day, and it’s never a problem. When the right dares to compare the left to Nazis though, suddenly such comparisons are disgusting and problematic.
Changer, if it weren’t for double standards, the Left would have no standards whatsoever. At least, in the United States. The same people who protested the 1st Gulf war, sat there with a cheeseburger in each hand cheering when the government killed all their suspects and burned the site at Waco. Why? because it was ‘their team’ doing it to ‘the other team’. They don’t oppose the MECHANISMS of Fascism, they only object to the target selection of past fascist regimes.
just, so you know what kind of thinking you’re looking at here.
It… wasn’t the government who burnt down Waco, it was the nutbangers in that cult that burnt it dwn, when they realised they were about to lose and be sent to prison because their nuthugger cult leader lied to them
That is fact and truth.
DO NOT BRING THAT IN HERE!
Next thing we know, you will be spouting ‘logic’! *shudder*
Wut?
Humans are tribalistic animals. But those on the Left are at least trying to find and live by consistent principles that don’t harm others. The Right has all but given up even pretending to have any standards at all.
And you can’t figure out why that might be? Comparing people to Nazis is not in and of itself morally good or bad. It depends on whether or not the comparison is accurate. An inaccurate comparison suggests either misunderstanding or malice.
Funny thing, historically speaking:
Many people are drawing parrells to history these days. But they might want to actually READ some actual history before they start speaking. A good speaker can make a printed word mean anything at all. Case in point, a certain corporal from Austria and a certain orange haired charlatan.
But um, to clarify, comparing anyone today to the National Socialist Party of Germany is an insult to the Nazis. Not all of them were evil. Not all of them were fanatics. Statistically speaking, very few of them were but they were in positions of power. They took a country that had been utterly destroyed after WW! and turned it into something that could have conquered the world. Their horrors and crimes are mostly known.
But…
My great uncle served in the 101st Airbourne. He was sent to Bastogne as his first battle. In said battle, he was caught in an artillery barrage and took a great deal of shrapnel. So much so, that his buddies thought he was dead. He didn’t have a pulse when they checked, so he didn’t blame them. (Much) The ‘evil’ Nazis found him, realized he was alive and rushed him to medical aid. Most doctors in wartime would have simply written him off as too badly hurt to survive. Harsh, but realistic. In such times, you save your resources for someone who can be saved. But one card carrying Nazi surgeon made it it his mission to see my great uncle saved. 30 operations later, my uncle walked to a prison camp that was liberated a week afterwards.
Yes, the Nazis did great evil. They did such evil as will likely never be forgotten. But they ALSO sometimes did good. That is always forgotten.
It is much easier to hate evil people after all.
Yups, it’s like saying all Democrats or all Republicans are evil because of which ever president is in charge at the time (have no damn clue which president belonged to what party, and don’t give a shit, their party is only ever relevant when the two are trying to beat each other off or to blame someone when they don’t get their way)
People like to forget (or ignore) that the National Socialist Party of Germany was a political party, not a religion or a race
Funny you should say that, since the crux of many of the arguments about whether or not it’s appropriate to call someone a Nazi hinge on people forgetting that it was a political party (voluntary membership) demonizing , dehumanizing, and committing genocide against members of a race (involuntary membership).
A person’s behavior is a product of both their nature and their environment. Good people can do evil things, and evil people can do good things. Most people are neither; they simply do what their environment tells them to do.
Many people living in Nazi Germany were simply trying to survive. Some of them did awful things because they felt they had no choice, that if they spoke out they would be punished. Others embraced evil wholeheartedly.
And people in the US or Great Britain didn’t?
Oh, wait, never mind, they were the ‘good’ guys, THEY could get away with silly things like war crimes.
History IS written by the victors. Always.
I’m certainly not saying they didn’t, any more than I’m saying people now don’t. They absolutely did and do. Yes, history is written by the victors, which is why I’m suspicious of any bit of history.
The past is past. What matters is what people do now. Dredging up the past to justify current behavior just perpetuates suffering.
There was a great movie, “Cross of Iron”, which portrayed the honorable part of the German army… among other things.
One scene, apropos of nothing…
At one point, a soldier under Sergeant Steiner’s (James Coburn’s) command takes a captured woman into a barn to rape her. She bites his manhood off and he kills her in response. Steiner, faced with a soldier likely to bleed to death due to his own brutality and stupidity, locks the wounded rapist up with the remainder of the captured women.
Funnily enough, the right did that too. You know all those pics of cops apparently injured in US BLM protests?
Those were actually pics of Australian cops injured in the line of duty over the course of a decade.
Yeah, its not like BOTH sides do that.
After all, truth isn’t what matters. Angst that can be exploited is.
All of them? That’s a big claim. And it’s 100% false as stated, since I saw pictures of wounded cops in US uniforms.
Reference to where you GOT that claim?
Yeah… Jew here. And after spending the last few DECADES hearing gentiles compare Republicans/Democrats/smokers/anti-smokers/environmentalists/anti-environmentalists/ANYTHING they disagree with to Hitler and the Nazis, the claims that Gina went too far are EXTREMELY hypocritical.
Especially since I’ve seen her tweet. She pointed out that the Nazis didn’t just take power with guns aimed at all the trembling, morally outraged but frightened Germans. The Nazis swept to power at the behest of Germans who were eager to see violence done against others. Because everyone was in agreement that WW2 was a war of good versus evil… but both sides saw themselves as the good guys.
(Remember, the Allies included the British Empire – with its history of genocide, brutal oppression, and reliance on a powerful military utilizing conscript troops and child soldiers; the United States – whose racial policies inspired the Nazi’s own eugenics programs; and the USSR – led by Joseph Stalin, with a higher body count of innocent victims than Hitler ever dreamed of amassing. There are reasons why the rest of the world didn’t automatically side with the Allies)
Not just hypocritical, but ludicrous.
I’m in one of the suburbs south of Houston and I had no electricity AT ALL Monday through Wednesday. So now I’m a week behind schedule (funny how that works).
My mom was without power for 6 days (intermittently, about 25 minutes of power followed by 8-10 hours of no power) but finally has power again. I wanted to order her one of those propane emergency space heaters because she also didn’t have heat but by the time it arrived, she had power again.
Still good to have for an emergency.
Sorry you went through that also. Happy to hear you have power again now.
After I lost power during a storm during the summer in New York for 5 days (most of the borough lost power and Con Edison didn’t get to us until near the end), I wound up pretty much prep-crazy to make sure I wouldn’t have a problem again if it happened again. Got myself a propane space heater, a battery-powered oscillating room fan, a camping stove/oven that uses butane, a generator that can be used for one room (I figured I’d use it for the kitchen to keep the refrigerator running 4 hours before I have to recharge it), some solar panels which I still don’t know how to hook up to the generator, and like 30 LED stick on lights which I’ve put all over my house so if there’s a blackout, I can turn them on and it pretty much lights up the entire room.
Mainly because it happened, I wound up sleeping in my car several days because it was the only place I had air conditioning or a fan. Not fun at all. My main entertainment was using my phone to watch movies and TV on Netflix and reading webcomics. :)
Be careful of carbon monoxide with those propane powered appliances. Your prep should include a CO detector/alarm.
Already have one in the house and so does my mom, but thenks for the heads up on the prepper advice:)
Proof that Henchwench isn’t the brightest bulb: her motive for going on her destructive rampage was, allegedly, to not get caught and incarcerated.
She had this portal backup power from the getgo.
Instead of using it as her last resort, if she had used it as her first resort while she still had her other powers, it’s quite possible she could’ve made a clean getaway. Incredibly probable, even:
Combine Concretia’s spectral form with the portal and then nobody could touch her while she made her escape.
But, hey, if she was smart enough to have thought to done that, she wouldn’t be in this situation.
So… Spectral form bails and her physical form gets locked up just like what happened to actual Concretia?
As for the portal, I suspect it is a one time deal and/or only valid after her other contract expires. Otherwise she would have likely been using teleport spam during her battles as well. Provided it doesn’t have a long cooldown.
Also, as every gamer knows, if you have a one time use ability or item you save it even if a good time to use it comes up because the next time might be better. Or the time after that… Or the time after that time…
Nah she merged it with the meat remember? Unlike concretia, henchwench was able to make the physical and spectral form one.
I don’t think that was her motive, she wanted to fight and test her powers. However, more intelligence would have let her realize that she couldn’t win and better get out before someone found a way at her powers, so your conclusion is still correct. ;)
Seems like classical hubris to me. Her whole attitude indicates that she also fails to get a grip on the severity of her situation. It is amazing that she even managed to survive thus far, contractual powers or not.
DaveB – about the colouring… I rather prefer the style with which you began the strip. It’s genre appropriate. My opinion is probably biased by the fact that you seemed to have a gag per panel in those days.
Not to get too into the legal details of this world, but now that they know how her power works, I wonder if they could just impose a legal restriction on her that nullifies any contract within the borders of the United States. Since cancelling her previous contract lost her the powers, pre-emptive contract nullification could in theory keep her from ever using her powers inside US territory.
That’s got to be illegal though, it’s the equivalent of forcing her to either leave the country or commit crime to survive. How is she supposed to even acquire food and shelter if she can’t work, which of necessity requires a contract (if only a verbal one)? How is she supposed to work without an employer? Her only option would be self-employment, which has got to be nigh impossible for a paralegal, and finding honest clients as a freelancer is going to be pretty difficult at this point.
Also, she could easily form a contract outside the US’s jurisdiction and act here anyways. It might be illegal for her to operate here, but that wouldn’t void her extranational contracts without a formal process getting the foreign nation to act, which I suspect would be hard to pull off on short notice. If anything, limiting HW to international contracting would make it harder to monitor/counteract her within the US.
Nope. You don’t need to have other people’s superpowers to “survive”. It’s the legal equivalent of laws preventing felons from having and using firearms. If such a contract with the government COULD work, then it would be legal, and it could just be written to allow employment with unpowered employers.
Your second point is spot-on, though. The suggested contract just wouldn’t work.
Forbidding employment with supers is different than forbidding all employment – that would be more workable. But just as unpractical as it’s not enforceable, given that there is no registry for supers, and therefore employers with powers can’t be required to reveal themselves to HW (or any other applicant).
Make it so her probations officer has to authorize any contract. Awkward, but workable.
DaveB – if you’re in DFW, and if you ever need anything — literally anything — then let me know IRL and we’ll make something happen. You have my email.
No henchwench just no you aren’t going to get away from this, you go to jail and you stay in jail.
Is there a loophole in super-law for “Yes, I do need a paralegal- but also her fashion sense happens to *precisely* align with what I am all about.”?
“Okay, so here’s a question. If Henchwench’s powers only work with supervillains, her ability to gain powers from someone makes her a reliable supervillain detector, right?”
Actually, Dave, what HW’s power is really good for is as a corruption detector. If HW were to join Archon, she wouldn’t gain any powers – as long as Archon’s leadership remains Good. If any of them should have a change of heart and turn Evil, HW would immediately gain their powers!
Of course, a LOT would depend on HW’s definition of ‘supervillain’. Would an Archon cop who ‘occasionally’ took bribes be considered one? Would they have to murder someone? Pledge their soul to the forces of Darkness? There’s a lot of wiggle room there. Arianna could throw together an iron-clad employment contract specifically defining these terms, or they may be defined in the Archon charter.
Down by the beach in Panama City there were these two seagulls sitting on a light pole in the Walmart parking lot watching the shoppers as they came and went, keeping a weather eye out for the scraps the tourist usually toss from their cars. Their names were Bernice and Gertrude. As they sat there they talked about politics, the economy, and how nobody could even spare a couple of french fries these days. Bernice thought it was such a shame, Gertrude didn’t think much of it because she had eaten a half of a gluten free bagel just that morning. She had kind of a pained look on her face.
Bernice said to Gertrude, she said,” Gertrude, it’s not just the food that’s getting smaller. The cars are getting smaller too.”
To which Gertrude replied, ” They can’t be that small when the people keep getting larger.”
And Bernice exclaimed “It’s true! They don’t even run on gas anymore. They make electricity and charge when they stop!”
“They must not go very fast if they only make electricity when they stop.” said Gertrude not really paying attention. She thought she might be coming down with something.
“Come Gertrude, you must have seen those tiny hybrids running around!”
“No Bernice, I really haven’t.” A car pulls up behind Gertrude as a great splash sounds and she looks behind her feeling greatly relieved. “Though it looks like I just spotted one.”
“Oh, and it looks like they had sunroof open!”
I steal all of the puns here. My clown act is improving.
Just looking at that second panel would leave me thinking that the the government is insane, you would not be feeding someone of that size a tiny meal. A mean that size unless it is extremely packed with everything the body needs would be starving someone of that size.
Given the person HenchWench chose as her “dream partner”, it’s obvious she doesn’t know that he’s in solitary confinement, in a room decorated with happy unicorns and rainbows and breathing an atmosphere tailored to make him really happy and passive.
And probably have 24/7 munchies…
Also Vehemence isn’t the most trustworthy employer. Given after he got enough energy to fight Maxima during the parking lot fight, he basically cut everyone else go.
*hires HenchWench, massive riot breaks out, Vehemence becoming turbo-charged*
V: “HenchWench, I no longer require your services. Our contract is now finished.”
HW: *looks at all the angry supers as her power goes poof* “AH CRAP!!”
Actually, the only one Kev ‘turned on’, was Vektor, because he was getting ready to get Opal to ‘bug out’ with all Kev’s playthings
Technically speaking, he also threw For Whom the Death Tolls (was that his name?) under the bus, by pointing him out to Sidney as one of the more likely high-level threats, which got her to focus on him and figure out his power.
Vehemence turned on them when they were trying to retreat (which would have weakened his aggression aura stunt). HW isn’t the type to retreat early, however.
It seems her biggest weakness this entire time is telling, as loudly as humanly possible mind you, both what her abilities are and exactly what she is about to do. Should she have just stayed silent, her effectiveness would have increased exponentially. I’m quite sure this self-harming boaster mechanic of heroes and villains alike has to be called by some kind of name, but for the life of me I’ve never heard it.
Perhaps she’s still playing by Silver Age Rules?
Whatever it is, it’s likely documented on the TVTropes Wiki. Perhaps under “Speeches and Monologues”. Maybe “Evil Gloating”?
Warning: do not click any of those links, unless you’re prepared to lose several hours on a wiki walk.
That particular trope is known as “Explaining Your Power to the Enemy”, and it seems to be a very common compulsion.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExplainingYourPowerToTheEnemy
Ah, Monologuing. So many evildoers undone by their-
Um, did I just quote the Incredibles? I can’t remember. I think I need to re-visit some tropes.
(Twelve hours later)
Nope, not a quote.
What logical end ? crimes that deserve the death penalty have existed through history and are still in place in many countries. Use reality rather than theory please.
Your comment appears to have become unmoored from the original thread.
Anyway, if a crime doesn’t deserve death the first time, then why does it deserve death the second?
Yeah forgot to hit reply , thank
Because the first time you might argue it was an aberration of their normal behavior that does not define the individual.
Repeating the same act means its part of their character and society is justified in defending itself.
The death penalty isn’t the only way for a society to defend itself. People and their actions are shaped considerably by their circumstances, so you can’t draw many conclusions about their character from only a few instances of their behavior, particularly under similar situations. Most people aren’t stubbornly choosing to do the wrong thing; they do whatever they think they have to in order to fulfill their needs.
Crime is a product of lack of education, lack of opportunity, and unmet needs. Character is a lens through which those forces produce an outcome, provides a threshold at which a person becomes so desperate that they prioritize their own needs over the needs of others. But you can’t accurately judge a person’s character from their behavior without knowing their situation.
I… What?
Politics? I really don’t come here for politics.
Well as political as talking about the morality of a universe with super beings ( plus the narrative driven need to have the same super villain escape over and over ).
I like to using history as to how the normal humans might react but this is not related to the real world except as a method to keep things grounded.
Every good story provides an opportunity to explore meaningful philosophical issues, including politics. Some people like to discuss them. You don’t have to engage in that way, but how does it affect you if other people choose to?
Indeed not.
Supermax prisons are basically Solitary Confinement, 24/7. Lock them all in small windowless boxes by themselves and wait for madness and brain damage from social isolation to destroy their minds (many of which were not entirely sound even before they were arrested).
Most countries consider this a form of illegal torture, but the USA is a big fan (In particular, politicians in election years trying to prove they’re “tough on crime”).
They don’t seem all that bad actually. :) Plenty of Netflix, possibly endless Doritos and playing Kirby. And Opal’s cell looked bigger than some apartments I’ve lived in when I was younger. I know friends who would be into that. :)
And clearly they get to talk to the guards, judging from how it was with both Opal and Vehemence. So it’s not exactly the Shawshank Redemption ‘box’ that we’re seeing. :) It’s not exactly ‘isolation’ – or at least that would be a very good argument to make (on top of the many cases providing legal precedent against the argument you (and quite a few attorneys) try to use.
But more seriously… technically, super-supermax feels a little more like prisoner segregation than actual isolation, and VERY individualized, since they are in regular communication with other people (ie, the guards, the people who are getting Kevin his Doritos, etc) – it’s just they are not in communication with the other prisoners for reasons which are pretty much glaringly obvious. So far we’ve only seen two examples of people in super-supermax prison, and both of them HAVE to be isolated from other prisoners as a necessary means of preventing them from using their powers to escape or cause a catastrophe or both.
ARCHON does seem to be just taking necessary precautions for people who can NOT be in a general population prison because it would be a GREAT danger to others, since things like superpower dampeners do not exist in Grrlpower’s universe. It might even be on a case-by-case basis, for all we know. Some supers MIGHT be in a type of ‘general population’ prison if that would be able to contain them and prevent them from being able to escape and cause chaos and/or death.
As far as US law is concerned, solitary confinement is NOT cruel and unusual punishment that would violate the 8th Amendment on its own (key words, ‘on its own,’ meaning it could be cruel and unusual punishment if there were additional elements included beyond mere segregation from other prisoners). It is only cruel and unusual punishment, at least in the United States, “if one or more of its accompanying material conditions result in wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain upon an individual.”
Example: Murder in the First starring Kevin Bacon – that is an example where the US would recognize solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment. It was meant to be psychological torture, barely any light at all, let alone sunlight, barely any room to exercise, no interaction even with the guards except 30 minutes a year, literally being given only stale bread and water IE, it was a lot more than just not being allowed to interact with other prisoners in general population. It was isolation + other factors which made it torture, any one additional factor of which would have been reason enough to consider it torture.
PS – If they were in certain other nations, there would be specific limits on how many continuous days a prisoner can be in solitary confinement (15 days for Canada, 3 months for India, etc). Other groups, like the UN, has ‘Mandela rules’ which define solitary confinement as “the confinement of inmates for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact, and a prohibition of solitary confinement under those rules of more than 15 consecutive days.”
By the UN’s rules, which are obviously far more lenient than the US’s rules on solitary confinement, it can be argued that neither Opal or Deus is/was in ‘solitary confinement.’ (see above reasoning re: guard interaction, etc)
Although admittedly, some of this post is a moot point if you’re not actually talking about ‘super-supermax prisons’ as it relates to containing someone with superhuman powers. :)
Correct. I was only speaking of real world, supermax security prisons, which, unlike fiction ones, are entirely solitary confinement cells for all prisoners, at all times.
Solitary confinement in North America was started by the Quakers (you know that dude on the oatmeal package?) A strongly religious group, put a Bible in there with The prisoner, expecting him to use that time to study it and Repent directions, but so many prisoners were coming out of the confinement deeply disturbed and unbalanced, that they abolished the form of punishment. It remained illegal for more than a century, Until politicians brought it back to curry favour with the uneducated masses, who just wanted anyone considered a “criminal “ to suffer.
There is a topic I am seeing mentioned in passing in a sort of matter of fact way, I did too, but probably could use some explaining for those who haven’t seen or read of it in sci-fi or fantasy stories before.
Spectral Restoration *AKA: Ghost, Ethereal, Ascended…and a bunch of other local story terms for this*
basic idea a person transforms into an energy (or other equivalent ghost, astral, psychic, ascended, ect…) ethereal form and then back again and their ailments are gone; injuries, missing teeth, blindness, broken bones, disease, ect…
basically they turn into an ethereal form and then back to flesh; so you may ask, well if they change back shouldn’t those conditions come back as well. No, because they aren’t really changing back.
Flesh becomes energy that energy uses a mental template the person has of themselves and then that energy changes to flesh based on that. Hell its not unheard of for people doing that to come back stronger, healthier, different hair style, height, ect…if their mental image was different enough from how they were before.
So for Henchwench, she fused with her phantom form, the phantom form looks to be an astral matrix based her mental image of herself, so when being turned to flesh the astral form was used as the template filling in any missing gaps.
-unless the story uses a snapshot feature so the return is a perfect double of what you were like before “ascending” or traveling to other dimensions.
for laughs you can even have this whole process cause stomach and bowel problems for a few weeks as the process eliminates all your gut flora that aid in digestion as they weren’t part of your mental template.
How many people really have a mental template of their sinuses. Or their spleen?
Some stuff we can shrug off as astral shadow clone. That and subconscious awareness through the nervous system.
My post said, that would make for an interesting story that someone ascends or something but when they come back they return changed , like a different enhanced species with different organ structures and everything, they just look human. Like they came back as some techno organic Android or a human shaped plant or fungus and every one including them questions if they really came back or if this is a clone or copy with their memories imprinted in it. I think i have seen some where the experience did affect them psychologically but broader physical changes like, well you can digest rocks now , or you know longer have a spleen but instead have a new organ whose function we don’t know. A more general story is coming back with super powers, which would be redundant in this case. Unless Henchwench gets a new power permanently imprinted from the experience.
Funny thing Dave: Apparently it is a Federal Crime to change the weather in the US (without permission).
15 U.S. Code § 330a
“No person may engage, or attempt to engage, in any weather modification activity in the United States unless he submits to the Secretary such reports with respect thereto, in such form and containing such information, as the Secretary may by rule prescribe. The Secretary may require that such reports be submitted to him before, during, and after any such activity or attempt.”
well things like seeding clouds exist so it was likely a pre-emptive move seeing this kind of technology expanding later on or being abused by the private sector.
Super speed would only help if she knew where Hench Wench was going.