Fuck Stark. Indefinite prison for failure to register and conscripting people…yeah he’s evil.
Ironically for that scene, MySpace is now almost as much a relic as Cap is…
Not an entirely unreasonable concern. But, on the other hand, is not registration itself a “significant check” on the abuse of power? (Literal “power,” in this case, amusingly.)
I mean, just because something—from a practice, or a substance, to a person—can be abused doesn’t mean it should be completely banned. Just that it requires control, and regulation.
(Bolding mine).
Look, I know there’s a lot of evil organizations out there in the Marvel-verse, but is AOL really that bad?
Which is fine…as long as it’s controlled and regulated all around. While the government is protecting us from them, who’s protecting them from the government? And if the government makes them part of the government, who’s protecting us from the now-more-powerful government?
As I said - in theory, I support registration. In practice, the thought of the government having control over dozens or hundreds of superheroes would freak me the hell out. Hell, just look at what the Patriot Act wrought - give the Army a few superhumans and it won’t be long before Congress is thinking that the US can now go beat up anyone it wants (again). [del]Penis[/del] War will quickly ensue, followed by rebellion from those who don’t want to be used as weapons and bingo bango we’re back to civil war.
Well hell, if you’re unwilling to trust any system of governance because it might be abused, then why stop there? Why elect anyone, if they might be incompetent or corrupt? Why risk having an organized police force? Why risk having laws, let alone try to enforce them?
Because they’re tools. Mechanisms used to perform a function, in this case to operate a modern human society. Should there be checks and balances in place “all around” to control them? Of course—just like safeties in any other system, from the legalese wording in a contract, to a blowoff valve on a boiler.
As Sagan put it, “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves[…]Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.” To live, we have to work with the tools we have, that we’ve built for ourselves. To improve them, and to create new ones when we can, to be sure. But to completely shy away from using them because they’re not perfect, because something might go wrong, isn’t prudence, it’s huddling in a cave.
Apart from if he walks into traffic or in front of a train?
Apart from if he walks into traffic or in front of a train?
I’m not sure this hyperbole follows from what I said.
And therein lies my point. Stark’s proposals had no checks and balances to the additional - and considerable - powers the government was attempting to allocate itself, and the current checks and balances were/are insufficient to mitigate the effects of any abuse of those powers. So I want more checks and balances built in. Is that so wrong?
My heart says Cap. My sense says Stark. I think a lot of people see it the same way I do.
That’s the trap Stark walked into in the first place: he wanted checks and balances against super-powered individuals.
The parallel with gun control really is fairly close to exact. My freedom…your security… They exist at odds with each other.
First off, forgive me if the following was answered in Civil War, I haven’t read most of the series. Just caught up on it reading various articles and reviews on-line.
I’m on Team Cap simply because the definition of super-powers, super-humans,and super-heroes (and villains) are so ill defined.
If Captain America or Hawkeye got rid of the tights, would they be considered a “super-hero” and still have to register?
How about Doctor Strange? He has no inherent powers, just knows some things your average Marvel guy on the street doesn’t know.
All of Juggernaut’s “powers” come from a mystic jem. Do we start registering any potentially dangerous item. Would that include Cap’s shield, Thor’s hammer, and/or Iron Man’s armor? How about Spidey’s web-shooters?
Speaking of Thor, he could be deported for being an undocumented alien, but most of his powers are natural to Asgardians. Do all non-humans have to register too? A skrull born in America would be a U.S. citizen but would he have to register? After all, his “powers” are completely average to his race.
Then there’s super-humans like Cypher. Almost useless in any combat role and if he hadn’t met Kitty Pryde, he might have gone his entire life without realizing he was a mutant.
I really don’t see a gun control analogy to be apt. A gun is easy to identify, it’s a device that fires bullets.
Just my $.02 - DESK
The value of the analogy is the central moral dilemma: safety or freedom?
Sure, you bring in some Marvelous (ha!) questions, and the answers will vary by whomever you ask. Is Reed Richards (without stretching powers) “super” because his intellect lets him build monstrously dangerous machines? Tony Stark himself has no powers, but is one of the world’s top “supers.”
In my opinion, this is completely beside the moral point – although, certainly, it would be very key to the legal enforcement of a registration law.
The moral point is dead simple: how much control should society have over people who, because of themselves or because of their possessions, could pose a danger to that society?
And that’s a question civilization can never answer to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s what made the comic book story arc better than many, many others. It really did reflect questions we have to ask in real life.
(The whole “Mutant Menace” was also reflective of real life, a metaphor for racism and, too, for the safety/freedom dilemma.)
Tony Stark wasn’t wholly wrong. (Detention camps in the Negative Zone…that’s wholly wrong. But I consider that to be bad writing, just as Captain America’s gross misbehavior was at the beginning of A vs. X. The “real people” wouldn’t have done shit like that.)
For those who think the comic series was nuanced…I’d like to know just which series you were reading. It started out nuanced, but by the end, they practically had Stark twirling his mustache and Reed Richards throwing out Nazi salutes. It was ham-fisted demagoguery because the writers lacked the perspective and maturity to show the good points of a position with which they disagree.
As for the question…I don’t agree with the conscription OR the registration of people who have superpowers, but I do think that anyone who wanted to fight crime or be a superhero should be an agent of some government, be it local, state or federal. Basically, you want to fight crime then you have to be a cop. NOT necessarily a federal agent, but a cop. I could see a lot of superheroes getting badges from some small county sheriff and using that as a workaround, sort of the Steven Segal of the superhero world…
There just might be room for super-powered individuals to work as “bounty hunters,” still licensed and registered, but not actually sworn duty officers.
But…knock down one apartment building, flatten one school, smash one commuter bus, or, God forbid, kill one innocent bystander, and you’ve got to face the full consequences. Spider-Man would be in court-ordered restitution debt to the tune of millions.
Stark. Mutants and superheroes have powers that are often dangerous, unpredictable, difficult to investigate, and the worst offenders might as well be walking low-yield nukes. They have to be accountable for the use of those powers, and fuck yeah I’d want people watching people like the Hulk or Scarlet Witch. Wanda could obliterate the universe in a flick of the wrist if she wanted to. What happens when someone mind-controls her, or she gets suicidal ideations for one reason or another ?
The whole secret identity thing is a red herring IMO. “Oh, but the super villains could target mah poor family !”. Two things : one, if you think your family is important, how about you don’t put yourself in the crosshairs of a supervillain ? It’s not like anybody’s putting a gun to your head to fight crime. That choice was yours to begin with. Two, the identities of cops, soldiers, judges, lawyers and spies are either public or government databased.
Why should self-appointed vigilantes get a pass, again ?
Ideally, registration also opens up avenues for teaching mutants to master their powers (i.e. like Xavier’s, only without the creepy pedophile who might just be mind-controlling each and everyone of his students. How else could you explain the yellow spandex ? :))
[QUOTE=Gyrate]
In theory I agree. In practice, however, the government (any government) has a bad, bad history of abusing its own powers and without some sort of significant check you would end up with automatic conscription or internment camps or similar, all in the name of “public safety”.
[/QUOTE]
So have the civil war when *that *happens, not because you’re scared of a possible slippery slope at some point somewhere. It’s like shooting up the block because government passed a gun registration law, on the certitude that “they’re gonna git confiscatin’ 'em next !!”. Wouldn’t *that *be insane ?