Balance,
Thanks for clearing up my point. I wasn’t arguing for draft registration being similar to mutant registration, just that the laws on the books shouldn’t necessarily be changed.
I still think it’s too easy for someone with a more severe agenda than Trion’s (apparent) to take advantage of this registration for something more sinister.
:: Hefting leeks & eyeballing Cal ::
Blanace, I shall attempt to reply to your post later. I’m about to head home now and I just want to take care a few minor things.
What, now I’m the bad guy?? Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”. There’s lots of potential for misuse in any law or even any invention. You’ll just have to trust those of us in power. (heh heh)
Cal, I notice you aren’t on the People Pages. What are you hiding?
[Disney Reference] I said if [/Disney Reference]
You’ll note, Tri, that I’m not painting you the bad guy. I’m just not presuming I can trust you. There is a difference, you know.
OK, I’ve been thinking this through and I’ll try to lay out my thinking in a comprehensible manner. We’ve compared this act to both gun registration and registration for the draft. They both apply to different ideas involved in the creation of the Mutant Powers Registration Act (MPRA).
If the Act is both a good idea and legally allowed then we have to ask “Why Not”. So far most of the objections fall under the heading of “potential government misuse”. To this I say “Too Bad”. Guns can potentially be misused and we continute to allow people to have them. (I know it’s a constitutional right, but we can change the constitution if we need to). Speed limit laws give cops the opportunity to hassle minority motorists. We don’t repeal the law, we get rid of the bad cop. You need a better argument than “potential misuse” to convince me.
…And there is a better argument. Under the heading of #2 above I think we may have a problem with Invasion of Privacy here.
Damn. I think I just argued myself out of a Senate Seat.
On another note - Strangely, I only took the pro-registration side because I figured that if someone didn’t this thread would die pretty quickly. It’s scary how easy it became to argue the side I chose.
How powerful do you have to be to have a “power”? Say my webbed toes make me the world’s fastest 100 meter swimmer, cutting my time to almost 2:30 faster than the next fastest swimmer, clearly beyond the range of a “normal” person. Do I have to register?
Also, why aren’t there any super animal mutants? Bessie the cow flying through Akron, fighting crime by shooting nitrous oxide flatulence, that sort of thing. Should we have the mutant pet registration act? They’d be dangerous, too. I ask because I have a frog who came from a tadpole treated with Ethidium Bromide. He’s definitely a mutant - would I have to register his powers: the extra deformed leg and the abdominal abcess?
Kind of along ABP’s lines, how do you decide who’s a mutant? I hate to break it to you, but every single one of us has some mutations in our DNA. We’re all mutants. Deal with it. Kind of makes it hard to single people out, doesn’t it? It changes it from “Mutant Registration” to “People who can do weird stuff Registration,” which I think is harder to justify.
Hmm, I’ve heard this arguement before, oh yes, now I remember where…it goes something like this:
“Jews are dangerous; they plot to take over the world and opress us. They do weird stuff we don’t understand. We should know who they are. Let’s make them register”. Sound familiar?
And don’t tell me it isn’t the same–it’s how you were born (I am, of course referring to heredity and not actual practice of the religion, but so were the Nazis).
Besides, many comic books were written with large subtle undertones of acceptance of Judaism and many of the paralells are directly made. If you doubt me, get a good history of comics book, and especially look at Superman.
So put me down as firmly anti-registration.
Trion says:
“I’ll bite the bullet and take the pro-registration stance. Like the good Senator Kelly says, we require prople to register their guns, why not the deadly powers of a mutant.”
What country do you live in? There is no National gun registration in the United States. Provided the NRA keeps the panzies out of office, there never will be.
We should not register mutants for the same reason we should not register guns. If one day the government decides to get rid of them, they will know where to go to get them. Also, only the “good” mutants would register. The evil ones will go on living unregistered and they will be commiting all the crimes. I think it is a bad idea to register mutants. They should have the same rights to privacy as we do. Maybe we could register them AFTER they commit a crime, like the way we do sexual predators. But just because someone is a mutant doesnt make them a bad person.
The only one who’s addressed this point so far is Balance, so I guess I’ll bring it up again:
The characterization of Mutant powers as ‘potentially deadly’ is silly.
Most Mutant ‘Powers’ are, at best, worthless - like Balance’s Purple Piss - or at worst, crippling. For every X-Man, there’s a half-dozen Morlocks, and a score of people who can do a neat party-trick. And, of course, the useful ones aren’t all dangerous - Wolvie’s healing power (if it wasn’t coupled with those claws of his) is quite benign to everyone but Wolverine himself, and pretty damn good to him.
Don’t worry, it wears off. I sometimes horrify myself when I play Devil’s Advocate–but I’ve never adopted any of the causes I’ve argued for.
I’m glad you agree that the invasion of privacy issue is a critical problem with the proposed Act. As for potential misuse as an argument…well, I think it can stand. Myrr21 pointed out the example I implied earlier; I really don’t believe any such minority registration program has ever been implemented without being badly–even horribly–abused. There is no sufficiently compelling reason to implement mandatory registration in the face of the potential harm it could cause.
Do we all agree now that the M§RA should not be implemented? Maybe this isn’t much like Great Debates, after all…
Note that Logan’s claws (according to X-canon) are not the result of mutation–they, along with his reinforced skeleton, are the result of (of all things) a secret Canadian military program. His healing factor and enhanced strength and senses are the result of mutations. The healing factor was also good for Rogue, who had occasion to tap it to heal herself at least once.
Now–I have exceptional senses of hearing, smell, and taste (the less said about my eyes, the better), and I’m a bit stronger than average. I heal quickly–though I can only dream of healing like Wolvie <sigh>. All of these are genetic traits common in my father’s family. All of them presumably are the result of mutations somewhere along the line–that doesn’t make them “mutant powers”. At what point, what generation, do we stop calling it a mutation? When does a “power” (however trivial) become just a family quirk, part of the normal spectrum of humanity?
Sigh. Yea. We need someone with a genuinely EVIL viewpoint to play with. I’m just a big softie liberal at heart.
One other point. Those of you asking what makes a mutant. C’mon people. If you set off Cerebro, you qualify.
Even if you inherited the power from your parents? Or a long series of ancestors? I’m glad you’re not evil enough to really support this. I can’t abide villainy in a man. Won’t tolerate it.
BTW, if you’ve got Cerebro on hand to check on these things, I’m on my way over…with a schematic capture program on my laptop.
Well, then, either I’m misremembering the last few issues I read, or his healing factor must have really done a number on him after the Weapon X project got finished with him, since, IIRC, after Magneto ripped out the Adamantium (this was just before I stopped reading the X-Books), Wolvie still had the claws - just they were bone (And didn’t look near as sharp) now, rather than metal.
I don’t think he had claws before Weapon X. I could be wrong–it’s been a while since I read that bit, and I had stopped reading them before Magneto did his number on Wolvie. I suppose you could retcon it by saying that Wolverine’s healing factor gave him bone spurs inside the adamantine claws–that would make the bone claws shorter and duller, I suppose. Now I’m actually going to have to go reread some stuff.
BTW, do you look anything like Nightcrawler? I mean, with the teleportitis and all…
Either one of us is misremembering, or SOMEONE didn’t read his character bible closely enough. I’d be willing to lay my money on the latter…
::Thinks::…were you in chat last night? 'Cuz if not, I’ve just been seriously wooshed…
(And if so, sorry I didn’t see you.)
I found a couple of internet reference stating that he had bone claws to start with; that’s good enough for me–I must have misremembered.
Nope, wasn’t in chat–so I have no idea why that would be relevant. I was referring to the tengu creatures from the game “Nethack”–they teleport at will and you can get teleportitis (chronic involuntary teleportation) from them. It was just an obscure joke.
[hijack]
NO, Balance wasn’t in chat. Despite my best efforts, dammit.
[/hijack]
Either that or the references are talking about continuity after someone at Marvel noticed their mistake. ^^ I’m glad to know I’m not the one who misremembered, though. ^^
My exit from chat last night was a tad Nightcrawleresque. (A puff of smoke.)
Ah, check. 'Splains the WOOSH then. Never really played Nethack. Gave it a try, got a headache from trying to get the controls down, gave up.