The Gaming Den

virgil wrote:but that hasn't mattered to the detractors, who feel that violating someone's agency is violating someone's agency.

Then those people are fucking idiots, and they are currently violating my agency by not letting me murder them and get away with it.

Or you know, people's agency is not a thing that is uniquely good and never capable of interfering with other's agency.

Are these idiots aware that they are pro-racism libertarians or do they think they aren't?

Kaelik wrote:

Where are the people who are mad that Max is a dumb shithead and we should all beat the shit out of him if we get the chance?

Seriously, if someone has a magic STD that cures aids, I'm totally fucking down for telling them they have to have sex with one person right the fuck now, and that's literal rape, I can't imagine that Max using his power is any more intimidate or unwelcome than sex.

To be clear, I have no idea what SFP even is or stands for, so I'm not ... watching? reading? listening to the radio broadcast? of this.

I'm totally with you on that. Max is a giant idiot. He actually said that when he found out that his power was to buff other people, he wanted to die. That he perceived that as being worse than having no superpowers at all. He couldn't even consider all the ways he could leverage that into becoming the most important person in the world. Nope. He was just disappointed that he didn't get super-strength or flight.

Not!Wolverine is a willing and consenting actor to the body bag harvest. She is doing a public good and should be lauded for it; with the process now turned into a 40 hour week instead of a constant lockdown, there's no real sacrifice on her end because [insert office humor here].

Yeah, no, she is still pretty much sacrificing her entire life for this. Just now she does not need to be in constant surgery and pain. Just 40 hours a Week. For those of the people reading not currently eployed fulltime, this means she has 8 hours of surgery a day. And the rest of the day, which is then all of 16 hours, for sleeping it off and maybe if she is fit enough going outside for a bit. Maybe. If they allow the ultimate universal donor to leave out into a world that hates her for being her and would rather see her dead and this practice ended than have normal people soiled by her regenerate organs. Well, killing her or even seriously harming her is now pretty much out of the equation, if she can go full wolverine and regenerate basically her entire body in about 10 minutes, but you could still capture her and put her somewhere where she will not be available as a donor anymore. throw the key away and leave her in there indefinitely as well.

These people seem to be taking the stance of personal agency is important at least insofar as it doesn't infringe upon others. They've not been advocating that personal agency to harm/infringe others should be protected, but forcing a doctor to perform an operation is a violation of their autonomy (for example).

Actually, Stahlseele, it's 40 hours per month, not per week. And from the sounds of it, she can regenerate basically her entire body in 10 seconds; and people had been trying to kill her when she had crappier powers for years when she was a superhero.

virgil wrote:These people seem to be taking the stance of personal agency is important at least insofar as it doesn't infringe upon others. They've not been advocating that personal agency to harm/infringe others should be protected, but forcing a doctor to perform an operation is a violation of their autonomy (for example).

Yeah I mean, the first part about denying my agency to murder them was a joke. But I was totally serious about the part where they are in fact pro-racism libertarians, and I wonder if they are aware of that.

I mean, when racists refuse to hire or serve blacks, are you going to be evil and bad deny them their agency by forcing them to? And if not, then how is that any different from Asshole McSelfish refusing because he's offended?

I own a hospital. I refuse to admit homosexuals for treatment. Should the government use force or threat of force to coerce me to do so?

Fine, let's not use an example where lives are potentially at stake. I rent apartments. I refuse to rent to homosexual couples. Should the government use force or threat of force to coerce me to do so?

We live in a world where people can both intentionally (the RNC) and unintentionally (random ass racist people fucking everywhere) coordinate efforts to deny access to goods and services to minorities by simply owning those goods/services and not doing business with those minorities. Agency is only the ultimate moral good for people like Randian objectivists. If you agree with shit like the Fair Housing Act, then you believe there are moral goods more important than individual agency. I'll leave people to explore their own limits, because holy shit that's a complicated subject, but it does mean having to make more nuanced arguments than "someone forced someone else to do something they didn't want to do, and that's bad" because that sentence describes the federal prohibition against refusing to rent apartments to black people because they're black, and fuck you if you think we shouldn't have that prohibition.

That kind of 'freedom for freedom's sake' attitude is pretty popular. Not even just to gun toting people who insist on not having their right to get guns inhibited by the messy business of having to register them. A guy I don't know just blocked me on facebook for asking him how is it good to have a significant portion of the population working full time for below poverty wages while being simultaneously against public welfare. No answer, just blocked. This is after he held up Seattle, Washington as some kind of proof that raising the minimum wage was bad somehow (after making the standard argument that businesses should be free to make their own choices because they only make good ones).

Edit: Somehow didn't see the two posts before this one. Yea, libertarians, blah blah bad.

Most people seem to agree that "your rights end where mine start", and in that case, the right to live of many people trump the right of one individual to not do something that doesn't harm him.

It's all about relativism here. Both forcing and not forcing Max are wrong, the key is choosing which is less wrong.

Theoretically that's society's job to define what is the accepted solution. For most common cases, we'd have social mores and laws defining what's good. In that case, Al is deciding by herself, which is the actual problem here, foreshadowed by Gurwara.

For that actual case, her choice is probably what society would accept as the best one, but there's no saying that it'll always be the case. In order for her actions to fit in a democracy, there needs to be either a mechanism to have society validate her decisions, or to have a mechanism for society to check her actions and take measure in case of a mismatch with society's values.

I'm not sure why you would think that democratic voting on single use superhero powers is the correct moral framework.

Pretty much by definition people unwilling to use their powers for a specific action that benefits the world in total are not going to register each action they refuse to take with a bureau, and the people have fuck zero knowledge about the situation.

The very best case scenario is that they vote into office congress people who pass a law that creates an agency that regulates super hero action, and then someone heads the agency who is capable of enforcing it's decisions on other super heroes and connected enough to the superhero community to know what is going on... So basically,

Someone like Allison will force someone like Max to do something like use his powers infringing on his poor baby agency

without a vote.

So there you go, right back to not voting.

If you don't know how the government currently handles decisions about Disaster Relief, or Fire Codes, or the Regulation of Food, then your opinion on how we should vote on each use of super powers is less than worthless.

I'm not saying it's the correct moral framework and I'm not talking about democratic voting on single use superhero powers.

What I'm saying is that it's up to societies to regulate the use of powers (not just superpowers but any power, like the power to kill, the power to grow stuff or the power to build stuff).

And in the case of democracies, it's done by having laws (that are created through a democratic process that's supposed to keep them aligned with society's stance) state how they should be used and mechanisms (theoretically transparent enough) to check that these laws are respected (and if needed that the laws are kept up to date with the evolution of that power).

I would say that the obvious way society would validate her decisions would be for him to attempt to bring charges against her. That is usually how society defines what is acceptable.

TiaC wrote:I would say that the obvious way society would validate her decisions would be for him to attempt to bring charges against her. That is usually how society defines what is acceptable.

Actually in this specific case society would bring charges against her, because she committed a crime against him, specifically, extortion. So if he wanted to he could report said crime and which ever state he lives in would choose whether or not to bring criminal charges. Of course there are no witnesses in this case and no physical damage, so no case would ever be made, but that's not really relevant to the ethics.

The real ethical question presented, for my money, is one of justification. Is it justified to do harm in the service of doing good? It's a reducto ad absurdium argument for utilitarianism: the potential harms being extremely small and the potential good being practically off the scale.

Once you accept the utilitarian principle as operating though, you start talking about issues of scale. So, what if, in order to achieve the same outcome, rather than wasting four hours of his time and traumatizing him slightly, she'd needed to kill him?

Is you could cure cancer forever by walking across the hall and killing the person who lives next door would you do it? And would it be justified? would it be correct?

For a government, building a framework of laws and policies, the answer is certainly yes, because the law deals with people as abstractions and takes the Spockian view. Superheros, by contrast, reduce the ethical to the personal and one of the strengths of SFP is its general awareness of this. I also think that the answer proffered in this specific case: that you'd do it, but you wouldn't feel good about yourself afterwards, is about right.

Furthermore, he does not want anybody else to know he is a freak of nature.
Also, he and his family employ (illegal) immigrants doing their gardening work and so on being paid under the hand. So, yeah, he has no real way to do anything about people being assholeish to him for being assholish to everybody else.

Found this, which I found to be amusingly relevant.

Stahlseele wrote:Furthermore, he does not want anybody else to know he is a freak of nature.
Also, he and his family employ (illegal) immigrants doing their gardening work and so on being paid under the hand. So, yeah, he has no real way to do anything about people being assholeish to him for being assholish to everybody else.

And those illegals don't really have anything they can do about working his garden for peanuts.

Fuck what he wants. If your rights end where another's begins, then what happened is merely someone stronger imposing their right to act. Nothing in Libertarianism makes you too special to get your shit run.

Indeed, every part of libertarianism eventually traces itself back to the idea that if your grandfather murdered people and declared that he owned all the fertile land then it's not violence to refuse to feed anyone until they all die of starvation, but that it is violence for other people to sneak onto "your property" and grow crops and tend them, and then eat the produce.

If you don't agree with that arbitrary distinction, then you can't really be a libertarian, which is why so much of libertarian intellectualism is devoted to self deception on that point.

Chiming in on SFP, re: Max's total lack of intelligence (or creativity) with the power to buff other supernatural characters.

Appreciably, the fact that it's possibly a "highest" tier power means that his ability to buff would not only grow with practice, but would develop new powers; possible the sorts of powers that would impress as stupid and rockheaded a character like Max. Finally, there's a good likelihood that his "useless" power could catapult even "tier 4" Biodynamics to tier 1 capabilities.

The fact that someone who comes from asymmetric financial power; and can't see a and purpose in a value multiplier as a means to create even greater asymmetric financial power... is more a product of the writer's lack of understanding of... well... humans. Especially the mindset of capital gain focused humans. If you have an advantage over everyone else in the business or financial sector, to ask the audience to believe that they won't not leverage it is cognitively dissonant content.

"Stupid kid (who may be kind of a spoiled brat) wants to be personally awesome, throws tantrum when life denies him" isn't really weird. It's weird that an adult is still getting all choked up over it, because grow the fuck up, but whatever.

But yes, SFP tends to write certain characters as painfully on the nose as possible. See any of Alison's professors or classmates. There are some characters in SFP who exist only to be hated, and when they show up holy shit are they obvious (and also kind of wildly unbelievable).

I don't think whatshername was wrong for forcing this dude to help, but if that was my super power I'd tell her to fuck off too.

Question, because I don't care to read the comic, did the guy ask for any sort of compensation or is he just being hard-headed? I could defend "Fuck you, pay me" but not "Fuck you, I'm refusing because fuck you".

His original reason for refusing was that he didn't want anyone to know about his power, but once that was adressed it was explicitly and spesifically "Fuck you, I'm refusing because fuck you."

I can understand the first (some supervillain would have no qualms with coercing him to improve their powers) but the second is just being pig-headed.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Chiming in on SFP, re: Max's total lack of intelligence (or creativity) with the power to buff other supernatural characters.

Appreciably, the fact that it's possibly a "highest" tier power means that his ability to buff would not only grow with practice, but would develop new powers; possible the sorts of powers that would impress as stupid and rockheaded a character like Max. Finally, there's a good likelihood that his "useless" power could catapult even "tier 4" Biodynamics to tier 1 capabilities.

That was my thought, as well.

We've already seen that powers develop as they're used, based on the actual mechanisms by which they work. Alison has a skin-tight forcefield that makes her highly resistant to damage and gives her super-strength. And that eventually evolves into flight. Moonshadow had invisibility by bending light, and that eventually grew to include complex illusions by bending light.

If Max can manipulate powers, then he can manipulate powers. He might start off as just a buffer, but pretty soon he's likely develop the ability to take powers away, giving him the most effective anti-superhuman power.

The character of Paladin in SFP is also holding an idiotball of massive proportions.

They claim that all of their patents "have" to be bought by Templar Corp..

However, they're too stubborn to simply release their "world changing" technology as open source material. Thereby circumventing the whole process of patent claims.

Shit, they could simply be leaking all of this tech to all sorts of rival corps to Templar Corp and force them to litigate with them instead of Paladin themselves.

Seriously this is so easy that it happens in the real world, Elon Musk does that with old Tesla designs; why isn't Paladin?

Judging__Eagle wrote:The character of Paladin in SFP is also holding an idiotball of massive proportions.

They claim that all of their patents "have" to be bought by Templar Corp..

However, they're too stubborn to simply release their "world changing" technology as open source material. Thereby circumventing the whole process of patent claims.

Shit, they could simply be leaking all of this tech to all sorts of rival corps to Templar Corp and force them to litigate with them instead of Paladin themselves.

Seriously this is so easy that it happens in the real world, Elon Musk does that with old Tesla designs; why isn't Paladin?

There's also the fact that Templar Corp was a criminal enterprise that would have reasonably been hit with RICO so fucking hard. It's literally a front organization whose sole purpose was providing combat robots to a supervillain who seriously tried to conquer the world.

There's also the fact that the contract could be voided by Templar if they hadn't A simple renegotiation in which she agrees not to murder Templar's CEO in exchange for being let out of her original contract should suffice. And if it doesn't, she could work through Templar CEOs until she gets one that values his life more than her contract.

Allison said it best, really. Every day that she doesn't murder thousands of people, they should throw her a ticker-tape parade. Allison and Paladin are both operating at above the law power levels, in the sense that any attempt to enforce the law on them would fail miserably.

I'd really like it Allison finished barfing and then got a serious look at doctor Walden and said "tell me about the other opportunities."