With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[Vaermina]

"No. Fine. I could talk about them being mass murderers who I encountered while they were enthusiastically mass murdering thousands of people. If the main concern was legality then I could point to Self Defence and Defence of Another laws both nationally and in the state. But when you get right down to it, as far as I'm concerned, once a person has a body count above a certain level, killing them is just… Common sense."

Click to shrink...

Actually it wasn't, because you never know what kind of dead man switches bad guys like that might have in place.

 

[NightmareWarden]

Common Sense Paul has nothing on Paragon Paul doing an orbital bombardment of an inhabited planet.
The problem for people may be the scale being smaller? There's no actual objective scenario where killing people with this level of body count and the intent to continue wouldn't be considered lawful and correct.

Click to shrink...

The mass destruction he caused to the spider cannibalism when the yellow corpsman kidnapped Paul's student? That's pretty much pulled directly from the playbooks of villains looking to fight a superhero. I'm pretty confident that he's going to do a lot of killing once Dox has determined the galactic alliance against the Reach is done recruiting, and it is time for blitzkrieg. Or the equivalent with DC resources.

I trust the Controllers with technology… with weapons like sun-eaters more than Amanda Waller. More than Common Sense!Paul. And when their perspective is skewed enough, all three misused their available power. Paul could have used his ring to speed up the prep for the military instead. The plan he chose risked his failure, and the same strategy with the support of his team and leaving the munitions to the military could have gone fine. Any troops lost to black Adam would have been worth it in the military's eyes, I reckon.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Sure, Janissary Paul is pretty normal, but even then, he's a Janissary for an evil alien empire who's married to a homicidal maniac.

Click to shrink...

Technically, she isn't homicidal. She's never killed a human.

Missed opportunity to place the department of common sense logo at the end.

Click to shrink...

The idea is common sense, but he already had the idea. Having the interrupt here would indicate that telling Batman was common sense.

Bolded should be "Barring".

Click to shrink...

Thank you, corrected.

Tangseid first injected himself with psycho serum and was later brainwashed by an evil mind control artifact

Click to shrink...

In point of fact, he was not brainwashed by an evil mind control artifact.

 

[Neruz]

Holy hell, this Paul is unsettling. I don't disagree with him, but he still feels…off.

Click to shrink...

It is almost certainly because you aren't actually used to people behaving rationally.

Despite what most people say and think, the vast majority of the time the vast majority of people act based on their emotions and then rationalize why they did so after the fact. This leads to certain patterns of irrational behaviour that people come to think of as normal and rational.

Killing other humans is very much one of those areas; humans normally have an instinctive aversion to killing others, even when doing so is entirely reasonable and justified. A person who doesn't have that aversion and who just does the math, realizes that it is morally correct to kill in this situation and then acts on that realization thus comes across as deeply concerning, because on a fundamental level you are subconsciously aware of the fact that this person is not following the normal behavioral patterns that you have come to expect from other people.

The reasons why they aren't following these patterns are irrelevant to your subconscious: All that matters is that they aren't following the patterns, which makes them different, and different means dangerous.

 

[Duke Long]

I'm… Glad that you haven't been in this position yet, but with the empathic abilities the ring gives me, it's not that hard to see how… Vile some people are. I imagine that you'll experience something like that with telepathy eventually.

Click to shrink...

Reminds me a bit of this scene from Dredd.

In point of fact, he was not brainwashed by an evil mind control artifact.

Click to shrink...

Wait, so there's another fakeout? I wonder how he ends up as he did, then.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Reminds me a bit of this scene from Dredd.

Click to shrink...

example.com? A timly reminder, sir, but I'm not sure how it relates to our current situation.

Wait, so there's another fakeout? I wonder how he ends up as he did, then.

Click to shrink...

It wasn't a fakeout so much as low hanging fruit, and an explanation as to where his brainwashing power came from.

 

[Duke Long]

example.com? A timly reminder, sir, but I'm not sure how it relates to our current situation.

It wasn't a fakeout so much as low hanging fruit, and an explanation as to where his brainwashing power came from.

Click to shrink...

Whoops. I pasted the BBcode and forgot to add the new URL. Should be fixed now.

Ah, I see. I think a fair few people probably assumed that it was cursed. Part of it is probably that it was (I think?) the end of that group of chapters, and personally I assumed that was going to be the last we saw of that universe, from which perspective it makes sense to assume the magic item caused it, rather than something that hasn't been introduced yet or something like him using the evil serum again or naturally changing his mindset.

 

[Someguy Somewhere]

Well, common sense Paul does show up in the time trapper crossover. So he's still active further down his timeline.

Hmm, if we're looking at alternate timeline of this moment, there's bound to be a few where Black Adam smites the whole team in an eye blink and the league deals with the fallout of using sidekicks as canaries. Wonder what those would look like further along.

 

[Wivk]

Actually it wasn't, because you never know what kind of dead man switches bad guys like that might have in place.

Click to shrink...

The sooner you kill them, the less dead man switches they have time to set up and the less atrocities they have time to commit. If there is valid concern over their contingencies then that isn't an argument not to kill them, its an argument to torture or brainwash them for information first at best.

 

[Bolo]

After this Paul gets a reputation and the Hero's start to question his character something else needs to happen to flip the script. Where being Understanding and Nice save the day when everyone wanted a beat down.

 

[Ngamer11]

After this Paul gets a reputation and the Hero's start to question his character something else needs to happen to flip the script. Where being Understanding and Nice save the day when everyone wanted a beat down.

Click to shrink...

Common Sense Paul doesn't really do that kind of stuff. Part of his deal is that he solves issues using his common sense. Because of this, he doesn't take as many risks as the main Paul or the Renegade, so he both avoids potential pitfalls and doesn't get unexpected and/or hard to attain benefits.

 

[ForeverShogo]

He was completely correct to do what he did. A lot of comic book villains deserve exactly this treatment. They just get to keep living by being thrown into easily escapable carboard prisons because having recognizable, repeat villains is more profitable for the comic book companies.

It's always been a stupid thing you ignore for the sake of enjoying the story.

 

[CrazyNoVa]

Actually it wasn't, because you never know what kind of dead man switches bad guys like that might have in place.

Click to shrink...

What kind of dead man switches are we talking about here? Because last I checked, there's not really anything that Paul couldn't deactivate that comes to mind.

 

[Duke Long]

What kind of dead man switches are we talking about here? Because last I checked, there's not really anything that Paul couldn't deactivate that comes to mind.

Click to shrink...

I doubt any such things existed, but there definitely are things Paul wouldn't be able to trivially deactivate. A bomb hidden in a populated area which will go off if not given a signal once per week. Standing orders for the Vlatavan military to cause trouble if Vertigo dies (though I doubt they'd be loyal enough to follow such orders). Hostages trapped in a remote locale who will die of dehydration or some other means if not tended to.

 

[CrazyNoVa]

I doubt any such things existed, but there definitely are things Paul wouldn't be able to trivially deactivate. A bomb hidden in a populated area which will go off if not given a signal once per week. Standing orders for the Vlatavan military to cause trouble if Vertigo dies (though I doubt they'd be loyal enough to follow such orders). Hostages trapped in a remote locale who will die of dehydration or some other means if not tended to.

Click to shrink...

No, that doesn't really add up, because if they had hostages and bombs, wouldn't it have made more sense to use those for the distraction instead of the giant plant monsters? Or at the very least, the villains would have announced the fact that they had hostages over their TV broadcast alongside their giant plant monsters to put extra pressure on both the Justice League and the world governments to distract them even more, because why take hostages if you're not actually going to use those hostages at all? If they actually had hostages, they would have announced it in their broadcast too, because a hostage doesn't work on your enemy if your enemy doesn't know that there's a hostage to begin with. When you take someone hostage, you NEED to let your enemy know that there is a hostage, otherwise they won't do what you want. That'd be like if I tried to blackmail someone into doing what I want without actually telling them that I have blackmail material on them. Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

 

[Kencord]

I get where Batman is, to a point. Batman, however, is juggling local level criminals and crime families.

Killing will escalate as the other bodies involved see the stakes have been raised. Batman attempts to make crime a Zero Sum game. You can't benefit, you can very actively lose, and take a beating during it.

This code DOESN'T translate to worldwide terrorist strikes.

That said, Sufficient Velocity has a story - Project Gamer V.2. The lead stops a Joker attack, a city wide Smilex attack. When Batman talks to him afterward, the lead has the best 'Pro-Batman' argument I've ever heard.

"It is not Batman's job to make up for the failings of the US Justice System." Any rational system would see Joker executed for his crimes. Why is it Batman's job? He catches them, hands them over, and gets back to work.

Beaten to a pulp by Batman, why doesn't Joker tragically try to escape, fall down some stairs onto some bullets? Why doesn't Joker get an accidentally lethal dose of painkillers from the medical personnel treating him after a 24hr shift of saving his victims?

Why isn't Joker just found guilty of Murder and executed in Texas? He can't be both too crazy to understand his actions and need medical care AND clever enough to consistently break out of and massacre workers at the Asylum set to hold him!

In short? A LOT of other people have a vote in the 'kill Joker' race, and its not Batman's fault that every single one, who has much less skin in the game for keeping him alive, ALSO fail to murder the Joker.