Grrl Power #924 – Do not taunt happy fun Maxima
Cora is really skirting the edge here, and I’m not really sure why other than it makes me laugh. She does probably have a point about warrantless “wire” taps, especially since she’s using crazy alien tech to tap the A/V feed from someone’s living nervous system. Anything she records would certainly be inadmissible, and there are probably some, you know, privacy concerns.
Her opening word bubble basically boils down to, “Maybe I did a bad, but I definitely did a bunch of goods.” I’m not sure there’s a justice system on Earth that actually balances good deeds out with bad ones. Yeah, there’s character witnesses and judges generally have a lot of leeway in sentencing, but it’s not written down, like a law that says if you’re a doctor and you create a vaccine that saves a million lives, you don’t get 999,999 get-out-of-jail-for-murder cards. Maybe Cora’s thinking of some alien worlds where that is the case, and come to think of it, I’m really surprised I’ve never seen a Star Trek or Doctor Who or something where they visit that planet.
Now that I think about it though, if you lived on that planet and you ran someone over with your car by accident (or murdered your neighbor on purpose, I suppose it doesn’t matter) and you didn’t have a “good” credit, would you go straight to jail, or would you have a year in which you have to save someone’s life, or otherwise accrue enough good credits to balance out the bad? I think a society would quickly figure out that one life for one life simply wouldn’t work. Doctors and firefighters and EMTs could be untouchable serial killers, and I think there’d be a real potential for massive population decline. Plus, there’d probably be services like fake suicide attempts people could “thwart” for good credits so they can go kill their neighbor’s noisy dog or whatever.
Yeah, that system wouldn’t work at all. Still surprised I haven’t seen it on Star Trek.
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The Law; nearly everyone arguing legalities has a point and every lawyer in this world will be salivating at the idea of arguing their case(s) one way or the other. Some courts will buy the arguments thereby creating new precedents while others will not and existing precedents will hold sway. And each of those lawyers will be arguing the position that benefits their clients, even if those lawyers are working for ‘the state’, whose client is theoretically the people (or ‘the state’ depending on how cynical you want to be).
Cora; I take back what I said before. Cora is treating Max *exactly* like she treated that cop back on the Dyson Sphere. Whether its a dressing down by Maxima or a beat cop handing her a ticket for littering because there were pieces of body parts on the ground, she just doesn’t care about the details. Justice versus Law, Mission objectives versus Optics. If you were to sum up her responses in either situation it would amount to, “Sure. Whatever.” If she had a philosophy it would probably be something like, “Little people argue little details while the true Alpha Woman just wins.”
Max; I’ve been thinking uncharitable thoughts about Max but the simple reality is she’s having a bad day for reasons. Rather than list all those reasons why I’ll just point out unlike Thor or Wonder Woman, Max actually works for people as a job. And, possibly more importantly, being the most powerful woman in the world doesn’t mean at this moment what it did when this day started. She’s good people so she’ll rise to the challenge but until then she’s going to be a little grumpy.
I don’t know that every system makes use of legal precedents. They are pretty ubiquitous in the US legal system, but at one point in time, the concept was pretty revolutionary.
Precedent in Common Law system (such as the US or the UK where we got it from) is very different from in Civil Legal Systems, such as in France or the International Court of Justice. [Note: don’t confuse “Civil Legal System” with “Civil Law” – the latter is an element of America’s amalgam of Common Law System and Constitutional Law System, and is to be distinguished from Criminal Law or Admiralty Law and maybe a few others]
In common law jurisdictions, precedent refers to law created by a court’s decision, in the sense that future cases must be decided according to the same rule unless it can be distinguished or – rarely – overruled.
In civil law jurisdictions, courts are not bound that way, although they may refer to precedent. How?
As a law school project, I analyzed every ICJ reference to its seminal “Corfu Channel” case, of which there were many. IIRC none of them used those references to indicate that “Corfu Channel” created binding law; rather, it was more or less a shorthand way of referring to a set of legal logic that the judges didn’t want to recap unnecessarily.
There is much to recommend this system, since it takes the court system out of the business of creating law. Against it is centuries of our tradition and the advantage to the legislature of not having to deal with messy details of the laws they pass – let the courts take the blame! Reasonable minds may differ on this subject.
Um… in a Constitutional Law system, it’s also supposed to take the court out of making laws.
That’s… sort of the whole point of separation of powers. Legislature makes the laws. Executive executes the laws. Judicial interprets the laws.
Unfortunately, activist judges on the Supreme Court and other lower courts tend to either not realize that, or try to disingenuously subvert it by taking their interpretations and making them laws instead. ie, activism instead of just interpreting what the law is in writing and in spirit by the authors of the law. Which honestly should be unconstitutional. But this has unfortunately been going on for decades now, since the Warren court (I’m not going to say since Marbury vs Madison since I don’t think that enforcing the concept of judicial review is the same as being an activist judge), so until there’s a SCOTUS composed entirely of strict constitutionalists, this is probably how it will be.
And unfortunately most non-lawyers and non-judges don’t even realize that a judge isnt supposed to make laws, they’re just supposed to interpret if existing laws apply as written, if those existing laws are in accordance with the state or federal constitutions, and if the parties involved breached existing laws as written.
Well … this has been an argument almost for as long as there *has* been a Supreme Court: what is the dividing line between making a law and interpreting a law? And … where does declaring a law unconstitutional fit in – is it “making law” to say that a state can’t do thus-and-so?
If you or I could clear that up neatly, one or both of us would deserve to be on the Supreme Court.
And what of the many many cases involving points that the Founders never, ever considered?
For example “The Propeller Genesee Chief”, 53 U.S. 443 (1851) turned on the question: what does “admiralty” mean in the constitution? In 1789 it unequivocably referred to “on salt or tide water” because that’s England has no navigable waters beyond the tide. But by 1851 the USA has major commerce on our inland freshwaters – the Great Lakes and major rivers – and the Supreme Court decided that “admiralty” must include them too (citing some action by Congress as evidence of the meaning of the word … kind of iffy.)
Was the court being activist? Maybe, although they seem to be saying they are just being reasonable.
(I’m still not so sure about Marbury. We all like the result but it is a great example of everyone simply agreeing to a useful fiction)
Muddying the waters. This is what your question is intended to do. I know, you specifically aren’t trying to do that, but the question is posed as some sort of absurd quandary. It’s not.
Interpreting the law has been defined by a SCOTUS case, though IANAL, so I can’t quote the case. Anyway, basically:
A.) The law must be interpreted within its historical context (i.e. no calling a militia anything other than the whole body of the American people, no deciding corporations can have more protected speech than citizens, etc.)
B.) The law must be interpreted within its intended reading (i.e. no referring to bear arms as those from literal bears, no substitution of word definitions, etc.)
C.) If the law cannot be interpreted within the above two constraints, but is still viewed as invalid in modern contexts, then it must be passed back to congress as rewording laws is the job of congress (i.e. your admiralty example is explicitly illegal)
I will be cutting and brutal since what I will say next runs counter to SCOTUS itself:
Never mind legality; this method of lawmaking is haphazard and prone to abuse. And abuse it has achieved. If we don’t tighten up our legal system very soon we will not have a coherent body of legislation to use as a basis. These willful misinterpretations run back even to the 1800s as you note. Back then it was just laws; nowadays, people are taking aim at the Constitution. Once that also falls prey to modern ambiguity… So too will the United States.
If a nation divided cannot stand; what happens when that nation isn’t even clearly defined?
“where does declaring a law unconstitutional fit in – is it “making law” to say that a state can’t do thus-and-so?”
Declaring an existing law to be unconstitutional is not making a law. The court isnt supposed to look at a law, say ‘this law is unconstitutional SO WE WILL REWRITE IT TO MAKE IT CONSTITUTIONAL.’ They’re supposed to say ‘this law is unconstitutional, so it’s not able to be a law anymore. Legislature, if you want it to be a law, make sure it complies with the Constitution. Remake the law.’ Or ‘This law is unconstitutional as written – go back to the drawing board if you want to do this end in a constitutional way.’
“Was the court being activist?”
When I say a court is being activist, it’s where they are making up laws without relying on the language of the Constitution or a constitutionally-adherent statute. They’ve then stepped over the role of ‘judge’ and gone into the role of ‘activist.’
“I’m still not so sure about Marbury.”
I know. Some people look at Marbury v Madison as being activism. But honestly it feels to me like interpretation. The whole point of Marbury v Madison was the court saying ‘No’ to the legislature, when they tried to go behind making the law and into ‘interpreting’ the law. Especially since Madison was the one who WROTE the law that was at the heart of the case that SCOTUS was interpreting. :) The point was to firmly entrench that the courts are the ones who interpret, not the legislature. If the legislature was not happy with the interpretation, they’d need to write the law less ambiguously to make it less subject to alternate interpretations of the lawmaker. Which they are perfectly capable of doing by just passing another law or amending the existing law so the result of the court case does not happen a second time. :)
I would say that’s probably because courts, judges, and common law precede the existence of constitutional law, and that the US court system inherited from the older systems by default, without understanding how that would conflict with the concept of constitutional law. Marbury v Madison is but one instance of many that make it clear that the founders were unable to anticipate how the systems they created would play out, or what might be ambiguous or insufficient.
We have unfortunately developed a reluctance to amend our laws and constitution using the systems intended for those purposes, and in order to keep society functioning, the judicial branch has been pressed into the role of trying to pass judgment using laws that do not reflect reality. Some distortion is inevitable.
People often say the founding fathers were “unable to anticipate” things as an excuse to justify later behavior. Really, the only thing they didn’t anticipate was the the swift decline in society’s valuation of honor. The rules and regulations they entrenched were specific and broad; later politicians started by cutting out small niches and then gradually widened those niches into gaping legal loopholes. Now, many of the constitution’s “shall” and “shall not” statements are treated more like a weak suggestion, and then people just claim the founding fathers didn’t anticipate it. Well, they did, considering they made so many lines in the constitution cover as many bases as possible. If a law isn’t realistic it’s supposed to be passed back to congress and SCOTUS itself has agreed with this requirement of the constitution.
Of course, since we want to insist that logic doesn’t exist and laws are just a legal fiction we can bend to our whims, well, there’s nothing the founding fathers can do about it posthumously. If we’re going to blame them for not being immortal then I guess that is indeed their fault.
Legalities? Cora is THE SOURCE of alien tech for the US Government.
Either she gets a pass or the President gives her a pardon.
On the contrary, Cora just recently attempted to take away their main source of alien tech, claiming it was polluted and dangerous – but in a way that Earth sensors couldn’t detect. Whether she was telling the truth or not, they have VERY little reason to trust her. Especially given her latest antics.
To be technically accurate; she didn’t take it away, she said they couldn’t keep it. We did see her explain it as dangerous to the planet. We didn’t see it discussed but she may have made mention of potential reaction by Galactic Society when it became known a Fel ship remained on planet Earth.
Either the U.S government believed her, unlikely as that sounds, or they were at least willing to make a compromise that would avoid a potential issue with Galactic Society and military while still obtaining something vital they couldn’t otherwise get on their own. They get a working solar capable space ship with tech they hadn’t figured out yet in exchange for busted salvage that might yield nothing and really annoy the neighbors by being up on blocks in the front yard.
Max is definitely an ace in the hole in discussions like these but someone had to at least consider the possibility that doesn’t mean much if the rock that used to be planet Earth is an asteroid field.
Just sayin’
She didn’t ATTEMPT that, she DID that. And she made some kind of deal in order to do it. Details held offscreen.
First HenchWench outmaneuvered her and now Cora’s rattling her cage; Max isn’t having any fun at all. In the last panel, Cora seems to be saying “Enough of this, wanna get down and do the nasty?” with her eyes. I wonder how long it’s been since Max has had her ashes hauled; if ever?
I honestly don’t particularly like how the story is going with Cora.
Saving Sydney aside she’s been rather busy causing trouble (intentionally or otherwise) and then gleefully not giving a shit about it.
Killing a jackass and not caring is one thing but lets not forget that she also dragged an alien invasion along with her ship and the ensuing ‘alien tourism’ situation is directly part of the reason Sydney was in said mortal danger in the first place.
Honestly the fact that Maxima hasn’t decked her for at least one of those things is surprising, considering the amount of issue Cora directly or indirectly brought along. Dabbler might be a trolly little shit at times but personally bothering Maxima aside seems to at least know that ‘casual disregard for lives and rules’ around Maxima is a bad idea.
It certainly doesn’t help that its somehow construed as a ‘haha’ moment that she went so needlessly overboard. (Sydneys reaction aside)
I don’t think the tourism is on Cora. It was a cop that followed the Fel ship to Earth in stealth mode then reported back that put Earth directly on the radar of galactic civilization.
Not sure she’s causing trouble so much as not caring about the laws of a tiny backwater hick planet but I can see the viewpoint.
Agreed. Cora was really in the news on Earth, but not at all in the rest of the galaxy, versus the cop that followed the Fel to Earth that was not at all in the news on Earth, but very much in the rest of the galaxy.
That said, Max may not even know about the cop ship.
Just remember, the only reason Cora came to Earth in the first place was to give Sydney a ride home. A ride Sydney needed after she became stranded on the Alari home world during a mission commanded by Maxima. Sydney’s presence on that mission was questionable as she was still a raw recruit who hadn’t yet completed her basic training. Maxima was responsible for that call as well.
During the battle Maxima got distracted dealing with a single opponent, reducing her focus from a full battlefield situational awareness to a personal grudge match against that single overly annoying opponent. While she was distracted the bad guy’s flyer made off with a piece of alien technology, and the still not fully trained recruit was captured, drugged and nearly killed by a scummy bad guy.
Meanwhile Cora, despite having no responsibility to assist in any way secured several alien prisoners, rescued the missing recruit, rescued another super held under duress, captured the bad guy’s yacht and its crew, and has now provided Maxima with the means to track down and capture the rest of the gang.
It looks to me like Cora has pulled Max’s ass out of the fire here. The termination of “Daddy” was fully justified, saved Sydney’s life and made it possible for Cora to plant the trackers on the two henchmen. It can even be argued that Daddy was taken out as humanly as possible as he hardly had time to register the pain of his demise.
I think that Max is just mad at Cora because Cora dealt with the current situation far better than Max has done.
Justified? Yes. However, she was given one rule. “Don’t kill anyone”. She broke that rule. If she can’t be expected to show at least a LITTLE restraint then she’s a liability. Jackass could just as easily been subdued in any number of nonlethal methods. For example, he would have survived, without either arms or legs. Bound by one of 1,000 nonlethal gadgets Dabbler has and could have shared, the astroid cable comes to mind. A FUCKING NET. Hell, a normal gunshot wound to the shoulder would have sufficed. Or, IDK those Alari disks she used on the aliens would have done just as well.
The point is she CHOOSE to do overkill because it suited her. If she’s willing to just blatantly ignore the one request made of her by the people in charge around here then you can expect her to ignore any further requests and it’s probably best she be removed from any future engagements.
She have technology that allow to hack a human nervous system to transimt what they see and hear. I find hard to believe she can’t use that same technology to, for example, paralize most voluntary muscles or something like that?
She killed him because she wanted to, and that all there is to it.
I always found silly those comics where somebody, usually the villain, try to convince Superman that is ok to kill, I mean, what if he agree and decide to start with him? :-D
So many people assuming that Cora had all sorts of high tech non lethal options. Where is the canon list of Cora’s loadout? Saying that you assume she had a certain capability is not in any way proof that she had that capability.
Thank you for there being someone that mentions this.
From the legal perspective, yes Cora’s range of lethality in that moment with that weapon is officially unknown and only she, her crew, and perhaps Dabbler could speak to that in court. Can’t see her getting convicted on that point.
But we saw Cora tell Dabbler at the beginning of the fight that her current gun’s lethality was “variable”. Given that dead vs not-dead is fairly distinct, it’s reasonable to assume that if she can dial it up to “just-barely-dead” to “hilariously overwhelming”, she can also dial it down to somewhere below “barely alive”. I think it could be proved beyond reasonable doubt that she could’ve used a non-lethal option.
“But we saw Cora tell Dabbler at the beginning of the fight that her current gun’s lethality was “variable”. Given that dead vs not-dead is fairly distinct, it’s reasonable to assume that if she can dial it up to “just-barely-dead” to “hilariously overwhelming”, she can also dial it down to somewhere below “barely alive”. ”
Variable lethality can also mean Dead vs Chunky Salsa vs There’s no atoms left of the target.
Or I guess we can go with your Princess Bride inspired definition of lethality. Mostly Dead means Slightly Alive. :)
However, I think that still would require a little changing of the ordinance in ADVANCE before walking in on the hostage situation. Cora literally had almost no time before he was going to shoot Sydney in the head, and just decided ‘shoot him with whatever I happen to have loaded.’ Given she just came from a battlezone where the enemies were aliens with high tech defenses and then supers…. her ordinance was obviously going to be a lot more than needed for an average human with a bad attitude. :)
I agree with ᛟ though (geez I had to cut and paste to do that symbol thing)… we do not know what Cora’s loadout is. We DO know that even her light ordinance is pretty extreme, from what we saw on Fracture Station with the police officer after the mugging attempt.
Show the page where Cora was told not to kill anyone?
Yes, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t told not to kill anyone.
It was just a suggestion. :)
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-912-maximum-trauma/
(people are going to probably argue with you that Cora herself said she promised not to kill anyone, but those people are reading into what Cora said – when she actually just said that Maxima ‘SUGGESTED’ that Cora use non-lethal ordinance. Which meant she still could also use legal ordinance instead.)
The thing about witty roguish types is that their “loveableness” is entirely dependent on if you agree with them. They are insufferable if you disagree with them as they tend to know exactly how much to push someone before an actual fight they couldn’t win occurs, so they never quite get to be punched in the face. But if they are extremely fun when you agree with them because then you get to enjoy them being smug and insufferable to characters around them that disagree with you.
There is a reason why so many loveable rogues are written to be vaguely “roguish” but then have exactly the same moral standards an average viewer would have. I think Cora is written more ‘realistically’ but that does have the drawback that she will divide the audience depending on what actions she is taking at the time.
+1
And a very succinct way to put it.
Heh… reminds me of a Mutants and Masterminds campaign where the GM was genuinely shocked that we didn’t think his “loveable rogue anti-hero” was all that loveable. As I pointed out, “he’s a criminal. He abuses his powers to commit crimes. He might not be a murderer, but he has no hesitation working for supervillains who are. We want to put him in prison.”
Also, the functioning psychopaths/sociopaths that usually make up the really good operators develop a taste for graveyard humor that would totally shock and disgust most folk.
Trying to blame all that on Cora is silly. Cora did not one-shot the Fel ship because she wanted to try something. That was Max. THAT directly led to aliens coming here to collect her for weapons research.
If you want to connect the dots, connect ALL the dots.
Max’s biggest issue is that “whats OK for her, is not ok for anyone else to do”.
Max didn’t blow up the ship just because she “wanted to try something” or felt like being violent, she opened up to full power on an attacking enemy because her 2 trusted experts in the field were telling her a) no mercy or humanity is doomed, and b) their defenses were far beyond anything Earth had on hand, perhaps beyond Cora’s ship. She had full reason to believe that holding back would be catastrophic, and therefore plenty of justification for cutting loose. The fact that she had never tried that attack before means that she’s been showing great self-restraint for years (decades?), not that she wanted to destroy sentients for fun.
It’s perfectly reasonable for Max to enjoy the opportunity to stretch her power after she verified it was not only warranted but necessary, which she did. Cora on the other hand knew she could have protected Sydney without killing someone, but chose an extremely violent murder over a quick one or perhaps even just incapacitation.
Which one would you let police your neighborhood?
Almost any video game that has a karma or morality system works like that. Do enough “good” and you can then do completely heinous things and still be considered a hero by the game. I still remember a play through of Knights of the Old Republic. My character was at the Sand People’s camp and I opened a container. It branded me a thief and I wound up doing my Anakin Skywalker impression and slaughtered the entire population of the camp. The game still considered me a Paragon of the Light Side after that as apparently I’d stocked up enough good deeds beforehand.
Arcanum has a similar Good/Bad attribute rating. It’s been too long since I’ve played it to remember anything more about it.
Fallout 3 is best example. You can give a bum a bottle of water every few days to get enough good will… That you can blow up the town he lives in with a nuclear bomb and still be seen as a wonderful guy.
“My character was at the Sand People’s camp and I opened a container. It branded me a thief”
That’s the reason for these kinds of systems – the “bad” detection has a significant number of false positives in it.
To be fair, killing the sand people isnt considered a bad action no matter how you go about it. No one calls you out on it and ylu get no darkside points for it, even if you waltz in there and kill them.
I’m starting to miss seeing some of Deus’s shenanigans. Not that there is anything wrong with the current storyline. I like it. I just feel it is ready to be resolved and the next story arc started. That and I could totally see Deus doing something like sending an Operation board game to a Parkinson’s ward or use his status as major donor and supplier to Archon to request a tour of the public part of facility for a small crowd of sugared up elementary schoolers making sure to hand out harmonicas and kazoos before they go in.
Dave sure likes to draw exotic alien babes and putting them in new exotic clothes.
Good thing he draws a superhero webcomic, right?
That’s one of the major selling points of this comic, absurdly beautiful people in tight outfits doing sexy poses.
Of course Cora have a Lawgiver shooting all kinds of odd projectiles.
Am I the only one that feels the real cliffhanger here is what ever Dabbler’s new outfit will be that she is obviously changing into??
I wonder if Max could defeat Cora given all of Cora’s alien tech
Yeah. Power beats cute. Trust me.
Compared to Max, Cora is a normal or a crunchy. Yeah, she has access to alien tech but its really about how you define ‘defeat’ in this context.
Henchwench ‘defeated’ Max by escaping when Max had her by the throat. But that took place after Henchwench was ‘defeated’ by another crunchy (Ariana), who neutralized Henchwench’s abilities to continue the physical fight. Sometimes it’s about the strengths, sometimes the weaknesses, and sometimes it’s just about being willing to do the thing others won’t. Sydney didn’t defeat Kevin, but she did use her resources to put him into check long enough for Maxima to setup for a coup de grâce. Then she pointed out the obvious to Kevin and nicely asked him to surrender before Max defeated him. By ‘ashing his brain’.
Its all about the definitions.
Cora might have access to scary alien tech, but that’s all. Unlike Dabbler — literally the only living person who has ever forced Max into a stalemate in combat — she doesn’t have demon magic or super intelligence.
If Max wanted Cora dead, all she needs to do is superspeed and pop one of her energy implosion blasts into Cora’s smuggly open mouth. All the hard light body suits in the world aren’t going to save her from that thing going off.
I suspect Max could twist Cora’s neck into a ragged bloody pretzel similarly due to super speed, or yeet her into low earth orbit.
I think she’d also be able to rip the energy cell out of Cora’s suit and leave her a limbless trunk.
No, Tell us what you really think.
True he’s being extremely subtle about his feelings on this. :)
Pretty sure that’s just the dress she was wearing at the beginning of the arc. She and Cora swapped outfits when… I wanna say ?Ray Cosmos? showed up.
That’s correct (both on Ray Cosmos’ name, and Dab’s new dress). If anything, she’s not changing her clothes, she’s just dropping the illusion she put up.
… that’s assuming she actually wears clothes. Might be always just illusion.
If she can “teleport” small weapons into her hands, she can do similarly with her actual clothes.
Well, the lack of a warrant is likely to wind up in court. :p
Exigent Circumstances will be brought up.
how is this different than the dye packs in the bank money? they didn’t have a warrant to put the explosively propelled dye upon the perps.
In that court room the phrases of the day will be “probable cause”, “rescue of a kidnap victim” and “torture”. Bonus points as to whether Ariana gets them classified as terrorists, kidnappers or foreign agents. The latitude for treatment of terrorists is probably wider than for kidnappers but foreign agents just disappear into a void for ‘questioning’ and are never heard from again.
Let us not forget that they were associated with the brawl that led to the Stasis Gun getting yoinked, and they were also after the stasis pod…
I imagine Ariana is going to have her work cut out for her, and/or a great time, dealing with all the legal shenanigans with this incident.
Warrant for what? That was not a wiretap. The evidence will probably be excluded because it is not proven reliable, and no reliable chain of evidence can be attested.
Nonetheless, it is not a poisoned tree, because law enforcement was not involved in planting the bug, nor did they ask her to or know that it had happened. Thus, they can use all the investigative data they get from it.
Hand sanitizer isn’t the only kind of alcohol I would need if I saw my supervisor turned into pudding.
a statement that could be taken one of two ways,
PTSD or celebration.
Re: The new vote incentive
huh huh huh her shirt says cum on it
“Yeah, that system wouldn’t work at all. Still surprised I haven’t seen it on Star Trek.”
That makes it MORE surprising not to have seen it on Star Trek. They do many dumb things on the road to entertainment.
I think you’re likely to see that on The Orville sometime soon.
Too close to the one with the social media justice system.
(I’d really love to see what Kirk would have done to that planet. I bet he’d have turned the voting into a self-referential referendum that turned itself inside out.)
People figure out how to abuse any system – especially social/civil ones. A system with a designed-in mode of abuse wouldn’t last long enough to be conquered (the fate of failing social systems which don’t self-correct), it would implode in days…
Okay, I can’t directly address the law, because i do not know it. However, it occurs to me that since Cora is definitely not a U.S. Citizen, and Dabbler may be but is definitely not a native of earth and is already treated with quite a bit of leeway regarding the laws, it may be difficult to actually prosecute them for any laws that they may break.
Let’s say you wanted to prosecute Cora, You would arguably have to contact her consulate, which is on an unknown planet, which we do not have any way of reaching, except maybe by asking her for a ride. If we got there , her being the captain of a ship, it is entirely conceivable that her government may declare her a trade ambassador. Good luck prosecuting.
This is more likely to be handled as if she was a Confidential Informant (CI). Did she break a law? Yes. Did the CI manage to stop/inform on laws of greater impact while she was breaking said laws? Well, actually Yes. Is the CI of further use? Hell Yes!
Possibly of greater importance, is the CI working for the military or the police? If it’s the military, then her actions could be argued to be taking place in a war zone, and i think it’s a given that her government is not a signatory of the Geneva Convention. Any of them.
A a result, it would be hard to find a law you could prosecute her under.
She killed a space invader which was in the process of abducting a military officer.
As for the lack of a warrant, don’t buy the hype. You need a warrant to prosecute, not to hunt them down like dogs.
One could also argue that human laws and associated penalties apply only to *humans*. It’s widely acknowledged that they don’t apply to, say, chimpanzees.
We’d need to update the body of law to expand it to incorporate aliens, and probably need a whole section defining what *kind* of alien(s), and which part(s) of the law do and don’t apply to specific alien species depending upon their characteristics, abilities, level of sentience, ability to be impacted by specific legal penalties, etc. etc.
And then run into the philosophical tangleweed of what to do about the Humans who don’t meet whatever standards we’ve drawn for Non-Humans to be considered People…
Given the sheer variety of Non-Humans out there, and the potential for more unknowns or hybrids, I expect that a species-based approach to whether a given being counts as a Person in the eyes of the law would quickly become unworkable. Defining Person-hood on a case-by-case-as-seen basis according to level of sapience would also cover non-biologicals such as Icon (the Council’s walking armour) and software-based AIs, and differentiate Uplifted Animals from unmodified ones.
But the Law of Truly Large Numbers suggests that for any system based on threshold values in non-discrete characteristics, a large number (if not a large proportion) of the Human population won’t pass. The odds may be millions or even billions to one against such a result, but we’re rolling those dice billions of times.
Which gives us two options. Option one: maintain a consistent and evidence-based approach to whether the subject is a Person based on their individual characteristics. Option two: deliberately discriminate against certain classes of subject, by questioning their Person-hood while other classes face no such scrutiny.
It’s a question we’re likely to have to deal with even in our own world. (Assuming we get that far, but it’s unsafe to assume otherwise for such an unknown timescale.) At some point we will either make or discover something that’s definitely operating on a Person level, and equally definitely is not a Human. We’d better figure out what we’ll do about it, and have an answer ready!
Interesting train of through, but you are starting from the wrong premises.
Suppose an Iranian showed up in the US & got pulled over for speeding. He’s potentially going to have a REALLY bad time.
First, his mere presence in the US is a violation of federal law. Second, by entering the US voluntarily, he became subject to US law. Third, because there is no recognition of the Iranian regime by the US, there is no consulate, and he has NOT right to consular support. In fact, his rights under US law are minimal. Bail? Flight risk. Speedy trial? We’re investigating the circumstances of his entry to determine if he represents a security risk.
REALLY bad day.
Cora, like all of these others, including the “tourists” have entered the US illegally, and are subjects of governments with no current relations with the US.
Now, it is highly likely that Cora has been recognized under some sort of “friends and family” arraignment based on her prior aid to a high-value asset, and the vouching that she presumably received. This is especially true since she was deputized to watch prisoners. HOWEVER, at the same time, she is most definitely now functioning as a Federal Agent, and that carries with it certain…duties.
Yeah, it’s clear that she’s a tougher match for this than Halo. But if the law decides to go after her, she better have a teleporter on hot standby. (I assume she does.)
Correct, Cora is not here illegally. Yes, she is subject to US law. She was invited to Earth as part of a request to rescue Halo, and physically brought to New York by Arc. If the paperwork hasn’t been processed yet, it still doesn’t make her illegal.
No, Cora is not “functioning as a federal agent”. She was responding to an SOS from a friend, who she had previously rescued based on an SOS for Dabbler. That’s it. Neither of those rescues anointed her as a Fed.
At most, she was deputized to watch prisoners but she left that post to go do the rescue.
Cora is in NY because she was invited to come with the Archon team, which makes them at least connected to her involvement, though not actually responsible for her going off the rails because Max told her and Ray to stay out of the brawl. Cora has clearly acted outside Max’s intended scope here, but I doubt that’s enough for a court to allow Archon to use all the evidence she obtained illegally.
“Sorry your honor, I told my civilian friend the private investigator to stay in the squad, car but he disobeyed me and broke in the back door while my head was turned. Please admit all this evidence he found under the suspect’s mattress before I got there.”
A night to think about it mad me realize something. Aliens have been visiting the planet and the country with the knowledge and presumably the blessing of the government. While actual laws are unlikely, regulations and policies are almost certainly established, and given both recent events and the nature of the people involved, they were all most likely aware of the rules and their limitations. I don’t think Max can arrest her for her actions. My guess is there anything s a lethal force exception in lace for alien combat. Her warning was a threat to provide a additude adjustment.
Dabbler is a US citizen and a person under US law.
Cora, to be determined.
DaveB in Robert Heinleins Number of the Beast. our heroes decide to settle on an alternate earthlike world then discover that the legal system there was based around balancing. the example given one of the main characters has to wait behind a line of traffic because someone had run over a bystander and it took 20 minutes for help to get to them so the authorities as punishment had the perpetrators leg run over by a car on the location it happened and then waited a timed 20 minutes before helping him. this caused the hero to seriously reconsider settling on that world
I remember that as a short story, not part of that aborted novel.
The viewpoint character in the short story was someone who had driven drunk, and as punishment for that reckless behavior had to help with the “run over the leg” scenario balancing out harm the real drunk had done.
First-season “Orville” had an episode visiting a planet where everyone had a vote up/vote down button pinned to their shirt. You help a little old lady across the street, she votes you up; you annoy someone, they vote you down. The only law is people with up votes have privileges, people with down votes get bad stuff.
Of course everyone is on the internet there so if a foolish space visitor makes fun of a statute of a beloved elder, he gets a million down votes almost immediately which makes him death-penalty eligible. Hilarity ensues.
Also known as the “Planet Facebook” episode.
The annoying thing about that episode was that no one on the Orville was creative enough to turn the damn planet on its head.
There kinda is. Most (many? A majority?) crimes are actually crimes against the state. That’s where the DA comes in and decides to press charges or not. I used this last comments section, but if you run into someone’s burning house to rescue their dog or their kid, you are actually trespassing. Which is a crime. It’s not your property, and you didn’t have permission to enter. So you trespassed. I doubt anyone would ever be charged with the crime, but again this is where the DA comes in. If you were charged, and if there isn’t any “Good Samaritan” law on the books that would find you innocent, you’d be found guilty, and the judge would almost certainly waive every part of your sentence and fines and etc. that they had any discretion to wave. You’d still be found guilty, because you broke the law, and you’d have the crime on your record, so there would be a lot of injustice going on, but the system isn’t perfect because no system is perfect.
So anyway, the DA is the balance I think you’re looking for here. They have broad discretion to charge people with a crime, or not, or to drop charges made by cops or individuals if the crime is against the state and not a person. And despite the political ramifications on their re-election impacting their decision, or their personal prejudices, they are the ones who can decide to either not press charges or to drop charges before they go to court. And that discretion might have a lot to do with the circumstances surrounding the supposed crimes which were committed.
@Dave
You know, China in the middle ages or so used to grant nobility to those merchants who provided enough logistical support for wars. One of the most significant benefits of being a noble in China was they didn’t get capital punishment for murder. Noble committing the murder only lost his title, and that’s it. If I recall correctly, this detail is mentioned by an Italian language teacher with degree in history, Rafaello Urbani a.k.a. Metatron.
I dont know about you guys but if I had liquid boss all over me I would shower with a fire hose
I think instead of punishing the guilty, the laws should be structured to try as best to make the victim whole as much as possible. in cases of murder, the family and close friends of the murdered would get to decide the punishment. it could be death, but if the victim was the breadwinner of the family, a large monetary fine could be placed on the criminal, enough to replace or partially replace the missing income. if the criminal cannot earn that type of money on a regular basis, other things can be thought of. there are probably some really dangerous jobs that pay very well, but they cannot be done because of OSHA. welding the heat exchangers on a Nuclear power plant comes to mind it pays 6 figures for 15 min of work, but you cannot work for the rest of the year because you have reached your curie limit. let him get a full day’s work doing that and the family would be set. they would also get the closure they need to get over it, and as a deterrent, men will face a chance of death easily, but mess with their money. that will really give them pause.
The philosophy of criminal law has a long and distinguished history, and the principle of restorative justice that you propose is used sometimes. IIRC some tribal courts in America use a this restorative principle at least for lower level offenses. Often the community is too economically poor to be able to afford to lose a breadwinner who did wrong, and the victim may prioritize restoration over punishment.
It doesn’t seem to be workable where the ties of community are weaker or there is gross disproportionate power, e.g. where a person with more resources would be happy to bully or abuse people if he can just write a check to make them go away. The law is at least partly about order .. that’s why criminal trials are The State vs. The Suspect, not The Victim vs. The Suspect.
I am reminded of Ghost in the Shell, I think they were called preceptors, basically hacking the eyeballs of perps and other cops *the crux was they were being used illegally and without consent on people in the police force*.
of course magic wise you see it fairly often too, although hijacking the body to act as a spy is also common.
Although there is a huge difference between passively observing through someone’s senses and hijacking their body as a wolf in sheep’s skin soell or ghost hacking for sci-fi.
I like Sydney’s clarification.
I don’t like Cora’s color scheme. It grates on me. So I’m not disposed to be fond of her. Still, two points for Corador.
Considering what Cora’s seen what Max can do to an invading ship’s hull (and shields, and decks, and the hull on the other side, and whatever else was in the way), I think she looks WAAAAAY too calm in that last panel. Someone so world-smart (heck, worldS-smart) should realize what a cliff she’s dancing on the edge of.
Cora may be a wild card but Max is not. She’s the ‘good guy’. Maybe Cora believes there is no possibility of Max attacking her. Or maybe she is fatalistic enough to be accept there is nothing she could do if Max did attack her and it would be over too quickly to feel any pain.
On a tangent; bad guys believing they are ‘safe’ from a good guy killing them is why in the comics the honorable or ‘nice’ hero’ will sometimes punch their fist through the wall a millimeter from their opponent’s head or arbitrarily destroy a thing the villain values. Its intended to remind the villain that while they might choose not to kill, their opponent should never forget its a choice the hero makes each time rather than a rule they mindlessly adhere to.
Max took Cora to task for her actions but she is also the one that was a microsecond away from killing Kevin at the end of the restaurant brawl. She’s military and generally will do what is required to achieve her mission objectives.
Rechecking that last panel, I think Cora’s turning on the sex kitten. Which is not helping Max’s day at all.
considering the whole reason that Max is giving Cora grief is use of unnecessary/excessive force. Cora knows enough about Max to know she is not a hypocrite, so isn’t going to beat her up or wreck her ship while upbraiding her for excessive force.
Question on the vote incentive, what the heck is the motto on Maxima’s shirt *supposed* to mean, because when I enter it into a latin-to-english translator it comes out as broken gibberish.
I think it’s supposed to be “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”
Yeah, Dave verified that in the comments on the last page. Interestingly, the word “responsibility” has barely changed from Latin. (“responsabilitate”) which is probably why he tweaked it a bit.
If you can imagine a system of law some culture or government or collective over the last 10,000 years has tried it in some form. In that regard every attempt to balance the scales has invariably led to imbalance in that system and rampant abuse
“Do not taunt happy fun Maxima”
Happy fun maxima may cause Napalm Death.
Am I the only one who doesn’t like Max and her constantly bitchy attitude?
Yes.
Agreed. There’s a difference between “bitchy” and “understandably annoyed.” Maxima is the leader of a (presumably) elite team of Federal first responders, attempting to protect lives and property. Cora is a smug little foreigner who is currently attempting to justify a sociopathically “hilarious” method of killing someone, when her words really say it all – she chose the most amusing method rather than the most efficient method. While continuing to evidence a condescending attitude towards the locals, like an arrogant tourist who uses words like “quaint.”
If Maxima looked and sounded like Tommy Lee Jones I don’t think anyone would call him “bitchy.”
I’m actually fine with it. It’s a personality flaw with Maxima. I like when people have personality flaws in fiction. It makes them more relatable to real life when they might not be morally perfect. Sometimes Maxima’s personality is annoying, but she also has the ‘big sister’ personality with Sydney, which is different than her personality with Anvil, which is different than her personality around Hiro. She’s multi-faceted in that way. She was already annoyed with Cora, because of something which she IS being admittedly hypocritical about, and Cora did make a good point, even though she did something that, as a commanding officer of a military police force essentially, Maxima should be against, and usually is (when she’s occasionally not doing something similar). Cora’s last snarky line is something where Maxima has to admit that Cora’s way worked well, and Maxima realllllly doesnt want to hear that right now. :)
PS – yes, the video would almost DEFINITELY be inadmissible in court, but you can sometimes get around that if you can show that the information you cained would have been inevitably found by other legal means with a warrant. It’s almost a regular strategy used on court shows like Law&Order, and something that is actually taken from some RL court cases. :)
ie, the prosecution can argue ‘We would have inevitable found the kingpin by questioning the 14 suspects on board the swan ship until one of them cracked, at which point we would have inevitably discovered the name of the person in charge to get a warrant for their arrest.” Whether the judge accepts that or not? Up in the air – depends on the judge. But precedent tends to side with yes.
Oh it also depends on if the kingpin is an American citizen or not. Whole other set of laws and rules for the latter.
She’s a complex character reacting as something like a human to difficult situations.
But if I were to start actually disliking Maxima for her attitude, as opposed to disliking a choice or action, I would probably go back and re-read the comic where she is exactly like this at Dabbler for baking cookies in her panties in front of an audience. She acts exactly as you describe but Dabbler is her friend and recognizes its an act to cover her anguish and frustration over Sydney being abandoned on the Alarai homeworld when the gate closed. No, she’s doesn’t always act in a way I would appreciate if it were directed at me but often seems appropriate in the context of the story.
Oh, and Dabbler is a far better friend to her than she is to Dabbler but life is like that sometimes. Probably an example of Dabbler being ‘human adjacent’ enough for Max to forget she isn’t human despite knowing better.
Have you read the comic “Darwin Carmichael is going to hell”? It’s about a guy with a ridiculous amount of bad karma who is trying to balance it out by doing good deeds. It is a good read.
in the Canterbury tales, there’s a story of a guy pretty much like that justice system you briefly talked about in good dead vs crimes. a (possibly magical) old woman decides that justice would be served by giving a guy who committed a crime a year in which to do a specific good deed, or he will be executed for his crime then. going on a quest for crimes was a bit of a theme for that era of story telling, so you can find similar stories in other, less famous works. that doesn’t cover whether or not someone gets to commit crimes after doing a good deed, though. i think you’d need to do MORE good deeds after your crime.
Do “nero-transmitters” work by playing tiny violins?
Before we start wondering what the law would say about Cora, we first need to ask if the US Gov has any interest in arresting their only source for alien-tech.
Rant-referencing:
What would be the proper ratio of deaths vs saves, do you think would make the system work? What if you were only allowed to count saves that weren’t part of your day job, otherwise the company got the saves? (I could see that being a real problem if pharmaseutical companies were allowed to kill the CEOs or rival companies…) But then again, maybe whoever you kill has *their* save account detrimented from your account rather than just 1? And if someone is in the negative, then you can get a bonus by killing them…
So pharma company A has saved 3,000, and the ratio is 5:1. Company B comes along, and has saved 15,006 and at this point can kill the CEO of pharma company A, dropping their saves down to 1, but still technically on the ‘good’ side. But then, the new volunteer crisis counselor can come along, who has saved 7 suicide victims so far, can turn around and kill the CEO of company B.
This could get real convoluted real fast.
I could see this being a really interesting action TV show as long as you don’t look too closely at the plot.
Game of Throats.
Oh yea, the political intrigue could get insane.
My spouse raised an interesting question in addition:
What would be the effect if you killed someone with a negative score? Or saved someone with a positive score? Or the inverse, what if you saved Hitler or killed Ghandi? Would their score impact your score with saves vs kills? Would saving Hitler make your score go down or up?
And what about mothers? Do they get them for giving birth? So for every five kids, they can kill one?
And then this brings up countries. If this enfoced by some international treaty, and countries have to save so many lives before they can wage a war (or face some insane penalty that’s totally not worth it)… the careers of politicians would be such a numbers game.
“What would be the effect if you killed someone with a negative score? Or saved someone with a positive score? Or the inverse, what if you saved Hitler or killed Ghandi? Would their score impact your score with saves vs kills? Would saving Hitler make your score go down or up?”
I’d think of it like the Karma system in Fallout :) Save Hitler and your Karma goes down. Kill Ghandi and your Karma goes down
Now is this our-world Gandhi, or Civilisation Gandhi?
Our world Gandhi.
Civilization Gandhi is clearly Gandhi’s evil twin, who shaved off the goatee to avoid suspicion until he successfully nukes the world.
Can you leave your score to your heirs? Can one make a will that say something like “If I am killed by someone, I leave my credit to the one that kill the one that killed me”? Can you sell you credit for money?
I am a little annoyed that I never had the idea for a society that openly embraces moral crediting as a legal mechanic. I am sure DB isn’t the first person to invent this thought experiment, any more than I am. But I might be the first person to invent a Dungeons and dragons campaign world where, for one weeks game session, I might take your player characters into a society that has nigh perfected such a form of justice, and simply see what you do (hopefully something other than “immediately try to break this system in ways that have obviously been tried before”.).
See, this is why Maxima is both a little bit hypocritical but I also love her :). Because of that last panel especially. I love that.
Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell has an interesting take on the life-for-a-life premise you suggested. Basically karma is real (and inheritable). The titular Darwin gets stopped by police all the time for having such terrible karma, whereas his friend inherited such great karma that she can do crimes basically without consequence.
Cara… I don’t care HOW badass your alien-tech weaponry is…
… DO NOT… TAUNT… THE WOMAN…
… Who can literally OBLITERATE THE ENTIRE PLANET WITH THE FLICK OF HER WRIST IF SHE WANTED TO!!!
Everyone here is banging on about Cora. Meanwhile, I’m looking at that cashier who seems less concerned about being robbed and more disturbed by the fact that the people doing it are just coated in gore. I can practically hear him thinking “You know, if you’d just *asked*, I might have just given you some, but noooo, customers always have to do things the hard way.”
Chaotic Good: Sure, there might be a body count, but the only bodies being counted belonged to really awful people.
By their own chaotic judgment.
…I’m sorry, but did you miss the bit where Captain Lasagna Filling was about to Do An Murder To Our Protagonist in hopes of stealing the alien hypertechnology she’s bonded to, while simultaneously being an abusive misogynist in order to control others? ‘Cause I didn’t, and I don’t think the devil strictly needs an advocate in this circumstance.
Your statement did not seem to refer specifically to this particular event in the comic, so neither did my response. While I agree with the outcome in this particular instance, I don’t believe that’s a reason to accept it as a universal rule.
Don’t mind me. I’m just here for the doughnuts. Mmm, raspberry jam.
You know, this has gotta be one of those character defining moments in manga/anime/comics…. sydney just learned that she is a possible commodity, brings it home that she is not “playing superhero” she is in it for real
I think it might be worse than that. She isn’t the commodity. She’s the obstacle on someone’s path to gaining the commodity.
There is good news though. Let’s be realistic; the hyper intelligent space wizards did not create the orbs in such a way that a user could be jerked around like this. Not even beta tech would be that buggy, not on this level. So sure Sydney is accessing the powers but she’s has almost no idea how the orbs actually function. She’s like a child jumping up and down to make the pretty screen light up because she doesn’t understand the vibrations are moving the mouse on the desktop just enough to cause the monitor to come out of sleep mode.
exactly my thoughts, she is like a child or an animal playing with a computer screen or other high tech toy with no instructions and just figuring out through trial and error what does what.
Chances are what ever made these orbs couldn’t be jerked around by them, I get a sort of safety strap so you don’t lose them vibe from the link that was never intended to be used with tiny squishy human as the operator. Like I was surprised or suspecting had Cora not shown up Sydney might have pulled a beast mode and learned the orbs could have smashed through the concrete or pulled a return to user now sideways through dimensions feature; which if true and she finds later will make this situation a look back on moment as a “oh come on I could have done this, THEN!?”
not unlike playing a video game after skipping too much dialogue and discovering while button mashing you had a triple jump the whole time that could have reached that power up block earlier on you were frustrated you couldn’t reach. *I actually did something like this in Breath of the Wild, Revali annoyed me so I was skipping through his dialogue and didn’t see how to use his gale ability, I also got him last so there’s that too, then while ducking from a lynel behind some rocks it kicked in…and I was like..huh…oh right duh, forgot I had gotten something from Revali also*
Your image is evocative, but it’s pretty clear the orbs consider that she’s the family pet, and therefore teachable. It’s possible that if they had attached to someone with more brainpower, that they might have started with more dots filled in, but she clearly understands how to use what she’s been given access to.
Hmm…. that would mean that the Skill Tree is actually just the orbs choice of teaching & interface with sydney, neat thought