Stop manipulating her, Patrick. How deep does your shell game go?

I hope the main thrust of this is that Moonshadow is justified in what she has been doing. I mean, unless you got new intel, you aren’t -that- persuasive, Patrick.

Opinion isn’t analysis so while an interesting point on perception if you were to ask thee countries governments the answer would be very different in many cases.

Patrick pulls out the “I’ve killed less people than that other group” trick. It’s the same old bottom-of-the-barrel argument about how you can’t be condemned so long as you can find someone who’s worse than you.

Ethically, it is still the obvious choice to push them. Socially however, it is dangerous to do so. People will call you cold and callous. Some will go so far as to call you a psychopath, or murderous.

The best choice is to not worry about any of the five people. THey can take care of themselves. Just join the crowd of shocked onlookers doing absolutely nothing.

Eh, I’m not gonna bitch at super villain for wanting to overthrow the Unite States. Though I’d prefer he’d be cooperative with Canada and help transition the states into confederation.

And she’s Patrick’s only real friend; think about it.

Hmm.

in the SFPiverse, superheroes happened in 1991 (and then were publicly revealed in… 2006 ?). it’s possible their current governement is different from what we know.

(oh, hey, we have a http://strongfemaleprotagonist.wikia.com/ now !)

The point is not to deconstruct the situation for being implausible. The point is to pose the question of whether you could/would/should sacrifice one person to save many.

To quote and paraphrase Black Summer: “”You want to change the nature of justice in America and you kill a president? What did you think that made you? Two-fisted Super-Jesus for the American Way? It made you Lee Harvey Oswald, you prick. You know what? Lots of people hated John F. Kennedy. He barely got elected. But Lee Harvey Oswald isn’t remembered as an American hero. Just a prick with a gun who killed the president. That’s you now, Patrick.”

The right answer is “people”.

…aaaaaaand “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change.” continues to be the best dismantling of the superhero ethical stance in a single sentence that I’ve ever heard.

This.
You can’t justify your actions by saying that somebody else did something worse.
By that logic, the Holocaust was fine, because Communism, particularly in China, killed more people.
I see Patrick’s point though.

Is it really the same government though? I’m assuming that nobody in the current US administration (because they’d have to be REALLY old) was part of that decision. I suppose you could argue that that was the same government, or that the current US government still benefits from it, but it seems to me that that argument is very similar to blaming somebody for the crimes of their ancestors. Which doesn’t achieve much.
The war on terror would be a much fairer thing to reference.

Okay, I’ve thought a bit about my objection to Patrick’s argument.

Patrick is correct about the US having killed large numbers of people, even if we only look at the last approximate half-century. He’s correct about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Japanese government was willing to come to terms, but not to surrender unconditionally, and their main sticking point was that the imperial position not be abolished. Since the Americans ultimately decided not to abolish it, they could have ended the war with a conditional Japanese surrender without the need for either the bombings or a land invasion. Throughout Latin America, they overthrew democratic governments, propped up tyrannical ones, trained death squads and torturers, and funded terrorism, all for the purose of maintaining US people in the region. They took similar actions in other parts of the world, including Iran. They killed over a million people in Vietnam, mainly civilians, and their attacks on Cambodia were to a large extent responsible for the Khmer Rouge, and thus bear some responsibility for its crimes. For the last fifty years, they’ve politically and financially backed the Israeli occupation, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That’s not even getting into the harm done by the economic policies that the US has pushed on nations of the world – especially the developing world.

However:

1) I don’t believe Patrick when he said that he endeavoured to minimize civilian casualties. He’s already said that he’s extremely adept at manipulating people because he knows what they’re thinking. He seems to have inherited wealth. If he’s really so smart, it should be trivially easy for him to hire a lobbying firm and have them make the policy arguments that he knows would be most convincing to the people holding the levers of power in Washington. “Taking over the world [or the country] via killer robots” is not remotely the lowest-casualty way a telepath has of effecting change.

2) Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and any other US actions in the past, are a red herring. If Patrick wants to justify violent overthrow of the government, he has to do so on the basis of wrongs the US government are currently committing, the deaths they are causing and will cause in the projected future if they continue their current actions, and an argument that the number of deaths he’s causing is lower, AND an argument that his being in power would prevent all the deaths the US is currently causing. He’s made no attempt at such an argument; instead, he’s deflecting. “Less than Hiroshima” still leaves him with a staggering potential death toll.

3) From a utilitarian perspective, his argument is overwhelmingly flawed, because as I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of deaths in the world (i.e.: over 75%, and over 90% in most years) are not caused by deliberate violence, but by disease and accidents. Patrick’s power, in the way he’s using it to learn about time travel, gives him the ability to develop cures for many major diseases in the world – there’s less obstacles to a malaria cure than to time travel, surely. It could enable him to develop methods of making gene therapy broadly workable, which could cure every genetic disease in the world. Those actions would, in the long run, save far more lives than he could save by eliminating violence altogether.

4) If his argument, as some on this thread have suggested, turns out to be about climate change, that’s even more idiotic. Climate change isn’t a result of the US government being evil; it’s the result of most of the world being dependent on fossil fuels to achieve a decent standard of living. He’s a billionaire genius with a superpower that allows him to synthetize the knowledge of numerous different scientists; there is literally nobody on earth better suited to developing workable, global-scale alternative energies and energy conservation technologies. Not that such an achievement would stop global warming, or prevent its negative impacts – to quote another show, the avalanche has already started and it’s too late for the snowflakes to vote – but it would prevent us from making things worse than we already had.

5) If he’s making a moral argument – not “what I did was right”, but “why are you calling me evil and not calling [so-and-so] evil” – fine, Patrick: the actions of Bush, Cheney & Co were evil. The actions of arms manufacturers are evil. None of that means that your actions aren’t. It’s not an either/or proposition. I have no doubt that Allison regards weapons manufacturing as immoral.

So why did Allison bust up supervillains and not arms manufacturers? Because once you do the latter, that’s a revolution. And as I said in point 2, while I’m not fundamentally opposed to a revolution, you need to have a strong rationale that your actions are causing less destruction than those of the regime you’re deposing, and that you’re able to put something better in its place. A war between the US government and biodynamics – which would be the probable result of Allison taking that course of action – is a potential world-war, mass-casualty level situation.