Yeah, I’m talk more about the unintentional reaction, versus the reaction of choice. Being overwhelmed by your powers is supposed to be something entirely beyond your control – if you’re feminine, your powers are bigger than you, and you swoon, doncha know? Where a man is more likely to struggle and master them.

The soldiering versus asking for help is a societal trope I find so much more annoying but from both sides, because it’s more in my face.

Uh… no. Having a negative consequence doesn’t suck the dilemma out of the moral. NOT having a negative consequence is what sucks the dilemma out of the moral. Because if everything works out perfectly for her despite doing something immoral, there’s no real dilemma, now is there?

It’s a bit alarming that you consider threats to be murdered and torture, resulting in Max having to go into hiding for the rest of his life for fear that the crazy superpowered unstoppable juggernaut lady will force him against his will again in the future should she deem it necessary to be ‘somewhat inconveniencing.’ I wonder how you would feel if you were the one ‘somewhat inconvenienced’ in that manner. Probably not so good.

Wait. So… if a man were to kidnap and terrorize a woman, then it would be her choice to seek protection against him? If it were an abusive husband who had threatened to kill her, would you say it’s her “choice” to flee for her life instead of sticking around and letting him follow through?

Also, you just compared seeking protection against an unstoppable superbeing who pointedly told him “whenever I want to do this again, I will,” to working a voluntary job under the table. Unless those men were working under duress (which means “guns pointed at their heads,” not “needing a paycheck”), the comparison is unfair.

(then again, you put “took him hostage” in quotes, as if there were another term for “attack, restrain, apply physical pain, threaten murder, and coerce the victim to act according to the attacker’s desires.”)

Yeah… and in the past when people have brought up the gardeners, I have pointed out the following.

1: Those gardeners were NOT in his employ. They were hired by one of his father’s assistants. He was not their employer, he did not have the right to give them orders, he did not pay their wages. If a technician comes onto a property to repair a malfunctioning system, the owner of the property can refuse to allow them to stay on the property (for whatever reason) – but he can’t tell them “go home and take the day off.” The technician’s actual employer will be annoyed.

2: I was paid under the table once. It was actually VERY good money. It depends on the employer. And we’re talking about two guys being hired to do the gardening at a private residence filled with valuable possessions. An employer with half a brain would make certain they’re both well paid and well treated, for obvious reasons.

3: I know EXACTLY what it’s like to have money issues, to be worried about paying the bills – or even paying for groceries. And combining that with point 2… it makes me think of how I lost that “under the table” job and the excellent money I was being paid for long but very enjoyable hours. And the people responsible for screwing over my employer and costing me that job… I’d love to see those two gardeners run into Alison someday and start screaming at her. “Thank you SO much, “hero!” We were getting paid a hundred bucks a night, tax free, to prune a nice kid’s hedges for a few hours and then sleep all day! You took the food out of our kids’ mouths!”

(edit: I just wanted to emphasize that, by your own logic, Alison put a gun to the head of those gardeners’ kids. They lost their steady paycheck thanks to her)

Yes, Max states that he doesn’t know – because HE IS NOT THEIR EMPLOYER. Is he spoiled for not pausing to chat now and then with the people hired to work in his home, maybe offer them a drink now and then? Yes. Does that make him a horrible person who deserves to be tortured into participating in medical procedures against his will (or as some would put it, “twisted his arm into helping millions of lives,” because they’re as bad at math as they are at ethics)? No.

Also, you haven’t acknowledged the fact that Alison actually did cost those gardeners their jobs. Max did nothing to help OR harm them and their families… but Alison, with her screams of “I AM RIGHT AND I AM A PARAGON OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND I WILL! DO! WHAT! IS! RIGHT!” has cost them the steady employment that allowed them to feed and clothe themselves and their dependents.

Alison has a very, very, very long track record of causing massive amounts of collateral damage.

He didn’t give “mouth foaming rage.” He grew quietly angry because his date started making demands of him, telling him what he ought to do – and from his point of view, he’s rather justified. He’s of “privileged” background, and so he has to deal with people who not only want him to share with them, but imply that he’s obligated. I just had dinner with some people who were discussing the latest powerball winner ($397 million), and the agreement of “she’s going to have a LOT of “long lost relatives” showing up on her doorstep.”

It’s one thing to ask for help, and it’s another to expect it as an obligation, to demand it. “Guilt trips” are a form of passive-aggressiveness. Boiled down to their essence, they can be summed up as “I’m going to make you feel selfish for not giving in to my selfish demands.” That’s the mentality of a MUGGER.

(Or to quote Criss Jami: “Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.”

Or as Jon Krakaeur put it: “It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.” )

Also, you’re once again twisting things. He didn’t see two people “silently suffering.” He saw two guys pruning the hedges the way they always do. There were no quiet sobs of despair, there were no trembles of fatigue, there were no tears for the daughters snatched up to be sex slaves while they toiled under tyrannical oppression. But you’re implying that these men were suffering oh so much, so that Alison sounds justified for telling them “hey, those two guys who don’t actually work for you? You should feel guilty about that – go tell them to take the night off. I’m big on social justice and all, so I know all about telling other people what they ought to do.” And then you go on to “arm twisted,” as opposed to “assaulted, kidnapped, tortured, threatened with murder.” Minimizing Alison’s very very VERY real crimes (punishable by many decades in prison were she not Ms “I’m superpowered and above the law”), and emphasizing Max’s obliviousness to two guys doing some yardwork on his terrace.

Regarding the transplants… you’re once again emphasizing why Max was 100% right to refuse, and why his only actual failing was not resisting to the point that Alison inadvertently murdered in her selfish stupidity. Those “ten thousand” people who you can’t even mention by name… they deserve compassion, they deserve empathy. But not Max? According to that logic, MAX IS NOT A HUMAN BEING. According to that logic, Max is being treated as an outsider: “we will take from you and devour you, and expect nothing in return! You are not part of our community, you are a THING to be used!”

That’s actually the premise of an old story by Robert Heinlein: Methuselah’s Children. Humanity lived in a utopian society… until they found out that some naturally long lived people lived among them. They then declared “these unnaturally old people are undeserving of the basic rights that all humanity are entitled to according to our laws – we will now begin arresting them for existing and torturing them into giving up the secret of eternal life.” The reaction by the Foundationers was to flee the planet. And they were right to do so.

Re: Jobs. That wasn’t his “estate.” That was the apartment where he lived… until he “chose” to go into hiding (i.e. to flee like any other victim of an abusive stalker who feels that the law doesn’t apply to them). If no one’s living there now, there’s no more need to employ the gardeners. They weren’t “fired just to spite Alison,” they would have been laid off – as in, “we’d keep on paying you… but we no longer need you to do that job.”

No, the point is that if nothing bad happens, and everyone tries to force the narrative to be ‘that person was evil because we say so and it’s justified to do that to him’ (regardless of whether he really is evil or not), and Alison defenders keep trying to minimize what she did, or act like Max deserved it, and everything worked out for everyone PERFECTLY with no problems whatsoever and happiness and rainbows and puppies for all afterwards, then there is NO GRAVITAS to the supposed MORAL DILEMMA in the first place. Oh… look, Alison felt bad for three seconds. Moral dilemma. Yawn.

We have been through this before ad nauseum. Not doing something selfless and heroic is not the same as being a villain, unless you caused the problem in the first place, which Max did not.

Now you’re doing a strawman argument. Max didn’t initially say no just because he had any sort of malicious intent in his inaction. He considered it dangerous for him to do it. THEN after Alison started behaving like a jerkoff, he said, at thatpoint, that he might just say no just because it’s HER asking. Don’t start ignoring his valid reason, or taking inaction for reasonable cause as being equal to malicious action, or malicious inaction even. There was noting malicious about what Max was doing (or rather, not doing).

“Max made the vague, handwavey claim that helping Feral would mess up his life in some ill-defined way. ”

Stephanie, you’re wrong. Link to the page and read it again. Alison even admitted that he had a point there, before utterly dismissing that valid point. And not to mention the fact that she does NOT have the right to force someone do do ANYTHING, which is MY point that I’ve repeated so many times. She is not god, she’s a not-particularly-bright woman who has way more physical power than she has emotional stability or mental comprehension, and used a ‘Might makes right’ method of thinking with how she acted with Max… which is a fascist mentality.

“Max admitted that he was not going to do it, would not do it even if he wanted to, specifically because he wanted to upset Alison.”

Again no. Read it again. If he said no specifically to upset Alison, he would have STARTED with that. He said no, was polite about saying no, Alison persisted, he said no again and said he shouldnt have to explain why he doesn’t want to, because he’s allowed to make his own choices in his own life (WHICH HE DOES HAVE THAT RIGHT TO DO), then she got violent, because Alison is a brutish emotionally unstable fascist, quick to anger and threaten and bully, when she doesn’t get what she wants.

“Even if you don’t believe it was originally his reason, it was indisputably his real reason by the end of their conversation,”

Actually, if his reason was to spite her BECAUSE of how she was acting, then it’s the fault of the person who was acting poorly to make him change his reason to not do what she wanted. It’s Alison’s fault for not having a more convincing argument to the person she was trying to convince, rather than the fault of the person who she was trying to convince.

Hate to do this, but I go back to a rape analogy. And in advance – ‘trigger warning’ because I know some people here tend to want to have trigger warnings about stuff like this and I don’t feel like having people yell at me about that and throw this off on another tangent.

After a date that didn’t really click, a man asks a woman to have sex with him. Woman says no, politely. Man asks again, more insistently and calling her a tramp who has been leading him on, demanding to know why she won’t have sex with him. Woman says no again, and is angry about his presumption, and tells him ‘Because I said no, and no means NO. I don’t need to give you a detailed reason why I don’t want you having sex with me.’ Man demands again, and woman says ‘I wouldn’t have sex with you if you were the last man on Earth, get out!’ Man grabs woman, forces her against the table, threatens to kill her if she doesn’t comply, and rapes her.

But hey… it was karma, right? She was asking for it by being attractive, and letting the guy buy her dinner, right? Her refusal to have sex with him willingly is no less abhorrent because the man started getting mean to her, right? Wrong. The guy needs to get castrated and be put in prison for life.

That’s the same mentality of Alison and Max. And you know which person I consider Alison to be in that scenario.

“and I’m not going to entertain analogies that leave out the most pertinent aspects of the scenario. ”

But you do seem to entertain analogies of people who won’t get as many organ replacements in the future from Feral donating 24/7 vs Feral only having to donate 40 hours a week, as being ‘millions of people who will die’ despite no proof of that.

But we’ve already argued and debated this ad nauseum in the past, as I mentioned before. No one was dying because of Max. Not one person. The only actual definitive result of Max not helping would have been that Feral would be voluntarily torturing herself for 24/7 instead of as a 40 hour work week.. Key word being voluntarily.

“”It’s morally repugnant to let people die to spite someone” and “It’s morally repugnant to forcefully refuse to have sex” are two very different positions”

I really don’t want to have to start arguing about what analogies are again. We did that for weeks last time.

“The fact that you’d even use that comparison shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why I believe Max is a piece of shit, even though I really think I’ve been as clear about that as I could possibly be.”

Being a piece of crap, even if you argue he is one (which I don’t see him as being) does not somehow eliminate his right to autonomy in choice of how to use his own body, so long as he’s not directly hurting another person. ie, you can prevent him from shooting another person when not in self defense. You cannot force him to save another person’s life, or use his powers in the most altruistic way. Or use his power at all. At least not without being a thuggish fascist, analagous to the mentality of the most disgusting thing I can think of – a rapist. Which the overtones of the Alison/Max scene were definitely showing, especially with how she was talking to him while hurting him.

“but I do not see the arm-twisting as karmic retribution for Max being a dick.”
Threatening to break his arm, torture him and murder him by dropping him in the Atlantic Ocean to drown. Not ‘arm twisting.’ Where’s ALISON’S karmic retribution? Nowhere. That’s the point of my original post that got to this thread in fact. That there MIGHT be a karmic retribution of the OP’s statement turned out to be true.

” It is made one hundred percent explicitly clear in the comic that Feral was not able to meet the global need for organs before her boost. ”

That’s truly a very two dimensional view of how organ donation works in the first place. Doctors can only donate organs at the speed at which they can remove them without destroying the organs. And organ donation works generally by giving organs to the MOST needing first. There’s a shortage of organs available, but even at Feral’s normal generation, she was able to meet that minimal need, and eventually her powers would have augmented on its own – probably soon, given how Cleaver and Alison (and possibly Moonshadow) had already augmented on their own, and now Patrick has as well probably. So you haven’t shown, at all, that ‘millions of lives would have been lost. Just temporarily inconvenienced so that the non-critical organ recipients might have to wait until Feral’s powers augmented on their own. And like I said, you’re still limited by the speed of the doctors. You can’t just hacksaw out the organs or dig them out with a shovel. They need to remain viable.

We’ve argued ALL of this before. More than once. You generally ignore (I am assuming it’s not maliciously so, but more likely because you’re focused on your ‘Max is a piece of crap and deserves bad things happening to him’ bias) the more pertinent parts of the points I make though, which is why most of our arguments on this particular debate tend to be useless from my perspective.

You keep continually saying millions of lives. Only based on Alison’s one sentence. And like I’ve said before, I don’t consider Alison to be a particularly bright person who bothers to think with logic when emotional diatribe alone will suffice.

“But I’m sick of arguing about this.”

I am too. Not because I don’t enjoy debating you – I think you’re usually pretty polite actually. But we don’t actually ever resolve anything and we keep arguing the same things back and forth with very little change. So there’ not a lot of point in repeating it again. People can just look at past posts instead.

“Just do me a favor and never come at me with that “Oh, you think Max is an asshole, so you must think rape is okay!” shit again.”

Stephanie, you’ve read the totally wrong thing into what I wrote. You’re strawmanning again by changing what I said into something I did not say, in order to argue what you feel is easier to argue against. I did not say ‘You think max is an asshole so you must think rape is okay.’ I am using the logical extension of what Alison did, and comparing the mentality of a crime which one of us thinks was horrible and the other thinks is acceptable, with a DIFFERENT odious crime that BOTH of us can agree is horrible, that has the same exact mentality involved when you burn away the surface details. In fact, the fact that I do NOT think you’d ever think that rape is okay is why I compare the two. Because since you don’t think that rape is okay, since you’re not a total degenerate, then by logical extension, you shouldn’t think that what Alison did is okay either.

“You wrote a mock-argument in favor of rape, in the style in which one rewrites an opponent’s argument to take it to a repugnant extreme.”

1) key word here is ‘mock-argument’
2) I wasn’t rewriting ANYTHING. I was doing a direct comparison with the same words in order to show how, since what you’re saying is utterly unacceptable if used in excusing a rape (and it is unacceptable to excuse rape), it should also be utterly unacceptable if used in excusing a different circumstance with the SAME mentality of ‘I am stronger than you, I want your body to do something despite your unwillingness to comply’ – ie, what Alison did to Max. Again, I’ve written this many, many times, often with the exact same wording, and for the exact same purpose, and I feel that it keeps falling on deaf (but not malicious) ears when I debate this with you and some others.

“You appeared to equate my main issue with Max–that he refused to save lives out of spite–with someone using his same wording to refuse sex.”

No, I equate the mentality that makes people think it’s acceptable to have Alison forcing Max to use his body to do something against his will by threatening and using violence and pain and threats against his life to the mentality of rape being okay just because one person is stronger and the other person might be argued to ‘owe’ sex. I consider the latter to be immoral, horrible and illegal, and therefore I consider the former to be immoral, horrible, and illegal. Because BOTH are. Not because neither are. Both have the same fascist mentality of being owed the autonomy of another person’s body.

“Do you see how “that came across like an attempt to refute my argument by equating it with rape apologism? And why that would upset me? It would mean a lot to me if you can put yourself in my shoes here.”

I actually went out of my way when writing the post to NOT make it look like that. I tried to stress that NEITHER action is in any way acceptable, and stressed how you’d find rape (and by extension rape apologists) to be disgusting (which they are), and therefore you should find what Alison did to be disgusting on a moral level as well. At worst, I’m saying to hold different opinions on these two identical mentalities is hypocrisy. Definitely nevereven implied that you’re a rape apologist. The entire paragraph was dripping with sarcasm, as I even refute the question within the same paragraph and say ‘of course not, no.’

So yes, I can put myself in your shoes. I did, in fact. Sometimes when we argue, you make very good points and I enjoy that. You are not here though. And I wrote the post specifically to avoid exactly what you read into it anyway, because you might have been predisposed to think that in the first place, especially if you have a blind spot when reading my posts by ignoring (unintentionally perhaps, but perhaps because it’s easier to argue a strawman version of my posts than what I’m actually writing by cutting out what you consider not pertinent, but are actually VERY pertinent) parts of what I’m writing, or focusing on other parts while glossing over the key points made.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall nothing in the comic to suggest that pre-boost Feral was supplying the most critical patients at a sufficient rate to prevent anyone from actually dying.”

Actually they specifically gave numbers in the beginning to show that she WAS preventing people from actually dying.

“There is plenty in the text to support the interpretation that she is now saving many more lives than she was before,”

Actually there is not. There’s just Alison’s one sentence, then the doctor’s sentence that makes no sense from a point of logic. It’s probably one of the most poorly written arcs I’ve seen in this story, ignoring logic in order to railroad a plot point. There’s only so fast that doctors can remov organs. THAT is the speed at which they can go – not how fast she replenishes the organs. everything she ws doing now, she could be doing before, but just with more suffering by HER, and having people wait a little longer so they would give organs to the most critical patients first. Then eventually her powers would have augmented on their own, and she’d be doing what she’s doing now ANYWAY. All without torturing Max, threatening to kill him, ruining his LIFE, and throwing away all of Alison’s supposed principles in the process.

“I have been ignoring the parts of your posts that aren’t pertinent to the question of whether or not Max is a piece of shit, ”
1) When debating, you should not ignore parts of your opponent’s statements.
2) The question was NEVER whether Max was a piece of crap or not. It’s about if that makes it okay to do what Alison did. It’s not. The SIDE issue is that Max is not a piece of crap in the first place. He’s an almost textbook example of the ‘Strawman has a point’ trope. You’re mixing different arguments together instead of focusing on one, arguing that one, then moving on to the next one.
3) On the topic of Max being fecal matter, it’s almost wholly irrelevant. What is NOT irrelevant is if having different opinions, based on just words and non-action deserves violent physical action taken against you. It does not. Not in a free society.
4) I’m doing what is called ‘steelmanning’ (the opposite of strawmanning). I’m taking your strongest argument and arguing against THAT, instead of ignoring what you said and making up a different interpretation of what you said. Even if I WAS to grant that Max is an epic jerk and horrible person (which I do not believe him to be, but I am giving you that in this example in order to give you the strongest possible argument that you are making), it does not excuse what Alison did, and the person in need of karmic retribution is Alison, not Max.
5) We already argued the ‘is Max crap’ vs ‘Is max reasonable’ before, many times, so arguing it again in this VERY long series of posts will just make it even longer, for something which is purely subjective.

“Just because you think the story is badly written doesn’t mean that the parts you dislike didn’t happen. You can say it doesn’t make sense, but you can’t say “and therefore what the authors showed happening is not what actually happened in-universe.” It’s their show, not yours.”

Here’s something that literally did not happen. No one was going to literally die if Alison did not torture Max. And you’re again doing a strawman argument. If you’re going to say what I said, please actually say what I actually said in the way I said it :/ You keep using two or three DIFFERENT debate points I am making, and combining them into one. I don’t understand why you’re arguing like this now instead of to what I’m saying.
Point 1 – The plan for Feral did not make sense from a logical standpoint for organ harvesting. If she regenerates her organs every 3 seconds, it doesn’t help if the doctors cannot remove viable organs every 3 seconds continuously.
Point 2 – Alison had no way whatsoever to actually know her stupid plan would work, except for some sort of deus ex machinae method of having everything turn out puppies and rainbows for a poorly thought out plan.
Point 3 – the authors did NOT show millions of people being at risk of dying if Alison did not torture Max – it was a single sentence by Alison said without any proof whatsoever. Keep the points separate.

“If there really is a page that states that nobody is dying of organ failure anymore thanks to pre-boost Feral, please link it.”

That’s not even what you asked to which I responded! :/

You said “I recall nothing in the comic to suggest that pre-boost Feral was supplying the most critical patients at a sufficient rate”

I then pointed out that Patrick had actually told Alison about the ACTUAL NUMBERS of organs a pre-boost Feral had been donating only a few DAYS into it. Right before the hospital scene. Don’t now change what you’re telling me you said to ‘nobody is dying of organ failure anymore thanks to a pre-boost Feral’ because they don’t mention ANYTHING about that in the first place except her numbers as of a couple of DAYS into it. Extrapolate those numbers for the first few days into months, and you can figure out that she was definitely supplying enough organs for all the people on the ‘Most Critical’ list. It’s just going to be more torturous for her. More voluntarily torturous.

“If you think the question of whether Max is a piece of shit is irrelevant, I’m not sure why you’ve been arguing with me about it for this entire thread.”

Because you’ve been implying that (and outright stating in past posts) that you can use physical violence on a person simply because you do not like them – ie, if they’re, in your opinion, a piece of sh**. I find that to be an awful moral stance to have. I’ve always found that to be an awful moral stance to have ever since the Max/Alison thing first happened and Alison apologists started up. So obviously I’m going to argue against something I consider inherently morally, ethically, and legally wrong.

“I don’t know why you’re making a point of telling me Max doesn’t need karmic retribution when I have literally never claimed he does. ”

Why did you bring up ‘karmic retribution’ in the first place? It really confused what you were saying and made it look like you were arguing that Max, being a piece of crap in your opinion, meant he was reaping the karmic retribution of what would happen.

It’s good to see such a fair, incisive and straightforward assessment of the issues you had with previous post. I think we can all learn from this – so, thank you. Couldn’t have put this better myself, kudos.

“Using innocent people’s deaths for petty revenge is an asshole move that only an asshole would do.”

I’m happy to see others notice this point, too.

I didn’t forget – I just have explained this so many times to Stephanie (who I’ve actually found to be polite even though I disagree with everything she’s said on this subject and have found it impossible to get her to acknowledge the inherent problem in condemning someone for non-action as being just as evil as bad action) and others with no ability to get them to acknowledge that fact that it almost doesn’t make any sense to keep repeating it to the same people. 🙂

I know Max didn’t refuse out of mere spite for spites sake. He added that last part about how he might say no just because SHE asked because Alison was being an a-hole after his initial no for VALID reasons.

I do know that she’s made at least three posts in response to my words after blocking me (the second being to claim she had temporarily unblocked me, and the third claiming she was going back to blocking me).

I don’t mind if someone makes unpleasant replies to my posts if I can’t even see them… they’re still reading my words, they’re screaming where I can’t hear it, and I don’t care. But then you made an EXCELLENT point about stalkers… yeah, I can see how that would be an issue.

It reminds me of an article from some years back, about how the Internet was growing increasingly civilized and “tame” for the same reason that the Wild West was tamed. Anarchy might be fun for the outlaws, but not so much for the rest of us.

(Also, she’s hardly ‘forgetting to add’ anything. She disagrees with that assertion and so wouldn’t champion it. You need to be respectful to the views of others to receive the same respect in return.. if you did get blocked, this is probably why.)