I started with “no” for effect. To draw focus to it being intentional and considered, not some mistake or attempt to misrepresent.

I left out the second half of the sentence because I believe the comparison it draws to be a false comparison intended to obscure the act of abuse and right it off as insignificant.

I left it out because that was the entire point I was making.

You’re still not seeing it. My point is the act is unacceptable, irrespective of its dimension. It’s an absolute, not a relative measure.

If you know what my point is, why did you just claim it was something else?

It’s like explaining a magic trick: the big, wide, expansive gestures (so many dead, oh the humanity), obscure the subtle prestidigitation with the rabbit up the sleeve (let’s brutalise Max and say it doesn’t count). If I want to show people what’s really going on, then telling them to look at the big, wide, expansive gestures isn’t going to show them anything, It’s focussing in on the smaller elements that illustrates what is really happening.

For another parallel, the invisible gorilla in the basketball game. When you’re discussing it afterwards, telling people to focus on the game as a way of illustrating the perceptional illusion doesn’t show them anything, asking “did you notice the gorilla in the room?” does,

I don’t find the claim I’m misrepresenting the sentence to be convincing. I think I’m representing exactly what it means for Max. But it’s easier to make the argument about me than address my point.

Max suffered violence. You say that doesn’t matter because context. I say it matters whatever the context.

Plain enough?

Deliberately ignoring parts of the comments you’re replying to will do you no favors if you want to accomplish anything other than establishing that you’re outraged.

Speaking as someone multiply marginalized, this makes me highly uncomfortable. Because Max’s situation is a lot more about the comfort of the super-privileged than the rights of the few and his main “minority” status is that of the 1%.

The situation is way more analogous to robbing a wealthy capitalist so that poor people can eat; yes, it’s a crime; yes, it’s violating that wealthy capitalist’s legal rights and it scares and possibly traumatizes them, but I am much more convinced of the moral right to *live* than the moral right to live way more comfortably than other people ever get the chance to.

Remember, Max has been as safe and able to not care in the first place *because* his mother pulled extralegal strings to get him an out, one that other biodynamic kids never had (and which she could have worked for but did not). He was already a beneficiary of massive injustice, and he’s made it clear he’s totally cool with injustice so long as he’s the one benefitting.

What Al did was take that away. Which she had no right to do, we’re in agreement there, what she did to him was absolutely unjust violence.

But the analogy to what *we* go through? Is way off. A far more accurate analogy is that of the “innocent” educated elites who get hurt or killed or have to flee because of a revolution. Is it awful for them? (us, in my family’s case, to some extent) YES. but is it an injustice on the level of say the murders of Black trans women? NO. it is not.

David, please know I’m coming from a place of respect and do not mean this as a personal attack at all. But. This is disturbingly un-nuanced, to the point of being wrong in several ways. I expect that from most people, and often do not expend the energy on responding, but activists really need to do better in our understanding or we end up doing harm rather than good.

My own work is limited to explaining things to people because of massive health issues but I can normally do that, at least, so lemme try. Apologies for length.

I’m not at all disputing that what Al did to Max was violence, and was cruel as well as illegal. It’s absolutely true that everything under consideration here = examples of violence. But it is not true that any of them are analogous at *all*, and making the specific analogies you’ve done here is itself harmful.

For context, I’m an agender bisexual disabled/chronically ill person of color who reads as female, and I’m a non-citizen resident of the US. but also, I’m middle-class, middle-aged, college educated, non-Black, non-Jewish, non-Muslim, married to a cis white man, never incarcerated, allistic, and probably missing some privileges here because we do. ALL of this affects how I’m treated and how I experience said treatment at ALL times, there is never a moment where one of these things exists independent of the rest. Even in spaces where I’m closeted & not targeted I am affected — *but not* to the extent that someone would be without my set of privileges.

& That is the basic point of intersectional theory, which is super important.

Max being part of the 1% is absolutely relevant when it comes to his biodynamism, and so is his being male, white, and as far as we know cis and straight and able-bodied. So is Al’s being white and apparently cis and straight and definitely extremely able-bodied — but so is her being female and def. less rich than Max, and, so is her being a celebrity who was recruited as a child soldier, someone who has never had access to the secrecy or freedom we’re talking about Max losing. When you’ve given up your childhood (though even that implies a level of consent a child can’t give) to save others as best you knew how, and then given up the good parts of that to try and do better, dealing with Max’s kind of entitled selfishness has to be actively traumatic. And Al has indeed acted traumatized by it, though she doesn’t seem to acknowledge her own trauma very well.

It’s misleading to say that Al in this situation is abusive and Max is not. Either they both are or both are Patrick’s victims, playing about the abuse he staged, and in either case I do not know that the violence Al enacted is the worse violence. Physical violence is just easier to see than emotional violence, it’s not actually more damaging.

OK next point. Twisting someone’s arm to do a thing is never going to analogize well to outing. It’s like saying that punching someone in the face is like shooting them in the face, it’s just not. Both are cruel and violent but outing is on a different scale. It’s a violation not just of agency, but of identity and personhood, and carries definite risk, not just the nebulous possibility of future risk (esp given that Max’s main danger at this point is… being outed further).

The person who *outed* Max is Patrick, and you could accurately compare his act of violence to the Mail outing Lana W, sure. but not Al’s. Strangely though (not actually strangely, because misogyny is prevalent here as everywhere else), people are putting relatively little blame on Patrick in all this, and only bringing him up at all to further blame Al for not being wiser to his manipulation. Which is textbook gaslighting.

Second, the Daily Mail is never going to analogize well to Al. Or even to Patrick. The Daily Mail is such 2D scum it’d be too badly written a character to show up in this comic. There was no good to balance the bad they did, either in intent or in effect. (Especially given that Lana W promptly started using her trans status to dodge accountability for her appropriation & antiblackness.)

Which leads into this: of course her privilege is relevant to her being outed. It made her more likely to be outed but far, far less vulnerable to the worst consequences, and both those need to be taken into account. Cause look, she’s not at active risk of being murdered, which *is* the risk poor trans women run if outed, because they’re not kept away from danger and because they don’t have the money to meet cis beauty standards. And poor trans women of color, especially Black and Latina and Native women, are at the highest risk by far, so race is also *never* irrelevant to the effects of violence.

Some of my friends have to worry about running out of hormones and makeup and being killed on the street for it, *daily*. Eight trans women of color have already been murdered this year in the US and that’s just the official count I could find as of earlier this month.

So, whiteness and wealth can never be irrelevant to the violence of outing, because it’s a huge buffer from consequences.

Also, trauma seems to come from repeated harm and emotional neglect, both of which wear a person down. It’s clear Max *is* emotionally neglected, but not by Al; she is, again, not his actual/primary abuser despite having been his bully. He is not entitled to sympathy or any other emotional labor from a woman he’s been a complete asshole to, whatever either of them is thinking he’s owed. (Also: on their dates, before he was so bad she left, he was repeatedly testing her boundaries and violating her agency to the extent he could, only giving way temporarily to active pushback. And then he actively said he’d say no just to hurt her. (Just so she didn’t have her own way for once is bullshit; he wanted to hurt her not teach her. It’s also projection, because lashing out is his response to not getting his way for once.) Which is all *relevant* to her response and provides context.

This is already too long. Sorry. But the thing is, a simplistic analysis that takes things out of their context and comes up with “the person with less social protection, who is responding in part to being treated really badly, is totally the abuser here” is always going to be one we *have* to consider critically because it’ll almost always be wrong.

But you are ignoring violence with this unnuanced view. THAT is my problem. You’re ignoring the violence being done less visibly, *by* Max, *by* Patrick, *by* people off-screen, to focus on Al’s culpability alone.

And that is a simplification that merely enforces oppression.

I get that this [edit to clarify: not ignoring violence I mean] is your intent. I am telling you I believe it fails catastrophically.

This is the kind of reasoning that says that a trans woman yelling back after 3 days straight of horrible harrassment by terfs is “abusive” because she’s the loud one that people notice also because the harassment she suffers is so *normal* that people get to ignore it and look only at what she does in response.

It’s the kind of reasoning that demonizes BLM because people are great at ignoring the horrific injustices they’re responding to, and see *only* disruption and discomfort caused to themselves and blame the protestors instead of what they’re protesting.

It. Does. Harm. FAR more harm IMO than the simplification of calling Max’s hurt negligible specifically *in comparison to that of the lives he refused to save*.

Apologies for the belated response, it’s been taking me a while to reinterpret what you said before according to this. Having this for context, if you’ve acknowledged elsewhere that you misinterpreted Stephanie in a harmful way, we’re cool, and apologies for missing it.

If not, then as far as I can tell you are currently guilty of the thing you’re taking a stand against. Which is why I think you’re missing something, and not realizing how you’re doing that.

Perhaps the piece you’re missing is that other people have pushed the *same* skewed reading onto Stephanie’s comments over the last few months, picking part of her sentences and responding as though that were all she said? The overall pattern reads pretty clearly to me as an attempt at silencing, not an honest disagreement, so, it *is* a form of violence.

I can be a lot more specific, but there’s not much point if you didn’t actually miss that context.

You know, it’s funny. I’ve never heard of a spoiled rich girl being taught by their parents to live in fear of someone finding out something secret about them. Then again, I’ve also never heard of a spoiled rich girl talking about how just because she’s rich doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have problems, only to have someone throw it back in their face and demand they submit to someone else’s equally selfish desires.

Frankly, the people who insist that Max is awful and terrible are suggesting that Alison is less morally righteous than Mary, i.e. Moonshadow. Mary openly stated that she’s prepared to harm the innocent to continue to do what she believes is right (more specifically, to continue to murder people she considers to be acceptable targets). Whereas Alison has gone on record as saying, “that thing I did to Max? That was completely and totally unacceptable of me. Not because my goals were wrong, but because my methods were wrong. I need to own up to it and try to fix things.”

(But if you want to continue to argue that he’s like a spoiled teenager… please, tell me what “car” Alison offered him before he threw his big selfish tantrum)

Edit: I just thought of one example of spoiled rich girls being taught to fear exposure of their secrets… and that would be if they’re closeted homosexuals…

I imagine there were a lot of “spoiled rich girls” who were told by their parents that they would suffer substantial dire consequence if word ever got out they they’d had an abortion. (And – just like you might wonder with their families – is it really Max or Max’s mother’s political career that is being protected?)

Yeah emotional abuse of rich kids absolutely shouldn’t be discounted. But it doesn’t come from less rich kids, we have a lot of eliding of real responsibility I think, because the issues Max has come from people who are off screen.

Well, Max HAS used his power. Against his will. Assaulted and forced into doing so. And after specifically stating his fears of his powers being discovered. That is his specific dialogue when she confronts him. And the fact that he didn’t attempt to find out… she didn’t exactly give him much of a chance for that. She didn’t OFFER anything, least of all information. Just demands.

“You’re a horrible selfish person if you don’t do everything I want without expecting any compensation or even protection from negative consequences.” That’s a horrible, selfish, and self-centered attitude to have. It is the attitude of a criminal, be it a supervillain or just a mugger. It is also the attitude of those saying that Max is in the wrong for wanting her to give him some of the empathy she demanded he show to Feral.

Yes, he reacted to winning the lottery – getting a superpower – with a sense of horror and entitlement. That couldn’t possibly have anything to do with his parents. Including his mother, who HAS been shown in the comic. She’s part of that Harmony Council that is linked to the deaths of those other biodynamics who were deemed “too likely to actually do some good.” The one that Patrick’s been going after.

Also, “because Alison found out and forced him to.” That’s… literally the thing that he’s been afraid of. His mistake there was the same one made by assault victims who assume that the attack will come from a stranger and not someone they personally know. He made the mistake of thinking he was SAFE around Alison.

(Also, my “headcannon” is the official story here. That’s why Alison’s eating pizza with Gurwara while he helps her come to terms with the fact that she did a very very bad thing and has to deal with the consequences. The fact that she admitted that she should have shown Max empathy and not… done what you’re doing, is why I still find her a relatable and likable protagonist)

I meant they needed the witness to find/catch the killer, not put him away 😛

But you’re right about Karma biting you in the ass.

Max was a victim, and it’s been established Alison could’ve handled it better, but It hasn’t been established that Alison was completely unjustified. Even if Alison hadn’t been so quick to rely on force, Max might’ve still said no, and I’d still find what she did reasonable. Terribly unfortunate that it had to come to that, but reasonable.

And no, I don’t condone trampling individuals for the greater good in general – but I’m not talking about the general case, I’m talking about twisting Max’s arm to save the lives of thousands.

There’s a principle in disability activism, that a ‘hierarchy of disability’ is corrosive and dangerous. By a ‘hierarchy of disability’ we mean attempts by non-disabled people to say that disability A is more severe than disability B, and therefore a person with disability A is more worthy of support. We’ve learnt through bitter experience that it’s used as a tool to divide and conquer by setting one group of disabled people against another, in order not to have to make the changes needed to give us across the board equality.

Flowing out of that we have a general principle that no one’s needs get discarded, that no form of discrimination gets a bye. And that’s what this argument is about, excusing the discrimination, the assault, that Max experiences because it’s convenient.

Is it right that people aren’t getting the medical support they need to live. No. Is it right that Max is assaulted, Equally no.

Yet it’s convenient to your argument that the violence against Max be discarded.

We have medical data that is considered irrevocably tainted because of the way it was gathered. The Nazi data on hypothermia, the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment. We’ve learned the lesson of these, studied the ethics, and our laws have been rewritten to say you can’t ignore the damage you do to one person because of the benefit to others. What Alison did to Max might not be a formal research study with a review board, but it is part and parcel of the medical treatment you’re proposing for these people. And ethics, and law, say you don’t get to ignore what was done to Max.

The Nazi hypothermia research is complicated. According to http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006 it had been cited in at least 45 papers as of 1990. The paper analyses the quality of experimental design and points out significant issues, particularly in record keeping (and this is exponentially better than much of the Nazi human experimentation, which was basically sadism in a medical gown). But that doesn’t cancel out the fact that people wanted to use it, that the ethics of doing so were challenged, and that ethical standards were changed to say this kind of experiment must never happen again.

Ostensibly the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was excellent science: following a single cohort across four decades, with excellent record keeping and a structure designed to ensure compliance. Just so long as you only focus on the single experimental aim of tracing the precise manner in which syphilis kills black people. It’s when you consider that it was born in racist beliefs and should have been stopped the moment penicillin was shown to be a general cure for syphilis, not 25 years later when the truth came out, that the problem appears. And again medical ethics were revised to say ‘never again’.

You say the manner in which Feral was boosted has no bearing on the usefulness of her organs. We don’t actually know that. Feral initially went through a study to see if she was a viable donor. We don’t actually know how long that study lasted (I’m inclined to say not long enough given the rough timescales), but we do know that the medical team said that boosted Feral was okay to continue donating within a single day, and that’s just not long enough to do even basic science. We’ve had utter tragedies post donor treatment: CJD infected Human Growth Hormone being one of them, with symptoms showing up as late as 38 years afterwards, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2002489.stm

“In any case, don’t put words in my mouth. I have never argued that the harm Max suffered was not real or that it should be excluded from our analysis of the event.”

Putting words into your mouth isn’t my intention.

“My position is that while it is a real thing, it’s so enormously
outweighed by the averted suffering of thousands or millions of people that it would be reprehensible to allow those people to suffer just to avoid harming Max.”

So it can be discounted. Is that a fair summation?

The problem is we’re not discussing an abstract link. Max being hurt is the method to prevent that suffering.

” it really grinds my gears when people completely dismiss the pain of the thousands with euphemisms like “convenient” or “so Alison could get what she wanted.” Just because they’re offscreen doesn’t mean they’re not real”

Has it occurred to you I might be doing that as a literary device to contrast the way you’re writing Max’s suffering off? That they might be just as real to me?

I’ve a historical concern here. The ostensible justification for Aktion T4 was that killing institutionalised disabled kids and adults allowed the Nazi state to free up their beds for injured servicemen. Sure a couple of hundred thousand disabled people were killed, but it wasn’t as if their lives were worth anything in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who could be treated and returned to service. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you feel the same, I’m sure you find it horrifying, But when someone suggests writing off harm to one person for medical good to others, this is the example I think of, and the reason I find the canceling out of harm to one person because of good to others so threatening.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve used a “literary device” that obfuscated your actual point. ”

I’m not sure it did so much as make a point you don’t want to accept, but in either case I can live with that. I don’t just want to make my point, I want to make it in a way I find interesting.

Meanwhile there’s three paragraphs of information preceding that you left out addressing in your reply.

“The Nazi comparison is just outrageous and I’m not going to entertain it.”

Even if it’s driving my discomfort with your whole position? No the degree of harm is not remotely comparable, but both are instances in which people argued harm to a minority could be ignored because “it’s for the common good”. And the point isn’t whether it matters to you, because I’m trying to explain why it matters to me.