I’m not blaming him for what Allison did to him. That is on Allison.

I’m blaming him for not being willing to lift a finger to save countless people.
I was blaming him for it before he was assaulted, and him being assaulted doesn’t change my position on that.

The problem seemed to be that I somehow “blamed the victim”, before he even was a victim.

Now it’s that my position won’t change… when he becomes a victim?
Or maybe you’re thinking of some other time when I should change my mind?

I’m not going to go back to discussing the pre-assault situation: we have pages and pages of that already.
And I’ve already given my position on assault.

Even if you don’t agree that he *should* feel any guilt, I think that the reaction of many of us here shows that it’s not unconceivable, hence my first post.

Of course, Al’s actual request was omitted from the strip.

Gah… gonna have to copy/paste this one since multiple people made this point for me to provide the counterpoint:

Alison didn’t care about those other people. She only cared about Feral. The “millions of lives” were a convenient rationalization; she had already established she would unhesitantly condemn them all to death if it meant getting Feral off the table. There’s words, and there’s actions – and I’ve learned to trust actions over words.

A more detailed and sourced argument… that would be the second half of chapter three. Starting with page 38 (where Patrick explains what’s happening), on to page 42 (where Alison begins to openly state how much she wants Feral to NOT go through with it, even as she agonizes over the fact that she does not have the right to stop Feral from saving so many lives), then on to page 54 where she tells Feral flat out, “I don’t think you should go through with this plan, Feral.” And then on to page 57, “Feral… I’m just gonna come out and say it. I don’t think what you’re doing is right.”

So yes, I’d say that counters page 83 of the current chapter, where Max begins to open up about his own pain. How he was so miserable that he jumped off the roof in a desperate attempt to attain the power of flight in order to escape his life. And then, when he did develop a power, he was encouraged to feel as if he were a failure for having the “permanent buff other” power – and that’s something a kid only feels when their parents tell them, “you’re not able to take center stage and take everything for yourself, so you’re a loser.” A sign of abuse at least as obvious as bruises. Then, after asking Alison if she knows what it’s like to be unsatisfied with her powerset, the same person who had spent literally the bulk of the comic up to this point lamenting her inability to solve the real problems with super strength then snidely said, “no.” Then in page 84 of this current chapter she twists the attempt to share his feelings, his pain, his unhappiness, into a personal attack on herself. At that point he became enraged and wanted her gone.

He had every right to want her gone. She continued to mock him and dismiss his feelings and unhappiness as irrelevant, while demanding he show empathy for others. Then page 85 comes and he points out the colossal risks involved. Then, after her attempts to convince him that she’d protect him, he says no, and adds that EVEN IF he wanted to, he MIGHT still say no just to be spiteful. (I.e. that it wasn’t the reason, but he truly wanted nothing to do with her at that point)

Cue the violent assault and Alison speaking to him the way a rapist speaks to their victim, “what’s going to happen is this. You’re going to do the following things that I want you to. If you don’t, I will murder you.” (and yes, I am aware that some people get upset with the rape analogy. That’s because it’s TOO apt, too accurate, and it makes it too difficult to justify her actions)

I would also bring up, from this particular chapter, pages 120 (where Alison acknowledges and admits that she failed to show him the empathy she demanded he extend to someone else), page 121 (where she references the thousands of lives Feral was saving as an afterthought before focusing entirely on Feral as her attempts to rationalize and justify her misdeeds fall away upon self examination), and page 122 (where she recognizes that the three things that would have been most likely to convince Max were understanding, compassion, and trust, and that she has a bad habit of being too quick to resort to violence). And of course page 123 (where she admits that if Max were to retaliate in any way, then she would have a very hard time saying he was in the wrong; and that she has to try to compensate him even though it feels vulgar and monstrous – but she still has to try to make things right).

Is that sufficiently detailed and sourced?

Actually, it did confirm exactly what her opinion regarding the fate of those people was. She knew she had to save them – as a precondition of saving Feral. Saving them was the only way to save Feral.

The point there isn’t that she was completely heartless towards them (though she was certainly prepared to try to stop Feral from saving them, which is a fairly large indicator). The big point is that her demanding that he risk his life and that of anyone close to him (literally, given what would happen the moment anyone found out that someone with that kind of power was available for kidnapping and coercion… y’know, as Alison did) is massively hypocritical. She wasn’t honest with him. Again: exactly as she finds herself admitting in pages 121 and 122 of this chapter, when her attempts to justify her actions as being on behalf of thousands becomes a bitter acknowledgement that she assaulted one person to help one other person, when it was unnecessary and counterproductive.

As for the rape analogy, it’s quite accurate. Is it a rhetorical trick? Hell yes. That’s why I’m using it – because the deliberate use of hyperbole makes it harder to dismiss Max and what was done to him. Hyperbole in the hopes of cracking through the shell of rationalization and get a few people to think, “hey… even if Max is a wealthy white heterosexual male, he’s still a person. Just because he’s not a minority, not female, not transgendered, and not impoverished, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to terrorize him as a cheap shortcut to get around treating him as a person.”

(And before you go accusing me of being a red cap wearing Deplorable for suggesting a rich white male could be a victim, a reminder: I voted for Johnson because I couldn’t vote for Stein, and the one I really wanted to vote for was Sanders. I’ve regularly mocked conservatives wanting to shove their retconned version of the bible down everyone’s throat on disqus as well as elsewhere, and I’ve made plenty of observations about how Ayn Rand was a hypocritical moron whose philosophy was based on her adolescent fangirl crush on a semiliterate child murderer on death row. I’m simply pointing out that bigotry goes both ways – and the attempts to depict Max as needing to apologize for… pretty much anything aside from quoting Objectivist idiocy during a date, ultimately boils down to simple prejudice)

Everyone has precisely one motive… right. As if I’m the one who insisted that Max said no to Alison because of petty and childish spite.

Second, this “child of androids” has long observed that people often have a disconnect between their words and their actions. And that’s why I say that ALISON DID NOT CARE ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE. It doesn’t matter that she said she felt bad for them. She was prepared to condemn them to death herself, for the sake of her friend. At that point she’s prepared to say “I really feel bad about killing all those people…” as if that somehow makes it better for those people and their loved ones.

If you lived in a tribal village and you decided to throw someone to a pack of hungry wolves in order to escape, you don’t get to express delight that they survived and made it back safely, or express outrage that someone else isn’t ripping off their clothes to bandage the wounds of the villager you threw to the wolves. You lost your right to use them for the sake of moral posturing.

(that, btw, would be why I was actually rather pleased that Clinton did not win – she has a very, very long record of saying one thing and doing another. Claiming to support the rights of minorities while victimizing them for her own profit and that of her corporate supporters. At least Trump never called adolescent black americans “super predators.” Both are detestable, but at least the media is willing to report on Trump as such)

Third, I’m not the one resorting to cheap personal attacks in lieu of civilized debate. I’d like to think that such behavior is beneath you.

(And honestly? I will admit that I’ve never been raped. No… I just live with a rape survivor. Only she doesn’t like to be called a “survivor,” because she doesn’t want to be relegated into the tiny little box marked “victim.” If you really want to establish that the analogy is inaccurate, prove it – with a well reasoned argument. And I say that as someone who can provide one for you, while providing an even more apt-but less deliberately provocative – exampe in its place)

“ALISON DID NOT CARE ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE”

…There’s actually just evidence you can look at that goes against this:

“The truth is, you would be okay with Feral living in pain forever, if you thought it would make a bit of difference. But you know it won’t.”

https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-3/page-43-2/

Feral, normally, doing her thing, wouldn’t fulfill literally all of the organ-scarcity in the planet. Because Alison doesn’t do well with the “it makes a difference to this one” mentality, she wanted to dissuade her. It wasn’t “really a change”.

Now…if she COULD fulfill the whole planet’s needs for organs…

You say that she did it to save Feral, and the other people don’t matter. I… think the opposite. I think that if supercharging Feral put her at maximum capacity and that meant fulfilling all of the planet’s needs for organs, and she still needed to be in surgery 24/7, Al would have done exactly the same thing. Her friend would still be getting tortured, but also there is a fundamental change in healthcare and organ scarcity in the world.

Al seems to measure positive change in how much the system changes. Not how much one person or another is better or worse off.

Note: I’m not actually providing a moral value to her actions, just trying to provide greater insight into her psychology.

“So I’m not saying she couldn’t have felt bad about them (and you’re right, she certainly did feel bad about them).”

I’m not actually talking about her feeling bad though. I’m talking about whether she thought the change was “worth it” or not. You say that it becomes increasingly clear that she was doing it for Feral’s sake, but I think that was just a really really happy side-effect. Did she actually have a way of knowing that supercharging Feral would meet the global demand for organs so easily? Or would it have been more reasonable to think that supercharging Feral would make her action go from “some nice thing somebody does that helped a bunch of people” to “fundamentally changing how the world currently works”?

For an analogy, let’s compare the blood-donor man(James Harrison) at the top of the comment section to Alexander Fleming (the penicillin guy). James Harrison is Feral. Alexander Fleming is Max. Harrison hasn’t actually changed anything about healthcare, or anything about the disease, or the like. The system is the same. He’s just feeding resources into it. Alexander Fleming changed /what kind of disease could kill a person and how easily/. He changed what the system was.

“But… she was prepared to throw them to the wolves.”

Because it “wouldn’t make a difference” in her view. I think Alison would be fine with James Harrison not-donating-blood, because what’s a few thousand or even hundred-thousand in the grand scheme of things? I mean, it would be BETTER if he donated, but it would be better if a few hundred thousand more people donated their super-normal blood too.

But… this isn’t a few hundred thousand, maybe. This is millions. This is tens of millions. Remember, Feral also gives blood, and tissue donation is probably worked in too. If Feral was meeting the world’s required supply of organs, that’s not “saving some people”. That’s “wiping off organ scarcity as a cause of death for the planet”. It’s fundamentally changing /the system/, which is that thing Al seems to be obsessed with.

Hence why Valkyrie isn’t just her randomly going to superpowered people and suggesting they do this, it’s a more systematic thing. She wants to wipe off “beaten by abusive partner to death” as a cause of death for abuse victims.

Re: Her right to judge Max, personally I’m not in a team here. I think they were both wrong. Max as an asshole(the smaller the cost of doing a thing is to you, and the greater the benefit, the more of an asshole you are for not doing it. It’s why I donate blood, and it’s why I have Tab For A Cause), and Al was kind of hypocritical (I mean, she told Pintsize to do science, but she doesn’t actually. All the research that she’s involved with is about her powers, she’s not working at some physics facility that could develop supermaterials or something. The kind of thing that “changes the system” so to speak. And she GOT RID OF A FUCKTON OF MONEY. Do you know how much lifesaving medicine could have been made with that kind of money? Probably several African countries’ needs’ worth, if you pick the right problem to solve with it!).

“(Not to mention that it became increasingly evident that she wanted Max to save FERAL, not those people who were, in fact, just an abstract concept to her. “Innocent people” as an abstract concept rather than faces and lives)”

…not to me, honestly. It seemed to me that it was just a happy consequence. I mean, a REALLY HAPPY consequence, but not the main goal of the situation. The main goal of the situation was the countless, countless lives. But that might be both of us projecting. I would have been focused on those, you seem to have a more individualistic view and may have been focused on the person with a face. Having spent a lot of time being a person without a face, I find numbers more persuasive than sad stories and names.

I love the Dresden Files!…Are you talking about Marcone?

Let’s take your example of Rogue. Yes, Rogue would find small comfort in basically getting murdered for the sake of other people. But… what about Some Anonymous Person who would live if that happened, but isn’t going to because Rogue didn’t want to get sacrificed? What about that person’s family, if they’re a family of mutants, or maybe that person’s group of mutant friends? All of them with their own stories, all of them with their own needs, all of them with their own lives and beliefs and their own loves and hatreds and desires. How would they feel for essentially being “sacrificed” themselves for the sake of this girl who didn’t want to do what would save them?

Or, here is a better example, Dresden Files! Remember why the fucking war started? I mean, there are a multiplicity of reasons, but the inciting incident was that Harry wouldn’t let Bianca(? It’s been a while) enslave his then-girlfriend as a half-vampire(wow that series sounds weird when I describe it). Instead, he basically said fuckit and attacked the shit out of the place, killing baddies and kickstarting a war responsible for basically DECIMATING THE COUNCIL by the time Dead Beat rolls around. How many fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents, friends, lovers were killed because this asshole thought his girlfriend mattered more than they did? How many lives and jobs and pet-projects and books-I-mean-to-read got destroyed? How many people had their entire family, their entire connection to the world destroyed(lots of Wardens are old people without real families. See: Luccio for an example)?

And hey, he basically burnt that place down. What about any bystanders who got killed in the process? Maybe somebody was locked in a broom-closet. Was their life not as valuable as Susan’s?

But you know… Susan, Susan is worth those thousands of lives. Susan’s cool.

I think there’s a difference between culpability and being another link in the chain of causality.

If you sell me a gun, and I use it to kill a person… you didn’t kill that person. I did. But you gave me power to do so that I otherwise wouldn’t have had (and let’s just say the person was perpetually out of arm-length to avoid that whole argument about “well you could have killed them some other way”. They’re in a cell, backed against the wall and my arms aren’t long enough). If you had not given me the gun, the person would be alive. That doesn’t make you a murderer, but honestly the question of culpability kind of bores me. After all, I think prisoners should be rehabilitated and put in nice places like those in Norway, independently of the fact that I may personally think THAT PERSON IS AWFUL AND DESERVES TO BE PUNISHED. It’s not about what feels right, it’s about what will lead to the best outcome. Not giving me the gun would have made for a better outcome.

Therefore… no, I can’t put it all on Harry. Harry didn’t kill a bunch of people in South America. Harry didn’t destroy huge chunks of the Council. It’s not Harry’s fault. But… he was a link in the chain of causality. Same with Susan, who could have just not-gone-there, same with Bianca, same with lots of people, all of whose actions had to align for that specific situation to arise.

You talk about how we CAN’T FORGET THE PEOPLE WITH A FACE because hey, that way lies dehumanization and genocide and all that. You’re right!

But…can we forget the people without a face? By that I mean the people who are “statistics”. The people whose lives get ruined because of collateral damage, the people whose lives got saved when Max used his power.

You bring up that they’re but an abstraction… let’s try to mend that. Imagine… Jane.

Jane has a debilitating congenital heart disease. She likes drawing, and she wants to be an animator one day. The doctors have given her until age 18 or 19 to live, and she’s 16 now, so she spends a lot of time practising to get really good really fast. She likes Oreos and she’s a fan of Nintendo and Disney. She spends months at a time in a hospital, and so she’s not really enrolled in school. Her mom has a hard time paying the bills, and their insurance isn’t great, so sometimes she works extra shifts and doesn’t get to see her daughter. It breaks her heart, but between seeing her daughter and having her survive for as long as she can, it’s a no-brainer. Her dad… isn’t in the picture.

Still, she doesn’t need the heart NOW. She’s in a long waiting list, she has another year or two before it becomes particularly urgent. Hence why she’s not of too-high a priority for the doctors. That said, her mom has crunched the numbers, and given how long it takes to get a heart and how many people are in front of her on the line… it doesn’t look like the wait will only be one or two years. It looks like longer. If that’s the case, well… she’ll die before she gets one.

And then Alison goes to Max’s place, and she tells him hey, asshole, boost my friend to save /countless countless lives/. And he says no.

He’s not saying no “to Alison, the person who berated him”. He’s saying no to Jane. Somebody whose life would be far better if she had a heart. If organ-scarcity wasn’t a problem. He’s deciding, in that moment, that Jane can die for all he cares, because hey… Alison wasn’t polite enough. And that somebody asks him nicely matters more than the life of Jane.

The thing is… The “pixelated image of the people” contains Jane. And it contains her in an obvious manner (her case isn’t exactly rare for people who need organs. The whole thing is about organs. “Countless countless lives” are actually people and not a talking point). Saying “well, they don’t know about Jane” when there’s probably a FEW HUNDRED PEOPLE IN SUCH A POSITION among the “countless countless lives”… Seems disingenuous to me. Jane is assumed when you bring up people with organ problems. Lots of peoplee with wildly different circumstances are assumed. “The people” are not an abstract idea. They’re all of those individuals put together, all of them with stories. The people who fight passionately and say Al was right in this comment section do it because they’re thinking of Jane, and John, and Maria and Juan and Belle and Jaques and so on. All of them with individual stories. All of them potentially dead if Max refuses and Alison respects it.

It’s like saying “hey, I just got a lot of money for no reason. I could donate it to charity in Zambia to save several thousand people, but the person who came to tell me about that was a dick, so no.” You KNOW what donating to Zambia means. There are LOTS OF INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE THERE. Denying the money does not affect the dick who brought it up that much. It affects the Zambians who will die. You are not saying no to the dick. You’re saying no to them.

Not knowing them personally is… Dismissing the people without faces. Having been some faceless stranger, I can tell you it’s not pleasant to have somebody somewhere decide you’re not worth helping because they don’t know you as more than a number. If everyone really has a face like you say, why is Jane a non-entity?

Is the world history filled with assholes who used the “greater good” to justify terribleness? Yes! I mean, STALIN is there! Hitler is there! Fidel Castro is there!

But you know who also puts a lot of effort towards the greater good? Bill Gates. People who donate their kidneys to strangers. Doctors without borders. You know who else does that? Any government that taxes people. Any government that puts people in jail for the protection of the populace. Any government that has community service as a punishment.

(Also yes. Harry does not have the BLAME. I have agreed with this. But he was a link in the causal reaction, and if not for him shit would have gone differently. He could have done things differently and thousands would have lived who now are dead. Still, like I said, if you sell me the gun and I kill the person… I still killed the person. The vampires still killed the people. The blame rests with them.)

Gah… gonna have to copy/paste this one since multiple people made this point for me to provide the counterpoint:

Alison didn’t care about those other people. She only cared about Feral. The “millions of lives” were a convenient rationalization; she had already established she would unhesitantly condemn them all to death if it meant getting Feral off the table. There’s words, and there’s actions – and I’ve learned to trust actions over words.

(Also, not needing to copy/paste this part to the others, but… Max did not brag, Max did not act out of petty spite, claiming that he’s an adult version of Montana Max from “Tiny Toons” is a false narrative. Alison was the selfish and spiteful one, and the reason why she is attempting to provide restitution in this page is because she fully admitted that on multiple previous pages. To insist that Max is a two dimensional caricature of a cliched cartoon villain is to say that this comic is so poorly written that it would have such characters in it, and I disagree on that)

My rationale would be page 85 of this chapter. Juleslt challenged me to provide a detailed and sourced argument earlier, so it’s still pretty fresh to me:

“And even if I wanted to do it, I might still say no, just to you.”

That’s pretty straightforward. He’s saying that even if he did want to, even if he weren’t afraid of the repercussions, he was specifically saying no to the person who was such a colossal jerk about “asking.” He might very well have said “yes” to someone else, someone who was not Alison, someone who was not rude, insulting, and dismissive of his unhappiness, fears, and the signs of emotional abuse. Or as you put it, his “freakin’ fee-fees.” No one has a right to demand a favor from someone they can’t even be bothered to pretend to respect.

As for his “dehumanization” of “his” hispanic workforce… they weren’t his. They were contracted by one of his father’s aids. Max did not have the right to tell them to take the day off; they could have been fired for listening to him. Just as Alison did not have the right to tell him to tell them that, when she had no idea of the specifics of the situation – were they working late for any particular reason, because something had to be done late that night? How well compensated were they?

Again, being the victim of assault does not automatically make everything a person has ever done okay. Max is not innocent. In case I need to be clear, not being innocent is also not a good reason to be assaulted; Al is also not innocent. But claiming that Max is for some reason a completely innocent soul is a blind view to take.

Part of the problem is that we never saw the part where she lays out her case to him. She went to his place, then we cut to her explanation being finished. We know she made the facts of the case known to him, but we don’t know if she included any sort of additional argument whatsoever. That ambiguity has, I think, fueled the debate considerably, since everyone puts their own spin on it–Ali’s supporters assume she included the best arguments; her detractors tend to assume that she insulted him throughout, either deliberately or in casual dismissal.

So I’m going to go with what we know for certain. He knows the bare-bones facts of the case: that Feral is underoing extreme torment to benefit others; that her ability to provide that benefit would be enhanced, and her own torment reduced, by his intervention; that Feral herself is someone Ali cares about.

Knowing all three of those things, he chooses to refuse her request, and makes it quite clear he’s not interested in further appeal. I don’t consider her decision to force him justified by this–but I also think that focusing on the legality of her actions is, in itself, an error. She had a fully legal route of coercion that could have been even more devastating to him–exposure, of multiple misdeeds by his parents as well as his true identity. That threat probably would have had him completely willing to go to the hospital, and even left him under her thumb at least as well as the threat of further physical coercion. So when you stress the fact that she committed assault, you’re actually distracting from the core issue of whether or not coercion of someone in such circumstances is ever justified.

Of course, I also regard him as a completely selfish shithead for choosing to not act; his reasons for inaction do not impress me. But there’s a sharp line between that and believing he deserved what happened to him.

Gah… I’m needing to copy/paste this one (along with minor editing to get past the spam filters) since multiple people made this point for me to provide the counterpoint:

Alison didn’t care about those other people. She only cared about Feral. The “millions of lives” were a convenient rationalization; she had already established she would unhesitantly condemn them all to death if it meant getting Feral off the table. There’s words, and there’s actions – and I’ve learned to trust actions over words.

Please scroll up to my reply to juleslt, starting with “A more detailed and sourced argument…”

I never said that what Ali did was the Worst Thing Ever. There are many characters in the story who have done considerably worse things – such as Feral herself, who was a murderous vigilante now repenting for her past. Cleaver the mass murdering goon with the razor sharp claws and a heart filled with rage and misery. Moonshadow the superheroine turned serial killer who justifies her thrill killing with a combination of selecting “acceptable targets” with truth serums (inadmissible in legal trials because they DON’T WORK) and openly admitting that she’s not afraid to kill an innocent victim or two by mistake. And of course Alison’s ex-boyfriend Patrick, the former supervillain who caused the deaths of thousands, and is STILL up to nefarious activities (he’s just more subtle about it).

I’m simply pointing out that what Ali did was wrong. Flat out wrong. And that the reason why she’s now a penitent hero seeking redemption and not a villain protagonist is that she recognizes it as well.

He doesn’t *have* to lift a finger. He isn’t obligated to do anything at all. It’s HIS body and HIS powers. I could have donated to African kids instead of getting a red bull at lunch today, does that make me a horrible person?

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/871:_Charity

So the basic human right to make your own decisions about your own body is just one ethical system of many. Good to know.

Sounds like some shit ethical systems then, I mean if its ok to ignore a persons rights for convenience sake then may as well bring back slavery. Probably would be a great economic boost. Just imagine how many lives could be saved.

What does the range of human values matter? Some opinions and beliefs are wrong no matter how many people may believe them.

The same way you convince anyone of anything, calling them names on the internet and making angry tweets.

That’s a very interesting site. I’ve done quite a few of the tests on the site and have found them illuminating.

Which brings us back to:
That’s your ethics, which you are entitled to.
Just as the rest of us are entitled our different ethical systems, and the ethical judgements that ensue.

You need to reverse two and three, because three implies taxation to fund it (plus society tends to come to a crashing halt without, say, roads to get goods to market, garbage collection, schools to train the people to keep society running, and so on)

Collective protection is the primary aim of a society. Flowing out of that you need infrastructure: in the earliest days perhaps just a torch to wave at a wolf, or pointy sticks to wave at the other guys intent on taking your clan’s stuff away from you, etc. But as society becomes more complex you start getting stuff that one man or woman can’t provide. Initially defensive fortifications (and religious stuff), but as your society grows the needs become more abstract – sewers, roads, schools, hospitals, and the direct benefit to an individual in funding them in advance becomes less apparent, particularly as you develop beyond the single community. Hence taxation, whether in labour or in kind.

I think part of your secondary aim of protection of property I see as falling under the primary aim of collective protection, but society always implies at least a degree of goods/labour held in common in order to carry out the primary aim or produce the infrastructure that supports the primary aim (‘it’s your turn to wave the torch at the wolf’, ‘Cover my back or we’re both dead’, ‘If we don’t finish the stockade the fvlk clan’ll slaughter us’, ‘everyone needs to make 10 arrows or a spear so we have plenty to hold them off the stockade’). So protection of property I see as secondary to infrastructure, because the primary aim already expects you to sacrifice your labour, as does the need for defensive infrastructure that flows out of it.

Interesting, but seems very weak on transportation infrastructure and food security.

I’m not sure they do conflict, rather they interact as a form of commerce. (Oh, god, I’ve invented capitalism as a justification for commun(al)ism).

To do what I want I need safety (both individually and for any family).
I can provide a certain amount of that myself, but even in a primitive culture I can’t really do it all individually – who covers my back in a fight, who waves the torch at the wolf when I’m too tired or sick to do it myself.
Other people will do that, but they expect the same from me.
So an interchange of personal labour for mutual benefit.
As society becomes more complex, the needs and benefits become more complex and infrastructure dependent, and personal labour gives way to payment in kind, and ultimately taxation.

You could always try to take unfair advantage, but that then runs into the general principle that my rights stop when they interfere with yours, and vice versa.

My point is that it is a well known short story by a well known author that you described with almost perfect detail. It took me Seconds to find the source.

You did get that we were having a discussion about whether your body could be used for another’s medical benefit, right?

It’s one of the (relatively few areas) where there’s a biological rather than social difference between the sexes, y’know? If a baby is going to be born, there’s a social interest in insuring that the child has sufficient support. (Different countries handle this differently – some make it much easier, for instance, to simply not name a father, which takes a lot of the pressure out of the paternity situation.) I think there’s a lot to criticize in many of the solutions, but we’re talking about the situation of pregnancy, which is something men don’t have to deal with and is kind of a big deal.

Max was certainly forced to use his body in way he didn’t consent to. And it was, as it happens, to both Feral’s medical benefit (she gets to have a life and only has to spend 10 hours a week in dreadful pain!) and that of organ recipients everywhere. It wasn’t an invasive procedure on him in anyway, which probably means the medical ethicists would have to go off an spend a few years wangling about it. It was a medical intervention, in any case. Autonomy is pretty strongly held by in the west, at least.

You’re forgetting the part where she strangled Daniel/Cleaver half to death AFTER she defeated him and he was no longer a threat to her.

And the part where she admits that DBRD registration means losing some civil rights, but then goes on to say that she thinks that’s okay.

First of all wrapping something around someone’s neck and pulling it tight is more likely to kill someone than simply knock them out, just ask Eric Garner. And contrary to what television may have taught you, getting knocked/strangled into unconsciousness is super fucking dangerous.

We have not been shown any evidence that the DBRD is concerned about public safety. Case in point: they let Furnace zoom around burning people alive. Also I fail to see what quizzing Alison about her reproductive status has to do with public safety. And Al specifically said that most of the biodynamics she knows (I.E. fellow former superheroes) support it. The only innate we’ve been introduced to (who was forcibly outed by mandatory registration) certainly hasn’t been helped by the DBRD.