With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[Vaermina]

"No. Fine. I could talk about them being mass murderers who I encountered while they were enthusiastically mass murdering thousands of people. If the main concern was legality then I could point to Self Defence and Defence of Another laws both nationally and in the state. But when you get right down to it, as far as I'm concerned, once a person has a body count above a certain level, killing them is just… Common sense."

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Actually it wasn't, because you never know what kind of dead man switches bad guys like that might have in place.

 

[NightmareWarden]

Common Sense Paul has nothing on Paragon Paul doing an orbital bombardment of an inhabited planet.
The problem for people may be the scale being smaller? There's no actual objective scenario where killing people with this level of body count and the intent to continue wouldn't be considered lawful and correct.

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The mass destruction he caused to the spider cannibalism when the yellow corpsman kidnapped Paul's student? That's pretty much pulled directly from the playbooks of villains looking to fight a superhero. I'm pretty confident that he's going to do a lot of killing once Dox has determined the galactic alliance against the Reach is done recruiting, and it is time for blitzkrieg. Or the equivalent with DC resources.

I trust the Controllers with technology… with weapons like sun-eaters more than Amanda Waller. More than Common Sense!Paul. And when their perspective is skewed enough, all three misused their available power. Paul could have used his ring to speed up the prep for the military instead. The plan he chose risked his failure, and the same strategy with the support of his team and leaving the munitions to the military could have gone fine. Any troops lost to black Adam would have been worth it in the military's eyes, I reckon.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Sure, Janissary Paul is pretty normal, but even then, he's a Janissary for an evil alien empire who's married to a homicidal maniac.

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Technically, she isn't homicidal. She's never killed a human.

Missed opportunity to place the department of common sense logo at the end.

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The idea is common sense, but he already had the idea. Having the interrupt here would indicate that telling Batman was common sense.

Bolded should be "Barring".

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Thank you, corrected.

Tangseid first injected himself with psycho serum and was later brainwashed by an evil mind control artifact

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In point of fact, he was not brainwashed by an evil mind control artifact.

 

[Neruz]

Holy hell, this Paul is unsettling. I don't disagree with him, but he still feels…off.

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It is almost certainly because you aren't actually used to people behaving rationally.

Despite what most people say and think, the vast majority of the time the vast majority of people act based on their emotions and then rationalize why they did so after the fact. This leads to certain patterns of irrational behaviour that people come to think of as normal and rational.

Killing other humans is very much one of those areas; humans normally have an instinctive aversion to killing others, even when doing so is entirely reasonable and justified. A person who doesn't have that aversion and who just does the math, realizes that it is morally correct to kill in this situation and then acts on that realization thus comes across as deeply concerning, because on a fundamental level you are subconsciously aware of the fact that this person is not following the normal behavioral patterns that you have come to expect from other people.

The reasons why they aren't following these patterns are irrelevant to your subconscious: All that matters is that they aren't following the patterns, which makes them different, and different means dangerous.

 

[Duke Long]

I'm… Glad that you haven't been in this position yet, but with the empathic abilities the ring gives me, it's not that hard to see how… Vile some people are. I imagine that you'll experience something like that with telepathy eventually.

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Reminds me a bit of this scene from Dredd.

In point of fact, he was not brainwashed by an evil mind control artifact.

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Wait, so there's another fakeout? I wonder how he ends up as he did, then.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Reminds me a bit of this scene from Dredd.

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example.com? A timly reminder, sir, but I'm not sure how it relates to our current situation.

Wait, so there's another fakeout? I wonder how he ends up as he did, then.

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It wasn't a fakeout so much as low hanging fruit, and an explanation as to where his brainwashing power came from.

 

[Duke Long]

example.com? A timly reminder, sir, but I'm not sure how it relates to our current situation.

It wasn't a fakeout so much as low hanging fruit, and an explanation as to where his brainwashing power came from.

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Whoops. I pasted the BBcode and forgot to add the new URL. Should be fixed now.

Ah, I see. I think a fair few people probably assumed that it was cursed. Part of it is probably that it was (I think?) the end of that group of chapters, and personally I assumed that was going to be the last we saw of that universe, from which perspective it makes sense to assume the magic item caused it, rather than something that hasn't been introduced yet or something like him using the evil serum again or naturally changing his mindset.

 

[Someguy Somewhere]

Well, common sense Paul does show up in the time trapper crossover. So he's still active further down his timeline.

Hmm, if we're looking at alternate timeline of this moment, there's bound to be a few where Black Adam smites the whole team in an eye blink and the league deals with the fallout of using sidekicks as canaries. Wonder what those would look like further along.

 

[Wivk]

Actually it wasn't, because you never know what kind of dead man switches bad guys like that might have in place.

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The sooner you kill them, the less dead man switches they have time to set up and the less atrocities they have time to commit. If there is valid concern over their contingencies then that isn't an argument not to kill them, its an argument to torture or brainwash them for information first at best.

 

[Bolo]

After this Paul gets a reputation and the Hero's start to question his character something else needs to happen to flip the script. Where being Understanding and Nice save the day when everyone wanted a beat down.

 

[Ngamer11]

After this Paul gets a reputation and the Hero's start to question his character something else needs to happen to flip the script. Where being Understanding and Nice save the day when everyone wanted a beat down.

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Common Sense Paul doesn't really do that kind of stuff. Part of his deal is that he solves issues using his common sense. Because of this, he doesn't take as many risks as the main Paul or the Renegade, so he both avoids potential pitfalls and doesn't get unexpected and/or hard to attain benefits.

 

[ForeverShogo]

He was completely correct to do what he did. A lot of comic book villains deserve exactly this treatment. They just get to keep living by being thrown into easily escapable carboard prisons because having recognizable, repeat villains is more profitable for the comic book companies.

It's always been a stupid thing you ignore for the sake of enjoying the story.