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

Thank you, corrected.

 

I don't know why the JL is being so hesitant. I mean, last we checked basically every time traveler that the League has come across has described a different, sometimes multiple stellar empires taking over Earth and crushing it. Do they think that if they mash their eyes shut tightly enough it'll just not happen?

Nah. Anyone can muster up some rage in the heat of the moment. If he can maintain that level of frothing madness after five years in solitary then we'll talk.

 

My guess is that it's a combination of 'this is really quite different from what we're used to doing' and 'most of us don't trust Orange Lantern all that much.'

 

Yea... Someone needs to nip this particular line of thinking in the butt... Fast...

Because mind control ends nowhere good.

 

Ah, yes, of course. Far better to lock people in a cage for their entire life; a choice between "mind control or prison" is clearly completely unacceptable and horrifying.

 

And off the top of my head the only superhero in DC who it would actually be a worthwhile use of their time and capabilities dealing with a space fleet would be the Veteran, who is an actual general who has experience commanding troops.

Dealing with a space fleet would take time and effort to learn to do well, time and effort best spent by people who don't have the unusual skills or abilities to be a superhero.

 

Abin Sur agreed to the point of co-founding the Indigo Tribe oh wait...

Also is it still "mind control" if you re-write once and leave it? Same end result as psychotherapy, just cutting out the endless months spent on couches.

 

Is it still mind control to rewrite someone's brain by force into the exact pattern you want and they don't? Yes, yes it is

 

There’s also Alpha Centurion, who has his own spaceship and is working for the Alliance of the Just, if I recall the names properly. He should have at least some experience with spaceships and space fleets, I think.

 

That's why you should give them a choice of two options:

1: We will re-write your brain so that you don't do all that horrible stuff again.
2: We will quickly and painlessly kill you.

... oh, right, and because people really like this option for some unfathomable reason:

3: We will lock you in a concrete box with terrible food, constant violations of privacy, and ever-present danger from guards and other people in the box. You will stay in the box until death by old age, which will probably take a few decades assuming no one stabs you.

 

Mostly because in the third case if/when you come back later and realize that you made a big mistake you can open the box and let the person out again; 1 and 2 are a bit more final.

You know what else was quite different from what they're used to doing? Cleaning up all the dead children from Klairon's little dick move, which should still be fresh in their minds as it happened a bit over a year ago IIRC. How many global mass casualty incidents do there need to be before the Justice League starts to realize that they need to take the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure approach to some threats? Indications are that the answer for most of them is "more than one."

 

Even if they don't want a space fleet, using interdiction devices like OL set up for Tamaran solves some of the problem as it makes getting to Earth too much hassle to be worth it.

 

Ah, but that has a very simple solution: Figure out how to reverse both 1 and 2.

 

Assuming you just rewrite out the bad parts, leaving a perfectly decent person, 1 can't be a mistake.

 

depends on how long he's been a pretty little shit- depending,this could theoretically mean regressing him to infancy.....

 

In this setting, 'The Veteran' was what they nearly rebranded Captain Nazi as.

More or less what the SI who ended up in the Warhammer setting did to the crew of a Black Ark.

 

Wait, where was this?! That sounds really cool!

 

Fool's Canon 2, though I'm afraid that particular scene is only referenced. He ends up having a debate over the morality of it with a Bretonnian Questing Knight who really doesn't get it.

 

Huh, so this version of OL will get along pretty well with the Indigo Lanterns if and/or when they exist.

Or that was just a throwaway joke because this guy's father is usually credited as either the founder or the inspiration for the Indigo Corps. Kinda hard to tell with this story.

 

An Indigo Lantern has already shown up in story, though I don’t recall the name of the episode- the same one where Paragon meets the Guardians.
Given that the Lantern was apparently a villain in DC comics canon (Professor Ub’x or something similar), I believe the Indigo Tribe’s brainwashing-criminal MO is evident in WtR continuity too.

 

Something I feel a number of people are forgetting...

Mind control always ends up broken.

 

Then you're using some shitty mind control, and you need to improve it or find a new technique.

That, or the metaphysics of your universe are terrible and you should probably go find a new one. Looking at you, DC.

 

Experience with space ships, yes, but unless Zoat changed things (which is certainly his prerogative), I doubt they gave him much experience with waging war in outer space.

You see, Alpha Centurion is an unwitting quisling for an alien invasion, ala Blue Beetle.

The difference is that instead of an unwitting sleeper agent, he's a PR move for cultural assimilation. "See how cool we are? We gave you a superhero! Now be good little barbarians and join our glorious Space Roman Empire," the "or else" unsaid, because if the carrot doesn't work they intend to beat humanity into submission with the stick.

Fortunately the alien they left on Earth to prepare for the invasion went native, he decided that humans deserve better than conquest by an empire that was a corrupt shadow of what it used to be.

The comics, it has a weird set up, perhaps the Green Lanterns have a wary eye on them too, because Alpha Centurion in the comics was given tech that allows him to go toe to toe with Superman. They did not give Alpha Centurion their good tech, so the non expendable schmucks have power armor that would make them more powerful than Superman. Yet they expand by preying upon primitive worlds.

When you can make your grunts more powerful than Superman, you shouldn't have to rely on subterfuge to deal with a planet in which bows and arrows is state of the art technology.

 

To be perfectly honest, after they re-write your brain, they've already killed you.

You're not you any longer...just a meat puppet walking around to someone else's programing.

 

Well... eh. Kinda, maybe, maybe not.

First, how much did they actually change? There's gotta be a threshold somewhere, a amount of change beyond which you can be considered a new person. I mean, you wouldn't consider someone a completely different person if a dastardly villain altered your mind so that you no longer like yogurt, would you?

For the second part, in a figurative sense, kinda yeah. Assuming it's not a continuous sort of mind control, you aren't being actively controlled, but you have had your mind altered to something by someone else. I mean, hopefully with the simple goal of removing whatever bit made you do that horrible thing, with a minimum of other changes and done in a publicly-verifiable manner, but still, it's reprogramming. It's definitely a massive violation of personal autonomy, privacy, etc etc.

But the thing is, at that point you're already more-or-less willing to kill the person. At least, you're willing to imprison them, and how is life imprisonment meaningfully better than death, aside from the fact that it's technically reversible. Forget about 'quality' of life, it's basically decades of borderline torture. And you can't reverse time, so congrats, you proved their innocence 50 years later... well, guess you'll just have to live without those 50 years.

Mind reading-and-editing techniques would both allow you to harm someone the least while also achieving the goal of rehabilitation/removal of threat to society. If you kill them, they die, because people die if they're killed. If you put them in prison, they die a long while later and they're tortured for the entire duration, so it's even worse than dying. But mind-control would plausibly allow you to harm them less than outright death, because some of them is still there afterwards. And if they disagree, and think that it would be worse than death to have a goody-two-shoes copy of them running around... well, that's why you give them the choice of death instead.

And the very same techniques you use to read-and-change their mind would also let you determine if they're really guilty, or narrow down the possibility of their innocence to "someone kidnapped them and altered their mind to look exactly like a crazy axe murderer!"

 

He might have wanted to experiment. After all, there are lots and lots of people who he's going to kill, such as the Reach - if he can reliably mind control people into being perfect Orange Lanterns then he can kill his enemies with his enemies. Efficiency!

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Regarding the Justice League's hesitancy to accept a fleet of warships, it's probably because they're trying really hard to not conquer the world. As is, they can be stopped if they try it. If they control the orbitals with a space fleet of warships then it's a hopeless cause to oppose them.

 

Mind controlled prisoners are useful to you. Caged prisoners are not. This creates a much bigger incentive to abuse the mind control process than the imprisonment process.

 

So the solution to potential abuse of the system is to abuse the people in the system instead?

Why not just take the people who abuse the system, and put them in the torture-box, and keep using the better system for everyone else?

 

I have a question. Weren't the Dolman gates, supposed to have difficulty reaching past the orbit of the moon? How did Paul set up one that could reach Alter Clemetia to pull souls through for Hades to judge?

 

If you can infallibly get rid of people who abuse the system, a lot of unrealistic things become realistic (for instance, the best form of government may be a dictator with unlimited power). If you are not infallible, you should create a system which people would be less likely to abuse. One way to do that is to reduce the incentive for abuse, and one way to do that is to not let people profit from prisoners.