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

"Species" isn't currently a field on the immigration forms. It should be possible to do this without committing fraud.

 

Yeah, but race and country of origin are on the forms. You can’t be “white” or “black”, etc... if you are not “human”

 

Well, there would be an interesting question. Living in a dangerous shithole and trying to leave makes you a refugee. But being unjustly punished by an inhumane state would instead require a claim for political asylum. Those processes are, IIUC, not all that similar. So, which is Hell?

 

You could make an arguement for either, but I'd avoid the political asylum request if you have a religious judge, as you'd have to convince him that punishment in hell is unjust.

 

Which was the aftermath of getting citizens like Red Tornado legal rights.

Equality for all M'dear.

 

The problem is sort of rooted in the fact that the law (by design) assumes everyone is equal in essence, and only differ in the actions they take. That's all well and good for humans, because outside of things like brain injury or such, that's pretty much true.

The problem arises when you start to consider things like, for instance, demons. Who are (literally) made of evil, clearly and demonstrably, and for whom being a remotely normal-and-not-malicious person is the exception. The justice system isn't prepared to handle a situation where that's true; it's designed to avoid that assumption because its usually made erroneously.

 

Perhaps. But I wouldn't ascribe a perhaps poorly worded law designed to give people what they deserve, to be recognized as you know, people, as a fit of "Stupidity" on OL's part.

Sometimes you just have to take the bad with the good.

 

Untrue. They're self-identified, not based on any specific phenotype or genotype. And there's an "other" field.

 

He pushed for the Law to provide rights to AIs like Red Tornado and Firebrand. Said law also covers any other intelligent species, such as Tameranians and other aliens, mythological beings (like that Dryad friend of Paul's), and unfortunately, Demons (or Angels)

 

Except if you build your laws in such a way that certain groups are allowed to be discriminated against, how do you decide what groups get included in that category? What rules do you define to determine when prejudice is and isn't okay?

The only consistent answer is that you draw the line at "never judge based on racial origins." Judge each individual by their own behavior. You can possibly use past social relationships as evidence to inform that judgment, or at least as a foundation for further investigation. But we wouldn't judge someone for going to grade school with Ted Kaczynski, so that can't be the sole reason for making the call.

 

Not worth it after all.

 

It's a... very complex problem. Hmm... I think you're right, but for different reasons.

In a more ideal world, race would just be a word, a origin, a datum. The biggest problem is that humans have some ass-backward biases originating from prehistory/our ancestors, and that results in people believing ridiculous things about races without a spec of evidence to justify it. If this wasn't the case, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to consider racial origin any more than, say, political group affiliation or social relationships. Granted, it would probably be less significant than either of these, because race actually doesn't mean much of anything in itself; heck, the biggest differences originate clearly not in actual genetic differences, but in the way that different races treat eachother, which is itself a symptom of the stupid tribal biases... but without that it would still be a usable datum.

But if that was the situation, there's still the question of: datum for what? As evidence of a crime committed? Race is useless for that, as are social relations, culture, affiliations, etc etc. You need clear evidence of criminal activites, not a statistic bordering on noise. It might be relevant for something along the lines of... "computational evidence"; something like how Amazon can take your facebook page and a couple of website visits, and predict what you want to buy with startling accuracy... except applied to the justice system. That might be a thing eventually, but in that situation race would be just a tiny bit of info, and could and would probably be inferred from the rest of the data anyway, so its a moot point.

But that's for crimes committed. A person applying for citizenship can't be guilty of any crimes, unless your nation is rather stretching the definition of "law". Not a citizen, not subject to whatever rules you made for your citizens. So then what is being judged here?


Likelyhood to commit a crime after becoming a citizen? Okay, but that sounds like a bit of a roundabout way to punish people who haven't done anything, and we're sort of assuming you shouldn't do that.

Maybe we're trying to gauge the compatibility of someone, and be selective on that basis? That sounds more reasonable, any group can grant/deny membership of itself for whatever reason after all, be it a baking club or a nation, and however just or unjust a reason. So selectively granting citizenship to people who would be compatible with the country at large, and including, among other things, race (or more importantly, languages spoken, personality traits, political affiliations, etc) in that decision, would be reasonable...

Except the U.S. doesn't go for that. It literally grants citizenship to anyone born on their land, with no regards to compatibility. I'm not intimately familiar with the immigration process, but my understand is it basically asks "can you speak english, and are you a member of any of the designated enemy tribes of the country?", which is... not exactly checking for compatibility, certainly not to the degree where you'd even care about race.



So, in conclusion, I've reconsidered: I agree with you. Race has no reason to be included in citizenship checks. The fact that demons can use it to sneak into the country and murder, rape, and pillage should be be plenty of incentive for Earth-16's U.S. to:

A: Get over the damn tribal bias already.
B: Get their shit together, figure out what they're trying to be, and rework their citizenship system (along with everything else) into one that makes sense for that.
B: Having done A and B, realize that race means nothing for humans, a little bit for aliens, and a whole fucking lot for supernatural entities, and start grading people accordingly on the compatibility tests.

 

This makes the assumption that demons, by virtue of being demons, are inherently evil and are 100% guaranteed to commit crimes by nature of their birth instead of the circumstances of their upbringing. It's the nature-vs-nurture debate again, but this time racism gets the excuse that there really IS a difference this time, gosh darn it!

Problem is, we already have accounts of demonic asylum-seekers that want nothing more than to get on with their lives separately from the goings-on in Hell. Plural. More than one.

And again: Even if we assume that demons are irredeemably bad, what about the next extradimensional species that comes up? The first few dozen we see are all unrepentant violent criminals, and then a refugee comes in seeking to join our society. Turns out there's a war on, and ONE country over there is aggressive, while the other major country opposes that. There's racial tensions where they came from; they're not one big monoculture any more than humans are.

But how would we KNOW that? How could we meaningfully judge the newcomer based on what turns out to not be a majority stance?

I guess Scott Free should be denied citizenship because all of the other New Gods that came to Earth are evil. They're the same class of supernatural being, after all.

 

Mr Zoat, I just noticed that DC spells Starfire's species as Tamaranean, not Tamaranian as you have done. Will that be edited, or will how you spell it just be how it is for the whole story?

 

Because the pen-and-paper test we're imagining in this situation is a compromise for a less-bad situation than having literal demons running around the country. The effective assumption that all demons is bad is not necessarily correct, but its close enough to correct (because they're literal demons) that its justified discriminating against them because the alternative is way worse than discrimination. I mean, a entire city ended up in Hell for a significant period of time, that's not a good thing, this isn't just "racism but it's okay this time, really!". There are actual, severe, and demonstrable consequences.

If you wanted a situation where you didn't have to make compromises like that, lest you get smacked in the face by a worse alternative, you'd need a better system than a questionnaire that tries to judge you statistically.
Ideally, you'd have something like a combined magical MRI/brain scanner which takes a detailed (and confidential) scan of your brain and soul/magical essence, and analyses them (reads your mind) to determine if you do, infact, understand, agree with, and fully intend to abide by the laws of the country.

If you did that, there'd be no need to consider political affiliations, personality traits, your past actions, race, or really anything else.

(This is the point where it becomes obvious that I'm basically paraphrasing from this other fictional world)

 

Problem is - nobody understands and agrees with all the laws of a country - they’re just far too complicated, and intent is normally a lot harder to search for. For example, in Camlifornia, it’s an old law that it’s illegal to eat oranges in the bathtub. A lot of people don’t know that law, don’t understand why it exists, and often have no intent to follow it. Politics is too complex a process to scan in someone’s mind for understanding of.

 

This is wrong, for a very simple reason.

Demons are, by their very nature, evil. Even the exceptions, the now Love Elemental, and Blaze, the now Angel-esk, did horrific things.

Basic pattern recognition is not wrong.


Demon is not a race. It's not Racism to want them gone. They're monsters, pretty much without exception.


Note, that says nothing about Law. It's just a simple fact that if you give demons anything, from legal protections to creativity, they will use it to make things worse.


I always end up pointing out, you cannot treat a shark like a sheep. They are not the same.

 

Does this mean that animals are also US citizens? Am I committing mass murder by setting up a bugbomb in my house?

My point is that there is an obvious carve-out for animals and other objectively sub-human species, unless they missed that aspect and the law is either immediately thrown out or the US government collapses under the weight of trying to give the vote to every mammal, insect, and amphibian in the country. Demons, similarly, could be covered under that heading; after Fawcett City it would be rather trivial for President Home to issue an executive order to that effect, and the political pressure on him to do so would be overwhelming.

 

And the carve out is if they are intelligent beings or not. For example, a talking mouse would have the same rights as a human, but a normal mouse would not. This is discrimination on intelligence, not species.

 

Same with robots. You can’t give a roomba a human’s rights, but you can give them to a sentient AI.

 

That just means that a major part of the problem are the laws. If they're so complicated that it takes a law degree to have a decent understanding of them, how could the average person be expected to follow them? How could anyone be expected to avoid breaking countless niche laws, remaining unpunished only by the judgement that those laws are pointless, made by those who are supposed to enforce, but not judge?

If you want a solution that doesn't come down to "there are basically some broad rules but the rest comes down to decisions by people who aren't supposed to be deciding", you need a clear, concise, understandable, and enforceable system of law. Without it, individual people will often, effectively, be given vast power, and as it turns out the average human is kinda a dick, so this really doesn't work very well at all.

 

Which is why we have trial by jury. Ideally, it allows a person to break a law, and not get punished for it so long as a group of their peers says it’s fine.

 

Er...... Maybe we should move on and just wait for the update?

 

Yeah, I feel like we’re starting to break the rule.

 

Eh, it's nothing within the past decade or two, but this stretches back a lot further than that.

 

Also, what you can have is a general system of laws that everyone understands, and then still be able to have all the really complicated laws that people with law degrees do in addition to that.

 

problem is, few people need to know the laws relating to running a business, or to completely paying taxes, but it’s important to follow them nonetheless.

 

OL should do some PSAs. Magic, demons, aliens, theology, etc. People are so damn ignorant about these things in DC.

 

Well... If it's Lilith or Mazikeen you're fucked and there's nothing even Paul can do about it.