Let me take a moment and thank you for using “loose” correctly. (I’m so used to seeing it used as, “I can’t believe we’re going to loose this game!” Ugh, pet peeves!)
But if I attempted to build a rocket in my backyard, and I accidentally set fire to my neighbor’s house, saying, “My experiment got out of control” would not remove any liability for the damage, or for the deaths that resulted. If you do something that accidentally kills someone, or if you make something that gets out of control and kills someone, that’s still manslaughter.
I try although often I am not doing much self-correction on message boards.
But if I attempted to build a rocket in my backyard, and I accidentally set fire to my neighbor’s house, saying, “My experiment got out of control” would not remove any liability for the damage, or for the deaths that resulted. If you do something that accidentally kills someone, or if you make something that gets out of control and kills someone, that’s still manslaughter.
But no one is stopping you from trying. I guess my biggest issue with this is not absolving them of liability or responsibility but the assumption of guilt and the absolute authority for governments to regulate abilities. If I could read other’s minds, am I immune to the regulation because you can’t see it. Am I breaking laws by using my ability to my advantage? Are we just regulating violent abilities. What if an infant can cause a fire, can the government regulate someone learning their abilities by just taking them away from their parents? And frankly, if it came to the judgement of Ross or President Drumpf, I am going to trust Captain over both of them. I just am.
Well, it’s another point in favor of these guys maybe needing some oversight. They literally stole military hardware and decided to use it for their own means because… They’re better than everyone else?
I’m not sure they stole it from the military, they could have stolen it from Hydra backed SHIELD (I honestly can’t remember). Either way it avoids the point that the Falcon’s suit has nothing offensive inherent in it, it’s simply a means of transportation. Why does the U.N. need to have a complete monopoly on that tech?
Like I’ve said the whole idea of the U.N. using force to seize a monopoly on technology goes against your earlier claim that inventions and thoughts weren’t being regulated. The Falcon’s suit, the Iron Man suit, hell any of the super heroes aren’t inherently weapon platforms, they could all be used for peaceful purposes. Captain America, Vision, Scarlet Witch, etc could give cirque du soleil a run for its money, but they aren’t given that option. What the U.N. is trying to do is monopolize them as purely weapons platforms so they are only used for forceful purposes directed by the U.N.
They stole it from the US military. In fact, Wilson has left active service when he meets Captain Rogers. They bust the suit out of Ft Meade.
Wilson using the suit as Falcon starts as an illegal act. SHIELD apparently sanctions it later, making it legit, but I highly doubt they said it was his to do with as he pleased. I assume the stipulation was something along the lines of “You can be an Avenger, but that suit is US Army property and we reserve the right to take it back.”
Because they needed the flight pack to stop HYDRA from killing millions of people and taking over the world? I’m not sure why everything needs to be viewed through this “top 1%” lens.
I already answered that above: it’s not that it’s always/usually bad, it’s that it’s not any more guaranteed to be good than the acts of private citizens, mainly because governments are made up of the same people as private people are made up of, plus on top of that, government is a monopoly, and monopolies are generally bad.
The argument for oversight is analogous to Hobbes’ silly, self-contradictory argument, that you need Leviathan to be the ultimate guarantor of contracts because people in the raw are just too mad, bad and dangerous to be trusted. But if that were truly the case, how could the contract to form Leviathan stick?
It’s pure smoke and mirrors. Actually, governments have always been the biggest murderers throughout history. Constitutional/democratic liberal government is the best of a bad lot, and it forms a reasonably stable platform for progress, but it’s really just the least worst version (as Churchill said somewhere), and eventually we’ll learn to do without it altogether.
Government is basically just the historical precipitate of successive waves of bigger and bigger bastards seeking power, a la GoT, and bamboozling the people that their power is in some way justified; modern democratic government is the result of liberal/democratic revolutionaries taking the reins and apparatus of big bastards’ power (17th-century onwards), thinking they can do good with it. The cure is simply to dispel the illusion that it’s necessary, and intrinsically a good thing. It is at best a necessary evil, and intrinsically liable to misuse and abuse.
In reality, it’s government that needs oversight - precisely, by the people.
Plus also (back in the movie :) ) Cap had of course seen the results of government shit going bad in the previous movie.
Exactly. It’s all plot contrivance. There is no good reason outside the silly plot for #teamcap to be presented as if it were a viable realworld perspective. It makes zero sense, as has been amply demonstrated in this thread. The central conflict in Captain America: Civil War has about as much political relevance as a Transformers movie. At least a Transformers movie doesn’t pretend to be about politics.
Until we get to his “WHYDIDYOUSAYTHATNAME?” moment.
That’s why it’s #TeamIronMan and #TeamCap, not #TeamGovernmentIntervention and #TeamVigilanteJustice. I’m not sure why the plot of the movie has to be “a viable realworld perspective” in order to be relevant and worth discussing. That seems like an artificial constraint.
Yes, that’s the point where you see Tony Stark break down, and his reasonable, rational perspective, which has completely failed to hold the team together, is abandoned in favor of a purely emotional response. It’s definitely a turning point for the character. Was he right to abandon his principled position for the sake of personal revenge? Was he justified all along that Bucky was dangerous and needed to face a military tribunal for his actions? Does fighting with Steve Rogers reinforce or undercut his beliefs? These are all interesting topics for debate.
Everything for Stark was shown to stem from his relationship with his parents, primarily (for better and for worse) from his father. Finding out that your ally and friend was withholding the news that his best buddy had murdered them earns some serious violence in a film about comic book heroes.
Everything for Bruce Wayne also stemmed from his relationship with his parents, and their deaths. However, after (for the sake of argument) buying into the “If there’s even a 1% chance” line of BS, finding out that Superman had a mother with the same name doesn’t “un-earn” that violence in any way, shape, or form. It just highlights that Bruce Wayne is [clinical term warning] one crazy-ass dude who needs to be on some heavy medication.
We’re smart enough not to even go into P&R. We’ve seen what happened to Superman (or, more the point Senator Finch), in the hearing, and what happens to the folks who show up at that dopey UN signing ceremony. Who knows what traps you will try to spring upon us there? No thanks.
-xtien
“Just because it’s the path of lest resistance doesn’t mean it’s the wrong path.”
To put it more cleanly, and with less [Tony] snark, the person arguing for the regulations of the Accords is the one who actually needs it. As in politics, and even personal relationships, the thing you’re totally trying to regulate is probably the thing you’re jonesing to do. Tony Stark has always been the wildcard in these movies. The simplest way to point this out is that they gave him the titular line in the first movie. It’s a dumb line. It makes no sense. But it certainly pertains to this argument. “If we can’t protect the earth, you can be damn sure we’ll avenge it.”
Uh. Well. We don’t really consider vengeance a part of our justice system. At least not in that word and not by individuals. So it’s no wonder that Tony is so afraid as to need to sign the Accords. Because he is afraid of himself, foremost. And after that, he’s jealous of Captain America. He can make fun of his outfit all he wants, and talk about how everything special about him came out of a bottle, but when it comes down to it he understands that Captain America is self-governed, and he is not. And while he, as Iron Man, may be more powerful…he lacks self-control. So he needs the Accords. Jealousy demands that he make Steve sign them too, even if doing so is antithetical to Captain America’s character, powers, and purpose. And detrimental to the cause of justice.
The thing is, neither side in the movie makes sense. We’re presented with a choice between Steve Rogers’ Team America World Police of globe-trotting vigilantes and Tony Stark’s Orwellian One World Government that executes suspects without trial and confines the survivors in an underwater gulag. Which side are you on?
To their credit, I guess, neither Iron Man nor Captain America seem entirely comfortable with the sides they’ve chosen. Cap almost signs the accords. Iron Man goes on his own off-the-books mission at the end in contravention of the agreement that he signed. So maybe we aren’t so different after all. Kumbaya.
This is actually an excellent point, since I think the greatest struggles are internal. Which is why Black Widow has the toughest role in the conflict, as she has to convey that for us.
I liked the fact that Spider-Man apparently has no opinion of his own on the issue. He just sided with Iron Man because that’s the Avenger that hit him up first. I assume Stark brought him up to speed off-screen, but the way it’s presented in the movie, Peter Parker is just an easily swayed kid.
It should make Spidey’s solo movie interesting when the villain lies to him and he just accepts it at face value.
Wait, so you are NOT saying government is always/usually bad, but you are ALSO saying because governments are monopolies, they are generally bad?
What the? DOES NOT COMPUTE.
I think you have a prejudice against government in general. You see government always as an apparatus of oppression, having a will of its own; but some people see goodness in a VERY specific form of government that is a natural extension of mutual cooperation between private citizens. The fullest expression of this “government as facilitator of mutual cooperation” position doesn’t come until Adam Smith and liberal economics.
In the state of nature it is a zero sum game: I win at your expense. In the free market, OTOH, with a referee that enforce the rules of the market but no more, it is is a positive sum game rather than a zero sum game. We both are better off than before, and we are both winners, as long as we play by the rules that ensures mutual benefits. Being this kind of referee is a thankless job because it uses its power ONLY to serve the market participants and no more.
We can have debates on what this “referee that enforces the rules of the market but no more” really amounts to. Libertarians say this amounts to minimal government. The progressives remind us that “rules of the market” are rules that ensure mutual benefits of market participants, therefore the referee should be an active government that stamps out exploitation and zero-sum behaviour. And so on. We can also have debates on how to hold this referee accountable to the people it is supposed to serve: regular democratic election, check and balance etc. But if you accept liberal economics arguments, then you need a government or something like it to be the referee.
BUT if think you DO NOT NEED a referee and private individuals will just spontaneously act for their mutual benefit, well, I hope you enjoy state of nature, because your life is likely to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
What really makes the Spidey recruitment interesting is that the version of “with great power…” he gives Tony is basically Caps motivation, and you get a beat of that playing on Tony’s face.
Abstractly, Tony is of course correct, but he’s doing it for the wrong reasons. He just want to be shift the responsibility and guilt to someone else.
