maximara said:
Well, see one part of the entire equasion is that due to your personal political leanings you think that McCarthy and Executive Order 9066 were entirely bad things, both of which can be massive debates in their own right.
The issue in Marvel is one where the arguement was being made against the accountability of super humans to anyone except for other super humans. Basically saying that "the law applies to everyone, except for these guys that have powers". You invent a new blaster weapon that makes you above the ordinary person, congrats you can now break the law with imputiny!
You totally missed the point. Executive Order 9066 originally applied EQUALLY to Germans, Italians, and Japanese but when it came time to actually enforce it only Japanese (ie non Europeans) were effected. Joseph McCarthy was a fear monger pure and simple and the hysteria he created resulted in the DEATHS of two minor spies.
Therumancer said:
See, the issue is one where we have heroes who are quite blunt in saying that the law doesn't apply to them, and are willing to mete out what they consider to be Justice. Property destruction, tresspass, illegal surveillance, all of these things are routine behaviors for costumed adventurers and vigilantes. While arguements can be made that it's nessicary (as I pointed out with guys like Doctor Doom), from a legal perspective it's no differant than saying say all blonde haired and blue eyed people don't have to follow the rules of society but everyone else does.
In pretty much every case you've given your looking at situations where the problem wasn't the policy, but an X-factor (so to speak) that caused things to go wrong. Such as the whole assumption that any AI is by it's very nature going to go berserk and turn on humanity. Things could just as easily go in an Asimov direction with robots being people's friends and protectors, it's just that this doesn't make for as good of a storyline on a large scale (it only works when it's a singular robot usually). Incidently there are also numberous cases in marvel of Technology being used successfully, I don't believe AIs figured into this (except through nanites in the video game version) and remember this was being spearheaded by both Tony Stark AND Reed Richards.
Tony Stark and Reed Richards have in the past have been shown to be... well idiots. Stark's armor war and Reed's believing a supposed diary (faked by Doom) two of many cases in point. The point was not that an AI was involved but that they were aware of compromises to security that the average person was not privy to and they STILL thought it was a good idea. Property destruction, trespass, and illegal surveillance are also done by the US GOVERNMENT of the Marvel universe (again I refer to the Sentinel program) and yet no similar outcries were raised.
"Operation: Zero Tolerance" is a prime example of the illogic in Civil War--people were turned into Bio-Sentinals AGAINST THEIR WILL and yet the public of the Marvel US seemed to have gone 'Uh who cares?" In anything even remotely like the REAL world there would have been an outcry that would have made Watergate look like a minor tiff. Again based on the HISTORY OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE the Pro-resitration side Civil War was stupid. I would like to remind that part of the reason HAMMER was created was due to Secret Invasion which was a security fiasco that made the whole AI takes over SHIELD and HYRDA look like a cake walk.