Ranting about Babylon 5's "Sic Transit Vir" (spoilers)

[Yukaphile]

Bwahahahahaha! Again, that you say that is funny...

[Beastro]

And you've said some pretty awful stuff on that front. So I don't buy it.

Yes, I am a flawed person. I also believe that it is important that we do not confuse the good for the bad and while we forgive the bad, do not condone it or pretend it was justified.

I've found it interesting for awhile how we use good in contrast to both bad and evil, yet bad and evil are not fully synonymous. One is a grade along the path of the other, and in some ways can be completely unrelated: A kid can being bad can in no way be evil or going in that direction, they can just be a little shit doing something they shouldn't at the particular moment in time.

That then makes me wonder if problems come from the same thing not applying to good and how we need to have another word come in to sit next to bad or evil and leave good with the other. IMO, if evil boils down to willful malevolence, then good should specifically apply to willful benevolence and a replacement to stand with bad must be found.

I don't really see the issue. The comedy is at Vir's expense, after all, as he applies stock love clichés to such an inappropriate situation.

I think the show just couldn't go full dark in the way the episode was going in. Doing grimdark about genecide in the way people here expect it too just wouldn't fly in a 90s show. They had to cushion the blow and they tried to use humour. It couldn't work, but it had to be there.

A serious interpretation of what I think was meant to be humorous is the fact that Vir is actually playing the Schindler game here and being very polite as well as gracious to people he's working against because if he doesn't, well, then he'll be frozen out of the power structure and more Narns will die.

His ability to help others depends on him being a harmless soft-hearted eccentric.

Not a dangerous radical.

There's also the fact that he is those things. Look at how he reacts to Morden's offer, then look at how he acts when he finally does get what he wants. He isn't a vicious guy who'd want to see people crushed as he watched, like Londo eventually does with Refa, however deserved it is. Even when he explains what he wants to Morden, it's not him executing Morden, but others for what Morden has done.

[Beastro]

I also find your words a bit disturbing, Beastro. I've said over and over how I'm a twisted freak, yet I've always resisted the urge to do anything what you'd call "evil" and I think would be evil, despite how easy it is. We all have absolute autonomy over ourselves. The world is what we make of it, yet we can't do better in hundreds of thousands of years.

No, we don't, at least not from how I think you're approaching it from the perspective of the conscious self and free will.

We have agency, but that is power to act within certain restraints. If we had absolute autonomy then you'd never have those urges in the first place as you'd never have allowed them to exist within you to be urges. Yet they are there however much you wish you could wish them away. There's more to you than "you"; there's more of you looking out of your eyes with "you".

There is funny, and at first, unsettingly cognitive science to back that up, as brain scans have shown that even acts like tapping a finger that have suddenly come to people to do were actually sitting in the brain as it mulled them over as much as ten seconds beforehand. For me that was creepy at first, but consistent with what I've learned of the mind. From that, others can decry that consciousness serves no purpose, but I'd rather take it as a sign that there is more to individuality and who we are than just consciousness and "us". It's something that has massive room to impact things like the legal system where it's implicit: For me, I've begun to question if lack of guilt can ever come from actual insanity, as that is still some part of that person acting even if not consciously.

The world isn't what we make of it, our world yes, which is why people can honestly feel like it's ending when theirs collapses despite it not literally ending.

[Mecha82]

I don't remember ever laughing at Vir when I have watched B5. I always found him sympathetic character whom I empathetic towards. So I must have missed whole thing that there was supposed to be comedy on his expanse.

[AllanO]

For me, I've begun to question if lack of guilt can ever come from actual insanity, as that is still some part of that person acting even if not consciously.

Note that insanity is a legal thing, mental illness is the medical, cog-sci thing and it is not just our treatment of deviant states of mind that are at stake in the possibility of an insanity defense. There is also the "it was an accident" defense that depends on state of mind, if we don't consider states of mind (Mens rea, criminal intent), what you can perceive, predict etc. well then Freud was right "There are no accidents!" We should be holding people responsible for accidents and so on or no one should be held responsible for anything, both of those seems wrong. After all the thing about them that caused the accident is still a part of them...

Note, my sense is you usually make an insanity defense on the basis that you did not understand that you were committing a crime at all because of a mental defect, not because you were unable to resist the temptation to break the law (there are exceptions).

As an analogy, it makes sense to hold people responsible for learning to read, because they can (usually) adopt the behaviour of studying reading and so learn to read, the model of personal responsibility, moral suasion etc. works very well for that sort of thing. If someone is physically blind then expecting them to learn to read normal text (not Braille or something) and then finding them wanting for not learning is both stupid and sadistic as it was impossible for them to learn that.

Likewise if insanity defenses make sense it is because the person in question could not have been expected to achieve the relevant feat, which is usually taken to be resisting criminal impulses. So a blind student may study their heart out and still fail to see letters to read, likewise a criminally insane person might be able to resist any conscious criminal impulse, but is unable to recognize that some impulses are criminal and instead mistake them for non-criminal ones, just as a person who slips on a banana peel does not fail to resist the urge to step on the banana peel but rather did not intend to step on the banana peel at all and simply failed to see it or something.

So long way of trying to explain why I don't think you have the right idea about what insanity is doing in legal arguments etc.

[Yukaphile]

I mean, I've mused on this endlessly, as you no doubt can tell, if... those people who abuse others for their own twisted sexual joy actually do feel sorry when they claim to be reevaluating their behavior. I find it very hard a man who has reformed that way could ever get it up again, and would more likely turn to a path of celibacy and teaching to make sure others don't fall like he did, how easy it is. But that requires actual courage, and I notice many of these breeds of people, like humans in general, are enormous hypocrites, and studies have shown that many people who get off abusing others that way, even children, can years later take a wife and have consensual sex. That's a scary thought. I wonder if those people truly lack some kind of chemical "spark" we have in our brain makeup that we do. Hell, some psychologists think the world is slowly being divided between two breeds of humans, the psychopaths and the non-psychopaths, which if true, has ALWAYS been the case. And history could show won won in each case if that is indeed truth.

[CharlesPhipps]

A bit off topic Yuka.

[Yukaphile]

I was responding to what Beastro had said. This does tie into discussions of guilt vs. insanity. And it's a very personal issue to me because of my Feminist worldview.

[Riedquat]

That doesn't work. I never got the impression Vir would be really thrown into a camp or something if he didn't do exactly as told.

In one episode (can't remember which, or the details but Chuck's reviewed it) Londo threatens to utterly ruin him and his family if he doesn't go along with something.

[Yukaphile]

That was to blank his mind so a telepath would see Londo acting boorishly when he and Refa were ramping up their game.