DAREDEVIL: Anti-porn activism, cyberspace and morality.

[starwolf_oakley]

Since it seems I can't post anything on this board without causing something of a "dust-up" in the replies, I thought I would post some pages from DAREDEVIL #327 and #329. It features Karen Page as an anti-porn crusader, fears about the new cyberspace and Captain America wondering about 1990's morality.



The guy buying "Playdude" is supposed to look like Tom DeFalco.



This storyline was called "Tree of Knowledge." It took place during the time everyone thought Matt Murdock was dead and a "new" Daredevil was going around in black and red armor. It also explored the then-new world of "cyberspace" and "system hacking." Basically, the days before we used computers to bitch about movies/TV shows/comic books.



This obviously takes place before adult entertainment went "legit" and its stars appeared on talk shows or get VH-1 shows. The funny thing is BORN AGAIN made it seem that Karen was doing the *really* dirty stuff, not the stuff regular New York producers would be "proud" of.

Two issues later...



Can you really say "Teledildonics" in a code-approved mainstream comic book?

Kathy Malper is a character introduced during the "Fall of the Kingpin" storyline. She was a federal prosecutor who didn't mind wearing Boston Red Sox caps and jackets around New York City.



I remember those commercials.





Breaking one laptop caused a supremely powerful BBS to fall apart? Stupid Internet.



Cap thinks more about the "good ol' days."

"TOK" had a series of terrorist attacks designed to bring New York City under martial law. HYDRA wanted to turn the citizens of New York against its government and its superheroes. Wild, huh?

Comments

[halialkers]

Yeah, sure. WWII was good and evil.

....

Cap evidently overlooks the little matter that the Western Allies had their Token Evil Teammate in the USSR which did most of the grunt-work and also most of the most horrible fighting. WWII was never a "good" war any more than any other was. Granted, Cap would think so, but any war that has both the Soviets and the Nazis in it by virtue of those two societies being mirror evils and equal to each other in terms of the evil both involved (and Maoism did all its ugly shit in peacetime which along with the higher casualty rates makes it much more blatantly evil than the other two) is de facto Grey and Grey.

[halialkers]

Yes. The two societies were equals. Everything the one did the other did. The difference was the Soviet leadership was capable of finding its own ass without a map with a gigantic arrow saying "Here it is, fuckwits!". The Soviets were smarter, hence why they were more dangerous.

[halialkers]

Aside from such minor things as deliberately starving their own peasantry out of existence, repeated ethnic cleansings that killed millions of their own citizens, the whole Gulag slave labor system was a genocide if I ever heard of one, and the minor infractions against basic humanity that were the Soviet treatment of the Baltic states and the Soviet penchant for killing the ever-shifting definition of Kulak, no.

Which means yes.

[jlbarnett]

nothing I've heard says that the Soviets targeted people of a specific race/religion/creed to be systematically wiped out. The Nazis had a specific horrible goal in mind. The Soviets just had a highly paranoid, non-survivable prison system basically.

[halialkers]

Er....run that by me again. Marxism-Leninism saw the idea of a vanguard of people capable of throttling history and then building a brave new world and lots of bloodshed and repression first, but the Soviets lacked a specific horrible goal. I see.

[jlbarnett]

because the people could be ANY people, basically.

[halialkers]

Not quite. Kulaks were a limited class defined primarily by wealth, even if the definition was rather nebulous. And the Soviets did have rather clear ethnic targets such as the Ukrainians and the Caucasian peoples. And the Kalmyks.

[starwolf_oakley]

So, the Soviets didn't have a clearly defined "enemy," so they persecuted and murdered indiscriminately.

I'm going to have to get back to you on where that falls on the Sliding Scale of Evil.

[halialkers]

It's like deciding between cyanide and arsenic bullets in a game of Russian Roulette with five barrels having bullets.

[jlbarnett]

I'm basically looking at it this way: the reason for the Holocaust was is was part of the Nazi philosophy, the reasons millions died in Russia was because Stalin was paranoid in a way that more clearly spoke of insanity than the anti-semitism and racial propaganda that fueled the Nazis.

[halialkers]

Er.....no, it was because he damned well wanted to industrialize the USSR regardless of how many people died in that process. His ideas killed millions in pursuit of Marxism, both creating the proletariat and ensuring its die-hard loyalty to the Soviet state. His ideas were perfectly logical in the context of creating a Marxist Revolution in an agrarian empire.

[lamashtar]

I've actually heard estimates that Stalin killed more of his own people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust. There was some incident relatively recently where they found a mass grave that had been hidden and managed to stay secret until they started digging up bones.

Soviets did target minority nations for persecution (though the Jews had it bad even in Tsarist Russia--watch Fiddler on the Roof) but the real target were disloyalists, a term I've just coined for people who couldn't follow the party line enough. But our awareness of all the people killed was pretty late.

However, I do not believe any of the machine of fear and informing and KGB torture and disappearing quite compares to the sheer slick religion of twisted hate that was Nazism. Quality over quantity IMHO.

[halloweenjack]

"Teledildonics", for crying out loud... it's as if the writer read about six months' worth of Wired at once, and sort of half-understood it.

[lamashtar]

Do you remember which issues these are from? I was gonna post the 2 pages where Cap and DD talk about the internet sometime.

[starwolf_oakley]

The first two pages are from DAREDEVIL #327 and the rest are from #329.

[jlroberson]

Funny that's "Playdude," but Wolverine got to read HUSTLER, by name.