Comic #2802: 2013-01-18

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Here's the text from the comic transcribed accurately:

Child: Daddy, the villains' henchmen in movies are always robots!

Dad: That's because, as a civilization, we're no longer comfortable with killing soldiers on the basis of nationality.

But although we recognize that patriotism is often the handmaiden of dehumanization, we haven't yet given up the notion of Manichean struggle between evil and good.

To mentally sustain the contradiction, we insist that evil is exceptional and localized in a small number of humans. This allows us to believe evil is a separate type of mind, and not a facet of all minds.

In drama, the avatar of this psychological frailty is the lone villain with an army of automata, fighting humans who under no conditions could ever be like the machines.

Child: Sorry, let me try that again: Can I have a toy robot for my birthday?

Dad: Only if you accept the ethical implications!