Next year will mark the 10 year anniversary of the one million slave sacrifice. Lately, I have been wondering how we in the Amarrian Orthodox Church, Sedevacantist will observe this event, if at all. But all these bloodthirsty responses have given me an idea. What about a One Million True Slave sacrifice? Can we even get one million True Slaves from anywhere? Would a One Million True Slave sacrifice have a more inspiring and unifying effect than did sacrificing one million Minmatar?
No. You donât hold a bunch of rabid hounds and declare their destruction âa sacrificeâ. Itâs a fsking tragedy. Something being a necessary evil doesnât make it any less of an evil. If there were a way to truly recover these people, then weâd have an obligation to spare no expense or hardship to enact it. But there isnât, so we have to take the actions that protect the rest of humanity, and give these poor bastard victims the only closure available to them.
Only fools speak with such certainty.
Stated⌠with such certainty.
Again: the mind is an emergent process over time created by and entirely dependent on your brain activity. Brain activity is, obviously a function of the physical lump of material we call âthe brainâ. The moment the first implants go in of any sort, youâre altering the brain, and so altering the mind. Most medical implants are designed to be mininimally-disruptive to normal brain function. Capsuleer implants considerably less soâwhich is one of the reasons the first thing they used to do when you got your jacks was kill you with a burn scanner and then flash-grow a new brain (the same way your medical clone works after graduation) around the implants that matched (mostly) the old brain-state.
Sansha implantsâ invasiveness and alterations of the brain make capsuleer jacks look like temporary henna tattoos.
Can you, conceivably, get a True Slave away from the hive mind? Sure. Can you rip out the implants without killing them right there? Questionable. Will they ever be a whole and healthy human being if you do? No, theyâll be a shattered, crippled, maimed thing that can barely function because large chunks of their brain have been permanently altered to offload critical cognitive functions to a distributed network (the hive mind).
I get that you donât want to believe it. Iâd rather believe in a universe of happiness and fluff, too. But we donât live in that universe. We live in a universe that is cold, callous, often cruel, and which, when any piece of it notices you at all, usually wants you dead.
Be kind to them. Put them down, rather than putting them through years of hellish agony because your hubris wonât let you accept that once those implants start rewiring those brains, the person they were is already dead.
I am certain Sansha stains every realm it encounters with its poisonous intent to subvert as you demonstrate by your very presence in this forum, loquacious of Nation.
@Vizage, so nice to see you again. Itâs been years. We do need to catch up, but frankly I have been keeping myself quite occupied and have for the most part detached myself from this sort of Capsuleer social interaction. I feel a bit out of practice and I hope my response did not trouble you too much. I am sure I could clear up whatever issues there may be, but this is not the proper place for such discussion.
As for the rest of this thread, I think Iâve said more than enough as it is. I hope people can stay on topic and keep the back and forth at a minimum. Opinions should be heard and weighed. I champion the concept of open and communal discussion where all voices can be accounted for.
I think I may begin to sound like an audio recording stuck in a loop, but in an effort to keep my thoughts all in one place I will posit the same hypothetical I spoke with a friend about last night on this very subject.
Lets say a baseliner, in the process of their duties suffers a catastrophic brain injury, sadly not an exceedingly rare injury especially around shipyards. Assume the damage is so extensive they lose much of their memories, perhaps their ability to speak, or even to move appendages. To be so fundamentally injured that their lives will never be the same. The person who attended to their duties that day is not the person who wakes up from the injuries suffered.
Should we then, euthanize them as you suggest? Or do we not make effort to return them to their loved ones, and better leave the question to them? Why is it, that when our citizen are abducted and maimed in such a way we deem them unrecoverable? Because some pose a threat? Truly no one here is arguing you should be trying to negotiate with an Incursion. I make no claim to understand the state of consciousness nor how it is altered by TCMCâs but I suspect the question is, in the end irrelevant for this very reason. The degree of damage matters little I suspect.
But to callously arbitrate the lives of our citizens who may have family still waiting for them, feels monstrously out of place with our potential to help instead.
I think perhaps your disdain for conversation proves my point.
I would very much enjoy that, my door is always open.
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Now assume theyâve also lost the ability to form a coherent thought on their own because the cerebral structures involved have been permanently altered. And assume that there is a significant likelihood that what individual directives do remain in their head all revolve around bringing others into a similar state.
Weâre not just talking about maimed victims here. Weâre talking about dangerous maimed victims. Weâre talking about potential time bombs, and you have no way to tell.
This is a very strange sentiment to hear coming from someone whose people would routinely expect elders and infirm to walk out into the frozen night to die before they became a burden on their community.
There is no potential to help. Sansha implants are far more than simple TCMCs.
So you agree, that a Citizen if injured in such a way that they become overly aggressive should be euthanized. That is your position?
I would only say it is an equally strange sentiment to hear coming from someone whose people were enslaved for more than seven hundred years that we simply should have killed them off.
Think of it like quarantining Kyonoke. You canât be 100% sure whoâs infected and whoâs not, but you also canât afford the risk of letting the threat slip the quarantine. So you err on the side of caution, and overly-broad quarantines. And you essentially count everyone in quarantine as already dead. Then it becomes a question of whether or not you let them suffer, or end it quickly and painlessly.
I would not want years of agonized suffering inflicted upon members of my Clan, especially not in the name of empathy or compassion. Forcing people to endure such suffering is not compassionate, and it is not empathetic. It is cruelty and callousness, wrapping itself up in the label of âcompassionâ, because the person âhelpingâ the victim in question is too weak, selfish, or misguided to accept that all they are doing is inflicting suffering.
Maybe that âcaregiverâ canât bear to see the other person die. Maybe they canât bear to feel responsible for killing someone. Maybe they just need to believe people can always be helped, can always get better. Itâs irrelevant.
All that matters is that that person is inflicting needless suffering on someone else, with no possibility of gain, and endangering those around the victim as well.
Give them peace, end their pain, and end the danger.
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I suspect this is were we fundamentally differ. I am not willing to simply consider those lost as dead. Maybe because of this we have reached an impasse. I certainly agree that ever effort should be maintained to ensure no more are taken from us. But to condemn those gone, it feels to far for me.
âŚWait which is it? Are the -dead- or are they suffering?
Perhaps you should consider the fact that you are hearing it from someone whose people have been, and continue to be, a savaged and maimed nation, largely consumed by hate and rage. and turned from a society that had done away with war and weapons, toward unending violence, retribution, and lashing out, even to the point of mass-murder of our own people⌠as a cautionary tale of just what lasting suffering you are looking to inflict on others.
And for all that⌠for my people, there is still hope. TCMCs and Vitoc are not the norm among Amarrâs slave populations. We can heal. The enslaved can be recovered and restored to a path toward health. True Slaves cannot.
Then you are a fool. There is a reason your own people quarantined an entire city in the recent outbreak, and were prepared to suffocate the whole thing. Some infections are just too dangerous to risk.
The person-that-was is dead. The mind is broken and gone. The body is alive, as a potentially dangerous, suffering, unreasoning ape.
I have to admit I am deeply confused by your position here. So you agree that Slaves on which TCMCs and Vitoc were used should be euthanized?
Can you explain how you know this for certain? Because it seems wildly inconsistent to condemn one and not the other knowing what we did then versus now.
Again I think this is the root of our disagreement. I do not see the abduction of our citizens as the same kind of problem as Kyonoke outbreaks. I suspect this is a false equivalency.
You attribute suffering and unreasoning, to them, but would you do so to stone? This feels like a deflection, if they are gone they cannot suffer, and as such do not need the burden of your âmercy.â I ask again, which are they, dead or suffering?
Itâs the false choice that feels like a deflection.
A person with a terminal condition can easily be beyond help with available methods, but still aware and suffering. Koyonokeâs not a bad example-- it was looking for a while like everyone at the Inquest was going to die horribly of an ancient bioweapon. We couldnât even copy ourselves out to fresh clones because the stuff had a prion-like state that was apt to get copied right along with the rest of the brain.
A cure (essentially a chemical off-switch) did get found in time, but up until then it looked like we were all going to die. And us-- all the infected-- dying, or even proactively being killed, was exactly what would have had to happen if it hadnât been.
The world can be unkind, with no sense of pacing or narrative. The stories it tells can feel both arbitrary and cruel. That doesnât stop it being the world.
Sometimes you can change things. But itâll be hard to do that purposefully if you canât accept the realities, first.
Those who are as good as dead-- doomed, utterly-- can nevertheless suffer terribly, and often do.
So you do understand the value of seeking solutions outside terminal choices? You ask me to accept that they are gone but in the same breath say this? How deeply paradoxicalâŚ
So you do see a distinction. An important step.
The current state of play is that itâs not curable and the infected are very proactively contagious.
If a cure is found, that changes things. It hasnât been. The needful is necessary, and vice-versa. The tension will come if a cure is found, but is expensive, time-consuming, and/or risky.
Meantime we canât let the fire spread, which means mercy in most if not all cases is a quick death.
If Nation were a little less predatory that might not be so, of course. Perhaps youâd like to talk with Master Kuvakei and see if heâs open to halting the heavily-armed recruitment drive? There might be some things worth talking about if he did.
How can a cure be found if the mandate is eradication? Worse, what will our tolerance be for such a policy in hindsight if such a cure is found? I would not want to be on that side of history. But perhaps I simply lack the stomach for it.
Pain does not require reason. Insects feel pain, can suffer. Earthworms feel pain, and can suffer. Just because the consciousness is gone does not mean the meat cannot suffer, cannot feel pain, cannot react and lash out violently.
Again, Sansha implants are not simple TCMCs. TCMCs can be adjusted. Vitoc can be treated with Insorum. True Slaves⌠well, letâs get to the next bit, yeah?
True Slavesâ cognition is part of a distributed process. The parts of their brain that would have provided cognition and individual reasoningâwhich are still functioning for their original purposes at reduced capacity in TCMC and Vitoc victimsâno longer provide those functions. Rather, they have been repurposed to be part of the distributed process. They take input from, and give their output to, the implants. And once the brain has been rewired this way by the Sansha implants and nanomachinery⌠you canât fix it. You canât change it back. The neural pathways and connections that formed memories, personality, etc, have all been severed and rerouted, repurposed. To replicate them naturally, you would need to duplicate the exact conditions of their original formation. In effect, youâd need to revert the brain itself to itâs initial state, and then reply the personâs entire life.
In theory, you could, if you had a perfect brain scan similar to that from a podâs burn scanner, flash-grow a new brain to replicate those old structures, but the percentage of baseliners with access to that prior to being abducted is vanishingly small⌠and if you did have that⌠why did you wait to get the original body and damaged brain back?
So when you say it seems wildly inconsistent to treat vitoc addiction, or behavioral inhibitors, differently than massive brain damage and nano-rewriting⌠that tells me you have no idea what youâre talking about.
Eradication is the cure. It is prevention. It is ending the threat of these abductions and brain-rapes in the first place.
Mandates have exceptions and variations; a policy of âburn on sightâ doesnât prevent the occasional survivor being scooped up, defanged, and delivered to a lab.
Actually thatâs even likely to happen precisely to find methods for more efficient burning. Brute force can destroy, sure, but knowing just where and how to apply pressure can allow for much more efficient destruction.
Or a cure, which, if you happen to be the disease, is the same thing really.
That seems to be the short of it, yes.
History will choose its villains. Really so will the present. If youâre breathing right now there are good odds someone thinks youâre evil, or (for the more ⌠overtly harmless?) at least too weak to be in any way admirable.
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Pain is not suffering. This is a false equivalency.
You must understand how deeply confusing having a discussion where you walk back your own positions is no? Which is it, unfixable or in theory fixable?
Should a person suffer an injury causing total disassociated amnesia with no chance of recovery with no brain scans in place to revert the damaged psyche should we kill them?
So you recognize that the most promise comes from the exception to this rule, and not the rule itself?
Perhaps I am, I will have to think on this. I feel in my heart though, this is not the unenviable position of the two.