Beat you to the punch, and see the above. You’re united in this moment in your distaste for the Triglavians to the point that in either case you’re willing to underplay the Empires and the scale of their crimes to try and score a point.
If she’s defending the Amarr Empire in this moment, her record doesn’t matter. How wrong she is does.
She’s not wrong, though.
(Gods and spirits, Mr. Arnolles, you really know how to pick yourself an unwinnable fight. Weak rhetoric around Arrendis on a subject she cares even a little bit about is like hopping in a slaver hound pen at feeding time wearing a formal dinner suit made of beef carpaccio.)
Anyway, time for bed for me.
Arrendis … good hunting.
The simple point that you’re making yourself look like an idiot. I am, and have been, a rather vocal critic of the Empire, and very much look forward to the day when they’re the most horrible thing in New Eden, so I can go back to advocating that we need to buy more bullets to shoot at them.
Make no mistake: the Empire has engaged in, and continues to engage in, horrible crimes, both war crimes and more long term crimes against humanity. They have engaged, and continue to engage, in a protracted and malicious program of cultural rape (in addition to the very real programs of actual rape in breeding facilities etc) against the Matari people and other ethnic groups they have ‘Reclaimed’.
But at no point did those human beings cease to be human beings. At no point were they forcibly changed into something else, something that can never return to a normal human life, never re-engage their unchanged friends and family in the same ways, etc.
If I say ‘Nauplius is an idiot and a vicious, petty, insecure monster who has murdered thousands of people, but he’s never glassed a whole goddamned planet’, that’s not defending Napkins. He’s still a vicious, petty, insecure monster who’s murdered thousands of people. And the Amarr Empire is still a massive, predatory machine that oppresses its own people while distracting them with the lure of ‘look, slaves to look down on!’ while encouraging hundreds of different forms of personal violation of other human beings.
At the same time, the Caldari State is a ruthless exercise in overcompensation and fetishization of a military they’ve touted for decades as ‘the most modern, most capable, ship-for-ship’ that turned out to be completely incompetent and ineffectual. The Federation’s a semi-anarchic hellscape of squabbling children who all think their opinion should matter and won’t shut the hell up no matter how many times you shoot them in the head. And the Republic is a maimed, brutalized population of (justifiably) xenophobic trauma survivors who are prone to over-reaction and violent outbursts in completely unproductive ways, currently led by a murderous embezzler who should probably be strung up for his crimes against our people. He won’t be, of course, because he has the Sebiestor Tribe to point to and say ‘ZOMG, THEY WANT TO OPPRESS YOU’ and because he and his henchmob fabricated a bunch of nonsense when they murdered lots and lots of Minmatar civil servants, people believe him.
I’m not defending any of them. They’ve done what they’ve done. And none of what they’ve done has literally turned people into something that wasn’t human. Nothing they’ve done has put—at the most ridiculously conservative estimates—tens of millions of people through forced mutation, and wiped out massive amounts of indigenous biodiversity on every habitable planet in more than two dozen star systems, basically all at once.
Person A is a thief.
Person B is a serial killer
To say ‘Person A is a thief, not a serial killer’ is not defending Person A, it is being accurate. Nothing more.
And yeah. I’m gonna ignore a certain degree of petty theft while I focus on making sure the serial killer is put down. Once that’s done? Mebbe I’ll go shoot me a thief.
You come in here accusing me of, what was it?
and
and I told you that you should know who you’re talking to before you look like an idiot. Because you do. I’m not proselytizing, and I’m no saint. I’m a monster, and an enabler of monsters. I have been one of the primary enablers of slaughter on a scale all the Kybers in Pochven haven’t managed. I have been one of the people who built a war machine that saw two hundred fifty-seven titans die in a single day. That saw twenty-five million people die in a single frikkin’ engagement. And you think I’m claiming frikkin’ sainthood?
I am blood and slaughter writ large, and the unseen hand that fires bullets into the heads of mothers and fathers from miles away. I know remorseless, relentless, uncaring evil when I see it, and I tell you right now: yes, the empires are evil. The Triglavians are still much, much worse.
And you remain a damned idiot for opening your mouth without having the first freaking clue what you’re getting into.
Really ? When and where ?
The only planetary scale chemical weapon attacks that I’ve heard of, have been Blood Raider and Elder Fleet attacks on Amarr planets.
As for other cosmic vandalism, there was the attack on Reschard by the Equilibrium, and the Scourging of Starkman Prime, but nothing as widespread as the Triggies vandalizing all star systems.
Pick an unwinnable fight eh? I don’t know Miss Jenneth, i’v picked some unwinnable fights in my life and this isn’t one of them.
How much does it take for this to get through your head? It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a ‘vocal critic’ of the Empire and you’ve been looking forward to their end for the better part of the last several decades.In fact I find your attitude rather detestable, there’s nothing worse then a ‘freedom fighter’ whose fueled just on hatred rather then knowledge, and as far as I can tell Arrendis is all emotion.
Talking about weak rhetoric, let me break it down for you: The whole idea that bioadaption makes you ‘nonhuman’ is an of itself a stupid argument. The Triglavians are clearly humans and operate human like ways even if you can’t be bothered to parse what they are saying, and they take the same bioadaption that everyone on each of their worlds do. As a matter of fact, their bioadaption chambers are the exact same facilities and serve the same purpose. Oh, I also like how you put in the little bit about their families and friends being unchanged as though you know ahead of time that the easiest counter to that is that humans do indeed continue to exist on these worlds and live lives with their families.
Even if I somehow, someway, agreed with you that they suddenly ‘stopped’ being humans it’s such a non-critique that i’m not quite sure to begin. Have you looked in the mirror lately? We’re infomorphic beings that hop from one cloned body to the other through a combination of winning a genetic jackpot and highly advanced technology. We have advanced so far beyond what ‘human’ is that the idea of someone suddenly being some kind of horrible abomination because they’ve been bioadapted to their environment is frankly laughable.
While I appreciate the token attempt at pointing out the Amarr Empires crimes, i’m still confused as to why exactly the simple point of scale evades you. You realize this doesn’t happen on just ONE world right? or twenty worlds? it happens on thousands, so many more then the Triglavians have as to fill up most of the clusters heart, and with scales of atrocity that vary wildly between.Once you get past ‘Oooh, they sucked twenty seven systems into Nullsec and their suns are red, so that’s probably bad.’ a lot of the arguments teeth just don’t hold. The Triglavians do not, and cannot for that matter, commit atrocities on the scale of the Empires, perhaps not even the individual empires because they don’t even have enough territory split between the Clades to do that. The fact that Veles behaves wildly differently from Svarog almost cuts that down to two thirds by default, and that’s only depending how favorably you do or do not look at Perun.
The Empires butcher planets worth of people monthly not as a matter of intentional malice, but merely as a process of them moving. The intentional malice behind that just makes it so, so much worse. How a Capsuleer, who presumably has traveled many systems and knows how BIG each of the empires is individually, cannot comprehend this is simply nothing short of mind boggling.
Saying person A is a thief and person B is a serial killer is very much defending person A if it turns out person A is in fact the serial killer and person B is the thief. because that’s really what it comes down to, they stole some suns from you, and for some reason you have a hatred of them being nonhuman despite the fact that we’ve moved so far beyond the human standard and yet lead perfectly functional lives.
It’s such a simple thing to actually point out that I just find it bizarre you can’t see the obvious. Though I will say this, I am in fact a damned idiot for not looking into that. Because you are, by your own admission, a…what was it? blood and slaughter incarnate who by your own admission enabled slaughter on a scale all Kybers in Pochven haven’t managed. That is ONE capsuleer mind you, and even the strongest of us doesn’t do things on the scale of the Empires.
In this rambling mess of an attempted counterpoint what even were you trying to accomplish? Was it establishing that you, rather then I, were the cartoon villain all along?
Gotta admit, that’s a good twist at the very least.
Sure they are. Because humans have three separate minds, right? C’mon now, let’s see your data, your actual, independently-verifiable stuff that tells us exactly what happens during bioadaptation. Because from the data we do have, no, the Trigs aren’t human. We don’t know if they’re still born genetically human, but they pretty firmly make themselves into something else, something with the meat-based mind we have, an active purely digital infomorph, distinct and separate from the electrochemical processes that form the meat-based mind, and what seems to be a plasmid/non-human artifical biological mind also implanted.
And, you know, that’s not human.
We’re not, even if this is one of the most persistent bits of idiocy among capsuleers. But idiocy it remains. Our minds are an emergent property of the electrochemical processes in our brains. We don’t actually exist outside of those processes, and our awareness of ‘now’ itself only exists as a kind of smeared blur, spread across several microseconds. When we die in the pod (and we do die), a copy of our at-the-moment brain-state is made, recording all of the electrochemical activity as it exists right then, and that data is used to flash-grow a set of neurons in the right form, and set them to the same electrochemical state, as the brain that no longer exists.
This is not the same person. This is a copy. It is a copy that is completely indistinguishable from the original via interaction, and even via self-examination, but it remains a copy. If I record a concert performance and play it back later, that’s still just a recording. It’s not the original performance.
We die. And nobody cares, because we’re immediately replaced with another ‘us’ that remembers everything prior to that moment of death, so as far as anyone else is concerned, that replacement is functionally the same. But functionally the same doesn’t mean ‘actually the same’. But ‘become disposable’ doesn’t exactly have a lot of marketing cachet, so they tell you you’ll be immortal, and most capsuleers buy into that nonsense. But it’s still nonsense. You’re not a demi-god, you’re toilet paper, and there’s another one of you waiting on the roll when you get flushed.
What, precisely, ‘happens on thousands’ of worlds? Amarr slavery? Gallente mob rule? Caldari grinding people underfoot to feed the engines of production? Those people remain people. They continue to have hope of a better life among other human beings.
Or are you going to claim that Amarr chemical weapons attacks on entire planets happen ‘on thousands of worlds’? Because, y’know, they don’t. The Blood Raiders have used chemical weapons attacks on… maybe a dozen worlds? The Amarr glassed Starkman Prime, but that was centuries ago and basically made them immediately decide ‘holy crap, unrestrained attacks on inhabited planets is wrong’.
AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH. ‘Moving’? Exactly what ‘movement’ do you think is costing ten billion+ lives every month, and given the Amarr Empire’s population of ~10 trillion, how do you think they’ve survived, when (even if they’re just killing 1/4 of that total), they should have killed off their entire population in under five centuries by ‘moving’?
You say that as far as you can tell, I’m ‘all emotion’, but you’re making all these claims without a shred of corroborating data. My statements about the Trigs, their triune mentality, and bioadaptation are all based on openly-accessible data logs from the Trigs themselves. So where’s your sourcing? Let’s see some hard numbers on the monthly death toll from ‘moving’, complete with sourcing.
No. No, it’s not. It’s not about ‘they stole some suns’. It’s about what they’re doing to people, and how far it is beyond even what the most egregious of our empires’ crimes have been.
I find the idea that the Triglavians are a 'somehow less of a person because of their additional augmentations such an absurd misunderstanding of their culture that it borders on parody. I get they’re called ‘The Collective’ but they aren’t a hive mind, individuality and individual proving are highly valued aspects of their society to such a point that I would actually argue many of them are more individualistic then some of the Empires, and that applies to their human components. What you’re describing isn’t bioadaption, it’s not even strictly just Triglavians, it’s a ‘Troika’ and Troika is a much different process which I would argue doesn’t make the person less human.
The individual in question houses three separate minds as you said. The Koschoi, who we know the least about and seem to be the bonding agent between the other two, the Navaka who appear to be infomorphs who might be able to detach from their bodies and communicate with things like Rogue drones, and us, the human component. But just because the person is sharing their body with two other beings doesn’t mean they are less human, the person is still very much themselves and they function like a council over their body.
As far as clone death is concerned: Actually I agree, it’s quite possible, more then likely even, that we just stop existing after our death and we just get a copy of ourselves who continues to persist as our imitation Still, we are augged up to the eyeballs and jacked on so many drugs and other things that we’re firmly in the ‘post human’ state if we’re saying Bioadaption and Troika’s are nonhuman then we are also pretty much nonhuman at this point as well.
As far as chemical attacks go: Yeah no, the Amarr have been caught trying to viral bomb other worlds in the Gallente Federation and presumably other places within our lifetimes, that isn’t a blood raider thing, that’s something you find out if you take five seconds to look at the Federation Navies records. To the point above that that these things are okay because people remain people, to my knowledge the Triglavian bioadaption process doesn’t involve robbing you of all your ISK. It certainly doesn’t involve the sort of brain splicing you can get in the Caldari state even if it alters the rest of your body physically, so this point seems pretty weak. Triglavians do not seem like a hopeless miserable people, weird and hard to understand at times yes, but far from hopeless.
As far as data goes in regards to people moving, it’s common sense, not raw statistics, but you can easily get that too if you look at the body collection services of organizations like Lost Stars and go from there, to the point of needing 2,000 ships to effectively carry out their services for the Gallente Federation alone and the reason why is obvious: Shifting industry, huge system wide projects, the massive amounts of resources that go into making the war machine and filling the ships that patrol their borders to keep out pirates, pretty much any interaction large groups of people have with Capsuleers. Keep in mind as well that’s just one organization that specializes in space based corpse retrieval in particular. The data isn’t some secret ledger of atrocities, it is, to put it rather bluntly, the average staff size of a battleship. That was my fundamental point and mind you, not what i’m blaming them for as that’s just the upkeep of a Cluster wide empire. What I do blame them for is, just as an example, pretty much everything that happened during the Gallente-Caldari war.
That is where the death toll skyrockets as people then proceed to mass murder each other and burn worlds to satisfy their bloodlust, and that’s not counting the various hidden atrocities that actually surpassed what happened on Caldari Prime but neither side likes to talk about because it would make them look bad.
I stand by my statement: You’re running on emotion and your arguments are illogical, they hinge on me viewing the Triglavians and Bioadapted individuals as inhuman, and I just don’t. Troika are clearly human beings with their own individual personalities and customs, it’s why the Clades even exist.
Dates. Places. Payloads. Provide sources.
Are you perhaps referring to the innumerable freelance contracts that Navy agents offer to capsuleers to do their dirty work for them ?
That’s usually what happens. Navy offers a contract to capsuleers telling them to go there and shoot everything. And capsuleers are so willing to do that without asking questions.
Considering the fact that the conclusion of said contract viral agents were found inside the ships in question above Gallente worlds i’m inclined to believe that the mission statement given was correct.
Or do Amarrians just make a habit of floating virus bombs above random worlds for no discernable reason?
You get a lot of au out of that ‘borders on parody’ line, don’t you? But I guess you need it with the way your goal posts keep warping around. Did I say they weren’t people? I said they weren’t human. Because they’re not. And please, before you go on about how important ‘individuality’ is to them, you really need to be able to back that up with some verifiable examples. Right now, they’ve shown about as much ‘individuality’ as the Drifters. Ooooh, look, Zorya’s got a name! So’s Apollo.
Yeah, because humans function like a council over their own body all the damned time, right? Humans take a quick vote and then self-immolate regardless of what the human mind decides?
In other words, it’s nonsense. Because again: 10 Trillion in the Amarr Empire. At the rate of death you’re talking about, they’d need about 330 years to kill everyone in the empire. There are individual Amarr older than that. So clearly, they ain’t killed everyone in the Empire.
I’m not the one refusing to provide data, or insisting that the empires operate in a way that would have seen the Republic wipe itself out almost two hundred years ago.
Once again: source needed, because while we’ve seen different methods from the different Clades, we have no indication this arises from individuality. For all we know, it arises from differing priorities in the consensus, and the natural, logical outgrowth of those priorities then being subject to cladistic proving. ‘Which set of priorities serves the whole best? We shall find out by attempting them all in subsets.’
Vitoxin, TCMCs and breeding programs are not mutations, but I am not sure the technological differences makes them morally superior, or even practically different.
Never said any of them were at all moral, Else, but all of them do have treatment options with differing degrees of success.
Forced mutation and brain slugs that kill the host when control is threatened, not so much.
Vitoxin was not treatable when it was invented. It is temporarily curable by Vitoc only because that is part of the control method, not because Amarr were gracious enough to grant us a cure. We still struggle for an effective, mass-producable cure and it looks like we sure as ■■■■ will not have one if we don’t work to build it ourselves, given the enthusiasm the international organizations show for the issue. We might not have a cure for forced mutaplasmid adaptation now, but we will have one in time, as likely (or not) as we will have mass-producable Insorum.
Results of breeding programs are altered genetic lines of people. They are what they are. How is that “treatable”?
Those people remain human, and the trauma inflicted upon the individuals in the forced breeding programs can be treated. You know me well enough to know I’m not letting the Amarr off the hook for those atrocities, Else.
Vitoxin doesn’t have the awareness to intentionally kill the patient at the first sign of Insorum. Trig brain slugs do, and we know they’ve already done it when control was threatened. We don’t even know the host body needs to be conscious for the slug and infomorph to make that decision.
If the point of saying they aren’t human isn’t that they aren’t people then what exactly am I supposed to be upset about? The goal post isn’t warping around, that is the goal post and if that’s not the goal post your entire line of argumentation doesn’t make sense. Then they’re just another form of sentient life that I should not want other people to become because, what exactly? if you aren’t specifically a member of the human race you don’t have a future or something?
As far as individuality goes: I point you to the easily observable Semosis Theaters who are entirely dedicated to individuals proving the worth of themselves, their groups, and their ideas. It’s an entirely dialectical society and that by extension requires individuality in order to prove new ideas and think new things. This is reflected in pretty much every aspect of how they interact with each other and interact with us.
Saying they have a comparable level of individuality to the Council of Tyrants is honestly so utterly stupid and easily disprovable by things that you can see with your eyes that it barely warrants this response. It is, indeed, probably the dumbest line of argumentation i’v heard in all of IGS thusfar.
Regarding the council and how that impacts a Troika: Though the other two individuals can vote to self immolate that doesn’t make the human component of them any less human, unless you have some kind of evidence that the human component is somehow not that for…reasons I guess?
As far as Data goes: Going off individual funerary organizations like the lost stars you’re looking at about five thousand recovered bodies per deadspace pocket, with of course larger casualty counts for any major conflict that might involve something larger then a cruiser. Which in this day and age, is a lot of things. With ten trillion people in the Amarrian Empire a planets worth of death, or even a few planets, would only be unsustainable if they had an extremely low birth rate. Perhaps saying a few planets worth of people die every month to the Empires is a bit much, but given the raw numbers every few months is pretty accurate I would say.
Finally: Given their fixation on dialectics it’s obvious the Clades set out their goals with proving themselves best and then the leftover ideas of their proving are put to the use of the collective. The source for this is the requirements of dialectics in and of themselves to function, they NEED an other to be proven against to act as a antithesis to the thesis, or no synthesis can occur and you stagnate. This is more then likely why the Conclave of Triglav is considered outside ‘The Struggle’, with the Struggle referring to the Clades combating each other with their own ideas to prove their way is superior to others.
I give you that the trigs have technological means that the Amarr at least so far do not. On the other hand, they seem less religiously hell bent to destroy my way of life, rather than “just” hijack a certain number of systems for themselves and then coexist.
I am not arguing the Triglavians are not bad any more than you are letting the Amarr Empire off the hook.
What I am arguing though that while technologically superior and unpredictable due to being unknown, they do not at this point seem the kind of immediate existential threat they did, say, last August.
The worst case scenario I see here is not Triglavians nor is it the Amarr. It is Trig tech in the hands of the slavers.
If you want to voluntarily undergo bioadaptation, great. Go for it. Enjoy it. Forcing it upon populations that will die if they don’t get it, and are only at risk because the Trigs put them in that situation, though? And the people who don’t want that and attempt to leave are basically rolling dice to see if the Trigs will slaughter their unarmed transports for giggles? That is the problem. The fact that the violation they are inflicting on people makes them something not-human, that becomes dependent upon their new masters for survival? That’s basically vitoxin on steroids.
The easily-observable things they want observed, which all happen to be homogenous. 
Yep. Totally legit and not even a little suspect.
We’ve seen how they interact with us. What we’ve seen of how they interact with each other has consistently been at the level of the troika… which by the very fact that it’s a troika means it’s not an individual.
So, I’m sure you’ve got the brains to be aware of this, but the birth rates tend to be higher at the lower end of the economic spectrum, while the guys actually running ships and fleets tend to be drawn from the upper ends. What you’re suggesting would have quickly decimated the actual hierarchy of the Empire, and more or less left them with no actual military capability, pretty damned quick.
Careful now, we’ve not even been at this discussion a month. Don’t start backpedalaing on me this early.
Which doesn’t require sustained individuality. It only requires multiple initial priorities which interfere with one another, and so come into conflict. Initial attempts to resolve these conflicts give rise to internal justification, and as complexity increases, simulation modeling and projection becomes an impossibility, leading to a brute-force solution: try all of them, and find out where the balance point is.
None of this requires individuality any more than a ‘Game of Life’-esque simulation requires intelligent behavior on the part of the cells to achieve equilibrium.
That, I will absolutely grant you.
the sins of the past do not sanction the atrocities taking place by the invading Triglavians. The only good invader is a dead invader.
A true existential threat does have a way of concentrating worries in the present. I suppose it may be arguable if the Triglavians continue to pose an existential threat. I know that I have encountered small clouds of their ships outside stations in otherwise “safe” Federation space. I don’t stick around to see what they are shooting at (once I actually thought they were shooting at each other), but they don’t seem completely content to remain inside their new region.
As an academic luxury, it would be “comforting” to know what is going on with those stars. If the classification of terrestrial and oceanic planets orbiting them does not change, the energy coming out has not changed enough in either direction to render liquid water on the surface impossible. The green blotches in space are obviously artificial nonsense, but “bruised purple with gargantuan electrical storms” is not itself an ordinary color classification, either.