Still not convinced she’s not just trying to mask that she can’t keep her shite straight.
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Mm. Well, but it’s not like she returns to very different personas when she goes back to stage 1, Arrendis. Actually the claim that that is “the real Veik,” and nothing else that she does is truly inconsistent with that reality, is one of her more consistent ongoing themes. It seems like the real question is whether those are beliefs truly held, or just a favorite mask.
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All I see are attempts to discredit the person rather than the points she’s made. Quite good ones, in fact.
… which of course would explain the retreat to discrediting the person, if they’re too good to refute.
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Veik’s apparently after my attention in particular, Miz. I’m hoping Pieter will have something useful to say.
Given his claim to be able to speak for the Caldari, I’m hoping it’ll be good.
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… so you give her said attention, rather personalized at that, and still leave the points untouched and un-refuted? I mean, it just gives a certain amount of credence to them to an outsider.
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Eh, if that’s what floats her boat. Still seems like she’s trying awfully hard.
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I don’t think we can accuse too many people on this board of not trying to hard
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Miz, is there anyone you really try not to argue too much with? Diana Kim, maybe? Mr. Nauplius? You have your standards and your reasons, but, for me, the conversations I enjoy having are the ones where there’s something for me to learn. I don’t tend to want to talk all that often or all that long with people I can’t learn very much from.
I avoid arguing with you very much because I get tired of getting beat over the head by a moralistic extremist who’s perhaps unfailingly “honest,” for what it’s worth, but that worth is a little suspect between your myopia and allergy to nuance. Most of the most interesting things I find out about you I learn from observing your interactions with others from afar, not from talking with you. It’s why I had you blocked for a while.
Veik’s the opposite case. Whatever her actual nature, she’s largely without principle or scruple. She often presents herself as cruel, callous, and shallow, but she is, at minimum, sharp enough to be pretty dangerous. When I do speak with her, it’s often because I’m attempting to make sure others have at least fair warning of what they’re dealing with-- a labyrinth of mirrors and fog, a shifting puzzle box who might or might not be a lie right down to her osteoplastic bones, a lie told by one Mattias Kurovassi. And not a harmless lie, but one that kills gratuitously for the sake of establishing her character as one who kills gratuitously, and who appears to believe that not really being that underneath it all makes it somehow okay.
“I’m not really a sadistic killer; I was just pretending to be sadistic. … What? Well, sure, I killed a bunch of people by skinning them with a nail file but I didn’t enjoy it as much as it looked like I did.”
Slightly paraphrased.
If I argue with Veik, at minimum, I’m arguing with a sophist who is almost certainly arguing in one form or another of bad faith, and who appears to be cringe-inducingly interested in, yet contemptuous of, women of my ethnicity. The fact that she seems to particularly want me to is enough for me to want to post a warning sign and then swap spots with Pieter, who has more of a stake in this latest argument than I do anyway. She claims it’s all an act, but “Achur interns” were already an uncomfortable in-joke vis-a-vis Veik when I joined PY-RE. If it’s a front, it’s not for my benefit alone.
If Veik were the last thing in this world I didn’t understand, it might be worth puzzling through what in her strange existence is real, and what is not. As it is, the offered return is getting to the bottom of just one or two inevitably very dark spirits.
You offered a basic taxonomy of her nature, yourself. What truth am I going to find there that’d be worth the excavation?
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You seem to have missed the point. Or perhaps it just is rather irrelevant to you, given how you seem to value things in what you get out of them. “Truths excavated” etc. I suppose that ties in with your choice to ignore truly horrendous issues as inconsequential or inconvenient, and label it “myopia” and “allergy to nuance” when people point out that these things are a damn sight more important than the meager offerings of redeeming qualities.
I’m not saying this to be cruel or vindictive. I genuinely think you could become so much more as a person if you took a long hard look at these things. When people disagree or use arguments you don’t have an answer for, you start looking for excuses to dismiss the people making the arguments rather than tackling the arguments themselves. You’ll even go out of your way to deliver these excuses and views, with quite significant investment of time and effort - relatively of course, in this case relative to the standards of communication on these boards - while staunchly ignoring the arguments.
In this particular case, Veik is actually making some very good arguments. For an outsider like myself, they seem to match what can be grasped on a surface level understanding of the State, and with no counter arguments from reasonable sources that means they will carry weight, whether Veik is ‘largely without principle or scruple’ or a ‘labyrinth of mirrors and fog’.
So what would you get out of refuting these things, if they can be refuted? Well, you’d get to share the “truth” you may have excavated at some point past, with the rest of these board’s inhabitants. This is not enough? Why should you need to gain anything else from this exchange of arguments and views? It’s a rather selfish kind of stance to take that you need to be the primary beneficiary of a conversation, or that there even needs to be one in the first place.
Personal gratification being the primary requirement for doing something is a rather… Sabik way of thinking.
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So, if you believe your sight is clear, Miz, think of it from my perspective. Why would I not want to engage Veik the way she’s invited me to engage her?
Assume it’s not something like, “She’s absolutely right.”
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I feel no need to speculate on that matter. The potential reasons - especially when you include unjustified ones - are many and that is why I invited you to offer your views on your decision. If you feel this is unreasonable, so be it.
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Okay, well, the ingredients are right under your nose.
Veik has made it plain-- directly stated-- that she has ulterior motives for trying to engage me, and that I’m the primary target of her remarks here. Even if I don’t very much credit her explanation that this was all some kind of distraction meant to keep me away from some project or other, that by itself still gives me reason to be wary of giving her precisely what she’s after, and reason to invite Pieter to take a turn. She’s also been trying to minimize and dismiss my efforts to warn others about her, which suggests that she’s trying to get me to stop. That’s reason enough for me to continue.
The tricky thing in all of this is of course that it inherently involves trying to work out the maneuverings of an intelligent and deeply dishonest person. Depending on how deep the trickery goes, I could be playing into her hands, somehow. However, the fact that she’s okay with letting it slip that she’s secretly an evil genius strongly suggests she’s not one, so I feel fairly comfortable going with my best guesses, here.
Also, if I wait a bit and Pieter doesn’t say something helpful, someone might still come along who isn’t openly intellectually dishonest I might be able to discuss it with without having to address Veik directly. Maybe that would be you. … But I’d rather give Pieter a chance to weigh in, first.
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Seems a tad convoluted to be honest, and paranoia easily on par with mine. At absolute worst, you’ll lose the time spent on the argument which you’ve already spent on me and the lack of refuting, unless you ascribe this non-evil-genius the power to affect you through your own argumentation on State affairs, philosophies and views.
This is why I don’t bother with dishonesty or underhanded manipulation. Manipulation, sure, but straight forward and open such. If all I give here on these boards or other public places remains exactly what it appears to be then dishonesty and under-handed manipulation becomes utterly irrelevant and powerless, as I give nothing I can’t afford to lose and at the same time there is no opening for harm, since any and all possible damage was done when the view or stance was taken beforehand.
It must be exhausting trying to play games with words all the time.
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You know, when you start taking these statements together, Aria, you wind up with things like ‘Or she just wants you to think she’s trying to get you to stop, so you’ll pour more effort into warning people about what they can all plainly see for themselves’, and ‘alternately, she really could be enough of an evil genius to know that letting you see she’s an evil genius means you’ll dismiss the possibility that she’s an evil genius’…
… since, you know, you do that a lot: you over-analyze… everything, really. Sometimes, the inconsistent nutcase screaming ‘you all just want to matter as much as I do hahahaha’ really is just an inconsistent nutcase.
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No, I am not, nor was I ever one. However, what I was pointing out was that you and others have attempted to minimize and dismiss me by going after my reputation – whether it is about Achuran women, or being an edgy sadistic killer. You call me dishonest, but the masks others put on me are not my design, but simply what people want to believe about me, from the rumours others spread. Then when all those rumours do not correlate, do not corroborate, I am the one called out as inconsistent?
I daresay, when allegations prove to be inconsistent or a contradiction, then logically there must be some lie to them. Yet, there is the amusement inherent to the whole affair – you, and others, are so adamant in your personal confirmation bias that cannot abide the truth, so insist upon the lies you yourselves propagate.
Because you don’t want the truth, as I said, you want to believe the worst about me.
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Alternately, we could believe you’re just doing your thing, having your fun, and aren’t anything we should really care about beyond our own incessant need to natter on like idiots. 
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?
… Words are fun, though.
Mostly, I’m more concerned with how to use them to communicate well than to hide stuff. Using thousand-ISK words to make sure only people with expensive vocabularies can keep up well enough to argue was a trick of my predecessor’s.
I try to be someone who uses words to reveal this world, rather than someone who hides it away. … Though responsibility means not being able to say everything that I might want.
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This is the point at which IGS comedians would start quoting posting statistics for comedic effect.
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Why, thank you.
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We can talk about masks, Aria, as everyone knows that the Caldari famously wear them. Veikitamo is no different from any of the other high-level Executive caste, in that respect - whereas I’m a prole, at heart.
My masks are, therefore, a little different from Veikitamo’s. Less ornate.
Veikitamo is, as I said, from the Executive caste and her use of masks is probably a form of ‘deception as warfare’ designed to keep people unsure as to what her actual motivations, objectives and opinions are. Sure - some of this is purely selfish, but other instances have been designed to protect both her and others. I remember it being very hard to pin down her loyalties on the Heth issue, for example - during a period she made statements that hinted at support for the former-Executor AND for the Oritsuu faction within KK.
She also pads her statements with plenty of realpolitik - almost quoting from the Corporate Art of War - and my estimation is that this is meant to suggest that you shouldn’t take ANY of her idealistic statements seriously. It’s meant to suggest that she’s a pragmatist and someone you can do business with, provided you ignore the speechifying.
Of course it should be considered that you can’t trust anything that she says, that she can argue passionately in favour of one ideology whilst simultaneously acting to both support and undermine it. The disingenuous jokes are part of this, of course, you’ve already noted the ‘just playing’ statements.
So, yeah, I speak for the common Caldari inasmuch as I feel that you shouldn’t regard any public statement as particularly impactful. If you want an actual commitment on something from Veik then my advice would be to seek it privately - and to view it as being roughly as binding as the contract that accompanies it.
And remember. A contract is a contract is a contract - but only between Caldari.
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