Honestly, Aria, look back over the history of this board and its predecessors. It’s always been more acceptable and encouraged to talk about battles and bloodshed, wars and campaigns, to hold up this idea that ‘oh, I am a warrior and so totally honorable just ignore that I’m basically the capsuleer equivalent of a kneecapper, hired by organized crime to bust up a union strike’, than it has to wax eloquent about something as simple, natural, and universal as feeling close to another human being and wanting to spend your days as part of their life.
That has nothing to do with my emotional state, and whether or not I’m clinging to some ridiculous idealism in the face of overwhelming evidence. It’s just how things are. Being willing to say it isn’t evidence that I’m somehow heartbroken or ‘something has happened’. The idea that openly saying something we all know is true is somehow a sign of damage… I think that says far more about the people who’d rather dance around such an issue, and the ones who prefer to wallow and revel in their monstrosity and hypocrisy, than it does about the person shrugging their shoulders and refusing to ignore it.
But I don’t need persuading of any of that. That’s the world I’ve always lived in.
It’s not the factual content of your statements that concern me-- or Pieter, I would guess. But lately, your tone’s shifted, darkened, past where it was before. It’s been the progress of a few months.
There’s nothing ridiculous about idealism. Idealism, in the end, is just looking at awful things, and saying, “It shouldn’t be this way.” And trying to change them. … Without idealism, nothing changes. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or worthy of ridicule. If idealism was really so bad, there’d be fewer idealists. Their continued presence in the species suggests that they serve an important purpose.
But I do think it’s a hard thing to be-- not difficult, like “challenging,” but hard. In the end, an idealist is facing a particularly intractable and stubborn kind of enemy: the messy complexity of the world, and its resistance to being changed to solve certain problems without creating as many problems as anyone solves.
Some witty person at some point suggested, or maybe just pointed out, that a cynic is just a broken-hearted romantic. … I don’t think you were ever really very cynical, before. But more recently you’ve been saying stuff like how every human being deserves to be shot.
So. Yeah. That starts to sound a little more like the real thing.
You can’t expect things to change if you don’t call them out, Aria. You can’t fix a problem without acknowledging it’s there. Humanity’s a plague, a rancid rotting lump of cancer upon the universe, and it all deserves to be excised and incinerated… but that doesn’t mean it can’t get better, can’t learn to maybe, just maybe, rise above the nigh-irredeemable morass that it is.
It just means that being all happy fluffy fedo-farts about it is living in denial.
Now it’s you I’d invite to look back, Arrendis. This is not where you’ve always been.
Miz noticed it, months ago, when she warned you you were growing darker. I noticed it, too. She and I agreeing is kind of one of those things.
Make of it what you like, Arrendis, but sounding like someone who’s about one bad night away from running off to join either Sansha Kuvakei or the EoM is something a little new for you. It’s not a good change, I don’t think-- not because you’re wrong necessarily, but because it seems as though what you’re coming to understand of this world is making you miserable.
It’s where I’ve always been. Expecting anything less than the worst possible outcome means not preparing for all eventualities. And Kuvakei and the EoM can, as the Gallente say, lèche moi où je merde. You don’t improve things by making people into mindless drones, and you don’t improve things by giving up everything.
Just because I’m not sugar-coating my position doesn’t mean it’s changed.
Minmatar rebellion wasn’t a “catastrophe”. Minmatar rebellion was, on a grander scale of things, predetermined, and, while there surely were enough signs for the wise ones to predict it, those in power were blind, so it happened.
The sin of pride. The hubris. That’s why it happened.
Look at Nauplius the Butcher or at the deeds of a former chamberlain (who’s struck from the Book of Records) for the examples. That’s why it happened.
God punished us for our sins, for our evil, and the tribes were merely a tool in His hands.
The Minmatar Rebellion wasn’t a catastrophe; it was a lesson.
A crucial lesson that the Amarr have yet to learn; namely that no person, culture or civilization is inherently superior to another and with some sort of manifest destiny to rule the universe.
That fact should have been the take away from the Rebellion.
And that no matter how much one dresses it up with pretty words and how much one justifies the act, putting the boot into someone’s neck is still putting the boot into someone’s neck. Sooner or later, the guy under the boot is going to start stabbing the foot, the shin, the knee and everything upwards from there.
Volcanoes do erupt, and some eruptions can be predicted, and definitely all of them were predetermined. It is not wise to build on a slope of a volcano, but still - many people live there, live in a vicinity of a danger that can strike them, that can burst now, this year, or next millenia…
And still, the consequences of the eruption will be catastrophic. Well, I did blame a Volcano, and I admit, I was wrong - it was caused by that little annoying hydrogen sulfide geyser that erupted in IGS and disgusted me to write such… emotional article about the Volcano.
But blaming Volcano in eruption does nothing - it just erupts and that’s it. Blaming people, who will build on its slope and will be sweeped by lava and pyroclastic flows doesn’t hold merit either.
I think the real problem is what we have at hand, is to find a solution to close this Volcano once and forever or somehow… isolate it.
Or at least somehow close these geysers so we won’t be smelling hydrogen sulfide eruptions again.
I don’t think you understand Matari psychology, sweetheart. Comparing them to a force of nature is just going to inflate their ego and make them proud.