Off-Topic Thread vol. 2

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
6184

Yeah, that’s pretty much what the whole Cal/Gal warzone is, Ms. Dallocort. There’s more to it of course, but there’s a reason Heth’s invasion of Luminaire, the retaking of Caldari Prime, was so popular in the State when it happened.

As for you, personally? You’re one of probably billions or even trillions of similarly-arrogant Gallente, and I’ve long-since lost my taste for honor duels (possibly on account of someone who was … very loud about them).

You’re in EM, anyway, so we’ll probably be on opposite sides of a fight sooner or later. I’ll just wait for FC to call you primary.

6185

And this is why the Federation must be destroyed.

This post written by my device’s predictive text facility.

6186

Exactly.

#1 way to unite the likes of me with the likes of Ms. Kim: try, as an outsider, to tell us who we are and what that means.

(Of course then Ms. Kim starts arguing for literal genocide or something very close to it. There’s “Leave us alone!” which is a near-universal Caldari sentiment and then there’s “Get out of our universe!” which is not.)

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6187

Well, first, let’s remember that Adams is a separate thing from whether there is one Caldari culture.

But while Adams may live in, and work for, the Federation, he’s not the Federation, and he isn’t trying to dictate to you what it means to be Caldari. Instead, now you are all trying to dictate that same thing to him… You’re insisting it’s so because the State Caldri say so.

Dictating right and wrong because of majority opinion… Stop being such… Feds. :wink:

He doesn’t seem to think so. And identity is like any other possession: if you want to control it, you’ve got to demonstrate the ability to stop other people from using it. Which leaves you in the unenviable position of having to enforce that claim.

Brand him a traitor. Shoot him on sight. That’s all well within your purview. But until you can stop him from doing it, he’ll keep identifying as Caldari. Good luck.

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6188

I know being confidently incorrect is your entire brand on the IGS, but seriously, stay in your lane.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

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6189

I mean, if we’re to take that post at face value, and assume:

  1. I do, in fact, have no idea what I’m talking about, and
  2. being confidently incorrect is my entire brand on the IGS

Then wouldn’t you be making that my lane? :smiley:

Regardless, Adams has made his bed, and he’ll have to lie in it, and that includes being called a traitor and a turncoat, which I think can be said to be accurate.

It also includes being told he’s forfeited any right to call himself Caldari, but that presupposes the existence of only one Caldari culture, where there are at least two. It’d be interesting to see if he’s made any efforts to hew to the ‘Raata Caldari’ culture as opposed to the State or Megacorporate Caldari culture.

Whups! Sorry!

That should be: wouldn’t you be making that my lane, Your Majesty? :smiley:

6190

What a very Gallente thing to say. Democracy in action, eh?

6191

So does that political party have a fleet of spaceships or what ? Nobody seems to want to answer my question in that thread, so I may as well try it here.

6192

:person_shrugging:

6193

I’ve been a lot of stuff, over time, not much of it very honorable in Caldari terms. I’ve been a criminal, dissident, exile, merc (that’s considered honorable, btw), murderer, even kinslayer.

But one quality my predecessor and I hold in common is this: we are, I am, no traitor. To do that, to cross that line, would be like death, like a suicide that kills body and soul together because it would sever me from my identity. It would kill me as a person in Caldari eyes; what remained would be a sort of wretched echo, like a smell that reminds you of a horrible thing someone did to you.

The voice of such a remnant is without weight or meaning.

It’s subjective. Of course it’s subjective. We know that and we don’t care. He is worse than dead to us. The Caldari honor their dead.

If he’d just gone to join the Raata and live a life in peace, I could have respected that at least. But he didn’t. He’s a fighter, a proud killer of his own once-kin. He is not only dishonored or honorless but someone to whom the concept no longer even applies: un-personed, soul-and-memory-dead, not-of-us.

He’s been baited in by the enemy, tamed and turned to kill his kin. It’s the worst, the lowest and most contemptible fate.

His opinion in this matter carries the same weight as yours:

Dust. Or the memory of dust.

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6194

The problem with claims like this, Aria, are that they’re inherently contradictory. Just making it proves it false. Responding to me to tell me my words hold no meaning or weight… just shows they do, or you wouldn’t bother.

Consider this: when’s the last time you’ve seen me respond to statements you know I disagree with, from say… DK? She can say whatever she likes. It means nothing.

The moment you can all utterly ignore Adams, treat him like just another nameless, faceless FDU pilot… that will be the moment his voice has no weight or meaning with you.

6195

The problem with claims like this, Arrendis, is that they originate in an idealized ether that has little connection to the real world. I respond to you not because I value your opinion on who the Caldari are and how they should live (and who counts as Caldari) but because I want you to stop trying to tell us who we are.

The alternative to me acknowledging it by telling you to kindly bugger off is to resort to the same tactics you claim to favor vis-a-vis the Amarr.

The Gallente have for actual, literal centuries, been trying to do that. Their first major in-person mission to Caldari Prime was by the CDS, the “Cultural Deliverance Society,” which really says it all, over seven hundred years ago. They probably did some good work; the Caldari were fractured into about a bajillion little competing post-Raata kingdoms at the time, but having been beneficiaries of an uplift doesn’t make the resulting bubbling stew of resentments even a little less poisonous.

To put it another way, consider what your people are prepared to do to tell the Amarr to let go of what you see as yours, go away, and leave you alone. This is our own equivalent, and you might have noticed that just ignoring the Gallente doesn’t make them shut up. It just makes them talk louder, and in more ways.

What works, historically, is a closed, militarized society, a prickly sensibility, lots and lots of guns, and a lack of concern for non-Caldari human life.

Even then, the Federation has persisted in trying to enlighten all us savages by literally selling us their culture (holoflicks and the like). What they managed to do was corrupt our leadership. Do you have any idea how damaging it is to get a Gallentean-style libertarian heading a Caldari megacorp? There’s no philosophy short of the Sabik that’s so utterly self-serving, or so utterly incompatible with Caldari culture.

In short, Arrendis, this is our equivalent to your problems with the Empire. If you persist in this line of argument, yes, I might ignore you, and also thank you for your contributions to ensuring that any realignment of the Caldari State to the Minmatar Republic fails.

Maybe in the end not even anti-imperialists can resist the temptation to tell each other how to live, what to think, what to value.

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6196

Maybe… but I’m not doing any of those three. All I’ve done is point out that there’s more than one culture with a valid claim to being ‘Caldari’, and that Adams is going to identify as Caldari until and unless you somehow stop him.

6197

That is not all you’ve done.

That statement frames his identity as objective fact, establishing our perspective as in conflict not only with his perspective, but with reality itself.

The Raata presence in the Federation is awkward in a way for everyone concerned. As you know I love problems that illustrate the artificiality of categories and borders so this, naturally, delights me. It’s also actually great that they have someone speaking for them. Certainly someone should.

But it’s just a cataclysmic shame that it’s Adams. He does not represent a gray area. He represents a black one, like an event horizon.

6198

Nope, because his experience is 100% subjective. The State can’t invalidate that, because he’s defining ‘Caldari’ according to what it means to him. So, to him, it’ll be valid. That’s all. I will, though, admit that I wasn’t explaining myself correctly in my initial off-the-cuff comments, though, and for that I apologize.

6199

Ah. Well, it’s why I jumped in to begin with, so yeah.

(Isn’t the point a little over-obvious, though? I mean it’s more or less a tautology that Adams thinks what he thinks.)

(Or part of a grim witticism. “You can’t change what’s in somebody else’s mind,” someone says. “Just give me a minute on that,” replies the warclone, powering up the rail sniper and chambering a flechette.)

Anyway, accepted, speaking for myself.

6200

On it’s own, sure, totally over-obvious. But it was coupled with the reminder that there there isn’t just one culture that has legitimate claim to being ‘Caldari’, which makes it much, much harder to issue blanket assertions that someone ‘isn’t Caldari’ just because he no longer adheres to one of those cultures.

It’d be like claiming the State ‘isn’t Caldari’ because they abandoned the old ways, and I think you’d agree that’s patently ridiculous.

6201

Well … only, I’m sure at least some among the Raata believe exactly that. There is … sadness, to me, in the way the Caldari have reacted to their experiences with the Gallente. They learned a lot, and my own people and other client peoples have benefitted, perhaps greatly, from how badly the Caldari wanted not to do to us what the Gallente had done to them.

But the State Caldari are a people forever preparing for winter. Only in space, there is no winter, so we identified a substitute to forever prepare and guard against: the Gallente, the Federation, those not-of-us who would steal our traditions, steal our identity, and leave us as soft and weak as they are. Maybe that’s why we adopted winter as our sign and seal: cold-gleaming metal, brutal edges, harsh realities.

In our determination to remain as we were, we changed ourselves. There is sadness in that. I couldn’t blame the Raata for seeing it also. I hope they don’t judge us harshly for it, but I’m sure some do.

That would also be sad, if it’s so.

(The attentive might notice that I occasionally switch from including myself among the Caldari to not. I’d like to claim some kind of consistency but it reflects an ambiguity in my own background-- I’m culturally of the Achura, a sort of poor cousin and client people to the Caldari, but also half-Caldari, Civire, by blood-- so basically whether I do or not depends mostly on how it feels in the moment.)

(Either way it’s unambiguous that I’m from the Caldari State generally. Just, it tends to depend on whether I’m thinking more from Mother’s people’s perspective, which is related but a little distinct, or from that broader whole.)

6202

I’m sure some do. But, you know, they’re not the sole arbiters of Caldariness any more than the State is.

I’d say just the opposite: In space, you’re always looking for hard-to-get resources, and one mistake from freezing to death in an unforgiving environment.

And as a reminder of where the State Caldari had come from, and what shaped them before they left, yeah.

6203

Yeah, see, this is where you start sounding like you’re speaking for reality, Arrendis. One thing I can say with some certainty for any of the contenders for the title of “Caldari”: they’re not going to care much what anyone outside that circle as they define it has to say on the matter.

Let’s say the two circles are mutually exclusive (I don’t think this is the case, mind). In that case you’d come closer to the overarching reality if you said that they are each the sole arbiters of Caldariness-- each, immutably, implacably, in its own mind.

Nah. Maybe that’s how it is on Matari ships or stations (and I don’t think even there) but food and fuel’s not generally much of a problem (gravimetric fusion’s kind of our thing, you know? And, you know, hydroponics, etc.) and while space is very unfriendly if you’re underequipped even Caldari Prime’s winters didn’t historically suffer from a lack of air.

Space is its own thing.

Well said.