So many people so eager to virtue signal their friendly feelings towards the Intaki people and their determination to help. Perhaps that’s the problem?
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I have always been of the opinion that if the majority of the Intaki system’s population wish to leave the Federation, it would be a mistake, but the Federation should allow it.
The simple fact remains: the majority of the Intaki system’s population wish to remain with the Federation.
Buttes. 
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Noisy.
Okay, let’s see, who is this? Hm. Rhey Aziah, member of Tears of Reschard for 1784 days.
Tears of Reschard: “We remember.” Alliance history: none. War history: none. Member count … five.
Maybe a combat record anyway? Let’s see … six kills, ever; five retrievers and a capsule, all in the low end of Gallente highsec. Catalyst ganking, looks like. All over a year ago.
And she’s threatening the president of the Federation. Among other things.
Maybe all those belligerent statements are aspirational? Like, meant to attract the like-minded? Stir up supporters who might turn into a real movement? Or maybe the capsuleer corporation is just cover for an order of political assassins?
Even so there’s a maxim coming to mind, something about not offering contracts your butt doesn’t have the kredits to fill.
I wouldn’t be too quick to write off Tears of Reschard.
They are credited with some involvement in the death of controversial Khanid slaver Sa-Baron Atazil Kufail in YC121.
There has also been some debate regarding the potential consequences of their actions, closer to home in Intaki, so they’re certainly not to be encouraged either.
Hrm. So my half-jest about an order of assassins might have actually been closer to the mark than I thought? Sort of like an Intaki counterpart to the Templis?
Guess everybody’s got an extremist nationalist element somewhere, huh.
I just remembered why I stopped being a capsuleer and left the IGS!
It’s because everyone’s morality is inverted, and I mean that in both senses!
Did morality come into this exchange somewhere, Commander?
Or … did you mean in other threads?
It’s just the general vibe.
So … I feel like I’ve said this before, probably even to you: not agreeing with you about a moral matter doesn’t mean people don’t have a solid moral point, especially in their own contexts. Practical stuff (like making threats you can’t follow through on and/or are likely to result in everybody you know getting vaporized) is easier to criticize with confidence.
(And still maybe be wrong.)
That said … I don’t really disagree: we’re generally not the best people, and I’m not sure there’s a society outside maybe the Blood Raiders that would think we were. Maybe the power and freedom we’re given are too much? With those in combination with the sorts of things that are asked of us, I wonder how strong a soul has to be, not to be dimmed, darkened.
I mean, when I found one of us I was sure was a good person, I swore a life in service to her, disregarding our cultural and religious differences. That was how rare she seemed. (And, mostly, seems.)
Maybe that’s reason enough to walk away from the pod, but, to me … I guess, between “good” and “useful,” I still want to be useful more.
I mean I think I can boil it down to the fact that there are at least two people posting on this forum advocating literal and unrestricted genocide, but also that for 17 years I’ve watched people attempting to portray the actions of the Minmatar Republic and the Amarr Empire as equivalent in moral repugnance, when the Amarr Empire is a theocratic fascist empire that has committed multiple genocides, several centuries-long eugenics projects, chattel slavery of multiple trillions of people and the development of a viral toxin that tortures people to death if they don’t take the retroviral equivalent of heroin on a regular basis, while the Minmatar did a terrorism once or twice, maybe?
The Federation - the only enduringly democratic nation in all of New Eden - is somehow morally unforgivable for crimes it considers to be its greatest historical shame, but the man who dropped a carrier on two million civilians who were currently suffering under the same autocratic government that had bombed his homeworld is still celebrated as the State’s greatest hero.
Oh, and the State - whose animating historical grievance seems to be the denial of personal agency - is allied with the theocratic fascist empire that keeps slaves, and even helped build what is essentially mind control technology for them.
We live in a world where the cluster is regularly threatened by five major criminal organisations, including:
- A drug cartel that stole a superweapon with the ability to glass planets
- A major criminal syndicate that engages in extortion, theft and human trafficking
- A bunch of gleeful nihilist murderers with stolen military hardware
- Actual cyborg zombies
- A literal blood-drinking death cult
And in more recent times, we’re threatened by:
- The extremely violent and uncommunicative splinter faction of an ancient hypertechnic empire
- Dogmatic numerology-obsessed posthumans who lived in Space Hell and can eat stars (???)
But yeah sure the Federation are the bad guys right
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Well, at least we can agree on that, if few thingse else.
So, basically, Commander, I don’t think much of anyone (excepting maybe Ms. Kim) thinks of the Federation as the bad guys.
But, I don’t think all of us see democracy as a good thing. To you, democracy and personal agency seem to be clear and unquestionable positives. To a lot of us (like, pretty much the whole rest of New Eden) they look a lot like chaos, mob rule, and/or the tyranny of a majority with which our own cultures have little in common.
I don’t hate your Federation. I’ve visited it, spent weeks there, upwards of a month. Even if I still have questions about its intentions and long-term stability, it doesn’t seem like a horrible place to me. People seemed happy there, mostly. More than most places.
But I don’t have any place there. I’m not someone it can accept. I’m not someone it should.
It’s a strange thing, to be in line for coffee and realizing that, to everybody around you, you’re a villain. And that, by their own terms, they’re not even wrong. To them, I was something horrible: a mass-murderer who killed innocent and/or heroic people for no better reason than to sharpen my skill at killing.
Surrounded by “free” and happy people, I sank into such a depression I could barely leave my hotel room. I started having dreams where I was using my own blood as high-grade black calligraphy ink. It played a major part in parting me from PY-RE and returning me to SFRIM, and to the directrix’s side.
Your Federation’s not evil or anything. It’s just not for everyone, even if it thinks it should be. It’s been slow to recognize that not everyone wants to be thought of as an individual first. Even if it’s our governments and cultures teaching us such things, so what? They’re still key to our identities. They’re important to us.
Often, more important than our selves.
If you find yourselves being treated as the villains more often than you’d like … maybe consider that the things you want to free the rest of us from, the things you see as shackles, are things a lot of us really care about.
Maybe that makes us awful people, or pitiful fools, in your eyes. But that judgment that you seem to think is so obvious is precisely what we reject to begin with. You don’t get to judge us by your standards without being subject to judgment yourselves, under ours. You may not like some of the standards being used for that, but they make sense to us.
If we were powerless, if you had us at your mercy, it might be different. But it’s not. We’re in a position to judge, and to give our judgments teeth.
If that seems upside down and inside out to you, well, that just means the world wasn’t made for your convenience, either.
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I’m just going to point out that it’s only actual psychos that literally drink blood, not the vast majority of Sani Sabik.
Psychos like Funk, edeity, Chakaid etc.
I really wish you wouldn’t go speaking for ‘pretty much the whole rest of New Eden’ when you go conflating democracy and personal agency and decide that our views on one have to be our views on the other.
Democracy is chaos and mob rule, and definitely risks a tyranny of the majority. That said, the Federal system does provide a fair number of safeguards for most of their minorities. And, you know, they seem to like it, so good on them. It’s not right for us, but it doesn’t have to be.
Personal agency on the other hand… that is, for lack of a better word… holy. It is what makes everything matter. And even you, Aria Jenneth, know it. You are a weapon, and a sworn servant of someone else, and that’s fine. You chose that path, and you choose to hold to it. There is nothing stopping you from deciding ‘eh, screw it, I’m going back to piracy’ except… personal agency, the ability to choose your own path, over and over again every day.
The fact that you choose to hold to the same path doesn’t mean you aren’t making a choice. There have to be times when it’s not the easiest row to hoe, when you’d like to just slip back into being a rampaging murderhobo and just permanently end certain annoyingly yak-happy individuals with some precision terrorist bombings at selected cloning facilities… but you don’t. You don’t even attempt it. Because you can choose. Because you’re not just a bundle of knee-jerk reactions.
Personal agency is the only reason putting service to others—be it Clan, Family, Megacorp, or just one person’s oath to another—ahead of ourselves has any value at all.
Huh.
I feel like this might be precisely where the Matari outlook diverges from the Caldari, culturally.
(I kinda wish you wouldn’t try to tell me what I “know,” Arrendis. It’s a lot of why I don’t talk to you much. I’m not at all sure I know any such thing, and if that’s the case then treating it as something obvious seems more like a block in your own understanding, a philosophical prejudice, than a truism in my life. What’s obvious to you might not be, to me. It might not even be true.)
What, exactly, are people meaning by this word “fascist” that is being used so much in the past few days ?
It seems pretty vague and lacking a clear meaning other that “a person or government I don’t like”.
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As far as I am aware, word “fascist” is used to describe the gallentean regime that started the first Caldari-Gallente war (I believe they had president Duvalier back then).
By extension we could call Foiritan regime as fascist because they started second Caldari-Gallente war. Roden regime was fascist because they invaded Luminaire in violaton of treaty signed by Suoro Foiritan and Tibus Heth. And finally, current gallentean regime can be considered fascist due to their invasion into Intaki.
Though personally to show that I don’t like them, I prefer using words “Gallente swines”.
Fascism does not have a single agreed upon definition as I understand it, which makes it easily abusable to use as a descriptor for, as you say, “person or government I don’t like.”
However, there are some generally agreed upon characteristics of fascism:
- It is authoritarian, generally focused around a single individual possessing immense charisma
- It often positions itself as a “third way” outside of the normal political spectrum
- It tends to have a positive view of violence
- It can have a promotion of masculinity and youth
- It will seek to regulate the economic system of the nation
- It seeks to transform the nation into an empire
- It may have a political aesthetic of romantic imagery
All that said, fascism is a somewhat nebulous thing, and trying to pin down a single definition can be difficult.
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Why are you claiming on one hand that it’s describes something unlikable, and then are trying to make us like it?