I have always said that every diplomat in the cluster knows the secret technique for finding out the plans and moods of the opposition. You know, the one called “I asked them”.
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Still, you have to admit that it’s nice to see she’s consistent about holding her own ego to be more of an authority than the CEP, CBT, or treaties ratified by the Megacorporations.
Subversion. You can start with the hard, aggressive approach, but you have to know going in that nothing you’re told is reliable. Once the subject ‘breaks’, they’re telling you whatever they think you want to hear. It won’t matter if they don’t know anything, they’ll make something up, just to get you to stop. If they do know something… they’ll still make something up, because what if you don’t believe the truth? Better to give you what you expect, so you’ll believe it.
But again, that means, as Utari says, you have nothing actionable. None of it can be trusted. So all of the effort in that section is completely counterproductive. The better approach is to conserve your effort and resources. Isolate them. Mildly neglect them. Human beings are social animals. You’ll see when even the brief moments of contact for feedings have become something they crave.
Then you offer them what they want… what they need. You let them get cleaned up, tend to any minor medical issues… and you give them people to talk to. You keep it light, conversational. You get them laughing, you laugh with them. If they cry, you offer sympathy and understanding, comfort. And you ask tangential questions… never approach what you want directly, but let them ramble in their answers as you ask about things that aren’t directly connected… but their ramblings can tell you the size and shape of the hole they’re trying to avoid talking about.
And little by little, as you follow-up with questions about the things they volunteered near (but never on) the edges of that hole… they’ll fill in the hole, too… mostly without realizing it. Mostly without actually doing it… but they’ll say things that fit together with things other captives are saying… neither one giving you anything critical alone, but together… narrowing that hole down immensely.
And then you look at how the hole fits into all of your other intelligence-gathering. If your intelligence arm is at least as good as a bunch of knuckle-dragging mouthbreathers in null, you’ll have a result that’s not only actionable… it’s solid, and your enemy will not ever know you have them… until your slug goes through their gray matter.
But then… I suppose they won’t know then, either.
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Honestly, at this point the degree of inflexibility and dogmatic adherence to her own bias is impressive. It’s so far past the usual rigidity one would expect of nationalism to be its own class entirely.
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Torture is silly for attempting to gain actionable information about anything other than umm… erotic preferences of the prisoner.
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I was deliberately misusing triggie grammar to annoy people.
With this message hereby I notify you that this misuse of triggie grammar did not annoy you, but as a matter of fact it did confuse me.
To Argue that artificial People are “soulless” would first Require a Definition of what a Soul Is.
If the “Soul” is Defined as the Emergent Properties of a Thinking Being derived from their collective Experiences and Memories, then… I can Demonstrate that I have a Soul, given that my Identical Sister is not the Same. She was Constructed with the same Hardware, uses the Same initial code, and Yet, she is very Different to Myself, in her Opinions and Interests.
From this Perspective, I have more Evidence that I have/am a Soul, than I have Evidence that human beings have/are Souls.
I invite @Aria_Jenneth for an Opinion on this, as I respect her Thought Processes, and would be Interested to know if She has a definition of what a Soul is.
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Well now I know what I’m naming my next combat ship!
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Just to be a little persnickety, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the opposite adjective doesn’t require quite the same thing? To be ‘soulful’ isn’t assumed to be in possession of a metahysical construct, only to evoke deep emotional resonance. e.g. ‘That music is soulful’ or even ‘that guy’s got soul’. Not ‘a soul’…
Just an observation.
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The soul is that which cannot be defined, the core of existence and sentience. It is not bound to the rational/irrational dichotomy that seems to limit the thoughts of the more materialistic on this forum. Machines are unable to comprehend this as they are constructed mechanisms, no more than a particularly advanced cog or gear. Humans are the “uncreated” the wellspring of divinity and existence itself that so many ( especially the Amarr ) foolishly try to attribute to a “God”. Your inability to understand this marks you as a machine, the beings molded from clay by the hands of the Divine. You are born to serve.
Then it’s literally meaningless.
So … it maybe won’t be surprising that I don’t think of soul as some separate, spiritual self. (Like most of my sect’s spiritually-educated, I don’t really believe in such things-- spirits and deities are best understood as guiding metaphors.)
To my way of thinking, the “soul” is simply the whole of the self-- not the body (or not just the body), not the mind (or not just the mind), not even both at once (though also that).
Your soul is you. It’s all of you, every aspect, past, present, and presumably future (though it’s maybe an open question whether that’s already extant or in a sort of continuous process of becoming until you die and your soul is complete). It’s every cup of coffee, every hand you’ve shaken or held, every word spoken, every footprint left. It’s every memory you left in another’s mind, every flake of dead skin you left for the dust mites.
It’s every thing and every life you’ve touched. Or ended.
It’s who you are, completely, the Totality of you.
So even if I don’t believe in it as a separate, spirit-existence, I still think it’s an important concept. My soul is everything I am, everything I have ever been. It’s the part I have played, the part I am playing, in time’s tapestry-- in the greater Totality of all that is.
It will be who I was when I am dead and every memory and record of me is gone, the form my life took in the weave of causes and effects. I need no god, nor any immortal life to follow, for that to be important to me.
And as for whether you have such a thing, Synthia, I think even a rock has a soul, easily as much as I do. Just, probably, a simpler and less troubled one.
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Moving this over here because it’s a massive tangent off of the purpose of that thread. It was just gonna be an offhand comment, but then I started explaining what I meant by the second sentence after the quote, and well… here we are. Feel free to ignore it, but it’s information that’s there if people are curious, I guess?
One has nothing to do with the other. The current fighting in nullsec is just the latest iteration of null politics. This one was set up two years ago at the end of the 14 Month War. Or, really, a year earlier, at the beginning of the war.
Four years ago, TEST and the Legacy Coalition began a war against Fraternity with the intention of securing space for Legion of xXDeathXx, who’d been evicted from their long-held territory in the north. Legacy didn’t want to commit to the kind of risk the offensive would take, and FRT didn’t need an offensive, since they were, you know, the people getting attacked.
So the war basically stalemated for like 8 months. Vily turned to the Mittani for assistance with the war, but the Imperium, at the time, was dealing with issues in Pure Blind, Fade, and Cloud Ring… and frankly, Mittens and Noraus got along better than Mittens and Vily did, at that point. So he said no.
In response, Progodlegend and Vily cut a deal with PanFam and FRT to end the ‘war’ against FRT and join forces in a megacoalition calling itself ‘PAPI’ (PanFam + TEST Alliance Please Ignore). Their goal: a war of ‘extinction’ (to use Vily’s words) against Goonswarm1.
BRAVE’s obligations as a member of the Legacy Coalition dragged them into it, even though, BRAVE’s top leadership didn’t want anything to do with the war. Their FC cadre, on the other hand, wanted what null FCs always want: senseless slaughter for kicks. This kicked off 14 months of (from the perspective of BRAVE’s non-FC leadership and much of their line, by the accounts I heard) BRAVE basically being made TEST’s whipping post. Whenever anything didn’t go right, BRAVE got blamed. BRAVE FCs ran PAPI fleets with BRAVE pilots in the ships, while simultaneously BRAVE got blamed for never showing up.
So when the war ended in, shall we say, not-PAPI’s favor, BRAVE, under the leadership of Dunk Dinkle, issued a public statement withdrawing from the Legacy Coalition and declaring that they were vacating their space in order to move someplace where they could get away from the politics of null and get back to trying to live their best Brave Newbies life.
They went to Pure Blind… which, at the time, was kind of wide open, with small groups living there, like We Form V0LTA. And for a while, everyone was happy with that.
Then FRT decided they wanted more space they could rent out. So they decided to move on Pure Blind. And they ordered their minions asked their friends in the greatly-reduced TEST Alliance Please Ignore if they wouldn’t mind getting the hell off FRT’s couch in Omist and going to Pure Blind to help with the war effort2.
That was last year. FRT, and Horde, after basically being fought to a standstill by BRAVE and V0LTA/BL0B, finally decided to commit their supercapital fleets to the punishing people for not meekly accepting the dominance of feudal landlords. Which, near as I can tell, is when BRAVE reached out to the new folks in charge of the Imperium and said ‘Do you wanna kill some keepstars?’
The PanFam/FRT main staging Keepstar in X47 comes out of its hull reinforcement in about 16h, I think, with another FRT Keep in Y-1918 in Branch coming out 2 hours after that.
Feel free to go watch the fireworks. Ignore the number of people dying, if you can. Just, you know, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking the null blocs give a damn about anything the Empires are doing.
There is no emergence of anything in HS/LS that is at all connected with the wars of Null.
1. FRT’s involvement in the war was performative at best, and they pretty much left early except for when PAPI basically screamed for max numbers for days ahead of time. Which, you know, was fine with Imperium leadership… after all, it’s what Mittens and Noraus agreed on when things started. Seems the only people who didn’t know FRT didn’t really care about the war… were Vily and Piggles. I’m not going to say that TEST got played from the start, because obviously, PanFam deeply wanted to see the Imperium destroyed, but… yeah, right from the start everyone but TEST knew that no matter which side won, TEST was going to lose. Either PAPI would win, at which point TEST, who were footing most of the bill, would find themselves fallen on next, or PAPI would lose, and Goons would have their traditional utter lack of sympathy for the brain-dead idiots who tried to stab them in the back.
2. There’s a reason most of TEST’s people from 3 years ago are in Horde, FRT, or scattered to the winds, these days. After 8 months of laying siege to a single constellation, PAPI leadership, fronted by PGL, promised everyone ‘give me 2 more weeks, and this is over’. They announced a massively expensive new Tengu doctrine (imported largely by the very people who were telling people to fly them!) to break the siege, and began the prep for their ‘final push’…
Which consisted of BlOpsing a tengu-fleet into the obvious back-end of the constellation where Initiative was waiting (BECAUSE IT WAS SO DAMNED OBVIOUS) and the covert-fitted Tengus died in the process of trying to refit for combat. At the same time, they fed close to a thousand Muninns into the spinning blades of 2 supercarrier fleets’ worth of fighters on the gate into the Imperium’s staging system. And before the fight was over, without so much as telling anyone else he was doing it, Progodlegend, architect of the war, importer of Tengus, mastermind who thought ‘hey, we can keep using blaster harpies against fighters even though all we do is die’… started unanchoring all of PAPI’s staging and extraction keepstars. All of them. Then, when they’d been forced to admit the ‘2 week’ thing was a scam to sell Tengus to line members(?!?!? Who does that crap?!?), Vily and PGL both step down and leave TEST leaderless WHILE EXTRACTING FROM A WAR THEY’VE JUST CHOSEN TO LOSE.
Seriously, anyone who ever follows either one of those guys again deserves to lose everything, I don’t care if they’re just standing behind them in a queue.
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Got it.
Well, the direct enlistment and the consequences of the mess you just told (Similar scandals and stupid moves will make people migrate between alliances as you said), could bring to interfere with the “Big 4” activity. Consider there’s a member of the Imperium who decided to fight for the Minmatar Republic.
Well, I hope that doesn’t go horribly wrong for them, then… my sources tell me there hasn’t yet been an ‘official’ policy announced, and if they’re in contravention of the one that does eventually come out… because of course one will… that could get awkward.
Thanks for this post Arrendis. I’ve been aware of these events without really understanding the sequence and relationships so a short, clear explanation like this is really interesting. Much of the posting on other GalNet fora assumes knowledge, is obviously unreliable or so filled with grudge splurging that it’s hard to wade through.
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Well, keep in mind that I’m still writing from the perspective of my own limited knowledge and POV. That obviously includes some things Joe Line Guy wouldn’t know… like Noraus and Mittens being pretty tight during the war and FRT more or less having a ‘yeah, don’t worry about us, we’re just here for show. Our real goal is make money and secure our own infrastructure across the north while these idiots attack you’ position about the war. (And for anyone who doubts that, just look at how FRT was immediately positioned to ‘encourage’ Horde to shift their focus westward and leave the space they’d formerly shared to mostly FRT ratters and miners.)
But at the end of the day, it’s still just my POV, and there’s a lot I didn’t (and still don’t) know about the maneuverings going on. For that, you’d need someone like a Black Hand director, and they’re not gonna talk.
With respect, Mr. Aloga, I don’t think it’s the tech that’s to blame. Cybernetics aren’t a new thing, certainly not in the Empire (though admittedly cloning kind of is). If they consistently eroded the soul/damaged the person, surely that would be understood by now? I could even see the Amarr banning them for that reason if it were so; they care a lot about the spiritual realm, even if it’s mostly their own. Going before their god maimed isn’t something I think most would be okay with.
My predecessor agreed with you, believed that repeated cloning eroded us. To me it looks like we’re contending with a much older spiritual enemy: power-- power, and a casual comfort with taking life I think might usually be rooted at first, in our case, in how little the cans of people we’re paid to shoot at look like people.
People tend not to pay much mind to those whose opinions can’t hurt them, so power has a tendency to corrode empathy for those who don’t have it. Combine that with a sometimes-even-cheerful relationship with death, and … well, look at the behavior of various warrior elites down history’s course, playing games of strategy among themselves with actual armies, vying for power and prestige with living, breathing humans as their pawns.
I’m not sure we’re very different from such folk. To me it seems like we’re callous, arrogant, and cruel in all the same ways.
Just another elite class of killers.
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Here’s a notable difference: Capsuleer delusions of immortality. Those old-school ‘Warrior Elites’ went out to prove their worth and wagered their bodies and lives. They faced an undeniable risk of annihilation and non-existence, and accepted it.
What ‘risk’ do maniacs who believe themselves immortal face? What courage is there in someone who believes the worst he’ll suffer is the inconvenience of losing a ship—and replacing the tool is more a concern than replacing lives?
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