I’m not. And I don’t think anyone here should go trying to label themselves that way. We choose our fights, every single one of us. Don’t want to do it anymore—whatever ‘it’ is? Don’t do it. We can walk away. We can go someplace else, do something else. Nobody in this forum has made any commitment that you can’t end whenever you’d like. Sure, there’s consequences for doing it, but we can do it.
None of us are legally required to stay in the service. Nobody here is working on a state’s payroll and acting at the direction of their military infrastructure. Not even PIE is, and if they want to claim they are, they’re a bunch of liars until they can produce their books and show that they’re 100% on the Empire’s payroll and not bankrolling their own crap through market investments or running little side operations that go freelance bounty-hunting and such. If Aldrith and the Newelles wanted to fark right off and get the hell out of the warzone, they could do it.
We walk away when we want to. We stop flying for a few months whenever we decide we feel like it. We don’t draw a pre-determined government paycheck at predetermined regular intervals. We’re not soldiers. Some of us are mercs. Some are pirates. Some of us are explorers. And some of us are members of massive organizations with billions of employees, working in a framework that’s almost a kind of pseudo-state. But soldiers? I just don’t see that.
I agree with Arrendis. Independent capsuleers are not soldiers. We are not exactly civilians, either - some rules about combatants apply to us, say. I use the words [translator: warrior, combatant, member of an armed circle] or [translator: hunter, predator, guerrilla] for us, but neither of those translate well.
Your girlfriend has a quarrel with her kinswoman about, well, basically, you, and states in it that she wants the kinswoman to approve of her and the path she has chosen…
… and your reaction to that is “Great, now that that nonsense is sent away, maybe we can talk about my mastiff?”
I’m a corporate asset on retainer out of a sense of personal duty and obligation to my Home Company.
I don’t see myself as a soldier – that would require being beholden to the authority of a chain of command, ethical standards, and a uniform code of justice which do not apply.
The closest which I think applies to me would be something akin to Caldari corporate Direct Action Units. Their operatives conduct operations such as sabotage, assassination, kidnapping/hostage rescue, infiltration/exfiltration and other assorted dirty tricks of espionage but are officially disavowed by their Home Company.
So, I can say I act in accordance with the interests of Kaalakiota as an individual but my actions remain my own and no liability exists on the part of Kaalakiota for my actions since there is no complicity, I am a “lone wolf” and independent of the Company as a capsuleer.
Intara Direct Action once tried to sue the company I was CEO of as having ties to Kaalakiota, years ago, but as we can see it was dismissed as wasting the time of the CBT court.
Addendum: I think those who self-identity as loyalists place a lot of unnecessary effort being an “official” part of their home empires – like a soldier. Rather, I have found official disavowal combined with the extralegal and extraterritorial rights afforded to independent capsuleers under CONCORD of great utility. Being official brings with it a set of restraints along with that recognition, in my mind.
If your infomorph data coes corrupt today and you never wake up again, the universe will go fine without you, as it did in all those many many many years before you were born.
You are not responsible for anything, you make yourself feel this way.
Then you suffer
Then you complain about it
Stop hitting yourself in the head metaphorically, that is probably the origin of the headache you mentioned.
While not longer serving in official active military capacity, I did serve in the Republics Armed Forces in my pre-capsuleer days. So while I am no longer a soldier, you don’t really lose the training, and it is fairly easy to snap back to that state of mind. So while not a soldier in the technical sense of the word, I do see my self as a warrior.
No we do not. And we are not Imperial Navy. But we are an active chapter of a Military Order of the Amarr Empire.
The specific criteria for calling oneself a soldier that Arrendis is trying to impose just seems completely off base for understanding military service to Amarr, especially after the recent changes in the Pax e Kilizhe Do.
I think the difficulty for me is that a soldier should represent being part of a hierarchy with some form of military executive or commander-in-chief who determines orders in the interests of foreign and strategic military policies.
An independent capsuleer who claims being a soldier thus represents with their actions the foreign and military policies of their armed forces, does it not? In effect, that they are commanded directly by someone else and carry out those orders instead of acting autonomously to serve an interest.
