I would like to congratulate our honorable allies with this brillian victory!
How I see it, it doesn’t matter for me, is there Matari people, is there Amarr people. What I do care about, is that the system now is in Honorable hands, that it will be ruled by strong hand, bringing all the people disregarding their birth Law and Order, ensuring peace and prosperity.
Congratulations, and well done!
They were. The protestations of you and Captain Marshal xer Qosh to the contrary are a falsehood.
You also, again, like to ignore the actual reasons behind those sanctions.
No, I assume a group that is capable of making the determination of how to ameliorate the impact to achieve conditions all can overcome, vs a group that purposefully concentrates the impact on a small portion.
The position of the Caldari delegate is in line with that of Captain Marshal xer Qosh, so portraying it as a fringe position is dishonest.
And reasons?, until you can tell me with confidence that the sanctions have done less harm than those reasons, or that you give a damn what precipitated the pacification, you’re as hypocritical as I’ve come to expect.
How well does the Republic, or the Federation ameliorate poverty? On that front all of us have some things to learn from the State
Federation generally has the least gap between poor and rich in the cluster. We’ve got a pretty unbelievably high standard of living here. We still have problems in Gamma cities and Delta cities, as well as the not-officially-recognized Omega settlements, but more often than not, poverty isn’t as big of an issue here as it is everywhere else. It means things like our military suffers, but oh well.
I didn’t say it was a fringe position. Just a lie. Deliberate misinterpretation of the laws to try and score political victory. Sanctions have happened before. Some from Amarr’s side. We didn’t complain then.
Of course I do. What precipitated it was a biological attack against the Khanid people. The Kingdom chose, instead of helping those people, to exterminate them, along with anyone else who might be in the line of fire. The victims were, from the start, the slaves of Kahah. The Kingdom compounded the atrocity.
Do sanctions harm the lower classes too? Yes. But when the alternative is sitting back and doing nothing, allowing blatant atrocity to go unpunished, ensuring that it will be done again and again… there is rarely a decision that doesn’t lead to some harm, Saronu. Perhaps consider that people do not make decisions with fantastical projections of reality where you can 100% avoid any and all harm, but on what best moves you towards your goals.
And quite frankly, based on Amarr’s reactions so far to the sanctions, it was the right call. This hugely aggressive response shows that it actually hurt them. Maybe once Amarr is done throwing its tantrums, they’ll be willing to make changes. That’s a big maybe, though. More likely Amarr will do as it’s always done, and continue to stubbornly refuse to have done anything wrong ever.
HAHAHAHA
Seriously? You’re going to point to the State as a bastion of handling poverty? The State, which removes the poor from its records so that it can pretend they don’t even exist, let alone give them any help? Of the four empires the State treats its poor the worst.
The Republic, at least, has a fantastic safety net. I would know. I was living on that net after my family moved away from the Empire because our opportunities in Amarr after being freed were ■■■■.
Except for that whole ‘making the poor into un-people who don’t legally exist’, you mean? I don’t disagree that we’ve all got room to do better. But that doesn’t make enacting targeted sanctions on a specified range of goods and services, spread out across an economy of tens of trillions, nearly equivalent to a focused attack on civilian populations over a contract dispute between governments.
Am I to understand it’s ok to kill as many as you like if it’s untargeted? The scale of the Empire more than relevant to this discussion. Using the most pessimistic casualty estimate of nine million, and a reasonable approximation of the Empire’s slave population, twenty trillion. If nine slaves in every two million were to starve, that approximates the deaths of Kahah. In the event of any economic effect from sanctions, even with every effort given to mitigation that seems conservative.
A severe downturn of the sort that Kernher is thirstily speculating about could again conservatively see one in every hundred slaves starve. That would be two hundred billion, does that bring the stakes of this ‘contract dispute’ into sharper focus?
You are attempting awfully hard to justify an asymmetrical position to life with neither evidence nor proof to the evidence you’re using to do so.
Does the position that more people starve when a nation has less money need exposition for you? Or can you be trusted to find and read a book?
I can also talk you through the arithmetic tomorrow if you’re still struggling, for now I’ll be getting some sleep.
When a man walks into your home and threatens to kill your family or take your ISK, do let me know which you decide.
Oh Look! little miss lady claiming poverty! Has playing at war impoverished daddy’s coffers?
You do understand that ‘targeted sanctions’ means sanctions specifically crafted to impact certain kinds of products and services, right?
So, for example, if you’re going to claim that 9/2,000,000, or 0.00045% of the Empire’s population is going to die because the Republic and Federation have said ‘we won’t sell you titanium sabot XL for your artillery’… that seems pretty damned insane.
Do you have any evidence that the impact of the sanctions is killing people? Because I’m pretty sure the active military campaign Sarum began on Floseswin, specifically targeting the civilian population, is.
If it were our sanctions over Kahah that made Sarum so desperate they had to antimatter bomb civilian targets on a backwater planet, those would be damned impressive sanctions and I’d have to seriously devise my estimates of the relative power of the nations. (Of course, seriously, they did no such thing, and are not a reason but an excuse.)
I did try to raise this with less audience first, but…
Listen, everyone has friends in low places and when push comes to shove and going gets tough, those friends get called. More often than not, when people ride on the high horse and claim they won’t, it is either because they feel they do not need to yet, or because they cannot, having already run out of favors or being chronically unable to garner some it the first place.
If you cannot bring yourself to speak names that anyone with eyes can see on battlereports and anyone with half a brain had figured out prior to this battle anyway, it’d be andesh to at least say “24th, CVA, and allies”.
Elsebeth
Another battle long and hard fought, Aldy! It’s a pleasure flying with you and the others. Hope they’re sending you back home for a spell to reacquaint with that beautiful wife of yours before the next offensive.
That leaves you with, what… just a few more hours, give or take, before you’re back on the frontlines? 
I’ll agree to the nitpicking; I’m certainly more an ally than a crusader by far, and I haven’t based out of Providence for a long while now.
Since I see a deluge of pissing and moaning on the horizon for the matter, though, a couple things: No sides are innocent from receiving outside or unconventional aid, and I’m not convinced Aldy asked for more than the strength of the exact groups he mentioned.
Just this merc’s two kreds on the topic. Take them or leave them.
Not from me. I do not object to the fact that it was done, I object to the pretense that it was not.
The point of sanctions is to create pressure, this pressure is rooted in being economically deleterious. However targeted the sanctions are claimed to be, unless ineffective they contribute to a slowdown or contraction of the imperial economy.
Among the first spending programmes to be cut are often those without clear or imminent profit, healthcare and education for slaves, manumission. It is likely but not demonstrable that more will die as a consequence of these sanctions than half a dozen Kahahs, but for billions of those who will endure there is an end to hope. Something far more cruel.
Frankly I’ve never read so much rubbish, so many poorly constructed arguments, and such flimsy reasoning.
And I have to read first year student essays.
You all get an F.