You celebrate and proudly brag of your ability to unleash sudden, brutal war and invasion upon a peaceful people, and we’re the ‘barbarians’?
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Simple question with a too-simple answer set, Arrendis. I’m lying if I pick either.
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So, ‘I don’t know’?
How about this one:
Do you think it is likely that the Amarr will be successful in using non-violent means to convert absolutely all of humanity to the worship of their god?
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There is at least one gargantuan and probably wrong assumption in that question you just asked. Also “I don’t know” is accurate but also at least somewhat misleading.
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Then please, explain both issues.
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Melisma Ramijozana had it exactly right.
Now do you all see why I’m more inclined to believe what Arrendis and Miz believe? You can’t reason with those who are unreasonable or their self-deluded lackeys.
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We have slightly different positions. While I believe the resumption of violence is inevitable, and at this point that we might well be better off attempting something on the order of the Elder Fleet at a much, much larger scale, I’m not against reasoning with Amarr loyalists or their retainers if our discussions have even a chance of turning more Amarr against slavery. It’s not like I can start a war against the Empire, you know?
I’ll just keep preparing for war while I talk.
Edit: Wow, accidentally deleting one word while re-writing a sentence changes the whole meaning, huh?
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Okay. The two are actually a little linked.
So, first, I don’t think the Amarr will knowingly abandon their mandate while remaining as they presently are. However, by approaching things peacefully, they become merchants in a crowded market, one where they’re not limited to sectarian competitors. Sure, they’ve got a lot of drive and a deep pool of resources to draw on, but cornering the market on belief, or coming close to doing so, is far from a foregone conclusion. And certain players, notably Federal culture, can be depended on to push back hard in their own distinctive ways. At the same time, certain pre-cornered markets-- I’m thinking here of the State-- will remain largely or completely closed to them.
Some Amarr seem to assume that this will all go really smoothly and their faith will be a majority in the Federation and Republic within a few generations, but that’s pretty optimistic. In practice it probably will be a slog lasting many Amarrian lifetimes, with progress sometimes being made and sometimes lost. As a thought, it might go fastest when people push back violently against peaceful measures; martyrdom can be thought of as a religion’s opportunity to look its best. But, also, in order to compete in all the different places it’s going to be, it’s going to be adjusting to a lot of different circumstances. Further, it’ll be developing at least a small following in a whole lot of communities, and picking up a lot from them in turn. It won’t remain unchanged and unchanging. Actually it’ll have interesting new influences coming in all the time, even if its total number of followers is holding steady or probably even in decline; the faces won’t always be the same ones.
I don’t think the end of this is foreseeable, because I don’t think it exists in the foreseeable future. They’ve really got their work cut out for them, and the work itself will change them in ways we can’t really predict. Will they give up? Likely no. Will their mission still look very much in the end like it does now? Haha-- ah, I hope I live so long as to see what it becomes, but I really doubt I will.
In the meantime, I don’t see the functional strategic stalemate shifting all that much, and the more the culture puts into a peaceful approach the less ready they’ll be to pursue a forceful one. Of course, that can always change, but … if violence and vengeance are sort of cyclical-- violence breeding more violence-- hopefully peace can create its own self-reinforcing cycles. Even really bitter vendettas can be set aside, and historically often have been; how else did we create the mega-states of today, with populations way up in the trillions?
The future’s more hopeful, to my eye, than you seem to want to make it, Arrendis. The Amarr are very patient; it’s a virtue of theirs. But I think the future down that path is more interesting than they, or anyone, can anticipate with any certainty. And I think their plans are going to lead to very surprising places!
With luck, they won’t be disappointed to find themselves there. And hopefully, neither will you.
Edit:
PS: I’m already an abolitionist, not that there’s a major reason for the Amarr in general to take my opinion very seriously. But you knew that, true?
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Violently. Even the Federation has grown and expanded through violence and gunboat diplomacy.
You say things will change in unforseable ways. I disagree. Right now, there is nothing in the sociopolitical or military landscape that will prompt any ‘unforeseeable’ changes. The Amarr have been adopting a less violent, less confrontational approach… since being met with violent resistance they could not overpower. Nothing else has changed their calculus. Ever. And since that time, they have consolidated, re-entrenched, and engaged in a military buildup. Their international moves have been power plays to serve either their own military readiness—such as probing strikes into the Federation—or to weaken their prospective victims while feigning magnanimosity.
As for ‘adjusting’… the adjustments they will make are the same ones they have made again and again over their history: they’ll adjust whose blood they’re using to ink their scriptures, and not a damned thing otherwise. As you say: the Amarr are very patient. And they are ambushers, murderers, rapists. Have they shut down the breeding facilities? Have they repudiated striking down an unknowing, unaware, peaceful society that offered them no thread?
Have they even apologized? Or are they even now, in this thread, complimenting themselves on the civilized behavior of murdering, pillaging, and kidnapping defenseless civilians who didn’t even know they exists, let alone harbor any ill-will?
I think you’re deluding yourself, Aria, because you don’t want to believe anything less of them. You are surrounding yourself with illusions, and you offer nothing more than ‘because I like to think of it this way’ as evidence, when the history of the people whose virtues you extol indicates precisely the opposite.
PS: I know you are, yes. That doesn’t mean all of the people observing this discussion are. And maybe some of them will take a long, hard look at themselves. Maybe some of them will just take a long, hard look at a 1400mm artillery barrel and wonder if they really want those pointed at their children. Because until they renounce the Reclaiming, they are a direct threat, and they should expect that threat to be met just as directly.
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Would you expect otherwise? If she said or felt otherwise, it’d speak rather ill of her own choices.
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The terminology is correct: any society outside of God’s civilization in the Holy Empire of Amarr is a barbarian one.
Not always violently, though.
You speak in a lot of absolutes and extreme language, as befits an extremist. You ask for things you know they can’t see as reasonable, and then seem to assume I’ll agree that they are.
You’ve said that Miz has high expectations for people, so that they’ll fail to meet them and she’ll get to enjoy being outraged. Maybe that’s a lot of why she and I get along so badly: I expect very little from people, but I don’t blame them for the parts they play. (No free will, remember.) They are who they are, and there’s no point in cursing them for it.
Compassion’s easy for me (and I apply it indiscriminately, someone might say), while anger strikes and fades. I can’t share your outrage, and I don’t believe in justice-- a concept we use to comfort ourselves in a reality so much messier and harder to navigate than we want to admit.
I don’t blame you for your anger, either, or your belief in its rightness and utility. But the world I live in isn’t a world of “nothing… Nothing… Ever.”
So I will speak honestly and say: I understand your belief. I do not share it.
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I don’t care if they feel anything is unreasonable. If someone sees ‘maybe we were wrong to rape people’ is unreasonable, do you consider that person someone you should be supporting?
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Haha … ah, gods. Arrendis, I’ve never even been able to stay very mad at Nauplius.
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I didn’t ask if you’d be mad at them. You didn’t make it a practice of supporting Napkins either… though of course, that was only really hardened after it was your ox he gored.
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I don’t follow the Directrix because she’s Amarr, Arrendis; I follow her because she’s herself. The “Amarr” bit is a part of that. Not being afraid or angry makes it pretty easy to accept that part.
I began this path because I needed to heal, and she could help me do that. I continue it largely because I think this is where I should be right now, at her side. It’s not something I expect many others to understand. (People have been known to mistake it for romantic love, which is pretty funny.)
It’s my place to be, my part to play. My home. My life. And I think I can be useful here.
I don’t believe in evil, and I wouldn’t think the Directrix was evil even if I did. And you don’t have to be evil, either, for me to get in your way. And if you, or Miz, or any other self-righteous Matari consider me evil because of it?
That’s fine.
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I didn’t ask why you follow Luna, either.
I’m asking if you consider someone who sees ‘rape is wrong’ as unreasonable to be someone you think you should be supporting. Do you think Luna feels that’s a reasonable statement? I’d think she does, but you know her better than I do.
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I’d think she’d consider that a misleading and very emotionally loaded way of describing what the Amarr do, Arrendis. A discussion-ending one, even, like, you using it is a deliberate provocation, an insult. I’m aware you look at it as literal, or as good as, but I hope you’ll understand if I also understand why the Amarr don’t look at it that way at all.
And if I don’t share my own thoughts.
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In the breeding facilities, slave women are impregnated without consent.
How is that not literally rape?
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Yep. They do that. You’ve also used it as something more metaphorical regarding cultures and so on in the past, so thank you for clarifying.
And I think the ideas of the “Pax Amarria” have a way better chance than yours, of getting them to stop. After all, all they need to do to defeat yours, is win. And it’s not clear to me that your chances are even 50/50, even in the long run.
If you attack them, and they crush you this time too? End the military stalemate, gain the upper hand, the momentum, AND their cultural sense of military superiority (badly damaged ever since Vak’Atioth)?
If it comes to that, odds are strong that you’ll lose your leverage. And we’ll lose ours. And back to Reclaiming by the sword they will indeed go.
Well done.
So, sure. I’m on the same side as people who systematically commit rape. I wish they’d stop. And I think what the Society stands for stands a better chance of getting them to, than you do.
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