I simply don’t have any fondness for highsec miners. Personally, I just find them easy to dislike. Even apart from what they actually do , their presence has always irritated me. I suppose you could say that I have a natural prejudice against them.
When I examine the phenomenon of the highsec miner, I put all of that aside. Do I despise them? Absolutely. But am I able to be completely objective? Hell yes! In studying the highsec miner, I am essentially a neutral party, as my hatred of the miners becomes a non-factor.
My objective analysis of the highsec miners has concluded that my prejudice against them is well-founded. They do deserve the disgust that people feel for them.
Highsec mining operations are crawling with botters. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. And nobody knows it better than the human miners. They mine together day in and day out, side by side. Thick as thieves.
Allow me to make one thing perfectly clear to the humans who mine in highsec: We suicide gankers will make no distinction between the botters and those who harbor them.
Whenever I tell a highsec miner this, I always get the same response. They whine that they would never help a bot, and surely if they ever saw one, they would immediately report the bot to CCP. So please, please , they say, leave the human miners alone.
Uh… No. I don’t think so.
Of course the highsec miners harbor the bots. They camouflage them. They act as human shields. If it weren’t for human players mining in highsec, the remainder would be known botters, and would be instantly banned. But worst of all, highsec miners contribute to an institutional system and culture that legitimizes botting.
As a matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say that all of the miners in highsec are bots. Even the ones who aren’t running any bots or macros. The human miners are bots, and they deserve to be treated like it.
Imagine it were possible to remove a very small piece of the human brain and replace it with an advanced piece of technology. This equipment is so advanced that it can completely take over the functions of the removed portion of the brain–so much so that the person is unaware of any change. Now suppose a second small area of the brain were likewise replaced by machine, and so on. Bit by bit, the brain is replaced by a computer. At what point do we say that the person is no longer human, but a machine? That the mind no longer exists?
You see, the dirty little secret about the human miners is that, in everything they do, they aspire to become bots. Like the bots, they automate all of their activities as much as possible. Everything they do is to maximize the time they spend AFK. If you listen to them, they take great pride in being elsewhere, doing other things. They think it’s cool to be AFK.
Now for a second thought experiment, one which I hope will end all doubt as to whether the highsec miner should be condemned:
What if CCP made it legal to use bots for mining? What if they made these macros and botting scripts freely available? What percentage of the highsec miners would use them?
The answer is obvious. Every single highsec miner, 100% of them, would use the programs and become bots. There’s not a single miner in highsec who would continue to mine manually. The only reason there are any human miners in highsec is that they’re afraid of getting banned. They want to be bots, every last one of them.
They’re guilty .
Now let’s turn it around. What if it were permissible to use a bot that enabled a suicide ganker to kill a miner while the ganker was AFK? Would they use it, or would a ganker still want to be at his computer to pull the trigger himself?
Once again the answer is obvious. The suicide ganker, unlike the highsec miner, wants to actually play the game. They want to experience the kill. They want to be involved in Eve.
That’s the fundamental difference between the highsec miner and the suicide ganker. The gankers are human. The miners are bots. The miners are quite literally less than human. They deserve to be wiped out, every last one of them. To the extent that they still feel anything, it should only be fear, humiliation, and misery.
And that’s not my opinion, mind you, it’s just plain common sense and logic. No one can argue with it.
