Intergalactic Summit

Thanks, I'm assuming fits and such are on the channel motd? Shouldn't be a problem but I want to make sure I can actually field what's called for (I can fly just about everything bc down but possibly not some fittings).

Yes. As I said to Elmund, mail one of us if you have questions.

Well, this is an odd development.

I'm going to ask everyone to take a deep breath and step back from the argument here (I'm trying this new thing where I'm being reasonable and stuff. I'm sure it'll give way to Gooniness when I least expect it) and actually look at what got you all tearing at one another.

A comment was made about Ali's words tempting fate, which was followed by an exchange that, let's face it, is at least 50% levity with the 'antidote' bit. And if it wasn't levity, and you folks really do think that saying 'we're all gonna die' somehow wards off that exact event, you have got to go out with us the next time someone is drunk enough to let Dagrid lead a battleship fleet. We'll disabuse you of that notion right around the time he can't figure out why the battleships aren't keeping up with his perma-MWD'ing Proteus.

Ali followed that up by saying that when people don't die next time, credit could be given to the FC. And people jumped on her for 'hubris'.. when that won't even be her. She told the entire fleet that the command team was rotating on the next op, remember? So if she's saying 'or, you know, you could give that other person over there who's going to be running this a little credit', that's not hubris. She's not talking about herself there. Not even a little, unless she's managed to evade the 'you can't have more than one you running around or CONCORD kills you' restrictions.

As her 'real talk' explanation makes clear, the pride Alizabeth has been displaying isn't hubris, either - it's pride in you, in the pilots she's led in these fleets, and on whose shoulders and performance her success or failure have rested. She's talking you up, to the entire cluster. And the next time ARC's expeditionary group goes into a Hive, someone else will be leading them. Mittens' Kittens, let the woman go out with a win.

'Fate' is irrelevant. If fate is going to kill you, fate's going to kill you, and it doesn't care if you or anyone else said something cocky a week ago. If fate says it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, and worrying won't save you. If fate says it's not gonna happen, then it won't, and worrying won't help you. Either way, if fate exists, it's not going to tell you what it's planning, and it's not going to tell you why its planning it, so focus on the things you can control, and let fate go play with itself in the corner - that's really all it's doing, anyway.

Now, could she have been a bit more 'real talk'-y in her PR-focused statements? (PR, propaganda, recruitment, politics, it's all the same thing: how to win popularity contests and influence the foolish.) Of course. She should've been talking up the rest of the fleet more in the PR, rather than coming across (as she obviously did, given the reactions) like she thinks it was all her doing. That's a screw-up, and it's on her, and I think when she's not feeling like she's being backed into a corner and told 'YOU'RE TOO FULL OF YOURSELF, MISSY!!', she'd recognize and acknowledge that there are more productive ways to present the public face of this work. But you know, she's got reasons for being touchy where the Drifters are concerned.

Not gonna lie: she's a little obsessed. But really now, let's face it, the entire Amarr Empire's been a little obsessed over this. It's understandable. The Empress' death was a lot more than the assassination of a Head of State. The attack on Seraph was the biggest blow to the collective Amarr ego since the Elder Fleet romped all over the vaunted Amarr Navy pretty much without a care. And it was a blow that removed from the chessboard the very piece that saved you last time. If that's not a kick to the babymakers, I dunno what is. Heck, it dealt you guys enough of a dent to the codpiece that Ibrahim there was pontificating as 'confirmed fact' the idea that these ops demonstrate a clear intellectual superiority. I mean, you wanna talk hubris? That's hubris... and none of you called him on the nonsense.

Not one.

But when the surety and puffed-up rhetoric aren't coming from someone who owes their position to the accident of their birth, that's too much? That's being too proud of what her pilots have done? Gotta tell you, publicly busting down your most visibly successful FC? That's not gonna do your recruitment any favors.

I'm not gonna claim to be some 100% neutral, dispassionate observer here. But I've seen the work you do. It's damned impressive, and I respect each and every one of you who does it. I've also seen this woman in some of the darkest, most soul-crushing fighting the cluster's ever seen. I flew on her wing the night we lost six hundred battleships in a meatgrinder of a battle, just trying to get through the gate of our staging system. I know how hard every single logistics pilot in those fleets fought to try to keep each and every one of those crews alive. If someone's armor clawed its way back up from nothing, we felt like we'd won the Alliance Tournament. And every time a target lock flickered and died on another TFI, we lost a little piece of ourselves, and bore down to keep on fighting against death itself. You all know her, to one extent or another. She is not someone who is given to excessive personal pride or arrogance. She's busted her butt to do everything she can so you and your crews get through these ops and back home alive, against an enemy that the entire Cluster has been told is unstoppable. Where I'm from, she's earned some time to smug it up.

Yeah, definitely getting Goonier here. Ah well.

Elmund, if there is a god, that created all of existence, I would hope their ego is a little bit thicker than Progodlegend's. Seriously - the expedition's already faced a lot worse than what we faced on the last fleet, and came through it without losses. And if a little bit of chestbeating was going to annoy that which made everything, I'm pretty sure humanity wouldn't have lived long enough to master fire, nevermind Drifters.

I think your mistake, Arrendis, is assuming all the different people meant all the different things that were said. Different people said different things that are only totally crazy when taken on aggregate.

I say that as someone who could be furious at Alizabeth for abandoning her people to join a bunch of foreigners.

I am not furious at Alizabeth, however. Whatever my misgivings going in, I am always ready to give someone a chance to fail to disappoint me. She has consistently done precisely that - failed to disappoint. Decent pilot. Decent Fleet Commander. Woman seems to have principles, even. It's a lot better than others have managed and may whoever brings up the past lose an eye!

As someone who is in horde I second this statement

God didn't drop anything on Mittens. We lost some space. We lost a war. Life happens. Honestly, now, think about this: you're saying one person - any one person - is important enough to merit an omnipotent being who could simply say 'hey, your implants fail, poof, you're dead', moving half of the nullsec pilots in the cluster to shoot at a bunch of other people... uprooting and killing millions of people just among the baseliner crews involved... Heck, killing millions of crewmembers in the continuing wars that are the fallout, wars that don't involve that guy or his Alliance... one guy's ego is that important?

If one person, one heathen, is that important, then any one person can become that important in the eyes (or whatever) of the omnipotent.

So, you know... exactly who's dabbling in epic scales of hubris now?

Also:


Horde and GSF agree! THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

Heh. Actually, we likely agree on a lot of things - like CO2 needing to be shot in the head, repeatedly.

There is a God and He is on the side of the Amarr.

I think the usual way of putting this goes something like: "Omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent: pick two." It's shorthand for what I gather is a really long-running discussion among believers and theological scholars, the "problem of evil."

I'm not Amarr, myself, but, I don't think it's a good idea to just assume that no one's developed a useful response.

Or that this is a very good place to hammer out an ancient theological issue.



(If someone wanted to start up a thread on it, though, that could get really interesting!)

Any one of which would have earned them a general beating. Let's stay focused on the fact that they:

1. Killed a head of state.
2. Invaded a sovereign nation.
3. Are a potential existential threat not only to capsuleers but to all human life in the cluster.

If, at some point, they want to send a weirdo to the Concord HQ to plead the case that they've been horrifically misunderstood then we should extend them the courtesy of weighing up their claims. Until the time that they, at least attempt, communication we ought to classify them as straight up hostile and take the necessary steps.

With extreme prejudice.