Intergalactic Summit

Well, I'm not sure if you can call it dating, more like, ummm, hmmm, how to put this...

I have an occasional thing, with someone, but well, you know, a couple little issues keep getting in the way, you know, typical dating stuff. Should we go to this restaurant, or that one ? Does this outfit make my anatomy look weird ? Have you decided to renounce your heretical ways and embrace the True Orthodoxy ? I can't make this weekend, I already had plans. Sorry for not turning up, I had to eradicate some heresy, etc. etc.

You know. Typical 2nd century YC dating complications.



See, Nauplius has what the Scriptures refer to as "bad boy appeal". He is like, literally the wild-haired zealot with peculiar Scripture interpretations, that mothers are warned about in Scripture, where it is Written about how a Righteous Daughter should shun the attentions of wild-haired zealots, and instead go after more conventionally attractive young men and so on.

You know, rebelling against parental authority and all that malarkey.

I understand the difference others see in it. Just as I completely understand that there are other viewpoints and opinions on the matter.

They're wrong. They are as wrong as the people who like to claim that we're not responsible for bringing the Draifters down on our own heads. I still fully support blowing them all to hel because it's us or them, but make no mistake: we did that to ourselves, now we've got to wipe out the nornets' nest we kicked over.

So yes, there's plenty of different viewpoints about this. Mine is: a group of maniacs from one island wrote a book to justify wanton slavery and bloodshed in order to advance and expand their own power. Their descendents continued to use that book that conveniently said they were uniquely authorized to murder and enslave people... to murder and enslave people until they controlled their entire planet. They obliterated by force and cultural 'violation' every other nation and way of life on that world.

Then they spread their cancer to the stars. And they continued to tell everyone else they had two choices: either be killed or enslaved by force, and have their own unique cultures brutally sodomized into extinction, or agree in the total and perfect divine rightness of a book that says the Amarr get to kill and enslave anyone in the name of culturally sodomizing them until they give in and agree with the book.

Do it at gunpoint, or we'll shoot you and torture your kids until they do it.

And none of the other opinions, none of the other viewpoints, can alter those simple truths. That's what happened. That's what's continuing to be done to every still-enslaved lineage in the Empire. Anyone who says otherwise is either wrong... or a liar.

That's really all there is to it, Aria.

Open, Oh can of worm!

Only, Arrendis, whether what the Amarr did and/or do is awful wasn't the question. The question was whether there's no meaningful difference between them and the Sani Sabik, whose collective reaction to such a sentiment, should they get the chance, would kind of boil down to, "Challenge accepted!"

The fact that Sani Sabik seems to be basically the Amarrian error state is at the heart of me really not wanting to see the Empire fall even if that were a possible thing. The likely fallout from that would be....

It seems to me that one of the most dangerous sentiments in this cluster is, "It can't be worse." It's really, really rare for that thought to be true.

I'll never claim it couldn't be worse. Only that the Sani are different from the rest of the Amarr only in the particular flavor of self-indulgent religious justification for their obscenities. Just because the mainstream Amarr collectively say 'that's not what we want to do' doesn't mean that they wouldn't, if it was. Or that they wouldn't justify it with 'God said so'.

Also, Arrendis is bad.

If you're claiming they're only different in their "particular flavor," you're implicitly saying neither is worse than the other; they're just different flavors of an otherwise indistinguishable invasion.

That's really just a quibble, though, I guess. The sort of moral equivalency you're aiming for is mostly shrug-worthy for me. Being dismissed as barbaric and wrong by someone who doesn't share your context is something most people from the State can relate to.

Neither is. They're both the sort of thing that should be met with a bullet to the head from anyone who doesn't endorse them.

I think the Amarr hold that being Amarr makes you different from everyone else, and fully justified in commiting your atrocities because your 'Book of Why We're Better' says so. And until the atrocity ends, it should be opposed. If I thought we'd accomplish more than just annihilating ourselves and expanding the proportion of Matari in chains from 'some' to 'all', I'd be right there with Miz on burning the Empire down to ash.

That's a product of the belief, rather than the people. Thus the belief needs to change. Unless you're saying I should be purged as a slaver waiting to happen?