Intergalactic Summit

There are many enemies of the State that spread lies and slanders about us and me in particular. But this one? This one is a real marvel. Tell me, gallente propagandists, in which gutter did you pick this little "diamond"?

Try harder, gallente bootlicker. You are just laughable. Don't bother me until you will manage to come with something coherent, or at least remotely resembling a truth.

Nonsense, Pieter, you're a loyal citizen of the State. There's no reason we can't hold differing opinions without one of us 'shilling'. That would just get into... well, Kim-esque levels of making everything about us.



Sensor data showing the existence or nonexistence of debris would compromise State security? Really?



Those situations, Pieter, tend to be the ones where the government takes at least a little bit of care to ensure the questions are never asked. In this situation, that would've been 'the freighters all self-destructed and look, we conveniently have flight data recorder logs that show it'.

The lies, in such things, tend to be competent, and thought out ahead of time.



Let's be clear: I've never said what those logs would show, only what those logs should show if the official story is true. The existence of debris around the freighters as they came out of warp is not a matter that would compromise State security. As for the freighters' recorders...

The recorders were in the hands of two groups: the freighter crews, and the Customs Service. The voice recorders on the freighters were working fine, and mention missile fire. Nothing about ships breaking up in warp (which you'd think they'd have noticed). Nothing about 'they know!' or any other indicators of suspicious activity among the crew.

So there's no indication of any motive for the freighter crews to have tampered with the data recorders. This indicates that we can, in fact, produce a reasonable hypothesis of who tampered with the data recorders.

Beyond that, all I've said about them is that it's mighty convenient and suspicious that they were all damaged in just the right way that between them, they can't account for any chunks of the missing minutes of flight time.

Ah, sure. When I say you don't know why they were suppressed I don't mean that we don't know it was because whatever is on them was being suppressed, I mean that we don't know what precisely is on them that we aren't supposed to know.

All we know is that whatever would be revealed would be worse for the State than the settlement - which says that there was no malfeasance on the part of the Quafe convoy and that customs killed the ships for some good reason which they accept responsibility for.

I'm just very uncomfortable with people talking about the moral and ethical implications when we don't know the true story - and knowing that we don't know the true story is about the only thing that we DO know.

Well, duh. The whole point of the settlement is to limit the vulnerability of the State Armed Forces to further civil law suits by the families of the dead. Even if they'd executed each crewman on video, the settlement would be worthless to the SAF without that finding.

It's the point of the settlement. Limited liability.

But this is a court of law, it is legally proper - not truth.

Yes, there are discrepancies and inconsistencies in the timeline of events as presented and I cannot pass any moral judgement on the issue without an accounting of the facts. I am leaning right now in best faith on the side of the SAF however I am also aware of the wider issues at play currently.

Second quarter corporate shareholder meetings should be coming up and if this matter remains in the public consciousness then those shareholders might push the Executive boards to place the matter before the next CEP quorum. Which would make sense since the matter involves both border security and the death of citizens by a State agency. The prospect of the SAF being placed before a CBT Special Investigation is, yes, is probably what the SAF leadership is trying to avoid. Because the CBT have their own moral obligation to discover the truth and if any wrongdoing occurred their special investigators have a rather well deserved reputation for being both apolitical and relentless.

This is why the settlement was pursued: to prevent any CBT inquiry. Given my own experiences in CBT courtrooms, being placed before an Arbiter is probably the last thing they want.

So this really is the game being played here. I don't want to pass a moral judgement on the SAF in the absence of all the evidence because it's the damn SAF. I'm also not blind to the inconsistencies here either or the potential palace intrigue that might have been going on because my conspiracy sensors are activated by the whole affair.

Given the sheer size of the entity in question, the legally binding sense is basically the only one that matters. Throwing pocket change at the problem to make it go away doesn't really strike me as anything more than 'here, now shut up so we can ignore this'.

In the waning days of that patriotic conflict that resulted from corporate secession sometimes referred to as The Exodus War as my direct primogenitor would have called it; a group of neuroscientists, cyberneticists and those kind of guys who think sticking nanometre thick meshes of electroencephalitic materials into people's brains just to see what happens explored that ever abstract of questions: Hey, how do we bring people back out of that wetgrave?

I'm not sure if results were as planned but hey out popped me: Infomorph ex nihilo. Guilty as charged.

So I am who I always am, which much like an AI programmer with a penchant for profanity is just stochastically... recursive.

Addendum: Yes, killing people is ostensibly morally wrong and all that. Just to remain tangentially on topic here.

Does it really seem like people wait for a really strong rhetorical position before saying nasty stuff about an enemy, though, Arrendis? It seems like in practice, it's always, "You're wrong, and awful people, and X is clear evidence of that." If X is something that hasn't been fully exposed and fixed, the cry is corruption and rot. If it has, the claim becomes that it was a symptom of a deeper problem-- so, also corruption and rot.

It seems like people generally look for the worst in their opponents, and find it.

I absolutely trust them to conduct an honest investigation. I absolutely believe they would sacrifice the careers of a few officers in the cause of the public smokescreen that would conceal any unpallatable findings of that investigation from foreigners.

Seriously. Get over the idea that the SAF believes the public has any right to know what is happening under the mask.