Intergalactic Summit

Who is rolling expensive cigars mr. capsuleer Brutor while your brothers are languishing in slavery and you sit back, a convenient ideologue, saying how wrong it is to purchase your brothers out of slavery. I don't have the convenience of rubbing chin and making ideal philosophical statements about the morals of buying back freedom. Debate what I'm doing as long as you want, but don't be such a hypocrite while your tribe's brothers suffer under the yoke of slavery. Some of your brothers are part of the 157,500 people aboard my ship right now on the way to freedom. Debate with them about the morals of me buying their freedom, Mr. "Free, Wealthy, Capsuleer." Also you ought to know by now that you can't contract slaves. However if you want to bring liberated slaves to any one of several Freedom Centers, there are many who will gladly receive them. Saying that it is wrong to buy the freedom of others is just a rich man's sorry excuse to do nothing but keep his money to buy more weapons so he can play tough man while his brothers continue to suffer under slavery. If anyone is pathetic and shameful it is you. You ought to know better. By the time it took me to write this, you could have freed a whole city of your brothers, but you won't because you love your ISK more than you love your brothers. That is the truth, that you know too well. If not, prove it. Where is your moral superiority now? This is the last time I waste my precious time talking to you.

This is part of it, but not entirely. The ISK might not go to the Amarrian war machine; it might just go to paying for the slaver's new villa, or his funding a new smash-and-grab operation to obtain new "merchandise".

Purchasing slaves in order to free them is akin to negotiating with pirates or paying extortion fees. It only rewards and encourages the slave traders. It is only a short-sighted solution to a much greater problem. If you used all the ISK in the galaxy to purchase every slave out of freedom, the next day there would be more slaves on the market than ever before. It is not a route to a permanent solution, nor to one that actually dissuades slavers from their behavior. Nor is it one that stops them from slave-trading permanently, like death is.

I will indeed pay a billion ISK if I am delivered a million liberated slaves, regardless of the method of trade -- be it contract, direct trade, or even arbitrated 3rd party trade. I was not aware the contract system does not work as I have never been involved in the trading of human beings before. Edaine apparently has had experience, though.

At any rate, that is irrelevant to my initial message, and is more of an angry response to being baited with hollow proclamations of heroism in exchange for ISK. My point was exactly that that sort of thing is why the STON announcement did not receive a super-positive reaction: abolitionists, freedom fighters, and heck, even slavers, prefer action to rhetoric. These super-frequent STON threads contain a lot of the former, and very little of the latter.

You have edited your post and thus I think it merits me addressing it. I, too, agree that the Amarr material wealth is inconsequential (hey, more things for me to blow up). However, a wise merchant who sees a never-ending slew of buyer demand for a certain "product" (in this case, slaves) would bump up the price, and do whatever he can to get his hands on more "product". In this case, it's extremely simple: kidnap and enslave more people. This is an unacceptable end result -- we Minmatar end up again abused by the Amarr for personal gain.

Also: if a million people take a billion isk to save, and there are trillions of our people still enslaved by the Amarr (actual numbers unknown), and considering prices are going to rise because of the shenanigans above, and assuming no re-capturing of freed slaves (which would drive the cost up even more) the total cost of freeing everyone in the Amarr empire would be upward of 1,000,000,000,000,000 ISK, or one quadrillion ISK. To me it is a counterproductive scheme that can never be truly brought to fruition.

Still, I suppose it's better than most Matari people who just shrug and go about their days while trillions of our brethren remain enslaved.



You truly are the master of thread-management. I am awed.

It's alright, I often do the same.

I am perfectly fine with differing approaches towards the goal of freeing our people. When I said I appreciate the work that the Disciples do I was not being sarcastic. The reason for my angry ranting was being offended by the implication that my own uses of ISK, be they more violent than STON's, are not legitimate.

Glad there are some level-headed people around, though.

Apology accepted, though unnecessary. I don't want to pick a fight with people with whom I share an objective -- we have enough enemies already. As such, I also apologize for my response outburst.

We have differing approaches to liberating our people. A compound approach may even be the best one. We come for our people!