Intergalactic Summit

You do? I use mine to increase the rate at which I master new skills and gain knowledge . Sheesh, you people will misuse everything to further your putrid cause, won’t you? Now I wonder what mischief you vile bunch cause with the help of something as innocent as a doll.

Edit: You fill them with drugs?!?! NOOOOOOOOO! YOU SICK FUCKS!

Toviyah,

Before you go badgering you own conscience, I would urge you to consider a few things.

First, violence and conflict are not always inherently evil nor is the death of someone always an unspeakable atrocity. Human life is something not to be trivialized or wasted and it possesses a value that should not be measured, but there are circumstances under which the taking of a life is an acceptable, if unfortunate, necessity.

Second, while you provide implants that may be used to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of capsuleers who would commit "unspeakable atrocities" do not be fooled into thinking you are complicit to those behaviors. A swordsmith is responsible for the making a sword, not for how the sword is used. The sword may be used to defend life or take it, to end conflict or to cause it. The one whom wields the sword bears the weight of responsibility for its use, not the one who made it. Anyone who argues otherwise is seeking to justify themselves through associated guilt.

See, here I disagree with you. Under no circumstances are we to take human lives if the cycle of violence is ever to stop. Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus, if you will. We capsuleers have it even easier than most people. We do not even have to kill in self-defense in order to save our lives. As such, a murdering capsuleer is even more unacceptable than any other one.

Don’t worry, I won’t be.

Indeed you are or else you wouldn’t be able to roam the skies on your sanguinary path right now.

Oh, the humanity!

Indeed. Someone who kills did so without the intent of doing so. Someone who murders either accepted the risk of killing a person or flat-out intended to do so.

I fully agree with you up until this point. Yes, violence will likely never be entirely banished but the least we can do is to keep it to the spontaneous “crimes of passion”. And yes, it takes indeed an equally strong-willed resistance to oppose the forces you described. In fact I almost prefer courageous people who are willing to use violence to cowards who will stand idle. Make no mistake, my pacifism is not one of indifference and passivity. But this resistance does not actually need to employ the same methods as said forces in order to combat them. It is here where you are mistaken:
If he makes use of the same despicable tools then he certainly is. Take the incident at hand. Would not an armada of ships fitted with warp scramblers, webifiers and the like have sufficed? Surely murdering them is not the only way of stopping their misdeeds that you can envision. In fact, seeing as they are capsuleers capturing them alive appears to be the vastly superior way of rendering them harmless.

The “and the like” obviously covered targeting disruptors and such. And nay, you would not have had to maintain it indefinitely as one could have employed drones capable of breaching the hull and filling the interior with sleeping gas or other incapacitating agents. Self-righteous murderers tend to overlook other methods than violence. Don’t be one of these lazy people and be a bit more creative when it comes to possible solutions. I never said that pacifism is the easier route. But I am sure that you too will be able to come up with non-violent approaches in time if you just try.

Soldiers and policemen, yes. As for doctors ... I don’t know what you are getting at with this.

You sacrificed all respect and merit you held when you said that policemen and soldiers are all murderers. Your decision to incite hostile responses through insult and derogatory comments regarding the Amarr Empire and its leadership is counter to your proclamation for passivity as well.

You may not condone physical violence, but you practice verbal assault and instigation. You are not a pacifist, you are only self-righteous.

I am not a pacifist, but I have spent a good deal of time working with a group of pacifists and have come to respect their consistency. I also do not know this David Toviyah and am in no place to judge his motives. However, I will give just a few observations from my work with other pacifists that can perhaps form a buffer of mediation here.

A pacifist may use words that provoke not necessarily for that purpose, but because the pacifist position by nature tends to elicit defense from those that use violence. I have felt a bit defensive from time to time, when my own careless use of violence has been confronted. In fact, being around pacifists has caused me to look at my own use of violent tools more carefully than ever before. When a pacifist uses words effectively, those words focus on the value of every life destroyed by violence. This is painful to think about.

I use weapons to defend the lives of my ship crews. I have killed the crews of other ships to save my crews. I believe that the value of what we were trying to accomplish justified lethal defense of my crews. But I have not always been this thoughtful about my use of violence. It took the stinging confrontation of a pacifist to get me thinking more self-critically.

The burden of justification should fall on us who use lethal force and take the lives of others in our work. If I have to endure a little provocation from the pacifist voice, that is OK with me. Do I agree with statements that cast the policeman and the soldier as murderers? No! The pacifists I know, do not feel this way. However, I have come to agree that most of us are way to ready to use violence just because we can.

Perhaps over time, Mr. Toviyah will learn to measure his words more carefully without making them too soft. More important will be if he can remain consistent to the very hard and disciplined life of a capsuleer pacifist. I know of few who can do it.

Finally, back to the subject of the original post. 160,800 lives were violently discarded. Soldiers, Warriors, Enforcers of the Law, Pacifists and non-Pacifists, anyone of honor needs to remove one's hat and stand in silence at the loss of these lives. Let us us agree on that at least.