Intergalactic Summit

I trained alongside a half-Gallentean when I was in my early teens, during the Akkilen years, when Ishukone wasn't the corporation it is today. Lisette Tokaren.

She once told me that what drove her to train hard, learn hard, work hard and succeed hard was the very adversity that came her way. Every joke, every prejudiced glare, every moment when some Caldari-as-the-mountains frakwit gave her a rough time for her hair colour and the shape of her cheekbones - she said she hated it, and she let that hate drive her to prove the bastards wrong.

I've not heard from her since she joined the Watch Security track and I went onto Watch Paramilitary, when we were sixteen. But if I'm any judge of character, she may well be a station security chief by now. She had that drive.

That's the secret to success in a megacorporate life, I think - Drive. Determination. Grit. she had them in by the freighter load. You see, nobody is entitled to be respected more or less than anybody else, except by virtue of their hard work. Exceptional respect is something you earn by exceptional effort. And you earn them with those qualities of grit, drive and determination, not with bitterness.

You had a rough time. Suck it up, so did most everyone in New Eden. If you're angry about that, commute your anger into the inspiration you need to succeed, get out there, and make a billion ISK.

Welcome to immortality.

If you think you had it hard being only half Minmatar, imagine being of full Minmatar blood living in the State. Suck it up. As others have pointed out, no one is entitled to anything in the State. You must work for it. Sure not being Civire or Deteis means you have to work harder, and can be called unfair. But life is unfair, and you must strive in adversity. Furthermore, someone truly in touch with the Caldari Way would know that it is not necessary to prove yourself and gloat out in public like you are doing now.

In any case, welcome to space.

I hope you aren't being serious, Verin. I figured someone like you who has lived in the Republic of all places would know very well that life is not fair.

Ah, but we always find that which we do not possess to be risible.

Honour. Loyalty. Integrity. For example.

What's your definition of "fair" here? Because believe me, the universe itself is unyieldingly, horribly fair.

You live, and you die. Everyone dies. Even us infomorphs, eventually. You can't beat Entropy. everyone winds up the same way in the end - what could possibly be more fair than that? No matter who you are, not matter what you did, not matter what opportunities were open and closed to you, one day you will cease to be are and will become are not. Fun, isn't it? I aim to put it off for a few centuries at the very least, but if there is a god anywhere in the universe, its name is Thermodynamics, and I very much doubt humanity will ever slay it.

"Fair" means that for every up, there's a down, for every profit, a loss. "fair" means that if you look at a Matari gutter urchin and compare them to Empress Jamyl, you'll find that both of them have to take a dump on a regular basis. "fair", in this case, means the ignorant tyranny of ninety-nine point a-frakload-of-nines percent of the universe being incapable of even knowing that you exist, much less caring about delivering success and opportunity to you on a solid silver butler drone.

Fair isn't a good thing. Fair is bad. Fair is the most awful thing in the universe.

People, bless us for our hubris, are the ones who invented the concept of "unfair", and it's one of those endearingly, beautifully insane ones we do so well. We've got this impulse to take the great wide unthinking infinity and civilize it. Give it rules, shape it towards our ideals. We've come up with these concepts like "rights" and "meritocracy", and please understand, I believe in that latter one very fervently.

Why? Because the concept of making the world unfair in our favour is possibly the best thing about our species, because if we ever ARE going to kill the great got Thermodynamics, the first thing we need to do, as the old book on warfare says, is to stack as many factors in our favour as possible.

Unfair is wonderful. Unfair is when we tell the blind cruelty of existence to go frak itself, we're doing things our way.

When life gets hard? That's the great machine of infinity grinding you up because it simply doesn't care that you exist. PEOPLE are unfair, and that's glorious.

And you let them?
Weakling.


And so you decided to drop your career because of this and to die for your clones to be capsuleers?
Weakling.

Think the fact that he did it anyway kind of means that no, he didn't. Really, Puppy, you've become so shortsighted.

One of my best friends was born to a Civire father and an Amarrian mother in one of the outer colonies. She told me a few times that she received a lot of prejudice after she was orphaned and taken to the academy. Didn't last long, though. Even at the age of seven, she was apparently a driven hardass. She still tries not to reveal her ancestry as a rule.

Kudos to you, pilot Kourdus, for holding your head up high as to your blood, even after what you went through.

Yes! When they first offered me to become a capsuleer, I decided to stay as a footsoldier and declined the offer without hesitation.

And thus, Puppy, we see a rather interesting demonstration of your thought process.

You freely admit that you initially ignored the opportunity. Despite the fact that a lone infantryman's ability to seriously effect change upon the world is limited in the extreme, that it would have resulted in being a microscopic cog in a vast machine. There are millions upon millions of footsoldiers in the State, let alone all of New Eden. You chose to stay as nothing, when your rhetoric, genocidal urges and proven (if poorly executed) loyalty to the State would dictate that your duty would lie in maximising your potential in the State's service.

You have no idea what are you talking about, gallentean boot-licking scum. If you had known me better, you wouldn't say things like this, but alas, your mind infected by gallentean thoughts can't apprehend information and simply dives to sick illusions.