Intergalactic Summit

Am I usually consistent?

... maybe. I usually try for clarity. Reality is consistently itself, but its complexity's pretty high. Fractal, even.

Ms. Ember thinks Mr. Nauplius is manipulating me. That's a warning I've received before, at various points, but, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Mr. Nauplius is a lot of things. Do deceitful, wily, and subtle really strike you as among them?

He's honored every bargain he's ever struck with me, letter and spirit, interpreting them more conservatively than most would have. I believe Ms. Raske can report similar experiences.

Just because I don't hate him, and don't hide my feelings when I hope he can be a better person, doesn't mean I'm being played.

Although, maybe I'm playing myself, trying to coax a man out of dark waters who drowned there long ago.

But the part of my soul that needs work isn't the cold-blooded realist. That bit is well-fed, happy, and sitting back making cautionary remarks with the rest of you wise people.

Napkins wants one thing. It's a thing he can't get unless other people give it to him. He's consistently made moves to provoke people into giving it to him. That's manipulation. He doesn't have to be deceitful or subtle to do it. He simply has to say 'you're going to give me what I want, because I'm going to do something that makes you give me what I want'.

That's it. So, yeah.. he's pretty manipulative. Openly manipulative.

Then maybe I'll learn.

(In an absolute sense, it's maybe hard to communicate at all without manipulating someone. That's not usually what we mean when we talk about it, though.)

Edit:

Oh, we're talking about the way you think he's manipulating everyone, and for what, not me personally.

... so ... I've taken a while to think about this.

A part of me doesn't want to respond at all. But, it seems like this kind of supposed wisdom's kind of become a favorite idea of a few people I usually like okay, so, maybe I should reply.

My predecessor was a calculating person. The idea that Ghost Festival was a family, something closer than a circle of predators united by a common, cold purpose, was a thing she rejected. I guess family had never really been a source of joy to her, after all.

As a result, though, it seems pretty clear to me that by the end, Ghost Festival wasn't hers at all anymore-- not just because she'd been replaced by a better leader, but because she didn't understand the people who had left her behind.

I'm not so much of a masochist.

So I'd likely reject the idea of sacrificing more lives in the short term to save more in the long, regardless, because I don't really want to be the kind of person who watches a million people die, thinking, "It's okay; he'll give up eventually, and stop."

If that seems naive to you, or hypocritical, okay, I'm naive and a hypocrite. And I don't care, because I prefer that to being someone who doesn't listen to her heart.

That quality of humans, to sacrifice the person under threat today, to save others-- maybe many others-- later on, is an important quality. It's a quintessentially human thing to be able to do.

But I think it gets overused a little. So, I'm not going to listen to it unless I really believe it's the correct thing.

And, right here, I don't.

In the abstract, ignoring Nauplius might be the right thing to do if you could really maintain and enforce discipline on this, but he has the really unfortunate quality of being really good at making himself really hard to ignore. Get every existing pilot to ignore him (ha! right), and the next act will be that much more charismatic-- bearing in mind that Nauplius even getting a regular diet of attention is fully capable of verifiably annihilating a million people once a year.

And someone will ask, "Why don't you do something?" And you'll tell that person. And maybe they'll agree with you! Maybe everyone still will ... and then he'll do something even bigger and uglier. And something bigger and uglier still. And then?

And then, someone will say, "He's Amarr, you know."

And it all comes apart. The Matari will go after the Amarr for heartlessly ignoring a mass-murderer. The Amarr will taunt the Matari for sitting on their hands while their kin are murdered. No one will listen to your voices of reason when there are cheap political shots to be taken and partisan points to be scored. Nauplius-- assuming attention really is what he wants-- will be sated to bursting. You'll lose every inch of ground you'd gained. In the meantime, the massacres will have gotten worse, and there'll be no reason at all for him to tone it down.

And that's IF the Amarr could stomach sitting on their hands while a heretic conducts massacres in the first place.

Ignoring a situation like this is the prerogative of those who aren't especially close to it. So, please, go ahead, if you can stomach it. Do like Miz does: ignore the whole nasty mess and sneer at us for trying, until someone comes away with a few thousand rescued Matari for you to threaten people over.

I can't. And I'm too close to it, anyway. I've helped treat too many of his victims; counseled the survivors, comforted the dying. Listened to the names of the dead, read out one by one, for over eight hours without pause.

So ... yeah. Walking away from this isn't really an option for me.

Even leaving Achura aside, this is personal for me in a pile of ways. I cannot walk away.

If that disappoints you, be disappointed.

....

Well ... this is very much in the spirit of the thread, I guess.

I don't like Tom Horn very much. Even leaving his politics aside, he apparently tried to get Nauplius to let him brutalize people in addition to whatever else might be going on.

So, I guess, imagining violent things happening to him isn't unpleasant? I guess I didn't think too much about it.

Whatever happened its in the past, he wont hurt you anymore. You have every means of defending yourself now. No need to carry a weight that is not right here right now.

The post above is evidence that capsuleers can lose their 20/20 vision after screening.

What is the inference then?

Uh-- actually, Mr. Nauplius, it's just that my eyelashes are pointed almost straight at the camera. You can still see them. This might help: I don't normally wear makeup other than lipstick. That's not eyeliner you're seeing.

Quite, in much the same way that the classical Amarr aquiline nose enabled their priests to more easily lead them around, and thus enabled greater social cohesion.