I mean. The actual proposals under discussion are not "let the IF oppress Yellow Zoners a bit." They're along the lines of "build some forts that the IF actively wants and the other parties don't care about, but that might well be a good idea anyway even if nobody was asking for them."
Remember, we've done a LOT of stuff that NO party extracted promises from us to do, purely because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Promising to do something that is not inherently harmful to Yellow Zoners, in terms of physically pouring physical concrete and building bunkers, simply cannot plausibly be seen as "letting IF hurt Yellow Zoners." Even if IF asked us to do it and the other parties were like "sure whatever you do you," the way they've been with the last several phases of fortress towns we built.
Edit: Sorry. I'm just venting a bit.
I'm just getting really annoyed with this kind of stuff. It feels like people are deliberately trying to make a underclass based off of them not having the correct point of view. That rubs me the wrong way. I want GDI to at least try and work with everyone.
"Underclass" isn't really the word, I think, because there's no proposal to economically exploit them or anything.
"Group of people who never get what they want and whose representatives never get anyone to answer their calls" would be more accurate, but I'm not sure there's a concise word for that.
...
Then again, consider this. Imagine you're a voter for a fringe party in a multiparty parliamentary system. A faction that makes up less than 10% of the electorate, that has few interests in common with any other major party, and whose leaders regularly make demands no likely majority coalition will want to grant, given how few supporters you are.
Being frozen out of the electoral process is pretty normal in that situation. Realistically, in a multiparty system, a party generally gets
entirely ignored unless it can muster at least 20% or so of the vote, or unless its demands are modest enough that it can "play nice with others" and integrate into a coalition built around larger, typically more moderate parties.
Initiative First is in precisely the situation where if they complain about their political impotence, one is tempted to look at them and go "yeah, well what the fuck did you expect to happen?"
...
I'm frankly sympathetic to both sides of the actual OOC argument here.
I can respect the desire to just totally shun IF and let them do whatever they do in isolation as long as we're not responsible, because they're disgusting.
I can also respect the desire to engage with whatever residual non-toxic desires and tendencies they have, which we can grant without
actually doing anything wrong, in hopes of figuring out some kind of path to reconciliation and a better world that doesn't involve InOps putting on the counterinsurgency boots again. Because IF is disgusting, but importantly,
simply too weak to be a realistic threat, and us building some forts won't change that.
