I need a Cybran character to come in and go off in all the ways they think the UEF sucks.
Excerpt from Praxis and Practicalities Roundtable.
Hosts are KH-6 of Racing Fire Node, Balthazar of New Sephirot Node, and Ng Talia of GreetTheDawn Node.
KH-6: Look, if you really want me to go off, I can.
Ng: Do it.
Balthazar: Been too long since we've had a good rant, I say go off.
KH-6: Alright. Don't say I didn't warn you. Look, if you want to understand the UEF you need to go back to the old Earth Empire, actually you can go back a lot further than that, I'll dump some relevant references into context for those interested, but I'm going to focus on the Empire. Now, Earth Empire comma ending and social dynamics thereof. Specifically, you've got the question of how to maintain a corporate aristocracy in the face of looming post scarcity. Believe me, you have not seen unhinged until you have watched CEO Wollian explaining why restricting protofab operation to corporate charters would be necessary to protect capitalism and democracy. This is after the first Cybrans were liberated mind you, so we're off doing our thing on the rim while this nutjob is whining about how protofabs will make everyone lazy and how only the corps have the wisdom and foresight to use them properly.
So you've got this bubbling cauldron of fireworks ready to go off, just waiting for someone to kick it over and set everything off.
Balthazar: Enter Admiral Burislov.
KH-6: Enter Admiral Burislov. The weird thing is, there was actually a lot of optimism about Burislov when he turned on the Empire. I've read and listened to lots of thinkpieces from the time about how he was going to abolish the loyalty program.
Ng: He did not.
KH-6: He did not. What he did do was purge the corporations and the government while promising bread and circuses to the masses. All well and good, but then he goes on to reforge the government into a war machine with the singular stated ambition of bringing humanity under its banner. That's the stated goal of the UEF, spelled out in their constitution. A lot has happened in the thousand years since then, and I'll be dropping my analysis on some key events into Context, but here's my conclusion: the UEF is a military with a state, not a state with a military. Everything flows from that.
Colonies and colonists are planned and produced as recruitment pools for commanders and support personnel. All that crap about citizens being artists and philosophers exists to justify the UEF and the infinite war, and if those philosophers come to conclusions that don't support that purpose, well, lets just say that according to the UEF my kill count from my assassin days is about eight times higher than it actually was. They literally have me at three different places at once at one point.
Ng: What were you actually doing at that time?
KH-6: I've been asked by some councilors not to talk about this, but Racing Fire has consistently voted not to classify it, so fuck it. I was paying a visit to one Commander Coolridge about the burning of Allbright/c Creche. I actually got a recording of his reaction when the virus hit and he realized he was about to cook off. Dropping into Media.
Balthazar: Oh god, he was picking his nose. Literally picking his nose when the alarm went off.
Ng: Too good for the child murdering fuck.
KH-6: You can see why our UEF allies don't want that circulated. The Commander went up in the middle of his ACU's support facility, estimated death toll in the thousands, moderate damage to nearby civilian facilities. I do not regret any of it.
But back on track: the reason the UEF was, and to some extent still is, a fucked society.
Restricting the franchise is a big problem. Only those who have served the government can vote, the government exists soley to serve the military, you get a feedback loop even without the loyalty program.
Which brings us to the fatboy in the room, the fucking mind control. The vast majority of UEF symbionts were in or supporting the military. As such, there was a significant fraction of the voting population casting those votes with a literal mind control program in their heads. The scary bit is that someone at some point decided that all the UEF's symbionts voting in a block would be suspicious, so they programed it so that symbionts would fall into a 63-71%/37-29% split.
So you've got a society built on imperialist military revanchism as the highest goal, with added mind control, and dissenters suffering from "terrorist attacks" and becoming martyrs for the war effort. So now they've got to uncluster that fuck, and to his credit Hall genuinely seems to be trying to transition to state-with-military. Problem is, that involves telling a lot of people that oops, they were the bad guys, and that doesn't go down well. You'll note that he hasn't tried to expand the franchise yet, which is probably the most important thing that
needs to happen for the UEF to become a functional society. I've got some other thoughts, mostly about UEF media control, but I'll drop those into Context, they're mostly about feedback cycles and manufactured consent/voter manipulation.
With that, I conclude my rant. Next up: our resident rabbi and the Halachaic interpretation of Aeon religious law.
Balthazar: Fuck you and your Node, you couldn't make me stick my foot into that mess with a Nation level referendum.
