ConsiderableHat said:
Something that your Imperial Overlords hammer into your culture for generation after generation absolutely will take deep roots, yes. Between the British, French, and Spanish Empires, it's pretty damn' widespread, too. Wouldn't be surprised that between them they weren't getting much change out of half the planet.
Edit to add: since the USA is basically a British Empire franchise that went independent, between them and their colonies, I'm pretty sure we're well over the 50% mark.
...[shrugs] Maybe it's my particular flavor of neurodivergence here or something. And to be fair, I don't remember when I first thought or heard about non-patrilineal succession systems, but it was a
while back; it might be that the idea actually did seem strange and hard to grasp to me then, difficult as that is for me to imagine now (If anything, patrilineal succession now seems the stranger to me; if you're choosing between a single sex act and the potential uncertainty of paternity on the one hand and nine months of gestation and the much greater certainty of maternity on the other, why on Earth would you pick the former? And that's without the more detailed biological knowledge of things like mitochondrial DNA... Patrilineal succession seems to make more sense to me only in highly polygamous systems, where the emperor or whatever just has dozens of children and the most promising one gets picked, but that, even ignoring any other issues, is an extreme minority of the situations patrilineal inheritance has actually been
used in. And yet, it's been
extremely widespread, and as far as I know was already pretty widespread even
before the "Age of Discovery".).
Outside of that more-than-half of the planet, something analogous to tanistry with varying sizes of electorate (sometimes just the reigning king as single elector, nominating his successor from among the eligible group) was rather more the norm. Most chinese dynasties did this, and the Holy Roman Empire had an elective monarchy very much like tanistry for most of a millennium even if the Habsburgs managed to basically rig the elections in their favour for the best part of three centuries.
Now, if you want weird, the Ottoman system of 'whichever of the previous Sultan's bastards makes it to the throne first and successfully gives the order to have all his half-brothers strangled with bowstrings' is a definite contender. And yes, I exaggerate slightly for comic effect. But only slightly.
I think I already knew some of that, but not all of it -- and either way, thanks for the information.
Pale Wolf said:
So things started hammering me again and I didn't get much done, but I can at least respond to commentary finally.
Ah, good luck dealing with the hammering.
ConsiderableHat fielded this one pretty well but basically, yes. I mean, these are English-speaking communities. That means their only exposure to non-primogeniture systems is 'foreign culture X' and Crusader Kings. And when you're the people whose ancestors did so much imperialism you rule the world? You don't really have to think about Foreign Culture X unless you go actively seeking it out.
I guess that makes sense. And I mean, I've played Crusader Kings II and was already thinking about Foreign Culture X for various values of X before that, but I probably
am in a minority in the Western (particularly American, because European, for example, countries at least have a bunch of other European countries crammed up next to them) world for at least that combination.
Also, I just realized that there's some humorous (at least to me) irony in me having so much trouble wrapping my head around Bagrat having so much trouble wrapping
their head around something.
re tanistry:
Interesting! Thanks.
So, yeah, the kandake system
does seem to make sense from the standpoint of mainline feudal succession, as it's just a (to me seeming) generally better way of doing the same thing. Look at it from the right
different perspective, and the kandake system doesn't make any more sense than male-exclusive patrilineal primogeniture does.
(Central Asian steppe nomads have a comparable tanistry-like system, but I would be stepping massively outside of my knowledge base if I were to talk about the underlying logic or features of their inheritance and property management systems)
I also don't know much about that, sorry.
re the E88 providing cover:
...Aaaaand I'd previously been thinking that at least it was nice that the E88 made target identification so easy. But once again, something Nazi-related turns out to have been even worse than I'd previously thought.
Well, thanks for the information. And at least
these Neo-Nazis are fictional...
can make damage happen on a national scale, not an individual one
Which is why we literally currently have a "Do not travel, do not even take a connecting flight for which you stay entirely within airport security through" advisory for the entire state of Florida, which is just... great. That's so great, that we have that now. And it's not like we exchanged our ongoing national problems with racism and such for problems with rising persecution of queers, of course, oh no, why shouldn't the #1 USA have
both at once?
and directed her 'hero' career against entirely nonwhite criminals
Yeah, and, like... yes, Brockton Bay has nonwhite criminals, and some of them probably are pretty nasty, just statistically from the size of the population. But it has far from
only nonwhite criminals, and you know what she
could have done if she was really trying to reform, and didn't trust herself to be racially fair? Take the same "race sense" she'd developed as a Nazi, and invert it. See a nonwhite person you think's a criminal? Leave them; someone else can deal with them. Go after the criminals the E88 puts at the bottom of the priority list, and after the E88 themselves. And if you can't bear to fight your old comrades, despite those comrades being Nazis? Leave town. Plenty of crime to fight elsewhere.
But... no. She doesn't leave town. She doesn't even make a clear
attempt at racially-blind crimefighting. At best, maybe she doesn't hatecrime people who look sufficiently non-criminal that even she thinks "Hero"!Purity couldn't get away with it (And, hey, from way up in the air, exactly how easy
is it to tell a loaf of bread from a handgun, really?), where Openly Nazi!Purity would have turned them into scorch marks, but that's not all that much of an improvement.
and her brain instantly decides they're prostitutes, they're just taking a break from the prostitution
And ABB members, note! They're
clearly not just independent prostitutes (who'd of course be bad enough for... uh... reasons that
definitely exist), but
hardened gangsters!
And Purity also explicitly isn't going down and running them off or grilling them for information (all perfectly civilly, I'm sure, with no burning death from above or torture) not because she's trying not to be racist, not because she thinks there's even a chance she might be wrong about them, but just because she thinks they wouldn't be worth her time.
So, wanna bet those drug dealers she attacked the previous night were ABB at all? Rather than a bunch of Asian boys Purity decided looked criminal and their loitering must obviously be for the purpose of selling drugs?
Nope, I do not think I'd win that bet were I to make it.
Purity legitimately offered her half of Empire 88 as a force to cooperate with the PRT in maintaining order in the city after Leviathan turned it into a disaster zone.
Wow.
Obviously, this offer was refused point-blank.
I assume Director Piggot was still in charge at that point?
But given the state of the world, there are almost certainly people who think 'she just wanted to help!' and castigate the PRT for that decision
Because, yeah, given that, I wouldn't have called Purity being refused there obvious...
He still doesn't think to use it.
...
[facehoofs]
You're right. He could turn that on whenever he was reading...
anything. Complex philosophical texts to online posts by people who don't know English very well and everything in between, he could figure out what was meant. Clearing up communication difficulties or stopping them from happening in the first place, explaining complex concepts to others...
And what
else is he using his power for while actively on an online forum?
But, nope.
Wow, and he doesn't even have Leet's excuse of any experimentation potentially being punished with inconvenient explosions.
I mean the coral reef thing is cool, but not so much the rest.
I mean... it's cool if it's sufficient distant. And still kind of cool if it's
you, sure, but, on the other hand... what spontaneous health problems might you have? What diet might you need to eat, and what happens if it's not what you're eating now? What diseases are you vulnerable too, especially things the humans around you might not think to be careful about? How long are you going to live; is this a situation where you've got only another five years before you collapse into a puddle, or is your colonial-ecosystem body going to self-renew indefinitely and leave you outliving almost everyone you know?
Are you going to start suddenly reproducing by budding at some point?!?
Who knows! Wow, you really look stressed for some reason, let's hope that doesn't start you growing a bunch of spikes or something...
I really do need to get around to this point. There's some fun going on here.
Oh?
re Dragon's mobility:
I thought she had robot bodies she could use?
And I mean, he had one source on how to care for an AI. The best source any parent has: The child saying 'I'm suffering'. Apparently he ignored that source of information.
But how long did it take before it was even clear to him it
was a child? Once he decided there was, how did he know how truthful the child was being? If she was human, he'd have had a lot more existing information to make those judgements with.
Though I think we may have gone about as far with this thread of conversation as we can. We both seem to agree that Richter was pretty harsh with Dragon and that under the circumstances that may still have been about the best he
could have responsibly done. We seem to disagree on how bad that makes him, though, with you taking the view that
even if it in fact was, based on the information he had, one of the best courses available to him and would have been a good set of actions to take if Saint had been
right, or a large number of other things that could have gone wrong had, that doesn't absolve him of the suffering he inflict on Dragon.
(Does that sound like an accurate statement of your view here? I think it's the impression I've gotten, but I want to make sure I've not misunderstood you.)
Meanwhile, I'm more inclined to forgive him due to that limited information, given he
was releasing her over time (one could argue that he shouldn't have made a sapient or even sentient AI in the first place, and could have avoided any of the suffering that way -- but Dragon, even with his early death and Saint's actions,
did turn out to be a very actively good person).
re who knows about the Palanquin and why Persephone isn't on that list:
Ah, thanks.
And Tattletale and I Love You spooked Persephone a bit - she got made that hard off what she'd already asked, she didn't want to put more questions online and provide more texture for people to figure things out.
Presumably finding out that Cauldron wasn't just monitoring that forum but had something set up for a pretty fast response time did
nothing to help with the spooking, either.
What I mean is that while Riptide assumes official reports and media are unreliable, he doesn't assume that the opposite of what they say is totally always definitely true.
Ahh, thanks.
ConsiderableHat said:
Possibly because the Scots would point and laugh because in their version of goidelic insular celtic that word means 'cream'.
...
Huh. I wonder how
that came about?
@blueJane:
I think Alex might not be sure how to feel about that skirt.
