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The Secrets' Crusade

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[x] Who are you, really?
[X] How did your people go from using Contact Fleets for the First Contact, to using Tribute Fleets? We have witnessed the Hjivin and the Zlathbu, but we see no answer just yet.
Revoting with pertinent write-ins
 
Coda said:
Yeah... "moral calculus" is the phrase that comes to mind at this point for the Shiplords. Shut up and calculate. There is no room for emotion. Choke down the trauma, block it out, partition it into a separate part of your soul, and make the hard choices that you have to make to save the most lives you can, no matter how much it costs.
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Yeah, because quite frankly the Shiplords' policy of genocidal madness and destructiveness towards the lives of other sentient species... It's a million-year trauma drama exercise, and very little else.
 
Coda said:
Yeah... "moral calculus" is the phrase that comes to mind at this point for the Shiplords. Shut up and calculate. There is no room for emotion. Choke down the trauma, block it out, partition it into a separate part of your soul, and make the hard choices that you have to make to save the most lives you can, no matter how much it costs.
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And never examine the epistemics of your actions, because it hurts too much.

[X] "We want peace. You want peace. You wanted peace. ...Why, then, are we spiraling into war?" (Why are you doing this?)
 
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TheBiggerFish said:
And never examine the epistemics of your actions, because it hurts too much.
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I mean, that's kind of the problem.

The Shiplords don't examine the epistemics of their actions, because by all appearances the shape of their civilization has been defined by trauma that they saw only one possible way to react to. And they have spent all the ages since refusing to consider just how terrible it is, to stack the weight of that trauma in one pan of a balance scale, and then stack all the trauma of all the galaxy forever in the other pan, and claim that the first pan is heavier than the second.

And what they should have done eons ago is to stop, just stop, to as noted shut up and calculate, to stop making it about how "unacceptable" a certain outcome is. That they should have weighed the consequences and realized that it doesn't even matter if they know of no better way to avoid whatever it is they're trying to avoid, because what they are choosing to become is worse than any other actually extant thing in all of creation.

Because all of it seems to come back to the bedrock certainty that anything they do is justified, as long as this is what they are fighting, at least in their own minds.

A certainty they hold... because of that racial trauma, as far as I can tell.
 
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I agree. I bet every time someone came up with another solution, he got a 'but what if ...', painting a worst case scenario (suddenly a second iteration of the Sphere, because non-invasive diplomacy failed in the few hundred years of contact, the current-day Uninvolved not acting and the galaxy being eaten) and coming to the conclusion 'it's too risky'.
 
Simon_Jester said:
because what they are choosing to become is worse than any other actually extant thing in all of creation.
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A tyrant zookeeper that occasionally culls the menagerie isn't worse than an omnicidal maniac hellbent on eating everything in sight.

So while your statement is true, it's true by construction, as that is their explicit goal: be the bad guy so that no one CAN be worse than them.
 
Coda said:
A tyrant zookeeper that occasionally culls the menagerie isn't worse than an omnicidal maniac hellbent on eating everything in sight.
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And yet if the tyrant zookeeper continues to torture the animals in the menagerie, every single one of them, for a million years, assaulting and killing the majority if not the totality of every sapient species they encounter, to the point where the very ascended coalesced SOULS of those species are traumatized after the fact...

At some point, one has done more evil than any actual omnicidal maniac, in the sense that you can do a lot more harm to someone by keeping them alive to torture them for fifty years than by killing them up front.

The Shiplords' justification is that they have done worse and wilder than any actual omnicidal maniac, in an attempt to forestall the rise of any hypothetical, future, successful omnicidal maniac.

...

This is, essentially, the natural product of defining one thing that is so bad that it has infinity weight in the balance of judgment, such that literally anything can be justified in its name.

Which, again, is the product of Shiplord trauma, not Shiplord calculation, except in the sense that if you let your trauma do your math for you you can justify a lot of bad things in the name of coping with your trauma.
 
[x] Who are you, really?

I want more than"name, job description, reason for being here". "Who are you" is "How do you define yourself?" It is, to be practical, "what are the elements of you personality that I can leverage to fix this situation".

Welp, time to cosplay a Vorlon. :p

More seriously, one of the things I can see Amanda saying as followup is "You are going to have to relinquish core aspects of your culture/self if you want to heal from this." Which is going to hurt, most likely.
 
Snowfire said:
Now consider: what has Amanda shown herself to be really, really good at doing?
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I get the impression you are angling for 'mending' for some totally unfathomable reason. But - getting their soul healed would mean the SL had to trust someone to fiddle around with their souls which is not them. The DC of that request is, I guess, somewhere just outside the local cluster?
 
MTB said:
I get the impression you are angling for 'mending' for some totally unfathomable reason. But - getting their soul healed would mean the SL had to trust someone to fiddle around with their souls which is not them. The DC of that request is, I guess, somewhere just outside the local cluster?
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A lot of Practice work is far less obvious. Amanda is good at healing trauma, and frequently does that just by talking with people.
 
So something that occurred to me.

Given how painful these memorials are to the Shiplords, those who choose to effectively live there, to maintain the memorials and guide others through them, are probably quite different mentally from the bulk of the Shiplord population.
 
Something else occurred to me.

Every Shiplord has a euthanasia switch. Euthanasia is, evidently, culturally accepted. This is likely a response to the frank horror they've made of their own existence.

…

In other words, a large fraction of the people who'd most object to their actions are either dead, or sleeping effectively forever—things have gotten worse, not better, so hoping for improvements after a rest is a futile hope.

Cultural evolution has never been so literal.
 
Baughn said:
Every Shiplord has a euthanasia switch. Euthanasia is, evidently, culturally accepted. This is likely a response to the frank horror they've made of their own existence.
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Not necessarily. If you have an effectively unlimited natural lifespan, you will eventually have people who want to die. There is such a thing as living too long. Storage is always an option, but wanting to move on is equally valid - or at least should be, imo. How it's used now compared to where it began could be another matter, of course.
 
Snowfire said:
Not necessarily. If you have an effectively unlimited natural lifespan, you will eventually have people who want to die. There is such a thing as living too long. Storage is always an option, but wanting to move on is equally valid - or at least should be, imo. How it's used now compared to where it began could be another matter, of course.
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Just wondering - are the SL an example of why a race should move on to become Uninvolved instead of lingering in 'normal' space indefinitly?
 
MTB said:
Just wondering - are the SL an example of why a race should move on to become Uninvolved instead of lingering in 'normal' space indefinitly?
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This is a...difficult one to answer, honestly. The process of races inevitably going Uninvolved appears to be one that the Shiplord pioneered - you're not sure if they encouraged it before it became a method of oppression. I'm not sure it would ever be fair to say that going Uninvolved is the 'right' choice. It's just a choice, and one the Shiplords have never made. You have the data to work out part of that reasoning now, but I doubt you'd be able to work out the entirety for a while yet.

Don't forget to vote, folks!
 
[x] Who are you, really?

There's a lot of valuable questions to ask, but this seems a perfectly fine place to start. Especially given Amanda's making an effort to think of Kicha as a person rather than part of the faceless monolith of Shiplord oppression.
 
I think people are misunderstanding my "moral calculus" comment.

I meant that's how they perceive themselves right now. They're doing their best to isolate their emotional trauma in order to do things that they find revolting, because when they try to look at the greater good instead of what would make them feel better they decide they have to do what they're doing now.

If you want to understand them, then you should be careful assigning human moral values to Shiplords. They operate on a much larger scale than humanity.

Ancestral humans operated on a scale of groups of up to 150 individuals. Modern humans are still wired that way but we can abstract things out somewhat to be able to process communities on the order of thousands to hundreds of thousands and at least kind of comprehend the existence of billions of people.

Humanity 2.0 in the PW-verse, thanks to Practice shenanigans, have overcome that legacy instinctive wiring. I haven't seen evidence to suggest that individuals maintain social groups of a size larger than modern humans, but they can maintain their perspective across the entire multi-billion-individual population of the species instead of fracturing it into smaller groups or handwaving it as statistics.

Shiplords have seen so many individuals over the eons that it's wrapped around. They've potentially seen quadrillions, to the point where thousands or even millions of individuals don't really register as having individual meaning. This even extends within their own culture; their individual lives matter less than the bigger picture. But species? That's still a number that can be comprehended, probably on the order of magnitude of thousands or tens of thousands. (I doubt there have been a million distinct spacefaring races in the history of the galaxy.)

From that perspective, the Shiplords aren't exactly "torturing." It's more like taking a kid to the doctor for their vaccines. The kid hates it. It hurts, the pain lasts, and it can instill a long-time fear of needles. But it protects the kid from potentially fatal diseases and also limits how much the kid can be a vector to hurt other kids by passing on those diseases. Better to make the kid scream and cry and be scared than for the kid to die.

Of course, this doesn't excuse it from a human perspective, and from a Humanity 2.0 perspective where they can still think of billions of people as individuals it's even worse. But even from a human perspective, I don't think it's accurate to say that what they're doing is worse than being omnicidal.
 
If I remember right, the Shiplord data analyst from the interludes actually had the gall to call what they do 'chastisement' without even blinking, so honestly that tracks. It's probably not unconnected to them never actually making contact with people anymore.

They don't communicate with anyone, they just hand down decrees. They never, ever meet anyone in person. They distance themselves both to keep up the facade of being untouchable and also to enable themselves to not confront the horror of what they're doing.

The Shiplord that fought Amanda hit the euthanasia switch for their entire fleet more or less the instant they felt a moment of empathy for her.
 
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