Discussion: Divided We Fall

now I'm wondering what COH: Family Guy would be like. "All hail Emperor Quagmire! Giggity!"

Well, we draw comparisons to physical reality, how about deriving good and evil, right and wrong, or such, from physical principles? I have a suspicion that, were it even remotely possible, would end up proving sacrificing one to save two is, yeah, greater good. Everything short of this is just someone imposing their own arbitrary values system and applying it, imperfectly, to make judgments.

Like it or not, there are no absolutes in life, only these subjective human values, judgments, and resulting labels. You can come up with your carefully defined rights and wrongs, and at the end of the day, it comes down to nothing more than who, and how many, you can convince to agree with you. All this is no better than a house of cards; words that are defined in terms of each other, nothing fundamental, nothing absolute, nothing outside of the human experience. To me, the only alternative beyond that is appeal outside the human experience to a supreme being.

We have a fairly widely accepted and fairly self-consistent set of Western definitions of Right and Wrong, and even Good and Evil. They found much of our legal systems, but not all of them. They find acceptance outside of the West, but not everywhere there, nor even consistently inside the West. I'll happily accept that Cole is a Bad Guy in those terms. But those terms don't make him Evil in some absolute sense; I find it easy to conceive of a self-consistent set of definitions of Right and Wrong where he's the Hero of the story, and his supporters are heroic too, and his opponents and detractors are at best deluded fools. I don't like that vision, but my experiences and values are derived from our cultural and historical experience, not Primal Earth's, and certainly not Praetoria's. I don't like that vision, but I'm not advocating it for the real world when I explore it through imagination and storytelling in-game.

I feel trying to create or impose the absolutist frames of reference on everything halts too much of the storytelling potential of the setting. For some of the participants, I wonder what motivates them to argue it so strongly; sure, some people just love to argue. I wonder if others feel their own grasp on real-life right and wrong is threatened by it, and have to respond on that basis.

This is why I find these discussions so nearly pointless; hardly any of us are changing our minds, because the logic that could persuade us is not compelling from any side. Because it's not a matter of logic. We all have our personal experiences and interpretations of our cultural and historical heritages, and are limited by the amount of imagination we happen to have, and end up disagreeing on matters many of us feel ought to be self-evident universal truths. Newsflash! Humans are imperfect, story at 11. I'd much rather discuss the other, more interesting, parts of the game story that's evolving here.

Tyrant is evil enough to be classified as evil, period. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims/hunts like a duck, but flies like an eagle, its still a duck. It's being comfortable making a judgement dispite inconclusive data that people still find him potenitally redeeming and "not all that bad" enough to classify otherwise.

If I met Praetorian Marcus Cole on the street I would always avoid him, keep an eye on him, wouldnt trust him, not do business with him, and even if he tried to spin a behavior/action he commited in a positive light, I'd ignore it. He has his agenda and whether you die is whether you get in the way, thinks you got it the way, or some other whim, and he wouldn't care. Gangster.

His greatest act of evil is prolly make you *think* he's not that evil.

It is kind of interesting te lengths to which people will go for their opinions to be validated.

Now am I confused or did Cole stalemate Hamidon? Apparently no one else could even do that.

So after that he is the driving force behind herding up everyone into a walled off mega city to protect them and keep them human.

The question put before the audience, i.e. us, is not just of whether the ends justify the means, but also how far a person should go to protect humanity. Killing people, torturing them, and modifying their mental state, that can labelled these as evil all day but if the other choice is extinction, well that is where an absolute black and white morality breaks down.

Look at the resistance, blowing up hospitals, threatening those protective walls, just for their freedom. It is an modern perversion of the ideal of liberty. Liberty which did not even exist as freedom before John Locke, is not just about getting what one wants. It is about responsibility as well. That is to say we have to deserve freedom, we have to be responsible, shouting fire in a crowded theatre is not responsible. Threatening the only barrier between humanity and extinction is not pursuit of freedom. In the case of mutual benefit or mroe seriously survival, a giverning body is expected to do what is needed to protect its citizens.

Now before someone posts about it all being a set up by the 'great emperor', I hope they will consider how that would not be supported clearly by canon, hence an opinion, just like those that suppose Emperor Cole may not be the utterly evil villain. (stones and glass houses?)

oh! one great motive for Cole never letting a single hamidon seedling into primal earth, never harming innocents and never nuking areas , would be because he wants to live there! Seriously, why wouldn't he want to bring his version of Utopia, without Hamidon threatening humanity. With a ncie and weak hamidon in primal earth he and his people would have it made. Just rememebr nuclear weapons, war and despoiling the earth make hamidon stronger too. The Hamidon is tied into the earth's self defense mechanism, if you happen upon some rubbles walking around their description explains how they arise naturally from devatastion.

For my part, I was unaware that Mortimer Kal reported to someone on the Praetorian side (I presume... I took the hinted, mysterious "master" to be that based on the presented flow of events, at least).

Was that a known element of his backstory that I missed/overlooked previously, or is that something new?