Discussion: Divided We Fall
By
2short2care,
Posted on: 2011-09-07 11:12 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
lol, this story could also be compared to almost any micro-cosmic zombie apocalypse story.
You and a few hundred people are trapped in a property surrounded by walls almost strong enough to keep the zombies out; as long as everyone does their part to patrol the walls and patch it up where needed.
You've been given the task on ensuring security of the people and integrity of the wall. This means keeping people on task in making repairs to the wall, making sure no one (intentionally or otherwise) causes damage to the wall as well as keeping the peace (because you've got problems enough without exacerbating them with internal conflicts).
Food and water are fine as long as everyone follows the food plan; growing, rationing, storage and disposal.
Medicine isn't readily available.
How would you deal? Or would you even bother?
Now what if the number of people under your charge grew at a pace of a hundred new faces and personalities a week.
Food, water and medicine become harder to ration. People start getting edgy and doing things that aren't conducive to self-preservation. At what point would you become 'evil'?
Apparently, I play "City of Shakespeare"
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Prometheus mentions it several times - he's a universal contact for the entire player base - Heores, Villains, Vigilantes, Rogues, Resistance, loyalists - everyone interacts with him, and he guides players through the Incarnate storyline.|
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
Still all assumptions, supposition and conspiracy theories that have no basis in canon....yet.
In fact, there is no proof(and probably no mention as far as I can tell) of some desire of his to "conquer the multiverse". |
He tells us about each Trial, and puts it into context regarding the attempts of Tyrant to enslave the multiverse , the actions of the Well, and the Coming Storm.
Mender Ramiel also talks about the conquets of the multiverse in the I20 trailer, and the Issue overview for I20 on the maine website also reveals that as beign Tyrant's grand plan.
In-game and out of game, Tyrant and the loyalists are presented as the biggest threat that players have so far faced in the 7+ years of CoH.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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A normal Earth, you mean, rather than Tyrant's Thrid Reich tribute act on Praetorian Earth? |
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
2) You give people the absolute freedom that the Resistance supposedly wants and you get Primal Earth.
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You have all been corrupted by propaganda of our own society and authors of books like 1984 and Brave New World. I read those books and understood them and their warning. Praetoria has some similarities, but Praetoria is also much better than the societies of those books. |
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| Sure, the people of Praetoria have no control over their world, but is that any different than us electing leaders and just hoping they do what we want? |
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| Sure, Mother Mayhem and her seer slavery program need to go, but the rest of the governmental system isn't bad. |
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| And even with the seer program and some sort of "happy pill" in the water....I would probably like to live in Praetoria if it were real. |
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| Really, what freedoms are the people of Praetoria actually losing? |
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| If they have the essential freedoms, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"(liberty actually means freedom from persecution without cause such as being a criminal), then how is that not good? |
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How is Praetoria a horrible nightmare society if people have the very freedoms the foundling fathers of the USA said every person deserves? Those are the freedoms that matter, not the freedom to kill other people which isn't freedom at all; it's psychopathic selfishness. For one, I would gladly trade the "right to bear(right word?) arms" for the "right to not be killed by a person with a gun". |
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| "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or aboliosh it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." |
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| "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". |
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| Do they use nukes anymore? Nope. now they actually have working fences and a stronger smarter military that is actually not willing to sacrifice everyone else just so that their little group can survive. |
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| People need to band together to protect each other, always through electing/appointing a leader and group of protectors. |
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Those that dissent in Praetoria do so for only one or two reasons: 1) They know the lessons of "power corrupts" and think "Cole will go too far" so they want to preemptively take him out rather than ensure the system doesn't become corrupt from the inside(and cut out the corruption already there). |
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| They would open the world up to civil war and would-be conquerors rather than the Emperor they elected. |
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| They're trying to "protect the people" by taking out the one group that is already "protecting the people" and has proven themselves better at it than any other group in history with a much happier and more comfortable world created by them. |
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| Emperor Cole is right. You do need to protect people from other people, what is easily at least part of what he meant by "protect people from themselves". |
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| Cole is only as "evil" as others force him to be |
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| I don't see Cole as anything less than "lawful good"(to use a D&D term) |
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Sure, some of the things in Praetoria are wrong, but I find it very hard to make a long list. The things that are wrong: 1) The seer program is involuntary slavery. This could be made right by making it a volunteer only force and not controlling the volunteer's minds while limiting them to "empathic sensing" only instead of keying off ordinary citizen's innocent thoughts. This would preserve the benefit of a seer surveillance network to alert police to crimes. 2) A few scientific experiments are not right. Neuron's ghoul creations should never have happened. The scientific experiments need to be monitored and policed, especially when they affect people who would otherwise be healthy and fine. 3) Feeding the destroyers fixadine is wrong. Dominatrix needs to be taken down a peg for stirring up crime while people cure the addicts so they don't require it anymore. Other than that, Cole and his administration seems fairly justified in most actions. |
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It seems to me you people just "believe what you are told" without question(remind you of your opinion of the Praetorian people?) and don't examine the evidence. If you did, you wouldn't write Cole off as evil just yet, though you may not be happy from the perspective of "a super from Primal Earth that he has declared war against". Are you analyzing this from the perspective of an outside objective observer or from a subjective position and possibly from a "Paragon City has always been heroes, anybody who opposes them is EVIL!"(how very totalitarian of you, and like you think Cole views things)? |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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I'm sort of beginning to see you as being evil. From my particular moral perspective, someone saying that fascist dictatorships are morally ambiguous is not standing in a grey area. The moral question is whether freedom is intrinsically worth anything. Cole's morality sees it as being worth nearly nothing and therefore expendable. You seem to value it in a similarly low sense: based on what you've said so far, you believe to save a few, its morally ambiguous to permanently remove the freedom from everyone. Its morally ambiguous to eliminate crime by eliminating the capacity to commit crime. All these things are only morally ambiguous if you believe its morally reasonable to appoint yourself as judge of the world.|
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
This is why I don't see Cole as outright evil.
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Do you grant me that moral authority over you, so long as I have the ability to enforce it? Remember that once I do, you're not going to be in a position to quibble over whether I'm executing that authority in a just manner. Because I will be the only judge of that.
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OK, just my $0.02:
Everything in Praetoria happens by Cole's will. Everything.
EV-ER-Y-THING.
THIS Duray sent the Devouring Earth to Primal Earth because he was programmed to do so whe he was instantiated. Just like the next pair are being programmed to save Primal Erth, in Cole's name. Cole kept the IDF troops around to witness his "outrage" so that when the story of what occurred reaches Primal Earth through the various Longbow / Vanguard / Arachnos / Ouroboros / Resistance / Girl Scout spies he has so carefully nurtured in his own organization, his image as the ravening dimension conquering pawn of the Well will be softened.
And if his pet Hamidon gains in power from infesting Primal Earth? Well, how many Pokemon trainers are upset that their prize monster evolves into a more powerful form?
What? You actually fell for the carefully orchestrated romp through the Underground, and believed the artfully planted misinformation fed to that DeVore woman? For shame.
(Only slightly tongue in cheek, folks. Until we put Cole down like the bad mirrorverse clone he should have been, and move on to a worthwhile comic book menace, I will continue to use everything I learned from 1984, Paradise Lost, Animal Farm, and the Paranoia role playing game to interpet this story-line.)
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Wow!|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm sort of beginning to see you as being evil. From my particular moral perspective, someone saying that fascist dictatorships are morally ambiguous is not standing in a grey area.
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That has to be the dumbest thing I have ever seen you post.
Look up the definition of "fascist" and "dictatorship" and neither ever includes the word "evil" or the word "bad" or the other word "wrong".
It's just a different system of government.
Whether it is good or evil is dependent on what actions are taken AND the reasons for those actions because things such as giving a murderer the death penalty is not evil, as it prevents future murders from being done by that person and gives them exactly what they asked for by killing another person("treat others as you want to be treated", so he asked to be killed).
By the way Golden Girl, they did elect Cole, but that doesn't mean they need to reelect him.
(Edit: Our own US government didn't even have presidential term limits until after WW2 when Roosevelt(?) served 4 terms and the government itself - without the people asking for it, since they elected Roosevelt for those extra terms - decided to limit the terms all by themselves.)
Also, our own political leaders voluntarily step down in real life because they don't have a person army or superpowers to be able to hold the office like bad dictators of other countries do.
I bet at least some of them would like to stay in power and do whatever they want. I bet as a group they would do it if they thought they could get away with it. They already spend our money like it is going out of style and then tax us more when they can't budget well. They're behaving like a dictatorship already.
I'm tired of this argument. I'll just continue being a little wiser and objectively viewing things while you people "religiously" denounce him as absolute evil despite any of his actions that would be considered legal or heroic in our own real world that would make him a vigilante, not full villain.
Edit:
You people who think Cole brainwashed Duray into sending a Hamidon seed to Primal Earth so he could just turn around and make himself look like the good guy....
....Stop drinking the coolaid and reading the conspiracy theory newsletters that say aliens are in your ears.
You're so intent on "canon says this" and "canon says that" and yet you read this story and start making up reasons to write Cole off as the mastermind and evil without any prompting.
You're insaaaaaane(em crazyeyes).
At least wait until there is confirmation that your theory is right before claiming it is fact.
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Well, I can definitely stop wondering about it:|
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
Wow!
That has to be the dumbest thing I have ever seen you post. Look up the definition of "fascist" and "dictatorship" and neither ever includes the word "evil" or the word "bad" or the other word "wrong". It's just a different system of government. |
Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
I suppose in your philosophy there is the bad forcible suppression and occasional racism, and the good kind, but that only means your moral philosophy is incompatible with mine in a way that commonly generates converse results.
Which is precisely how I define "evil." I'm not saying you're Satan evil or anything; but you are at least Google evil, and probably approaching Oracle evil.
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Yes - and evil system of government. Which is why the game gives Heroes fascist groups and dictatorships to fight.|
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
Look up the definition of "fascist" and "dictatorship" and neither ever includes the word "evil" or the word "bad" or the other word "wrong".
It's just a different system of government. |
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| By the way Golden Girl, they did elect Cole, but that doesn't mean they need to reelect him. |
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| I'm tired of this argument. I'll just continue being a little wiser and objectively viewing things while you people "religiously" denounce him as absolute evil despite any of his actions that would be considered legal or heroic in our own real world that would make him a vigilante, not full villain. |
Which is why the game doesn't even consider the option of letting Heroes side with Tyrant and his loyalist monsters
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| You're so intent on "canon says this" and "canon says that" and yet you read this story and start making up reasons to write Cole off as the mastermind and evil without any prompting. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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1) "often racism"|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Well, I can definitely stop wondering about it:
Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism. |
Obviously, that "definition"(used loosely in this case) is including things that are "often" true "but not always".
That is not an absolute definition then and actually depends on what example of the term you are referencing.
2) "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism"
That is "an action" "performed by" some dictators(yes probably most past ones, but not required to be a dictator) and not a "this condition must be met to be a dictator" statement.
This is especially true of democratically elected dictators(yes this can exist and is the reason for the term "fascist dictator") because the type of government is not linked to how it came to be nor how the financial system operates nor anything except the minimal qualifications, such as "one person holding power" in a dictatorship.
This is how things like "socialism" get twisted and turned into fascism, like with Russia and how it wasn't actually socialist/communist when Stalin controlled everything and had control over property despite supposedly being socialist/communist.
Evil is a moral descriptor, not one irrevocably tied to any one physical system. Even democracies can be evil, which would happen if everyone in a country voted to go attack their neighbors to **** and pillage the land without provocation.
Also, the US is a democracy, and was in Praetoria, but the president has the privilege of declaring war and commanding the military(without a vote), as well as Praetoria's US president deciding all on his own to use nuclear weapons to fight the Devouring Earth despite it also being an action that condemned the people to death who were still not infected.
Praetoria was pretty "evil" even before Cole became president or Emperor, when he was just wandering the world as they thought he was dead.(according to canon)
All I'm saying is "use terms properly" and maybe you will see the objective point of view I have been talking about.
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Going Rogue did seem to draw a few of the stiff-armer types out from under their rocks - although they were soon disappointed when their hoped-for "nice" Nazis" turned out to be normal Nazis who even the red siders would want to fight |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Well, I can definitely stop wondering about it:
Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism. I suppose in your philosophy there is the bad forcible suppression and occasional racism, and the good kind, but that only means your moral philosophy is incompatible with mine in a way that commonly generates converse results. Which is precisely how I define "evil." I'm not saying you're Satan evil or anything; but you are at least Google evil, and probably approaching Oracle evil. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Your point of view has been that of someone frustrated with being born a century too late, and on the wrong continent |
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
All I'm saying is "use terms properly" and maybe you will see the objective point of view I have been talking about.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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1) Devs can and are wrong sometimes.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
So when we'e told by the devs and characters in-game....
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2) Devs can and do lie, to hide future content and plot twists or mislead players so that they "don't see it coming" and the plot twist (such as this story) has greater impact.
3) In game characters are "role-playing". They are speaking from a very limited(non-omniscient) point of view with their own biased motivations.
Ask a Loyalist and a Resistance member a question about Cole and you'll get two different answers.
Ask two Resistance members about Cole and you'll get 2 different answers.
Ask two Resistance members about Vanessa DeVore and you'll get 2 different answers, especially if one of them thought she was hot and was shot down trying to get in her pants or whatever other reason he would have to think even slightly different of her than the other person does.
Good storytellers write things in character, even if they are wrong form the omniscient point of view.
That is why I go by actual in game evidence.
In essence "pics or it didn't happen"
(my turn to wink )
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huh?
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Your point of view has been that of someone frustrated with being born a century too late, and on the wrong continent
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Actually, they would fight anyone. The main symptom of any "anti-whatever" movement is that they usually are just pointing fingers at whatever scapegoat they can to try to justify their point of view.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
who even the red siders would want to fight
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The Nazis didn't really hate the Jewish....they hated anybody that wasn't them. After all, even their leader who spouted everything about the "blond-haired and blue-eyed master race" was dark-haired and certainly not a member of his "master race". (Edit: Maybe his end goal was to eliminate dark-haired people so that he was instantly recognizable as the only surviving one, and remembered as such beyond the grave, in some twisted "deification" scheme. We will never know.)
This is why the Resistance has the Crusaders despite them doing horrible things.
"Any lie or despicable act to reach our goal is acceptable." "The ends justify the means."
Both sides in Praetoria are guilty of evil, and as much evil as the other.
The choice in Praetoria is not "Loyalist or Resistance" but "the government or the dissenters" AND "Wardens(good) or Crusaders(evil)" or "Responsibility(good) or Power(evil)".
That is how it is. It's morally gray because both sides have good and evil that you choose between, or do both.
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Of all the places to pick as the field of debate with me, few are worse than the dictionary. Unless you want to debate information systems best security practice of the last twenty years.|
Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
All I'm saying is "use terms properly" and maybe you will see the objective point of view I have been talking about.
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I'm well aware of what the terms mean. Don't encourage me to prove it. Also, perhaps you should actually read the threads you decide to post in: its good practice:
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm sure you could generate a narrative in which Hitler was the good guy, and the Allied powers were the villains. And I'm not saying that to be flippant or to invoke Godwin, I mean its literally possible to do so if you start with no initial morality principles and try only to construct a system of morality that is self-consistent without having to adhere to any preconceived notions of right and wrong. Morality has no "first principles" in that sense that come from the physical world. The physical world frankly doesn't care.
However, I don't think anyone is debating whether or not by some weird code Cole could be interpreted as the good guy. I think most people are arguing whether some reasonable extension of commonly held beliefs of right and wrong are consistent with Cole's behavior. And I think in that sense, some people are getting hung up on whether there is a "greater good" served by Cole. We can never know that with certainty: that's one of the limits of mortality. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I'm not saying its obviously black and white against Cole. I'm saying you either oppose Cole or you don't. Maybe you don't know if he's "evil" or "bad" or whatever else you want to call it, and maybe you'll never know, and maybe you think that's unknowable. But within the fiction of the game, you will still have to make your choice. "I don't know" is making a choice, its ultimately choosing to let others make the choice for you.
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Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
Look up the definition of "fascist" and "dictatorship" and neither ever includes the word "evil" or the word "bad" or the other word "wrong".
It's just a different system of government. |
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| The Nazis didn't really hate the Jewish |
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Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
The choice in Praetoria is not "Loyalist or Resistance" but "the government or the dissenters"
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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That was my biggest disappointment with the expansion. |
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Going Rogue did seem to draw a few of the stiff-armer types out from under their rocks - although they were soon disappointed when their hoped-for "nice" Nazis" turned out to be normal Nazis who even the red siders would want to fight
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You can still stand in the middle of Nova Praetoria doing /e praetorian salute and hail your Leader and pretend that everything's fine |
Originally Posted by Starsman
That was my biggest disappointment with the expansion.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
Just ignore the T_
He admitted in another thread he quit playing CoH a long time ago. His arguments are nothing but troll behavior. He knows barely anything about the two worlds. What he does know is second hand knowledge has he doesn't play the game anymore.
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I'm just saying the definition you posted was highly subjective and not a true objective definition.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Of all the places to pick as the field of debate with me, few are worse than the dictionary.
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It may as well have had a picture of Stalin saying "there, he was a dictator" and given no reasons why or how he was a dictator, just lumped all his actions together under the term.
Hell, we're all dictators whenever we tell someone "do this" or "do that" or are having a secretary write something down for us(called "dictation" though far from evil).
The definition needs to be as precise as possible or it is wrong.
Dictators do not need to be evil, but dictators can be evil, which is why you get the phrase "evil dictator".
Obviously, I caused confusion among everyone here, especially Golden Girl, and I apologize. I tried to be absolutely clear, but apparently that was a mistake.
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You take things out of context much too quickly. You missed the next part where I said "they hated everybody that wasn't with them".|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
These are some pretty stunning politcal insights here - got anymore for us to, uh "enjoy"
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
And the game has everyone help the dissenters overthrow the government.
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I just haven't seen anything to point me definitively to which side is better up to level 20 on the live servers, nor the incarnate trials which are just defending from an invading army and arguably in response to a previous invasion from the defending side.
I am prepared to side with the Resistance. They just have to do better things than the Loyalists do in a measurable sense.
They need to be "the better people" and I will support them then.
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Would rather they [writers] gave me a reason to want to do that.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
You can still stand in the middle of Nova Praetoria doing /e praetorian salute and hail your Leader and pretend that everything's fine
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I am not going to side with T_Immortalus but I have a hunch of where his line of thought is coming from. From their own minds, no one is evil. Same stands for Emperor Cole. At least the way the story is portrayed, the character is meant to believe he is doing something morally good, at least in his own little delusional mind. Evil has little to do with anything, though. He is an oppressor and only the ignorant can claim to love his dictatorship.
Mind you, you can pull similar effects with democracy. If played correctly you can make people think you are accepted and democratically designated by the masses. Its hard to pull off and even harder to sustain but you can make that show work out, for a while. I would say Georgia is waking up from such a "democratic dictatorship" right now but thats a story for another day.
I think it was goal at some point to make the player also buy into that, and compared to every other cartoon villain this game tosses at us, the character had much more depth. But for better or worse that illusion was skin deep and didn't make it past marketing and out of the Praetorian first ... 10 levels?
I think (and am not a mind reader so may be wrong) T_Immortalus has not played the content to see the actual in game representation of Emperor Cole. If you base yourself only on the marketing campaign for Going Rogue (and had it held up to the actual in game content) he would be right, after all. Marketing attempted to make him be appreciable as either, a tyrant or a savior.
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It was the one from the dictionary.
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Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
I'm just saying the definition you posted was highly subjective and not a true objective definition.
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I'm still playing, as obviously I have a subscription to be able to post here.|
Originally Posted by chartube13
Just ignore the T_
He admitted in another thread he quit playing CoH a long time ago. His arguments are nothing but troll behavior. He knows barely anything about the two worlds. What he does know is second hand knowledge has he doesn't play the game anymore. |
So, which of us doesn't know the facts? I think that would be you who doesn't even seem to know how these forums work.
So, from what I'm gathering so far... we're not even really discussing good vs. evil anymore. What we seem to be doing is contrasting and comparing evil.
Evil vs. Evil.
Which Evil is bad enough to make the other Evil appear Good (or at least necessary)?
How about changing the question to one of elements. If Evil were Fire what would be the Water needed to extinguish it? Or do we just continue to fight Fire with Fire?
Apparently, I play "City of Shakespeare"
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