Loregasm

Of all places ... SPARTA.

Sparta wasn't a direct democracy in the sense that Athens was, and it definitely had strains of monarchy and oligarchy running through it ... so Sparta might not be the sort of "ideal" democracy/republic you'd want to replicate today. But Sparta maintained stability as a city-state for something on the order of over 600 years(!) ... until they had their economic support cut out from under them (by their rivals "freeing" and empowering their slave populations of Helots to rise up and overthrow their Spartan overlords). Indeed, many of the conventions of how government should be structured that went into The Constitution were not based on Athenian democracy, but rather upon the longstanding stability of Sparta.

Personally, I rather like this historical tidbit about the Spartans, which you can find in the wikipedia article for Laconic Phrase:

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

I'm just wondering where this part came from to start with. Was someone asserting that
NCSoft was a government unto itself, and a successful example of democracy? Because I
don't see where this even has anything to do with the issue at all, unless this is confusing
the issues of democracy with the issues of capitalism.

It's not over yet.

The American founding fathers took significant inspiration from Sparta, but only broadly. Sparta wasn't just kind of like an oligarchy, it was a genuine oligarchy with almost no democratic aspects at all. It wasn't just politically non-democratic, it wasn't even socially democratic.

Sadly I've never gotten beta to work for me but I guess I'll give it another try.

There's a story about the populace of Athens voting to having someone executed in defiance of the law, and after they were put to death when it was determined the evidence against them was false, they decided to rectify that by voting to have the people who originally accused the person executed, again in defiance of the law.

You couldn't have found a less palatable bunch of poster boys for democracy than the Athenians back in the day if you hired the same ad agency responsible for all those "The King" Burger King commercials.

Consuming that doesn't have to be a one-time thing. If the Batallion had enslaved or destroyed those races that had Wells of their own, it would seem to follow they could essentially put a lid and tap on it so long as they maintained that control (or that it'd run out or transference distributing it among the Batallion's members in the case of destruction). I'd think it'd kind of look like how Emporer Cole was fed more and more of the Well's power the more power & control he maintained. If something could enslave an entire peoples, would the nature of the well itself simply feed its conqueror? How much choice would it have? Would it retain, or be capable of retaining anything resembling sentience?

E:FB;

A lot of the stuff Prometheus says indicates the Well has some sentience to it, though I guess it could be true that Prometheus is just an unreliable narrator. I'd rather go with what the game states until told otherwise, though, and just amend the parts that weren't explained clearly and were clarified in the document, though.

Prometheus does mention that " When confronted with another 'well', or by a species with power nearly as great, any given 'well' could be controlled, enslaved or even killed as much as any other living thing," so it is possible the Battalion could control/enslave Wells. However he also mentions that the Kheldian Well had been killed (in the future), so the Battalion has some way to siphon the potential from Wells they kill.

This is the part where I start making wild conjectures.

Prometheus mentions that a Well (or the sentience behind it, at least) is just a personage who has agreed to serve as a connection between the species and a greater power (the actual power of the Well). I interpret that as meaning that WITHOUT someone guiding the power it's either useless or even dangerous to the species, so someone has to step in and take responsibility for it. That person controls the excess energies of life and potential the species generates and "invests" it back in the species, leading to greatness.

Now, because of Prometheus's wording I don't think the sentience is naturally occurring (though I could be wrong), and is actually appointed. This is important, and could be the loophole that lets the Battalion harvest Wells. They first kill the Well, and then have one of their people (probably an incarnate powerful enough to ascend into a Well) take it's place. Now the species has someone else at the helm, and all that precious potential that was once re-invested into them is now being sent to the Battalion.

Or something like that.

Hey now, keep the gloves up. That's a low-blow warning

So, the United States is the only functional democracy in the world? Well, perhaps according to your year-2000 definition of 'the world':

Leela: Look, I know there are no car-chases, but this is important. One of these two men will become President of the World.
Fry: What do we care? We live in the United States.
Leela: The United States is part of the world.
Fry: Wow, I have been gone a long time.

I'm going to assume that's a rhetorical question with extremely poor aim.

I don't know what that even means. The aim was to interject a Futurama quote. If that's 'poor', ma'am, then we have nothing more to say to one another! Good day!



(Disclaimer: I'm not really mad.)

I agree the Scirocco story sounded like it would have been really cool. A couple of questions about it, if you don't mind:

1) What were the plans to incorporate the PC player in this, if at all? Was it just envisioned as playing out a Signature Character story using the mechanics introduced during the later revisions- ie, swapping out a character model for your character and giving them "temp" powers to represent Scirocco (a la Tyrant, Anti-Matter, and the Skulls arc in i24?)

2) Where do you envision Ice Mistral and Scirocco's relationship? Is she in love with him, or is it a more platonic mentor/student relationship? How much of her feelings- if any- are due to his tamperings with her mind with the Malleus Mundi in his patron arc?

You guys are true heroes. Thank you for taking the time to make this.

So that's why they shut down the game - they couldn't have that Moonbase finally getting built. >.<

They described it as being like a Personal Story like what happens after an arc's over, only it's a whole chain of missions where you experience it all through Scirocco.

Yep. Athens planted the seed, but Ancient Rome (pre-Caesar) is probably a better example. Certainly, the Roman Republic is the more practically useful example, judging by what subsequent governments have chosen to do.

Right, and once you've narrowed the field down to the British Parliamentary system versus the United States, you're firmly in subjective territory. Nihilii seems to believe that the United States doesn't count as a good example of a democratic/republican system until (at the earliest) the Civil Rights Movement, which is a legitimate position for him to take, but it's not a factual (irrefutable) position. A society's perceived level of fairness is related to, but not directly determined by, its system of government.

(Technically, universal male suffrage predates the Civil Rights Movement by some 90 years in the United States, and women's suffrage predates the Civil Rights Act by about 45. In neither case is the United States markedly behind other governments, and depending on your point of view, the United States is ahead of many others. In practice, yes -- minorities were often prevented from voting in various states prior to the Civil Rights Act, but that was not a direct feature of the US government.) (EDIT: Arcana's example, Switzerland, apparently didn't give women the right to vote until 1971; I didn't realize they were that late.)

The British, after all, still have a nominal monarch. The monarch has almost zero practical power these days, but that wasn't the case as recently as the turn of the 20th Century. It's hard to pin down an exact moment for the transition, but one thing's for sure: the establishment of the British Parliament didn't immediately transform England/Britain into what we'd call a democracy-like system. If the matter were that simple, then the United States probably wouldn't even exist (as we know it, anyway).

For all that the United States is widely (and justifiably) regarded as the upstart young cousin of its counterparts in Europe, the United States' system of government actually has a longer history of continuous and relatively stable operation than most any other government in the world. We are the young upstart culturally, not necessarily politically.

That said, the upshot of all of this is that whether you agree with all the implied particulars of Positron's statement or not, his statement is not preposterous. He did not say that the United States is the best democracy in the world; he said that United States is the only one to work for any significant period of time. Depending on your definitions of the words, "Work," and, "Significant," his position is reasonable enough -- subject to good-faith challenge and debate, but by no means did Positron insult billions of people, alive and dead. It's one thing to say that you disagree with Positron; it's another to say that his position is so obviously false that any sixth grader in an educated country would know better.

And in any case, Positron's point had very little to do with United States, per se. The question he answered assumed that the Cimerorans should have fought for democracy, not a monarchy. Whatever your position on the efficacy of Athens and other, similar Greek city states, ancient people wouldn't have regarded democracy as unambiguously superior to the alternatives. (Hell, Plato's Republic is a repudiation of democracy, and he wrote the thing in Athens.) The questioner implicitly ascribed modern sensibilities to the Cimerorans; Positron's observation about the United States is meant to underline that fallacious association.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

It's a good quote

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Huh. Fancy that...

... Too bad Incarnates and being your own Well is the course the story was taking. And ultimately is the penultimate power.

I don't know why you took this revelation as an opportunity to attempt to shove it in my face. If you want to play a gnat, that's fine. Just don't get upset when you're hit by the flyswatter?


Edit: To cite another source, it's fairly obvious how vast that power difference is, going by Scirocco's ascension and ability to just march through Grandville like he owned the place, up until he ended up beating himself to be stopped.

So, yeah. Cool that there's powers that originate outside of the well. Doesn't make them utterly inferior aside from minority cases... well, no. Even Battalion is just drugged up on a billion Wells or so!

Anywho, back to my lurking. See yourself out.

I agree with Positron's point (that enforcing modern sensibilities in a historic setting is stupid). I just think the example he used to underline that point was borderline offensive (I don't know offensive to whom, though. Because my first thought was 'that's such an American thing to say'.)

That was my first, gut reaction too -- but the more I thought about it, the less outrageous Positron's claim became. I think his statement is more a case of lead-developer dismissiveness rather than American arrogance.

Positron's tone was deliberately brusque because he was responding to a question phrased as if its faulty premise were self-evident. If you read that tone and associate it with the letter of what he's saying ("The USA is the only democracy to work for a significant period of time"), rather than with the point he was making ("why would the Cimerorans want democracy?"), then it looks vaguely like sneering nationalism, but I don't believe that was the intention.

And again, the bit about the USA, offensive as it may seem at first blush, is at least defensible based on a reasonable reading of history. He didn't say, "America rulez; everyone else droolz." He referred to the USA government's status as a stable and long-lived liberal democracy (or, if you prefer, a representative democracy). It's easy to forget in 2012 that that status is really quite rare in the grand scheme of things -- that, in fact, the USA's history under essentially the same government is longer than most any other country's. Positron underscored that point about rarity by explicitly noting that even the US isn't a direct democracy, in which citizens vote on everything. Direct democracy frankly doesn't work.

So the question wasn't only silly because it ascribed modern sensibilities to the Cimerorans; the question was silly because it implied (or you can reasonably infer from it) that a system that essentially doesn't even exist in practice should be presumed superior to monarchy, by default. Positron can be forgiven for brushing the question aside, given that he was answering a bajillion, often semi-pedantic questions about the game's lore, in his free time and after having just been laid off.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build