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"Why are you still alive?"

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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by Brigade XO   » Thu Mar 24, 2022 4:56 pm

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There is a vast difference between changing or switching tracks (which is usually a low speed and planned/controlled change) and jumping the tracks (a wheel or set or two come off the rails) and a high speed derailment where equipment and cars and engines can be piling up in a mangled jumble and or bursting into flame. The latter is the stage the Alignment is at now.

Mesa, as scapegoat and diversion, was meant to be a total basket case of trashed and decimated world. Lots of nuclear explosions (with fallout), everybody despising them, one of more systems possibly fighting over the scraps. It's not that but it was supposed to be. Between Houdini and the Final Flourish it's in bad shape but there is, at least for now, a stable if imposed government in change with an actual capable and professional Navy sitting on it. I don't then the Alignment ever expected the Engagement (or whatever they have chosen as a name) of the non-Onion Alignment to be anything more than yet another set of misdirections to be hunted down in the bloodletting the Alignment expected when Mesa took it's hit.

Given what I have seen so far, my current perspective was that the LDs were intended as yet another range of misdirections and prods. Post the Breaking of the SL, they could stand off from Systems that were doing too well and probably being aggressive with various of their neighbors and "attack" them with the invisible starships but blaming the bombardments on ships from the neighbors who were in system for various reasons including "peace talks". Nothing gets people rile up like somebody sitting down to negations as an apparent cover for a sneak attack. That is classic Alignment. Heck one of the newer RF members (perhaps not one of the original dozen RF members) gets the same treatment early on and lives are tragically lost by the RF negotiation team and a couple of their ships in system as the other system in the negotiation (not the RF member) supposedly opens up on the planet and orbitals with pods "they" spread as they were coming in for the conference.

How many ships and stations have the Alignment done something similar too in Talbot etc. Heck, they did it at Beowulf to further enrage the GA against the SL.
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by cthia   » Thu Mar 24, 2022 6:23 pm

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Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by tlb   » Thu Mar 24, 2022 7:01 pm

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cthia wrote:Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

It is more of a community; definitely not an autocracy. There are various names mentioned in TEiF, but not one to rule them all.
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by cthia   » Fri Mar 25, 2022 7:24 am

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tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

It is more of a community; definitely not an autocracy. There are various names mentioned in TEiF, but not one to rule them all.

A community without a leader? Who makes the sort of rules that says you can't have a bonfire in the middle of the street? Who is responsible for the direction of the "community"? Its bylaws, its purpose, its dos and don'ts?

There has to be someone calling the shots. Or else they never would have deviated from the Detweiler plan.

No mention of a government? Nobody establishing laws? So there is lawlessness? What exactly are their goals?

Could Gail be one of their leaders?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Mar 25, 2022 8:57 am

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cthia wrote:A community without a leader? Who makes the sort of rules that says you can't have a bonfire in the middle of the street? Who is responsible for the direction of the "community"? Its bylaws, its purpose, its dos and don'ts?


He didn't say that.

There is a cadre leading the group, including Arianne McBryde. She's the most obvious name to us and the most prominent in the book, but it also hints she was not the most senior. There are others.

But it seems this is a community with a bottoms-up type of arrangement. The community chooses their leaders to represent them before the new Mesa Government, before the League and the Alliance. It's not an autocracy, imposed top-down; it's especially not one whose leaders aren't known.

There has to be someone calling the shots. Or else they never would have deviated from the Detweiler plan.

No mention of a government? Nobody establishing laws? So there is lawlessness? What exactly are their goals?

Could Gail be one of their leaders?


Wait, are you talking about the Benign Alignment before Houdini? In that case, they might have had "leaders" who didn't actually lead. Those were either dupes or patsies, or controlled by the Onion, or some variation of both. They were also constrained in communication because they were a hidden organisation, meaning they probably operated in a cell-like structure. The majority of the members wouldn't know who those leaders were, only their local contacts. So long as they were steadily making progress in creating the benign genetic mods, fighting and frustrating Manpower as well as they could, and not getting arrested, the majority was probably content to let matters be.

It's not until Mike Henke and Lester Tourville stopped by and started hunting for the Alignment that they came to light. And probably realised that those leaders were nowhere to be found. Zilwicki and Cachat would have found that particularly interesting. That's when the meetings including Arianne McBryde started taking place.
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by tlb   » Fri Mar 25, 2022 10:06 am

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cthia wrote:Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

tlb wrote:It is more of a community; definitely not an autocracy. There are various names mentioned in TEiF, but not one to rule them all.

cthia wrote:A community without a leader? Who makes the sort of rules that says you can't have a bonfire in the middle of the street? Who is responsible for the direction of the "community"? Its bylaws, its purpose, its dos and don'ts?

There has to be someone calling the shots. Or else they never would have deviated from the Detweiler plan.

No mention of a government? Nobody establishing laws? So there is lawlessness? What exactly are their goals?

Could Gail be one of their leaders?

In any community, there might be some people that like to take charge and others that will go along (think of a Home Owners' Association or Monty Python's constitutional peasants). It still runs by consent of the governed. There can be jostling for control, but that does not result in a permanent leader; instead there is a turnover (for example, see democracy).

I would be very wary of the Engagement, if they did have a permanent leader.

As was pointed out to me (I cannot find that instance now), they did NOT deviate from the Detweiler Plan; instead they remained faithful to the plan as originally stated by Leonard Detweiler. It was Leonard's heirs that eventually corrupted the plan into one of universal domination.

Why lawlessness? They are already living in a society with laws. It is more as though they were an oppressed minority.

Gail is not anyone's leader (if you are talking about the weapons analyst on Darius). She is certainly not a leader of a movement on Mesa.
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Mar 25, 2022 6:29 pm

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tlb wrote:As was pointed out to me (I cannot find that instance now), they did NOT deviate from the Detweiler Plan; instead they remained faithful to the plan as originally stated by Leonard Detweiler. It was Leonard's heirs that eventually corrupted the plan into one of universal domination.


Leonard never spelt it out very well want he really wanted. He never did write the Plan. When we talk about the Detweiler Plan, we've all assumed it was the Leonard Detweiler Plan, but we've also been told that it was created after his lifetime.

So maybe it's named for a Richard Detweiler that lived 100 years later or so, and was the one that faked his death.
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by tlb   » Fri Mar 25, 2022 7:18 pm

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tlb wrote:As was pointed out to me (I cannot find that instance now), they did NOT deviate from the Detweiler Plan; instead they remained faithful to the plan as originally stated by Leonard Detweiler. It was Leonard's heirs that eventually corrupted the plan into one of universal domination.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Leonard never spelt it out very well want he really wanted. He never did write the Plan. When we talk about the Detweiler Plan, we've all assumed it was the Leonard Detweiler Plan, but we've also been told that it was created after his lifetime.

So maybe it's named for a Richard Detweiler that lived 100 years later or so, and was the one that faked his death.

You are wrong, RFC has talked at some length about the argument between Leonard Detweiler and the Beowulf establishment that lead to the creation of Mesa and Manpower Inc. Here is a piece of that:
runsforcelery wrote:Now, it can legitimately be argued that Beowulf, in eschewing a program of direct, explicit, targeted improvement of the human baseline turned its back on the potential to improve the human race as a species. That was, in fact, Leonard Detweiler’s position. And, for those of you who have asked, Leonard Detweiler probably would’ve been horrified by the Alignment’s current strategies and policies. Detweiler never envisioned the horrendous dehumanization of genetic slaves. In fact, he never specifically referred to them as “slaves” at all. Don’t get me wrong — for his time, and considering the culture from which he sprang, he was an incredibly ruthless bastard, perfectly prepared to create thousands or even millions of human beings who would be second-class citizens. He had, however, almost a patriarchal perspective on the genetic “indentured servants” he created, and the Mesa constitution’s provision for manumission of genetic slaves was inserted at his insistence. Moreover, he regarded the creation of the “indentured servants” as a priceless opportunity to incorporate superior characteristics into them and (through them, in the fullness of time) into all the rest of the human race. They were to be his laboratory, in which individually valuable genetic traits would be developed, enhanced, and conserved in the process of solving individual specific needs. In a sense, this was the same logic as the Beowulf code’s willingness to modify colonists to better suit them to their new planetary environments except that by commercializing the process on a large-scale basis, Detweiler was creating a far larger experimental population with a view towards eventually combining all of those individually engineered traits into a single genetically superior species. As part of his mindset, emancipated “indentured servants” were never supposed to become Seccies. Once they were emancipated, they were supposed to have the vote, to see their children fully integrated into Mesan society, etc. To be honest, that was probably the least realistic of his several unrealistic assumptions of what was possible, but it was fundamental to his own thinking and the moral system which justified everything else he was prepared to do.

After his death, the “Detweiler vision” was corrupted, as generally happens in a closed society which sees itself as a threatened/visionary minority surrounded by hostility and threats to its noble purpose. Moderation is normally the first casualty of that sort of environment, and paranoia and megalomania while not necessarily inevitable are certainly likely. Driven underground, confronted by Beowulf’s savage denunciation of genetic slavery (and Beowulf was the first to insist upon that term instead of “indentured servant”) and (in what became the Alignment’s opinion) vilified for simply desiring to improve all humans, the Alignment’s leadership started its gradual but steadily steeper slide into what it has become by Honor Alexander-Harrington’s day.

--- snip ----

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t members of the Alignment who, faced with something like a Francesca and Herlander Simões, wouldn’t turn out to be additional Jack McBrydes. It means that the initial vision of Leonard Detweiler has been not simply corrupted but institutionalized as a conspiratorial, revolutionary organization which measures the moral acceptability of any given act or strategy solely in terms of whether or not it believes that act or strategy advances the achievement of its “noble” goal.

--- snip ----

Ultimately, I’m fairly sympathetic to the Leonard Detweiler view of the possibilities and value of deliberate, targeted genetic “improvement” on the baseline Version 1.0 of humanity. What they’ve accomplished in their own Alpha and Beta lines demonstrates the potential for improving the human genotype. So do Honor Alexander-Harrington, Benjamin Mayhew, Yana Tretiakovna, and a gentleman named Jeremy X. However, despite any sympathy I may feel for Leonard’s original view and objectives for improving humanity’s DNA, I find Beowulf’s more limited view of what is acceptable far more likely to preserve humanity’s humanity.

It’s not my intention to paint the Alignment — or any of its individual members — as cardboard cutout, mustache-twirling Agents of Evil. I think they are agents of evil, but it isn’t because they have knowingly and willingly embraced evil. It’s because they are so consumed by their purpose that they are unable to recognize evil actions when they are the very ones committing them.

Detweiler Vision vs Beowulf Code: "Right" and "Wrong"
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Fri Mar 25, 2022 11:46 pm

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munroburton wrote:Wormhole links are unpredictable. One of the things which derailed the Alignment's timetable, if not quite their entire plan, was the discovery of the Manticore-Lynx bridge.

Which brought Manticore about four to six hundred light years closer to Mesa. From that point onwards, much of the Alignment moves have been reactive and probably improvised - the half-baked Talbott resistance, Monica affair, Byng and Crandall's deployments. They were forced to launch Houdini much earlier than intended and even then it did not succeed 100%, costing them their shadow emperor.

The prematurely launched Oyster Bay was also completely reactive(to Apollo), whereas the original OOB would have been completely proactive. This turned it from a total tactical success into a total strategic failure as it planted the seed of a Haven-Manticore alliance.


I think the defector was an even bigger factor than the wormhole link. The wormhole pushed them into a bunch of stupid moves but I don't think that was nearly as bad as the leak.
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Re: "Why are you still alive?"
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 26, 2022 7:24 am

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tlb wrote:
ThinksMarkedly wrote:Leonard never spelt it out very well want he really wanted. He never did write the Plan. When we talk about the Detweiler Plan, we've all assumed it was the Leonard Detweiler Plan, but we've also been told that it was created after his lifetime.

So maybe it's named for a Richard Detweiler that lived 100 years later or so, and was the one that faked his death.

You are wrong, RFC has talked at some length about the argument between Leonard Detweiler and the Beowulf establishment that lead to the creation of Mesa and Manpower Inc. Here is a piece of that:


Thanks for the post. I stand corrected on most things. And also, Leonard did have a diary and did publish things so what he thought on a lot of subjects was well-known.

But I stand by saying he didn't write the Plan. His vision wasn't for a takeover of the Galaxy's genetics. In a section of your quote of RFC, he talked about how Leonard would uplift the human race by making those mods available to all, possibly for free as it got passed to children of manumitted former indents. So it seems like he wanted Humanity to be uplifted, and was willing to accept some things others (Beowulf) found questionable for the end goal, but he wasn't going to impose it on anyone who didn't really want it.

Much less the means towards that end that were written into the Plan, which included corruption, warships, causing wars, nanite compulsion, and nanite-triggered involuntary "suicides." Let's remember that the Solarian-Haven War was part of the Plan, but was means to an end, not an objective itself.
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