Sol 308
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 312
ARES III SOL 308
[08:31] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold - Unable to Display
[09:36] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold - Unable to Display
[10:10] JPL: Well, as you see, Mark, we’re beginning to have problems even at this low bit rate. Explanation will have to wait. For now, don’t bother making the cargo brackets for the alien engines. Put it off until later.
[10:42] WATNEY: How come? Did Bruce Ng and his boys run into a problem? Anything we can do to help?
[11:37] SYSTEM: ERROR - Destination reports Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Message Not Sent
[11:39] WATNEY: I see the problem. Roger wilco.
Spitfire frowned as Mark worked his way through the end of the chapter, delivering Smeagol’s lines in the weird voice he used for that character. It was a terrible voice, a wheedling, whining, rasp-edged voice that got on Spitfire’s nerves… which, of course, made it perfect for Gollum. Spitfire liked it a little better than Mark’s normal voice for one reason; doing the Smeagol voice forced Mark to slow down a little as he read, which made it easier for her to figure out what was being said.
“I don’t get it,” she said. That was one of the English phrases she’d memorized whole, mostly because she found it so useful so often. “We know Gollum betray… will betray them. Now he look nice for, for, for little time, and Sam, he, he, he make it bad?” Faust alive, but she sounded like Rainbow Dash right after she slammed into a mountain headfirst at speed… twice in a row. Which was a thing she did sometimes. “Why writer show this?”
“Maybe Gollum is changing,” Cherry Berry said. “He is a hobbit, or he was one. And Gandalf said hobbits resist the influence of the Ring. Maybe he’s fighting it off?”
Smoke rose from the snort Fireball gave at that. “I bet he already did betray,” he said. “Maybe he feel bad about it. He’s loco, you see that.”
“I think he’s changing his mind,” Starlight Glimmer said. She was fussing over something by the color-changing crystals, squinting at one and then another. She hadn’t taken a turn reading this time. “Or anyway, that’s what I want to believe. I listen to Smeagol’s bits, and I keep thinking how easy I had it, how generous Twilight Sparkle was to me. And the good part of Smeagol isn’t having it easy at all.”
“Is no good Smeagol,” Spitfire insisted. “Is bad Smeagol and Gollum worse. This cheap writer trick.”
“I think it’s a good moment of… um… right and wrong,” Cherry said. “The ring made Gollum do all sorts of evil, but there’s still a little part that resists. And it takes control for a minute, and Sam swats it down with bad temper. Suspicion.”
“Good.” That, unexpectedly, was Dragonfly. “Smeagol isn’t to be trusted. I’m sure he’s already sold out the hobbits, but to what I don’t know.”
“But it’s the Ring doing it to him,” Cherry insisted.
"Nope," Dragonfly insisted. "First rule of mind control: you can't directly force someone to do something against their will. At least part of them has to want to do it."
“Actually,” Starlight began, “that wasn’t how it worked when… never mind.” Spitfire couldn’t help smirking as the unicorn took an extreme interest in the rainbow crystals again.
"As I was saying," Dragonfly continued, "the Ring couldn't have done a thing to Smeagol by itself, not without making him into a total puppet. Which obviously it didn't do. Look at his history. Gandalf said he killed his brother, or cousin, or whatever, for the Ring. He snuck around, poked and pried at things, listening for secrets, stealing little things. That's how he was before the Ring- that's how it got him. Bilbo, on the other hoof, didn’t want anything for himself. He was kind, generous, brave, and loyal. The Ring couldn't do much with that. That's why it kept slipping off his finger- it wanted a new host.”
“But Bilbo couldn’t give up the Ring by himself,” Cherry protested. “It had hold of him enough to make him protect it.”
“Sure,” Dragonfly said. “It’s a gold ring that makes you invisible. Not hard to persuade someone to want to keep it. But Bilbo actually wanted to be rid of the thing. He wanted to give away the Precious, think about what that took! And it wanted to be rid of Bilbo, is what I think. That’s why I think it let Bilbo drop the envelope.”
“We’re getting away from Smeagol here,” Starlight said. “What makes you think Smeagol isn’t reforming?”
“Because Smeagol doesn’t want to reform,” Dragonfly said. “He wants his treasure back. That’s who Smeagol is. That’s who Smeagol always was. The Ring didn’t create that, it just made it worse, took away whatever good things he might have had in him. But you just can’t make someone do something they really don’t want to do. You have to first persuade them they want to do it. You have to start a crack. Smeagol was vulnerable already when he first saw the Ring.”
“Dragonfly,” Mark said slowly, “is this first-hand knowledge? The mind control, I mean”
The changeling looked Mark directly in the eyes and said, “Yes. Yes, it is.” She looked at the others, continuing, “Before the invasion I had a lot of infiltration roles, usually as a pegasus courier. Fastest changeling in the hive means a pretty fast pegasus disguise. My job was to read the messages and pass on anything useful back to headquarters. And yes, that meant hypnotizing a lot of ponies so they’d give me certain jobs or let me look at something I wasn’t supposed to see. I know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Dragonfly looked at Mark again and added, “And the last time I used that ability, you were half-unconscious with a badly burned arm, and I was burning magic like, like, like something that burns really fast, to keep you awake and driving and get yourself and Starlight back to the Hab.” She stomped another hoof. “If you hadn’t wanted to live, deep down, it wouldn’t have done a bucking thing. If you’d given up and decided to die, you would have died no matter how hard I tried to bend your mind. So don't expect me to apologize for knowing how to pull your levers when I really need to!”
This silenced the literary discussion so thoroughly that Mark needed a full twenty seconds before he could think of anything to get it going. “So, would you say that you feel sympathy for Gollum?”
“A little,” Dragonfly said after some consideration. “When I lost control and drained you, it was because some part of me really wanted to. Have I mentioned lately you’re delicious?”
Spitfire put her face in her hoof. This discussion kept finding new and previously unexplored worlds of awkward and uncomfortable.
“So I know exactly what it’s like to give in. Except I don’t think Smeagol ever really fought it.” She sighed. “No, if I understand the word sympathy right, then I feel sympathy for the Ring.”
“Explain.” Mark only said the one word, but it was one word more than Spitfire could muster.
“Pretty simple: mind-bending monster that wants to get home.” Dragonfly shrugged. “And six years ago I could add, ‘so that it can help destroy or enslave the whole world.’ That’s how I was raised. That’s how I’m made. The only difference is that I can decide that, although I definitely am a monster, I will not act like a monster. I don’t know if the Ring has that choice, and I sure don’t see any sign that it would choose to be nice if it could, anyway.”
More silence, followed by Cherry Berry murmuring, “You know, the only other changeling I can ever remember referring to herself as a monster is Chrysalis. None of the others think of themselves that way, at least not out loud.”
Dragonfly shrugged. “Maybe I’ve been around ponies too long.”
Spitfire, having gradually got over her shock, ran through the conversation in her mind, came to a quick decision, and got to her hooves. No one had ever bothered to return the two-meter spare section of Hab support pole to its cabinet back at the Hab, and it lay only a few paces away. She trotted over, picked it up in her teeth, and then walked slowly towards Dragonfly. The others, guessing what was coming, scattered.
“Spitfire,” Cherry Berry asked in a warning tone, “what are you doing?”
“That’s what I’d like to-“
Dragonfly’s comment was interrupted by the swoosh and thwack of plastic against chitin.
“OW!”
“Stop feeling sorry for self,” Spitfire grunted out around the stick. English was hard enough; English with your teeth clamped down on something was just annoying.
“I wasn’t feeling-“
Thwack.
“OW!!”
“Stop talking about be monster. Not let monster in space.”
“Would you like to tell that to my qu-“
Thwack.
“CUT IT OUT!”
“Stop bragging about be evil. Not thing to be proud about.”
“I wasn’t rooting for the-“
Thwack.
“That’s really annoying!”
“Next time you asked what you think about book, say, ‘I hope Frodo wins.’”
Dragonfly didn’t say anything.
Thwack anyway.
“What was THAT for??”
“Am I understand?”
“Yes, I got it!”
“Yes, what?”
“Spitfire,” Cherry Berry said, her tone making it clear that the farce was now over, “give me that stick. After you say yes, ma’am.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ears drooping, Spitfire let the commander take the plastic pole away. For a moment she’d felt back at home… and forgot where she was.
“Thank you,” Dragonfly said, only to get another thwack to the noggin.
“Don’t try to out-Chrysalis Chrysalis,” Cherry said. “I put up with it from her because she almost never tries to do the stuff she talks about. I don’t have to put up with it from you. Understood?”
Dragonfly stood to rigid attention. “Ma’am yes ma’am!” she replied crisply.
“Thank you.” Cherry extended the pole to Mark, who grasped it in one hand. “Please put that away somewhere.”
“Um… sure.” Mark set the pole beside him, then added, “What the hell was all that just now?”
“Percussive medicine,” Spitfire replied in Equestrian. She wasn’t even going to try to render that into English, and to her relief, Mark didn’t press the point.
“Maybe we could read a mystery book when this is done,” Dragonfly said, rubbing her head. “Fantasy is hard on the head.”
“I said, no feel sorry for self.”
Dragonfly, for a changeling, could do a very good disgusted pony snort.
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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke.
A United States President once quiped that "the only thing we have to fear is it's self" so to I think is the concept of evil. Those you white men you spoke of would most likely have thought themselves to be battling evil or " wickedness and savagery" and the tribesmen they fought would have thought likewise of them. Similarly we look back at them through the ages and decry their evil. So what dose that mean for the word "evil" ? It would seem to me at least that "evil" is mearly a word for "not us" but more than that so much "not us" that anything we do against it, or them is excused, justified ect. This word and the concept it embodies may infact be the one true evil.
On the subject of evil, keeping with the LOTR theme, I found this commentary quite poignant. (Go to 17:20 since I cannot get the storming video to start at the proper part...)
An eerie thought that... and one that humans are all together too adept at validating.
the interesting thing is...good and evil do not truly exist, they r human constructs that do not appear in nature. do we blame the Falcon for feasting on the Field Mouse? surly not, yet if we were to give the Mouse Human perception...then from the Mouse's eyes, the Falcon could be seen as evil. so, too is it with Mankind.
every Man, Woman and Child is the Hero of their own story, never do we like to see ourselves as the Villain, that title is applied to others. the world at large sees many people as Evil or Villain, the Holocaust was certainly not a very nice time to be anyone the Nazis didnt like and that group is painted by history as utterly Evil...are they really? they thought they were doing good, that their superiority was unquestioned, that the Jews were a threat to them...Evil...
i have seen much in my life, and thought much more, and it is by this thought that i came to the conclusion that...there IS no Good, nor is there Evil in this world...there is only, Perception...and even that is not absolute...
9005867
Ah, I see you're working to catch up with us. The word you're looking for is "grim".
When Gollum dies the honorable death, they're all going to feel sorry for calling him evil. I just know it. Also, I don't really think the ring is a....conscious entity. It may want things, but it doesn't understand why, and can't really ask questions. It's more like....an A.I. set to do one task, and it will do whatever's in its power to do that task. At least, that's my take on it.
9005887
I would hesitate to call golem's death honorable, the term "hoist on ones own petard comes to mind". The ring created in golem a creature so obsessed with it that in a frantic bid to save his precious and steal it back from Frodo he wound up causing it and himself to be destroyed.
9005913 More than that- the Ring itself was the victim of its own power. Remember that, just outside on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo (or the Ring- it's uncertain who had control) said to Gollum, "Begone, and trouble me no more! If you lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be thrown into the Crack of Doom."
Gollum did, and he was- but while he was clutching the Ring.
Oops.
While "parity" can technically refer to error-correcting coding, no programmer I've ever met would use it as you do in the fic because, intuitively, we consider "parity" to refer to mechanisms which can detect corruption but are too simple to correct it.
Something like the old "parity bit" system in RS232 serial links, where you might transmit 9 bits, with the ninth indicating whether the sum of the other eight is even or odd so the receiving end can request a retransmit.
What NASA uses for interplanetary links where retransmit latency is prohibitive is ECC (Error-Correcting Coding), which is the same type of mechanism that allows you to stick an image in the middle of a QR code and still scan it successfully. (ECC works by injecting a customizable amount of mathematically chosen extra data such that you get a much more complex version of A + B = C and can solve for any missing or corrupted pieces as long as the loss/corruption doesn't exceed a threshold determined by how much ECC you added.)
(A more localized version is also used by CDs and DVDs, which is why you can usually read all the data on a disc with pinholes in the data layer or scratches perpendicular to the spiral of the data track, but you'll need to pay to have the scratches polished out of your CD or DVD if the scratch follows the curve of the data track.)
Here are a few examples of a more plausible error message:
I'd also imagine that they'd probably have some mechanism to deal with worsening signal quality, such as upping the redundancy factor at the cost of even slower transmit speeds, offering a UI where, if the message fails to go, it will switch into a mode where it automatically retransmits without waiting for the round-trip latency of confirmation until either the receiving end confirms or the sending user chooses to cancel the send, or both.
9005936 I used it because it's what I knew. I may go back and fix it, but I lost an hour of writing time tonight to editing that chapter (it shrank by 200 words between drafts, mostly trimming back Dragonfly's rambling). As it is, buffer's back to 1/2.
was enjoying this...
right up to parts of the Author Comments.
---
part of its ... Personal but im SICK of the 'Racist, Evil White Man' crap.
My sides require maintenance now
Evil's a hell of a thing.
Sometimes, just trying to do good is evil, because you don't know the truth. Those people you talk about, they'd have been considered good, honest men of their day. Vets get a lot of it from certain circles, but in the end, nobody wants to be evil. We say 'I want to protect my family'. But if you judge through the lens of history, from knowledge they didn't have, is that even fair? Those settlers were led to believe horrible things and therefore, did terrible things.
Because at the end of the day, sometimes the only way to stop someone from doing evil to you and yours is to do a (hopefully) lesser evil to him. Because better him than you. In Equestria, at least it's easy to determine good and bad. In our reality, it's never so simple.
Spoiler for military unpleasantness that broke a fellow soldier. Read at your own peril. Killing children is wrong, absolutely. What do you do when the child coming towards your post has a bomb strapped to them? And with whatever you do... how do you live with the guilt?
Good and evil are moral choices. So yes, we create them as people. There is also right and wrong. We can observe pack behavior in animals where a pack member does wrong and is punished for it. It is often said that no one is a villain in their own head, but as with most absolutes, there are exceptions. There are people that embrace evil, that want to watch the world burn and be the one holding the match. And sadly, we live in that world.
9005974
You are seeing the wrong thing. It isn't "racist, evil, white man."
It is "racist, evil human being."
I have met many persons who don't need the excuse of race to be horrible to others. A couple times in the last few years, when I have had to describe a person to someone else, they have asked, "White or black?" I don't pay attention to this, because to me it makes no difference.
It makes me stop and think, "This is the 21st century. Why are we not past this? Why can we not see fellow human beings for what they are? Why does this still matter? Why does anyone yet choose to allow this to matter?"
You must choose not to see race. You must choose to see fellow human beings.
If you want to reply or discuss anything, please feel free to do so in a pm. I don't want to put anything more political or sensitive in a comment thread.
9004279
Ponies gave Mars space cooties.
Call me a stick in the mud, but I’ve never enjoyed the “Percussive Maintenance” joke.
I could tolerate it in the Three Stooges, but in this situation... it’s inexcusable. At least in my opinion.
I felt like Dragonfly was not feeling sorry for herself, but because of the history of changelings. Brainwashing subjects to further your agenda. Stealing energy to preserve the hive. Using dirty tricks to lure prey into a false sense of security. It was hardwired into her DNA.
She was simply wishing that she didn’t have these “survival instincts” fighting along side her real survival instincts. Not for her, but for the betterment of the crew.
And then here comes Spitfire. To beat the shit out of the Monster.
Who knows, maybe a good slap was all she needed. Maybe I’m just wrong and stupid, and the author is a god among men (Love you Kris! <3)
Maybe I shouldn’t read so hard into a fan fiction
TL:DR
Is hitting someone really the right way to make them feel better? No. It’s not.
Edit: Two seconds later, I’ve had one more thought!
When your stranded on a planet with only 6 people total, don’t hit anyone. That’s just a bad plan overall.
Use a squirt gun or something.
9005887
Oh, the ring is definitely a conscious entity. Not on the same level as Sauron himself, but definitely conscious. Maiar can properly wield their souls as they are spirits, and thus Sauron would have had enough control to create the ring exactly how he wanted it.
Mysteries, hm. Should probably go with Holmes for the classics. Haven't read any though. If Mark wants to lighten the mood, he could suggest that they DON'T PANIC before moving back to something weightier.
"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
this line, this line right here, this line deserves a hypocrisy award for being just so damned hypocritical it's not even funny, seriously if spitfire had an element right now it would be the element of hypocrisy.
i'm sorry but coming from the mare who was proud of what she did in rainbow falls up until she got called out, and the mare who had the audacity to get angry at rainbow dash's totally justified anger in wonder-bolt academy? thats just hilariously hypocritical.
Not all evil is banal and unimaginative.
But you're not gonna like the creative evil.
We had an ironic term "common fascism" that ment "any war crime that you couldn't believe was possible, yet it is". Like peeling prisoners' skin to make gloves, book covers and lampshades or starving children to death in the name of science.
It was pure, obvious evil, but not for those, who have already given in to the perversion and monstrosity.
For them it was ordinary. It was common.
In 1965 there was a movie called in US "Triumph over Violence", but when it was produced in USSR, it was called "Common fascism". The director slipped in many allegories and pointed out how communism started to resemble the fascism.
And I think that's what important.
Not being all goodie-two-shoes, but knowing the evil in your actions without trying to justify it. Without saying "it was for a good cause" or "I had no choise", but admit that it was evil and learn from it.
So... Good for you, Johanssonlis. You're going in the right way, comrade.
9005922
Regarding your definition of evil, Stephen King loves describing bucolic towns filled with pleasant friendly neighbours...and letting them tear apart each other once the supernatural force (the Myst's creatures, Mr. Linoge, Mr. Gaunt, etc...) begins to act.
Often, the scariest thing is not the monster himself, but how easy is to make people forsake their decency and morality, and how hard are things for the few are the ones who dare to resist and act.
I think being introspective requires some intelligence and that's why most changelings aren't. >.>
Silly Cherry, you can't out-Chrysalis Chrysalis.
9006123
Changelings can take a hit. Especially armored warrior changelings. CSP proved as much.
There is only one true thing about good and evil.
No one truly knows what they are because they do not exist.
What one thinks as good, other think as evil. What may look good at first may turn out to be a crime against nature later, and what looks horrible and inhumane may be what makes everyone breath for another day. Morality is a crafted thing: It is made. There is no universal definition for something that is not guaranteed to give the same result every single time.
We look back at history and say 'What they did was horrible', but they thought 'What we do is necessary, or even right'. In the future humanity (or other species) will look at our history in distaste or, more likely, contempt and hate.
In the end, YOU decide what is good and evil. But you are as right, or as wrong, as the person next to you. Debate all you want, nobody can get it right.
Calling it now - solution to engines not being adequate.
Breezie transform.
Maybe its 8,Y,1 serial port TTY on the laptop and thats after all the hardware communications ECC decode that happens to be getting the data down into the right range but due to unprintable characters etc is messing up the bits? Ive had all sorts of problems with communications.
Which is why I like the idea of using the full bandwidth to send autocorrelating codes that are just being used to transmit Morse, Even Voyager that would be almost 90% error correction, but you only need just over 50% and theoretically it would get through, because if you decode the signal and its inverse, you cant get more than 50% errors? That is, the decoded signal is asymetrically coded itself to bias it?
Getting hit by a plastic whip tentpole is more annoying than a lead water pipe, at least that thing absorbs impact energy by deforming, the tentpole returns the impact double by flexing back.
Which still confuses the heck out of me why All shock absorbing airbags on Earth are designed to collapse on impact, todissipate the force and energy, but Mars Rovers have to suffer the impact nearly a hundred times as they first come to a halt on impact, then are launched back up with a subsequent elastic impact recovery. Maybe thats why Beagle 2 survived the landing, its airbag exploded under maximum stress, that is, the point where it reaches zero velocity relative to the surface, sending the impact energy sideways, clearing the ground of debris?
I mean, getting smacked when you try to be introspective and share your feelings isn't great.
Perhaps the ponies can't relate, but could Mark, or other humans, having been predators ourselves?
Perhaps changelings couldn't afford being introspective when every day was about survival, but is it such a bad thing today?
Knowing that you fulfil many criteria for being a monster in the eyes of others does not mean that you are or need to be one, in particular if you are that self aware.
Dragonfly just seems like she needs someone to share those thoughts with, both doubts and fears, and be accepted as she is, rather than be pressed into the mould of a pony she can never be.
Perhaps this applies to Chrysalis as well? Who knows.
9005974
Do you somehow think that only white people are racist? God no, and that's not what the author was implying either. At the same time the white people thought the Indians were sub-human scum, the Indians thought the same of the white people. That doesn't make either acceptable. And Chinese people didn't use the term gweilo as endearment, and the French hated the British with a burning passion. Loads of people are racist, but it takes a special kind of narcissist to somehow make the narrative "all about me"
9006306 I think raping people and then cannibalizing their livers is good!
YOU CAN'T TELL ME OTHERWISE!!
That moral relativism is certainly useful as an excuse to sit on yer ass and do nothing.
It wasn't "because of consensus". The policy of killing Indians was beneficial and all that "consensus" and "duty" stuff was a consequence that arised exactly as a way of (sometimes preemptively) countering "hey, maybe what we are doing is morally wrong?" counterargument. Granted it wasn't too hard to argue: Indians were pretty eager to kill colonists too and looked like quite the weirdos from European point of view.
9006225 Uhm, that was the canon world's Spitfire.
This is a world in which the ponies have a space program. They're different ponies altogether.
9006158 The One Ring is the first example of a Horcrux. It's a significant part of Sauron's soul and power split off from himself and bound to the Ring's spell matrix, through which it could act directly upon the other Great Rings as well as control minds. Hence, why when it was destroyed, he was reduced to a vapor. You could also say that it prevented him from dying after the first War of the Ring, when Isildur defeated him. It's exactly the same thing as the sum of Voldemort's Horcruxes.
JK Rowling, in fact, took the concept directly from it.
I have ALL THE FACTS about said events. Suffice to say, no one cared one iota for the last 20 years it was taking place, when up to 10 times more were being affected per year.
It's simply a useful source of outrage for a certain group to use to get the uninformed and uneducated riled up... as with so many other such ploys employed over the previous 8 years.
As I've said before, it's nearly impossible to deceive one who knows almost everything.
9005936
Yeah, I wanted to comment on parity too before I notices it was already done.
Although, if I remember correctly, Reed-Solomon codes won't notify you if decoder input is too corrupted --- it would just decode it into different message (and that's kinda whole point of ECC: marking some subset of decoder's inputs as "incorrect" is wasteful from information-theoretic point of view and is thing to avoid). So if one wants integrity checks, something like additional hash function inside the message will be needed.
9006123
I take it, then, that you’re not a fan of the “bash to fit, paint to hide” school of repair?
9006419
Sit on my ass and do nothing? Not quite. I do what I think is right the same way you do.
As for what you said? Once again, depends.
Rape is obviously horrible, there is no way around it. As for terror tactics and to instill general fear and subservience? It works wonders, most horrible and despicable things usually do, like the atomic bomb. It is something nearly unanimously voted as depraved and wretched, but it will still be done by those that think it is right, or they will, at the very least, try.
Now, cannibalism in various ways? That is a bit more murky. If you are dying of hunger and the only thing you have to eat is the person next to you, you either choose to live or you chose to die. There is little else there if it is the ONLY solution, unless you are willing to croak doing nothing.
But cannibalizing someone else's life? To deprive them of the very means of survival, of their freedom, of their choices? That, once more, is horrible... But not unheard of and, much like literal cannibalism, necessary in some, very rare, cases. Like having someone under siege, wishing to weed out certain elements of a society that wish not to conform to the society itself by any other means and other such things.
Let's be real: If you had to choose between saving a newborn baby or saving a million people, the answer would be gut wrenching, but also easy, no matter who you are. Which one you choose, however, depends on you.
So yes. I agree in that the examples you put out aren't good. Do I think they are universally evil? No. Depends on many factors, and that you may not like the answer is not going to change the facts.
9006123 From the pony point of view, Dragonfly was getting so far into cringe territory that they could no longer find their own flanks with a map. Spitfire took action that, in her mind, would get them out of Cringeland and inhibit any return jaunts.
9006225 Oh, no question, Spitfire's not got a clean record on that front. The cartoon hasn't used her well at all.
9006268 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street
9006428 The one arises from the other. Granted, Spitfire has had the opportunity to learn from her mistakes; I'm not sure she had the inclination, though.
9006431 And as I had Mark mention in-story, Tolkien got his idea from even older works- the Ring itself from Wagner and the Arabian Nights, its containing part of Sauron's soul as a variant on the ogre/troll/giant whose heart is in another castle, etc.
I think evil isn't just a subjective thing (duh), it's an emotional concept. in most cases we equalise it to cruelty and define something 'evil' when it causes us unwanted/unwelcome suffering. It's also a matter of choice. You can't have 'evil' without 'good', or 'cruelty' without 'mercy'.
Changelings didn't have a choice on what to do, certainly not on individual level. How they went abour performing their tasks mattered, and that's what would be a basis for 'evil'/'good' definition for those who cared. What Dragonfly's doing now isn't guilt over how eeeevil changelings were. It's 'oh look at me, I'm like a million times tougher than you, I ate shits like you for breakfast back in the day'. She's not regretting it, she's bragging about it. Why? I honestly don't know, I would think they'd be past it. You don't get to brag about a war you lost.
9006306
A perfect argument for doing whatever the hell you want. The choice doesn't matter, it's wrong anyway, so why bother? Yeah, no. It's really not about that in the end.
9006030
He helped him achive his Destiny (or at least what he believed to be one at the time), hopefully, quickly and more or less painlessly. How is that evil or cruel? Not many of us are that lucky, on either side. (he probably would perish under the rubble from the carpet bombing/missile strike the next day anyway, and THAT can be a much more unpleasant experience)
9006481 From Dragonfly's point of view, they didn't lose the war. The changelings lived. That counts as a win, in her book.
Chrysalis, of course, has an entirely different viewpoint on the matter.
I don't really have anything to add to the larger conversation. I just like the character dynamics on display. The actions not so much, but the interplay itself os fantastic.
You know I wasn't expecting to see such a hot debate of good and evil being inspired by Lord of the Rings (personally, I found the series boring even if it is a classic).
I normally have a mixed opinion on what most people call 'evil' nowadays. Usually it's born simply from conflicting opinions on what is right or as Nier: Gestalt put it "You have your own desires and wishes and so do we. Sadly, it really is just that simple." I feel that this is truth behind most arguments in the world today.
Not that objective evil doesn't exist of course. Usually though it's some manner of perverse "Because I can" mentality. We can all point at the pedophile or the domestic abuser and say "No that's wrong" but when the issue becomes a contest between others prosperity and our own things get muddled.
Anyway that's my inspired rant. Thanks for the great chapter, made me think.
9006583 The closest thing I've found to a workable, clear definition of evil is from Terry Pratchett's works: evil is when you treat other people like things instead of people.
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Well it certainly puts the 'object' in 'objective evil'.
Given all the references to Pratchet's work you make I'm assuming it's a good read. Are his books a series? Is there a place I should start if I want to pick it up? And importantly, do they have a satisfying conclusion?
I get that this has been discussed to death already, but I can't resist the lure of a philisophical debate.
The main issue I have is the way banality is being used in the primary (author's) argument. To paraphrase, it's describing evil as being something some ordinary they people don't realize or recognize.
Realize or recognize. The implication is that there is an evil that is present, and it is merely the ignorance of those performing the action that prevents the people from recognizing their immorality. Built in is the idea that if they recognize the act as evil, they won't do it.
One thing that has been pointed out by others already is that morality is relative. This is the idea that without a authority beyond ourselves to declare right and wrong, each of our (individual or cultural) moral codes has just as much value as the next guy's. As religion is a touchy and murky topic, let's just provisionally accept this as a true statement.
With this, that means that, for example, the settler is not part of the banality of evil, because there is no evil for him to discover. He did not subscribe to a moral code that killing Native Americans (or Indians) was evil.
If he were to do it today, he would be violating several laws (which were likely influenced by a change in the prevalence of certain moral codes). However, this doesn't necessarily translate into evil, just illegal (two distinct ideas, sometimes conflated). After all, German soldiers just claimed they were obeying laws (I was just following orders), and are frequently declared as evil.
Whether or not something is evil is in the eye of the perceiver. The person who performs an act typically doesn't think it evil at the time (at worst, they probably think it a necessary one to enable a greater good they think is coming). Others decide whether or not it is good or evil to their mind alone. Today, while most would declare the hypothetical settler as evil (using standards common today), some less popular codes today would probably still declare him good.
So don't say that people don't realize they are doing evil at the time. A more accurate statement would be that most didn't think it evil at the time.
(Written on a phone while half-listening to a deposition in a courtroom, so there's probably holes in my argument and other errors. Error 1 was probably writing a discourse on the relativity of morality in response to a story about texhnicolor alien equines on Mars).
Ugh, that Dragonfly dialogue really made me uncomfortable. You definitely got the banality of evil thing down in this chapter. Just, the bragging about the things she did to Mark in front of his face and the acknowledgement that she knew she was expected to apologize but didn't think she did anything to deserve to, that's the kind of evil you see everywhere. Abusers use that kind of vocabulary and it was terrifying seeing it come from both a friend and someone they literally rely on to survive.
9006644 Three points.
First, my argument is about evil that ordinary people do not recognize or do not allow themselves to recognize. It's part of the same phenomenon that makes it nearly impossible for the victim of a grifter to be persuaded that they've been had; once you make a decision and become emotionally invested in it, your mind automatically embraces all evidence that confirms it and rejects all evidence that runs against it, no matter how little there is of the first and how much there is of the second. And there's no one easier to fool than yourself.
Second, my hypothetical settler almost certainly had a Bible in his possession with the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and Acts Chapter 10 and the letter to the Galatians, never mind Jesus's own teachings about always forgiving one's enemy. He was quite definitely given an option and a choice. But he (and the vast majority of real, historic white Americans of his day) chose to say, "These rules apply to other white people only; blacks and Indians are only animals, so they don't count, and I can do with them as I like."
Finally, I subscribe to subjective morality but not to subjective good and evil.
9006636 The vast majority of Terry Pratchett's work is in a series called Discworld. It's not a continuous series; each book is very much self-contained, and although there are sub-series where it helps to read a book farther up the chain, it's not required.
I recommend beginning with "Guards! Guards!", "Wyrd Sisters," and "Small Gods." The first one is the start of the City Watch sub-series; the second is the second book in the Lancre Witches sub-series; the third is a stand-alone. If you like those, I recommend following up with "Men at Arms," "Witches Abroad," and "Reaper Man." After that you can wander the series (over fifty books in all) as you like, though I recommend putting off the early books in the series until later and not picking up anything published from "Making Money" on until you've read all the others. (The early books were more parody than satire and tended to splinter into too many rapidly shifting viewpoints; the later books show a clear decline in quality as Pratchett's early-onset Alzheimers began to affect him.)