ONEG video: Hide And Q

[eyl]

Of course not. I think it will be less costly than the number of small scale conflicts that will rage if the planet isn't unified though. Of course, you could do a large amount of the conquesting relatively bloodless when you get people to recognize your overwhelming numbers and firepower.

Besides, that isn't the most costly part- I'm pretty sure industrialization will kill more people, even with attempts to soften it.

What overwhelming numbers and firepower? If yo're setting up a puppet regime, you're not going to give them troops (as that would kind of void the entire point of using puppets in the first place) - at most, you'd give them some technology (probably not too advanced from what they currently have, as they need to be able to manufacture it)

[Samuel]

Of course not. I think it will be less costly than the number of small scale conflicts that will rage if the planet isn't unified though. Of course, you could do a large amount of the conquesting relatively bloodless when you get people to recognize your overwhelming numbers and firepower.

Besides, that isn't the most costly part- I'm pretty sure industrialization will kill more people, even with attempts to soften it.

What overwhelming numbers and firepower? If yo're setting up a puppet regime, you're not going to give them troops (as that would kind of void the entire point of using puppets in the first place) - at most, you'd give them some technology (probably not too advanced from what they currently have, as they need to be able to manufacture it)

Agricultural and medical improvements will make their population boom, and give them cannons and they can reduce fortresses in days that would otherwise take years. Work fast enough and no one will be able to develop counter measures.

[Junghalli]

Agricultural and medical improvements will make their population boom, and give them cannons and they can reduce fortresses in days that would otherwise take years. Work fast enough and no one will be able to develop counter measures.

Actually the superior weaponry isn't the hard part, the hard part is going to be enabling a Midaeval culture to actually be able to control a planet. A planet is a big place, remember. If the planet has the same kind of land/water distribution as Earth you'll have to boost them up to at least Victorian level, because they'll need railroads and iron-hulled steamships at bare minimum.

[Samuel]

Agricultural and medical improvements will make their population boom, and give them cannons and they can reduce fortresses in days that would otherwise take years. Work fast enough and no one will be able to develop counter measures.

Actually the superior weaponry isn't the hard part, the hard part is going to be enabling a Midaeval culture to actually be able to control a planet. A planet is a big place, remember. If the planet has the same kind of land/water distribution as Earth you'll have to boost them up to at least Victorian level, because they'll need railroads and iron-hulled steamships at bare minimum.

So, we'd need to either set up massive industrialization first, or begin asteroid mining to supply the raw material and devices they would need. I'm a little leery of having the fleet become the sole source of material for the planet- I want them to industrialize and not just be based on the extraction of raw materials.

You sure they need steam ships though? Doesn't well built sail work fine? Plus you don't need refueling stations or as much infrastructure.

[Patrick Degan]

That was me mocking you. The fact of the matter that complaining people will die under my method is slightly hypocritical, given the will die almost certainly as badly anyway. Even if intervention screws up, the death toll will be a smaller percentage than letting the natives hack and starve each other to death. Remember how pathetically low the life expectancy is? Or the lack of counter measures to disease? Or the fact that despotic empires throughout human history were rated well for stopping people from killing each other?

The difference is you are the one doing the killing. No matter how you try to shade the argument, it's your force having to spill blood to establish the occupation regime. And the natives didn't ask you to come down and assume the White Man's Burden on their behalf. Exactly what part of that is so damn difficult to comprehend?

Exactly what do you propose is the eventual outcome of forcibly occupying a world and subduing its inhabitants so as to civilise them?

Except I have repeatedly advocated using proxies.

Still makes you responsible for the deaths, only you're using accomplices instead of your own troops directly. So what's the difference?

The logic I have been using is that if ou can help people it is morally imperitive that you do so. Your rebuttal seems to be we will screw up... because it hasn't been done before and that the natives have to go through all the shit themselves to learn You do realize that societies aren't cumulative and that they can learn the wrong lessens? I'm looking at you nationalism.

In a word, bullshit. There is no "moral imperative" to go to a primitive land, or world, kill as many natives as it takes to subdue them to your occupation regime, and decide for them what is their proper path to development and to force them down that road. They do not learn, as a people, the lessons of the climb to higher civilisation, but they do carry the legacy of being an occupied people and that resentment does not go away.

Ah, so that somehow makes all the mass death resulting from Japan's wars in pursuit of an imperial destiny fueled by the combination of modern technology with a semifeudal mindset they never learned to shed before we had to burn their island somehow... worth it. Tell that to the Chinese and the Koreans.

So the Japanese were using a "semi-feudal mindset", but the Germans were modern? The only difference I can find is the proliferation of war crimes... which Germany matches.

The difference is that the Germans, to this day, assume responsibility for their crimes of the war. The Japanese, however, deny it.

Come to think of it, how is the desire for conquest semi-feudal- EVERYONE was doing that! Did the US suddenly regress to semi-feudalism in the 1890s when we started grabbing colonies?

And that experiment proved less than successful, as Cuba and the Philippines bore out; the one went Communist, the other has been lumbered with either corrupt or dictatorial goverments for most of its history as an independent nation.

If Japan hadn't industrialized, it would have ended up like Ethiopia.

Proof for this being...?

Which would be bad for Japan. Or, in the analogies case, the people we are helping.

Once more, you put your ignorance on display. Ethopia suffered invasion by the Italians, the Eritrean War of Independence, a civil war and the 1988 famine and not because the West neglected their duty to uplift them. The Ethopians actually successfully kicked the Italians out of their country twice and organised a functioning parliamentary government on their own, a constitutional monarchy. But decades of civil war and famine would not have helped that country even if it had industrialised.

What's amusing is your ongoing contention that forced modernisation of every and any primitive society is an imperative, for which you offer no logical support other than your say-so.

[Junghalli]

or begin asteroid mining to supply the raw material and devices they would need.

I thought the whole point of using proxies was so you could do the Space Man's Burden really cheap? Setting up massive asteroid mining industries sounds expensive. And if you're going to go that route it'd probably be cheaper just to set up the mines and factories on the surface (if you're worried about the workers you're bringing in, it shouldn't be too hard to make the facilities basically invulnerable to a Midaeval enemy).

You sure they need steam ships though? Doesn't well built sail work fine? Plus you don't need refueling stations or as much infrastructure.

I'm not sure, but railroads are probably going to be a definite must. I don't see a planetary empire being feasible without them.

The only way I see a planetary empire being feasible with pre-Victorian tech is if the planet had only a single continent maybe the size of Australia, or nothing but small islands (and I'm not even sure about the second one).

[Samuel]

The difference is you are the one doing the killing. No matter how you try to shade the argument, it's your force having to spill blood to establish the occupation regime. And the natives didn't ask you to come down and assume the White Man's Burden on their behalf. Exactly what part of that is so damn difficult to comprehend?

So it is better to do nothing and have more people die than do something and get your hands dirty?
... Salvor Hardin is going into my sig.

Still makes you responsible for the deaths, only you're using accomplices instead of your own troops directly. So what's the difference?

I never said this wouldn't lead to people dying. That wasn't my point. I'm just tired of people not bothering to pay attention to what I am advocating.

In a word, bullshit. There is no "moral imperative" to go to a primitive land, or world, kill as many natives as it takes to subdue them to your occupation regime, and decide for them what is their proper path to development and to force them down that road. They do not learn, as a people, the lessons of the climb to higher civilisation, but they do carry the legacy of being an occupied people and that resentment does not go away.

Why not? If you leave the situation as is, more people will die.

As for learning the lessons, that is what CULTURE is for.

As for occupied people ... you just got over telling me that proxies still means I am responsible. However, using proxies means I won't be occupying them.

The difference is that the Germans, to this day, assume responsibility for their crimes of the war. The Japanese, however, deny it.

Which is probably due to the fact that the US liberated the concentration camps and got to see what bastards they were being, while we didn't do that to the Japanese.

And that experiment proved less than successful, as Cuba and the Philippines bore out; the one went Communist, the other has been lumbered with either corrupt or dictatorial goverments for most of its history as an independent nation.

What the heck are you babbling about? We grabbed colonies because they made the US feel like a big country, not for the good of the natives who we proceeded to screw over. You need to separate the publically declared justification from the actual justification.

Proof for this being...?

All of Africa was colonized. In Asia, only Afghanistan, China, Siam, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Japan avoided being gobbled up.

Given that Japan doesn't have harsh terrain to deter invaders or a huge population to make conquest impossible it would have fallen if it had not developed a navy to keep invaders out. It probably would have ended up a puppet state.

Once more, you put your ignorance on display. Ethopia suffered invasion by the Italians, the Eritrean War of Independence, a civil war and the 1988 famine and not because the West neglected their duty to uplift them. The Ethopians actually successfully kicked the Italians out of their country twice and organised a functioning parliamentary government on their own, a constitutional monarchy. But decades of civil war and famine would not have helped that country even if it had industrialised.

I was actually referring to the whole being conquered part.

What's amusing is your ongoing contention that forced modernization of every and any primitive society is an imperative, for which you offer no logical support other than your say-so.

Do you even bother to read my posts? Seriously? I have REPEATEDLY stated the rationale is to improve the standard of living from "shit hole" to "developed" and make it so people aren't dying from brush fire conflicts or easily treatable diseases. I'm pretty sure "Preventing people from suffering and dying from things you can easily fix" is a moral imperative.

You response is... we have to have the suffer and die to learn. Because the stupid natives can't learn from the examples of others obviously, even though that is the way civilizations throughout history have learned. Humans are special I guess

I thought the whole point of using proxies was so you could do the Space Man's Burden really cheap? Setting up massive asteroid mining industries sounds expensive. And if you're going to go that route it'd probably be cheaper just to set up the mines and factories on the surface (if you're worried about the workers you're bringing in, it shouldn't be too hard to make the facilities basically invulnerable to a Midaeval enemy).

Well, it would go with industrializing them, I'm just worried they won't have the technical knowledge to pull it off. How much knowledge do they need to have to pull this off?

The only way I see a planetary empire being feasible with pre-Victorian tech is if the planet had only a single continent maybe the size of Australia, or nothing but small islands (and I'm not even sure about the second one).

It could be done that way. The empires throughout Chinese history fit the bill (size wise). Of course, in a situation like that, it would be easiest to wait for one faction to attain dominance and open up trade with them- you wouldn't need all this skulduggery because the already have the planet.

[Junghalli]

As for occupied people ... you just got over telling me that proxies still means I am responsible. However, using proxies means I won't be occupying them.

Even with proxies you're talking about conquering and occupying much of the planet, it'll just be your puppets doing the conquering and occupying instead of you.

And while you're not technically occupying the planet, you are setting up an obvious puppet regime, and that will provoke similar reactions.

Well, it would go with industrializing them, I'm just worried they won't have the technical knowledge to pull it off. How much knowledge do they need to have to pull this off?

Victorian-era engineering? I don't know, but figure at least some years to train all the people you're going to need and bootstrap up the infrastructure.

It could be done that way. The empires throughout Chinese history fit the bill (size wise).

Of course, most planets probably aren't going to have all their land in one conveniently small and conquerable package.

[Base Delta Zero]

Let's face it, if the aliens are like humans (and it's Trek, so it's pretty probable that they are) transforming a Midaeval society into a modern one, complete with modern nicities like civil rights and not burning people you think might be witches, is something that's probably going to have to be done over quite a few dead bodies. Think of all the people on a planet like that who would probably fight modernity tooth and nail (think of US fundies, but about a million times worse).

Yeah... this assumes the aliens are 'like humans' at least psychologically. If not, I wouldn't even try. As for the rest of your point, there would definently be a lot of people who would 'fight tooth and nail', which is why you set up the ones who are actually sane to assist. While there are probably going to be 'a few dead bodies', there will be a lot of dead bodies if you do nothing (although, perhaps, spread over time), it also isn't self evident that every world you encounter will have the same backwards mindset. Heck, even during the middle ages, some parts of Earth were fairly civilized...

Heck, just think of all the fun you're going to have trying to convince all the kings and warlords to surrender their power to a planetary government. You're probably going to have to end up outright conquering and deposing many of them if you want to pull it off.

You can easily do that, if you want, but I think you probably won't need to. You not only have the Utimate Big Stick, but also the Ultimate Carrot. Even the base-level standard of living is so high above the best middle-age tech can offer as to be near godlike, to say nothing of the actual benefits to the commoners (even kings have to at least pretend to act in the people's interest. But of course, with your industrial base, you can make more 'substantive' bribes, if need be. Like a ton of diamonds, perhaps?

Of course you can say the same kind of thing is order of business there anyway, but I'm just pointing out the Space Man's Burden* is not something for people who aren't prepared to get their hands real dirty.

*Yes, I realize the association is kind of incendiary, but you gotta admit the basic conceptual similarity. "We must bring the benighted savages the benefits of modern civilization, for their own good."

Well, yeah. The problem with 'White Man's Burden' was that it was racist, half-cocked, poorly managed, and focused primarily on breaking natives of their cultural traditions, even (especially) the harmless ones rather than actual improvement. And it came after a century or so of 'fuck you, we're taking your stuff.'

[quote:Base Delta Zero]When did he say anything about slaughtering natives for their own good?

[quote:Patrick Degan]Perhaps when he started spewing garbage like this:[/quote]


[quote:Samuel]
At least in my method, people will die faster and in a significantly shorter amount of time.[/quote][/quote]
Alternately, the things that will happen anyways will happen immediately, and benefits accrue immediately after, rather than millenia down the road.

If you'd been paying attention to the discussion at all, which evidently you have not, I did indeed acknowledge that the war was a fuckup as part of the argument that it's logic was based upon a wholly false premise to begin with. The same sort of "logic" Samuel is proposing in this thread.

I have been paying attention. My argument was that you can't use an absoluletly incompetent attempt at doing something (assuming we accept that 'democratizing Iraq' was indeed the objective) to prove that it is impossible.

Ah, so that somehow makes all the mass death resulting from Japan's wars in pursuit of an imperial destiny fueled by the combination of modern technology with a semifeudal mindset they never learned to shed before we had to burn their island somehow... worth it. Tell that to the Chinese and the Koreans.

I'm ignoring nothing —unlike you, whose solution still comes down to you slaughtering natives for their own good.

When did he say anything about slaughtering natives for their own good?

Perhaps when he started spewing garbage like this:

At least in my method, people will die faster and in a significantly shorter amount of time.

Exactly what do you propose is the eventual outcome of forcibly occupying a world and subduing its inhabitants so as to civilise them?

And perhaps you haven't noticed how the Iraq war was a massive fuckup (garbage in, garbage out)?

If you'd been paying attention to the discussion at all, which evidently you have not, I did indeed acknowledge that the war was a fuckup as part of the argument that it's logic was based upon a wholly false premise to begin with. The same sort of "logic" Samuel is proposing in this thread.

Quote:
Or, say, Japan, which while it may have left a big mess, did ultimately uplift a feudal society into a modern, fairly sophisticated democracy in the space of what, 200 years?

Ah, so that somehow makes all the mass death resulting from Japan's wars in pursuit of an imperial destiny fueled by the combination of modern technology with a semifeudal mindset they never learned to shed before we had to burn their island somehow... worth it. Tell that to the Chinese and the Koreans.

Compared to what would have happened if we'd just left Japan a time warp sitting in the pacific ocean? Possibly. And in any event, it's unlikely we could actually do that... even assuming that no one else decided they wanted in, and Japan never stopped being isolationist, they'd probably notice the spaceships flying around about the time they developed electricity. Maybe you'll be lucky enough and they'll just pout. Maybe not.

I have to go for now, I'll continue my post later.

[Patrick Degan]

The difference is you are the one doing the killing. No matter how you try to shade the argument, it's your force having to spill blood to establish the occupation regime. And the natives didn't ask you to come down and assume the White Man's Burden on their behalf. Exactly what part of that is so damn difficult to comprehend?

So it is better to do nothing and have more people die than do something and get your hands dirty?

You still refuse to answer just why there is a "moral imperative" to impose your rule upon a bunch of primitives to force them to develop upward to your standard of civilisation and for no material reason than just to add another world to the Federation a few decades or centuries down the line.

Still makes you responsible for the deaths, only you're using accomplices instead of your own troops directly. So what's the difference?

I never said this wouldn't lead to people dying. That wasn't my point. I'm just tired of people not bothering to pay attention to what I am advocating.

On the contrary, it's perfectly clear what you're advocating —which is why you're getting flak for it.

In a word, bullshit. There is no "moral imperative" to go to a primitive land, or world, kill as many natives as it takes to subdue them to your occupation regime, and decide for them what is their proper path to development and to force them down that road. They do not learn, as a people, the lessons of the climb to higher civilisation, but they do carry the legacy of being an occupied people and that resentment does not go away.

Why not? If you leave the situation as is, more people will die.

Which is the business of the Federation... why, exactly? And how does this erase guilt for mass-murder in establishing the occupation regime?

As for learning the lessons, that is what CULTURE is for.

Except you've erased their culture to impose your regime.

As for occupied people ... you just got over telling me that proxies still means I am responsible. However, using proxies means I won't be occupying them.

YOU'RE PAYING THEM AND SUPPLYING THEM WITH THE WEAPONS TO ENFORCE THEIR RULE! Guess what, that DOES make you responsible and is as bad as a direct occupation. Especially if resistance mounts and you have to send in troops to back your proxy regime, which means you end up going to a direct occupation anyway.

The difference is that the Germans, to this day, assume responsibility for their crimes of the war. The Japanese, however, deny it.

Which is probably due to the fact that the US liberated the concentration camps and got to see what bastards they were being, while we didn't do that to the Japanese.

Just keep showing what an ignoramus you are. We liberated plenty of death camps on the Philippines, and the Chinese certainly liberated camps in their own territory. No, Japanese denial of war-guilt has nothing to do with lack of visible evidence, which was presented at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunals.

And that experiment proved less than successful, as Cuba and the Philippines bore out; the one went Communist, the other has been lumbered with either corrupt or dictatorial goverments for most of its history as an independent nation.

What the heck are you babbling about? We grabbed colonies because they made the US feel like a big country, not for the good of the natives who we proceeded to screw over. You need to separate the publically declared justification from the actual justification.

What was the point of you bringing up the red herring of U.S. brief period of overseas colonialism in the first place?

Proof for this being...?

All of Africa was colonized. In Asia, only Afghanistan, China, Siam, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Japan avoided being gobbled up.

Given that Japan doesn't have harsh terrain to deter invaders or a huge population to make conquest impossible it would have fallen if it had not developed a navy to keep invaders out. It probably would have ended up a puppet state.

Japan did have a huge population to make conquest impossible. You just keep spewing nonsense as fact and keep expecting not to get called on it.

Once more, you put your ignorance on display. Ethopia suffered invasion by the Italians, the Eritrean War of Independence, a civil war and the 1988 famine and not because the West neglected their duty to uplift them. The Ethopians actually successfully kicked the Italians out of their country twice and organised a functioning parliamentary government on their own, a constitutional monarchy. But decades of civil war and famine would not have helped that country even if it had industrialised.

I was actually referring to the whole being conquered part.

Translation: you don't have an actual argument on this point at all.

What's amusing is your ongoing contention that forced modernization of every and any primitive society is an imperative, for which you offer no logical support other than your say-so.

Do you even bother to read my posts? Seriously?

I do. Admittedly, it's hard to keep from laughing.

I have REPEATEDLY stated the rationale is to improve the standard of living from "shit hole" to "developed" and make it so people aren't dying from brush fire conflicts or easily treatable diseases. I'm pretty sure "Preventing people from suffering and dying from things you can easily fix" is a moral imperative.

Not when it comes at the price you necessarily have to impose upon the people on whom you're shining your unasked-for "beneficience"

You response is... we have to have the suffer and die to learn. Because the stupid natives can't learn from the examples of others obviously, even though that is the way civilizations throughout history have learned. Humans are special I guess

Riiiiight. Them dumb mud-people on Zeta Reticuli IV can't possibly be smart enough to ever figure out the civilisation game on their own, so it's on us to assume the White Man's Burden and do it for them, no matter how many we have to kill to do it.

[Samuel]

Even with proxies you're talking about conquering and occupying much of the planet, it'll just be your puppets doing the conquering and occupying instead of you.

And while you're not technically occupying the planet, you are setting up an obvious puppet regime, and that will provoke similar reactions.

And the populace will all know you are behind this... how? We are talking about a world where most of the populace is illiterate peasants. How on Earth will "aliens are controlling the rulers" get out if you control the amount of interaction?

I believe BDZ is advocating a more massive change plan. I'm basically doing the "shoestring budget" version, and BDZ has the flashy and awesome version.

You still refuse to answer just why there is a "moral imperative" to impose your rule upon a bunch of primitives to force them to develop upward to your standard of civilisation and for no material reason than just to add another world to the Federation a few decades or centuries down the line.

If you refuse to bother reading my posts, you won't find the answer. I have repeatedly stated that helping people out to prevent them from suffering and dying IS a moral imperative.

On the contrary, it's perfectly clear what you're advocating —which is why you're getting flak for it.

And you are advocating we do nothing... tell me, how is this different than Rwanda... in space?

Which is the business of the Federation... why, exactly? And how does this erase guilt for mass-murder in establishing the occupation regime?

You have a reading comprehension problem. If we do nothing MORE will die. You seem to think clean hands are more important than their lives.

Except you've erased their culture to impose your regime.

I wasn't talking about their culture! You keep on saying they won't learn lessons from history- they can learn from the examples of others!

Also, how am I erasing their culture by imposing my regime?

YOU'RE PAYING THEM AND SUPPLYING THEM WITH THE WEAPONS TO ENFORCE THEIR RULE! Guess what, that DOES make you responsible and is as bad as a direct occupation. Especially if resistance mounts and you have to send in troops to back your proxy regime, which means you end up going to a direct occupation anyway.

I wasn't defending the morality of the actions, just pointing out that, again, you don't seem to be reading my arguments.

Just keep showing what an ignoramus you are. We liberated plenty of death camps on the Philippines, and the Chinese certainly liberated camps in their own territory. No, Japanese denial of war-guilt has nothing to do with lack of visible evidence, which was presented at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunals.

I'm sorry. There aren't any museums dedicated to Japanese war crimes I am familiar with, unlike Museums dedicated to the Holocaust. Probably an example of my ignorance, but Japanese war crimes don't seem to have made a big an impact on public culture.

What was the point of you bringing up the red herring of U.S. brief period of overseas colonialism in the first place?

I was pointing out that saying Japan was neofuedal was ridiculous because the US and all the other European powers were doing the same exact thing as well.

Japan did have a huge population to make conquest impossible. You just keep spewing nonsense as fact and keep expecting not to get called on it.

Ethiopia had a population of 18 million when it was conquered by the Italians. Japan had a population of about 27 million in 1850. The nation had the advantage of central rule... except it was later engulfed in a civil war later on which the European powers could have exploited to make a puppet state.

Translation: you don't have an actual argument on this point at all.

No, the "translation" is that I wasn't referring to anything you proceeded to spew. If Ethiopia had industrialized, it wouldn't have been conquered. The other shit might have happened, but the conquest wouldn't have.

I do. Admittedly, it's hard to keep from laughing.

Eh, I am ignorant about alot of stuff. It comes from being young and stupid.

Of course, unlike you I seem to be able to actually read my opponents argument. You repeatedly bring up things I already addressed... occasionally in the previous post!

Not when it comes at the price you necessarily have to impose upon the people on whom you're shining your unasked-for "beneficience"

So it is wrong to help unconscious people? What do you want me to do- hold a poll... how hard would that be actually?

Riiiiight. Them dumb mud-people on Zeta Reticuli IV can't possibly be smart enough to ever figure out the civilisation game on their own, so it's on us to assume the White Man's Burden and do it for them, no matter how many we have to kill to do it.

Well, they could accidentally annihilate their civilization with nukes. Or they could be taken down by an extremely variable climate. Or they could arrive to the stars as a totalitarian state eager for conquest (Cardassians).

If they don't hit any of those traps, they will eventually get it... at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. I'm pretty sure tens of thousands is several magnitude below millions incidentally.

[Junghalli]

And the populace will all know you are behind this... how? We are talking about a world where most of the populace is illiterate peasants. How on Earth will "aliens are controlling the rulers" get out if you control the amount of interaction?

Well for starters forget about low-profile interaction nobody's going to notice if you're going to bootstrap a bronze age or stone age civilization to the level where it can actually control a planet within anything like a human lifespan. You'll need to recruit and train thousands and thousands of natives as workers and engineers to bootstrap the technology up to the level you need (probably Victorian era at least), or bring in lots of your own people and supply the natives with guns and transport vehicles and stuff. They'll need technical advisors in the field too, because they won't really know how to use all this stuff you just gave them. Either way we're talking about a fairly significant presence, and it's going to be fairly obvious to lots of people whose hand is behind Xbliquotl The Magnificent and his magic fire stick armed hordes sweeping over the continent.

[Patrick Degan]

Even with proxies you're talking about conquering and occupying much of the planet, it'll just be your puppets doing the conquering and occupying instead of you.

And while you're not technically occupying the planet, you are setting up an obvious puppet regime, and that will provoke similar reactions.

And the populace will all know you are behind this... how? We are talking about a world where most of the populace is illiterate peasants. How on Earth will "aliens are controlling the rulers" get out if you control the amount of interaction?

I believe BDZ is advocating a more massive change plan. I'm basically doing the "shoestring budget" version, and BDZ has the flashy and awesome version.

Uh huh. Because there's absolutely no way for word of visitors from other worlds to ever spread amongst illiterate peasants... oh, wait, people actually talk to one another and tales spread along with travelers —which is how illiterate peasants managed to learn things about far-away happenings in Medieval Europe. Which means your argument here is bullshit.

You still refuse to answer just why there is a "moral imperative" to impose your rule upon a bunch of primitives to force them to develop upward to your standard of civilisation and for no material reason than just to add another world to the Federation a few decades or centuries down the line.

If you refuse to bother reading my posts, you won't find the answer. I have repeatedly stated that helping people out to prevent them from suffering and dying IS a moral imperative.

You simply offer the same vague justification over and over and over and over again as if it carries the force of logic on your side. The problem is that you can't have your way of doing this without killing people in the process, which even you have conceded. So you're actually NOT preventing anybody from suffering and dying, you're merely changing the agency of death. So don't prate to me about moral imperatives. There is no moral imperative to deliberately impose your rule upon others for their own good. Especially when you really can't predict what the outcome will be.

On the contrary, it's perfectly clear what you're advocating —which is why you're getting flak for it.

And you are advocating we do nothing... tell me, how is this different than Rwanda... in space?

I knew the Black/White Fallacy would eventually rear its ugly head in this increasingly silly discussion, as well as the Leap of Logic. Who says anything like a genocide is necessarily happening on any given primitive world? And even if it is, who says it requires anything more than a short-term intervention to stop the killing, mediate a peace, and then let them work out their problems on their own? You just keep pulling self-serving psuedo justifications out your ass to try to keep a broken argument going.

Which is the business of the Federation... why, exactly? And how does this erase guilt for mass-murder in establishing the occupation regime?

You have a reading comprehension problem.

Look who's talking.

If we do nothing MORE will die. You seem to think clean hands are more important than their lives.

And here's the Appeal to Emotion Fallacy right on schedule, and combined with an Appeal to Consequence Fallacy as well. You seem to think your personal notions of "doing good" outweigh every other material and ethical factor involved. Especially considering that you really cannot predict the outcome of the project no matter how much you like to think you can.

Except you've erased their culture to impose your regime.

I wasn't talking about their culture! You keep on saying they won't learn lessons from history- they can learn from the examples of others!

Also, how am I erasing their culture by imposing my regime?

You have forcibly imposed the presence of an alien occupation force (or alien-controlled puppet goverment) upon a planetary population and you actually think this will NOT radically alter the shape of their culture if not obliterate it altogether? For fuck's sake —we have the Real World example of the Vanuatu Cargo Cult, in which exactly this consequence took place as the result of only a temporary occupation of the island of Tanna as an American military supply depot in the Pacific. The Tanna islanders are still waiting for their great god, John Frum, to return and redeem them. In the meantime, they build life-size bamboo replicas of warplanes and even whole Gilligan's Island-style bamboo airports as magick totems and conduct ritual parade drills with bamboo rifles, cast-off helmets, and with "USA" painted on their chests, to propitiate John Frum. Whatever culture the natives had before the Pacific War is long gone now and the Cargo Cult has been going on for the past six decades. I remember reading about it in National Geographic in the 70s! Whole generations have grown up on Tanna knowing nothing other than this as their "culture". And that's just an accidental consequence of a minor part of our war effort against Japan in a three-year period of time.

YOU'RE PAYING THEM AND SUPPLYING THEM WITH THE WEAPONS TO ENFORCE THEIR RULE! Guess what, that DOES make you responsible and is as bad as a direct occupation. Especially if resistance mounts and you have to send in troops to back your proxy regime, which means you end up going to a direct occupation anyway.

I wasn't defending the morality of the actions, just pointing out that, again, you don't seem to be reading my arguments.

Uh huh. Now you're handwaving.

Just keep showing what an ignoramus you are. We liberated plenty of death camps on the Philippines, and the Chinese certainly liberated camps in their own territory. No, Japanese denial of war-guilt has nothing to do with lack of visible evidence, which was presented at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunals.

I'm sorry. There aren't any museums dedicated to Japanese war crimes I am familiar with, unlike Museums dedicated to the Holocaust. Probably an example of my ignorance, but Japanese war crimes don't seem to have made a big an impact on public culture.

You really are determined to make a complete fool of yourself in this thread, aren't you:

Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre

The Nanking Massacre exhibition at Princeton University

Chinese Holocaust Museum in San Francisco

museum dedicated to the rape victims and sex slaves of the Japanese armed forces in World War II

September 18th History Museum in Shenyang

Preserved museum site of the Unit 731 camp in Harbin

Bataan Memorial Military Museum in Santa Fe, NM

Just a few examples.

What was the point of you bringing up the red herring of U.S. brief period of overseas colonialism in the first place?

I was pointing out that saying Japan was neofuedal was ridiculous because the US and all the other European powers were doing the same exact thing as well.

Tu-quoque Fallacy as well as a Red Herring. Does not invalidate the point about Japanese colonialism and its driving imperative.

Japan did have a huge population to make conquest impossible. You just keep spewing nonsense as fact and keep expecting not to get called on it.

Ethiopia had a population of 18 million when it was conquered by the Italians. Japan had a population of about 27 million in 1850. The nation had the advantage of central rule... except it was later engulfed in a civil war later on which the European powers could have exploited to make a puppet state.

A Japanese population of 27 million was far larger than any army that could have been landed to conquer and occupy the island, which is why none of the European powers nor the Americans never attempted anything beyond establishing treaty ports and trading rights. And a European invasion would have solved the civil war as the Japanese would have been faced with the problem of invading gaijin. And BTW, the Ethiopians successfully drove the Italians out twice in their history: in 1896 and 1941 —a point I believe has already been made to you in this thread but which you have chosen to ignore.

If Ethiopia had industrialized, it wouldn't have been conquered. The other shit might have happened, but the conquest wouldn't have.

BTW, the Ethiopians successfully drove the Italians out twice in their history: in 1896 and 1941 —a point I believe has already been made to you in this thread but which you have chosen to ignore. By all means, keep parading your ignorance.

I do. Admittedly, it's hard to keep from laughing.

Eh, I am ignorant about a lot of stuff. It comes from being young and stupid.

THEN WHAT THE FUCK BUSINESS DO YOU HAVE PRESUMING TO SPEAK ON SUBJECTS YOU HAVE ZERO KNOWLEDGE OF?

Of course, unlike you I seem to be able to actually read my opponents argument. You repeatedly bring up things I already addressed... occasionally in the previous post!

That's because you keep attempting to flog the same argument repeatedly and ignore any and all rebuttals. What we around here call the "Wall of Ignorance" tactic.

Not when it comes at the price you necessarily have to impose upon the people on whom you're shining your unasked-for "beneficience"

So it is wrong to help unconscious people? What do you want me to do- hold a poll... how hard would that be actually?

See above for the reasons why this "logic" is fundamentally broken.

Riiiiight. Them dumb mud-people on Zeta Reticuli IV can't possibly be smart enough to ever figure out the civilisation game on their own, so it's on us to assume the White Man's Burden and do it for them, no matter how many we have to kill to do it.

Well, they could accidentally annihilate their civilization with nukes. Or they could be taken down by an extremely variable climate. Or they could arrive to the stars as a totalitarian state eager for conquest (Cardassians). f they don't hit any of those traps, they will eventually get it... at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. I'm pretty sure tens of thousands is several magnitude below millions incidentally.

Appeal to Consequence Fallacy yet again. Why am I no longer surprised?

[Junghalli]

Especially when you really can't predict what the outcome will be.

This is the part that concerns me, what if you go ahead with all these ambitious uplifting projects and then the society that comes out isn't the one that you wanted to get. Like, say, what if they start cozying up to the Romulans? Are you going to keep on deposing the puppet governments until you get one that gives you what you want?

It's well intentioned but it seems a great way to end up having to prop up a bunch of unpopular puppet governments. Which will become increasingly more expensive as the high tech trickles down in their societies and just replicating some AK-47s so your puppets can go out and massacre some spearchuckers who won't cooperate with the script won't cut it anymore.

Honestly, I aprove of trying to uplift primitive worlds in principle, but something like this just has so much potential to backfire and bite you in the ass. It's pretty understandable that the Federation considers it not worth it.

[Samuel]

Well for starters forget about low-profile interaction nobody's going to notice if you're going to bootstrap a bronze age or stone age civilization to the level where it can actually control a planet within anything like a human lifespan. You'll need to recruit and train thousands and thousands of natives as workers and engineers to bootstrap the technology up to the level you need (probably Victorian era at least), or bring in lots of your own people and supply the natives with guns and transport vehicles and stuff. They'll need technical advisors in the field too, because they won't really know how to use all this stuff you just gave them. Either way we're talking about a fairly significant presence, and it's going to be fairly obvious to lots of people whose hand is behind Xbliquotl The Magnificent and his magic fire stick armed hordes sweeping over the continent.

Well, if they are rubber forehead aliens, we can blend in easily

You can minimize your presence if you are willing to wait longer- select people to have "invented" the technology and the like. And you can have a small number of people to help deal with the transfer of materials like medicine, textbooks, industrial machinary and the like. Once you have factories up, you can claim they are from there.

Or you can openly declare an alien, lie about where you are from, and procede to arm your ally. People inside the country will know this new state got a boost from its allies, but the people they conquer probably won't, and will think they came up with it themselves. A couple generations and you can erase the record.

Honestly, more open policies would be better- can you suggest a way to do so without screwing up? There are too many variables for sneakiness.

Uh huh. Because there's absolutely no way for word of visitors from other worlds to ever spread amongst illiterate peasants... oh, wait, people actually talk to one another and tales spread along with travelers —which is how illiterate peasants managed to learn things about far-away happenings in Medieval Europe. Which means your argument here is bullshit.

Yeah, because there is no way you can confine the knowledge of your existance to a small group of people who have a vested interest in secrecy... I'm not military, but they seem to be able to pull it off all the time.

You simply offer the same vague justification over and over and over and over again as if it carries the force of logic on your side. The problem is that you can't have your way of doing this without killing people in the process, which even you have conceded. So you're actually NOT preventing anybody from suffering and dying, you're merely changing the agency of death. So don't prate to me about moral imperatives.

No, if you noticed, I pointed out that less people would suffer and die from conquest than from continual warfare. Which counts as a reduction of suffering and dying.

There is no moral imperative to deliberately impose your rule upon others for their own good. Especially when you really can't predict what the outcome will be.

Except if they are not competant to make decisions for themselves or would hurt themselves if you don't intervene. You know, seat belt laws? As for not predicting the output,
perfect solution fallacy

I knew the Black/White Fallacy would eventually rear its ugly head in this increasingly silly discussion, as well as the Leap of Logic. Who says anything like a genocide is necessarily happening on any given primitive world? And even if it is, who says it requires anything more than a short-term intervention to stop the killing, mediate a peace, and then let them work out their problems on their own? You just keep pulling self-serving psuedo justifications out your ass to try to keep a broken argument going.

Well, genocide is occuring on Earth right now, and has occured repeatedly thoughout history so unless we find the planet of the hippy peacenicks, it is going to occur.

As for "establishing the peace"... yeah, that is going to work real well. It isn't working for the UN and it appears the only way to keep the peace in some cases is... full scale occupation. Not to mention it is preventing them from "growing as a culture" as you so nicely put it.

We already have examples from human history to demonstrate the point: the dominant events of the Middle Ages in Europe were the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague. Half the population of Europe dies as a result of those horrors. Yet at the end of it, feudalism was broken and the first cracks in the power of the Church began to appear, which allowed at an ever increasing pace the Rennaissance, the Reformation, the Copernican system of astronomy, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and the withering away of monarchism, the Industrial Revolution and the death of chattel slavery. But it all starts off when a century long war and the plague which accompanied it devastates a fossilised social order placing God and King at the head of a world predicated upon keeping the impoverished masses down, and dedicated to suppressing knowledge to secure its power. The Europeans draw lessons from their past and start not only the process of scientific advancement but the development of the entire theory of secularism and representative government based upon the concept of the Rights of Man.

So apparently intervening... would prevent them from developing. Pray tell, how is it a black and white fallacy if you previously advocated letting them kill each other as a necesary stage?

And here's the Appeal to Emotion Fallacy right on schedule, and combined with an Appeal to Consequence Fallacy as well. You seem to think your personal notions of "doing good" outweigh every other material and ethical factor involved. Especially considering that you really cannot predict the outcome of the project no matter how much you like to think you can.

Which would be a good point except that ethic is based on consequences.

You have forcibly imposed the presence of an alien occupation force (or alien-controlled puppet goverment) upon a planetary population and you actually think this will NOT radically alter the shape of their culture if not obliterate it altogether? For fuck's sake —we have the Real World example of the Vanuatu Cargo Cult, in which exactly this consequence took place as the result of only a temporary occupation of the island of Tanna as an American military supply depot in the Pacific. The Tanna islanders are still waiting for their great god, John Frum, to return and redeem them. In the meantime, they build life-size bamboo replicas of warplanes and even whole Gilligan's Island-style bamboo airports as magick totems and conduct ritual parade drills with bamboo rifles, cast-off helmets, and with "USA" painted on their chests, to propitiate John Frum. Whatever culture the natives had before the Pacific War is long gone now and the Cargo Cult has been going on for the past six decades. I remember reading about it in National Geographic in the 70s! Whole generations have grown up on Tanna knowing nothing other than this as their "culture". And that's just an accidental consequence of a minor part of our war effort against Japan in a three-year period of time.

Which is why all of Africa is comprised solely of European cultures. Or India has adopted British culture entirely. Or how the Native Americans, despite being deprived of the right to learn their language, forced into American style schools and forced into American standards lost their culture.

Uh huh. Now you're handwaving.

Handwaving what? I have already stated people will die and we will be responsible. I have actually mocked you on that. Why bother sending in troops?

You really are determined to make a complete fool of yourself in this thread, aren't you:

Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre

The Nanking Massacre exhibition at Princeton University

Chinese Holocaust Museum in San Francisco

museum dedicated to the rape victims and sex slaves of the Japanese armed forces in World War II

September 18th History Museum in Shenyang

Preserved museum site of the Unit 731 camp in Harbin

Bataan Memorial Military Museum in Santa Fe, NM

Just a few examples.

I have never heard of any of them. What? They don't really focus on Japanese war crimes during WW2- unlike the Nazi stuff, there isn't as much mention of it.

Tu-quoque Fallacy as well as a Red Herring. Does not invalidate the point about Japanese colonialism and its driving imperative.

So the United States of America was also Neo-feudal... as was Great Britian... at the same time that Japan was. I am simply pointing out the entire ridiculousness of your argument maintaining they were somehow differant from the "enlightened" Europeans.

A Japanese population of 27 million was far larger than any army that could have been landed to conquer and occupy the island, which is why none of the European powers nor the Americans never attempted anything beyond establishing treaty ports and trading rights. And a European invasion would have solved the civil war as the Japanese would have been faced with the problem of invading gaijin. And BTW, the Ethiopians successfully drove the Italians out twice in their history: in 1896 and 1941 —a point I believe has already been made to you in this thread but which you have chosen to ignore.

Yeah- Europeans have NEVER used puppet states to rule a country for them. And individuals have never made concession to help secure them victory.

Ethiopia was conquered by the Italians in 1935. It drove them out... after Italy was at war with Great Britian and had its access cut off.

THEN WHAT THE FUCK BUSINESS DO YOU HAVE PRESUMING TO SPEAK ON SUBJECTS YOU HAVE ZERO KNOWLEDGE OF?

I was under the impression moral issues do not require advanced education in order to talk about them.

That's because you keep attempting to flog the same argument repeatedly and ignore any and all rebuttals. What we around here call the "Wall of Ignorance" tactic.

Which would be true... except I have repeatedly answered you. Now, one of us is engaging in a wall of ignorance and one of us isn't.

See above for the reasons why this "logic" is fundamentally broken.

You mean the fact they will still die... even though the whole paln is for less people to die?

Appeal to Consequence Fallacy yet again. Why am I no longer surprised?

I can't answer this without flaming. Do you know anything about morality?

This is the part that concerns me, what if you go ahead with all these ambitious uplifting projects and then the society that comes out isn't the one that you wanted to get. Like, say, what if they start cozying up to the Romulans? Are you going to keep on deposing the puppet governments until you get one that gives you what you want?

It's well intentioned but it seems a great way to end up having to prop up a bunch of unpopular puppet governments. Which will become increasingly more expensive as the high tech trickles down in their societies and just replicating some AK-47s so your puppets can go out and massacre some spearchuckers who won't cooperate with the script won't cut it anymore.

Honestly, I aprove of trying to uplift primitive worlds in principle, but something like this just has so much potential to backfire and bite you in the ass. It's pretty understandable that the Federation considers it not worth it.

perfect solution fallacy

More to the point, if after you help them out, the civilization turns on you, you are really doing this wrong.

[Patrick Degan]

Uh huh. Because there's absolutely no way for word of visitors from other worlds to ever spread amongst illiterate peasants... oh, wait, people actually talk to one another and tales spread along with travelers —which is how illiterate peasants managed to learn things about far-away happenings in Medieval Europe. Which means your argument here is bullshit.

Yeah, because there is no way you can confine the knowledge of your existance to a small group of people who have a vested interest in secrecy... I'm not military, but they seem to be able to pull it off all the time.

You're not much of anything, really. You certainly are not knowledgable about a great many of the things you presume to discuss. There is no such thing as absolute secrecy, and with people who really would not understand the concept, it would be almost inevitable that tales of "visitors from the sky" would get out.

You simply offer the same vague justification over and over and over and over again as if it carries the force of logic on your side. The problem is that you can't have your way of doing this without killing people in the process, which even you have conceded. So you're actually NOT preventing anybody from suffering and dying, you're merely changing the agency of death. So don't prate to me about moral imperatives.

No, if you noticed, I pointed out that less people would suffer and die from conquest than from continual warfare. Which counts as a reduction of suffering and dying.

So, you think that your murders would be justifiable because they are lesser in scale? Again, boy, don't prate to me about moral imperatives —especially as you are patently unqualified from doing so.

There is no moral imperative to deliberately impose your rule upon others for their own good. Especially when you really can't predict what the outcome will be.

Except if they are not competant to make decisions for themselves or would hurt themselves if you don't intervene. You know, seat belt laws?

What arrogant presumption on your part. You justify your right to impose your rule based on your victims' alleged incompetence, and that based entirely upon your subjective judgements.

As for not predicting the output, perfect solution fallacy

No such fallacy. Have a quick browse.

I knew the Black/White Fallacy would eventually rear its ugly head in this increasingly silly discussion, as well as the Leap of Logic. Who says anything like a genocide is necessarily happening on any given primitive world? And even if it is, who says it requires anything more than a short-term intervention to stop the killing, mediate a peace, and then let them work out their problems on their own? You just keep pulling self-serving psuedo justifications out your ass to try to keep a broken argument going.

Well, genocide is occuring on Earth right now, and has occured repeatedly thoughout history so unless we find the planet of the hippy peacenicks, it is going to occur.

Hasty Generalisation Fallacy. And genocide actually is not occurring on Earth just right now.

As for "establishing the peace"... yeah, that is going to work real well. It isn't working for the UN and it appears the only way to keep the peace in some cases is... full scale occupation. Not to mention it is preventing them from "growing as a culture" as you so nicely put it.

Just no end to your bullshit, is there? Peace has been successfully concluded many times in the past 65 years since the end of the Second World War —Israel and Egypt being one such example. Chalk up a False Dilemma to your ongoing parade of error: if it's not absolute, worldwide peace, it's hell, which leaves only permanent occupation as the alternative.

We already have examples from human history to demonstrate the point: the dominant events of the Middle Ages in Europe were the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague. Half the population of Europe dies as a result of those horrors. Yet at the end of it, feudalism was broken and the first cracks in the power of the Church began to appear, which allowed at an ever increasing pace the Rennaissance, the Reformation, the Copernican system of astronomy, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and the withering away of monarchism, the Industrial Revolution and the death of chattel slavery. But it all starts off when a century long war and the plague which accompanied it devastates a fossilised social order placing God and King at the head of a world predicated upon keeping the impoverished masses down, and dedicated to suppressing knowledge to secure its power. The Europeans draw lessons from their past and start not only the process of scientific advancement but the development of the entire theory of secularism and representative government based upon the concept of the Rights of Man.

So apparently intervening... would prevent them from developing. Pray tell, how is it a black and white fallacy if you previously advocated letting them kill each other as a necesary stage?

Now you really begin to stray into outright dishonesty. There is a distinct difference between a brief situational intervention and the long-term occupation you advocate, which I have pointed out but which you ignore so you can use my words out of context.

And here's the Appeal to Emotion Fallacy right on schedule, and combined with an Appeal to Consequence Fallacy as well. You seem to think your personal notions of "doing good" outweigh every other material and ethical factor involved. Especially considering that you really cannot predict the outcome of the project no matter how much you like to think you can.

Which would be a good point except that ethic is based on consequences.

Wrong yet again. The Appeal to Consequence Fallacy says: "X must be true because, if not, then it would be bad". That is not the formula that ethical systems are based upon. As a rebuttal, that was particularly inept of you.

You have forcibly imposed the presence of an alien occupation force (or alien-controlled puppet goverment) upon a planetary population and you actually think this will NOT radically alter the shape of their culture if not obliterate it altogether? For fuck's sake —we have the Real World example of the Vanuatu Cargo Cult, in which exactly this consequence took place as the result of only a temporary occupation of the island of Tanna as an American military supply depot in the Pacific. The Tanna islanders are still waiting for their great god, John Frum, to return and redeem them. In the meantime, they build life-size bamboo replicas of warplanes and even whole Gilligan's Island-style bamboo airports as magick totems and conduct ritual parade drills with bamboo rifles, cast-off helmets, and with "USA" painted on their chests, to propitiate John Frum. Whatever culture the natives had before the Pacific War is long gone now and the Cargo Cult has been going on for the past six decades. I remember reading about it in National Geographic in the 70s! Whole generations have grown up on Tanna knowing nothing other than this as their "culture". And that's just an accidental consequence of a minor part of our war effort against Japan in a three-year period of time.

Which is why all of Africa is comprised solely of European cultures. Or India has adopted British culture entirely. Or how the Native Americans, despite being deprived of the right to learn their language, forced into American style schools and forced into American standards lost their culture.

I know you think you've scored a point, but all you've done is spew bullshit as usual. Exactly how does any of that rebut the point about the Tanna islanders? As for Africa and India, the effects of European colonialism on those societies have already been discussed in this thread and have demonstrably been negative upon those peoples for the most part. As for the Native Americans, yes, their culture and just about all their language is obliterated —something you'd know if you had ever bothered to study history, sociology, and Indian affairs. The preservation of a few ritual practises does not negate this sad fact of their existence.

You really are determined to make a complete fool of yourself in this thread, aren't you:

Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre

The Nanking Massacre exhibition at Princeton University

Chinese Holocaust Museum in San Francisco

museum dedicated to the rape victims and sex slaves of the Japanese armed forces in World War II

September 18th History Museum in Shenyang

Preserved museum site of the Unit 731 camp in Harbin

Bataan Memorial Military Museum in Santa Fe, NM

Just a few examples.

I have never heard of any of them. What? They don't really focus on Japanese war crimes during WW2- unlike the Nazi stuff, there isn't as much mention of it.

Excuse me? Those museums I cited DO focus upon Japanese war crimes, you blithering imbecile. The fact that you personally have been ignorant of their existence proves absolutely nothing except how little you actually know about anything you presume to speak upon.

Tu-quoque Fallacy as well as a Red Herring. Does not invalidate the point about Japanese colonialism and its driving imperative.

So the United States of America was also Neo-feudal... as was Great Britian... at the same time that Japan was. I am simply pointing out the entire ridiculousness of your argument maintaining they were somehow differant from the "enlightened" Europeans.

No, you are now committing a Strawman Fallacy. Your dishonesty in this discussion increases.

A Japanese population of 27 million was far larger than any army that could have been landed to conquer and occupy the island, which is why none of the European powers nor the Americans never attempted anything beyond establishing treaty ports and trading rights. And a European invasion would have solved the civil war as the Japanese would have been faced with the problem of invading gaijin. And BTW, the Ethiopians successfully drove the Italians out twice in their history: in 1896 and 1941 —a point I believe has already been made to you in this thread but which you have chosen to ignore.

Yeah- Europeans have NEVER used puppet states to rule a country for them. And individuals have never made concession to help secure them victory.

What a complete bullshit non-rebuttal. You really are a very stupid person:

Linky

Most European powers in the late 19th century were determined to secure territories in Africa. Italy was focusing its desires on particularly Ethiopia. The Treaty of Uccialli was negotiated between Ethiopia and Italy in 1890. Two copies, one in Amharic and one in Italian, were prepared. On the Italian version of the treaty, Francesco Crispi, prime minister of Italy, announced to all European nations that Ethiopia had become a territory belonging to Italy. On the Amharic version, it gave Menelik II the right to ask Italy for help in times of need, but it did not say anything about Ethiopia becoming a territory of Italy. When Menelik II discovered the misunderstanding, he immediately wrote to Britain's Queen Victoria, to the ruler of Germany, and to the president of France insisting that Ethiopia was still an independent nation. In 1893, Menelik II denounced the treaty and by 1895 Ethiopia and Italy were at war. On March 1896 Menelik's troops crushed the Italian army at Adwa, Ethiopia. Later, Italy did recognize Ethiopia as an independent nation.

After Menelik defeated the Italians at the Battle of Adwa, he expanded Ethiopia by conquest. Turmoil led to Menelik’s death, which brought his daughter, Empress Zauditu, to power in 1917. Tafari Makonnen was regent and heir apparent. Upon Empress Zauditu’s death in 1930, Tafari Makonnen was crowned Haile Selassie I as he became the 225th successor of the Solomonic dynasty.

What was that you said, exactly? "And individuals have never made concession to help secure them victory"? Exactly what did Emperor Menelik "concede" after he kicked the Italians asses?

In World War II, the liberation of Ethiopia was part of the Allied East African Campaign of 1940-41 and Ethiopian troops fought with British and Commonwealth forces to kick the Italians out.

THEN WHAT THE FUCK BUSINESS DO YOU HAVE PRESUMING TO SPEAK ON SUBJECTS YOU HAVE ZERO KNOWLEDGE OF?

I was under the impression moral issues do not require advanced education in order to talk about them.

Moral issues, along with history and politics, at least require a better basis than your admitted ignorance for discussion to proceed.

That's because you keep attempting to flog the same argument repeatedly and ignore any and all rebuttals. What we around here call the "Wall of Ignorance" tactic.

Which would be true... except I have repeatedly answered you.

Oh, is that what you call your repetitious bullshitting?

Now, one of us is engaging in a wall of ignorance and one of us isn't.

Try looking in a mirror the next time you say that.

Do you know anything about morality?

A lot more than you, actually. I'm not the one who's justifying the "logic" of the White Man's Burden here.

[Junghalli]

Or you can openly declare an alien, lie about where you are from, and procede to arm your ally. People inside the country will know this new state got a boost from its allies, but the people they conquer probably won't, and will think they came up with it themselves. A couple generations and you can erase the record.

What do you do with the people who worked with you? Remember, you're talking a fairly significant presence to boostrap the tech and infrastructure up to early industrial age level (minimum needed for planetary conquest) from whatever it was before. This alliance will have to include a good deal of technological aid, and that means thousands of their people working with yours if you want to get them up to planet-conquering level within something like a human lifespan. Those people will know what's going and if this species is like humans the truth will get out. You're not going to be able to keep something like that secret for the same reason it's ludicrous that something like the moon landing being faked or Roswell could be kept secret: there'd be way too many people in on it.

The only way you're going to be able to secretly uplift a Midaeval civilization is a Culture style program of slowly dropping inventions and tidbits of aid to them over a period of centuries.

More to the point, if after you help them out, the civilization turns on you, you are really doing this wrong.

Or you just fell afoul of the demon Murphy. Dragging a Midaeval civilization into the modern era will be an incredibly complicated task to make the democratization of Iraq look like child's play by comparison.

[Samuel]

You're not much of anything, really. You certainly are not knowledgable about a great many of the things you presume to discuss. There is no such thing as absolute secrecy, and with people who really would not understand the concept, it would be almost inevitable that tales of "visitors from the sky" would get out.

Because... what exactly? The people who are dealing with have a vested interest in keeping their mouths shut. Do you honestly think it will magically get out?

So, you think that your murders would be justifiable because they are lesser in scale? Again, boy, don't prate to me about moral imperatives —especially as you are patently unqualified from doing so.

... what the hell is wrong with you? So apparently it is wrong to kill people... even if it would stop more people from dying because... you don't say. Again.

What arrogant presumption on your part. You justify your right to impose your rule based on your victims' alleged incompetence, and that based entirely upon your subjective judgements.

No, jackass,

Then there's the case of Japan. Japan was gradually brought along the path to modernity following the War of the Restoration by the well-meaning English, who built them a modern army and navy, trained their military officers, and provided for them a model of parliamentary democracy, which they eagerly adopted, and a modern central-banking system, which they also eagerly adopted. They helped them develop their industries and their financial system, and by 1905, Japan joined the ranks of advanced industrial powers. Only problem is, however, that they never learned to shed themselves of the old mindsets of Emperor-worship and bushido because that process was pre-empted, and when they looked around and saw that advanced nations had empires, they decided they had to conquer one for themselves. At first, it wasn't so bad, and Japan's ambitions were relatively moderate. But the ancient culture with modern industrial and military might, which also saw itself as the superior people in a world of barbarians, never developed the wisdom to see why that mindset was wrong. And each victory won only fueled their Sense of Destiny until it lead them to a little yet never-ending war in China and an even bigger war with the United States which in the end got their country burned and added about another 28 million (of which a tenth was their own people) to the total death toll of the Second World War.

You argued as well that the natives couldn't be trusted with modern technology.

No such fallacy. Have a quick browse.

http://www.fact-archive.com/encyclopedi ... on_fallacy

You see, some of us, when confronted with new information that isn't in what we have place it in google and give it a search instead of assuming that anything we don't already know is false.

Hasty Generalisation Fallacy. And genocide actually is not occurring on Earth just right now.

Earth is to small a sample size?

As for genocide, I believe that Darfur would count, unless they have stopped killing each other by now- I haven't been keeping up. Of course wars and other large scale violence is essentially continuous and IS occuring now.

But I guess mass slaughter just isn't important enough to intervene to stop- it needs to total, right?

Just no end to your bullshit, is there? Peace has been successfully concluded many times in the past 65 years since the end of the Second World War —Israel and Egypt being one such example. Chalk up a False Dilemma to your ongoing parade of error: if it's not absolute, worldwide peace, it's hell, which leaves only permanent occupation as the alternative.

Peace between states. Given we aren't going to be dealing with states, but the equivalent of Palestine, you are commiting a red herring.

You just like throwing out buzz words, don't you?

Now you really begin to stray into outright dishonesty. There is a distinct difference between a brief situational intervention and the long-term occupation you advocate, which I have pointed out but which you ignore so you can use my words out of context.

Yeah, dishonest to point out that you considered war and the violence that they have to deal with a learning experience that we shouldn't interfere with

You WANT them to fight and die because you think it is the only way to learn. You'll intervene to stop violence from getting out of hand... which is the sort of situations you described as being essential for progress. You can't have it both ways.

Wrong yet again. The Appeal to Consequence Fallacy says: "X must be true because, if not, then it would be bad". That is not the formula that ethical systems are based upon. As a rebuttal, that was particularly inept of you.

Here is what you were attacking:

Well, they could accidentally annihilate their civilization with nukes. Or they could be taken down by an extremely variable climate. Or they could arrive to the stars as a totalitarian state eager for conquest (Cardassians). f they don't hit any of those traps, they will eventually get it... at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. I'm pretty sure tens of thousands is several magnitude below millions incidentally.

I'm pointing out what could happen if you let them to find their own path- they might not make it.

Or, the short answer- you are full of shit.

I know you think you've scored a point, but all you've done is spew bullshit as usual. Exactly how does any of that rebut the point about the Tanna islanders? As for Africa and India, the effects of European colonialism on those societies have already been discussed in this thread and have demonstrably been negative upon those peoples for the most part. As for the Native Americans, yes, their culture and just about all their language is obliterated —something you'd know if you had ever bothered to study history, sociology, and Indian affairs. The preservation of a few ritual practises does not negate this sad fact of their existence.

We were addressing cultural effects. Africa and India did NOT have their culture erased by the Europeans.

As for the natives, yes, most of it is gone, but it was not completely annihilated despite them almost being completely extinguished. Considering they had less than 100 thousand members at one point (and the members belonging to differant tribes) AND the government tried to eradicate it, I'd say that would be considered rather resiliant.

Of course, this was origionally about how natives could learn from the examples of others about society construction, an idea that you tried to rebut saying the native culture would be entirely erased... which is entirely irrelevant to what my point was.

As for the cargo cult, how exactly does a new religion arising invalidate my point? Did the Arabs have their culture eliminated when Christianity helped inspire Islam?

Excuse me? Those museums I cited DO focus upon Japanese war crimes, you blithering imbecile. The fact that you personally have been ignorant of their existence proves absolutely nothing except how little you actually know about anything you presume to speak upon.

"They" was society, not the musuems. The tangent I was going on was part of the reason the Japanese have not appologized could be that unlike Germany, which has Nazis and the Holocaust well known, Japanese war crimes aren't as well known.

Of course, it could be that I am completely out of touch with basic history, but my point was how much the average individual knows. Which is important for pressuring them, it getting into culture, etc.

No, you are now committing a Strawman Fallacy. Your dishonesty in this discussion increases.

Except you are maintaing that the Japanese were different, even though their driving imperitives were the exact same as everyone else!

I'll respond later- turkey awaits.

[Samuel]

The turkey was good, but the pumpkin pie was better

I'll be back soon... need to clarify.

[Patrick Degan]

There is no such thing as absolute secrecy, and with people who really would not understand the concept, it would be almost inevitable that tales of "visitors from the sky" would get out.

Because... what exactly? The people who are dealing with have a vested interest in keeping their mouths shut. Do you honestly think it will magically get out?

Magick has nothing to do with it. You are dealing with people who do not understand fully the concept of secrecy, and have no means of really keeping anything well and fully hidden. This isn't even a 20th century CIA we're talking about with the sort of regime a primitive world would have.

So, you think that your murders would be justifiable because they are lesser in scale? Again, boy, don't prate to me about moral imperatives —especially as you are patently unqualified from doing so.

... what the hell is wrong with you? So apparently it is wrong to kill people... even if it would stop more people from dying because... you don't say. Again.

I HAVE said why, and you just continue to blithely ignore the objection so you can keep repeating the same fucking argument. Who gave you the right to impose your rule and kill people who didn't ask for your rule so you can impose your notions of right and proper development upon them?

What arrogant presumption on your part. You justify your right to impose your rule based on your victims' alleged incompetence, and that based entirely upon your subjective judgements.

No, jackass,

Yourself, obviously.

Then there's the case of Japan. Japan was gradually brought along the path to modernity following the War of the Restoration by the well-meaning English, who built them a modern army and navy, trained their military officers, and provided for them a model of parliamentary democracy, which they eagerly adopted, and a modern central-banking system, which they also eagerly adopted. They helped them develop their industries and their financial system, and by 1905, Japan joined the ranks of advanced industrial powers. Only problem is, however, that they never learned to shed themselves of the old mindsets of Emperor-worship and bushido because that process was pre-empted, and when they looked around and saw that advanced nations had empires, they decided they had to conquer one for themselves. At first, it wasn't so bad, and Japan's ambitions were relatively moderate. But the ancient culture with modern industrial and military might, which also saw itself as the superior people in a world of barbarians, never developed the wisdom to see why that mindset was wrong. And each victory won only fueled their Sense of Destiny until it lead them to a little yet never-ending war in China and an even bigger war with the United States which in the end got their country burned and added about another 28 million (of which a tenth was their own people) to the total death toll of the Second World War.


You argued as well that the natives couldn't be trusted with modern technology.

Once again, you presume to use my words out of context. Risible considering that the course of action you advocate and one probable outcome is summed up by the very passage you lift.

No such fallacy. Have a quick browse.

http://www.fact-archive.com/encyclopedi ... on_fallacy

You see, some of us, when confronted with new information that isn't in what we have place it in google and give it a search instead of assuming that anything we don't already know is false.

Cram it, you arrogant little prick. So somebody decided to define a slight variation of the False Dilemma. I'll concede that tiny scrap of a point. What's laughable here is you presuming to lecture anybody about doing research when confronted with new information considering how little you can be bothered to research anything when confronted with inconvenient facts —as has been demonstrated multiple times in the course of this thread. Especially when you trumpet your own ignorance as if it's some sort of virtue.

Hasty Generalisation Fallacy. And genocide actually is not occurring on Earth just right now.

Earth is to small a sample size?

Has nothing to do with "sample size" but the swiftness of the conclusion you state with only a simplistic read of a very broad stretch of history.

As for genocide, I believe that Darfur would count, unless they have stopped killing each other by now- I haven't been keeping up. Of course wars and other large scale violence is essentially continuous and IS occuring now.

There is dispute as to whether the label "genocide" applies, since the causes of death in the Darfur region blur between that of the drought-induced famine that was already underway and the present war now taking place, as opposed to a deliberately systematic targeting of an ethnic population for elimination.

But I guess mass slaughter just isn't important enough to intervene to stop- it needs to total, right?

Again, cram it, you arrogant little prick. I have already stated that short-term intervention to prevent a disaster like Darfur is a perfectly acceptable course of action for a power like the Federation to undertake. That is very different from your construction of the White Man's Burden

Just no end to your bullshit, is there? Peace has been successfully concluded many times in the past 65 years since the end of the Second World War —Israel and Egypt being one such example. Chalk up a False Dilemma to your ongoing parade of error: if it's not absolute, worldwide peace, it's hell, which leaves only permanent occupation as the alternative.

Peace between states. Given we aren't going to be dealing with states, but the equivalent of Palestine, you are commiting a red herring.

NOT a Red Herring —you stated that efforts at peacemaking had been nothing but failure since the UN was formed; an argument which is demonstrably false on its face.

You just like throwing out buzz words, don't you?

Sayeth the arrogant little prick who does nothing but.

Now you really begin to stray into outright dishonesty. There is a distinct difference between a brief situational intervention and the long-term occupation you advocate, which I have pointed out but which you ignore so you can use my words out of context.

Yeah, dishonest to point out that you considered war and the violence that they have to deal with a learning experience that we shouldn't interfere with

YES DISHONEST, Gracie —particularly as you continue to offer the False Dilemma of White Man's Burden or Letting Them All Die.

You WANT them to fight and die because you think it is the only way to learn. You'll intervene to stop violence from getting out of hand... which is the sort of situations you described as being essential for progress. You can't have it both ways.

Wrong. I recognise that outsiders presuming to decide the destiny of an entire people are more likely to produce a result which is very opposite of the one they desire because those people never had the chance to learn some painful lessons on their own hook —especially when those same outsiders know next to nothing about the people they presume to rule for their benefit. Further, you continue the False Dilemma of White Man's Burden or Letting Them All Die and ignore the observation that, while genocides and ethnic cleansings have been local disasters, they have not, nor necessarily must be, global disasters —as even a casual read-through of human history in the last 5000 years can demonstrate. The entire Earth has not been a large-scale Darfur. But you seem to think that any primitive world can be likened to that tragedy and try to extend the analogy to a global scale as justification for long-term intervention: "It could be like that, and one day they might become that, so we'll go ahead and treat them as if they are that. Sure, we'll have to kill some of them, but they'll thank us in the end".

Wrong yet again. The Appeal to Consequence Fallacy says: "X must be true because, if not, then it would be bad". That is not the formula that ethical systems are based upon. As a rebuttal, that was particularly inept of you.

Here is what you were attacking:

Well, they could accidentally annihilate their civilization with nukes. Or they could be taken down by an extremely variable climate. Or they could arrive to the stars as a totalitarian state eager for conquest (Cardassians). f they don't hit any of those traps, they will eventually get it... at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. I'm pretty sure tens of thousands is several magnitude below millions incidentally.

I'm pointing out what could happen if you let them to find their own path- they might not make it.

"Could be, if, maybe, possibly, suppose..." I don't see anything resembling an underlying factual or logical support for the proposition "X will happen if we don't do Y" to justify your White Man's Burden course of action. All I see is an Appeal to Consequence. You have no argument.

Or, the short answer- you are full of shit.

Again, look who's talking.

I know you think you've scored a point, but all you've done is spew bullshit as usual. Exactly how does any of that rebut the point about the Tanna islanders? As for Africa and India, the effects of European colonialism on those societies have already been discussed in this thread and have demonstrably been negative upon those peoples for the most part. As for the Native Americans, yes, their culture and just about all their language is obliterated —something you'd know if you had ever bothered to study history, sociology, and Indian affairs. The preservation of a few ritual practises does not negate this sad fact of their existence.

We were addressing cultural effects. Africa and India did NOT have their culture erased by the Europeans.

Keep tapdancing for as long as you think you can manage it.

As for the natives, yes, most of it is gone, but it was not completely annihilated despite them almost being completely extinguished. Considering they had less than 100 thousand members at one point (and the members belonging to differant tribes) AND the government tried to eradicate it, I'd say that would be considered rather resiliant.

That's remarkably similar to the Rush Limbaugh pseudo-argument that there are now more indians today than there were a hundred years ago —which blithely ignores the inconvenient fact that there would have been a whole lot more without the near-genocide carried out against them in the first place. The fact remains that, except for a few ritual practises and the production of trinkets for the tourist trade, the American Indian culture has been extinguished as a practical matter. Nitpickery does not erase this no matter how much you desperately need it to.

Of course, this was origionally about how natives could learn from the examples of others about society construction, an idea that you tried to rebut saying the native culture would be entirely erased... which is entirely irrelevant to what my point was.

No, what this is about is you conflating and cherry-picking someone else's arguments for strawmandering purposes.

As for the cargo cult, how exactly does a new religion arising invalidate my point? Did the Arabs have their culture eliminated when Christianity helped inspire Islam?

Christianity did not help inspire Islam. The Arabs invented their new religion on their own, drawing from their own monotheistic and prophethood traditions which had existed for centuries before Muhammad ever came on the scene. That is very different from natives making a religion out of extraordinary things they see being carried out by far more advanced occupiers of their land and which they can't understand.

Excuse me? Those museums I cited DO focus upon Japanese war crimes, you blithering imbecile. The fact that you personally have been ignorant of their existence proves absolutely nothing except how little you actually know about anything you presume to speak upon.

"They" was society, not the musuems. The tangent I was going on was part of the reason the Japanese have not appologized could be that unlike Germany, which has Nazis and the Holocaust well known, Japanese war crimes aren't as well known.

Of course, it could be that I am completely out of touch with basic history, but my point was how much the average individual knows. Which is important for pressuring them, it getting into culture, etc.

They "don't know" because the Japanese have been in active denial of their war guilt ever since the Emperor broadcast the surrender rescript. Something you would know if you weren't, by your own admission, so out of touch with basic history.

No, you are now committing a Strawman Fallacy. Your dishonesty in this discussion increases.

Except you are maintaing that the Japanese were different, even though their driving imperitives were the exact same as everyone else!

WHAT I SAID WAS THIS:

Japan was gradually brought along the path to modernity following the War of the Restoration by the well-meaning English, who built them a modern army and navy, trained their military officers, and provided for them a model of parliamentary democracy, which they eagerly adopted, and a modern central-banking system, which they also eagerly adopted. They helped them develop their industries and their financial system, and by 1905, Japan joined the ranks of advanced industrial powers. Only problem is, however, that they never learned to shed themselves of the old mindsets of Emperor-worship and bushido because that process was pre-empted, and when they looked around and saw that advanced nations had empires, they decided they had to conquer one for themselves. At first, it wasn't so bad, and Japan's ambitions were relatively moderate. But the ancient culture with modern industrial and military might, which also saw itself as the superior people in a world of barbarians, never developed the wisdom to see why that mindset was wrong. And each victory won only fueled their Sense of Destiny until it lead them to a little yet never-ending war in China and an even bigger war with the United States which in the end got their country burned and added about another 28 million (of which a tenth was their own people) to the total death toll of the Second World War.

You proceeded to strawmander my argument on this point by saying that I was, somehow, declaring the U.S. and the European powers to be "neo-feudal" on the simple basis that they and Japan had colonial empires or that Japanese colonialism was driven solely by neo-feudalist ideology, which is an outright, bullshit lie on your part. I had argued, and this point was put forth by Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattle, Ching-Chih Chen, and the Joint Committee on Japanese studies, in the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1) as well as other sources, that Japan's drive for empire was fueled in part by it's viewpoint that colonialism was the mark of modernity, and that this motive was wedded to their pre-existing national self-image as the holders of an Divine Destiny, as observed in the aforementioned work:

On the one hand, the Japanese Empire resembled its European counterparts in that its authority was based on an assumption of the superiority of the colonial rulers over the subject peoples. To a degree this basic perspective stemmed from the fact, common to all colonial systems, that the empire had been imposed by a conquest of force by a stronger, more materially advanced race upon the weaker, more materially retarded peoples. Yet, in part, this assumption also derived from credos that were uniquely Japanese. These included Japanese beliefs in the mythic origins of the Japanese race, the divine creation and inherent virtue of the Japanese Imperial House, and the mystical link between the emperor and his people. The relative isolation of the country throughout most of its history, as well as a cultural deference toward China, had in centuries past prevented these beliefs of racial uniqueness from transmogrifying into a theory of racial supremacy. But a few decades of expanding dominion over neighbouring Asian peoples, reinforced by racial notions of Social Darwinism, inevitably released the virus of racial assertiveness into the Japanese ideological bloodstream and quickened the Japanese sense of superiority to the rest of Asia.

As I have pointed out in my essay on Japanese colonial ideology, these contrasting Western and Asian —Japanese— patterns of empire thus formed the perimetres for an evolving and contrasting set of Japanese attitudes toward colonialism, their own and that of other nations. As such they provoked two quite dissimilar Japanese approaches to the relations of colonial ruler and ruled.

—pg 13

While it is observable that the European colonial powers were also racist, in no way do any of them, or the United States, can be said to have undertaken the drive for empire on any feudalist belief that their races in particular had some sort of mystical link to a god-emperor or that it was "stylish" of modernity instead of strictly material concerns, either economic or military.

So no, dishonest one, I never made any such argument that the U.S. or any of the Europeans were "neo-feudalist", or that neo-feudalism was the sole driver of Japanese colonialism. Clearly, though, Japanese imperial ambitions were not "exactly the same as everybody else", as per your simpleminded formulation.

[Wyrm]

You WANT them to fight and die because you think it is the only way to learn. You'll intervene to stop violence from getting out of hand... which is the sort of situations you described as being essential for progress. You can't have it both ways.

Wrong. I recognise that outsiders presuming to decide the destiny of an entire people are more likely to produce a result which is very opposite of the one they desire because those people never had the chance to learn some painful lessons on their own hook —especially when those same outsiders know next to nothing about the people they presume to rule for their benefit.

Patrick, I have to ask exactly what you mean by a society learning painful lessons by "their own hook", and why this sort of experience is different from being taught the same lessons by other societies. Societies are collections of people, and each new generation in that society has to be taught those lessons anew. Only in the exact period of time when the lesson is learned by the society do people in that society have direct experience of that lesson. Further generations must learn secondhand.

For instance, even though slavery is a fact of US history, all my knowledge of it comes second-hand, through history books and its shadow on current society, yet I do grasp how slavery is a bad thing. Why would I not grasp this lesson if it wasn't my society that endured this lesson?

[Patrick Degan]

Patrick, I have to ask exactly what you mean by a society learning painful lessons by "their own hook", and why this sort of experience is different from being taught the same lessons by other societies. Societies are collections of people, and each new generation in that society has to be taught those lessons anew. Only in the exact period of time when the lesson is learned by the society do people in that society have direct experience of that lesson. Further generations must learn secondhand.

I thought the example of Japan illustrated this point explicitly.

For instance, even though slavery is a fact of US history, all my knowledge of it comes second-hand, through history books and its shadow on current society, yet I do grasp how slavery is a bad thing. Why would I not grasp this lesson if it wasn't my society that endured this lesson?

You oversimplify grossly. America would never entertain again the idea of chattel slavery because of how it's injustice was made manifest and led to a bloody civil war to finally excise it from any concept of constitutional government. It is a different matter when an outside force attempts to impose solutions to other peoples' problems, since inevitably it is looked upon as interference and is undone by the traditionalists at the first opportunity they gain power —because that notion was never soundly destroyed, merely suppressed by a foreign (or alien) occupation force.

[Samuel]

Well, I guess "I will tidy it up" grants you no reprieve.

Magick has nothing to do with it. You are dealing with people who do not understand fully the concept of secrecy, and have no means of really keeping anything well and fully hidden. This isn't even a 20th century CIA we're talking about with the sort of regime a primitive world would have.

If they understand the concept of lying, it is good enough for me. All we need to do is make sure all the people we work with have an incentive to lie- I'm pretty sure being considered the creator of a new invention or being "The Magnificent" is good enough. This does mean we will have to work with an extremely limited pool of people... which is what I have been advocating.

I HAVE said why, and you just continue to blithely ignore the objection so you can keep repeating the same fucking argument. Who gave you the right to impose your rule and kill people who didn't ask for your rule so you can impose your notions of right and proper development upon them?

Ah yes, the classic "it is imposed by force so must be bad!" The right I am using is the fact that inaction will cause more harm than action. You seem not to be able to understand that is a valid justification.

Once again, you presume to use my words out of context. Risible considering that the course of action you advocate and one probable outcome is summed up by the very passage you lift.

Yeah, an entire paragraph is out of context. And the point I was making is you AGREE that they can't be trusted. The hilarious thing that you don't understand is that I am aiming for a that, but preferably with less atrocities. Your "rebuttal" is my goal.

Cram it, you arrogant little prick. So somebody decided to define a slight variation of the False Dilemma. I'll concede that tiny scrap of a point. What's laughable here is you presuming to lecture anybody about doing research when confronted with new information considering how little you can be bothered to research anything when confronted with inconvenient facts —as has been demonstrated multiple times in the course of this thread. Especially when you trumpet your own ignorance as if it's some sort of virtue.

The fact that I mentioned a logical fallacy and you immediately decided it didn't count because it wasn't listed in your resources does suggest you aren't bothering to do the research. Given that you literally just had to plug it into google...

Nice ad hominum by the way. When confronted by the fact I was wrong, did I immediately claim "it doesn't really count", like you? No, I admitted I was wrong.

As for my ignorance, I am not proud of it. I am admitting it because I know that the factual information and the conclusion I make based of them might not be true because I have missed something. It is called honesty.

Has nothing to do with "sample size" but the swiftness of the conclusion you state with only a simplistic read of a very broad stretch of history.

The conclusion I made was that bad stuff occurs continuously throughout history. It doesn't have to be "indepth" or sophisticated to realize that people being killed dying from disease or starving to death occured throughout history often and was preventable.

There is dispute as to whether the label "genocide" applies, since the causes of death in the Darfur region blur between that of the drought-induced famine that was already underway and the present war now taking place, as opposed to a deliberately systematic targeting of an ethnic population for elimination.

So we only had two in the last 20 years?

Again, cram it, you arrogant little prick. I have already stated that short-term intervention to prevent a disaster like Darfur is a perfectly acceptable course of action for a power like the Federation to undertake. That is very different from your construction of the White Man's Burden

Because there will be absolutely no long term consequences from landing peacekeeping troops on a primitve world. Have you considered what you are proposing? This would require a large investment of resources, construction of planetary bases to house the troops, etc.

Then there is the consequences. First off is the technological contamination as the natives borrow/steal/buy/beg for the items that your men have. Which then results in the most unstable areas having the best equipment... a recipe for disaster.

Than there is the fact the natives aren't idiots. These people come here whenever our crops are burnt and give us food to help prevent us from starving to death...

Do that and you get perpetual flower wars. You encourage total war on the part of losers in order to bring in your peacekeepers and stop the killing, AND immuninize states to war- they can be as oppresive and detached from reality as they want and no one will topple them.

NOT a Red Herring —you stated that efforts at peacemaking had been nothing but failure since the UN was formed; an argument which is demonstrably false on its face.

I'll rephrase from:

It isn't working for the UN and it appears the only way to keep the peace in some cases is... full scale occupation.

To "doesn't always work and may have unintended consequences that spiral out of control". Better.

Of course, given that my plan would lead to worldwide peace it isn't a false dilemmia.

YES DISHONEST, Gracie —particularly as you continue to offer the False Dilemma of White Man's Burden or Letting Them All Die.

Explain how they will learn from conflicts if you keep on preventing them from killing each other.

Wrong. I recognise that outsiders presuming to decide the destiny of an entire people are more likely to produce a result which is very opposite of the one they desire because those people never had the chance to learn some painful lessons on their own hook —especially when those same outsiders know next to nothing about the people they presume to rule for their benefit. Further, you continue the False Dilemma of White Man's Burden or Letting Them All Die and ignore the observation that, while genocides and ethnic cleansings have been local disasters, they have not, nor necessarily must be, global disasters —as even a casual read-through of human history in the last 5000 years can demonstrate. The entire Earth has not been a large-scale Darfur. But you seem to think that any primitive world can be likened to that tragedy and try to extend the analogy to a global scale as justification for long-term intervention: "It could be like that, and one day they might become that, so we'll go ahead and treat them as if they are that. Sure, we'll have to kill some of them, but they'll thank us in the end".

No, global disasters are things like disease or the planets climate changing. Guess what? They happen as well! There is a reason that I keep on refering to life expectancy.

As for "not learning the lessons"... have you ignored they could learn the WRONG lessons? What about the lesson of the value of the nation-state, which has been nothing but trouble. The lessons they will learn from war are those that make them most effective at fighting- some will help them as a society and some will hurt them.

As for "deciding their own destiny", sounds real pretty, doesn't it? TO bad the majority of the people we will be helping will be illiterate peasents whose "destiny" is to be bossed around by the upper class.

"Could be, if, maybe, possibly, suppose..." I don't see anything resembling an underlying factual or logical support for the proposition "X will happen if we don't do Y" to justify your White Man's Burden course of action. All I see is an Appeal to Consequence. You have no argument.

Yeah- I am appealing to the consequences to inaciton. There is the possibility things could go much, much worse if we don't intervene.

Lets look at what your site says:

X is true because if people did not accept X as being true then there would be negative consequences.

X is false because if people did not accept X as being false, then there would be negative consequences.

X is true because accepting that X is true has positive consequences.

X is false because accepting that X is false has positive consequences.

I wish that X were true, therefore X is true. This is known as Wishful Thinking.

I wish that X were false, therefore X is false. This is known as Wishful Thinking.

Wow, these are all about the truth value of the proposition... have I been arguing that something is true or that something is moral?

Again, look who's talking.

Actually that is accurate about my person, but not my argument.

Keep tapdancing for as long as you think you can manage it.

If you had a point there, I would respond. The fact of the matter is that not all societies the Europeans have intervened in have had their cultures erased.

Additionally, this doesn't apply to my plan- I am using a puppet state, not going in and setting up missions, schools and the like.

That's remarkably similar to the Rush Limbaugh pseudo-argument that there are now more indians today than there were a hundred years ago —which blithely ignores the inconvenient fact that there would have been a whole lot more without the near-genocide carried out against them in the first place. The fact remains that, except for a few ritual practises and the production of trinkets for the tourist trade, the American Indian culture has been extinguished as a practical matter. Nitpickery does not erase this no matter how much you desperately need it to.

The Rush Limbough argument is there are more natives than there were 400 years ago.

As for "culture being extinguished aside from some rituals and trinkets"... what more do you want me to keep?

No, what this is about is you conflating and cherry-picking someone else's arguments for strawmandering purposes.

You declared that the natives couldn't adapt using other people's cultures because their own was erased. I'm sorry I didn't immediately go "that is the dumbest thing I have heard in some time" and went about showing that they groups still had culture even after intervention.

It won't happen again.

Christianity did not help inspire Islam. The Arabs invented their new religion on their own, drawing from their own monotheistic and prophethood traditions which had existed for centuries before Muhammad ever came on the scene. That is very different from natives making a religion out of extraordinary things they see being carried out by far more advanced occupiers of their land and which they can't understand.

I actually didn't know that there was so much contact with Christians in Arabia. Thanks for the link! Of course, given that the polytheism was completely wiped out... yeah I guess that culture was replaced by another.

As for "people making religions out of things they can't understand"... that is how ALL religions start. We have religions based on UFOs. How on Earth is this relevant? The natives will form a religion based on my agents... how? I am advocating a puppet state with minimal contact- your objection applies to DBZ not me.

They "don't know" because the Japanese have been in active denial of their war guilt ever since the Emperor broadcast the surrender rescript. Something you would know if you weren't, by your own admission, so out of touch with basic history.

... the US media and school system are controlled by the Japanese? I guess the more you know...

You proceeded to strawmander my argument on this point by saying that I was, somehow, declaring the U.S. and the European powers to be "neo-feudal" on the simple basis that they and Japan had colonial empires or that Japanese colonialism was driven solely by neo-feudalist ideology, which is an outright, bullshit lie on your part. I had argued, and this point was put forth by Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattle, Ching-Chih Chen, and the Joint Committee on Japanese studies, in the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1) as well as other sources, that Japan's drive for empire was fueled in part by it's viewpoint that colonialism was the mark of modernity, and that this motive was wedded to their pre-existing national self-image as the holders of an Divine Destiny, as observed in the aforementioned work:

You declared the reason they are neofeudal and Germany wasn't is because Japan hasn't apologized... which means they are currently neofeudal! I'm pretty sure that is a groos oversimplification of Japanese society and politics, but one you seem to hold as per their "refusal to admit or apologize" criteria.

Has the US apologized over Vietnam yet, or do we continue to write about the mistakes we made?

Are you an American? Because if you were, you might have heard of something called "Manifest Destiny". Totally differant than divine destiny of course.

While it is observable that the European colonial powers were also racist, in no way do any of them, or the United States, can be said to have undertaken the drive for empire on any feudalist belief that their races in particular had some sort of mystical link to a god-emperor or that it was "stylish" of modernity instead of strictly material concerns, either economic or military.

So no, dishonest one, I never made any such argument that the U.S. or any of the Europeans were "neo-feudalist", or that neo-feudalism was the sole driver of Japanese colonialism. Clearly, though, Japanese imperial ambitions were not "exactly the same as everybody else", as per your simpleminded formulation.

Right, so Christianity is more rational? We are going to Christianize the natives as a motivation and God wants us to expand are not equivalent to Japanese belief? Their belief in destiny is not equivalent to the Europeans belief they were the pinacle of progress and they were chosen for this course by God?

As for their expansion being "stylish"... the European drive for colonization was partially over prestige which is the same thing. The US drive for colonies was exactly the same thing.

Social Darwinism is also mentioned... which was imported from Europe.

Honestly, this all seems to boil down to is that somehow the Japanese were differant from everyone else... despite displaying the same exact behavior.

Basically, he is claiming it won't work... because the natives just can't do it. No way that is condesending.

What a complete bullshit non-rebuttal. You really are a very stupid person:

Linky

You have a hard time getting what the heck I am talking about! I wasn't talking about Ethiopia- I was talking about how they could take over Japan if it remained a backward country.

What was that you said, exactly? "And individuals have never made concession to help secure them victory"? Exactly what did Emperor Menelik "concede" after he kicked the Italians asses?

In World War II, the liberation of Ethiopia was part of the Allied East African Campaign of 1940-41 and Ethiopian troops fought with British and Commonwealth forces to kick the Italians out.

Once again, I was refering to Japan. How you could have missed it is beyond me.

Moral issues, along with history and politics, at least require a better basis than your admitted ignorance for discussion to proceed.

I may have a shallow understanding of many issues (there was actually a thread by someone who was thought they were dumb because of that), but I do know that when you make an argument, you actually need... an argument. You just asserted this.

Oh, is that what you call your repetitious bullshitting?

Bull shitting and wall of ignorance are two different things.

Try looking in a mirror the next time you say that.

Do you have any understanding of irony? We are talking about a fallacy that one of us is commiting and you can't see in yourself... and your immediate reaction is "it isn't me". I never have that level of self confidence unless I am grandstanding.

A lot more than you, actually. I'm not the one who's justifying the "logic" of the White Man's Burden here.

It is white mans burden... in space! Ya got me- we are secretly there for their tri-lithium.

And the reason the argument for the white man's burden was flawed... is because they were screwing over the natives. Where exactly did I have them paying us off for the priveledge of us helping them?

What do you do with the people who worked with you? Remember, you're talking a fairly significant presence to boostrap the tech and infrastructure up to early industrial age level (minimum needed for planetary conquest) from whatever it was before. This alliance will have to include a good deal of technological aid, and that means thousands of their people working with yours if you want to get them up to planet-conquering level within something like a human lifespan. Those people will know what's going and if this species is like humans the truth will get out. You're not going to be able to keep something like that secret for the same reason it's ludicrous that something like the moon landing being faked or Roswell could be kept secret: there'd be way too many people in on it.

The only way you're going to be able to secretly uplift a Midaeval civilization is a Culture style program of slowly dropping inventions and tidbits of aid to them over a period of centuries.

That is plan B. As it is, I am hoping to do things at a small enough level no one will notice- I am basing my plan off of Star Trek, which means about as much as Section 32 could cram in a small ship and siphon of the budget. That is the practical aspect I am arguing over. The theoretical one is a bit more grandiose and I haven't decided, although most of the argument is over that one.

Or you just fell afoul of the demon Murphy. Dragging a Midaeval civilization into the modern era will be an incredibly complicated task to make the democratization of Iraq look like child's play by comparison.

There is blatant lying. They are in Fed territry- have them "discovered" once they launch their first spacecraft and you can control their access to information and allow you to blatantly intervene.

Yes, my plan requires a large amount of skull-drugery. I am working of the worst case scenarion- little resources, few individuals and no legality or official backing. Technically the plan BDZ is white mans burden- mine has evolved into planet piracy.

I thought the example of Japan illustrated this point explicitly.

Except that I have spent most of my time disputing that.

You oversimplify grossly. America would never entertain again the idea of chattel slavery because of how it's injustice was made manifest and led to a bloody civil war to finally excise it from any concept of constitutional government. It is a different matter when an outside force attempts to impose solutions to other peoples' problems, since inevitably it is looked upon as interference and is undone by the traditionalists at the first opportunity they gain power —because that notion was never soundly destroyed, merely suppressed by a foreign (or alien) occupation force.

Supreme Court.

[Wyrm]

Patrick, I have to ask exactly what you mean by a society learning painful lessons by "their own hook", and why this sort of experience is different from being taught the same lessons by other societies. Societies are collections of people, and each new generation in that society has to be taught those lessons anew. Only in the exact period of time when the lesson is learned by the society do people in that society have direct experience of that lesson. Further generations must learn secondhand.

I thought the example of Japan illustrated this point explicitly.

It doesn't. The Japanese were very unlikely to shed the Emperor-worship and bushido aspect of their culture unless someone or something interfered. The Japanese were as socially stratified and isolationist as the Chinese, and look how long the Chinese spent in cultural stasis. We used paper and printing to democratize and specialize knowledge. We used gunpowder to put the nails in the collective coffins of the armored knight, castles and feudalism, and took the first steps toward the modern regimented army. We adapted bell-making techniques into cannons, and then into cylenders to give us the Industrial Revolution. We used magnetized pointers to sail the world and open it up to trade. Yet these were all originally Chinese ideas. What were they doing for a good thousand years? Where was the uses equivalent to what we levered their own technology to do? Nowhere, because it was exactly that stratified and isolationists society that shackled the Chinese. You couldn't move out of the pigeonhole you were born in, so you didn't bother trying to improve your lot in life. You do things the same way your parents did, because it was good enough for your parents, and it's good enough for you.

You need to shake this kind of culture up a little in order to get it moving. Not in the same ham-handed way it was actually done, but something. Otherwise, you come back a thousand years later and you still find Emperor-worship and bushido.

There was no process that was "pre-empted" here, Patrick. It wasn't happening at all. And it wasn't going to happen until something shook the Japanese up.

For instance, even though slavery is a fact of US history, all my knowledge of it comes second-hand, through history books and its shadow on current society, yet I do grasp how slavery is a bad thing. Why would I not grasp this lesson if it wasn't my society that endured this lesson?

You oversimplify grossly. America would never entertain again the idea of chattel slavery because of how it's injustice was made manifest and led to a bloody civil war to finally excise it from any concept of constitutional government. It is a different matter when an outside force attempts to impose solutions to other peoples' problems, since inevitably it is looked upon as interference and is undone by the traditionalists at the first opportunity they gain power —because that notion was never soundly destroyed, merely suppressed by a foreign (or alien) occupation force.

Why is it a choice between "let them learn the lesson themselves by direct hardship", and "suppress the practice until the last traditionalist dies out"? Why can't it be "show what happened in our history when we tried this"? Or even, in the specific case of chattle slavery, "this is what chattle slavery really means in your own culture"... by filming what the natives do to the slaves and let them as a group be disgusted by it?

[Samuel]

His point about Japan is they can learn... but it won't change them socially.

Almost certain it is false- the Japanese certainly changed in the example- just not in the ways that were good for their neighbors.