Grrl Power #934 – Space butler!
I’m sure a few of you are like “Uh, didn’t she get arrested?” It comes up on the next page.
The whole “You spared and/or saved my life, therefore you own my life and/or I must serve you” seems like one of those things that has only ever existed in fiction. I don’t know, maybe it happened in Japan back in the day, but it probably almost always involves someone of lower status giving up slightly more of their autonomy to someone who already above them in the hierarchy.
“Honor” may start off as a legitimate code of conduct, but it’s incredibly easy to twist. It’s simple to say any given action is or is not honorable to justify any other action. The system breaks down the instant it becomes dishonorable or against the rules to question superiors, because people abuse power, and as soon as your superior decides its honorable for you to give him half of your Hostess Snowball (as some sort of “tribute” I guess) then your Honorgarchy is basically doomed.
Klingons are supposedly big into honor, but it’s been established that they’ll shoot up a ship, then cloak and lay in wait for someone to come along to try and rescue any crew, because “There is nothing more honorable than victory.” Well, as soon as something like that is established, then you may as well not even pretend to have honor. Irradiating a population to sterilize them means you’ll eventually achieve victory over them, as would poisoning their food supply, or stealing their atmosphere or inventing a King’s Man style “rabies beam” so they all just kill each other.
I’m not suggesting there’s no value in the concept of honor. I just can’t think of an example in any fiction I’ve consumed, from James Clavell’s Shogun to Klingons to the Nordar in Star Justice where it wasn’t a very fluid target and wildly abused or flat out ignored by those with power.
If you missed the kickstarter for Tamer 7, the e-book is available for purchase.
The new vote incentive is up! I tried something different this month – instead of doing one well painted picture with a bunch of dress variants, I wanted to tell a bit of a story. Hopefully it makes sense without any dialog or sound effects. So, instead of one picture, you guys are getting nine. Well, you are over at Patreon. The vote incentive is just the first one. And yes, Pixel is bendy enough to do a full on T&A pose.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
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SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
So is the mask part of her face, or did she just decide to keep that one part of her mercenary outfit when she changed into civvies?
Or it could be cultural reason. “Never reveal one’s face in the company of others” or something like that
This is the way …
Like when Orko and his girlfriend revealed their faces to each other?
Did that mean that they’re engaged?
Could be like she has naturally super high night vision and needs the mask to filter out in normal lighting conditions?
This strikes me as the most likely. It may also be a medical necessity, like Geordi’s VISOR was.
Or the mask gives + to her stats, and as such she has no reason to remove it.
the simplest explanation i can think of is…that part of her face is wildly non human. and before you list off the blue skin and horns. both of those can be achieved with makeup and special effects, and routinely are. the t-shirt just adds to the effect. also, second simple explanation. her visual range may be shifted one way or another enough to make interacting difficult. (think color blindness type problems only worse) the mask/visor is more compact than anything Dues will admit to being capable of making to address that- so it easier to leave the mask in place.
I was thinking along those lines. Maybe humans would find her face scary or gross.
Or maybe she is so beautiful that consumption of food is backward?
there is also another vision problem. Not all eyes work the same, different ranges of color detection and light sensitivity. Its possible while the Earth’s sunlight doesn’t adversely affect her skin it may hurt her eyes. Such as too much UV radiation, too much X-ray, or simply too bright and her species evolved in much dimmer conditions. Maybe even had adjustable settings to filter out certain wavelengths so she can see better.
in short: super fancy required sun glasses
Has no one yet thought that perhaps the “mask” is the natural coloration of her face, much like a raccoon has a “mask?” After all, it matches the color of her horns too. The green spots may not be lenses in her mask either…Could be just the way her eyes ARE. The shape of her “mask” might also be the natural shape of her forehead for all we really know for certain.
Granted, it still looks like a mask that is being worn, but…ya’ never really know when you include the existence of aliens.
I thought for a moment maybe she was another one of those transferable flame demon people like Torchy from the previous arc, but there’s no floating flame entity on her.
That is literally the first thing the OP asked.
There’s all kinds of hentai opportunities here. Alas, it’s not that kind of comic.
https://s23209.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Easy-Thai-Chicken.jpg
hen Thai opportunity taken
Is that to infer that you’ve turned chicken?
Or that you’re being hen-pecked in life?
Oh well, “birds of a feather” & all that.
Since when? This webic has a Dabbler
That and DaveB actively draws porn of his characters.
And tentacle monsters, sexy aliens, furries etc…
and that idol of unspeakable… cuddles
Probably got its start as, “I have just defeated you, now you must serve me or I’ll just finish you off.” Then moved on to defeated people hoping to get that deal instead of being finished off.
But, who knows. Maybe “your shadow” means she has to follow him around obsessively until she sees an opportunity to kill him to redeem her honor. Some clarification might be in order.
Anyway, maybe he can get some alien ninja martial arts training out of this?
That 2nd paragraph is merely what I thought of.
The shadows we already have do nothing. Well, nothing helpful I can think of.
Ewtch. The 2nd paragraph in your upper comment. (Nice start for a day >_<)
Historically… it was a thing in medieval legends, where knights might elect to serve someone who defeats them in honorable combat (usually for a set period of time, like 100 days or a year or whatnot), most likely coming from the early establishment of kingdoms, as in the mentioned “I defeated you in battle, now be my loyal subject (or die)” style of conquest where one tribal chieftan clawed their way to “king” status over the neighboring tribes…
…but even that medieval myth may likely be derived from ancient greece, where sometimes (during the early days at least by all accord) wars between city-states were actually decided by single combat of champions, with the loosing side submitting to the winning champions side… (at least until the next time)
…while in actual history, it was profitable for people to keep loosing knights alive, since they were usually ransomable nobles, but… a simple payoff doth not for good storytelling make.
And of course in martial arts stories the “You defeated me, so I want to learn from you until I improve enough to defeat you in turn” trope is rather common…
…while the “You defeated me yet spared my life, now I need to stick around until I can repay the favor by saving your life” seems to be part of many a fictional warriors code (and wouldn’t that be a difficult thing to settle with Achilles whose life is -never EVER- in danger?)
And yes, some clarification would indeed be a good thing. But while I expect that may come in the course of the story, it -would- make sense if some archon paper-pusher made her explain it in detail “for our records” (its strange in how many tales people forget to ask for explainations to set up for a later reveal…)
There is also the fact that Honor and courtesy share the same root cause.
If it is legal to go out and slaughter anyone you want, any time you want, then your society cannot function. Hence why so many Americans these days seem to think such would be a good thing. Or at least so many who get the press. They have never lived in a true anarchy. I have.
Even the Vikings didn’t slaughter everyone they met. The Ottomans didn’t. Ghengis Khan didn’t. Yes, they all killed lots of people, but they didn’t kill EVERYONE. It eventually comes to the point where it is just not worth the time it takes to pillage and burn.
Honor has been used and abused throughout human history. It is a concept that is alien to many because it says ‘You can’t do that.’ and for many, they don’t want to be told such things. They want to do whatever the hell they want. But there NEED to be limits to such or all you get is a bloodbath.
Personally? I follow a fairly strict code of honor. One that I made for myself. I needed the control in my life. There have been MANY people in my life I would have LOVED to have taken a sword to. Some of them even deserved it. But, it wouldn’t have been honorable. So, they live and I live.
Is that right? Is that wrong? I don’t know. But I CAN sleep at night.
‘Honour’ (especially when it’s being abused by the other person) is usually dictated by the one whose ‘honour’ needs to be appeased (usually the loser)
IE “You can’t kick me when i’m down?” “Why not?” “Because you beat me!” “Weren’t you the one who attacked me first? Unannounced? While I was on the toilet?” “So? Honour dictates you have to give me a second chance.”
If it’s abused, it’s not Honor.
It’s being an asshole.
Indeed.
By definition, if you abuse honor, then you are not honorable and may be dealt with accordingly.
One of the BEST historical definitions I have found is seen here-
le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Terrail,_seigneur_de_Bayard
He was the epitome of a knight for his time. He was honorable, but not stupid about it. He was loyal even when others were not loyal to him.
One thing that many seem to forget is that knights (or their equivalents in other cultures) had the TIME and TRAINING to BE honorable. Not everyone had those luxuries. They WERE luxuries for much of human history. Only nobles could afford to be knights, but not all nobles felt that they had to act ‘noble’. That rarely ended well.
So yeah, act dishonorably, and no one need treat you with honor.
In some systems, knights were under nobles in their hierarchy. In this case nobles would often subscribe to a system known as “noblesse oblige.” It wasn’t really official in the sense that the royalty would decree “you must be honorable” (though it was implied) but moreso expected under penalty of being ganged up on by other noble houses and the royalty.
A decrepit noble territory was a serious risk to the continued existence of nearby nobles and even the whole of the nation, so the upper echelons had a vested interest in keeping their honor intact. After all, if one region decayed, it was possible for bandit groups to form – and, contrary to most fiction, those groups were typically taking orders from a noble (hence why they weren’t caught.)
In wartime it was often considered “cowardly” to shoot an enemy officer in the back. However, later on, England would expand that dishonorable system of noble/bandit relationships to form the English Navy’s international piracy groups. Pirates ultimately played a crucial role in both the U.S. Revolution and Chinese Opium Wars, and in the latter case, both sides were engaged in exceptionally dishonorable deeds. Thus the beginning of the end of honor as a system of governance.
There is a technical distinction between pirates and privateers.
This is true, but that technical distinction was intentionally not visible to anyone except nations who employed them. Blending into the criminal element was the raison d’être for privateers. Some privateers would even go rogue (notably within colonial America) and thus muddy the waters further.
I wonder how accurate Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag was. Because a lot of what you’re saying reminds me of that game. And it was a great game.
Yes, of course. No dishonorable government ever existed prior to the American Revolutionary War.
You are a special sort, aren’t you?
Seriously how are you trying to start a fight with namecalling over this with the massively strawman arguments?
There’s nothing to fight about here, calm down.
You disappoint me. I had thought that you could read.
Are you now seriously trying to start a fight about my saying there’s no need to start a fight? :)
Be like Achilles, my dude. Be chill.
Also yes, it is true. I cannot read. Or write. I’m just guessing at what people are saying on this forum and I’m randomly mashing the keys in hopes that it says something. Like right now.
And now.
And now as well.
He really hates me for pointing out the flaws in his personal ramblings and for not acquiescing to his irrational rejoinders; instead flipping my stance on non-violence which was the exact opposite of what he wanted. I know my ideas are provocative but they’re also based on extensive research and contemplation… Which, he can’t accept, because “I must be wrong.” Logically, if that were correct, anyone defending me must also be wrong.
In reality, if you’re reading this Oberon, I have been in favor of limited war to take care of malicious elements for a long time. This is no different than using armed force to arrest lawless drug cartels. What you actually did was force me to admit that my own beloved nation will contain some of these malcontents within the government itself. This is technically-speaking healthy since I will no longer subconsciously revere my nation above all others.
This kind of nationalism is the root of fascism and other dangerous ideologies; you’ve helped me remove any risk I might inadvertently fall into some form of ultranationalism. For that, I thank you – although I doubt you will appreciate the praise. Still, I hope this perspective can help you understand where I am coming from and allay the anger I have generated toward myself. Or at the very least: please don’t take it out on others like Pander.
Oh, is that how you’ve internalized the results of me pointing out your utter lack of knowledge on the various topics of:
Section 230;
The Bill of Rights esp Amendment I;
The difference between the Federal government and a private or publicly held company;
Reading comprehension;
Not threatening to kill people when you have all of the above pointed out to you.
Really, you are so very, very special. A truly unique snowflake. I bet you hardly have to work at it to believe six conspiracy theories before breakfast.
I backed my claims with sources, historical analyses, and extensive treatises on logic and ethics. You, on the other hand, have repeatedly abused me. Like you’re doing here.
I’m wrong? Okay, back up your claim with anything other than name-calling.
I repeatedly mentioned the honor system being abused… I don’t even know what to say to this.
You also never mentioned that the first dishonourable government was formed during the Revolutionary War
If anyone can’t read, it’s Obewrong (or at least, he only reads what he wants to read)
Ahem. Trojan war anyone? :)
Wzaerreazw blathered on about this:
1) Both sides did dishonorable things;
2) This led to the end of honor in government;
3) This was about the same time as the American Revolution and the Chinese Opium Wars.
So when I express my contempt at your claim that honorable government always preceded those two events, don’t come crawling to me to deny that you said the things that you said.
These are your words, Wzaerreazw. It’s not my fault if you are incapable of putting together a paragraph which manages to maintain any internal consistency.
If you want to instead say that you are a lousy communicator and meant to say something else entirely, then do so.
You missed the important word (again), let’s see if you can figure it out (or just resort to your typical namecalling and bullshittery)
I have a pop tart. Do I have the only pop tart? You’re really reaching on this one.
I mean, Honor exist to establish norms that favor the nobility, justifying the forms of violence that advantage them, while demonizing the forms of violence that would put them at a back foot.
I form of honor that isn’t inherently abusable only exists in the dreams of nostalgia. Though to be fair, honor exists to fuel those dreams.
Very true. This is a big reason why the honor system was doomed from the start.
Contrariwise, it did keep nobles in line to enough of an extent that alternate methods of thought began to spread among the populace. This led to the rise of systems like parliament and free elections. Without honor, it wouldn’t have been possible for the American Revolution to gather the amount of public support that it did… Even though the nascent colonial government had no problem simultaneously wiping out the natives and shooting arrayed English troops from nearby forests.
America’s hypocrisy did cause England to see they had gone too far preaching honor, and they did adjust their methods to cope with the evolving ideological landscape.
Except that prior to the Opium Wars, China refused to stop draining England’s silver-backed economy despite all attempts at trade and appeasement, even when England offered some of its most prized scientific developments in an attempt to normalize trade relations. At this point the English Empire totally lost its cool: repeated backstabbing and mass genocide became a nearly systematic response until as recent as the 1950s. This behavior, combined with the damage inflicted upon England in WWII, was the last straw for England’s most powerful allies and colonies.
In a sense, the concept of honor and its subsequent defeat directly led to the collapse of the English Empire. So, the history of England absolutely confirms your assessment.
That implies those not of the nobility (ie, literally everyone else) has no honour
That’s…not “true anarchy,” though?
Anarchy just means “no rulers,” not “no rules,” or “chaos & pandemonium.” I mean, I’m not even an Anarchist (or even an Anarcho-Blank) and I understand that.
On what authority do Anarchists demand that everyone else follow their idiosyncratic definition of anarchy?
I see what you’re doing here.
…
As an unironic MonarchoSocialist, I’ll allow it.
Anarchy isnt an actual government that can be put into place.:)
It can only be the temporary void during the transition between governments, regardless of if they call themselves anarcho-whatever:). And voids inevitably get filled by something. Insert obligatory sexual joke or pun here.
As soon as a society grows to ANY size where they want to do anything remotely organized, a government is going to form, even if a very loose government. Anarchocapitalist, anarchocommunist, etc
All those anarcho titles are basically one-word oxymorons:)
You’ve misunderstood the term, too.
Here’s the short & sweet: aside from the damnedest of damned ideologues, even Anarachists recognize the point you’ve raised. Thus, the guiding maxim of Anarchism is “no hierarchy is inherently self-justifying, and any hierarchy must be able to demonstrate that more harm is done by its absence, than its presence.
I am so confused right now.
There’s also the historical fact that European Knights used to capture other knights and ransom them back to their families. It’s how many made their fortunes.
If they family couldn’t or wouldn’t pay then they captor had the choice of killing the captive, imprisoning them, or making them earn their freedom.
Either way, Detla is trying to earn her freedom quicker.
I wish her luck.
Achilles may or may not understand where she is coming from, but he seems smarter than people give him credit for.
Now as to how Archon will take this? We shall see.
I’m pretty sure he’s actually in his chronological 60’s, at least, meaning he’s had more experiences & time to learn than your average looks-to-be-30’ish-year-old.
Lets see. His hairdo is stuck in the 80s so…. he’s been like this for about 35 years (remember at the comic’s point of time, it’s pre-2016). Plus another 25-30 probably for his age at the time he got stuck in unaging invulnerability so…. yeah your guess checks out. :)
I have a fanfic about Achilles that nobody will ever see. <3
Is this a ‘bow chicka wow wow’ (cue saxophone music) sort of Fanfic? :)
No!
…not _entirely_. <_<‘
What? Who wouldn’t want a partner who literally never runs out of stamina?
But seriously, mostly involves a road trip, a series of small town bar fights, a missing child, and some romantic sunsets on the beach, and in the California wine country.
And together, Bharda and Achilles fight crime and find love.
Hart to Hart, with super powers, less cheese, and more wine. X’D
Better sex too, I expect, and lots of naked cooking & Classic Rock…imagine Suite Judy Blue Eyes in the background, while a pair of 30 oz bone in prime rib are grilling on a campfire, empty bottle of Merlot in the grass while happy noises are being made under the orange trees, obscured by an electric blue drop top pony car, the whole seen limned by the golden light of the setting sun over the Pacific…
Did I mention I utterly love Achilles? ^_^’
A man with a mullet, a forever 80s style, and an appreciation of food with interesting mouth feels. What’s not to love?
What’s not to love? His senses of humour and fashion :P
You wouldn’t understand.
Love of the mullet is a complex and nuanced thing.
*remembers David from the List Boys*
….nnnnnnyyyyyeeeeggghh….. ^_^’’’’’’
Even for humans that really was a thing. There was a time (actual history) that the winners in a war could do anything they wanted to the losers. You know, like “Wash my socks” or whatever.
That was normal when the winners imposed it on the losers…The losers offering servitude to the winners is more or less the opposite of that.
Her shirt is a very effective human disguise.
Sure, about half the population won’t look high enough to see the horns.
The what?
Oh I think they’ll notice the horn
Don’t argue, we’ll split the difference: I think half the population will get horny while not looking high enough to see the horns.
Bravo!
Or low enough to read the rest of the words
Trying to read the t-shirt …
As far as I can make it out it reads, “This is my human costume actually I’m an alien”.
“This is my human costume actually I’m an alien with big tits.”
But the last sentence is rarely read.
Thank you, I was having difficulty making out that last line. It is a very good way to make people think that she is just co-playing an alien.
Sheesh, ya’ll got it wrong. It reads:”This is my human costume. I’m actually an alien.” I can read the last panel easily, did it get modified since ya’ll posted?
At first I thought it might have said “This is my human. There are many like it but this one is mine.”
yes, this is what I was thinking.
Some people believed that if you saved/spared someone, you were responsible for all their actions after they were supposed to have died including any evil. At least that was the motive for Tonto following the Lone Ranger around.
That’s what used to be called a “Chinese obligation” before PC.
But, per the original backstory, the Ranger had saved Tonto’s life when they were both kids, and Tonto had later saved the Ranger’s life as an adult, so they were just lifelong friends who owed each other their lives. And fortunately had a similar concept of justice, so they got along well.
Then there’s the inverse – if you kill someone, you have to do their job and support their family.
What if you’re both assassins? Do you assume both their contracts and all their past victims’ jobs? (ಠ.ಠ)
There’s a bad ass anime in here.
I would definitely give that a watch. :)
Love the shirt text. :p
Archon gift shop – for all your interplanetary ‘human’ fashion needs.
… Where’s all her stuff? I can see them impounding the blade, but those clothes don’t look like they’re from her neck of the neighborhood.
Well her sword appeared to be collapsable. So she may still have it on her person.
I expect that any (recognizable) weapons have been confiscated and will only be returned when she is about to leave the planet. The other option would be to return them to her after she submits to a trial and penalty (service or incarceration). When that is done, she gets her stuff back.
Plus, the fact several side-members of Archon witnessed said sword: she ain’t going no where without revealing that sword and having it entered into the system (plus, if she could hide one sword, what else is she hiding? time for the full cavity search! to the tentacle closet!!)
Ah, so that is where Trent is hiding.
Thank you, couldn’t remember his name :(
We’ll see about that. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone could take away her sword, given its ability to independently break apart and reform. However, given that she’s dressed in civilian clothes and able to freely walk around and come right up to Archon, she has probably accepted local authority and given her word bond to play nice.
I think the only version of “honor” in fiction that I haven’t found significant fault with is the version from the Quest for Glory video game series, which basically boils down to “do good.” Do the morally right thing in every situation. Yes, in a real world rather than a game it becomes much harder at times to always know what the right thing is, but within its own setting it is probably the best form of honor that I have seen.
Codes of honor vary wildly from person to person and then from culture to culture.
The Spartans had honor as long as you were a Spartan. Anyone else, they didn’t have to act that way to.
Samurai had honor, but again, it varied wildly. What many people do not realize about them was that duty was often more important. If their master told them, ‘Go do something dishonorable’, many did. For many of them., honor was served by following orders without question.
Some European knights had honor, but only when dealing with their social peers or superiors. Anyone else? They could do a they wished.
I am a WWII historian by trade and I found a lot of instances where combatants acted with honor at odd places and times. It just ‘felt right’ to them to act in such a away at such a time and was rarely repeated because their superiors would not appreciate such things.
Video games are not real, but sometimes, they get a few things about human nature right. :)
I recall one WWII story about allied troops hunkered down in an armed camp having Christmas dinner – a rare respite from the fight. The Axis forces nearest them had also taken a break for Christmas, so fighting was effectively on pause.
The allied troops had more than they could eat, so on impulse they gifted it to the Axis troops across the way – after a risky negotiation that apparently opened by sneaking up on the camp and flinging cooked turkey legs to the confused German troops, mainly as a way to notify them that this was not what would conventionally be called an attack.
In some versions of the story there is a reciprocal gift of some luxury item – chocolate or cigarettes – that the Allied troopers found themselves short of.
But the following day they went right back to killing each other.
Yeah, that happened.
If you want another view of honor, check out the Sabaton song ‘No Bullets Fly.’
Honor is only dead if we let it be.
Examples of this ‘mutual exchange” is much more common than most people realize. There’s lots of places that are hotly contested but on a very few of these, any interaction that’s directly ON the place is more with restraint & respect…much like a “friendly rivalry.”
Some other places are not handled with restraint…
https://www.businessinsider.in/defense/the-18-most-hotly-contested-islands-in-the-world/slidelist/47061436.cms
That first one seems to be just a way for the sailors of each nation to sample the alcohol of the other:
Canadian sailor: “Ear now, I’ll be picking up this vile bottle of akvavit to unclaim the isle for the Skandies, and leaving’ behind this fine bottle of Canadian Club to claim it for Canada!”
– one week later –
Skandinavian sailor: “Oy, the Candians have kipped off with our akvavit, and littered the isle with their vile Canadian Club. I’d best be picking it up so as no one trips over it by mistake.”
Having tried both, I’ll be avoiding that island in any travels I may make.
There was also the Christmas Truces in World War I in 1914, that sounds similar to (and possibly inspired by) these events.
Yeah, and the following year, after the Brass on both sides found out about it, wanted to ‘stage’ another football match, but both sides knew that the either side planned to open fire the moment they popped up, so it was a mutual trap-stalemate
Technically true but not entirely factual.
The fact was, that when the Christmas Truces (Several places) happened, all of the brass went completely ape! It was a mutiny. The soldiers at the front were not obeying orders.
So, the second day the generals on each side, in three different places that I know of, ordered officers they could trust to shoot people as soon as anyone climbed out of the trenches. Bang, the war was back on.
The next year? No one dared to try it again. Their own officers had REPEATEDLY stated they would shoot anyone who even looked as if they would disobey orders. AND they passed the word that it was all a trap, so everyone assumed it was. A full year of hell in the trenches cut down on any level of trust too.
I don’t think it made the history books that officers on both sides shot unarmed men to get the war back on, but then again, why would it? It was, after all, a mutiny.
I think Miles vorKosigan has been mentioned before in comments for this comic… He has an excellent take on honour (you have to read a lot of books to get there but that’s a bonus not a price)
its actually his father’s.
‘Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.’
and i will leave these two because one might have been an accident. the other was most defiantly deliberate.
‘The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.’
and…
‘A Caligula, or a Yuri Vorbarra, can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.’
both are from a book published in 1986.
That is ABSOLUTELY the BEST take on modern honor I have ever read. Bjold was a genus or just really good at summing things up.
Humans are human. We make mistakes. We act selfishly and in many cases short sighted and stupidly in the name of whatever emotion is gripping us at the moment.
But…
If we have a code. AN ethical guideline to follow, many of us tend NOT to make the same mistakes over and over again. (Unless we are a government or government employee, but I digress)
“The Butcher of Komarr’ was a title that was not deserved, but Aral made it his own and used it. Not always in the best way, but always TRYING to do what he thought was right.
Then again… Cordelia cut right through all the BS and showed why straitlaced idiots using honor to try and garner power should not underestimate the women. She too had honor. They tried to use it against her and her husband. In a word’ ‘Oops’.
Pssst – Lois McMaster Bujold is still very much alive, writing, and publishing. So no “was” in the “genius” bit. A very interesting author, with some deep insights, I agree.
My bad, I HATE spellcheck.
THOUGHT I Wrote ‘is’
But yes, those books stand up today. So much so that the Order I belong to has ‘The Vorkorsigan Saga’ as required reading for anyone who wishes to advance. GOOD books. The Curse of Chalion was a very good take on honor too.
one of the great tragedies is that there has not been a movie clip of Cordelia’s shopping trip…
paraphrased below:
‘i went shopping!’
‘that is traditional’
‘wanna see what i got?’
a particularly gruesome reveal
‘I spent too much’
‘that too is traditional’
*cue all the hardbitten tough as nails warrior types wetting themselves!*
“If you gentlemen will excuse me, I think I need to have some words with my wife.’
‘BRAVE man…’
You’re omitting the most interesting part. How afterwards, everyone treats Cordelia with wary caution, and she thinks they’re afraid she’ll lash out violently at them. Then she realizes they’re treating her with RESPECT… and she has a total meltdown and her husband has to calm her down.
“All of Kareen’s silent courage meant nothing! Alys’ bloody effort and labor were taken for granted! But cut someone’s head off and you were SOMEBODY, dammit…!”
Most people wouldn’t think that was as powerful as the scene where she showed what she had ‘bought’. Which is dumb.
Cordelia was ad is a very complex character and that was shown even better in later books. That said? DO NOT tick her off. The first book I read ‘Shards of Honor’ had her more like James Kirk in the Original Series of Star Trek than some high born noble who was afraid to get her hands dirty. Smart, capable, kind when she could be and utterly ruthless when needed. Flawed and oh so human.
That is one swanky pad, I knew the supers are well compensated, but a 10-ish story high rise with swimming pool, at least 2 helicopter landing pads and personal guard? that’s a 100 million easily just for a house.
Now, I’m not saying that a completely indestructible soldier wouldn’t be worth that much, but it does elevate Archon people out of the “normal people” range and into the 1%-er stratophere.
Kind of puts a dent into “relatability” if you contemplate that Maxima, for instance, would not just be “you, but super-powered” but “billionaire with no mortal struggles. Also, super strong, smart, can fly and will be forever effortlessly beautiful”
Or, wait, is that the Archon headquarters?
I might have misinterpreted the first panel… makes more sense for it to be HQ.
Mea Culpa
It is. I’d guess after all the shenanigans that happened in New York, it was probably better to bring everyone they could down to DFW and get things sorted.
But they all have private quarters on-site, so in many ways it’s just a free swanky pad with roommates.
Some appropriations committee member someplace is probably still having ulcers about it, but a shiny clubhouse is probably a fairly effective way to keep the entire team on site and on call while minimizing net security costs. A lot like the Silicon Valley companies provide free on-site chefs, day care, and massages to keep their employees at the office putting in longer hours.
Yes, it’s Archon HQ. You can tell from the first panel.
I think Achilles could probably afford it as he have been a invulnerable super since the eighties.
Even working a pretty average job, if you could afford to invest 100% of your earnings, because you didn’t actually have any survival needs, you could make a lot of money very quickly.
I like how the cast page describes Achilles’ outside jobs.
“He’s often off site doing something insanely dangerous – movie stunts, deep sea welding, collecting samples from an active volcano, but he prefers hanging out with the team, citing “You can only drive a car off a plane into an ammo dump so many times before it gets boring.” ”
That really does describe the character in a nutshell.
Wow it seems that Achilles is really up and his psychological warfare game
What? Confuse the hael out of them if squicking the hael out of them by deflecting a sword thrust with your eyeball doesn’t work?
Yeah that’s one way to put it. Mostly he has her questioning what is and is not real and his culture and making it seem like effort to uphold her honor is simply a matter of course even though he said that it’s common in fiction not in the actual culture of his people. It’s like those people that can tell you the truth and at the same time you learned absolutely nothing.
It’s reasonable to assume the man is in his sixties, which means he has plenty of experience. Even if we assume (not unreasonably) that he is largely “stuck” in a mid 80’s psychology/frame of reference, he is going to be able to recognize certain patterns very easily, and have learned how to work those patterns to achieve various results.
Not being a product of modern culturally engendered ADD/ADHD, he has what most Americans today would view as a terrible & frightening amount of patience. He runs the risk of being perpetually bored, but should be more-or-less unflappable.
I actually posted a fair bit about Achilles back during the brawl in Times Square. I think he is, very much, the teams CMHB.
What does CMHB mean?
Im assuming the C stands for Confuse based on context of the thread?
Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass.
OSP: https://youtu.be/xyp2-Ol6MD8
Well he have been superheroing since the eighties so he is probably very genre savvy.
Either that or his invulnerability would make it so that even though he knows the tropes he won’t recognize when he’s in the middle of one.
I really loathe the “consuming media” terminology. What do you do, cook booksoup then eat it? DVD fricassee? Movie stew? Theatre paté? It just doesn’t work. Just like overstretching “intellecutal property” doesn’t work, or talking about “products”, like “financial products”, when they really are services, or worse, vague promises of possible service delivery in the future, maybe. Anyway.
These “media” you “consumed” are all well outside the time that honour was an actual thing. We have changed from a honour-based culture to a dignity-based one. (And are currently transitioning to a victimhood-based one, according to some scholars.) Those cultural depictions of honour are by people who themselves didn’t really understand it, like Hollywood really doesn’t understand gravity or computers or much of anything else. So if that’s your yardstick, some confusion is to be expected.
In the Chanur series (C.J. Cherryh), there’s one alien species who have the concept of sfik.
It’s not honour. It’s very, very much not honour. It’s more like… chutzpah, perhaps? But it fulfills the same role in their society, and it actually seems to do so in a fairly stable fashion.
…sure, part of the reason for that is that a fundamental tenet of their society is that he who has the most sfik gets to make the rules (and, incidentally, to kill anyone who looks like they might end up with more sfik – it’s a cutthroat society, often literally)
I love Cherryh. Her aliens are not just humans with bumpy noses. She has everything from very-close-to-human-but-don’t-pretend-that-words-have-direct-equivalents to creatures with five brains that communicate with 5×5 matrixes of single words and no one has a clue what they really mean.
To lizards that communicate by building mandalas out of stones.
Achilles is showing surprising literary insight here.
On the honor, I’m trying to remember a planet of mercenaries big on honor, began with “Mor” I think. One of these men is told at one point that his will is so strong that if he took it upon himself to walk on air it would be possible. That is amongst other thing the sage he was speaking to dropped on him. As he is leaving that meeting lost in thought, he proceeds to walk across a lower area in the path at the upper height, thus doing the air walking thing unconsciously. Later in his room he does intentionally and puts a post it note on a 3.5m ceiling.
Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Cycle
I was thinking Dorsai until he talked about air walking. Never read that one.
…literally the first book.
I feel like I’m failing at being a nerd by not knowing any of these books that people keep talking about in the forum.
Me too. I hadn’t heard of this one either, but I’m 3/4 of the way through the Vorkosigan books so I’ll probably give these a shot next.
I can whole heartedly recommend both Dorsai!, and The Adventures of asthe Stainless Steel Rat.
Be advised, both were written in a less socially enlightened time, and are definitely sexist.
Oh, and Heinlein’s Number of the Beast…although, you should maybe read Methuselah’s Children, first. And I Will Fear No Evil. And the Lensman books…
Fuck.
Okay, SPOILER WARNING:
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The second & third acts of Number of the Beast rely heavily of references & content from a massive swath of other literary works.
I’ll probably check them out. I have more than enough free time on my hands since most of my work has been done from home for months now.
‘Number of the Beast’ was the book that eventually led me to stop reading novels: because those weren’t just characters in a book, they were real people, in a different reality, not being able to help them when ‘bad things’ happened to them just made me angry
What made them “real,” as opposed to any other figure in any other narrative?
You have read the book, correct?
The point was, that was when the realisation came to me, it wasn’t like an instant stop, but it was a major factor in the eventual end to reading for entertainment (use to read about three or four novels a month, sometimes more)
Also some movies or TV shows (or just certain episodes) won’t watch either because of what happens makes me too angry to enjoy
I am not you.
My experience of the thing is not the same as yours, because my experience of life hasn’t been the same as yours. So, I asked. If you can’t express it, that’s fine, just say so.
As for myself, yes, I read it. I was 10 or 11, I think. I’d worked my way through most of mom’s other books on that shelf. I Will Fear No Evil in particular stuck with me, surprise surprise.
Honor is a concept that is easy to say and very hard to define because people are a people.
There is often no honor in war. There is only survival. That said? There have been times throughout history where good people decided to good things despite there being a war on.
Honor can be taken too far, just like any other human thing, but without some framework of ethical behavior, things get very bad, very fast. The Klingons started in the Original Series of Star Trek as ‘the bad guys’. That was all they were, but even then, you could see they had a framework of some kind. They were not mindlessly killing each other every time you saw them. (And yes, that could and did happen through some of the bad parts of human history) It was a shock to many where they saw Michael Dorn play Worf in the Next Generation because Klingons had just been the bad guys and now? They were not. Or not entirely. (Some of them still were!)
Honor can be a good thing or a bad thing. It all depends on the who you are talking to.
Biggest shock about seeing Worf for the first time was: “What the fuck is that on his forehead!?”
Pretty much. :))
Then I remembered the Klingons from the Motion Picture and went ‘Whaaaaaa? Aren’t they the BAD GUYS?’
Which was the whole point.
There absolutely is honor in war. US soldiers and military vehicles may use camoflage, but they still wear uniforms. While hard to see, they still identify themselves as US forces, and ‘False Flags’ are still considered morally reprehensible. Most armies have pared down, or abandoned entirely, the use of land mines, biological and chemical weapons. The very idea of ‘War Crimes’ implies a code of laws beyond simple survival, and the desire to be held accountable to those rules, and while many may claim that these rules are violated out of ‘convenience’, they overlook the considerable degree that modern militaries constraint and restrict their soldier’s actions to uphold those very laws.
Those who believe war lacks all honor or humanity have a very narrow view as to the depths humanity can sink to.
Most official standing armies around the world have uniforms, with name tags and shit, even the most seemingly-corrupt dictatorships have them
They may (or may not) be a dictator, but they still want to be viewed as a legitimate ruler by other nations
Can confirm.
Moreover, every military force on Earth has the capacity for supposedly “dishonorable” warfare. They may not advertise it, they may even publicly denounce such, but trust me when I say that “honorable war” goes out the window when an existential threat emerges.
Which is why the US has (that I know of) the worlds largest stockpile of land mines. And chemical weapons. And many, many labs that can produce biological weapons at the drop of a hat.
All the tak about “just war,” is a smokescreen to legitimize power, and nothing more.
If you don’t believe me, consider the US invasion of Cambodia, and Operation Rolling Thunder.
You can look at it that way, or you can look at it another way: any threat to peace needs to be put down as quickly and efficiently, with the minimum number of casualties to your own people, as possible
Personally don’t give a shit about whether you believe the US likes to throw its weight around, or how quick they are to start with the shooting and bombing, but they don’t start shit, they sure as hael end it as quickly as they can, and in a way to ensure it doesn’t start back up again
Vietnam, Grenada, Mexico, Spanish Cuba, Iraq II…
How long a list of “starting shit” do you want?
And before it comes up, yes, I’m a Veteran.
Iraq II? Was that as a result of the gassing of the Northern Turds? Or the invasion of Kuwait?
Surprised you didn’t bring up Korea, or Somalia, or were those part of the ‘long list of bullshit’ you didn’t want to mention?
Iraq I (also called the Gulf War) resulted from the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait…after Kuwait started to engage in drilling techniques that were siphoning oil from Iraqi fields. But, that’s a complicated, messy thing, while AMERICA FUCK YEAH is simple & exciting & fun…and in the 90’s our leaders were (still) smarting from their defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese, so, yeah, we just had to go fuck up somebody to salve our ego.
Iraq II was invasion of Iraq in ‘03, engineered by Bush II & Rumsfeld, on the demonstrably false pretext of seeking out WMD’s.
The Halabja chemical on the Kurds (not ‘Turds’) occurred in ‘88, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which the US viewed favorably, as it was a drain on Iranian power in the region, and so we (for some reason totally not tied to Iran denying us control of their oil in previous decades) didn’t feel the lives of the Kurds worth intervening over. Also worth noting, Hussein was, up until the war in Kuwait, a prominent US ally in the region. We’re the ones who helped him take over Iraq.
Korea began as a valid mission, but was delegitimized when the US crossed the 38th. Not surprising that it happened, of course, as Truman was taking his orders from Wall Street, and “fighting those dirty commies,” was all the country was allowed to talk about.
In refering to Somalia, I will also address the vast majority of US military operations since the end of WWII: we are responsible for creating almost every single real crisis we have then responded to militarily. We have a track record, also, of destabilizing & overthrowing democratically governments that do not align with the interests of Wall Street, and backing inhuman dictators simply for agreeing to allow their populations to be exploited by our economy.
We use our ludicrous military power to enforce our economic imperialism. This practice requires us to constantly find new enemies. The Russians. The Vietnamese. The Cubans. The Iranians. The Iraqis. The entire god damn Muslim world…and now the Chinese. Oops, forgot the Venezuelans.
It never fucking ends. I’m going to be 43 this year, and I cannot recall a period in my life when this country hasn’t been pursuing some military action someplace. I was a military brat; I was raised paying attention to these things. I can remember the anxiety I felt every day when both my father & stepfather were deployed in the Gulf for Iraq I.
And then I enlisted in ‘97, so you can picture what my career looked like, post 9/11.
There’s no escape in blaming men like bin Laden or Hussein, either. We created them. We are responsible for all of our own “enemies.”
We are constantly inserting ourselves into other countries, and why? Money. Because some already unfathomably rich ghoul has decided that they are entitled to the resources of another nation…and so the US Government suddenly discovers a new threat, a new dictator, a new terror cell, a new…something, anything, to legitimize invading, entrenching, and overriding the local people. Then, weirdly, somehow, this winds up being enormously profitable for someone on Wall Street.
Back up a few centuries to European feudal wars, and it wasn’t unknown for nobles in a defeated army to be released on the condition that they (and by extension, those under them) swear not to take up arms against the victor. And that’s on top of the various conquest-by-force-of-arms scenarios, where the existing lords (or their successors) would swear allegiance to their conqueror – a change at the top of the hierarchy, leaving much of the lower levels structurally intact.
Both of those cases would depend on the circumstances. Parole instead of hostage-taking would generally be in cases where the victor was campaigning well outside their territory, and couldn’t spare the manpower to hold hostages for ransom. And the extent to which an existing hierarchy was recapitated rather than replaced would depend on many things – strength of the conqueror’s claim compared to any other claimants, extent and/or difficulty of the territory that might require experienced management, how many promises of land the conqueror made to get his own nobles on side that would have to be honoured…
Those are of course examples dealing with Nobles in time of war, when the compulsion for the Lord to serve or stay neutral could have strategic effect via their lands and levies. I’m not aware of cases of individuals doing likewise on purely their own account, and it sounds far less likely – an individual without retinue simply isn’t a big enough prize to be worth the hassle.
“This is my human costume. I’m actually an alien.”
I love this.
I think I want to print one up that says ” I am cosplaying as this particular t-shirt”
I haveca Halloween costume that just is a shirt that says “This is my Halloween costume of a cheapskate who did not want to buy a costume.”
I wrote it on a T-shirt with a permanent marker.
Then I found that shirts were sold like that already but it would defeat the purpose of the message.:)
I think “you spared my life so I serve you” was how ancient Greeks did (some of) their slavery. Did you defeat an enemy army and NOT butcher all the survivors? Congratulations, they’re your slaves now! Sack an enemy city and not massacre the inhabitants down to the last soul? You spared them, and they serve you now!
…. yeah, it’s pretty messed up.
It should be noted there was actually a code to treat POWs made slaves that way WELL, though (at least in public.
Otherwise you’d be looked down on.
I’m not excusing Slavery mind you, but the Confederates were literally some of the worst slave owners ever BECAUSE they mistreated them as much as they did. Back in the middle ages and such, you could end up earning your freedom, or even being adopted into your owner’s family, especially if you saved their lives. And this was basically an understood thing in most societies that owned slaves (like the West Coast Salish, or the Roman empire).
Some Confederates treated their slaves as less than the dirt they shat in, not all of them
Just like some of the Union owned slaves
And the first African American regiment formed in that conflict was formed in New Orleans in 1861.
1st Louisiana Native Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Louisiana_Native_Guard_(Confederate)
Yes, they were treated about as well as any other, but they were free men, not slaves who CHOSE to fight. Then they got screwed over by state government, just as the Union regiments often were. Historical fact: They were the FIRST regiment in ANY side of that conflict to have black officers.
Funny thing, when they disbanded and some joined a Union regiment that was formed from New Orleans personnel after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Louisiana_Native_Guard_(Union)
They were treated WORSE.
Technically, there were three completely different types of slavery in the US.
What modern Americans think of is the deep South type, the hard dehumanizing labor, black workers in the fields, and usually portrayed with white overseers rather than with the black overseers that were common in reality.
In the north, slavery was close to the same status as with white bond servants, so much so that there was cross racial marriage at times.
In the middle… I’ve forgotten the details, but it was not as messed up and inhumane as the deep South. (I studied that in college in the 1980s…)
“In the north, slavery was close to the same status as with white bond servants, so much so that there was cross racial marriage at times. In the middle… I’ve forgotten the details, but it was not as messed up and inhumane as the deep South.”
Are you referring to indentured servants for one of those?
indentured servants are bond servants. The deal is they serve until they can pay off their bond. Technically that bond may be paying off money they borrowed to provide for their parents’ old age (a deal that was usually concluded with the parents without the input of the kid “borrowing” the money). Or it might be paying off a fine of some kind, or it might be something else. Some people found themselves indentured after getting drunk and losing in a card game.
The treatment of indentured servants was bad enough that, had there been two or three hundred times as many of them (making them a majority of the population) and had their children been automatically made servants on the same terms, the situation would have been comparable to the American South.
The third class Dal mentioned would probably have been apprentices. If a kid was old enough to start learning a trade (which could be anything from, say, seven to seventeen) they could be placed in an apprenticeship with a tradesman who then got to treat them as a servant and errand boy/girl around the shop. The deal was that while apprenticed, the kid would be learning the trade, and at the end of the apprenticeship the master was supposed to provide them with something of a start in the business.
Some apprentices became junior partners in the business when their apprenticeship was over. Some wound up marrying the boss’s daughter and became sons-in-law (sometimes with an eye to one day inheriting the shop….). But a whole lot of them just got “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”
In the European tradition of apprenticeship part of the deal was that the master was supposed to sponsor the kid to join the trade’s guild, but guilds being relatively powerless in America that wasn’t really operative here.
Right. That’s why I was asking if he meant indentured servants for one of those groups.
Didnt think about apprentices also. Sort of reminds me of ‘A Knights Tale’ also.
It’s not as messed up as you might think. The opportunity to treat the defeated as slaves or servants after the battle was also an incentive to not slaughter them all and an incentive not to loot the place in a way that left their families no way to survive.
Both of which are good things. Another generation, another crop of lords and masters, not much change at the level of ordinary people. The city (generally) takes its sacking, spends a few years in recovery, and continues.
TOTAL atrocities – people slaughtered down to the last child and cities demolished to the last building – were rare. That kind of thing takes actual work, ties up the troops for weeks or months, and doesn’t result in much return on investment. It didn’t happen much, and usually only either as part of a deliberate terror campaign or when somebody needed a city GONE, forever, for long-term tactical reasons.
Yeah. The Romans, the Khans, the Ottomans, the Tsars… The list goes on and on, but it was a LOT of work.
When Rome finished off Carthage, the legions salted the earth, literally, so that no crops would grow there. There are still spaces tot his day where nothing grows where once lush crops flourished. They pulled in tons of salt to spread and it darn near bankrupted the empire to do so. It took YEARS even with several Roman legions doing it.
It generally wasn’t worth it to do such total destruction because of the time it took. It cost a lot to maintain an army even in ancient times.
But when you absolutely, positively HAD to send a message, it did. The message almost always was ‘War is Hell’.
To everyone saying it, yeah, it’s better than being killed outright. But graduating from only the option of death to the option of servitude or death is still a very ugly concept… especially in the context of code of honor being invoked in the modern era, as it is here.
I suspect what she actually means is:
I’ve been paroled in to joining Archon along with a bunch of other supers from last weeks incident.
So I’ve been assigned to follow you around so that I can catch up on the training the other recruits have.
Everybody else was taken and Arianna laughed a lot when she said I’d be assigned to the Mighty Halo.
Jabberwocky is doing work release, another such arrangement would make sense. Except that Jabbs had the excuse of Kevin’s aggro aura to get off the hook with, whereas Detla was part of a planned assault and kidnapping. I can’t imagine what would justify giving her lenient terms, unless she has something extremely valuable to offer Archon that other supers can’t. Guess we’ll find out in a few days.
Her current situation might involve the Council’s alien representative, Irradon.
Heres a possible scenario that could result in this outcome for Detla.
Irradon handles the punishment since he represents the alien presence on Earth, acknowledged by the Council, the US, and now the UN even. Most go to space jail, but Irradon says something like “Her species is extremely honor bound. Her working for the mercenaries is due to that honor binding aspect of her people, not a personal choice. Based on her code of honor she would want to kill herself before being a prisoner for an honorbound contract”
Maxima (with Arianna present): “well just letting her go will not work for us, Irradon. Whatever her reasons, she took part in an attempted kidnapping of a US military officer, namely me.”
Irradon: “Oh shes not just getting off scot free. She just will be serving punishment in a way more in keeping with our us/council treaty that still gives an option other than her death. Plus beneficial to Archon as well! In fact, she suggested the punishment herself, based on her own peoples law, if you’d agree to it, Colonel Leander.”
Cut to current scene
Can someone help me with Panel 8?
Should I recognise the story thats the basis for this joke?
Pretty sure it’s made up.
It’s close to “The Spy Who Loved Me”. Or just about any James Bond movie where he captures a femme fatale, who eventually lives to the ending credits.
Speaking of Klingons, in his series of Ruminations on TNG and DS9, the Lorerunner has been drawing the distinction between what he calls “fake honor” and “real honor” – the former being what many Klingons pursue: the appearance of honour as agreed by one’s peers and superiors; the latter being what individuals like Worf actually possess and demonstrate by embodying and living up to the ideals that most Klingons merely pay lip service to.
I’ve recently been reminded of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (which is due for a remaster soon) where a significant theme is the titular Prince’s pursuit of “Honour and Glory” and how that leads to disaster and continues to cause friction throughout most of the game.
Very true.
Honor varies from person to person. (Or Klingon to Klingon) They did not all see eye to eye any more than humans do. That said, their CULTURE gave them a basis that human lack.
‘Live with honor, die with a sword in your hand’ – Go to Sto-Vo-Kor, Klingon Valhalla
‘Be a lying cheating piece of trash?’ Go to Grethor, damnation and eternal pain.
Not that strange compared to some human religions.
It’s not even false and real honor… it’s what Chuck Sonnenberg (of STDebris.com) calls horizontal and vertical honor. Horizontal honor is external honor as compared to your peers, and can best be thought of as social conformity. Do what society has deemed honorable. Klingon society deems that victory and conquest are honorable, so Klingon honor is about victory and conquest. Vertical honor is internal honor that only you can define, and basically amounts to “always try to do he right thing”. It’s a ladder you climb, not a sea you navigate. It’s also a lot harder to quantify to those who aren’t you. What is “the right thing”? Seems objective enough, until you get to literally any social dilemma we have. Those in the trans debate, for example, believe they are Right. Both sides, even though that can’t be true. And millions agree with each side, and they all think the other side is Wrong. Even you, person who is reading this.
SFDebris.com, not STDebris. I hate when I spot an error *right* as I hit send.
Yups: basically two kinds of honour: personal and societal, sometimes they mesh well, other times they clash leaving the individual a real tough choice (or not, depending on their personal system) and it can go either way: do what society expects (dictates), or do what ‘feels right’ (and be ostracized and alienated)
Societal Honour is in a constant stat of flux, Personal tends to be more rigid and defined and not so easily altered
And ‘honour’ isn’t always ‘good’, specially societal honour
is her deal with this whole shadow thing going to be more like you defeated me and since you didn’t kill me and now I must be your intern until certain conditions are fulfilled (like an amount of time, or until they die, or until they can defeat the one who beat them?)
What ever it is, it’s something she has decided upon: she knows the details, and she decides when (or if) it ends
Who is this guy she going to? I don’t recognize him.
Nevermind, i saw his name. :S
Playing 50/50 here.
Either A – she is making it up and would rather be with superheroes since her ship is gone and does not want regular police, space police, or some new group that is annoyed at her for what she did yesterday coming after her and thinks that if humanity doesn’t know she is making it up then they can’t call her out.
Possibility B – She is telling the truth and doesn’t want to go back home saying “oh I went to a backwater world and lost horrible with nothing to return from it even when I brought a highly skilled team to back me up”…
So finding out they know something akin to it, but only used in fiction probably threw her for a loop… Especially since she has no idea how seriously they will take it or what they think she is saying.
I mentioned another possibility in response to something brichins said btw.
Can’t help it. I always find myself pronouncing Achilles the French way; ah-Sheel.
Or Ak’-ah-leez lol
I’m just reminded from a line from The Fifth Element whenever honour comes up:
‘I don’t like Warriors. Too narrow-minded, no subtlety and worse, they fight for hopeless causes. Honour, huh. Honour’s killed millions of people, hasn’t saved a single one.’
Whevere I read the phrase “Foolish Human” I always hear it said by a Ferengi
>”I’m not suggesting there’s no value in the concept of honor.”
Why not? It’s right there with nationalism and religious sectarianism, and basically used by both to excuse atrocities. There is no actual positive value in it, what is ascribed to “honor” as a positive thing is actually empathy and humanitarian thinking. Not based upon some bullshit notion of higher state of being – “honor” comes from caste systems and purity cultures, and since Europe managed to dominate the world in it’s name, it’s still as bullshit as colonialism and imperialism are.
Also, best regards from a cathofascist shithole, where honor is used to justify everything, from racist and homophobic hatemongering to defence of child abuse.
“Irradiating a population to sterilize them means you’ll eventually achieve victory over them, as would poisoning their food supply, …”
I’m put in mind of the Igraen/V’Straki wars, where the V’Straki poisoned the Igraen staple crops on all their worlds, leading the Igraen to bombard the V’Straki home planet (Earth) with asteroids, thus destroying the females of the species.
Honour is a very disposable ethic if there’s no goodwill present.
In Babylon 5 the Centauri attack and decimate the Narn homeworld using mass drivers. The use of mass drivers was considered very dishonorable by the other races.
Speaking of B5, it seems the G’Kar had a very high sense of honor, IMHO.
If he hadn’t?
Things might have turned out VERY different. Yes, he did and it cost him.
G’Kar had some awesome lines. Especially in Legend of the Rangers.
Espcially this one:
G’Kar: “We live for the One, we die for the One. All that. Interesting that you place all your emphasis on the SECOND half of that sentence. Is it not just as honorable to live for the One… as it is to die? Doesn’t just say ‘we die.’ It says ‘we LIVE.’ Dying…. is not honorable. It only relieves you of an even greater … obligation.”
Mimbari Judge: “His actions have led other rangers into dissention!”
G’Kar: “Indeed! They put their lives and their careers at risk for his sake. I’ve met very few who can foster that kind of loyalty. One in particular comes to mind… Stubborn, difficult, fractious, annoying, independent, and… willful!”
Minbari Judge: “And what happened to him?”
G’Kar: “Oh. He became the President of this Alliance. Of which the An’la’shok…. is a part. In fact I just spoke with him a few moments ago. Would you all like to hear what we discussed?”
—-
David Martel: “What did you tell them?”
G’Kar: “Four true things.”
David Martell: “That’s all?”
G’Kar: “You try finding one true thing in this economy.”
——-
And of course:
G’Kar: “Minister Kafta, this ship is being held together by little pieces of wire and good intentions. If we land in this condition, assuming we do not have an unpleasant encounter with the ground on the way down, I doubt very much they could take off again. They would be trapped with us, and the ship looking for them would find it, find them, find us, find you, a brilliant cascade of cause and effect. Isn’t the universe an amazing place? I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
Ranger: “Citizen G’Kar, Captain Martel would like to speak to you.”
G’Kar: “Of course. LOVE to say, can’t, have to go, kiss-kiss, love-love, bye!”
I just want to re-mention part of the first G’kar quote because it can really fit in well with Detla’s mindset.
“Dying…. is not honorable. It only relieves you of an even greater … obligation.”
Answer to the last panel: request an adult (one that is not Dabbles :P )
There WAS that Star Trek episode where a Klingon spy was altered to look human and tried to send a shipment of poisoned grain to the federation or something…and the only reason it didn’t happen was the cute fluffy space rats got into the grain and died after eating a metric crap ton of it.
Trouble with Tribbles.
And they never went into more detail in that episode as to why that grain shipment was such a big deal.
Several books went into more detail, but some of those flatly contradict each other.
Gist of it was, he was a covert intelligence operative, not a spy. Spies just spy on things, Operative do such as poison grain shipments intended for farming colonies. Honor gets in the way of getting the job done in such cases. No matter what he was, he NOT a warrior, so even the Klingon captain wanted NOTHING to do with him when he was exposed. Part of that was the fact that the captain likely had no knowledge of the operation but also? Intelligence Operatives are NO ONE’S friends. Not even their own side.
That is shown in several TNG and DS9 Episodes where such people show up and bad things generally happen. Honor is useless to such being sunless they can use it to further their missions, hence why Worf killed a couple of them.
The fact the female soldier appears to be blushing in panel two, and refusing to look at Les, was more than three-quarters expecting him to have been swimming naked, in sulphuric acid
Can’t wait to hear HER meaning of “shadow.” Its likely not what we think.
She may be here offering something like ‘military service and/or personal bodyguard duty in exchange for the chance to observe the victors’ way of life and training regime.’ I can see that as a plausible tenet for some martial order that she may belong to.
Doesn’t work without the cooperation of the victors of course – but Achilles is a canny choice there. He doesn’t have trust issues because he has nothing to fear. Of course he also has no need for a bodyguard because he has nothing to fear, so it’s basically down to his whim.
True klingons are all about that honor.
so if you do not have honor. you are free game.
hence if someone can do what ever they want with you, and you are unable to do anything about it. Tough luck.
But if you someone make such a fight and show of strength back that the Klingons are stumped. Then you are honorable.
Must be a constant hassle for the klingons to keep track of all their honorable things.
The thing is, Klingons are not monolithic any more than humans are. Yes, their culture is about honor, but it is means different things to each of them.
Case in point- House Duras. They were the villains of several episodes of The Next Generation and hte not so great movie ‘Generations’. They did things that no one can claim were honorable. Hell, Duras killed Worf’s mate and not in battle. The reason? His family had a history of being SCREWED by humans. Love it or hate it, Enterprise gave a fairly good reason for why House Duras refused to trust humans or anyone who gave them the time of day. For good reason. Humans attacked them, hurt them and killed many of their people. Not always openly either.
WHAT House Duras did was dishonorable, true. WHY they did it? *shrug* Harder.
That is one reason warriors do not generally go into politics unless they get too old to fight or get forced into it somehow. In battle, it easy, kill of be killed. In debate? Not so much.
Honor is just a tool to manipulate a fighting class.
So is law.
So is politics.
So is religion.
Your point?
Achilles’ life will be forever altered that day and now,how is he going to explain about Delta to his folks?
Love the t-shirt.
“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. There is no more hollow feeling than to standing wrapped in glowing public adulation with your honor shattered at your feet. The other way around is merely very irritating. ”
– Aral Vorkosigan in Lois McMaster Bujold’s “A Civil Campaign.”
“The chariot of state is pulled by three warring horses – fear, honor, and duty.’ Plato, probably badly paraphrased.
But I have also thought what Dave said and recall having written about skewed concepts of honor somewhere before. The warring concepts i acknowledged were the American soldier’s traditional code of honor and any system based on “party over principle.”
Interesting choice.
The Code of Honor of the American Soldier actually came about as a result of America’s entry into WWI. Most Americans didn’t want to get involved. It was too far away. Many had less than great opinions of the Great Powers in Europe. The LESS said about how some of my ancestors felt about going to war for the Allied Powers the better. NONE of them would have helped Russia in nay way, but Russia was mostly out of it by then. (Long and messy story)
The gist was, the soldiers were asked in training before they were sent to Europe, ‘Why do you think we are going? What would make a difference here?’ The US Army is not perfect. (FAR FROM IT!!!!!) But, they understood that soldiers fight better with a cause they understand and can get behind. When they went over there, they were not going to conquer, to pillage loot and then burn. (Yes, I am looking at you, Schlock!)
They wanted a reason that simple men could understand. Because quite frankly? It made NO sense for the US to get involved. The US was barely hit at all by the war. Yes, the Zimmerman Telegrams, the sinking of the Lusitania, all that rubbish. (And it was rubbish, but politcally charged rubbish that made for good press releases) It would have made FAR more sense for the US to come in on the side of Germany since so many Germans immigrated in the 19th century. But.. politics… *Shrug*
The US Army Code of Honor has been in place since 1917. It put in words the basic difference between the European powers who were fighting for conquest and the US forces who were fighting to end it. (That is not exactly true to life, such things never are, but it is closer I think than anything else.)
The US Army wanted a motivational reason for the men to fight a war they really had no stake at all in. They found one and in doing so, they found a calling as well. To be better than others because they COULD be. That has been tarnished by many things that happened in the alter part of the 20th century, but it never went away entirely. If it had? After January 6th of this year, we would be living in the dictatorship instead of an oligarchy and anyone who who dared offer the slightest disrespect to those in power would be stood up against a wall and shot.
Honor prevailed. Barely.
A good thing? I think so.
I am an American Fighting Man. I do not drink.
If I should drink, I do not get drunk.
If I should get drunk, I do not stagger.
If I should stagger, I do not fall.
If I should fall, I cover my rank insignia so that everyone will assume I am an officer.
There were two main reasons America wanted to stop Germany, and they were the same reasons as other powers on the continent. Hegemony and technology.
First off, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand Austria sent an ultimatum to Serbia to which he latter mostly consented. Germany was expected to – but did not – pressure Austria to accept the partial ultimatum terms. Why does this matter? Well, it was a sort of international pressure to make Germany take a loss. It would be reining in its own ally and in doing so weaken relations between them.
The reason Germany was even under pressure in the first place has to do with the nation’s geography. Germany had a long strip of coastline that allowed easy access of either the Baltic Sea or the North Sea. It was also bordered to the south by the Alps and to the west by several small “neutral nations.” With such a strong geographic position Germany was primed to expand east into Asia.
Unfortunately, Russia had kept the world’s largest standing army for many decades in an attempt to stave off general European and Asian ambitions, but this had taken a disastrous toll on their economy. So, Russia was not really in the best position to fight Germany in 1914 despite their huge troop count. Germany, on the other hand, was looking for any excuse to begin their invasion, and they’d finally found it in the Austrian ultimatum.
If Germany had been allowed to take sections of Russia it’d have put France and England next on the chopping block seeing as they largely controlled the English Channel. This is the main reason why Germany basically didn’t care about southern France in WWII except for its oceanic border. Even if the economy in southern France wasn’t already awful, the inland regions had little strategic value.
America’s involvement in WWI had nothing to do with honor… regardless of what the troops were told. It was all about preserving the status quo. Realistically, based on how England, France, and Russia behaved at the time, it was indeed more sensible (and probably more honorable) for the U.S. to side with Germany. However, taking honor and strategy out of the equation… We just didn’t like them: https://archive.org/details/genesisofworldwa00harr/page/590/mode/1up?view=theater
I do wonder how dramatically different the world would’ve been if we hadn’t helped drive Germany toward the arms of the Nazi party. Of course, the near-simultaneous rise of both Marxism and Fascism was nigh impossible to predict, otherwise I doubt we’d have made the same choice in retrospect.
Which just goes to show that actually honorable choices will probably have better outcomes. Economic competition with Germany and stronger use of Euro-U.S. policy to dissuade German expansionism would’ve brought about the modern international trade system without two massive World Wars. Even if the U.S. had joined as a neutral or defensive party in 1917 to negotiate a ceasefire it would’ve had a far better result for Euro-U.S. relations. Instead, we sought to crush our competition.
That said, the preeminent powers in Europe were not united with the U.S. to block German expansionism, either, much like today’s economic battles with China. That’s why the U.S. let Europe fight it out for 3 years before finally entering to stomp Germany in 1917. Oh Europe, when will you learn?
Um…
I guess, that like always, it really depends on which history you read. Or which version of history.
There WERE interests in the US who wanted to support Germany, and others that wanted to support England or France. It was all economic. (Then again, every war ever fought has been about economics in SOME way.)
You know… it is odd. Woodrow Wilson didn’t WANT to destroy Germany after WWI because he KNEW what would happen. They would want revenge. Some in Congress wanted Germany utterly crushed, but they realized his arguments were cogent. Of course, THAT didn’t generally make the common propaganda that is taught as history these days since it didn’t fit the ‘right view’ as commonly advocated. The Germans were evil and the French were all saints.
General Pershing was one of his top advisors in saying that the Treaty of Versaiilles was a BAD IDEA. That NO ONE was utterly responsible for what happened. But of course, the French got what they wanted and everyone else got another war in less than 30 years.
Historically speaking, the USA didn’t WANT Germany destroyed because it would cause economic problems. France did. They had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War and wanted revenge. They had been stymied time and again by the Germans in their own quest for global dominance, so they wanted to put paid to that. Instead, they made DAMN sure that there was going to be another World War.
But of course, the Germans deserved it because they started the fight before France could.
And then, everyone forgot and we got WWII. *Shrug* Let’s all just forget again, shall we? Oh, wait. We already have. Nevermind.
A re-post with only one source because Grrlpower doesn’t like links.
I first want to point out that in WWII France’s border was posted with defensive weapons. The Germans avoided those by invading through a neutral country – which France naively believed Germany would not do. Notably, most defensive weapons of the era were immobile and would be useless in a protracted land battle, so France definitely didn’t want to invade Germany. We can say that almost for sure.
Next, France’s army stayed relatively unchanged[1] until AFTER Germany began mass-recruiting troops. This is not the kind of behavior you’d expect from an “aggressive Germany-hater.” Let’s not forget that Germany failed to expand into Russia in WWI so if there was a second war it’s obvious which direction they’d go. If France wanted to goad Germany, then either France was exceptionally overconfident, or they assumed they’d at most be fighting a defensive war… Given France’s history of repeated defeat by then; I’d wager the latter.
As for the U.S.? Here’s where it gets really interesting. The U.S. declined to sign the Treaty of Versailles but DID later sign multiple economic treaties with Germany. When the 1929 crash hit – guess who called their debts?[2] Yes, France may have officially wanted Germany’s collapse, but it was the U.S. who tricked Germany into actual collapse. Why else would the U.S. intentionally bankrupt a country that was, despite the depression and increasing nationalist violence, still trying to pay their war-accrued debts?
It’s a bit hidden in the Wiki but look closely: The Lausanne Conference of 1932 – an international group intending to negotiate Germany’s debt – ended July 9th. The Nazis (in tandem with the Communists; a point modern-day socialists like to gloss over) finally seized a Reichstag majority on July 31st – a mere 22 days after the conference. The timing wasn’t coincidental. The U.S.’s manipulation of Germany’s debt alongside the NSDAP’s use of constant violence had finally driven Germans to the breaking point. That, of course, gave the U.S. an excuse to reject further negotiation. The U.S. had stalled for 3 whole years! It’s unlikely any real negotiation was forthcoming. Six months later, Hitler was properly and legally appointed Reich Chancellor. And that is how the Nazis were given the opportunity they needed to rise to power.
The U.S.’s actions differ little from modern Chinese debt trap diplomacy. Yes, I equated the U.S. with China! They learned some of their tricks from us, after all. In fact, I believe China is trying to replay these same events here in the U.S. Notably, Antifa and BLM use logos taken directly from Antifaschistische Aktion and Roter Frontkämpferbund, respectively, and they even serve the exact same purpose as these groups did in 1933 Germany. Antifa is the militarized/special ops arm while BLM is the legal defense/propaganda arm. The only part we’re missing is a “Stormtroopers” group. Hm.
A terrible salute,[3]
but these folks don’t mind.[4]
I went on a tangent there, but the point is to show that historical events are being repeated almost word-for-word, picture-for-picture. The U.S. didn’t randomly decide to recall Germany’s debts. Based on its choice to establish its own unilateral treaties instead of joining the Treaty of Versailles, there’s a good chance the U.S. intentionally pushed the Nazi party into power – assuming it didn’t create the Nazi party outright. We’ll probably never know for sure but the parallels are too striking to ignore.
Popular history is the official recounting of the victor. The victor of WWI wasn’t Germany and it certainly wasn’t France or England. It was the U.S. So, you have to seriously dig into what happened later to see if the official retelling matches up with actual events. In this case? It definitely doesn’t.
[1][2][3][4] https://pastebin.com/fCtpttpb
Defensive…
Right.
It is odd. You equate the military as the government. Was that intentional? I was not talking about the French military. THEY were underfunded. They had decent equipment, reasonable training for the most part and competent leaders, but most of those were stuck thinking about war in the WWI styles. That wasn’t really their fault. The major reason that blitzkreig worked was the discipline of the German troops. They were almost without a doubt the best rained troops in the world in 1939. The Japanese were a VERY close second.
Funny thing- Some of the French Military ALSO protested the Treaty of Versailles. (Many of them were court martialed as result, for cowardice and some moved to the US) They too said it was a bad idea. But the politicians wanted blood and they got it. Most of the British and US delegations just wanted the war done. They wanted some kind of resolution and maybe a means to keep such from happening again. The french government just wanted revenge and they got it. And then they got the shit kicked out of them in 1939 as a DIRECT result of their need to dominate their long time rivals and, coincidentally? Empowering a madman.
But, hey, what do I know? I am just a military historian.
*shrug* Some Nazis protested the execution of Jews. What a monolith does is what matters; not what the individual chips along its rocky exterior nominally tend to favor. That’s mere words and sometimes even carefully-placed propaganda. We even see this in our modern politicians with regularity. Someone campaigns on a promise but directly contradicts themselves the week they get into office. Words are hardly a reliable measure for intent when they contradict the eventual result.
France may have actively pushed certain political goals but the fact is they built mostly defensive armaments and were not actively pursuing updated military structures and techniques. Even if you wanted to argue they were an aggressor they were quite frankly a terrible one. Such weak aggression could not shake Germany on its own.
The military is the enforcement arm of a nation’s sovereignty. Much like a modern nation cannot exist without laws it likewise cannot exist without borders. Say what you want about open borders and illegals but the fact is that a nation is not a nation if it’s not sovereign. By that measure, a military is a form of government using the exact same logic as politicians being a form of government. A group who seek to enforce and enable the ideological dictate of a nation’s people and its leaders. Different methods; same result. Which is why militaries sometimes replace purely political governments.
“France definitely didn’t want to invade Germany [in the run-up to 1914].
[…]
Germany failed to expand into Russia in WWI so if there was a second war it’s obvious which direction they’d go. – Wzaerreazw
As regards the first point, France did have its own plan to invade Germany, to avenge and reverse the territorial losses it had incurred in Alsace and Lorraine as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Whether you call that ‘invading German territory’ or ‘removing an occupying force from French territory’ would depend on who you asked!
The French Plan XVII was very similar in concept to Germany’s Schlieffen Plan: both envisaged a strong thrust by their respective right wings while the left stayed largely defensive, followed by the right hooking round to envelop the opposing armies facing the left wing. In both cases, the High Commands tasked with enacting the plan blinked, and by assigning more troops to their defensive left wings may have robbed the offensive right of the weight needed to successfully follow up their initial successes. Schlieffen got a lot closer to plan than XVII did, for myriad reasons including timing, terrain, use of reserves…
As regards German ambitions to the East in the same period, it would be more accurate to say that they didn’t get as far as that bit of the plan, than that there wasn’t a plan in the first place.
The Reich’s High Command were aware of the treaty by which France and Russia were obliged to come to each other’s aid if attacked, but they were also aware that France would be much faster in mobilising its armies. The Schlieffen Plan originally envisaged the capture of Paris within 40 days and the surrender of France not long afterwards, in time for the armies on the Western front to ship across to the East and be ready to meet the bulk of the Russians when they arrived. It came very close to succeeding in taking Paris, nearly on schedule, and arguably failed (in its objectives – see later) more through miscommunication and misreading the French than through inherent flaws in the Plan itself. (Effectively just the French: British involvement at that stage was not far off the least we could get away with, and its field command at times verged on deliberately obstructive.)
The Reich High Command did have alternative plans drawn up that would have seen Germany attack Russia first, while only holding against France. Those plans obviously wouldn’t have involved violating Belgian neutrality, without which it’s unlikely the British would have been obliged to get involved (at that stage). In fact, if France were to get tempted and attempt to hit Germany through the age-old ‘easy’ route of Belgium, that would probably have brought Britain in on Germany’s side – Britain was at the time far more invested as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality than we were with the primary belligerents. That was the major flaw with the Schlieffen Plan: it may have worked in its objective of quickly knocking out one of the Great Powers already engaged, but even trying it brought in (however reluctantly) the one Germany would have been hoping to keep neutral.
Of course, without an early surrender of France to free up the armies of the Western front, there wasn’t much manpower available for a large-scale offensive in the East. And with the eyes and manpower of the world focused on the North, the events in the South were starved of resources then and of attention since. Not so much ‘history written by the victors’, more like ‘history focuses on the options that were chosen, not what else was on the table’.
You got the brackets wrong on that first quote. I didn’t mention WWI until the second paragraph.
Even so, I found your analysis enlightening and appreciate the input. When I said “it’s obvious which direction they’d go” I was indeed referring to military tactics as you mention but there were also other factors considered. Psychology and economics were most important.
See, in WWII there’s a problem with a possible second German loss against Russia. A big part of the fascist ideology was based on continuous superiority. So this was a huge ideological roadblock. They could lose battles against the U.K, France, the U.S. – whoever. But not the Russians. What “superior race” would lose against the Russians twice? The Nazi party was acutely aware how the German people were thinking; after all, they’d planted the seeds of fascism themselves. Which means they would’ve placed greater emphasis on preventing any such loss instead of trying to attack Russia a second time and hoping to patch up mistakes by throwing more propaganda at the problem. Which is why Hitler’s last ditch attempt to take Russia when the war began to swing in favor of the Allies was all the more insane. It showed just how far the party had fallen – even when contrasted against the nation’s already warped scruples.
The monetary system established under fascism more or less required exchanging troops for land to create a sustainable war economy. One of the more absurd moments of the Nazi party was when they built an estimated 70,000 ton concrete block just to test if the land was stable enough for a victory arch – before they’d won! Yet from the perspective of an economist it begins to make perfect sense: concrete was one of the Nazis’ most productive and least constrained industries at that stage of the war. So, building extensive concrete structures was an easy way to keep the economy afloat. Later, many nations including the U.S. and Russia would use exactly this kind of “forced economy” to spur development through massive public works projects. Technically, similar projects existed since WWI – the U.S. passed the Federal Aid Road Act in 1916 – but other nations scarcely saw a scale similar to what the Nazis undertook until post-WWII. Of course, most of the Nazi projects were fantastically unproductive, as the party largely benefited from infrastructure built by the Wiemar Republic. This… aspect of the plan would not be adopted by later, more successful nations.
“I didn’t mention WWI until the second paragraph.”
So you didn’t. My misreading, I stand corrected.
I wish I could claim credit for the scholarship and analysis, but I can only honestly claim the condensed summarisation! Your comment happened to come only a day or so after I’d finished reading a book about the first month or so of WWI as it happened*, which is where I got most of the Plan XVII and Schlieffen material. It was also not much longer after a book of ‘what-if’ counterfactuals which included the Russia-first scenario^. The potential for France to backstab Germany via Belgium while Germany went East, and for Britain to come in on Germany’s side for the sake of Belgium, incorporated elements taken from both books.
Any other time, and I’d have been much less primed to respond!
In a similar vein, you appear to have far more handle on the psychological/economic interpretations than I do (or have the time to gain), so I won’t dispute them. I would point out, though, that striking East in 1942 wasn’t a completely insane move, even if it suffered in the execution. Germany was suffering badly for lack of access to oil and other resources, and reaching the Black Sea and Caucasus would have gained them new sources with completely internal lines of distribution – no need to rely on overseas suppliers dodging naval blockades.
Unfortunately for the Armies of the Eastern Front, their High Command decided to go for the farmland of Ukraine at the same time rather than focus on securing the Romanian oil first (which may have been possible through Hungary and/or the Balkans, thus allowing the Russian non-aggression pact to remain intact for a while longer). And if they’d had the resources needed to take and hold those, they wouldn’t have had the shortages that necessitated taking them in the first place!
* The Guns of August, B. W. Tuchmann, 1962
^ Over the Top: Alternate Histories of the First World War, P. Tsouras and S. Jones, 2014
Honor/shame based societies are simply where honor is what they strive to achieve and shame is the socially enforced consequence of acting dishonorably.
Every philosophy, every idea, no matter how well it describes, explains, instructs on peaceful or good actions, can be and has been perverted into something terrible, and used to justify the most horrible actions, and then those perversions are used as a reason to abandon the idea in its entirety. Honor/shame based societies are included in that. I’ve heard many times in my life that our society seems shameless and could do with a little honor/shame. Unfortunately honor/shame is too easily perverted, so in practice it doesn’t live up to the theory.
Who defines honor and the consequences of failure (shame) is a big deal. If a person defines it for themselves, then they are voluntarily accepting limits to their behavior, and that’s a good thing, but that also means they could (that doesn’t mean they do!) be as flexible with their definition as they find convenient, in which case it merely becomes a self-gratifying declaration of goodness.
Too often honor is defined by others and applied exclusively to those whose behavior they wish to control, and shame is the punishment they wish to impose upon them. The whole woke/cancel culture ideology is a great example of that. If you/they are “woke” then you/they have honor and no further examination of your/their actions is required. If you are not “woke” then you have no honor and the penalty is cancellation.
My issue with honour is that the main modern uses of the word are normally followed by killings or other nastiness. I have a connection to some people in British Asian cultures and a few of them have suffered under their families understanding of “honour”. And some of the stories a couple of steps removed are really shocking.
Yeah, how is it more ‘honourable’ to stone your own daughter to death for refusing to marry some guy three times her age who has already had three or four wives (all dead of course, with no explanations why) than it is to let her marry someone who truly loves her and she is happy with?
Because the honor being questioned is that of the ‘authority.’ Middle eastern nations in particular are big on authority; it’s written into their holy book, the Quran.
– Quran, 4:59
Under sharia law a daughter is not only a weak woman with no authority, but a subhuman whose very existence is owed to her father. But wait, the above quote doesn’t mention females specifically…
-Quran 4:34
Truly disgusting.
I looked up the word “scourge.” Apparently it’s a specific type of whip. So, [beat] isn’t quite correct…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scourge