How do turians make it work and Alliance politics

Exactly what I was saying. And I respect humans, especially after serving alongside them during The War and working with them now, but I've gotten to see over the years that you're always impatient. A lot of "It's my X and I want it now!" regardless of how feasible or practical it is. I guess as Turians we're just been drilled into thinking more about what we can do right now for those around us, and for future generations. The Krogan and Asari can afford to be patient because they live for a thousand fucking years, and the Salarians just work frickin' harder because they know they only have about a third of the time we have to do anything. Hell, the Quarians were willing to wait 300 years to get their homeworld back, flying around on the brink of extinction. So, all this bitching after one year of a transitional government? Shit, takes, time; and it isn't always easy. As the Krogan would say, strap your quad back on and man up.

Fucking amen, Lieutenant. Everyone needs to just get on with it, instead of bitching. The sooner we rebuild and get things back up to speed, the sooner the Parliament can rebuilt and civilian government can be reintroduced.


I sincerely doubt it.

Speak for yourself. Among the Finns there is a saying- ken toista haukkuu se itse on. Perhaps one of them will care enough to translate. Many luminaries before you have proclaimed at various points in time the imminent demise of the nation-state. All have been proven wrong. The fact that we are now facing national uprisings on Terra Nova and Eden Prime as this is being written, asserting their distinctiveness as separate entities, should be evidence enough to the contrary. That we continue to divide ourselves along such lines, even as we move into space, speaks to its continued durability as the rational unit of human- and indeed, among some alien species it can boast an even more impressive longevity- organization. To say that it can be eradicated is Orwellian fantasy, nothing more.


A nation is more than the physical infrastructure of its capital. It is more than its government, or the institutions thereof, or the sum of both parts. Real life is not a game of pillow forts, where you win by demolishing your opponent. If it were so easy more than a handful of the countries in existence prior to the Reaper war would not have been, on account of having been wiped out and occupied repeatedly through history by their neighbors. At most they enter a state of hibernation, to reawake all the more violently after a twilight of suppression.


Partially correct, since there is really only one nation on Earth with any legitimate claim to having done so.


That SATAE is contemplating the implementation of this "One World" stupidity is a frankly more terrifying prospect than prolonged military occupation. The latter is assured never to last indefinitely, can be fought off and defeated in due course, but the turmoil and catastrophe the former will result in has every possibility of becoming a permanent state of affairs.

Well you sure have read your books, Mr. Political Commissar.

What he just said in my primary means "Who calls others names is a bigger one"

Like, person X says you're dumb. Going by the saying, person X is dumber than you in reality.

You know, that might have carried more of the intended mysticism if you weren't posting on a board where everyone reads text that is filtered through translation software capable of parsing idioms from whole other species.

Despite myself, I agree with you, though. National identity is not something so easily discarded; as you say, infrastructure and government does not a nation make, not wholly anyway. I'm a Terra Novan, and I will resist any attempt SATAE makes to homogenise Terra Nova's fledgling culture in the name of 'reconstruction'. The same is true for my mother's family, or what is left of them. If all these climate readjustment ideas actually take, you can bet the farm that my uncle will go back to being a water engineer for a vineyard up the road, that he'll go back to getting up a little before eight in the morning, strolling down to the local boulangerie for a breakfast croissant and a fresh stick of bread for lunch, that he'll eat his croissant with far too much butter and a strong coffee and later in the day, he'll take a light lunch out in the field while talking loudly in very coarse French with the two kids running the grape pickers.

In short, he will do his absolute best to be an amusingly stereotypical Frenchman and not give a shit about our far off space government. That's what makes nations, it's not a parliament, or an assembly or congress, it's not buildings and capitol cities, it's tradition, culture and ways of life that have evolved over centuries out of the environment, and the people around you. And that's what we stand to lose under SATAE, and attitudes like Lime Spider's. Sorry, you seem like a nice person but you're just plain wrong.

I'm afraid history would seem to suggest that war is not off the table. I hope it doesn't come to that, but to ignore the possibility is unwise in my opinion.

Why am I not surprised this thread turned out the way it did.

It would be dishonest for me to say that I'm completely satisfied with everything SATAE has done, especially in regards to the sovereign rights of nations, I may be human, but I am British, and I would prefer not to see my people's culture be abrogated. I want to believe Hackett indeed plans to hand power back once the five-year plan is finished, preferably a return to the Alliance's pre-war function.

Still...I do indeed pray that we never come close to a civil war. If that happens, than practically everything that we sacrificed from last year will all be rendered completely pointless.

Eden Prime was an Alliance colony. One that the Alliance liberated from Cerberus, after the huskmen blew up your government. SATAE never usurped anything, they stepped in to protect the planet and the Alliance.

Given that that'd mean a war between the millions-strong Alliance Fleet and brick-throwing colonists and a few traitors from the SAMC, it'd be a really short war. The seppers talk a big game, but that's all it is. Talk.

Hmm. I'll admit I never thought of the colonies as emerging nation-states - bit remiss of me, I know.

That said, you've missed a few points in your own reasoning. After all, the UNAS and EU are proof that the nation-state is no longer the only game in town, in terms of political organisation.

Do the nations still exist? Sure.

Are they remotely relevant in terms of contemporary political organisation? God no. Not when their territory been ruined(forgive me, it's been a while since I read Anderson or Ozkirimli, but that's still a major feature of a nation-state, isn't it?) and when there are at least half a dozen separate governments for every former country here on the homeworld.

Oh dear. That myth again?

It's funny how people argue about the political implications of SATAE instead of the material. Living standards have improved on a global scale. God, give it fifteen years and everyone will be living it up like they lived on Watson or Terra Nova.

National identity is important, in a socially-constructed kind of way, but that's not really what I'm arguing here. What I'm arguing is that national identity is a crappy way to organise our government - after all, nationality's only one form of identity and for a hell of a lot of people, your uncle excluded, it's no longer the most important.

Well, thank you, and it's OK. I mean, if we can't disagree with our friends, what's the point?

Hah. Yeah, sorry about that. Not for my politics, mind, but, well, I guess this isn't the board for it.

Regarding 'Britishness' and everything, I've never got the argument. I mean, you're part of the European Union and everything. Have been for centuries, in one way or another - if Brussels couldn't dilute the 'British identity', what makes you think that SATAE can? If Britain didn't dilute Welshness and Irishness and all that, why would SATAE?

Asari from Serrice are still Serrician, but they have a vote in Thessian affairs, same as Ulissians, Dassus, Armalites and so on.


Here here.

The people who elected Governor Stetson would disagree with you.

Governor Stetson? The absolute bastard who compared Earther refugees to the bloody Reaper invasion?

If you seriously think he counted a legitimate politican (or a legitimate human being), you've already lost the argument.

Methinks the paranoia over an entity only a little over a year old, especially the threat of secession and rebellion, seems to be fast talking and people trying to take advantage of others.

Certainly I could see things being the way some prior comments would love to make things out to be in a decade or more, but at this point I can't help but feel such attitudes are nothing but part of media sensationalism and antagonism brought along by those who would ultimately benefit from such a conflict.


In short, everyone needs to calm your god damned tits. Humanity has been through far more difficult situations before, where war seemed far more likely, and got through it without mass bloodshed, why not now? To collapse now, for whatever reasons, and divide would be a disservice to every human being who died during the war.


As for the Turians? My assumption would be due to thousands of years of trial, error, and success upon their government which even to this day still finds ways to adjust and innovate (even if to he slightest degree) and the following of the Turian people in a unified effort, or maybe it is simply a desire to keep things familiar and a status quo- after all that is a preference of military societies in general- so that returning to a normalcy after large scale conflicts would be easier. I couldn't say as I simply have never attended much time to living with Turians, only my readings from both their philosophy (I recommend Primarch Artellius' Reflections on the Heirarchy for those interested) and that of a few outsiders who looked in (Matriarch Inerieria's Lives of the Palavanian Primarchsor Marka-Tal's A socio-economic interpretation of the Turian people. Simply those can be food for thought, even if they are rather dated ... and dry.

Oh spirits, thank you In_Constant_Sorrow for saying all that. That's totally what I've been saying. Humanity just needs to just take a deep breath, and shift their focus on getting their house back in order. We have way more threats and problems to deal with out there than fucking political hissy fits.

When? Which situation? How many millions are dead, and you're talking about some fictional time when we've had it worse?

(Just quietly, people who come along saying "everyone calm down" and offering meaningless platitudes are even more annoying than the obnoxious sepper types)

The seppers are a loud minority.

And as Lime Spider said, it wouldn't be much of a war.

Well, Lime_Spider, it perhaps may not be on the sheer scale of what occurred with the war, and certainly these events happened in different periods (but such they still provide interesting anecdotes to how mankind itself behaves in difficult times), but I would hope you are familiar to look up something called the Toba Catastrophe? Where the Human Population was likely reduced to somewhere in the population of 10 or so thousand living? (Which, interestingly enough it's timeline would technically have lined it up around the period of the "50,000 year" cycles promoted by those who take interest in studying the Reapers. Perhaps that should be looked into...

Otherwise, perhaps I should also note any of the Dark Ages in which humanity has experience? Perhaps the Bronze Age Collapse of 10,000 B.C. in the Ancient Mediterranean? Events caused by a rapid series of disasters, migratory changes, and large scale destruction which ultimately led to the rise of newer and stabler empires? Or perhaps the societal collapse in Europe in what would become the Medieval Period? Where again despite the rampant destruction and chaos order was eventually brought forward into a unifying force? And for those who claim I am too centered upon the history of the Western World I put forward the Collapse of the Maya in the New World which gave way to new civilizations, or the Indus Valley peoples of Ancient India? And certainly despite the claims of our fan of the Little Red Book even China has suffered much at the hands of the currents of history. In fact, I'd love to hear him discuss Chairman Mao's efforts to bring his people into the modern world...

Or for more modern examples I point to the West after the World Wars, or for more recent history look back to all the difficulty we had just before spaceflight and our finding of Element Zero. Certainly we never reached anything on the scale of the Drell or the Krogan, but anyone with a routine knowledge of human history has come close enough plenty of times to total destruction on our own accord.

Take for instance, and I'm sure you're familiar with, the Cuban Missile crisis and how it was the simple action of a Soviet Naval Officer by the name of Vasili Arkipov, who was the only officer on board his submarine against the firing of Nuclear weapons; something which would have damned our species to a fate of total annihilation. Yet he refused and prevented us from utterly destroying ourselves. Consider this the next time a "separatist" (how I detest this word in connotation with the colonies, as that is a Turian issue)considers pulling a Vallum, or some asshole Admiral decides to use Dreadnaught scale weaponry against an actual revolution.

Today, we have a working economy that is rising to its feet. We have stable communication and medical services, of which I would consider myself a shining exemplar of that state, we have relative peace in the galaxy with possibly the lowest threat of piracy, slavery, or large scale destruction in decades. In truth, over the ruins of the city outside my window I see people who are going to work to rebuild and to make things better, to move on from what had struck us so low. This I see spread throughout the galaxy, not just among mankind but every living creature under the many suns. In truth, of the infinite possibilities which could have arisen from the war, I'd say we likely have one in the 10% of which would have been positive.

The Alliance of before the war was a bloated mess of bureaucracy and laissez-faire economics mixed with an entitlement streak which was constantly bringing us into conflict with our allies. Couple that with groups like Cerberus and I often find myself wondering how exactly we functioned as a political entity at all then. Now we have a temporary dictatorship (though maybe Junta is a better word) which, at least in the best of hopes will lay down their authority at the end of five years. Whether they do or do not I cannot say, but I do stress that we should at least wait until that bridge must be crossed.

Now is not the time to break what brittle legs we stand upon.

Don't be so quick to conclusions bud. The Alliance Fleet is strong and it has plenty of soldiers (though with the Batarians gone, Reapers neutralized, and piracy threats manifestly NOT requiring dreadnoughts to deal with can someone tell me why the navy needs to stay this big?), but that may not be decisive in a situation of asymmetric warfare. An Eden Prime guerrilla movement, with experience from fighting Cerberus would mean the Alliance would have to divert a lot of resources to keep Eden Prime down. Resources that are hard to come by given the reconstruction efforts. Defeating insurgencies can be tough even when one side adopts harsh tactics and isn't trying to recover from the most massive galactic war in history. If you think otherwise maybe you should ask the Hierarchy how easy it was to pacify Solregit before the Reaper war.

And this is the reason why people like me exist Mr. Winthrop.

Ah perfect creepy faceless dudes on the internet get to do the Alliance's dirty work now.

Yay.

You say that like Private Military Corporations have never been used in conjunction with standing forces before Mr. Winthrop.

Alternately, they blockade Eden Prime until capitulation.

Or withdraw their support and declare Open Season to anyone interested in raiding, but I trust SATAE will not take such...drastic measures.