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Topic: Evil in SC2 (Read 23031 times)
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meep-eep
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Enlightened
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Posts: 2847
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Many of the bad guys are following a shallow version of the Golden Rule, doing what they simplistically think others would want done to them.
I have some problems with that theory. (Despite you stating it as a fact, it's still a theory.)
It seems to me most of the races are just considering themselves more important than the others.
When they say it's for the others own good, it seems a mere excuse. They may have learned to actually believe it in some cases, but the actual motive seems to be their own benefit.
VUX are revolted at the idea of being human and can't understand how humans stand themselves -- they see killing humans as putting them out of their misery.
I don't think that is to be taken seriously. It looks to me like killing humans puts them out of the misery of the VUX.
Take this quote:
But now you have forced us to reveal our REAL reason for hating you humans
an embarrassing reason with no acceptable justification, but nonetheless undeniable!
Human! You are SOOO ugly, SOOO hideous to us that we will NEVER be able to find peace with your species!
Whenever we see your kind, we just want to kick you!... stomp on you!... squish you!...
...vaporize your ugly faces from the entire universe!
We know its unreasonable! We know that you had no choice about how you look!
We know that it is cruel fate that the Creator made you appear like putrid excretion
but WE JUST CAN'T HANDLE IT!
Mycon think Juffo-Wup is the ideal state of living and think they're doing everyone a favor by replacing them with Juffo-Wup life.
Where do you get the idea that they think replacing humans by Juffo-Wup does them a favour?
Humans gets in the way of the Mycon's purposes.
You impede the flow of Juffo-Wup through the Universe.
We will now remove this clog.
We will now aid Juffo-Wup by eliminating you!
Kohr-Ah think being an Ur-Quan is the ideal state of living and think they're doing everyone a favor by killing them and allowing them to be reincarnated as Ur-Quan.
The Kohr-Ah really do seem to believe that killing humans will eventually benefit them. But that's not their motive. Their motive is to remove any threat to the Ur-Quan. Maybe this reincarnation thing allows them to excuse their mass genocide to themselves, but by no means are they killing humans so that they can be reincarnated as Ur-Quan.
Kzer-Za think that their civilization is superior to everyone else's and even if others protest they're doing them a favor by making them part of the Kzer-Za's ideal social order.
Again, they may think they're doing humans a favour, but that's not their motive. Their motive is to make sure the humans are no threat.
Ilwrath think torture and pain is the ultimate pleasure and think they're doing everyone a favor (at some level) by killing and mutilating them.
Whether the Ilwrath torture for their own pleasure, or (also) for their gods, I find no corroboration for the idea that they think they do it in any way for the benefit of their victim.
Just because you've found an explanation which sounds plausible and better than anything else you've heard, doesn't mean it's correct.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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Art
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You assume that the only thing that kept the Spathi's population in check were the evil ones. Maybe Spathi just don't live very long (maybe they have a heart attack every time they see a shadow in the twilight). Maybe only one out of a million Spathi actually has children. Maybe Spathi have a gestation period of a few hundred years.
Well, one or all of these have to be true for the Spathi to make any sense at all; hundreds of thousands of encrustlings that grow into anywhere near human-size Spathi adults means death by mass starvation is utterly unavoidable unless one of these is true. I don't think super-short lifespans plausibly leads to their attitude about living a long life (though who knows, maybe every second counts more when you've only got six weeks to live). I think it's probably more likely that Spathi start out in some sort of nymph form as tiny little guys and only a few Spathi happen to make it to full adulthood while the rest continue living as little swimming things -- which would be a parallel with clam physiology (clams start out as little swimming things before a few clams get big enough to settle down and grow shells). Maybe that's one reason that the life of a full-grown adult is so full of terrors for young Fwiffo.
I don't get that. What do the Melnorme have to do with this?
Besides, the "grudge" may just be based on conflicting interests (competition, ideology of currency and information).
Oh, the Melnorme were the ones who sold the Spathi the terraforming gear in the first place, and they refuse to take responsibility for the Spathi's misuse of their awesome technology. It'd be thoroughly ironic for the Druuge to blame the Melnorme for this, but they seem like the sorts of hypocrites who just might.
But yeah, mos def the obvious explanation is just that the Druuge plain don't like business competition. And for that matter neither do the Melnorme. (They take special care to tell you how horrible the Druuge are, and even though they are telling the truth, they make sure to be as vague as possible to incite the most possible worry. "Hidden tariffs" indeed.)
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Art
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In other words, your religion has some truth in it, because you "feel" it has.
1. Just because you've found a better explanation than the common one, doesn't make yours true. There other possible explanations. For instance, you may "feel" it's true because you feel uncomfortable at the thought that it may not. Which brings me to the next point:
2. Just because something is desirable, doesn't make it true.
That's fine. I wasn't trying to claim that religions' doctrines about the supernatural and stuff necessarily are objectively true just because people believe them. Maybe even the opposite.
My point was that the Ilwarth religion doesn't *excuse* the Ilwrath for what they do. Just because what I believe isn't necessarily true doesn't mean it doesn't say something true about me. If I commit a crime because of my religion, I think I should be held just as responsible for what I do as someone who commits the same crime without using religious language as a motive. People who do wrong because their god commands them to are no better than people who kill because their glands command them to, or their whims command them to, or their employers command them to.
My point was the complete opposite of saying that the Ilwrath are only evil because Dogar and Kazon are really out there somewhere and making them evil. Whether or not Dogar and Kazon are fictional or not, the Ilwrath choose to worship them because (for a number of possible reasons) they are the sort of people to worship Dogar and Kazon, and they should be judged accordingly. Just as (within certain limits) the fact that someone is Catholic, and the kind of Catholic someone chooses to be, is still a reflection of their personality and their choices, and you can't pawn off their attitudes and actions on the Church. Nor can you pawn off, say, Middle Eastern terrorism on Islam. Whether or not the god is really out there in the world, if you respond to a god's calling and nature it's because of something in *your* nature. Religious or antireligious authorities try to override this, but you can't get away from it; it's the reason that monolithic religions break up into different sects over time no matter how powerful they are, because people will always find diffferent things about the religion that seem true to them and are important to them.
Hence people who think that a popular religion has a particular "personality" get surprised by the thoughts and actions of some practitioners, because the personality is ultimately dependent on the believers' personality. If the religion has truth in it it's a truth that's internal first and external afterwards; you believe in the Big Guy up in the Sky only if you first believe certain things about yourself. My believing in God isn't proof that God exists, but it *is* proof that I am the sort of person to believe in a particular kind of God; you can't dismiss religion as "random white noise" that says nothing about the people or cultures or societies that believe them, which is what some people seem to think.
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Art
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Re: Golden Rule
I don't take this explanation as a universal explanation for what bad guys do. I don't even think it's a good primary explanation, since if you poke even slightly hard at many justifications, like the Kohr-Ah's, the illusion breaks and sheer selfishness comes through. But it is worthwhile to see how most evil things people do *can* be expressed in terms of serving others' interests, so that a shallow reading of the Golden Rule fails -- being good doesn't just mean imagining everyone else is the same as you and doing stuff you would want done to them. A real application of the Golden Rule takes more than that, and it's the reason why there is in my opinion not that much more than a superficial distinction between, say, the Kohr-Ah and the Druuge.
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Art
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Another thing, with really fast population growth you won't be able to move enough Spathi to other planets fast enough. At least not without something more advanced than Hyperspace.
Not necessarily. A large amount of births at once doesn't necessarily mean births take place often, or that maturation occurs quickly. It may be that Spathi always have lots of encrustlings they don't know what to do with, but the little critters grow in batches that don't mature for a while so there's time to send year-long colony expeditions to get rid of them. The time it takes to cross from one side of the Home Sector to the other isn't really that long -- a few years with weak engines, based on game time. A few years is a long time when you're fighting the sort of desperate guerrilla war that Star Control 2 is about, but may not be that big a deal in a relatively peaceful pre-war environment.
Anyway, the Spathi don't necessarily need the worlds to support their population -- even if the growth rate is very low, the Spathi are the type to want lots of boltholes and secret hideouts and decoy worlds. Looking at what the Earthguard moonbase was like, their plan might have been to terraform Algol just to trick people into thinking they were settling there. Which makes the needless deaths of the Algolites just that much suckier.
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Art
Guest
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He doesnt, he just has to speak normally and maybe turn up the mic volume and lower the pitch.
What about the Umgah, Art?
Hee. That was more of a joke than anything else. The real problem is the act, not the voice -- the Captain has no access to the previous transmissions, knows almost nothing about the specifics of Ilwrath religion (other than, y'know, that they like killing and ripping and squelching and stuff) and isn't sure how far he can go with this whole thing without giving away that it's a ruse.
The main problem with the whole game is that it may be hard to get into Dogar and Kazon's character and absorb all that histrionic, slavish devotion with a straight face -- the Umgah were barely able to click off the mic before they started giggling.
Worth noting that the Umgah of all races probably have the least problem with customizing their voice, appearance, etc., what with their amorphous genetically engineerable bodies. That's probably one reason they do so many practical jokes -- for them it's easy. (And the Umgah caster probably has a built-in "Dogar and Kazon" voice preset to boot.)
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Sander Scamper
*Smell* controller
Offline
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I'm not a little teapot
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Damn Art, you must have a really boring job and a good internet connection or something. =p
Consider this...If a world was mad, and one man was sane, he would be considered the mad one.
If the entire world is obsessed with their religion, with no one to tell them wrong, then that anyone who disagrees is insane, and not worthy. So they are killed off, and eventually they all just go along with it, and find that they eventually like it (Everyones a little bloodthirst).
The way i work it around is that maybe its just gross, ideological ignorance, with a massive stubborness problem.
Maybe they don't know any better any more, and anyone who tries to stop them is wrong.
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"Oops!" KA-BOOM!!
"Space is a dangerous place where wimps eat flaming plasma death" -The Zot....or is it the Fot?? We may never know...unless the guy in the back tells us!
UQM/SC2 = World Peace.
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Art
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If the entire world is obsessed with their religion, with no one to tell them wrong, then that anyone who disagrees is insane, and not worthy. So they are killed off, and eventually they all just go along with it, and find that they eventually like it (Everyones a little bloodthirst).
The way i work it around is that maybe its just gross, ideological ignorance, with a massive stubborness problem.
Maybe they don't know any better any more, and anyone who tries to stop them is wrong.
Close. I've run out of other things to do before school starts again, and until then I'm living at home with only my PC for company. 
I think it probably is true that the whole Ilwrath race didn't start out the way it is now, and their nasty tendencies aren't really genetic despite our anti-spider phobias. The Dogar and Kazon cult just has a way of eliminating the competition. But in the end that just means that all the good Ilwrath are dead and evil Ilwrath survived; sure, there's deeper nuances than that, most likely, and everyone's actions are the results of complex histories and not simple moral choices. That doesn't actually excuse them any more than the complex history of the Middle East excuses crazy Al-Qaeda terrorists.
I still think there are plenty of logical ways to invent the Ilwrath's history that are consistent with the Pkunk's odd little deduction about the wraparound effect, and some sort of cultural revolution by religious fanatics type thing makes a lot of sense to me.
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Sander Scamper
*Smell* controller
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Posts: 408
I'm not a little teapot
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Like the good captain said. They would go well as a steak sauce.
True, Art, but Al-Quaeda are a minority, a VAST minority.
The Dogar and Kazon religion is species wide and is a way of life, and for a long time before they contacted other species (I assume) they stagnated for generations, with nothing to tell them that it was wrong.
?Modern? day Ilwrath are a product of what they were.
Theyre like children who were always told that torturing kittens and pulling wings off flies was Evil, and that being Evil was the correct thing. If that child grows to be 40, never meeting another human being, then when it does meet another human, it sure as hell would not change.
The Ilwrath are worse, because if they DO change, then their own priest cast (I'm assuming that a new priesthood replaced the anti channel 44's) will butcher them.
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"Oops!" KA-BOOM!!
"Space is a dangerous place where wimps eat flaming plasma death" -The Zot....or is it the Fot?? We may never know...unless the guy in the back tells us!
UQM/SC2 = World Peace.
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