Trope-a-Day: Evil Luddite

Evil Luddite: Well, obviously. All Luddites are evil*.

(* Space Amish excepted, for obvious reasons.)

…as the assortment of asshats gathered under the banners of the Enforcers of Mortality, Biotist Alliance, Parents for Natural Children, Never Last, the Ecoprimacy System, etc., etc., would demonstrate. Unfortunately for them, since Rock does not in fact Beat Laser, only the most spectacularly hypocritical of them have a life expectancy greater than that of an ice cube in the photosphere.

Trope-a-Day: Well-Intentioned Extremist

Well-Intentioned Extremist: Plenty of them.  The Empire’s (and Rim Free Zone’s – not that they’re really coherent enough to spend much time dealing with them, unlike the Empire, which understands that they’re both staggeringly counterproductive and vaulting merrily across the Moral Event Horizon) principal embarrassment in this department are the dark side of the Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic (see: Fictional Political Party), the mostly-Renegade Blood of Tyrants, who take the view that literally any violent action is justified if the people you take it against represent a non-consensual government, or advocate a non-consensual government, or tolerate a non-consensual government, or are standing a bit too close to… well, you get the picture.

Other examples elsewhere in the Worlds that at least someone can evidently appreciate if they just hear the friendly version of their aims – and not the details or the methods – include the Enforcers of Mortality (who object to immortagens for a variety of reasons, from the philosophical to the purely self-interested), the biochauvinists of the Biotist Alliance and their slightly more justified digital-supremacist counterparts in the Electron Reign, the deep ecologists of the Ecoprimacy System, Parents for Natural Children and other less-friendly-sounding genetic purists, and the assortment of baseline-über-alles groups united under the Never Last umbrella.  And, of course, any number of species supremacists and other more classical whackos.

Lunacy. Lunacy never changes.

More Reactions

(to these events…)

“By vote of three to one, the Photonic Network abstaining, the Presidium of the Conclave finds no justification in the any of the Accords to disbar any species from signatory status or from signatory-member status on the basis of its origin.  By vote of three to zero, the Photonic Network and League of Meridian abstaining, the Presidium of the Conclave finds that homeworld status under the Common Volumetric Accord is properly granted to the first colonies of the temísi, arthál, and zal!en under the nomadic-species precedent set by the róthich in in re Rothichican.  And neither the Presidium nor the Conclave as a body has any further comment on this affair.  Please refer your questions to individual legations.  Thank you.”

– Peliakos Amvarixin ve-Sintich, spokesman for the Conclave

“‘Playing god?’ is it?  ‘Fake bodies and rootless environment’?  Oh-ho!  I scent the stink of Never Last, Parents for Natural Children, or some others of that baseline-uber-alles, rah-rah crowd upon that so-innocent article sent anonymously to the Router.  All they need is to mention impurifying their essence and we’d have the whole set.  Unless that’s what they meant by that ‘natural species’ emphasis which – speaking as one of the enthusiastically Reengineered Esseli Biosystem – they can shove right up their excretory vacuoles.”

“The soph’s an idiot.  Makes no sense at all.  Fictional government — all governments are fictional until you implement them, and with people like the Iltines and the Galians and the Vonnies out there, they can hardly do worse.  And as for culture, these new species may not have much self-generated culture now, but that’s a problem that will solve itself in just a few decades or centuries spent living.”

“I’d offer to grow him a new exocortex, but this much stupid’s got to be contagious.”

– GTTAAACATATGGAGGCCATACGA, letter to the Accord Journal

“It’s certainly not what we expected when we sold the rights to ith-Vinithinios.  And for myself – when we first heard about it, I thought it was the weirdest damned thing.  Just a game setting, you know, no more than that.  I and my design team just made them and their cultures and all the rest of it up for the sake of the story we wanted to tell.  It never crossed my mind – never crossed any of our minds – that people might actually want to live there.”

“Now?  Well, no offense intended to those involved, but it still seems a little weird.  But mostly, I think we’re proud of having invented peoples, places and cultures that they wanted to make real.  And I very much look forward to seeing what they do with them.”

– Camdal Essenye-ith-Haranye, lead designer, Mirajdíä Studios

“Oh, great.  Nice for them.  But how are we supposed to play the games now?”

– overheard in a skymall, at Asché (Lilium Drifts)