Imperial Slavery is still Slavery!
- Thread starter Chrisfs
- Start date
To be fair, I've seen Empire sub-factions provide the same mission. "Slaves" aren't tolerated anywhere.
I'm pretty sure I had a similar mission from the Pilots Federation to free "imperial slaves" too. Next time I see it I'll post it.
I've see "slaves" for sale legally in a lot of places (mostly in federation space) so they are tolerated quite widely.
HAHA, Ten Years a Slaver... that's rich.
Pirate sub-factions aside I don't think I've ever come across a station where slaves were legal, but maybe that just means I need to travel more
Out of curiosity, does the Pilots Federation ever post missions to take part in illegal activities e.g smuggling? Point being, do we know whether factions have access to specific missions or if its just a list of all possible missions with an RNG element attached to each, in order to accurately judge the stance of a specific faction on the missions it issues?
and you know what happens to those imperial slaves?
they get thrown in a homeless shelter full of sick people, where they slowly grow enfeebled and die, allt he while wishing to see their kids again they cant afford to see because no one hires a homeless person for nough money to live off of, let alone get passage off planet.
whereas if they remained imperial slaves, theyd see their family on the weekends, get payed and educated in new skills while in servitude, and once their debt is repayed are in a position to continue their life from where they left off, if not a better position, instead of being dumped on some random world with a homeless shelter.
In short, Emperor Palpatine only wanted to unite the galaxy to defned against the yuuzhong vong, the rebels adn their galactic federation were the evil incompetent ones, evidenced by the almost immedaite civil war that killed billions shortly after the rebels took over.
No it isn't, even in the year 2008, at the bankcrisis, they figured out what money as debt means. There is enough
money for the debt but never for the intrest, so that means that the servs are in perpetual slavery for they can
never pay of their debts, because the money for the intrest doesn't exists, and so they stay in perpertual slavery.
Only a general pardon from the emporer, or the intervention of slavefreeërs, can get them of their perpetual torment.
During the year 2727, His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Vitellius Duval purged our great civilization of the villainous bankers. Interest rates went with it.
The theme of human bondage throughout human history has similar tones. These cultures existed in a different time, one where those in power were better able to manage the image of what they purported slavery to be, and how there version of it is somehow 'ennobling' to those enslaved. You obviously missed this bit posted by BigBadB:
"Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced."
Hmmm, seems the American experience had some precedence. That's because it's slavery, which by it's very nature is demeaning and crippling to the human soul, for both slavemaster and slave alike. Give one man ultimate, unquestioned power over another man's existence, and just watch him fall into the depths of what a human being can sink to. Perhaps you should take some of your own advice - actually familiarize yourself with what 'slavery' actually was throughout history to different cultures.
Educate yourself before flying off half-cocked about things that you know quite literally almost nothing about.
Oh, this old chestnut. The problem is not capitalism, you nit. Capitalism, deeply flawed though it may be, has lifted more people out of poverty than your form of socialism ever could. The proof is in reality. Look around the world - countries fail or succeed proportional to how much they embrace the concept of free-market capitalism. The effect of mineral and other inherent resources to a country's natural potential for wealth is obviously a big part of prosperity as well, but Japan and the former Soviet Union are a great example of how embracing free-market capitalism can make a country weak in these gifts strong, and a country rich in them poor. Capitalism has given people like you and I the wealth to be able to spout off about this crap in the first place.
I'm not saying I believe in completely unrestricted capitalism, by the way. Anti-trust laws are important, as monopolies are harmful to a true free market. But punishing people who earn more by arbitrarily taking their wealth, and arbitrarily giving people who earn less that same wealth, WILL NOT solve the problem. You encourage the job creators to hoard and protect their wealth even more than they already do, and thus invest less wealth back into society, and you discourage people at the bottom to try and better their situations themselves by simply giving them things they didn't earn, and wouldn't have been able to make, not without... intervention.
And that's the problem - the intervention. A system where a government is empowered to take from one class to give to another naturally gives those in positions of power within the government A LOT of power. They use that power to seek more power, more control of our lives. Power corrupts, and more power does more of the same. You're willing to trade the 'yoke' of the corporation and big business for the chains of big government. You're willing to trade one form of centralization of capital and power for another. Personally, I don't want either.
A proper capitalist system IS a meritocracy, the truest of meritocracies! All parties are enriched proportional to how much they're willing to go out there and earn it. This takes not just physical hard work, but mental effort and hard work, too. 'Living wages' are the worst kind of trap - They encourage people to live in mediocrity. Minimum wage jobs don't pay much for a reason - They're meant to be a stepping stone to something better. I'm living this reality right now. I almost let myself get trapped in a minimum wage job, earning just enough to scrape by, but never enough to make the kind of life I wanted. I don't want the 'benevolent' hand of government giving me a 'living wage' - I want a job where I can earn a better wage myself.
I want a government that'll stop colluding with big business, one small enough and limited enough that it won't be ABLE to, and I want my government to stop pretending it has my best interests at heart when it only wants more power over my life, and will get the hell out of my way while I go and make something of myself, by my own effort!
TL;DR - Stop being lazy and read.
Yet, they also have the other kind of slave mission.
I'm reposting this here from my original thread on the subject, with some slight changes. Please give it a read...
"I've seen a number of people on the boards make the point that there is a fundamental difference between Imperial Slaves and 'regular', non-Imperial ones in the ED universe. They say that Imperial Slaves have it better than normal ones, making the point that the Imperial ones eventually get out of slavery once their debt has been payed, which is apparently why many Imperial citizens sell themselves into bondage to begin with. Normal Slaves get sold into bondage, and there is no escape. The argument is thus made that there is a fundamental moral difference between the two, and that this difference must always be kept in mind.
But this is the delusion, though - There is no difference, in the end, aside from semantics over which may be considered slightly more or less 'evil'. Slavery is slavery is slavery - It doesn't matter if you want to be enslaved or not. It's the same concept as supposedly legitimate 'elected dictatorships', as ancient Greek democracies often turned into, where people would vote away their freedoms for the supposed security and protection promised by a would-be despot. You cannot vote away your rights, any more than you can legitimately sell yourself into slavery, which is the same thing, essentially. As a human being, you can't give away your right to freedom - it's a permanent, unalienable right.
Our right to liberty, as with the rights to life and the pursuit of happiness, are fundamental to who we are as human beings. They are an inseparable part of our humanity.
I know that these arguments for slavery are almost completely done from a RP perspective, but the argument is a disturbing one, so I wanted to answer it in this post, just for GP. Thanks for your time"
"I've seen a number of people on the boards make the point that there is a fundamental difference between Imperial Slaves and 'regular', non-Imperial ones in the ED universe. They say that Imperial Slaves have it better than normal ones, making the point that the Imperial ones eventually get out of slavery once their debt has been payed, which is apparently why many Imperial citizens sell themselves into bondage to begin with. Normal Slaves get sold into bondage, and there is no escape. The argument is thus made that there is a fundamental moral difference between the two, and that this difference must always be kept in mind.
But this is the delusion, though - There is no difference, in the end, aside from semantics over which may be considered slightly more or less 'evil'. Slavery is slavery is slavery - It doesn't matter if you want to be enslaved or not. It's the same concept as supposedly legitimate 'elected dictatorships', as ancient Greek democracies often turned into, where people would vote away their freedoms for the supposed security and protection promised by a would-be despot. You cannot vote away your rights, any more than you can legitimately sell yourself into slavery, which is the same thing, essentially. As a human being, you can't give away your right to freedom - it's a permanent, unalienable right.
Our right to liberty, as with the rights to life and the pursuit of happiness, are fundamental to who we are as human beings. They are an inseparable part of our humanity.
I know that these arguments for slavery are almost completely done from a RP perspective, but the argument is a disturbing one, so I wanted to answer it in this post, just for GP. Thanks for your time
"Are you not bothered at all by the fact that you're RPing a slaver? Not to mention you're a foot soldier for a dictatorship. You might find that fun and amusing - I find it disturbing. It's like roleplaying a National Socialist or a member of the SS or something - It just seems wrong. I get that people like to roleplay, but how can you WANT to play the role of slaver? I don't think I'll ever understand the draw...
I'm reposting this here from my original thread on the subject, with some slight changes. Please give it a read...
"I've seen a number of people on the boards make the point that there is a fundamental difference between Imperial Slaves and 'regular', non-Imperial ones in the ED universe. They say that Imperial Slaves have it better than normal ones, making the point that the Imperial ones eventually get out of slavery once their debt has been payed, which is apparently why many Imperial citizens sell themselves into bondage to begin with. Normal Slaves get sold into bondage, and there is no escape. The argument is thus made that there is a fundamental moral difference between the two, and that this difference must always be kept in mind.
But this is the delusion, though - There is no difference, in the end, aside from semantics over which may be considered slightly more or less 'evil'. Slavery is slavery is slavery - It doesn't matter if you want to be enslaved or not. It's the same concept as supposedly legitimate 'elected dictatorships', as ancient Greek democracies often turned into, where people would vote away their freedoms for the supposed security and protection promised by a would-be despot. You cannot vote away your rights, any more than you can legitimately sell yourself into slavery, which is the same thing, essentially. As a human being, you can't give away your right to freedom - it's a permanent, unalienable right.
Our right to liberty, as with the rights to life and the pursuit of happiness, are fundamental to who we are as human beings. They are an inseparable part of our humanity.
I know that these arguments for slavery are almost completely done from a RP perspective, but the argument is a disturbing one, so I wanted to answer it in this post, just for GP. Thanks for your time
Your 'Rights' are a contradiction. By your definition a person cannot sell his/her self into slavery and yet, we see that they can.
A person may have the right to life, but when that life can be taken it is no longer a right, but a privilege. We Imperials recognize this, that what we have are an agreed upon set of privileges.
Roleplaying aside, what you need to realize is that what we're discussing here is a twist on slavery, a fictional concept of what might it be like if we were in a society where such a thing was seen as an honorable recourse. Where the 'rules' that define it were very different from what we might know of slavery.
For some it's an interesting thing to explore, because its all fiction.
I don't expect agreement to this, nor am I going to enter line by line rebuttal territory, but to help you "understand the draw"...
Why the 'bad guy'? Because it's more interesting trying to do that well, without descending into 'generic murderhobo no.1', than playing a straight lace good guy.
Why the Empire? Because they are a lot more interesting and colourful than the generic gunmetal grey corporate dystopia that is the Federation. I honestly feel no bigger problem with their policies than I feel when I play a wargame (Unity of Command, Combat Mission etc) as the Germans. And no, I don't play axis exclusively, or even mainly.
Why a slaver? Well why not? In a game that largely centres round killing people in one form or another, I'm not convinced there is any compelling difference between, say, piracy and slavery in terms of how 'nice' the participants in their real life equivalents were. No amount of rot about noble corsairs and letters of marque can disguise that their real life counterparts were murderers, thieves and rapists that preyed on the weak (a trend that continues to this day).
I'm not going to feel a single moment of guilt about playing an unsavoury character in a fictional dystopian universe a thousand years on the future.
And for the record, I do not support or condone real life slavery. Or piracy for that matter. Game/RP <> Reality
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this is space scifi fantasy future, not america, the whole "you cant vote away your inalienable rights", well whos to decide what those rights are? did a couple old dudes who got about taxes to a king, who i might add also had slaves and were perfectly OK with it, even considering it "lifting the poor savages from the muck of the jungle", somehow make a decision that dictates what every other culture's moral standpoint is because of what THEY thought was "right"?
fact is, in the empire, if you gave a citizen the choice between indentured servitude or starving in the streets without a home or job, hed pick indentured servitude, because it has a definitive end-period aswell as promise of standard living conditions while bound to contract, and theyd be happy with it. thats their culture, thats what is "right" to them. who are you to morally judge something as "wrong" simply because it deviates from your somehow god-given culture?