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+--- Thread: My thoughts on vigilantism on Discovery. (/showthread.php?tid=121588)
My thoughts on vigilantism on Discovery. - Corile - 10-10-2014
First, please note the entirety of this post is an OPINION. You have to right to disagree, but do this in a civil way, please. I might be rambling in places.
Also, please don't change this into another \V/ feedback thread. It's not a good idea.
Quote:Vigilantes are usually people who enforce law or even "higher good" using all ways including violence and methods which are considered illegal from law point of view.
Quote:police should treat them as any other unlawful/criminal, and that is actually what they do...taking law in their own hands...killing and beating to satisfy their own justice.
Quote:Vigilante, what is it. Let's say Batman is a Vigilante, so is Spiderman - both hunted by the police. Why? Because they have no jurisdiction.
Some random quotes taken from \V/ feedback thread. All breaking down on the meaning of the word 'vigilante'. All failing to understand something that was said before ('faction name is arbitrary' repeated like ad nauseam). And if it weren't enough in and of itself, language evolves and in my honest opinion that word would probably mean something way different. Hell, over the last hundred years it changed its meaning very drastically, so what would happen in the next thousand?
There were and are various ways to interpret it. There's the one people consider valid and that is valid in the current days. We have to remember though that realities are changed in Discovery roleplay.
See, during the good old wild western times (that was over 100 years ago) the term 'vigilante' was incredibly broad because there was no actual law enforcement anywhere, so technically everyone who defended themselves could be called a vigilante. The thing is, you could by the same token call KKK vigilantes as you could call civilian people that know to use a firearm assisting the military because they felt that's something they wanted to do*.
I had known what \V/ were supposed to be but had never actually realised that until Spazzy wrote a post that quite frankly opened my eyes on some things that I feel are sometimes misinterpreted.
Quote:I never...actually realized just how medieval this game is. Just how bizarrely old the overall world is. Starting from something as simple as the value of a human life even.
Have you noticed this?
Just how quick we are to destroy a hostile target. The penalties for house space rules. The overall encounter between two sentient human beings regardless of their affiliation, age or experience. It is almost as brutal and straightforward as what we would usually tie to the generic ye-oldie setting.
Liberty is a house torn in a war between two other houses - Rheinland and Gallia. Also, it's getting destroyed from the inside by Outcasts, Rogues, Hackers, Xenos and Hellfire Legion. Why anyone in a sensible mind would even care about vigilantes in such place? In my honest opinion Liberty would need every hand they can get and hating a group of essentially free bounty hunters because of the fact that they sometimes shoot one SNAC too many makes literally no sense for me.
Imagine a situation from the middle ages. There's a merchant, let's call him Steve. Steve travels from one city to another and carries some goods to sell. Sounds familiar? To go from the first city to the other Steve needs to pass through a forest that is known to be a nest of highwaymen. He doesn't have the money or time to hire a mercenary, cannot ask an actual city guard or a soldier to assist him on the way so he kind of has to rely on his pure luck that he doesn't get robbed.
Now let's apply the same situation to Disco. Say you're a trader and you enter Liberty from Cortez (I'm kind of oversimplifying here because I can't be arsed to check actual prices for stuff). You need to get to Colorado. The chances you get pirated on the way are quite high because you didn't get an escort (because no money, nobody around, whatever) and there's no LPI online. You again need to rely on some pure luck that you won't get pirated.
Okay, so Steve left the town and is scared because he can't afford to stay to wait for someone willing to help him. But he, luckily, meets a white knight-errant in a shining armour that is going to willingly escort him because he's looking for some evil to slain and that forest really needs to be cleaned off scumbag wayside robbers. And he won't ask for any money, just maybe some supplies. What'd Steve do?
That's kind of my entire point. On Discovery, in a house that would, sensibly, need every sort of help it can get it would be quite dumb to throw off and outlaw people that are willing to help you and don't want anything for it. A charity police, if you will. Enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.
We often associate vigilantism with anarchy and unnecessary brutality. Remember it doesn't have to be that way. There are various ways you can take up the topic.
* - taken from K. May's novel Winnetou II
RE: My thoughts on vigilantism on Discovery. - Thyrzul - 10-11-2014
Calling yourself something you are not also helps a lot to be treated like something you are not. That is an other thing been repeated like ad nauseam in \V/'s feedback thread. You were often confronted with not behaving like vigilantes while calling yourselves vigilantes, to which the common response was the "arbitrary choice of name" excuse, implying you have had no intention to look and act anything like vigilantes in the first place. However at later points of the feedback thread you explained your choice of ID as being the closest of what the old Vigilante ID used to be, which then implies that you do have the intention to behave like vigilantes. Keep in mind that such contradictions can undermine your credibility quite fast.
Language evolves, that's a good observation, but it still doesn't mean that you can take a word, render a different ("arbitrary") meaning to it, start using it as such and then expect people to interpret it the way you do. Language evolves through the consensus of all of those speaking it, and in the case of the word "vigilante" there was obviously none here.
Anyways, I don't really understand where did you get the idea of "realities are changed in Discovery" or what exactly you mean by it.
And then there is the part where you take a quote from Spazzy to support your concept, totally forgetting that the harsh world Spazzy described Disco as happens to be this way simply because it has been developed around a space sim lacking game mechanics for jailing, judical courts and several other modern-day concepts of such kind.
About the significance of vigilantes in a Liberty struck by two wars and several other internal and external enemies... splinter civilian groups begining to act upon their own arbitrary interpretation of the law and the general concept of what's good and what's bad instead of following the overal house-wide consensus about such topics is just one more step towards chaos. Vigilantes should be treated with at least the same significance as other internal threats, such as Rogues, Hackers, Xenos, etc.
Steve is not the government, Steve is an individual. You first talk about the relation of authorities and vigilantes, and then bring the relation of an individual and a vigilante. I'm not sure what is your point here, but the two doesn't have to be the same. While Robin Hood and his Merry Men aligned themselves with the people, effectively maintaining good relations with them, they were still considered thieves, outlaws, hunted by the Sheriff and his men, their relation being quite bad. Thinking a little bit of it, the closest thing to a vigilante faction currently is most probably the Hellfire Legion.
You presented a seemingly pro-vigilante opinion and tried to support it's potential necessity with medieval analogies. My intention with this wall of text and point addressing is to provide a counter, and I could just as well bring analogies from various times of our history, just think about the people of France taking law and power into their own hands during the French Revolution, think about how good it was at first and how horrible it turned out to be later.
The tendency is that vigilante movements begin in good faith and with the intention to cooperate with the actual authorities, who maybe more often than not reply with denial mostly due to lack of competence or questionable methods from the vigilantes. Over time the cooperation ceases to exist and the two sides begin to work parallel, up until the point of the first clashes resulting from the conflicts of the original law and the new set of rules the vigilante group created to regulate their own existence and actions. If we inspect the fine details of the event series, we can see that the whole can make up to a logical chain of events. It may not have to be this way, but usually is.
Vigilantism is often, if not always, a response to actual social issues not treated the way they should have been. Such could be the case of Xenos, where a group of miners turned xenophobic terrorists to keep foreign corporations away from Liberty, corporations they blame for their bankrupcy, poorness, famine and related issues. As such, these movements align themselves with the people, just as in your example, but at the same time they align themselves against other people. The difference of their moral code from the authorial law is a two-edged blade: they can hit the guilty where the law cannot due to bureaucracial problems, gaps, or other issues, but with wrong judgement it can also hit the innocent deemed erroreously guilty. It has it's pros as well as it's cons.
TL;DR - Where the job of the authorities is to maintain order, the presence and activity of vigilantes are one more step towards chaos. From this logically comes that as preferences collide, so will these two sides, regardless of what happens with the idividual civilian.
Whew what a wall of text...
Language evolves, that's a good observation, but it still doesn't mean that you can take a word, render a different ("arbitrary") meaning to it, start using it as such and then expect people to interpret it the way you do. Language evolves through the consensus of all of those speaking it, and in the case of the word "vigilante" there was obviously none here.
Anyways, I don't really understand where did you get the idea of "realities are changed in Discovery" or what exactly you mean by it.
And then there is the part where you take a quote from Spazzy to support your concept, totally forgetting that the harsh world Spazzy described Disco as happens to be this way simply because it has been developed around a space sim lacking game mechanics for jailing, judical courts and several other modern-day concepts of such kind.
About the significance of vigilantes in a Liberty struck by two wars and several other internal and external enemies... splinter civilian groups begining to act upon their own arbitrary interpretation of the law and the general concept of what's good and what's bad instead of following the overal house-wide consensus about such topics is just one more step towards chaos. Vigilantes should be treated with at least the same significance as other internal threats, such as Rogues, Hackers, Xenos, etc.
Steve is not the government, Steve is an individual. You first talk about the relation of authorities and vigilantes, and then bring the relation of an individual and a vigilante. I'm not sure what is your point here, but the two doesn't have to be the same. While Robin Hood and his Merry Men aligned themselves with the people, effectively maintaining good relations with them, they were still considered thieves, outlaws, hunted by the Sheriff and his men, their relation being quite bad. Thinking a little bit of it, the closest thing to a vigilante faction currently is most probably the Hellfire Legion.
You presented a seemingly pro-vigilante opinion and tried to support it's potential necessity with medieval analogies. My intention with this wall of text and point addressing is to provide a counter, and I could just as well bring analogies from various times of our history, just think about the people of France taking law and power into their own hands during the French Revolution, think about how good it was at first and how horrible it turned out to be later.
The tendency is that vigilante movements begin in good faith and with the intention to cooperate with the actual authorities, who maybe more often than not reply with denial mostly due to lack of competence or questionable methods from the vigilantes. Over time the cooperation ceases to exist and the two sides begin to work parallel, up until the point of the first clashes resulting from the conflicts of the original law and the new set of rules the vigilante group created to regulate their own existence and actions. If we inspect the fine details of the event series, we can see that the whole can make up to a logical chain of events. It may not have to be this way, but usually is.
Vigilantism is often, if not always, a response to actual social issues not treated the way they should have been. Such could be the case of Xenos, where a group of miners turned xenophobic terrorists to keep foreign corporations away from Liberty, corporations they blame for their bankrupcy, poorness, famine and related issues. As such, these movements align themselves with the people, just as in your example, but at the same time they align themselves against other people. The difference of their moral code from the authorial law is a two-edged blade: they can hit the guilty where the law cannot due to bureaucracial problems, gaps, or other issues, but with wrong judgement it can also hit the innocent deemed erroreously guilty. It has it's pros as well as it's cons.
TL;DR - Where the job of the authorities is to maintain order, the presence and activity of vigilantes are one more step towards chaos. From this logically comes that as preferences collide, so will these two sides, regardless of what happens with the idividual civilian.
Whew what a wall of text...