Bandit LOAF said:
Attaching your own personal meanings to things and then passing them off as truths *is* insulting. If you take someone elses work and then use it to wave your own flag - hi, Privateer Remake jackasses - then you are in some sense belittling it.
But then I wonder how being certain that nothing intelligent can ever be present on a Wing Commander game is not a personal meaning, and claiming that any disagreement is insulting is not passing it as truth?
I don’t claim what I said about WC4 is something that should be imposed on others, but merely a reasonable interpretation made mostly from quotes present in the game. You happen to dislike parts of the game, the quotes and even more the interpretation, but that doesn’t make them either wrong or absurd.
You didn’t even reply to any of them directly, only mocked them. “Oh, see, I can make up stuff about WC, so that’s what’s Delance is doing!”
Bandit LOAF said:
You just repeated what I said in reverse. Except when I asked you to discuss what "he said" you....
Actually, you brought in the "war orders" argument, not me. You claimed it proved a point, not me. I said it didn’t prove or disprove anything. Then you said it didn’t prove my point, and of course I agree with that.
I didn’t claim your argument proved my point, just that it didn’t prove yours.
What it certainly doesn’t do is change the meaning of the quotes. On the Axius speech, Tolwyn says the Gen-select is and effective tool to make mankind stronger, and that it’s going to be used. Using it on A doesn’t mean it won’t be used on B.
Bandit LOAF said:
You need to take a new logic class; I'm not *proving* anything with my "fallacy" -- I'm only pointing out that it *can't* be used to prove your point. "Hornets are fighters" neither proves that the Hornet does or does not have mass drivers.
Now, if I were to, say, quote a novel about what kind of weapons the Hornet has, that might help my case...
Oh, wait.
Read back, you were trying to prove that the “we shall use it” quote didn’t meant exactly what it says comparing the Gen-Select with Nukes and Wrenches. Then you snipped my entire point and replied to an illustrative example.
I explained that nukes are nothing like Gen-select devices, and how they are completely useless if they are not used. It’s a secret, illegal weapon that would that had to remain hidden, had no effect as dissuasion, and was not a tactical necessity against the Border Worlds. Truman could make nukes useful without deploying them as a deterrent, a threat. The wrench was made to be used on specific things. The purpose of the bio-weapon is eugenics.
They were not stockpiling bio-weapons for fun. Tolwyn said the Gen-select was a “tool” he was going to “use” to make mankind stronger. But how could he do that in any other way other than deploying it?
Bandit LOAF said:
I'm pretty sure I addressed your vauge quote - I think I even went so far as to look up the actual quote instead of just referring to it.
I mentioned several quotes on the last message of the first page of this thread. In fact I even cross-referenced them with a specific argument. However you gave a generic response that didn’t even address any quote directly.
Bandit LOAF said:
This isn't some kind of creepy us vs. them scenario, and the fact that you think it is means you probably aren't involving yourself for the best of reasons. There are times when I agree with Delance - I think he was right about the whole Lance v. Excalibur thing ten years ago - and there are times when I disagree with him. This is one of the latter.
I have no problem at all with you not liking WC4, or thinking nothing intelligent can come out of WC, or not agreeing with my interpretation. I’m glad you think I was right Dragon vs Excalibur thing, even if you weren’t particularly vocal about it at the time. But the problem here seems to be considering conflicting interpretations about WC insulting, especially if they paint WC is slightly better lights.
And, let’s be fair, “we have a tool to do the job” and “we shall use it” have obvious meanings. Surely you can come up with some interpretation about how it means something else, but it would not be the only acceptable one, or be compatible with your previous concept that everything about WCIV was obvious devoid of subtlety.
Bandit LOAF said:
Does everything have to be backed up with a quote? It damn well better be, if it's countering another quote. I'm trying to deal with the fact that Tolwyn's plan makes no sense - which people have leveled *constantly* since WCIV came out. There's been this AGWC mentality assumption that he was going to immediately kill everyone in the world and hope that better people grew up and that this proves how truly evil he was - I'm suggesting that I think the plan was more subtle than that.
Oh, are you? It seemed that there was no room for subtly on WC!
But really, we are not countering quotes. If anything, you are. He said he was going to use it. And it’s not this single quote, but the scenes on Axius and Earth. Tolwyn built these bio-weapons to alter the genetic makeup of mankind, not to wipe out a few Border Worlds colonies.
The plan would make all of humanity a victim. Tolwyn wanted to play genetic engineer with mankind, the was Border Words was a justification, not the objective. As you can remember, the “threat” posed by the UBW was constructed by him, as they really didn’t stand a chance against Confed. It’s much easier to cover up illegal actions in the middle of a conflict. Anything unusual could be blamed on the Border Worlds, from Telamon to the kidnapping of the Bio-Convergence chemist and the theft of the Border Worlds laboratory.
Tolwyn had at his disposal stealth fighters capable of deploying the bio-weapons to any target. Even Earth’s defenses are no safeguard against a Dragon, or Lance Fighter. Those ships are overkill against the weak BW militia, but are the only means capable of secretly deploying bio-weapons on Confed territory.
The plan didn’t make sense but is explainable by it’s background on existing concepts. As for Tolwyn being evil, that’s another question. Not just greed and desire for power corrupts men, but also awfully misguided attempts to do something they would consider “good”, like “protecting” Confed. For Tolwyn, mankind was weak and faced extinction, so he had to alter it. No price on his mind would be too high to pay, and so he decided this end justified any means. The unbalance between means and ends, especially one that puts ideological ends as a justificatory for everything is very dangerous, especially with people in power.
The War messed up Tolwyn, but what potentialized it was his exposure and acceptance to the evil ideology that he spits out in every opportunity after Axius. It does seem that Tolwyn didn’t create that faction, but founded and supported it. Maybe it’s the old trick of wolf in sheep’s clothing. Maybe Tolwyn felt he was doing the greater good, I don’t know. Maybe he even realized it was evil, but felt it had to be done to avoid a greater one. That doesn’t exempt him for personal reasonability, but perhaps sheds a light on what happened.
His failure to tailor his ideas for the senate audience and just blurted it out like Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth” is movie cliché. It’s unlikely that the seasoned politician he became would make such a mistake, but it was necessary for storytelling.
Bandit LOAF said:
Okay - so... your claim is... what? That Wing Commander IV *didn't* use Nazi imagery to imply things about Tolwyn?
No, the claim is that they used more than that. One thing doesn’t prevent the other. It's just ironic that what you know consider obvious was subject to such heated debate, and what was obvious now is under debate.
