My understanding of Nomads is that you can do anything to yourself or others if there is consent. Bring others into danger without consent then you will be airlocked on Corregidor (if Gangbangers beat each other up, like hooligans, then it's ok, because both sides give each other consent to use violence), transferred to the Morlock Gruppe in Bakunin and on Tunguska nobody cares (or maybe you have to pay a fine). That's why the shady shit like the kids experiments got expelled from Bakunin and ended up on Tunguska.
There's probably more shades of grey to it but that's exactly how I see these things for Corregidor and Bakunin also. Tunguska - I think money is power there and everything might be done to anyone for a sufficient price. Tunguska are like a goverment that uses people to gain 'freedom' to do it's dirty bussiness. They fund Bakunin and Corregidor to use them as shield and muscle. Don't think they care for anyones consent. They are the Bank after all. :)
Nope, why would you think that? O_o I can participate in these discussions without wanting to play the faction. And note, I never said Nomads should not exist in Infinity universe or anything similar, in fact, it is good that they exist. Just lets not kid ourselves about what Nomads really do. Except that's not really true. There are good individuals from Nomad faction, sure; even maybe some whole good Bakunin modules (Riot Grrlz don't seem to have any downside according to lore that I know of). However, culturally as a whole they tolerate slavery (explicitly mentioned in one of the blurbs about chimera/pupnik waiting for the return of her master, and also more generally implied in other blurbs) or letting their citizens die if they cannot provide for themselves (implicit, but clear following from Corregidor lore). Not to mention the newest Tunguska unit - they trust them to fight because the brains are in a jar, easily accessible for control? Suddenly Yu Jing's Kuang-Shi have a bro unit! Err, what else could they experiment with?! Also, nowhere in Nomad lore is consent mentioned that I know of. Closest you have is Bakunins "don't harm group spirit", but hey, so long as you can get people without making noise (either at the time or by having no-one to make noise afterwards), no foul. :) There is a huge difference between existing to protect rights of people, and existing to prevent gang wars. ^^ Corregidor and Bakunin are a real libertarian paradises (of different flavours) :) The strong survive.
They can just leave Corregidor if they don't want to work. They don't get to eat off our plates. There's nothing to spare, we fix leaks. If you have 80% of the food required for a healthy diet demanding part of that is the aggressive action, not you refusing. It's not an ideal society, ideal societies don't have a permanent shortage of basic living requirements.
No they are anarchists! Tunguska is the anarchocapatilist/liberterain state/nonstate. The consent idea is not mentioned, because its the basic rule of anarchism. And regarding slavery, Pupniks are pets, which by definition have always an owner. Otherwise they are just animals. Of course they line is blurred there a bit but since you can make an argument for both the Nomad government can't make a law against it. And Corregidor letting people starve comes from the direct opposite: if you don't contribute to the community you aren't welcome to benefit of it's percs, like food, air and shelter. This is a know fact there so everybody knows what they are getting into, even kids get it taught as soon as they can understand and they are free to leave if they think it's dumb, but that's just the law and the only real law they need to function. It's very harsh but not libertarian. It does have more in common with socialism.
They're some degree of socialism/communism but exactly where is hard/impossible to define. edit: also not everything fits in to industrial era ideology I guess.
While true in political theory, there is not one shred of evidence anywhere in the lore that any of the 3 ships actually care about anyones consent except in the sense that that individual has the power and influence to make it relevant. Errrr... Yeah, I mixed up a bit Pupniks (human-animal hybrids) and Morlocks (modified humans). However, Pupnik being non-human animals doesn't help much as they're still quite close to humans and the way they use them (sex & fighting) does not speak well of society which accepts it as normal. Not that Morlock lore is much better: "From that moment onwards, that individual will add something positive to the ship. They will dose him with MetaChemistry serums to keep his violent impulses controlled until the battle comes." And what when you are unable for whatever reason to contribute? Hello darkness my old friend... Except the only way to leave is through an air lock - unless you have the money to pay for your trip out. It's easy to say "you are welcome to leave if you don't like it", it's hard to actually do it when you don't have anywhere to go. I see you are not a student of political theory - the idea that you need to work just to have the basic necessities of life is pretty much the antithesis to socialism. But lets not get into that discussion here and now - PM me or open a thread in Offtopic if you really want to have it. Point is that Nomad society accepts and even eschews a set of values which place individual and strength over anything else; and individual is only worth by however much he can do and what power he wields.
Basically socialism consumes resources without considering the source. In famine you just wait for your potatoes in the mail problem solved. Corregidor has communal labor and resources. The good and bad is felt equally. Anyone can find work they can physically do and it always provides enough to live. It's whatever that is called.
Morlocks are criminals (by the standards of Bakunin). The Morlock units are effectively penal regiments where individuals are held accountable for the consequences of their actions. You can absolutely leave them though (Bran) Pupniks are an acknowledge 'this isn't really cool' area: from what you see in the fluff it's clear that Pupnik fighting or sex is seen in a similar way to dog-fighting in the West today: consequently it's not mainstream and even by Bakunin's standards is seen as depraved. And yeah Nomads aren't the 'light and fluffy' faction. No faction in the Human Sphere is. Hell the most accurate way to describe the Observance is "a fundamentalist cult of psuedo-Christian feminazis". But if you don't like morally grey, don't play Infinity.... actually play CA: they're the least morally reprehensible faction.
I'm starting to think that the 'modifications' for dolphins are mostly just enough to translate their thoughts into words people can understand. They certainly act as smart as the Great Apes, which means bordering on sentient. And once you can talk, it's really hard to deny sentience. I don't mean 'repeat words', I mean 'hold a conversation'. There also seems to be something of a bootstrapping effect, as the children of animals used in these various intelligence studies tend to be smarter than their parents (I think it's early-childhood use of words, actually). Did y'all hear about the time the US Navy found a hundred+ year old torpedo? There's a Marine Mammal unit in San Diego (they're out towards Point Loma, if you live there), and they were out practicing when the dolphins indicated a found torpedo. The stupid humans ignored the dolphin(s) the first time, but it kept indicating, 'no dummy, there really is something there!'. So they gave the critter a line and told it to plant the line (normal events, the dolphins find the things and a human goes to check it out). Divers look at it and realize that it's a 130-year-old weapon! And the Navy does take care of their animals (whether Working Dog, Sea Lion, or Dolphin): the animal is given a higher rank than it's handler, which makes abusing the animal the crime of assaulting a superior. Considering that Morlocks are best described as violent psychotics off their meds, it's not too different from what we do now. People are only sentenced to Die Morlock Gruppen when they have demonstrated that they violently refuse to play well with others. And having a commlog means that your implanted drug-dispenser won't run out without getting refilled.
Except you aren't participating in the discussion. You're on a Tunguska thread trying to argue about the morality of Nomads. Make your own troll thread if you want, but don't try to pass your posts off as discussing TJC. No faction in Infinity has the moral high ground. They all have a dark side.
I think that in the Nomad nation people live with a few explicit rights, just like everywhere. But then there is a differentiation based on different areas, and also the Nomads have a very different legal focus for their legislation. As they live in space, they probably have incredibly strict laws and harsh punishments for stuff like threatening the integrity of the vessel, putting others at risk etc. But at the same time, probably very few limitations on personal activities in your own personal space. Like taking shitloads of drugs? Go ahead! Although if you turn up to your shift on a ship maintenance system high, we'll throw you out of an airlock, summary justice. And on that topic of summary justice, I imagine that in the Nomad Nation there is much more of a concept of citizens keeping their own affairs in line and handling minor breaches. If someone assaults someone, then the locals are expected to step in and stop the fray. But that's probably more in Corregidor, and here we hit on another subject; the Nomad Nation is really three quite distinct social structures who assist each other and mutually collaborate on certain things in order for all of them to get what they really want; for nobody to tell them what to do. In Bakunin, the common areas are basically run by commonly held consent based rules, enforced by the moderators. In the habs? Whatever they decide in that hab, you can't tell us what to do, although there are absolutely groups who are rejected from Bakunin for being too fucked up, and that does insinuate that all the habs are held to a certain base standard. But it's basically a place for whatever minor group or whatever to come and live in their own space and still be part of a wider social structure, which has it's benefits. In Corregidor, it's a pretty anarcho-socialist textbook society, but also at the same time, it's founding wasn't that of a "we are going to build utopia" but rather that they had to pull together and work together or all die. They had to learn to coexist and have a certain basic social contract, but it's the social contract of a resource starved ship with millions of inhabitants trying to stay alive; do your job, don't fuck with other people, and other than that we don't care what you do, but with the flipside being that if you don't do your job and you fuck with other people then the consequences can be pretty swift and brutal. For other people, that's messed up, for Corregidorans, they like it that way and it means they can keep a functioning, non-horrific society in the situation they live in without it all falling apart. And then in Tunguska again, it's basically a free-trade city like Dubai which doesn't give a shit where you got your money, it's safe here and we don't fuck with each other in this place, because it's bad for business. It's anarcho-capitalist except at the same time it's not supposed to be a whole self-sustained social unit, it's essentially a dark underbelly to the Sphere, knows that, makes money off that, and expects that people living on Tunguska are going to be part of one of the many groups with interests there. Your average citizen is tied to one of these groups in the same way that when you go to a massive business conference, everyone there is part of some external group or another who has representatives and an office etc. So you don't have the same kind of social requirements or expectations, and I imagine a lot of Tunguska's laws are about it being quiet, peaceful, let people get on with their jobs, don't fuck with other people because that disturbs things, and if you do then the justice is pretty harsh and summary but it's from a definitely arbitrary body which everyone agrees is needed. So yeah. Multiple very different social systems working side by side as a larger unit to protect themselves and avoid external intrusion limiting their freedom. I actually think that being a Nomad citizen on the whole is probably pretty good in terms of personal rights and freedoms, you can essentially do whatever you want to yourself and rely on the protection of the system around you, and because the Nomad Nation is kind of a stopvalve on the pressures of the rest of the Sphere it's not really dealing with the same average person as they are in PanO say, but at the same time, I imagine they don't really have the whole Demogrant population in the same way that PanO does either. In the Nomad Nation everyone probably has a job and even if you couldn't find one you wanted you'd be given one, which in the future Sphere is unusual in of itself. You don't really tend to see a lot of Nomads who don't want to be Nomads and like the freedom it gives them etc. I imagine that nobody grows up with a lack of interest in the society they are part of, you either support it or you leave, and they don't mind that, and they expect people to come and join all the time. So it's a fluid, changing society too, much more than typical nation-states. So yeah Nomads, complicated. Interesting. Not as bad as they are being made out to be, but at the same time, definitely an unusual, fringe, sometimes shocking society which is happy with stuff that other societies are not, and also is hugely diverse, complex and weird within.
Pretty good summary Solar and absolutely in line with my on understanding/interpretation of the Nomad fluff! To be fair, I moved the discussion with Nemo No Name to PM and we did have a very good discussion with interesting questions and arguments for both sides. One interesting question is how do Nomads treat their sick, old, or otherwise misfortunes. I don't think there are any clues on that topic in the fluff, so it comes down to a personal view of anarchism/human nature. F.e. on Corrigidor old people could be supported by friends, family, volunteers or send out the airlock, if they are to big of a burden on the community and can't contribute in any meeningful way anymore (maybe they even commit suicide themselves, instead of being forced, could also be a mix of everything). Both are a valid interpretation given the fluff.
If someone is willing to support someone else that is in the fluff. I don't know how strong familial ties are thou. I doubt old age happens much on Corregidor.
Euthanasia is probably endemic amongst Corregidor's incapable old. But there's probably also a chunk of baked in 'elderly person' work parties. Child care for the young I expect would be performed by the elderly, for instance. I kinda expect that Bakunin acts as the release valve for both Corregidor and Tunguska. Get to the point where you can't meet the standards (age or the social contract more generally) of those two motherships and move to Bakunin: find your home or you'll end up in the Morlocks. Metachemistry as anti-aging medicine. Also I find Hollowmen really interesting. It's plausible that Tunguska hasn't solved the issues with Sheut Sickness and that they're kind of a debtors jail that persists post Lhost death. The other interesting thing is that effectively there is no rebirth lottery amongst Nomads: if you get a new Lhost it's because someone paid the Black Labs for one. So you can't just have faith it'll all work out.
I suspect that the entire habs kicked out of Bakunin were ones that refused to abide by the 'leave me the fuck alone' social contract. Do whatever the hell you want in your own hab, but in the common areas you don't get to proselytize or preach.
Exactly why I'm against the idea of Kusanagi (or anyone in Bakunin) getting CoC. Why would members of varied Habs immediately obey the leader of one random Hab? The only reasonable choice is AVA 5 and Fireteam:Core.
