I have to point out that real life politics are best to be avoided and accusations against nations is not advisable to have.
Oh I agree Uprising could be twice as fat and centre on the build up, or be left on buildup and not the action and maybe some people would like it some would not, but the decision was made to have uprising on the time the buildup was done and the action happened, all reports are retroactively tracking down what happened and how easy, in retrospect, was to figure it out.
@BenMoss just to make sure we are talking about the same IS that is a true paramilitary organisation, does not care to hide they carry lethal weapons and no non lethal weapons (except a few madtraps here and there) whose units have a reputations of been violent and repressive, who not only turn citizens who do not agree with the party/ imperial line to human bombs and whose enforcer units have such a bad reputation that an actual superior needs to be seen supervise them to hold the biggest excesses? The ones who decided the best way to deal with the rise of boldness in gangs criminal activity was a full out war in the backstreets of Yu Jing cities? Because they, well, they seem quite capable of shooting what they see as traitors and try to suppress a rebellion in a way that the actual state army is appalled.
Well, a full on war to crush the triads is probably the correct response to those triads attacking courthouses with paramilitary forces. In that situation, shoot first and forget about the questions is a reasonable (not correct, just reasonable) attitude for the Bao Troops to display. As for Kuang Shi, the degree of dissent is pretty high - Lee Harvey Oswald, not MLK would be "recruited" according to the actual published background; your head-canon is setting the bar much lower than the writing prior to Uprising. Furthermore, it wasn't the IS who decided the war on crime should be a real war; they were created as a result of that war being waged by the triads. All of this is in the background , not in my head-canon. What irks is the persistent claim that I and others are just making it up, even when page references are given. "It was always that way and if you can't see it then it's your fault for not being able to read or for being too stupid to understand" is an unsatisfactory response whether in humour or in seriousness. If I can't see how Gutier is able to craft an internally consistent narrative by reading that narrative, the problem is not my reading comprehension. Implying or directly stating that it is, is an insult, intended or not. Denying that it's an insult makes it worse, not better.
See, what would make this claim believable is an apology or at least a clarification - "I'm sorry, I meant that... not that you were too stupid to understand." However, your quote was my sig for over a year and not once was there any hint from you that you didn't mean to say I was stupid. Instead when I called you out on it, I was banned for a month. I hate that we're still talking about Uprising, but like I said earlier, there's obviously still a problem THAT CB IS NOT ACKNOWLEDGING OR ATTEMPTING TO RESOLVE. I don't want to care about Uprising, I want to love the beautiful IA models and get hyped for Defiance.
Fair enough, the examples were used for illustrative purposes only as they were familiar; new examples edited in.
I didn't get the reference, but google gave me this: Spoiler Gay Men's Sexual Stories: Getting It! - Page 65 - Google Books Resulthttps://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=1560233192 Was that the right one?
As much as is possible, given that we are talking about geopolitics. As to the Kuang Shi, the RPG has some details about them: Emphasis mine. That's from page 11 of the YJ splatbook, which is official canon approved by Gutier/Interruptor. So I'm not sure that Manning, Berghdahl, or Snowden would have reached the level of getting Kuang Shi'd. Yeah, I know modern politics, but how else do you quantify the level of seditionists and traitors than to use actual examples from history?
"The art of the deal" may have Trump's name on it, but only the completely clueless aren't aware that it was ghost-written FOR him. The actual writer has come out publicly to say he regretted ever working with him and also donated his entire payment AND all royalties to various charities, btw. For a man so "good at deals" his university, steak houses and casinos (which themselves are a licence to print money) being absolute frauds and losses are a bit of an indictment.
Since when has Pan-O meddling been disproved? The story covered the roles of the Kuge, and shasvaasti meddling was also implicated. and to segway a bit, this is probably endemic of a lot of the discussion. The information given was a snippet of the event and people are concluding the entire event to be homogeneous with these snippets. There is plenty of scope for later stories to cover so many angles of this event. Thats the style of Infinity fluff, its like writing prompts. When treated as a comprehensive summary of everything, its obviously going to have holes.
The mere fact that @psychoticstorm has basically never been able to bring Pan-O up even once as responsible is telling. Hexahedron should be his go-to for defending this unfortunate piece of fluff, yet the only time when Pan-O is worth mentioning is when making note how powerful Pan-O are so that Yu Jing can't respond militarily (which doesn't quite match what I've gathered from the fluff) Basically it's all being defended with all of the wrong reasons in the most unconvincing way.
@psychoticstorm sorry you right shouldn't have use modern world exemples. I wanted to show that this kind of things already happen. Well everybody made his point. I like uprising background (less that Paradisio campaign, but much more than 3rd offensive). You don't. Maybe a majority on this forum doesn't. I agree to disagree on this. PS : I regret they did not create a full campaign out of each of these event. Well we get the narrative scenarios at least ...
I really hope the "no actual politics are to be used here" does not mean "reality is not allowed at all", because frankly we are entering positions in which the only way to reasonably expect humanity to endure the next book is if Aleph is ALREADY the mastermind and ruler in the shadows of the Human Sphere, due to the sheer lack of capability displayed by all human rulers. You confuse quality and quantity. In writing, they are not interchangeable. I would have pruned all those "extras" to most of the paragraphs in Third Offensive and cram the Dire Foes & Mercenary companies there, and devote the full length of the Uprising book *only* to Uprising. And that means more than a timeline taking twenty pages because of triple spacing between each date. Please be aware that what we play on tables is what happens when the game's afoot. I don't remember the Fasid in Red Veil being inside a port-a-potty, but directly deployed when the mission starts. And the IS are the "political police". The intelligence services are the Yǎnjīng, and those do go around discreetely. Yes, incompetence, stupidity and disregard for collateral damage, especially when you are shelling your own territory needlessly, tends to get those reactions from professional soldiers. You know, there are three kind of military sci-fi writers: those who know what they talk about, those who don't, and those who deal in such alien situations it doesn't matter (but need to build the situation and provide a reference for the reader). And I'm not even getting into the quality of the work. That's 'cause his Caribbean yatch is not capable of emerging after an inmersion. At least his expy on the Jennifer Morgue book *had* a submersible at hand, and an excuse for a lot of quirks. Sadly, PanO's "intelligence actions" are either nil, or totally passive in Uprising, them being presented as oportunistic militaristics ready to pound on YJ in illegal, at the time, actions that were "for some reason" retroactively approved by the "UN in SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!" that is O-12. Thus another gripe of so many... Uprising has, in fact, *more* space devoted to the background of mercenary companies and Dire Foes than to the Uprising itself...
Here's a modern proverb for you: only reality can be this stupid. As a rule of thumb, if reality is more believable to your readers, you did something wrong as a fiction writer
