shitposting rave 2, electric boogaloo

Please tell me the actual diplomatic team does not include you. Then again, that asinine idiot of a representative managed to get on board somehow, so I wouldn't be surprised if your representative spots are reserved for the people most likely to get the entirety of our race killed.

 

Are you still mad at the Devisens? I told you, it's not their fault.

 

Them, Oar, Swiftwing-- honestly, it's easier to list the competent representatives because there aren't any. This is a farce of a mission and I half suspect that it was designed to get the most annoying and idiotic people off their respective planets, because almost all of the ones in charge are completely useless as diplomats.

 

That's when you bust out the popcorn, lean back, and watch the drama unfold like a sitcom that only life could write.
Or whatever your species' equivalent of recreational snacks is.

 

I told you, it's a cultural thing, it's not going to be a problem when dealing with other people.

 

Excuse me I was appointed the Decepticon Representative by Lord Starscream himself!
Look, if you're so much better at diplomacy, maybe you should just fragging teach us glitchbrains for your own peace of mind?

 

With all due respect, I have to disagree.

There is a sickness in my soul and I know it well. I wasn't born with it. I didn't have a choice about contracting it. Neither would you, if you'd seen what they did to my family.

The people who wanted to destroy my world would have won if we had let them go on doing it. We chose otherwise, which meant we had to meet them where they were. We took care to shed as little blood as we could manage to (and sometimes we regret that, such as when Dr Pines returned from being kidnapped into another dimension to find that his house had been bombed (with an attempt to shift the blame onto several third parties, no less.). I do everything possible to avoid executing innocent people while at the same time taking care that the children of people who suffered a swift and clean execution at the hands of those whom they would gladly have denied a decent, relatively painless death do not come back to cut my throat one fine evening not too far away.

I win when I keep the sickness from infecting my people. I win when I contain the damage. I win when I decide how to use the ugly gifts that were bestowed on me when my family was dispossessed and my sister was murdered and...so many other things. I win when I look out upon the five worlds of the Imperium and see the vast majority of our citizens living lives that are only slightly less free and a great deal less brutish and unpleasant than they were when I was born here. (For the most part the common people are free to believe, speak and mostly to do as they please.) I win when I know that the things which made me who I am today will not happen to any more young and relatively innocent people on our watch.

If you lose when they infect you with their sicknesses, then you might as well just give up. But I'm not inclined to give up and my species is notably bad at bending the knee.

 

Oh, scrap. Doing bad things doesn't make you bad forever. Burlesque is saying you can't justify bad things now with 'well I've already done worse'.

 

Like, people can change, right? Or still be the same people but choose to do things different. Nobody is going, 'gosh, Tainell is such a monster because he violently overthrew the previous government'. Literally nobody. Well, maybe some people you probably already had killed, but nobody here. We're going 'gosh maybe Tainell shouldn't say he's a monster, because that makes it easier for him to do monstrous things.'

Like, I've been there. Probably for a longer time than you've even been online!

 

He has a peculiar was of arguing for that.
Besides the argument isn't "I've already done worse."
It's "I've already done at least as bad things. And I know I can survive doing these things. So you don't have to do it."
I'm a monster. But I'm also well trained and loyal.

 

Agreed. Have no idea what the Council was thinking trying to get representatives from places like Licentus, and my planet can't be the only one represented that really shouldn't be here...

(...don't regret coming, or actually wish the others had been barred. Too pleased with results. But... from a tactical standpoint, the Team's complement is a scrapheap. We might have... maybe three people onboard who wouldn't frag everything up as soon as they boot their vocalizers. Myself included in the latter category.)

 

That's operating on the assumption those things need to be done.

 

That might be what Burlesque meant, but it's not what they said.

"I've already done worse" is not, in fact, a good justification for much of anything. I also don't think anybody seriously uses that as a justification for anything.

That sounds to me like the kind of thing you say at fourth bell when you still can't sleep and you want to rescind the orders you've given but you know in your gut, heart and mind that if you do it, the things that will happen will make you feel even worse than knowing your orders are going to be acted upon.

Which is not to say that it's a good thing to say, but rather to suggest that when you're in that much pain, you can't argue with idealists for shit, love or money.

(I've had so many fourth-bell conversations with Ford that Valiska eventually settled by telling us both to shut up and get some sleep before we ruined everything.)

 

I have! The expressions that followed were amusing.

 

Also, no, I am not bad forever. But I am not a normal catte any more. I have seen things and done things that have changed me forever. That doesn't mean that I'm bad forever, no, but it does mean I'm sick in a way that I prefer to spare others when I can.

 

It doesn't mean you're sick.

 

Comprehension question: Would calling the issue by its name and knowing what exactly it is not be helpful in regards to dealing with it, in whichever way is required and/or wanted?
Excessive euphemisms strike me as soundly unhelpful in this regard, but I might be misunderstanding something.

 

Sick is also a euphemism!

 

My cousin Kalinthy, who is a healer, would heartily disagree with you.

 

Oh, okay, suddenly we learn he's been talking nonjudgementally about literal mental illness, that justifies using such a vague and loaded term as 'sick' around people who have already been told they're broken by what they've done, I was toooootally in the wrong.