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You happen to have landed in a near-lawless area of the Third World by accident (got lost on the road because the plane you were flying on has made emergency landing on a highway and you had to make your way back relying on ground transport till you reach the capital.. Which you have failed to do).

Unfriendly locals capture you as a trespasser and find out you come from a First World country where your wage is $20 per hour. You are super-rich by their standards (average wage of $1,5 per day in this Third World country) and also happen work for a large company that is known for severe violations in the region that range from death squads sent after union leaders to creating a scarcity of water. Moreover, they have discovered that your country took part in bombing their region several decades ago. Bad luck!

Their ideas about what to do to you range from lynching you on the spot to holding you for ransom. They demand you answer for the crimes of your nation in some way. They are not fanatical and don't need a public execution a-la ISIS, but don't care much about your life either.

How would you explain yourself? Your goal is to stay alive. Could you trick the locals into forgiving you and what arguments would you use?

Discuss.

Well if you guys want to ransom me go ahead, but I'm just a cog in the machine so good luck. But if you're going to execute me anyway can I pick my form of death?

Ransom? Look, the company does not care about me as a person. They can replace me a lot cheaper than they could ransom me. They will literally let me die here. If you want me to record some statements denouncing the US and the company for the bombing, I'd be happy to do that for you, but that's about all I've got.

If you're going to kill me, please make it quick and clean.

I guess it's time for some quality story telling. First I explain to them that the 1st world is not what they think it is, and that as a worker I have a lot more in common with the locals than my own people. For example, my company that's polluting and operating death squads in your nation? It's not like I willingly work for them, no, they do the same thing in my own country and they're actually holding my family hostage. If I don't work for them, they'll send death squads after my family and kill them just like they kill you guys, and then they'll kill me last. And our 1st world government is the same as yours, we didn't elects those assholes, they were fully bought & paid for by the corporations that are trying to kill us all, our votes mean nothing.

My goal would be to get some sympathy from the locals and convince them that I have nothing to do with all the shit that's going on in their country. After that I'll try to convince them to let me disappear into another country that they don't have issues with, and from there I walk into an embassy and make my way back home.

How am I being restrained? Any guards? I've freed myself from being hung from a tree by my ankles and from being hog-tied to a chair once each...

Raw Shark wrote:How am I being restrained?

You are tied to a bed

Any guards?

And the guard says you have a real purty mouth...

muse wrote:And the guard says you have a real purty mouth...

Negotiation path seems clear, then.

K. A. Pital wrote:You happen to have landed in a near-lawless area of the Third World by accident (got lost on the road because the plane you were flying on has made emergency landing on a highway and you had to make your way back relying on ground transport till you reach the capital.. Which you have failed to do).

Unfriendly locals capture you as a trespasser and find out you come from a First World country where your wage is $20 per hour. You are super-rich by their standards (average wage of $1,5 per day in this Third World country) and also happen work for a large company that is known for severe violations in the region that range from death squads sent after union leaders to creating a scarcity of water. Moreover, they have discovered that your country took part in bombing their region several decades ago. Bad luck!

Their ideas about what to do to you range from lynching you on the spot to holding you for ransom. They demand you answer for the crimes of your nation in some way. They are not fanatical and don't need a public execution a-la ISIS, but don't care much about your life either.

How would you explain yourself? Your goal is to stay alive. Could you trick the locals into forgiving you and what arguments would you use?

Discuss.

Try to explain to them that $20 an hour back home is starvation wages(though I doubt I'll make headway there), that the company treats me only slightly less shit than they do them, and, since I feel guilty over what the people I work for have done, I offer to help these guys out against these bastards, who I never liked working for anyway, in exchange for, at least, delaying the hour of my horrible demise until after they've won.

What little inside knowledge I have is sure to be worth more to them than some paltry ransom, assuming the company even bothers to pony up.

Bide my time until Sylvester Stallone breaks through the wall with a machine gun, liberating the country.

Seriously though, try to explain that I work for a non-profit, and that making 20 bucks an hour would be wonderful, as I don't even make that, and the concept of Cost of Living. Since I'm sure the prices in this country are much cheaper than mine for something like a loaf of bread.

Also ask them how I afforded an international flight on my meager salary, as it's a mystery to me, especially since I'm on a very tight budget and can't throw money around like that.

Convert to the local religion.

No, seriously. Since it's a Third World country, I don't speak the language, so I'll be doing my communicating through an interpreter. Moreover, the only people who are apt to speak my language in this lawless region are probably educated clergy, since other educated professionals, politicians, diplomats, etc. are most likely found far away in the capital or large cities. And since they are in this lawless region, they are probably the sort of hard-line, fundamentalist, evangelizing clergy who don't take especially kindly to heathens.

So, I'll cease being a heathen. The angry locals are going to be more leery about killing a co-religionist, especially one who's just seen the light and repented for his sins of being from an aggressive, godless, imperialist nation. Hell, maybe I'll even be afforded some kind of protection by the clergy, who might want to use me as propaganda. Still, it beats dying.

First, I would be severely surprised that Hungary was actually involved in stuff like this and assure them that we are just small bitches to much bigger dogs: which isn't completely false several decades back as Hungary was too neatly positioned in the Soviet zone of things by the end of WW2. I'd enbiggen how we were exploited and sort of draw the events of 1956 all over into everyday life. That's kind of how to go for. Take everyday truths (I can't just build a house, I have to pay just to have the right to the house and frame it as a bribe), stuff my own people do and tell those.

Second, how am I supposed to explain myself? I don't expect rural people from a third world country to have great access to English or even know where Hungary is.

Third, try to tell that I have a family too. I do have a niece. Draw on real common things like family. Their companies took the only good water supply from them? What a coincidence, they do the exact same thing back home and they own our sorry asses to boot, we work for them or were informed that they can do [thing that happened to them]. They are operating on emotional logic and rumors. If someone is evil to them, they'll believe that those will be evil to others too.

The issue is though that ultimately, I am screwed no matter what I do. I am not very charismatic to begin with, if these people want to have revenge on somebody for all their grievances laid upon them for decades of misfortune, they'll do it. If they are hesitating and my most earnest pleas for compassion or mercy are ignored, there wasn't much to do in the first place. Sucks to be me. I should have stayed with a group from the plane.

I'm assuming K.A. Pital's included some disaffected local kids who went off to join someone's military/to university/to work for the company doing the exploiting and came home radicalized, for lack of a better term amongst the denizens of this lawless area, and some of them became authority figures in this particular lawless area(one-eyed man in the country of the blind and all that).

The business I work for doesn't exist outside of the city where I live, let alone outside the country. But I could see another business in another country that does similar work deciding to use the same name, even without knowing of the company I work for.

So my first step is to try and clear up that confusion.

Sudden option.

Q appears and says that he can kill all the Third Worlders. He gives you the choice: have him kill them or have him leave you at their mercy.

Your call?

I'll gladly provide my services as a misshapen disabled CHUD to entertain your children!

K. A. Pital wrote:Sudden option.

Q appears and says that he can kill all the Third Worlders. He gives you the choice: have him kill them or have him leave you at their mercy.

Your call?

[racism]Kill them, they're all going to die horrible diarrhea deaths by 30 anyway![/racism]

Probably have to stay, I'll likely be put out of my misery by a drone strike eventually.

K. A. Pital wrote:Sudden option.

Q appears and says that he can kill all the Third Worlders. He gives you the choice: have him kill them or have him leave you at their mercy.

Your call?

The latter. There's a chance I can get myself out of this, if only for a little while. There's no chance to undo the mass murder of a group of people, many of whom were guilty only of having been born in pestilent shitholes.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:

K. A. Pital wrote:Sudden option.

Q appears and says that he can kill all the Third Worlders. He gives you the choice: have him kill them or have him leave you at their mercy.

Your call?

The latter. There's a chance I can get myself out of this, if only for a little while. There's no chance to undo the mass murder of a group of people, many of whom were guilty only of having been born in pestilent shitholes.

Pretty much this.

Or make promises to Q to do whatever he wants with me, possibly putting me in more ridiculous RARs, but don't kill people on my account.

K. A. Pital wrote:Sudden option.

Q appears and says that he can kill all the Third Worlders. He gives you the choice: have him kill them or have him leave you at their mercy.

Your call?

No thanks, Q. 1 life for about 20 isn't a bad trade, even if they're being moronic people looking for a scapegoat for their problems and not actual help.

I take the offer and justify it as an act of god. It was god's will, if they didn't take me hostage and make Q appear they'd all still be alive, it was god punishing them for their sins.

aerius wrote:I take the offer and justify it as an act of god. It was god's will, if they didn't take me hostage and make Q appear they'd all still be alive, it was god punishing them for their sins.

Q might be lying, and as soon as you agree, he disappears, leaving you with an angry mob who knows that you'd kill them all to survive.

Alferd Packer wrote:Convert to the local religion.

No, seriously. Since it's a Third World country, I don't speak the language, so I'll be doing my communicating through an interpreter. Moreover, the only people who are apt to speak my language in this lawless region are probably educated clergy, since other educated professionals, politicians, diplomats, etc. are most likely found far away in the capital or large cities. And since they are in this lawless region, they are probably the sort of hard-line, fundamentalist, evangelizing clergy who don't take especially kindly to heathens.
.

Thanks to the Britsish empire there are plenty of third world nations where English is spoken by a very large number of people or where English is even an official language.

Show them my First Nations ID card and establish that I have more in common with them than they might first think.

FaxModem1 wrote:

aerius wrote:I take the offer and justify it as an act of god. It was god's will, if they didn't take me hostage and make Q appear they'd all still be alive, it was god punishing them for their sins.

Q might be lying, and as soon as you agree, he disappears, leaving you with an angry mob who knows that you'd kill them all to survive.

Because, yes, Q's like that. He truly is.

Q scenario... yeah. Go ahead and leave me at their mercy Q. I am not going to consent to you killing them. Side benefit, they might see me decline to kill them and return the favor.

The basic scenario is implausible for me. For me to make any kind of counter-argument I would have to know my own job and company involved. I worked as a grocery store chain as a teenager, and universities since then. Not much chance of oppression. Future employment... I dont know, but there are only a few options.

Universities again. "Wait, when did the University of Michigan oppress you?".
The US government, but at least that makes sense. Though in terms of oppression the agency does not. The USDA and CDC are my most likely employers. The USDA does not get up to anything in the developing world other than trying to figure out better ways to deal with crop infestations and increasing agricultural yield through better management. The CDC fights the things most likely to kill the children in the developing world. The DoD might hire me, but when they bring in the entomologists it is typically to inspect food supply chains, or deal with tropical diseases during troop deployments or as part of humanitarian missions.

There literally is no one that someone in my specialty could reasonably be working for that does terrible terrible things. I am an entomologist for fuck's sake. The closest you get is Monsanto and other agribusiness companies, and they have not done anything even close to death squads.

"So yes. My government has done terrible terrible things to you, even recently. On the other hand, I work for one of the agencies in that government that eliminated smallpox, and is working on eliminating <list of local horrifying diseases> and/or creating the crops that will allow your kids to not starve to death anymore. In fact, not only do I work for that agency, that is the sort of work I do. I live on 20 dollars an hour (20 dollars per hour is a small sum for someone of my specialty and education) because I donate 15-30 of the 35-50 dollars an hour I actually make (where in the spread I fall will depend on eventual pay grade) to medicins sans frontiers, and various other NGOs that provide medical assistance in the developing world (this is something I do plan to do once debts are paid off). That 20 dollars an hour might be freakishly wealthy to you, but at american costs of living, I am getting by in the city in which I have been stationed. I am not considered a particularly wealthy person in the US on what I actually live on because that amount of money does not go very far. You would be much better off lynching one of your local kleptocrats if you want some sort of class-struggle revenge. I might even help.

If you want to ransom me, that is cool, but dont expect anyone to pay. No one in the US who values me enough to pay that kind of money has that much. If the US government finds out you have me, they wont pay for me. They will probably just send in marines--if they do anything. Or you can kill me, I suppose. Certainly my country has done enough to you over the years that your anger is justified, though I would rather it not be me you kill. You might feel better for a little while, but you wont actually benefit from it. Or, you can let me go. If you let me go, I know all the disease causing insects in this area, and how to reduce their ability to cause you harm. I am happy to help you if you let me."