Simon_Jester wrote:Again, I really do not like the image of the Heavenly City getting annihilated by massed nuclear strikes. From a policy standpoint, it's utterly perverse that we're angrier at the angels than we are at the demons, but I've been down that road before and don't need it repeated to me. Yes, I know, the demons only tortured billions of people for thousands of years and openly proclaimed that we were their enemies; the angels promised to rescue people but didn't deliver and that is somehow worse.
That's not the reason why people are angrier at the angels than the demons now. The worse the demons did was Sheffield and Detroit. The worse the angels did was hurricanes, tornadoes, anthrax, fucking kaiju, hill-sized rocks dropped on cities and all the other Bowls of Wrath, Uriel mind-killing people at random, and getting an Israeli sub to nuke Tel Aviv (not to mention all the other cities which would've been nuked had the missiles not been intercepted).
How is is utterly perverse from a policy standpoint that humans would be extremely pissed at the angels after putting up with all of that?
And, of course, the Red Tide (two of the other bowls of wrath) and dust storms. Several of those other attacks killed tens of thousands of people (Uriel, Wuffles, some of the Hurricanes). Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were each more than 100,000. The pretty severe damage to the U.S. food belt from the red tide and dust storms is going to be felt for at least a year. We don't know how many sea species are now extinct as a result of the red tide. And, plus, there's Katrina and the eighty billion dollars that Yahweh has owed the U.S. for close to two years now. All of these events occurred in the last two years. Yeah, humans are pretty fucking pissed off. The elimination of the Incomparable Legion is going to be seen as a down payment.
Granted, more people have died from old age and disease than all these disasters put together, but most people are not going to see it that way. They're almost certainly going to see it as 300 to 400 thousand unnecessary deaths, and more to follow in the years to come, because of food problems, economic chaos, ecological destruction, the establishment of potentially hostile states in Hell, etc. In our risk averse society, those kinds of losses will demand vengeance. And Yahweh started it by telling everyone that he was done with us and turning us all over to Satan. So, although the angels have not actively tortured humans for the evulz, Yahweh is ultimately responsible for the humans who were tortured. The daemons are proximately responsible, and the curbstomp war did quite a bit to satisfy that desire for vengeance. We tend to hold parents responsible when they leave their infants where they would die from exposure, and it seems that Yahweh turning us over to the daemons is certainly comparable.
I'm not sure if the economic impact of the war ending will be significant at all compared with the economic impact of the world-altering changes that TSW has brought:
1) Death being not the end
This is a major change to the economic assumptions we make, from our decisions about credit and loans and homes and jobs and retirement, to the way we handle crime, to the way we handle healthcare... this could be the subject of a book in and of itself.
I could see a person wanting to study everything they could, learn every skill they could from every school, university, apprenticeship, etc. they could on earth during their 1st life, so that when they die and go to their 2nd, they would be able to do anything they wanted to. While there will certainly be universities founded in Heaven and Hell -- imagine being able to have people like Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Issac Newton, Neils Bohr, Carl Sagan and so forth on the physics and mathematics faculty? After the older ones get up to speed on modern physics and mathematics, there could be an unimaginable flowering of scientific thought.
Health Insurance companies would probably start offering bonus money to people who, facing a long, painful, expensive disease, are willing to just start over in their second life. Even if it's made illegal, it'll probably still happen even for free. I mean, considering the options of dying slowly and painfully from cancer, and taking an overdose of morphine and waking up in a few hours in Hell, with a brand new body that will never age and can only be killed by an accident or act of violence extreme enough to kill immediately, the choice is pretty obvious.
Life insurance will probably change entirely, probably until it's unrecognizable. After all, if I die tomorrow through an accident, in this real world my beneficiaries will receive a single lump-sum payout, which is logical because I'm no longer around to provide for them. Even if the religious folks are right and I'll wake up after dying in either Heaven, Hell, or some other sort of afterlife, I certainly won't be able to work and send money through to my living family in this world. That's exactly what will be able to happen in TSW. I could even continue working at my current job, albeit from an office in New Rome or Dis. I would expect payouts to become smaller, premiums to be higher, and the restrictions on how you can die to be more restrictive.
The U.S. government's role in society will drastically change, as that will of a lot of other governments. After all, right now the U.S. government is mostly a pension and health insurance provider with a military. Medicare/medicaid and social security, and the administrations thereof, are the majority of the money it takes in and pays out, and military expenditures, which are higher in TSW than in real life, make up the majority of the rest. With many people choosing to take "early retirement" from life (their first, anyway) to avoid the pain and discomfort of being old and sick, medicare and social security will change a lot. They may even be eliminated, since really, what's the big deal if grandma runs out of money in her retirement account and is facing a disease that will cost $1M per year in medical bills? Just take a pill and start your life over in heaven or hell with a healthy body that can resume working or just live off whatever energy source sustains 2nd lifers. It may suck somewhat to start your 2nd life with no money, but it's a lot better than living the final years or decades of your one and only life with no money the way many people do in real life.
Our way we look at crime will have to change, of course. Murder may become much less common when the deceased can testify in a court of law. On the other hand, how will you evaluate the possibility that the deceased may make a false accusation or be confused? Because death is demonstrably not the end, killing a 1st lifer will probably become a much less harshly punished crime, but killing a 2nd lifer, a daemon, or an angel, for whom we have no evidence of survival past death, may become a much greater crime. After all, they could have lived for *centuries* but for you! (There will probably be an intense scientific effort to determine whether 2nd lifers do move on to a 3rd life, though.) Sentences of life in prison will become problematic, because the convict could just suicide and start over, unless a process was put into place where they would continue serving the sentence in their 2nd life. In that case, life sentences would have to be changed to a set term of years, possibly immensely long. What if a person was sentenced to one of the ridiculously long sentences that our justice system sometimes hands out, and then died prior to the defeat of Hell, and then is found in Hell? Does he go back to prison, albeit one in Hell? Do they give him time served with the recognition that the torture he suffered in Hell may have been a worse punishment than the original sentence? Will the death penalty remain in existence? Will there be proponents of a "death penalty plus" where we kill them in their 2nd life too, or find a way to reproduce the effect that Uriel used to destroy life?
2) Portals
The delivery service the nagas started is only the beginning. Eventually there will be teleportation booths taking advantage of how apparently every point in hell and heaven are topologically only inches away from every point on Earth. To say nothing of whether we can put a portal on the moon, mars, on the ISS (yes, it orbits, but the earth also rotates and apparently portals follow the rotation), or even on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri? We'll eventually all have a portal booth either in our homes or in locations near our homes, that take us to a 'grand central station' in heaven or hell (probably the former so it doesn't have to be climate-controlled with filtered air) where we go to the portal to our destination. This may not eliminate the daily commute right away, unless we work at a very large employer that can have a portal that we can all go to, but it'll probably nearly eliminate the airline and freight industries in much the same way that the airlines largely eliminated passenger lines other than for luxury vacations. Longer-term, employers will consolidate into central locations around portals, forming large industrial and commercial arcologies that will probably create economies of scale to save a great deal on infrastructure, whereas residences will become as far-flung as one can possibly imagine. A person will literally be able to live on the mountains of Tibet and work in downtown New York -- or even in Dis or the Eternal City.
3) Resources and land
Apparently Hell has more land surface than earth, and heaven probably would as well. Although the environment of Hell is fucked up, it's apparently fertile enough for growing food, and Heaven is obviously fertile. Provided that the food can be eaten by 1st-lifers, which seems likely since those who came into Hell didn't seem to have problems related to availability of food, and provided that it can be taken into our space without decaying immediately, then export of food from Hell and Heaven could be prolific and because it can be distributed through portals you could see Hellfarms growing food, then a portal being set up to put that food directly into a poor region of earth where food is needed. No distribution problem, no interaction with corrupt local government, just every month or every week a portal to Hell opens in East Shithole, Sudan, and out comes wheat, rice, beans, fruit, etc.
As noted, Hell has oil and minerals. Heaven probably does too, and it apparently has gems and other things that would be considered luxuries by 1st-life humans. The diamond (and other precious stones) market might be destroyed, or revitalized, depending on how it's handled.
4) A huge population who lack basic economic needs, but can produce economic goods.
2nd Lifers apparently do not require food or sleep. They may prefer to eat and sleep but it seems it's not required for them to remain healthy. This could be exploited by the unscrupulous but most likely we'll avoid that since there's so much scrutiny of what's going on in Hell. However there's no reason a group of 2nd lifers might not decide to exploit themselves and simply produce goods of economic worth nonstop without requiring the same things that 1st lifers would to survive. I could see people doing this to produce food for the hungry 1st lifers, as per my example above.
I don't know, frankly, whether the net flow of currency and items of value would be from 1st lifers to 2nd lifers, or in the other direction. I don't know if our existing economy will survive in any recognizable form, in fact.
I can't wait for the next part, of course, but more than that, I have one question: How does an umpteen-foot tall angel like Michael go around in human markets buying thermometers, Geiger counters and the like?
Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies,
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
UnderAGreySky wrote:I can't wait for the next part, of course, but more than that, I have one question: How does an umpteen-foot tall angel like Michael go around in human markets buying thermometers, Geiger counters and the like?
I would guess he pays humans to get things for him.
Stuart: The only problem is, I'm losing track of which universe I'm in.
You kinda look like Jesus. With a lightsaber.- Peregrin Toker
UnderAGreySky wrote:I can't wait for the next part, of course, but more than that, I have one question: How does an umpteen-foot tall angel like Michael go around in human markets buying thermometers, Geiger counters and the like?
I would guess he pays humans to get things for him.
Either that, or mind fucks them to seeing something else. We don't have any evidence he got those particular things after people started wearing their tinfoil hats.
UnderAGreySky wrote:I can't wait for the next part, of course, but more than that, I have one question: How does an umpteen-foot tall angel like Michael go around in human markets buying thermometers, Geiger counters and the like?
I would guess he pays humans to get things for him.
Either that, or mind fucks them to seeing something else. We don't have any evidence he got those particular things after people started wearing their tinfoil hats.
Some sort of mind control/suggestion. Remember the angelic herald killed in Iraq?
Well Stuart, there goes accusations of lack of dramatic tension! A long hatched plot has to be executed before the hoped for time.
"frozen water"? Wasn't there an earlier reference to one of Yahweh's hissy fits causing large, damaging hail stones to fall?
No, that was parts of marble being chipped off the temple from the multi-colored lightning.
If you are going through Hell, keep going. - Winston Churchill Michelangelo is a Party Dude!
But see, we invite him over for dinner and then he goes, "I stole your Nuclear Secrets." Then nobody feels like having apple pie. - Myself, on Joseph Stalin
Basically, the world economy has been propped up by a mix of war spending and, quite probably, price controls of some sort preventing inflation. In essence, the war spending has been kicking the can down the road on the mortgage collapse and probably papered over some of the anger that we've got IRL at the bank bailouts...because those bailouts would have been couched in terms of "Yes, the banks just lost 20 million customers, we have to work this out somehow, and most of those deaths probably involve net losses for the banks." My guess is that the government takes a lot of mortgages and houses in pairs, works out some sort of deal for cases where families lost one or more members but there are still adults living, and books most of the losses.
So the bailouts get some cover the first time around because of a quite literal Act of God, and government spending propping up wages prevents the waves of defaults that we got IRL. This is going to run out of gas once the war does. Don't get me wrong: Defense spending is going to remain at elevated levels for decades. First, we're going to have to hold down at least some forces in Hell, and with that is going to come support costs. Second, we're going to be extending ground-level infrastructure in both heaven and hell. Jeweled streets probably aren't exactly ideal for driving a humvee down. And finally, we're still going to be doing a lot of R&D...we've got a second universe to work the details of out, not to mention prepare for possible attacks from (something that alone justifies a dizzying military budget...yeah, we beat the first two guys we came to, but that doesn't mean that they're the only game in town. If anything, they're most likely not.
Finally, we either know or have good reason to believe that there are multiple human-compatible worlds in our own universe (they're at least compatible enough for the angels and demons to pop in for a visit) that the angels and/or demons are going to know the location of...worlds which presumably never achieved industrialization.
So, here's my guess: The economy is going to go for one hell of a ride. I'm predicting a spike of close to 15% unemployment on Earth after the war as the wheels come off, combined with a massive slug of inflation. Think the early 1980s in the UK for a good analogue (which, by the way, had all of these problems: A budget getting cut, inflation running wild, and a banking system that was a bit of a mess). This should start to cool off after a year or two as new infrastructure gets put online, but I also predict that you're going to see outsourcing to Hell on a respectable scale. Even if that assembly-line worker only works two shifts a week for a year to save up for a new wardrobe, if they're working for a low enough amount it won't matter.
So looking at the world by 2015 or so (five years post-war), I would predict a US defense budget running at about $1 trillion in real terms. I would also predict that we've got Heaven-Hell type portals going to at least 2-3 other habitable planets (based on what's in the story), and the economy is getting "back on track" amid a collapse in mineral prices gives everything a good kick in the rear. I also project that global cooperation is going to (pardon the pun) go to Hell after the war wraps up. It'll still be there, but it'll be much looser and fraught with colonial ambitions flying around. In essence, the world will be re-living the late 1800s or the 1950s in a lot of ways (probably complete with the occasional war scare), only your colonists will probably be living in middle-class suburbia and able to catch a train into New York for a show on a weekend (and yes, I would bank on there being at least some sort of rail-based transit network that would be set up, if just to handle connections through Hell more easily; think of setting aside perhaps 20 sq. mi. for a switching area with perhaps 50 portals on Earth and then another 50 to other locations, either on Earth or elsewhere, and running a net of tracks between them to permit almost non-stop connections between them).
And you know, in a lot of ways I've gotta admit that barring another major war I'm kinda jealous of the generation that will be growing up in the post-war decades. There are going to be issues, I know, but they're basically going to be growing up in a science fiction dream of sorts, complete with de facto FTL communication. Stuart, be careful, I may actually attempt to set a short story or two in that universe once you start putting the details out there. Of course, with that said, I can't wait to see what you throw at it.
Morilore wrote:As for "anger," isn't it a bit simplistic to just look at how much we hate our current enemy to see what we might do? I mean, there are a bunch of other factors that could come into play. How war-weary people are, whether there are internal political issues, etc.
This is all true.
What bothers me is the argument that we should be more angry with Heaven, that we should be more willing to destroy the angels as a species than we were to do so with the demons. That, taken in isolation, I cannot agree with.
Ilya Muromets wrote:That's not the reason why people are angrier at the angels than the demons now. The worse the demons did was Sheffield and Detroit. The worse the angels did was hurricanes, tornadoes, anthrax, fucking kaiju, hill-sized rocks dropped on cities and all the other Bowls of Wrath, Uriel mind-killing people at random, and getting an Israeli sub to nuke Tel Aviv (not to mention all the other cities which would've been nuked had the missiles not been intercepted).
How is is utterly perverse from a policy standpoint that humans would be extremely pissed at the angels after putting up with all of that?
Again, all true. But by any objective measure we're still stacking this up against the torture of billions of people for thousands of years. And yet we are not proposing to destroy the entire demonic species.
So it's been one of my chronic pet peeves for as long as I've been reading this story that we see people* advocating that against the angels. I have no qualms with the idea of using nuclear weapons on their field armies; they've earned it. But wholesale genocide of an opponent that, when you get down to it, is hardly more capable of resisting us now than the demons ever were? I'm not on board with that.
*Hardly at all inside the story; I'm more talking about the fan base.
nobody_really wrote:And Yahweh started it by telling everyone that he was done with us and turning us all over to Satan. So, although the angels have not actively tortured humans for the evulz, Yahweh is ultimately responsible for the humans who were tortured. The daemons are proximately responsible, and the curbstomp war did quite a bit to satisfy that desire for vengeance. We tend to hold parents responsible when they leave their infants where they would die from exposure, and it seems that Yahweh turning us over to the daemons is certainly comparable.
Well, I think any reasonable postwar resolution to this story starts with Yahweh's head on a pike, so to a point I'm with you here. But in the case of something like this, is ultimate responsibility more significant than proximate responsibility? We tend to treat ultimate responsibility as a higher form, but in this case I would argue that it isn't.
I mean, in what moral framework is it worse to abandon someone to a torturer than it is to be a torturer? Both are vile, but I don't think they can reasonably be seen as equally vile.
If we'd waged a war of annihilation against the demons, if they were so irredeemably horrible that we felt we had no choice, this might be less of an issue. But if we did not do so in Hell, consistency of our own standards demands that we not do so in Heaven if we have the choice.
wickeddyno wrote:1) Death being not the end...
This is a major change to the economic assumptions we make, from our decisions about credit and loans and homes and jobs and retirement, to the way we handle crime, to the way we handle healthcare... this could be the subject of a book in and of itself...
I could see a person wanting to study everything they could, learn every skill they could from every school, university, apprenticeship, etc. they could on earth during their 1st life, so that when they die and go to their 2nd, they would be able to do anything they wanted to. While there will certainly be universities founded in Heaven and Hell -- imagine being able to have people like Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Issac Newton, Neils Bohr, Carl Sagan and so forth on the physics and mathematics faculty? After the older ones get up to speed on modern physics and mathematics, there could be an unimaginable flowering of scientific thought.
Oh, General Dynamics Land Systems, not this again...
Friend, have you read the commentary on all this? This issue has come up several times, throughout the story, more or less since the time it was revealed that the human dead were still around in Hell. Every single time, the smarter people in the discussion have pointed out that there is a HUGE gap in skill and experience that makes it difficult for pre-modern individuals (like Newton, and possibly even like Einstein) to catch up and be useful in a modern context. And every single time, the author has pointed out that he does NOT want to make this a story of the Second Life humans. He has deliberately avoided featuring more than a few Second Lifers in his story. Most of them are bit characters. This is going to remain true.
So your observations on this subject are, to a point, true... but they are neither all that original nor all that relevant.
- Dennis
--
Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.
-Frederick the Great, 1777
Ellindsey wrote: Heaven has streets paved with gems and precious minerals.
Time to short DeBeers.
- Dennis
--
Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.
-Frederick the Great, 1777
Nematocyst wrote:So humanity is not the only race that Yahweh and Satan bullied. Why were we the first ones to rebel?
Who says we were the 1st ones to rebell? Actually Stuart has strongly hinted that races before humanity started to doubt Yaayaa and were than exterminated.
Simon_Jester wrote:Again, I really do not like the image of the Heavenly City getting annihilated by massed nuclear strikes. From a policy standpoint, it's utterly perverse that we're angrier at the angels than we are at the demons
The "who are we madder at" is a distraction. The Heavenly Host is the enemy we have at hand. We presently consider them to be more dangerous than Daemons. We are in "nuclear weapons-free" status. We will use them to minimize friendly casualties, and damn the morality.
- Dennis
--
Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.
-Frederick the Great, 1777
nobody_really wrote:And Yahweh started it by telling everyone that he was done with us and turning us all over to Satan. So, although the angels have not actively tortured humans for the evulz, Yahweh is ultimately responsible for the humans who were tortured. The daemons are proximately responsible, and the curbstomp war did quite a bit to satisfy that desire for vengeance. We tend to hold parents responsible when they leave their infants where they would die from exposure, and it seems that Yahweh turning us over to the daemons is certainly comparable.
Well, I think any reasonable postwar resolution to this story starts with Yahweh's head on a pike, so to a point I'm with you here. But in the case of something like this, is ultimate responsibility more significant than proximate responsibility? We tend to treat ultimate responsibility as a higher form, but in this case I would argue that it isn't.
I agree that it's certainly arguable, and I can see that reasonable people can come down on both sides of the issue. I am not especially sure myself, partly because of Lemuel becoming a more sympathetic character.
Simon_Jester wrote:I mean, in what moral framework is it worse to abandon someone to a torturer than it is to be a torturer? Both are vile, but I don't think they can reasonably be seen as equally vile.
I can agree with you that abandoning someone to a torturer is not as equally vile as being a torturer, but I would tend to see Yahweh as someone who gave the torturer their job and office and gladly paid them and finally actively drove the cab that sent the tortured to their fate. Yeah, he didn't actually waterboard or shove broken bottles up the anus, but he's arguably as vile.
Simon_Jester wrote:If we'd waged a war of annihilation against the demons, if they were so irredeemably horrible that we felt we had no choice, this might be less of an issue. But if we did not do so in Hell, consistency of our own standards demands that we not do so in Heaven if we have the choice.
Especially with Lemuel and Maion, and even Onniel, I don't want to see the angels genocided. Their culture destroyed, sure. And if they get with the program and really understand that they aren't the top dogs any more (unlike Michael as of yet), then they can eventually work with humans even as full partners.
Basically, I think I'm agreeing with you that saying the daemons are more deserving of survival than the angels is a bad idea. The destruction of angelic culture will be bad, though, and the angels that can't adapt to the new order are going to be in for a very bad time. Thanks for breaking it, Yahweh. You putz. Azrael, you're next. And Belial, when we find you, your ass is grass.
Simon_Jester wrote:
What bothers me is the argument that we should be more angry with Heaven, that we should be more willing to destroy the angels as a species than we were to do so with the demons. That, taken in isolation, I cannot agree with.
The thing is we don't want to wipe them out as a species. Micheal is scared that we will, but at no point hhave any of the human chracters expressed an urge to kill all the angels, as far as I can see they're just a bit more angry at the ange;s because they've been so hard to get to and that they're physically attacked earth itself inw ays they can related to instead of statistics of so many people tortured for so long.
So yes, don't mistake Micky boys fears as what the humans are really going to do there.
This odyssey, this, exodus. Do we journey toward the promised land, or into the valley of the kings? Three decades ago I envisioned a new future for our species, and now that we are on the brink of realizing my dream, I feel only solitude, and regret. Has my entire life's work been a fool's crusade? Have I led my people into this desert, only to die? -Admiral Aken Bosch, Supreme Commander of the Neo-Terran Front, NTF Iceni, 2367
Simon_Jester wrote:Again, I really do not like the image of the Heavenly City getting annihilated by massed nuclear strikes. From a policy standpoint, it's utterly perverse that we're angrier at the angels than we are at the demons
The "who are we madder at" is a distraction. The Heavenly Host is the enemy we have at hand. We presently consider them to be more dangerous than Daemons. We are in "nuclear weapons-free" status. We will use them to minimize friendly casualties, and damn the morality.
Yeah, plus we really hate them due to their betrayal. Think about it, the Baldricks didn't lie and say they were peaceful so we expecte dnothing but hatred from them. The Angels though, we expected to be our saviors, and they just turned their backs on us. Little wonder that we hate them even more than the Baldricks.
If Dr. Gatling was a nerd, then his most famous invention is the fucking Revenge of the Nerd, writ large...
"Lawful stupid is the paladin that charges into hell because he knows there's evil there."
—anonymous
"Although you may win the occasional battle against us, Vorrik, the Empire will always strike back."
Bayonet wrote:The "who are we madder at" is a distraction. The Heavenly Host is the enemy we have at hand. We presently consider them to be more dangerous than Daemons. We are in "nuclear weapons-free" status. We will use them to minimize friendly casualties, and damn the morality.
So when do we stop hitting them? When Yahweh is dead and the survivors surrender? When their last organized and trained field army is gone? When no surviving angel is physically capable of lifting a sword against us?
Even in "nuclear weapons free" conditions, there remains the question of when to say "weapons tight." Come to think of it, I'd argue that the current conditions for the use of nuclear weapons aren't "free" at all- nuclear strikes are being ordered at (or above, depending on how you view the HEA status) the army group level. Using them is still a command decision, and it still has to be made with an eye to the postwar resolution... whether that resolution is "we accept your surrender" or "make a desert and call it peace."
nobody_really wrote:I can agree with you that abandoning someone to a torturer is not as equally vile as being a torturer, but I would tend to see Yahweh as someone who gave the torturer their job and office and gladly paid them and finally actively drove the cab that sent the tortured to their fate. Yeah, he didn't actually waterboard or shove broken bottles up the anus, but he's arguably as vile.
Him personally? I can see it. But the angelic race collectively does not bear responsibility for that, though they may well bear it for other, lesser crimes (like killing 'mere' hundreds of thousands of people compared to the billions tortured in Hell).
OmegaChief wrote:The thing is we don't want to wipe them out as a species. Micheal is scared that we will, but at no point hhave any of the human chracters expressed an urge to kill all the angels, as far as I can see they're just a bit more angry at the ange;s because they've been so hard to get to and that they're physically attacked earth itself inw ays they can related to instead of statistics of so many people tortured for so long.
So yes, don't mistake Micky boys fears as what the humans are really going to do there.
I'm not just talking about Michael's fears. I'm talking about the readership. I get the feeling that if we handed the launch authority to, say, Bayonet, he'd keep throwing nukes until the angelic species was effectively destroyed.
It's the readers' reaction that's disturbing me, more than that of in-story humans. In-story, people are being as restrained as I have any right or desire to ask of them, under the circumstances.
Night_stalker wrote:Yeah, plus we really hate them due to their betrayal. Think about it, the Baldricks didn't lie and say they were peaceful so we expecte dnothing but hatred from them. The Angels though, we expected to be our saviors, and they just turned their backs on us. Little wonder that we hate them even more than the Baldricks.
You know, Night_Stalker, I just addressed this about a page ago.
Think about what you're saying. "Little wonder that" we hate someone who said they'd save us from the torturing fiends if we were really nice (but didn't) more than the torturing fiends? How does that make sense? How is lying worse than raping people and throwing them into giant pits of flame to burn for millenia?
Chad wrote:Who says we were the 1st ones to rebell? Actually Stuart has strongly hinted that races before humanity started to doubt Yaayaa and were than exterminated.
Why were we the first ones to succeed, then? No other race got nearly as far as we have.
And HUMANITY said: "it is our duty, not as men or women, not as black or white, but as HUMANS, to defend our species from utter annihilation and damnation. These Beings that for so long believed themselves masters of our destiny finally dropped their facade. HUMANITY will, as one, declare WAR on them. HUMANITY is master of its' own destiny. And we will fight to the last"
Chad wrote:Who says we were the 1st ones to rebell? Actually Stuart has strongly hinted that races before humanity started to doubt Yaayaa and were than exterminated.
Why were we the first ones to succeed, then? No other race got nearly as far as we have.
We got lucky and they got soft. They were probably used to being able to put things off for a few centuries to screw with the race(s) in question...there's also the Worldwar possibility, namely that we just hit a stride in technological development that was unexpected.
Nematocyst wrote:
Why were we the first ones to succeed, then? No other race got nearly as far as we have.
We got lucky. We happened to hit three hundred years of particularly rapid and effective development right in the period between their normal checkups. Other species probably would have hit their industrial revolutions right before a checkup, or took things slower in development and hadn't advanced as far as we have before someone noticed something. Or didn't have Michael deliberately choosing the best time to manipulate Yah-Yah into sending the message.
Though that brings me to a question - are the angels and demons also replaced every time a new species is subjugated? Because according to biology, angels and demons are ascended/corrupted humans. Did Yah-Yah and Satan replace their previous minions with modified humans? I think we could really do with some clarification sometime about the whole human-angel-demon link
Nematocyst wrote:
Why were we the first ones to succeed, then? No other race got nearly as far as we have.
We got lucky. We happened to hit three hundred years of particularly rapid and effective development right in the period between their normal checkups. Other species probably would have hit their industrial revolutions right before a checkup, or took things slower in development and hadn't advanced as far as we have before someone noticed something. Or didn't have Michael deliberately choosing the best time to manipulate Yah-Yah into sending the message.
Though that brings me to a question - are the angels and demons also replaced every time a new species is subjugated? Because according to biology, angels and demons are ascended/corrupted humans. Did Yah-Yah and Satan replace their previous minions with modified humans? I think we could really do with some clarification sometime about the whole human-angel-demon link
The way I read the latter point is that they took an early version of humans (about three million years back) and engineered it off into different branches. So they're not the same species, but they're probably related at the Family or Order level.
Simon_Jester wrote: So when do we stop hitting them? When Yahweh is dead and the survivors surrender? When their last organized and trained field army is gone? When no surviving angel is physically capable of lifting a sword against us?
I think that would be decided on a case by case basis, and with the decisions not uniform across all formations and units. As an example, look at the Battle for Berlin. Some Germans were surrendering. The surrender of some individuals was accepted. The surrender of others was rejected. Meanwhile, the Russians were still trying to conquer the City. That is one scenario of how a war can peter out to nothing. On Iwo Jima, it wasn't over until essentially the last Japanese defender became a crispy critter. OTOH, Italy surrendered as an entity and pretty much came over to our side.
The parallels are far from perfect, but they indicate the complexity of deciding when it's over.
even in "nuclear weapons free" conditions, there remains the question of when to say "weapons tight." Come to think of it, I'd argue that the current conditions for the use of nuclear weapons aren't "free" at all- nuclear strikes are being ordered at (or above, depending on how you view the HEA status) the army group level. Using them is still a command decision, and it still has to be made with an eye to the postwar resolution... whether that resolution is "we accept your surrender" or "make a desert and call it peace."
Those are the sorts of decisions that make generals and presidents earn their pay. Because Petraeus has been given Weapons Free authority, the decision will probably be made in the field. It will probably depend a lot on how the Angelic hosts behave after the annihilation of the Incomparable Legion of Light. If they surrender, I daresay we will accept it. If they give indications of holding out to the last flaming sword, we would glass the Eternal City. We certainly can't afford a Peleiliu or a Stalingrad 1,500 meters square, and having to burn them out of every wrecked house. I think that, right now, he's letting the situation develop.
Whatever the Angelic Host does, it will be partially misinterpreted, making the whole business more cloudy, and costing lives. The best possible answer won't be pretty.
- Dennis
--
Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.
-Frederick the Great, 1777
GrayAnderson wrote:
The way I read the latter point is that they took an early version of humans (about three million years back) and engineered it off into different branches. So they're not the same species, but they're probably related at the Family or Order level.
That's what I understood as well, but it raises questions of its own. Specifically - if Yah-yah knew about us that far back, why didn't he subjugate us then? Every mention of time that I've seen has suggested we've been under the thumb for thousands of years, not millions. And if it wasn't millions of years ago, where did the angels come from? Either way, it's just a little oddity that doesn't quite fit what we know
UnderAGreySky wrote: How does an umpteen-foot tall angel like Michael go around in human markets buying thermometers, Geiger counters and the like?
My guess would be Ebay. We know he’s a tech-savvy angel (wants to get his iPhone working), he could order his items on Ebay and have them shipped to any out of the way place and portal them in at his leisure. As long as he went with small shipments, he wouldn’t even need anyone to sign for them.
Simon_Jester wrote:Think about what you're saying. "Little wonder that" we hate someone who said they'd save us from the torturing fiends if we were really nice (but didn't) more than the torturing fiends? How does that make sense? How is lying worse than raping people and throwing them into giant pits of flame to burn for millenia?
Lying about torture isn't worse than torturing people. Handing someone over to be tortured when they were trusting you not to do that and you had the full power to protect them *is* worse than torturing. If someone puts throw a baby into a tiger pit, do you go after the person or the tiger?
I know you made a point about how not all the angels were behind that decision, but if we can want to kill baldricks for supporting Satan's rule and not stopping it from happening, then we can do the same for angels. At the very least, they're equally responsible.
Actually Stuart has strongly hinted that races before humanity started to doubt Yaayaa and were than exterminated.
