hey guys, i just wanted to say that sometime early tommorow (CET) i will be leaving for the weekend, and in due to going to bumhick sweeden, i will properbly not be able to get online, and therefore not be able to rp. So feel free to bot my chars if necessary
Sorry for not responding sooner, finally managed to wiggle out of the Jury Duty and I will be back home in a few hours. Just as an interest ping to @Uriel1339 @High_Adept_Zeth @Mechiaus @matt23 @GoreWrencha @Keidivh in order to ensure everyone is still wanting to continue where we left out, granted it was the "First Day" or that everyone involved was still interested. Did anyone ever notice when something really good gets going, life likes to throw a metaphorical Hiroshima at it? I'll also have a short story up tomorrow afternoon for the Archive.
In this case we will re-convene tomorrow evening starting at 1600 USEastern because I am exhausted, I want to finish my anime, purge some heretics, and also smash my head against the wall because of having to sit staring at the ceiling for 5 hours in the court waiting room.
So I'm re-reading a Halo book from 2014 and one of the lines in the final paragraphs when they're talking about the darker history of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the SPARTAN II program, particularly with Dr. Catherine Halsey was this: "It's kind of depressing though to think that the general electorate you're protecting would vote for Hitler." I find it hilarious because I immediately thought of Donald Trump for us poor Americans and also because from a psychological point of view, they were incredibly accurate and to the point. It went to show in a fictional setting an exact replica of what Government has done in the past on multiple occasions. The SPARTAN II program was responsible for the kidnapping, illegal cloning, bribery, manipulation of monetary values, assassination, and a couple dozen more political litigation just to grab less than 100 children between the ages of seven and eleven to turn them into counter-terrorist super soldiers. Now of course by now with the fact the terrorists in question were using nuclear weapons, were a couple hundred worlds, and were in all out war against the initial Government of the CSA/UNSC which led to the installment of the UNSC military dictatorship (something that a lot of people gloss over), neither side was particularly the good guys in even a general sense. The program which required the support of a few thousand of the most intelligent doctors and scientists at the time was approved and encouraged by military high command meaning that a couple thousand people with an insane amount of influence and the moral judgement to know that what they were doing was entirely unethical went ahead with it to fight TERRORISTS. During this program, roughly 30% of all candidates either died, were crippled beyond military capacity, or in a few lucky cases were simply left with organ and augmentation rejection and allowed to leave the program. Children, by now still at the oldest below the age of thirteen killed in a secret military experiment still only to fight other humans. Go forward a decade, you've now got teenage operatives who are heavily indoctrinated for Pro-UNSC, lied to and manipulated with no knowledge as they were "re-educated" that they even had a family before hand. The families in question left with clones that suffered in every case a series of crippling and extremely deadly medical problems ranging from advanced putrefaction (what is only seen in late stage corpses under decomposition) to cancerous and tumor development to die within less than a few weeks to a few months after having the original child kidnapped. Okay, good job. We now have a bunch of sociopaths for the Government who don't know any better, literally, but it's all well and good because we just used them to assassinate and kidnap people, some of whom were their parents who thought it was all a government conspiracy, which it was. Still doesn't seem so bad, UNSC totally the good guys and then you have contact at Harvest. The Covenant shows up, negotiations out the window and now it's a fight for survival. Suddenly the SPARTAN II project hits publicity to improve morale as "invincible" soldiers conveniently designed to stop the Covenant threat. They become the figureheads for recruitment and hope despite having over a decade of covert black ops under their belt. The Human-Covenant war goes on for nearly three decades and there's less than ten operatives from the SPARTAN II program left, one of them about to become CINCONI (basically the person who holds all the power and lies to HIGHCOM telling them that they're still in charge but in reality ONI controls everything) and you're faced with the moral dilemma of Catherine Halsey. What to do...I vote for taking names to send her out the airlock with the only regret being that it would be too quick for a female version of Hitler. And people said Halo was boring and lacked tack Based off the miniature rant above, what do our lovely patrons in this Tavern have to say about the psychological state of the human mind and what atrocities it can attest to. Why we would do it, and would you have the courage to stand up to it. While IRL we haven't committed an act as terrible as the SPARTAN II program in Halo, we have already accomplished several feats similar to it such as underneath Nazi-Germany's scientific experimentation and the United States Military War Departments development of chemical weapons and testing on the population "on accident" (reference to Agent Orange as one of the more documented instances).
I think we all know humanity is capable of many things both great and terrible. Hell that pretty much sums up the whole of human history from the invention of writing to the moon landing and the first murder to the holocaust. We humans are strange creatures that both kill and help one another over the most insignificant of reasons and yet here we are able to destroy our civilization with the push of a button while we're trying to figure out how the universe was created or feed the starving. But in the grand scheme of things were but a page in one of the chapters of our universe. Or in more simple terms. Blah blah blah humanity blah blah blah insignificant blah blah blah universe.
