Earth Fanfic (Post-Contact Hilarity II)

General Fanfic
261

So, I try not to rip too much from the headlines, but given the news that ICE goon squads have started in on creating international incidents by invading consulates (not technically an act of war, but the definition is fuzzy enough that it’s certainly construable as one if you feel like[1] doing so), this raises some interesting questions for the post-Contact world:

  • exactly what can the Ministry of State and Outlands manage to extort in exchange for not construing it as an act of war?
  • how far can a consulate guard (which means a legionary equipped with the power-assisted N45d Defender armor, on secondment) yeet an ICE goon along an icy road[2]? And how many points does he score for doing so?
  • are the goons ICE has been hiring these days smart enough to attempt to not fire a gun whose barrel is currently being bent into a neat U-shape?
  • how predictable was this that the consulate installed Yeet-Safe™ one-way kinetic barrier windows in the foyer instead of the standard clary?
  • and, perhaps most importantly, who is going to pay to get the urine stains out of the consulate’s rug? (It really tied the room together, man.)

  1. Especially since diplomatic standards in the greater galaxy explicitly support the notion of extraterritoriality. ↩︎

  2. Legation guards in non-hostile countries at least start out with the rules of engagement which require avoiding probably-lethal force. They are, however, a mite fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps. And full-body casts. ↩︎

262

Ah, but are the orcas signatories?

(Although, seriously, I’m sure they can get someone to deliver the cetacean version of Imperial-standard SHC-HAZMAT training before making delivery. It’s just good business!)

263

Are those the type that prevent defenestration or enable defenestration?

264

Depends which way around you install them!

Although I suspect normally they’d be “allowing” defenestration, on the logic that normally you want the barrier to stop outside things coming in, like insects/birds/leaves in regular situations and projectiles in security situations.

Not wanting your child or pet to fall out of a high window would be a reason to have them the other way around, except I can’t think of a reason you’d want outside stuff to be coming in so you might as well have normal glass and be done with it.

265

I would imagine the “prevents defenestration” option would have a pane of regular glass and then a barrier on the inside to stop would-be defenestratees (and would-be defenestrators) from breaking the glass

266

Enable.

It’s much safer to be yeeted through the window onto some nice soft grass, dirt, or thornbush than crash right into-and-almost-certainly-not-through a solid slab of diamondoid-derivative clary[1], especially once the window-cleaner finds you.

(They were designed for use in brawler’s bars.)

  1. No-one uses glass for windows any more. Clary has superior optical clarity, optimal refractive index, and most importantly, takes about as much effort to break as the wall it’s mounted in. ↩︎

267

Among the less obvious post-contact conclusions to be drawn from the Epstein files release is that for humans, wealth, power, and evil strongly correlate with being illiterate.

(Of course, so do poverty and impotence. No word yet on the other thing.)

268

…Would they be inclined to play nice with them, though? Any more than they would with the Bantrals, Iltines, Galians, et. al. if they decided to invade an Imperial Consulate? Especially once it becomes clear that they are not likely to learn from their mistakes, at least not through subtler forms of persuasion. Their successors, on the other hand… well, if they don’t learn after that, when will they?

As for being considered in the same breath as those (un)worthies: even at the US’s best (by their standards, not necessarily ours), I suspect that they would still view us with an unfavorable eye at best.

I would expect something more along the lines of a swift neutering of the United States’ military capabilities, likely done mostly if not entirely from orbit. After all, it would not be worth wasting a single drop of Imperial blood (or whatever equivalents any given legionnaires might have) on addressing their folly now, would it?

269

The relevant question is this:

Where’s the profit?

I mean, sure, they could do that and satisfy a big ol’ rage-boner, albeit at significant detriment to the reputational assets labeled “thoughtful and prone to deliberate, well-reasoned action“, “reliable“, and “being the grown-ups in the room”.

But the minds vast and cool and unsympathetic at the Ministry of State and Outlands prefer, when someone has just committed an act of profound unwisdom that has just dangled their metaphorical testicles right into their steely ministerial pliers, to take said pliers and gently refrain from doing anything in exchange for potentially valuable concessions.

(After all, they have a big stick, which means they don’t have to use it when awareness of its existence will do just as well. And even assuming that there’s no-one in the current administration minimally intelligent enough to grasp cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum, there’s a very lengthy escalation ladder before they get to slaughtering a couple of million folks just to punctuate their diplomatic notes.)

270

Today in things likely to prove legally contentious post-contact:

All-party consent recording laws[1].

(These are incoherent by Imperial legal standards, insofar as actually forbidding someone to record something which they are present for in a logically coherent manner requires forbidding them to see, hear, remember, and/or make notes afterwards, because memory is a kind of recording and vice versa.

Thus, law there makes no distinction between whether or not the sensors are made of meat or attached to your body, or what substrate the recording is laid down on.

Not that someone won’t be perfectly willing to waste vast amounts of legal time for sport by arguing that an esseli “recorder” - that being a small fuzzy creature with big eyes, big ears, and a very good memory in a brain that’s maybe 90% of its mass - is not a recording device in any Earthly sense of the word, and if it is, so is everyone in this courtroom and their pets.)

  1. These thoughts brought to you by random Internet arguments and people who claim that they’re not comfortable visiting the homes of people who have interior cameras.

    Sweeties, if you’re planning to do something in my home that you’d be made uncomfortable by my finding out about, kindly get the hell out of my home. ↩︎

271

Preventing them (or at least the offending polity in any official capacity) from instigating, or attempting to instigate, any further violence against Imperial citizens (and disregarding of any and all diplomatic norms)?

If they conduct themselves as a hostile polity, then they will be treated as such, no?

272

They were going to lose, and lose spectacularly without managing to rate “annoyance” on the scale, going in. Everyone else in the galaxy knew that from the start.

(And, frankly, if the State Department isn’t pissing itself over possible consequences the moment they saw “Curling onwith ICE" on CNN, they will be the moment the diplomatic note arrives with a request for clarification, because everyone knows what a “request for clarification” means in these circumstances[1].

Getting action to ensure this sort of thing never happens again and adequate more than adequate downright extortionate diplomatic concessions will not be a problem.)

To use an analogy, these idiots basically delivered the equivalent of an impotent scratch from an angry kitten. If, this having happened to you, you trot upstairs, fetch a bazooka, and blow the little motherfucker away, do you expect that onlookers will think well of you for so doing?

Or, to use a national analogy, do you think the US would come off well if it decided to respond to an equivalently trivial provocation from the Cocos-Keeling Islands (pop. 593) by nuking them off the map? Or would it just make us look like a bunch of psychotic assholes?

Reputations are hard to establish, easy to ruin, and once established, not worth burning to win a pissing contest with a dickless man. You’re forgetting the all-important “speaking softly” part of carrying the big stick.

  1. It means ‘Your mouth’s writing checks you can’t cash again. Back your ass down and start thinking about what you’ll have to give us to make this go away.’ ↩︎

273

Also:

It ruins the effect of “no matter how the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it” if the mountain insists on throwing an avalanche at every little puff.

Look at our current President for an example of how to fail this test comprehensively and fractally, and in the process look weak, petty, intemperate, and a variety of other qualities which no self-respecting polity or ruler wants to manifest, especially in a context which invites direct comparison.

On a completely unrelated note, one use for CGI aging is going to be importing Empire-made wuxia movies to Earth. It’s hard for humans to believe in the ancient sage who’s spent a thousand years on a mountain honing his qi when he looks around 35.

274

I feel like there’s literally a club of Eldrae who make cases like this because it’s their thing. At least for the current milennia.

275

On the one hand, that’s probably true.

On the other hand, it’s probably their equivalent of Bertie Wooster and the Drones Club.

276

(Looking back, I think I massively misread the bit with the proximity to an act of war. That is, read it not as ‘not quite strictly an act of war, but could if desired be construed as one’ but, instead, as almost the inverse in fact.

That being ‘Technically counts as an act of war, but they are willing to give the barbarians a chance to course-correct on their own.’

Something which I, at least, do not have faith in being the response of the current regime. Particularly since they cannot seem to even conceive that another polity might actually be their equal (at least, not without espionage, perfidy, or sabotage), let alone their better.

277

The latter is the correct reading, but as I’ve covered in several contexts previously, there is often a big gap in practice between what you are legally permitted to do and what it is to your best advantage to do.

Taking context into account, the reason you offer a chance by going through the escalation ladder - including the step where you park a highly visible gunboat over Foggy Bottom - is not just that you believe that they’ll back down and learn something from the experience. That’s the optimal outcome, but not the only acceptable one.

But it redefines your pessimal case to “Well, as the responsible, sober, upstanding galactic hegemon which we are, we have afforded these idiots every opportunity to repair their violation of interstellar law and custom, and they have rejected every single one. Now when we drop the heavy end of the hammer on them, no-one will be able to say that we didn’t make all reasonable efforts to resolve the matter like gentlesophs first.”

This is how the galactic hegemon avoids being perceived as - and avoids being - the sort of bullying asshole that the current regime hereabouts actually is.

278

Good ol Hegemony/Dominance distinction

279

Related to the latter note (

“cannot seem to even conceive that another polity might actually be their equal, let alone their better”

):

There’s an old business cliché that runs “As hire As, Bs hire Cs”, concerning the tendency of many people to not hire those who might outshine them. (Relative status ladders win again.) Applying this to democracy in general explains a great many things: it’s a wonderful appointive engine of mediocrity, lest the public find itself ruled by anyone they have to look up to. The horror.

(This isn’t even a bad thing if expansive egalitarianism is a core value for you. People made the world gray because they like it like that. But it does mean that the modal head of government and often of state in today’s world is a weaselly mediocrity in a mid-level executive suit.)

But, of course, the Empire doesn’t run that way and indeed can’t, because you can’t usefully compel eldrae, you have to lead them. The people leading the Empire are the product of a harshly Darwinian excellence-maximizing process, because if you can’t demonstrate your competence, excellence, and magnificence, things they insist on in those who would lead, you will rapidly find yourself leading no-one but jack and shit, and Jack left town.

The intersection of these things… well.

You don’t have to love them. You don’t have to serve them. You can hate them, and fight them, and resist them.

But when one of the Princes of the Stars strolls in, radiant with all this exquisitely cultivated larger-than-life awesomeness, and has themselves announced as merely herald and ambassador for the Dragon Throne and the Empire for which it stands, great and glorious beyond all greatness and glory, etc., etc., it cuts deep. It can’t not.

(Or, to paraphrase it by reference, “Who let the fucking Solar Exalted in here?”)

280

((In this case, obviously, it’s gonna be hate. I mean, their whole ideology is supposedly about “national greatness”, and then they meet some greatness - that they can’t manage to deny without hearing the lie, even to themselves - and which holds them in absolute contempt for their complete lack of, and failure to attempt to develop, any greatness-resembling qualities.

But even someone who hates the sun can grasp that it’d be a real dumb idea to engage it in a fist-fight.))

(((Especially since no-one from there would hesitate to enumerate various things about America that are great or potentially great and how they would very much like to see those things being cultivated, rather than this dumb fuckshittery. No, they wouldn’t be in the least threatened by that. More greatness is good for everyone, obviously.)))