“You were doing it mostly right. More fine tuning than anything else.”
"I can accept the help on making Focaccia di Recco."
“Same thing, boss. It was mostly a technique issue, not a fabrication issue.”
“But I won’t accept dating advice from my coffee maker.”
“Hey, I looked at her Instagram and found her OF account. She was bragging-on her free OF account-that she had a new wallet for all of her needs, within a week of knowing you. She had all of the ‘you play with boys until a real man comes around to bang you like a screen door’ memes you could think of. And she drank all the coffee, left a bare bit at the bottom, and never made a new pot. You don’t need a thoughtless bitch who won’t make a new pot of coffee when she finishes an old one.”
“The autistic experience of knowing people are lying and disrespecting you but having to calculate how much of it you should tolerate and play dumb about so you can look “reasonable” and fit into a society built on the absurd premise that dishonesty is a human right.”
Dishonesty, like all free speech, is a sophont right, in the same sense that the choice to put your unprotected hand into the open flame is a sophont right.
The problem arises from a society built on the absurd premise that dishonesty with impunity at minimum, dishonesty as the governing principle of the economy on average, and dishonesty grounding the foundations of wealth, power, and society itself in the maximal case — has any future at all, much less any hope of competing with a society not designed to prevent large-scale voluntary cooperation.
Imperial law and ethics do not agree with you at all.
Say it with me, students:
“The freedom of speech is not the freedom to deceive.”
Any intentional lie on a matter of fact is criminal fraud under Imperial law and prosecutable as such[1]. Because honesty is a virtue - “A person of teir deceives by neither word nor deed and shall have no cause to hide his face from the world.” - and this being the post-contact thread, insofar as they find it anything when visitors run into this particular legal quirk, they find it quite amusing.
At a minimum. Since humans are prone to lie a lot in the area of sex and relationships, it will be trivially easy for would-be Casanovas to talk themselves right into the lethal chamber. ↩︎
Who said anything about it being ethical? It’s an act of net positive entropy. Of course it’s unethical, and disgraceful. So is Defaulting. And yet it happens.
The load-bearing words in that sentence are in intentional and matter of fact. That’s not dishonesty, that’s fraud. Imperials being exponentially better at collecting and retaining evidence, that’s a snap for them to enforce and no one with more than seven brain cells can contest it.
But Aes Sedai didn’t just get a reputation for dishonesty from the actions of Black Ajah Defaulters. They swore on an ontotech relic to speak no word that is not true; not even the Power promoting Entropy in that world can prevent the enforcement of that geas. (They have to cheat and use the same relic to remove the Oath.) The prohibition is absolute: to the best of their knowledge, every word out of their mouth is a verifiable fact. Some even go further than the Oath requires and make disclosures against their interests that aren’t ontological imperatives.
And they still can be dishonest. It’s harder, but they do it, and if you don’t have an oncoming halting problem looming closely over your consciousness, learning to do it is not a big deal. Misdirection. Absence of confirmation (for plausible reasons, of course). Accentuate some facts more than others.
Now that is no guard against consequences. If someone deduces correctly that you’re practicing a subtle choice-theft, you deserve the penalties that thus accumulate. But that’s a tort, not a crime.
“You have the right to be dishonest” and “You have the right to be dope-slapped with the government’s tacit approval, if not assistance” are, in that sense, synonymous.
ETA: The difference being, most Terran governments and way too many Terran individuals think they have the government-enforceable right to not get dope-slapped. They don’t and they never have. You have the freedom to make a mistake, but not the freedom to avoid the effects of the mistake.
At a minimum. Since humans are prone to lie a lot in the area of sex and relationships, it will be trivially easy for would-be Casanovas to talk themselves right into the lethal chamber. ↩︎
It would technically be possible for the Eldraeic Transcend to enforce honesty on its constitutionals: “no communication makes it out of your mind that isn’t, to the best of your soul-shard’s judgement, true and honest” is a rule that could be enforced in real time.
But it doesn’t. It probably has reasons, and they’re probably good ones.
Unless I’ve missed something, members of the Transcend have just as much right, in the Catfish sense, to lie and practice deceit as any other soph.
I imagine, unless they’re very persuasive, that they have two niggling little voices in their head— one being their muse, the other the soul-shard — suggesting that they really should get a checkup sometime at their local psych-design clinic.
I have been meaning to ask how the eikones of clever trickery, intricate shadow plotting, espionage and war coexist with a Transcend-wide ethos of All Lying Is Bad, No Soph Should Do It, All Such Should Burn.
But the answer is, “That’s different.” And I already know that. But do they?
And one day, when you stop erecting straw men, arguing like a polit, and ignoring existing material touching on those issues, I might feel like answering you.
Well, if the Fifth Directorate did exist, theoretically, it would have operatives capable of equivocating. That would lend a certain dissonance to their proceedings, partially alleviated by the severe distaste it causes and the subsequent striving to use the ability as little as possible — in the same way that a military, being fundamentally engaged in directed entropy, is also used as little as possible.
The most frequent action these hypothetical operatives would use the skill for would of course be the denial of the existence of the Fifth Directorate.
Fortunately for everyone’s consistency and conscience, the Fifth Directorate does not exist, and thus these concerns all remain firmly in the realm of thought-experimentation.
On this topic, I suspect early on a lot of general trolling dipshits and jacks of the ass trade will find themselves on the unpleasant end of a very pointed conversation with an Imperial they talk shit about online.
Not saying every 4chan user is getting the Tameshigiri treatment on general principle, but we all know how humans are when they believe themselves safe from direct retaliation.
“Why do you say this to me, knowing that I will kill you for it?”
But really, most of the time they’ll probably practice the “however loud the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it” protocol, also referred to as “the dragon cares not for the chitter of the monkey”. Anyone so cowardly as to go around insulting people anonymously is so far beneath contempt as to be unworthy of notice.
(But the archives remember, oh yes, they remember. And one day they may come to me with a request, hopefully not on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and - switching references in midstream - I’ll look down and whisper “No.”)
I’m not sure how the eldrae would feel about Australia as a whole, but I think the kaeth could have a lot of fun. I could absolutely see a semi-official delegation joining in the Boxwars, where participants build elaborate armour and weapons and props and vehicles and stages out of recycled cardboard, then spend the afternoon joyfully fighting each other with them.
Even if there are ‘common sense’ rules against harming other participants, I suspect the kaeth could have great fun joining in the local harghcha and passing techniques down to the local enthusiastic younglings.
(My thoughts do rather run to the pre-sparring briefing. On the one side, it’s all “humans are squishy and fragile, here are some test dummies to practice on so you can get used to not breaking them” and on the other side, it’s all “here’s a pry bar; you need this so that we can feel it when you hit us, and you won’t break your hand trying to punch what’s anatomically a jagged metal plate”.)
One of the newest things in the B-mod community has been the “hammer” and "V’ jawlines for men and women respectively.
Coming out of the South Korean B-mod movement, this combines Imperial dentistry with highly reinforced jawbones for men or very delicate, jandak-han jawlines for women. In either case, modern dentistry that includes highly strengthened teeth, improvements in the facial muscles (especially masseter muscles, so that chewing is unaffected without ruining the lines or the golden angles) and the temporomandibular joint for higher strength and greater flexibility[1].
The new jawlines, due to Netflix K-Drama popularity, has moved to the overseas B-mod communities, especially in Atlanta, Dubai, Hollywood and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the Japanese B-mod community remains stubbornly fixed on the “two sides” (jomon and yayoi) and “four aspects” (Kawaii, Fresh, Adult, Kirei) style of full-body design, rather than individual modifications[2].
Beijing B-mods, very firmly tied to the Party and their “New Thought” cultural aspect, continues to refuse considering going outside of the “perfected Han” that they claim is the ideal beauty standard.
Some cynics claim this is to ensure that the person can deep-throat big cocks and handle large ball gags without issue. This is not exactly true, but the mods for those start on this platform. ↩︎
Japanese B-moders prefer to use specialized shells-bio and cyber-versus extensive “base form” modifications, but the popularity of “base form” mods is increasing in Osaka. ↩︎