Edit 1: It also likely depends on just how exacting the standards are as well. If it requires them to be an exemplary paragon of all virtues even by Imperial standards, well, I’m not certain that there necessarily even exists such an eligible candidate, when one selects also both for legal eligibility and for willingness/ desire to do so, and potentially for the requisite physical and mental capacity (if that is still meaningfully an issue).
Edit 2: Something like ‘has never (at least voluntarily) broken their word or communicated a (knowing at least) untruth or deception’ alone would disqualify a great deal of the population, I think. Removing even those qualifiers would likely disqualify the overwhelming majority of humanity, if not all of them. Exceptions being infants, of course, due to the simple expedient of presently lacking any capability to speak, let alone to promise or deceive (though even the latter could be nebulous, depending upon whether you consider crying for attention deceiving the parents into believing that there are other more pressing issues that require their attention, such as feeding, diaper changing/cleaning, or illness/distress).
Edit 3: Then again, I can imagine that just being viewed as a ‘skill issue, be better’ by a fair number of at least the more idealistic (and/or unforgiving) Imperials.
No, not really. It’s a matter of local regulation by people who remember the Barbecue Wars¹ or whatever their local equivalent was, and even then, it’s usually just a civil tort, unless you’re going around inducing dissonant personality disorder (DPD)² or deliberately trying to create murder-cults or the Fourth Reich (but I repeat myself).
After all, it’s still just talking persuasively³.
(A certain number of wacky religions, cargo cults, conspiracy theories, bizarre ideologies, urban legends, etc., etc., etc., are just part of the process of growing up into a culture that can handle being part of a mature information society.)
One of the best and funniest bits of fanon ever written for Transhuman Space, and something not that dissimilar unquestionably happened in 'verse history.
Not in our DSM, alas. Colloquially known as “doublethink”, it’s the term for the kind of crazy where you internally rewrite reality to match the demands of your dominant memeplex.
And in most polities, it turns out all sorts of people - priests, politicians, advertisers, and so forth - have certain incentives not to outlaw talking persuasively⁴…
Imperial memeticists don’t usually get into this particular area because, y’know, there are some things that it’s in poor taste to do even for a lot of money, but it’s a big galaxy and there are almost certainly some professionally trained memetic engineers willing to work for, say, American political parties.
Fortunately, there are also more than a few professionally trained deprogrammers, as well as people willing to explain why it’s not a good idea to put neural stiffeners in the water supply even if it would have avoided That.
Elon being Elon, of course this means he’ll make multiple attempts at inserting himself into the conversation via a sock puppet account and a crappy voice changer, only to accidentally out himself three sentences in because he’s just that much of an idiot.
It’s not going to check back through your entire history to ensure that you have never stumbled on the road to virtue; that’s more or less an impossible standard for anyone to meet¹. What it does care about is checking that doing so hurts you, you don’t just shrug it off, and you pay your dues thereafter and strive to be better. Which is a very strict standard of ethics, but not an impossible one to meet.
(It also hates nihilists, but then, who doesn’t?)
On the latter: not be better; become better.
Although there is a certain amount of “skill issue”. You are seeking extraordinary powers, yes? Well, for great power, we reserve the right to demand great responsibility.
And fails the basic requirement that it must be possible for people to become worthy.
On another topic, I found myself reading today an archived article from last year, concerning the Atlantic’s unfortunate settlement-to-avoid-a-default-judgement in a Japanese court that resulted in them having to issue 16 corrections to a single article, to errors existing for reasons which have a lot more to do with incompetence and not giving a damn than actual malice, and sadly defamation by incompetence is not something you can be sued for in US courts.
(And US courts don’t enforce defamation judgments made by foreign courts, although if you do any business or journalism in non-US jurisdictions, counting on this may not redound entirely to your advantage.)
So consider, in the post-contact world, the consequences of there being a jurisdiction which is not only quite comfortable to prosecute people not only for defamation, but also for publishing false information period; and whose requirement for standing for the latter crime amounts to “there was false information, you published it, and I read it”.
In curiously related news from an alternate timeline’s Los Angeles –
TOURIST DEFENDS ROBOTAXI, KILLS 137
with such quotes from the ensuing trial as
“Well, when I see a dutiful, helpful moebot being violently assailed by a mob of entropy-worshipping degenerates, I kill the bastards. That’s my policy.”
and going up from there.
From the other side of the news, there are also a lot of videos out there of ICE, to pick one example, dragging a lady away from a school pick-up line in a manner - thanks to their scruffy civilian clothing, masked faces, and unmarked van - functionally indistinguishable from an abduction and/or sexual assault.
I would not previously have imagined that this would be a safe behavior in our glorious and heavily armed nation - especially since criminals have already tried on multiple occasions the “we’re the police” gambit - and in the presence of said tourists would almost definitely lead directly to “STOP RIGHT THERE, CRIMINAL BLAM”.
“I apologize to the relatives of the deceased and would like to have a full and frank discussion with whatever lethally incompetent microcephaloid thought having government agents play dress-up as gang rapists was a good idea.”
What would one be willing to bet that shortly after that comment was made some bright spark in ICE decides to attempt to deport said tourist for the crime of daring to publicly challenge them (and also killing several of their agents they guess)
I wonder how long ICE would continue to exist as an organization afterwards
About as long as it takes for the Empire to respond? Assuming that the targeted tourist is not capable of personally dismantling it in a shorter timeframe. Same may well go for the US Gov’t as a whole, at that point.
I mean, this sort of thing happens in the less civilized parts of the Periphery all the time.
On the latter, there’s part of the informal briefing for those going to visit the less civilized parts of abroad that, for the purposes of simplicity, I shall represent with the following Girl Genius quotation:
Minsk: Gorb. Dis iz turnink into vun of dose plans… Hyu know – de kind vere ve keel everybody dot notices dot ve’s killin’ people?
Gorb: It is?
Minsk: Uh huh. And how do dose alvays end?
Gorb: De dirigible iz in flames, evryboddyz dead an’ I’ve lost my hat.
Minsk: Dot’s right. Und any plan vere you lose you hat iz?
Gorb: A bad plan?
Minsk: RIGHT AGAIN!
Probably - after losing a few more people due to the poor life choice of choosing “escalate” over “congratulate” and failing to note that American police tactics¹ and Imperial psychologies go together like red fuming nitric acid and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine - our protagonist² executes a strategic withdrawal via Wolfhound contract, and a few months later an extremely bored lieutenant commander brings his gunboat by to drop off the standard “our citizen-shareholder did nothing wrong, your chaps provoked this entirely through [barbarism|incompetence|bad faith|bad form|just being assholes] (delete as applicable), and we will be expecting diplomatic concessions for making us come over here” note.
Must be Tuesday.
(Which is not to say that those diplomatic concessions might end up being along the lines of “perhaps we should disband this organization and yeet its members into the unemployment line before they write any more checks our national security can’t cash”, but that part depends on the ability of folks to take a hint.)
The eldrae go from not recognizing monkey-posturing in the attempt to intimidate to not taking it seriously to realizing that it is meant seriously, at which point you’re dead⁴. The kaeth think it’s adorable, sort of like an angry kitten. The ciseflish don’t find much short of a global stock market crash to be intimidating, and in any case hire scarily effective bodyguards any time they might have to deal with the brutish and uncivilized. The galari will be calm and reasonable for as long as they have to be, secure in the knowledge that they’re huge goddamn rocks. And so forth. The only people who might really get it are the dar-bandal, and they play this game too, and much better.
And it could easily be and probably is the same protagonist for both incidents. I mean, they’re not going to be taking sides here³; if you appear to hate civilization, decency, and probably motherhood and apple pie, too, they’ve got some issues with your issues.
When the SOPHINT on today’s news made it back home, the author scrawled Ceterum censeo omnes in hoc orbe futui possunt across the conclusion.
Oh, gods. They’ve been firing rubber bullets at journalists, it occurs to me. Don’t ever, and I mean not ever, try that on an ICIN team.
Hopefully that’s not literally that restrictive, because if it is it can pretty easily end up getting into situations like “we published the best information we could find without spending more on research that we could afford, it’s not our fault that you happened to have done that research for your personal reasons and didn’t happen to have told us the results yet”.
…and/or “the information we published had changed from true to false for unrelated-to-us reasons too close in time to our publication for us to have realistically found out”.
(Or, of course, the good old “we had a typo/bit flip/bug in our code/microprocessor glitch/etc and didn’t actually intend to make the error, can you just let us correct it without punishing us further”. But at least that can realistically be declared to be incompetence.)
[And yes, both of those sound like they can realistically happen in intra-Imperial contexts too, so I’m guessing there’s some way around these problems - I’m just not sure what, and I’m also not sure whether humans are capable of using it.]
You misunderstand. Those are the requirements to have standing, not to win an open-and-shut case. Winning the case is done based on the reasonable sophont / due diligence standard with degrees of intent taken into account as normal.
…of course, that being said, the Imperial-standard platinum-iridium reasonable sophont is intelligent, educated, and well-read;
the expected standard of due diligence climbs proportional to the claimed authority you speak with (thus, news organizations there find diligent copy-editors and [preemptively|promptly] publishing corrections invaluable¹ in exactly the way ours don’t);
and there is an ethical and social norm that if you should find yourself tempted to opine without a comprehensively considered, well-informed opinion on a given subject, then you should shut the hell up and not pollute the noösphere with your idiot blatherings.
I mean, there is True Tales of the Worlds, but they’re not a news organization. Legally speaking, they’re a pasteurized processed entertainment meme product.
Here’s an amusing spinoff question for you, over on the other side of the world from the CCP’s increasingly frustrated attempts to tell Elaní min Gortháll that Hong Kong isn’t for sale, and they won’t be throwing in Shenzhen if he doubles his offer…
…how much of the US might a buyer be able to get if they offered to pay off the national debt free and clear in exchange for some, um, territorial concessions? In this age of increasing economic strain and debt interest eating the budget.
(“You can’t just buy and sell countries! Or even parts of countries!”
The representative from Gilea & Co. dumps a copy of the original documentation of the Louisiana Purchase and the purchase of Alaska on the table.
“Historical precedent says that you, in fact, can. Now let’s talk turkey.”)
In one specific scenario, here, feel free to reimagine this as “How many blue states can Donald Trump throw under the space-bus to receive remission for his economic sins?”
Bonus points if instead of just coin, the purchase is paid for with some highly sought-after widget or tech that contains a Trojan memeplex designed to help Imperialize the States
I wonder how they’d react to “yes, we would be willing to sell <some populated place>, but the price to convince everyone affected to agree to the sale is going to have an exponent on the exponent”
“Your funeral. Pretty sure anyone else you can get $100 trillion from free and clear is going to have less favorable terms to offer.”
(Perhaps with a raised eyebrow and a note that previous purchases of sovereign rights on Earth have been done in accordance with the time-honored “this is between governments, so you peasants can suck it” protocol.)
(Amusingly, I note that the Louisiana Purchase was for only $371 million, in modern money, for $1.2 trillion worth of land; and likewise Alaska cost us $113 million for $50 billion worth. Looking at some current estimates, $100t’s ought to be close to, if not well over, a buyout bid.)
I tried writing some fic about it but haven’t gotten it to work yet, so concept only:
The slightly nonplussed Imperial ambassadors when contacted by the War Thunder devs, who are checking what counts as ‘publicly available’ information about their equipment. That bit the embassy can understand, that’s possibly a bit paranoid but they’re happy to assist with people wanting to do business without violating laws.
They’re a little more amused at the queries about what to do if/when someone posts restricted or classified information, because this keeps happening. They can empathise with the tones of sheer exasperation.
My guess is people from the Empire are not sufficiently invested in the zero-sum cesspit that is War Thunder online play to start pulling out schematics and handbooks to prove a point
OTOH I imagine that what counts as restricted-or-classified-information in this context would probably differ enough between Imperial and Earthican sensibilities that the Imperial position might well be closer to “wait you’re restricting that? why would you do that? it would be absolute common sense to have that freely available in case anyone ever needs the data for anything”.
