Ttaagg

I must say, I find this to be a terrible descriptor for sex. But maybe what you and I consider violent differs too dramatically for this assertion to be reasonable to me. For this reason, how would you define violence in such a way that there are actions that are not merely "expressions of violent urges"? (Furthermore, would you say that an urge can be unconscious and thus unbeknownst to he who acts upon such an urge? If so, I think that it becomes futilely undecidable whether something is based off an urge or not.)

Such a philosophy seems melancholy to say the least! You seem to assume only the worst of man as being possible, and good to occur only as means to a more self-serving end. Thus, a person would only desire peace to avoid being curbstomped or to build up in order to demolish another group of people. Even under this assumption, however, I'm not sure that we can claim this is a "false peace that has no right to exist". There is obviously a point to the peace, and thus I presume it has a "right" (though I'm not sure how to accurately define "right" in this context). Even though, the peace would not be "false" under my previously stated definition. Possibly, we are working off of slightly different conceptions of peace. If I had to guess, you would call a peace with no internal or secret grudges a "true peace". Any state of peace with any sense of dislike would then be "false peace". Working from this modified definition set, I think I will agree that it is, in fact, a false peace, but peace nonetheless. Though, it invites the question of whether "true peace" is ever achievable, or if it is merely an ideal never realized. The biggest problem with this notion of true peace is that knowing the self is incredibly hard! I have some friends that are really smart, and I am a little envious of that quality. Does that mean that our friendship relies on a "false peace" between us? What about someone who I don't consciously envy at all? Is it possible that there is a subconscious envy involved, and thus true peace is not possible? And how would we classify situational feelings? (For example, on Tuesdays I am envious of alliance X since they all get free pizza, but every other day I have no desire to be among them, other than when I am hungry.) Though, maybe I am trying too hard to pull peace out of the realm wherein it is primarily involved. It may be that it makes no sense to talk about peace other than between groups of people. Working from the same true/false definitions, how do we adapt them for the use by a group? Is it false if any member has an unstated grudge, or maybe it needs to be a leader? What about explicit grudges that stay within the confidence of the alliance? Is there a distinction of classes of grudges? Such as, I can be envious of NPO's sexy flag all I want and wish that my alliance had it? Or maybe I cannot stand the leadership of IRON but love a majority of the membership? (Apologies for the undefined nature of grudges and the fuzzy definition of false peace. I'll put some more thought into it and see if I can come up with a better definition with justifications for either one.) --- You also mentioned that peace is a "state of perpetual dishonesty" and "a denial of desires and passions". While I can agree that this applies to the CN world in the general case, I'm reconsidering whether we can make such a blanket statement. For example, what if someone plays the game in order to annoy other players because they find this annoyance personally gratifying. For such a person, avoiding widescale war for all of CN would be the fulfillment of desire, as I think we are safe to assume a large portion of the playerbase enjoys war. Based on previous experiences (I'm looking at you, Artemis of !@#$%*), I reckon that there is another class of people that care not for war, but only for the friendships/social outlet that the game provides. I do agree, however, that for a majority of players, peace is denying the pleasure of war. --- I'm quietly considering whether any of these points we've raised has direct implications or relationships to "real world" life. (I.e. is there a disjunction between the nature of CN players and that of real people, or does the same set of rules govern both?) The issue of anonymity and perceived lack of personal consequences makes me ponder whether the internet is carte blanche to drop portions of the facade we use in real life and reveal a more disturbing part of ourselves. However, there is an alternative in that the internet is a venue for more intimate introspection into ourselves and our considerations of humanity in general. (I'm sure there are countless other variations, such as whether the internet is merely a way we seek pleasure, but I feel that these are too unsophisticated to accurately describe interactions done via anonymity.) For instance, I've never been a fan of confrontation in reality. On the internet, I don't go out of my way to engage in confrontations, but I won't back away either. Now, does this suggest that I secretly desire to get into barfights or shouting matches with coworkers? Or is it merely a desire to learn more about the way my mind works* and more general facts about "life"? *Maybe I'm the only one that thinks about how I think, and often think about why I think about thinking. That would simplify a lot of things, actually. But I think that you are all a bit more complicated than that (plus, I can promise you I'm not a unique little snowflake).

Don't leave me hanging like that! If you know of the solitary peace, do tell!

(I apologize in advance for not having read the entire thread. I've got too much work to do, but the OP was quite suggestive and provoked my curiousity.) Being relatively new to the game and as-of-yet still unaligned, I've gotten a very large number of "ZOMG JOIN MY ALLIANCE" spam. While most are completely nondescript, I must first laud NSO not only for the relative creativity in their theme, but also in executing it well (at least all of the PM spam I got was tied into what your alliance wants to be). I find your "Sith Code" to be provocative almost entirely for the sake of being (possibly ironically) edgy. But that doesn't mean it doesn't raise valid points. With respect to the segment contained in the OP - "Peace is a lie", I'm not sure it has been sufficiently considered to justify your code being the "only relevant philosophy". If we consider peace to mean simply "no war", I feel like we lose a lot of complexity of your argument. (And, to bring the real world into play, you get into situations where there is large-scale military action but no DoW. Is this then peace? By the preceding definition, yes, but I cannot agree to this in good faith.) It seems that you consider only the effects of a nebulous idea of peace. Since you haven't suggested a definition (or maybe you did and I'm just too tired to find it), I propose we consider peace to be a state of affairs between two alliances where there is no overt, sanctioned hostility. This does not have to be in the form of in-game wars, and the permission does not need to be granted in writing or even necessarily by the leadership of an alliance. For example, if a large portion of alliance A shows distaste for members of B on their internal forums, I could still call this peace. People are fickle and enjoy drama. However, when serious hostilities occur in the open (these forums and IRC are good realms for this), then I feel like the peace is broken. A single person or small group is a rebel, but when alliance leaders or a large portion of an alliance's prescence engages in the hostility, the peace has been disturbed. Furthermore, I will consider the "cyberverse" to be in a state of peace only if for all alliances A and B, A and B are pairwise peaceful towards each other. Actually, this is a bad definition of peaceful cyberverse, as there is bound to be some small alliance that is the local punching bag (i.e. FAN, I think). Thus, I think it better if we can state that there is a threshold of % of politically active players represented by all these universally pairwise peaceful alliances that needs to be exceeded. (In other words, with an arbitrary number of 90%: The cyberverse is in a state of peace if and only if there is a set of alliances {A_1,A_2,...A_N} that are all pairwise peaceful and that the total number of politically active CN players in these alliances exceeds 90% of all politically active CN players.) This constant doesn't interest me much other than by its existence. It necessarily has to be quite high (probably closer to the 96-99 range than 90 in order to be a good metric). ((I hope we can find this definition agreeable, and if not feel free to propose another from which we ought to proceed.)) A naive application of your code would suggest that there is never a time that these overt hostilities are not present anywhere in the game. This sort of absolutist reasoning seems flawed merely because it is absolutist (i.e. "Always the case that there is no peace."). While I cannot give a counterexample relevant to CN due to my relative inexperience, in previous browser games I have partaken of, I've experienced quite a number of lulls in the game, where there isn't any real tension. This state, in my opinion, is the worst to ever happen in a politics game (but more on this later). Thus, anecdotally, I'd disagree with the naive assertion that peace can never happen. (Furthermore, your absolutist assertion would apply also to all points in the future. I don't see how this could possibly be reasonably expected, let alone proven, given the operative definition of peace.) However, a different interpretation of your argument is that peace cannot be lasting. I think that this is a very good argument, but needs a minor addition of time-frame or state of CN. I would be welcome to consider "current peace is no indicator of peace lasting more than X time" for some arbitrary X. While this is obviously a much weaker assertion, I think it might be the only one reasonably expected to hold. As I mentioned above, peace in political games is no fun and people love drama. Thus, while peace is the least active time of the game for many people, for others it is the time to get to work -- and start the next war! From experience in at least one prior browser game, I can say that when there was a prolonged period of peace (a month or two), people got antsy and very easily aggrieved. In my opinion, most politically active players are not in CN to buy infrastructure and sign treaties. Since it is those people that escalate a relatively minor dispute to the point of universal war, the intentions of the player are obviously quite tied into the world state. Thus, assuming that CN retains a decent portion of these people through a time of peace, I think that it is completely unrealistic to assume that they will all fail to start a war over something that would be relatively unnoticed immediately after a war ends. For these reasons, I must say that peace cannot last. However, as you pointed out in the OP, if we are both wrong (and peace does prevail somehow), no one wins. I mean "win" here in the sense that a player at CN wins only when he derives satisfaction from playing. I can be ZI'd and still be "winning" the game by this definition. When logging in gets too tedious to be worth it, then I lose, and the community loses (not only because I'm super self-important, but also because a large community lends itself to more drama, ergo more "win" on the whole). If everyone just chills out and doesn't go to war, then we have a bunch of people playing dumbed down eSimCity. While some people might enjoy logging in every day simply to buy more infra/tech, I reckon such a player would get a lot more satisfaction out of a more realistic game. So, in order for the cyberverse to continue continuing, peace absolutely cannot persist. (Sorry for the long segment of text, and the very cursory treatment given to the final assertion. The former is due to interest, and the latter due to having to get back to work.)