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I think the Planet penalty arises from the same idiosyncrasies that today explain why so many religiously-motivated conservatives reject anthropogenic climate change.
it nonetheless also fits a certain kind of purely materialistic interpretation of dominion.
For Miriam's followers, it's more like, "Working our will on it is the point. It's ours. We can do whatever we like with it. No obligation."
I always felt that Miriam and her followers weren't really predisposed to understand why they had to defend their own commitment to faith.
And that's pretty much the anti-Christian bigotry in a nutshell. Like there are no Christians that are liberal, no Christian environmentalists...
You can paint them up like that, but it's a rather specific characterization on your part.
The game actually has Miriam defending her faith left, right, and center. God's always behind the last theorem. Miriam's defense is she can move the goalpost forever. She doesn't acknowledge that it's a bad defense, a pattern of self-serving argument. She never makes the explicit comment that at the bottom of it all, the final axiom, is her faith in God. Nothing else. Zhakarov of course sees this as her stupidity, and humanity generally. And as an atheist, I'm with him.All of the original cast of 7 are arguing with someone. Although, like radio evangelists, there's nobody actually arguing back, when they utter their great platitudes. You can do it in your own mind, but you can't actually call in and say, "Excuse me, excuse me, Mr. Billy Graham..." You get cut off. On to the next caller, if there are ever any callers. The usual format is one way sermonizing.Or in SMAC parlance: here are my memoirs. My Little Red Book for you to read.
I disagree. Miriam's comment on the modernity--"The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress"--is actually subversive to anti-Christian stereotypes.
I don't think there are many "wrong" interpretations.
It's just a bunch of dissonance. I refuse to utter the mouthful "vendetta" when I'm writing up After Action Reports. I'm not writing about the Italian mob. Factions declare war.
If I were writing a clean slate 4X TBS (which nominally I am; 1st worrying about graphics stuff) I don't think I'd call these groups of people "factions". But, Firaxis had the right idea of not calling them Nations either. Hmm, what the heck would I call them?
Most of them are pretty close to being political parties or regimes. Many are movements, being concerned with ideology. None of these are great names / terms though.
'Bloc' and 'sect' are terms with some applicability. The Believers and the Cult of Planet are definitely sects, and possibly so is the Hive. Maybe even the Cybernetic Consciousness.
The Hive is probably the hardest faction to subvert. Played straight, Yang is a monster. Slightly subverted, he's a potentially Platonic despot. But totally subverted, he's the kind of ruler who demands a strict accounting from his disciples--a kind of governing elite who are held to a higher standard in order to model proper behavior for everyone else, whom Yang genuinely supposes he is helping to survive the rigors of life on Planet.
Miriam presumably thinks that we strayed from the path of righteousness, whatever that may mean. It could be a fairly pedestrian decline in church membership, a darker reference to frustrations about thwarted theocracy, or something else.
Yang, I guess, would say that humans failed to place the good of the many ahead of the good of a few. That, or we "allowed" ourselves to be ruled by unsuitable people.
Morgan thinks we did nothing wrong. We just ate our way to the bottom of the buffet salver.
Zakharov would perhaps feel that we did not sufficiently exploit all the literal and figurative tools in our intellectual arsenal to solve our problems, perhaps because we let pesky ethics get in the way. In my retelling, Zakharov blames liberal democracy for promoting tolerance of what he calls "folkways." In other words, we "freedom convoyed" our way to practical extinction.
Santiago must figure most people chose the path of least resistance and didn't fight for what mattered.
Lal's quotations indicate, ironically, that we fell prey to dictatorship after allowing ourselves to become the victims of censorship. That's quite a specific fate for a guy who is otherwise generically the "democracy" selection. Freedom of expression and obsession with bureaucratic forms aren't one and the same.
Come to think of it, "society" would probably be a great replacement for factions. Especially in the early years, the colonists are refugees forming hardscrabble frontier societies. And societies imply values, which go hand-in-hand with the factions' ideologies.
I think there's more interpretations to be made there. Fanon considers him to be inspired by Legalism- well then, he could be a 21st century Planetary version of any of imperial China's emperors, from Qin Shi Huangdi on. None of those rulers, even as despotic as they could, did everything themselves. (Though as a twist, one could imagine a far-future tech Yang who entrusts the administration of the Hive to cybernetic A.I. copies of himself- or actual biological clones. Ironically, the SMAC spiritual successor and knock-off/clone Pandora: First Contact did that with their Hive xerox.)
I'm struck by how in Michael Ely's "Journey to Centauri" novella he had Miriam be the sole vote in favor of not dissolving the mission, besides Lal. Her faith doesn't view the U.N. as the antichrist's One World Nation, at least. My read of that novella is that Planetfall was particularly traumatizing for her, leading to an intense spiritual awakening and whatever fanaticism she gets into on Chiron has a lot to do with that. I think also her focus on the faith of her father and country is because everyone else, Lal aside, pretty much abandoned the mission when the going got tough.
That sounds about right. My pet theory is based on the Firaxis website bio, Yang also wanted to bring back the imperial-era Confucian system and ways of looking at the world, as he personally served as the bodyguard of a modern day emperor.
Yeah, not much to add to that. He reduces all of life to economic interactions, and as he's such a big fan of economic games, human life must perpetuate so there may be an economy.
Ely does a particularly good job incorporating that characterization into the opening novella's story when he has Zakharov insist on restarting the reactor or whatever over Garland and the others' objections, even when it may threaten the integrity of the ship itself.
The patchwork crew proved unequal to their new task. Damage control operations began almost at once under the supervision of Unity's Executive Officer, General Francisco d'Almeida, clearing the way for Chief Engineer Prokhor Zakharov's technicians to assess the reactor spaces. They were disrupted by multiple groups of armed stowaways who proceeded to engage in a shooting war between not only themselves, but the mainline crew. One of the ringleaders, Colonel Corazón Santiago, read aloud a manifesto over the ship's internal address system, and was able to secure for herself a face-to-face meeting with Captain Garland. Thirty-six hours later, he was dead at the hand of an unknown assailant.The surviving leaders fell into rounds of recrimination. Without extraordinary measures to correct drift, Unity would overshoot Chiron, be forced into a long elliptical orbit, and return only after a transit of eighty-four years. All the crew now-awakened would either need to re-enter cold sleep, a deadly-dangerous proposition, or attempt emergency landing on the world below with whatever diminished quantities of supplies they could reach in the chaos. Zakharov, whose advanced age greatly reduced the likelihood of survival in either contingency, insisted that it was still possible for his operators to save the ship and permit an ordinary landing with much of the cargo intact, but other division heads protested that their personnel were too disorganized, or else too few in number, to provide him with the necessary support.In the end, every hand turned to sabotage. It wasn't enough that Santiago's brutes opened fire on the same people trying to seal rents in the hull. Nor that Jean-Baptiste Keller's followers used the cover of chaos to avenge themselves on Holnists and U.N. Marines alike. Zakharov, too, bitterly assailed his peers and refused them the benefit of his precious engineers. Deirdre Skye, the mission's head Xenobiologist, diverted first responders away from engineer tasks to reinforce the structural integrity of the ship's remaining greenhouses. Records show that Francisco d'Almeida awakened 400 more personnel than was ordered, none of them with the firefighting or heavy rescue billets relevant to the present danger, but all of them combat-trained. Aleigha Cohen oversaw the nerve-stapling of hundreds of newly-awakened prisoners in the ship's forward detention blocks. Leaving her post in an overcrowded surgery, Tamineh Pahlavi ventured into the heart of the ship and, with a few determined followers, made off with the genetic legacy of Earth--an index of every organism alive on Earth, and some already extinct at Mission Launch. Citing her authority under U.N. protocol, Miriam Godwinson, whom the ship's computer still flagged as deceased, refused to force crew members in her care to breach irradiated compartments to make crucial repairs. Finding the situation hopeless, d'Almeida, acting as Garland's successor, gave the order for each leader to gather those crew still ambulatory and abandon ship. In his last official act as a United Nations representative, he unilaterally declared the Mission Charter dissolved.
She was basically a Social Darwinian and it sounded like the Spartans believed that they were the only ones apex predator enough to survive the challenges that laid before humanity. So the people who messed up earth, both the leaders and the masses, were weak sheep who should've been led, and possibly culled, by her wolves.
Probably a legacy of earlier iterations of the game when Brother Lal led the Keepers of Wisdom and had a more science-oriented faction. No idea how they were going to manage that, since Yang's Labyrinth also had a science bent, never mind Saratov's Archons.