Due to a friend, I recently switched my gaming time from one online game to another, back to an oldie that I hadn't played in a long time. In getting back into the swing of things, I wanted to get caught up on the story as well as all the gameplay dynamics changes, and what I found was rather amusing.
To put it shortly, in the World of Warcraft, a character named Sylvanas is the leader of a faction called "the Horde". There is a single major opponent to them, called "the Alliance". The two fight over all sorts of stuff, and in the game story, Sylvanas recently burned down a the massive tree that served as the capitol city for a race of that is a member of the Alliance. Because it was a capital city, there were "civilians" killed as well as military, and so the game and players of the game have tried to portray this action as barbaric and evil.
Except that they miss the justification offered by Sylvanas herself: "This is war."
The old phrase goes "all is fair in love and war", right?
People don't believe or understand that, not really. ALL is fair?
One of the major Horde characters chastised Sylvanas stating "There is no honor in this!"
You know, because during a time of war, honor is more important than survival. Ideals are more important than living another day.
The Horde and the Alliance have a set of mutually exclusive values. The Horde is largely a collection of outcasts and misfits, a largely untenable amalgamation, if not for the races of the Alliance, who have subjugated and killed all of them at some time or another in their own history. The Horde has struck back, so they are no innocent doves either, but what that means is that there is no "good guy" in this mess. Both sides have blood on their hands, both sides have done terrible things, and neither side is without the need for redemption in some manner or another.
But that doesn't stop people from virtue-signalling their pacifism and lofty ideals about how wars should be fought.
Peace is a lofty ideal, but it is just that, an ideal, and in a fictional realm where everybody is guilty of crimes against someone else, peace won't come through negotiations and talk. The races of the Horde and of the Alliance want different things, have different priorities, and deep scars that will never truly heal.
What this means for the Horde and the Alliance then, locked in conflict, is that whoever survives will be the one that eliminates the other. Whichever subdues or subjugates the other will "win". It's an existential fight, and so neither side has any reason to hold back on their enemies. They're enemies.
And this is where people try to confuse things, to insert their superior morality where they have no enemies, and so they would seek to broker peace. These people do not quite understand that, because it's a fiction, because it's not real, of course nothing that either side has done really matters, because it's all pretend. The story is make-believe, and so Blizzard can make it whatever they want.
In reality, though, peace often isn't an option. Diversity + Proximity = War, and that's despite lofty ideals, because those lofty ideals can often be the grounds for the ideological diversity that then leads to conflict in the first place.
The Horde and the Alliance are at war. There is, in the nature of their war, no way to fight that isn't terrible. It's all tragic, it's all horrible. War has always been described as such, and in portraying accurately how each side will do heinous things to their enemies, Blizzard unintentionally exposed the idealistic pacifists who do not really understand that they are playing a game which is simulating war.
In war, your goal is to win and go home alive. To do this, you will do terrible things that, were you not in war, could be categorized as "wrong". You will kill people. You will break things and destroy stuff. You will commit atrocities in the name of survival that, were they not required to be done in the first place, you'd not have pursued otherwise.
And that's why, in terms of war, what Sylvanas did was not wrong, and despite her own significant moral failings and personal flaws, she made a decisive strike against her mortal enemies in an ongoing war where her faction desires to remain free of the authoritarian rule of the Alliance, let alone worse.
Sylvanas essentially nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if you've seen the revisionist history trying to make out the United States as evil for having done that during WWII, for having gone "too far", for not having tried harder to "make peace", then you'll understand why so many folks, even those who played Horde characters, were taken aback at the decisive action to destroy an enemies' stronghold.
Sure, the story has been written such that it supposedly backfired so the Alliance then sack a stronghold of the Horde as well, and Sylvanas' character is full of bitterness and hate, but those things are a distraction, an irrelevance, they don't change whether what she did was correct or not in the context of war, regardless of the entanglements that existed on a personal level.
Choose to fight a war, to win it, instead of dying for an ideal which cannot actually exist.
Understand the times you are in, and act accordingly.
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
19.12.18
Entropy is a selective pressure
It is easier to surrender to circumstances than to fight against them. This reality is the truth behind the mixed truths of lofty rhetoric and idealism that has derailed Western Civilization.
A different example of this would be from lifting weights. You know that you cannot lift an infinite amount of weight, but you have to believe that you can lift more than you can right now, and that through good habits and consistent discipline, your max will increase.
Another example of this comes from parenting. Children are by default selfish little monsters who demand various tributes be made to them on a daily basis, and when they don't get their way, they are upset. You have to teach them to stop doing this, but its a lesson that isn't learned and then applied the first time it happens, especially when their brains are still having trouble connecting things like action and consequence, cause and effect.
A third example would comes from war. It is considerably easier to just lay down and die than to pick up a weapon and fight.
In each case, you have a choice to make, and that's either to push harder or to give up, and rarely ever is there a third option. The binary feels false, but that's largely due to postmodern conditioning, and that can be demonstrated with a fourth example.
2+2=4.
There are an infinite number of wrong answers to 2+2, and only a single correct answer to 2+2. There is a binary, even if the set of one "side" is a single value and the set for the other "side" has an essentially infinite number of values, from negative infinity to positive infinity, lacking only the number 4.
Postmodernism sought to create a variation of false piety where declaring agnosticism was viewed as demonstration of moral or intellectual superiority, even if there are means by which a correct answer could be determined. Subjective truths were to supplant objective truths, because humans could apparently never be perfectly objective, so while 2+2=4 for one person, if another person exists on a different plane of reality, then perhaps for them 2+2=3, and another person 2+2=5, because the "rules" which demand that 2+2=4 are not objectively true, and so truth becomes entirely subjective.
The movement didn't start out quite as explicitly obtuse, but the dynamics are identical. Instead of maths, postmodernists went after another objective truth: the presence of sin in humanity.
Sin exists in a binary relationship with Holiness. Holiness is "perfection in goodness and righteousness", and sin is simply everything short of that.
Pursuing Holiness then was deemed unnecessary, because within a lifetime, no human being would ever actually achieve perfection. Even struggling one's entire life, there will still be ways in which we fall short.
So when Christians drank deep of postmodern philosophy, no longer was an adherence to the process of sanctification of significant importance anymore. Trying to eliminate evil was deemed pointless because it would never ultimately be successful, and so Christians stopped trying.
It'd be like me refusing to lift weights anymore because I won't ever bench 300lbs.
Or just buying my kids whatever they want because trying to teach them how to be less selfish won't ever eliminate the root of their selfishness.
Or refusing to fight in a war because it won't be the war to end all wars.
What is missed by folks with these mentalities is that the byproducts of trying to fight "wrong answers", to hold onto the single correct one, has intrinsic merit and value, regardless of what ends may come of them. Teaching that 2+2=4 doesn't eliminate all the wrong answers.
But it's not pointless to teach it, to explain why it is correct, why only that answer is correct, and so on.
It's the same with children, in teaching them. You won't make them perfect, but you will help them regardless.
It's the same in lifting, you won't always grow your max, but the process improves your overall health and benefits you regardless.
Folks who "get this", who are willing to take on what is difficult and not what is easy, will naturally be placed at better odds when uninvited difficulties show up. When problems arise, folks who have practiced pursuing truth, focusing on truth, not being distracted from truth, will already have been practicing the perseverance required to not just survive, but thrive despite challenges they may face.
Others will simply be victims of fate, tossed about like a boat in a storm, at the mercy of whatever happens to them. They'll whine and complain, and they may even happen upon a time of peace, but at no point is it because of any choice that they have made, because they're refusing to make a choice at all.
In the coming years, when circumstances get more and more difficult, there will be little time for pity or charity. There won't be any sympathy for those who gave up on themselves, let alone assistance. When people are busy trying to keep them and their families alive, they won't care about a stranger that can't be summoned to care for even themselves.
When even animals have a stronger survival instinct, an understanding that they must exert some effort to continue their own existence, the humans that deny even this also surrender any claims to humanity, in that humanity has instincts and so much more.
If that "so much more" leads only to suicidal behavior?
The gene pool is better of without that variation of it still floating around.
Humanity will face a winnowing, and the people that survive will be the ones who, at the very minimum, want to in the first place. People who recognize that, even though they will eventually fail, that is not a reason for not trying in the first place. That even though we will return to dust, there is still meaning and value in the choices we make.
Your future, both temporally and eternally, will be better for it.
A different example of this would be from lifting weights. You know that you cannot lift an infinite amount of weight, but you have to believe that you can lift more than you can right now, and that through good habits and consistent discipline, your max will increase.
Another example of this comes from parenting. Children are by default selfish little monsters who demand various tributes be made to them on a daily basis, and when they don't get their way, they are upset. You have to teach them to stop doing this, but its a lesson that isn't learned and then applied the first time it happens, especially when their brains are still having trouble connecting things like action and consequence, cause and effect.
A third example would comes from war. It is considerably easier to just lay down and die than to pick up a weapon and fight.
In each case, you have a choice to make, and that's either to push harder or to give up, and rarely ever is there a third option. The binary feels false, but that's largely due to postmodern conditioning, and that can be demonstrated with a fourth example.
2+2=4.
There are an infinite number of wrong answers to 2+2, and only a single correct answer to 2+2. There is a binary, even if the set of one "side" is a single value and the set for the other "side" has an essentially infinite number of values, from negative infinity to positive infinity, lacking only the number 4.
Postmodernism sought to create a variation of false piety where declaring agnosticism was viewed as demonstration of moral or intellectual superiority, even if there are means by which a correct answer could be determined. Subjective truths were to supplant objective truths, because humans could apparently never be perfectly objective, so while 2+2=4 for one person, if another person exists on a different plane of reality, then perhaps for them 2+2=3, and another person 2+2=5, because the "rules" which demand that 2+2=4 are not objectively true, and so truth becomes entirely subjective.
The movement didn't start out quite as explicitly obtuse, but the dynamics are identical. Instead of maths, postmodernists went after another objective truth: the presence of sin in humanity.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. - 1 John 1:8 (NKJV)Much more than a century ago, a philosophical movement began which, lacking self-awareness, decided that logic and reason and the scientific method could replace God. The root of the paradox, which has only become apparent in the past few decades, is that without God, logic and reason and the scientific methods have no reason to exist or have any influence over the thoughts and behaviors of humans in the first place, evidenced in how secular cultures deposed God, and then when science proved incapable of putting them on the throne they had secretly lusted for all along, they have thrown science aside for alternative means of growing in understanding and knowledge.
Sin exists in a binary relationship with Holiness. Holiness is "perfection in goodness and righteousness", and sin is simply everything short of that.
Pursuing Holiness then was deemed unnecessary, because within a lifetime, no human being would ever actually achieve perfection. Even struggling one's entire life, there will still be ways in which we fall short.
So when Christians drank deep of postmodern philosophy, no longer was an adherence to the process of sanctification of significant importance anymore. Trying to eliminate evil was deemed pointless because it would never ultimately be successful, and so Christians stopped trying.
It'd be like me refusing to lift weights anymore because I won't ever bench 300lbs.
Or just buying my kids whatever they want because trying to teach them how to be less selfish won't ever eliminate the root of their selfishness.
Or refusing to fight in a war because it won't be the war to end all wars.
What is missed by folks with these mentalities is that the byproducts of trying to fight "wrong answers", to hold onto the single correct one, has intrinsic merit and value, regardless of what ends may come of them. Teaching that 2+2=4 doesn't eliminate all the wrong answers.
But it's not pointless to teach it, to explain why it is correct, why only that answer is correct, and so on.
It's the same with children, in teaching them. You won't make them perfect, but you will help them regardless.
It's the same in lifting, you won't always grow your max, but the process improves your overall health and benefits you regardless.
Folks who "get this", who are willing to take on what is difficult and not what is easy, will naturally be placed at better odds when uninvited difficulties show up. When problems arise, folks who have practiced pursuing truth, focusing on truth, not being distracted from truth, will already have been practicing the perseverance required to not just survive, but thrive despite challenges they may face.
Others will simply be victims of fate, tossed about like a boat in a storm, at the mercy of whatever happens to them. They'll whine and complain, and they may even happen upon a time of peace, but at no point is it because of any choice that they have made, because they're refusing to make a choice at all.
In the coming years, when circumstances get more and more difficult, there will be little time for pity or charity. There won't be any sympathy for those who gave up on themselves, let alone assistance. When people are busy trying to keep them and their families alive, they won't care about a stranger that can't be summoned to care for even themselves.
When even animals have a stronger survival instinct, an understanding that they must exert some effort to continue their own existence, the humans that deny even this also surrender any claims to humanity, in that humanity has instincts and so much more.
If that "so much more" leads only to suicidal behavior?
The gene pool is better of without that variation of it still floating around.
Humanity will face a winnowing, and the people that survive will be the ones who, at the very minimum, want to in the first place. People who recognize that, even though they will eventually fail, that is not a reason for not trying in the first place. That even though we will return to dust, there is still meaning and value in the choices we make.
Your future, both temporally and eternally, will be better for it.
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