Dean_the_Young wrote...
As charming as a belief as this is, it's historically wrong. There are realms and realms of studies and analysis for why and how people are able to kill and not break down, and then go on to lead healthy, productive lives. For all that PTSD is a headline catcher now, for most of human history it wasn't. Why? Because most people, upon returning from war, weren't reduced to shambling, morally devastated wrecks. The recognition of PTSD is actually a relatively recent development.
It is very real, and absurdly easy, to train people to be able to continue functioning after killing people. These are not psychopaths: these are common people, draftees and volunteers, all medical backgrounds and all social origins, desensitized and able to kill and carry on with their lives once returning.
It's the factors that training doesn't prepare people for that see most people buckle.
It is true that you can train people to be psychopaths. That doesn't make it a wise idea. PTSD is only recently recognized, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist prior to being recognized. Your statement is like saying that noone actually suffered from bacterialogical infections before they realized such things exist. Reality doesn't work that way. The fact that you seem to think there is any relevance to PTSD's being only thought of recently might explain why you also insist that Cerberus wasn't rogue until Kahoku discovered they were.
You miss the point that the Mass Effect universe doesn't claim to have that understanding, so huzah. Nor do even we have an understanding of prospective human chemistry on a computer-input level, so double huzah.
And no, gun balistics are not comparable to the difficulty in understanding chemistry and results on the body. Hence why bullet forensics are an established science and yet we spend billions of dollars researching drugs.
Actually, forensics prove that we do understand much of this already. How could studying corpses aid in crime investigation unless we have enough information to interpret wound patterns? As for the billions of dollars in drug research, there are fewer and fewer major breakthroughs. New drugs are usually minor derivatives of older drugs, with the majority of research time being clinical trials to make sure there were no calculation errors. Also while we know a lot about the human body, it is still very complex and processing power of computers is still not neccessarily up to the task of compete analysis. Furthermore, some of the features we look for in drugs might simply not be doable, such as the need for broad spectrum drugs that are similarly effective and non-harmful across entire populations.
Oh, and that is what we are capable of now. Rather a lot more time and research has happened by the time of ME, and computer processing power is similarly grown. In ME, we have Medi Gel, which is so far advanced over modern medicine that it might as well be magic. We also have grey boxes. We have Shepard brought back from the dead!
Uh, no. On all accounts.
You have judged Cerberus to be Not Good. Others have judged Cerberus to be not good. Your reasons and Others reasons are not necessarily the same, nor is there any arbitrary agreed upon rule that if X 50.0000000000001% of a population feels something, then it is.
Appeals to the majority is a logical fallacy.
In Ascension, TIM laments that there are people who disapprove of Cerberus' methods and therefore they have to operate from hiding. That alone essentially states that TIM believes the majority don't support him. If the majority did support Cerberus' methods, then why would they need to stay hidden? And why would they be needed at all? The complaints TIM has about the Alliance wouldn't exist because the majority would have voted in favour of similar methods to Cerberus, or perhaps voted TIM into power outright.
As for suggesting the majority are wrong, you have to make the case. It is true that the majority aren't always right, but when the concepts are ones that have been part of culture for millenia, there is usually a non-arbitrary reason.
No, it isn't. Not by the classical, working defenitions of terrorism at least, as used by most governments.
Besides the fact that there is no single definition of terrorism, terrorism is not simply any crime in which people die. At it's most basic, terrorism is actions intended to create fear to achieve political goals by shaping public/government behavior.
Destroying a Quarian flotilla ship wasn't the express purpose of the Cerberus operation. Recovering an escaped biotic subject was. Destroying the ship wasn't the purpose of the operation. Fear in the Quarian public wasn't the purpose of the operation. There was no political goal intended to be reached by terrorizing the Migrant Fleet into changing their actions.
Oh god, not the strict semantic definition of terrorism again.... You know very well that the term is used a lot more broadly than the strict definition.
Which, in no sense, is an implication of the composition: it's easy to see something destroyed without knowing exactly what does it. And if you considered your own words, you've already made it even more obvious that Cerberus did something else to whatever they put in Toombs, because he certainly wasn't eaten through in seconds despite having much, much weaker skin. Which means the thresher acid was altered in some way. Which means we still don't know what exactly was changed, and what it could have done (or if it did it).
Since you believe there is great value to such research though, I take it you will volunteer to be a test subject? Note that with the existance of medi-gel, the acid may well have caused catastrophic damage to whatever part of the body it was injected into, and they simply put him back together and repeated as needed.
You do have a point about there being different types of acids, but toombs did report that it was very painful and very traumatic, and that they ran the tests repeatedly on him anyway.
As for your 'but they couldn't know in advance what it would do' line, they should have had a really good idea from simulations, and they would only learn how it affected Toombs anyway. Again, one of the main difficulties in drug research is developing treatments that are effective and safe for entire populations rather than just for specific individuals. The amount of data gained from testing on such a very small sample would be very limited in use.
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