Xilizhra wrote...
According to you personally.
According to logic. Offer an argument that isn't just bemoaning my opinion without intellectually interacting with it.
Then it's a good thing I'm not being asked in any universe to devise a solution for it here and now; the most I've ever done in-game is stop one instance of genocide. All of this is thought experiments.
Thought experiments that you are failing at. You repeatedly insist that I am wrong and that alternatives are possible. Present one now. I am not being theoretical. Try.
We've only seen this happen in areas where the Veil was already badly thin, such as in the Circle tower during an act of demonology,
Veil tears aren't much of a defense for mages when mages are the primary culprit for tearing the veil.
I don't buy the argument that demonic possession is limited to tears and specific geographic locations either. More explicit information is required to make such a strong claim. If there's a source that outright says this I'd be keen to see it. I haven't played either game in a while but I'm sure I remember encountering abominations in fields and the outdoors nowhere near kirkwall, and stories like the possession of Meredith's sister suggest you are incorrect. Unless we are assuming that any lore character that contradicts your imagined defense is automatically a liar. Plus there is the precedent for some idiot mage kid knowingly letting himself get possessed and bringing havoc on an entire town. How many other mage children, too young to know better, will pull a Connor when life presents some difficulty that they think they can wish away
They fought a war to be free of templar control over their entire lives. That's the focus, not national law enforcement.
You aren't that naive, surely? You think that militarized revolutionaries will happily trust that they won't be victimized again, submit to yet another authority, and allow the tools that were used against them to be rebuilt? Have you studied many real world revolutions? I don't think this happens. If you believe this, studying African history would a giant bummer for you.
Fine. Yes, it's technically a risk, but as a general rule, people are good at policing themselves, both for moral reasons and fear of punishment. Flagrant public massacres are very rare things, they're just widely publicized and seem more common than they are.
I'm glad you are engaging with the point. Allows me to say something new.
People are miserable at policing themselves. If you are inclined to break a law, odds are you will be able to justify it to yourself morally. Besides, morality isn't some foreign thing here in Africa, most people are generally decent, and yet our crime levels are incomprehensible to people who don't live here. In First World countries, where law enforcement is, by and large, excellent, outright homocide is less than in the third world, but still occurs with alarming frequency in urban areas. The USA has an excellent standard of law enforcement compared to what we have to put up with in African countries, but even so there are alarmingly high gun death numbers every year. People break laws and kill people no matter where they are or what the moral fibre of their society is. The only thing that has proven to actually work to reduce such numbers is by limiting their access to weapons that empower them beyond what society is prepared to cope with. And you cannot do that with mages.
Magic is an even more pronounced problem in Thedas than gun control in the real world. Unlike a gunman, who has to rationalize his actions to himself, psych himself up for a killing, and, in the case of a mass-shooting, accept that he'll probably die in the process, a mage who becomes possessed jumps beyond psychological barriers and is ready to kill from the get go. Plus the abomination's killing potential dwarfs that of the crazed gunman. But puttting abominations aside, let's consider the psychopath mage. The psychopath mage has tremendous potential for disaster. The psychopath mage can kill outright, without a normal person having any defense against him, using a weapon that police and security forces cannot search him for, cannot remove from him, cannot limit his access to. The psycopath mage, unlike the crazed gunman, has a reasonable expectation that he can survive excesses of violence, because very few people are equipped to be able to stop him. The psychopath mage also has access to mind control, and can so wreak havoc, lethal or otherwise, for prolonged periods of time with a reasonable expectation of remaining hidden. The psychopath mage can summon up demons, or perhaps even force demonic possession on average, innocent people. The psychopath mage can pull of a terrorist bombing with bat guano and sulfur. The psychopath mage can potentially get in over his own head and tear the veil. And the psychopath mage, if he's the ambitious sort, knows that he actively further his own power through using blood and sacrifices. That makes some crazed social outcast with a semi-auto look like a toddler with a butterknife.
You say public massacres are rare things. But that does not mean that we must accept that they are just a part of life, a negligible risk, and accept that they happen, yes? Mass-shootings can be prevented, therefore there exists a moral imperative to prevent them. No how much more common would public massacres be if the kind of broken person who thinks about commiting them had access to phenominal cosmic powers, had a reasonable expectation of overcoming any averag human being with their invisible powers, and knew that killing people could make them ever more powerful? It is not unreasonable to think that if these assurances were present in the real world, public massacres would be more likely to happen and would be even more disastrous. The people of Thedas have the same moral imperative that we do to prevent such things.
Now
there I am making a personal ethical argument, from a sanctity of life perspective. Other ethical perspectives may differ. Someone might think that freedom for the masses means that the odd mass killing, as well as the general levels of gun violence in the world, are an acceptable price to pay for specific civil liberties. Indeed, many people do think that, as we can see in the American political climate. Perhaps to you even greater crimes are an acceptable price to pay for the civil liberties of mages. But either way, it is a real problem, not some fiction to justify templar human trafficking. If mages are free to disperse among the general population, the negative consequences of this, even if most mages are law abiding citizens, will be beyond what we have any frame of reference for in a world where a person's power is limited by the laws of nature. Even if you believe that it is a perfectly acceptable trade off for liberty, the consequences are there and must be dealt with. The templar system allowed for prevention, but mage liberty will have to mostly get by with punitive action and damage control.
Also, the Circle itself would have an incentive to hunt down mages who committed actively criminal acts.
And the mages in that circle would also have an interest in protecting their own people, and sweeping their crimes under the rug. They would have an interest in colluding with people who, as fellow comrades of the struggle and part of the "us" rather than the "them", they sympathize with. They would have an interest in overlooking petty abuses of power that become "part of the culture". Some of them would have an interest in colluding in procuring fuel for the blood magic that furthers their power. Plus dozens of potential corruptive influences that real world organisations fail to resist, aggrivated by just how extreme their power is. If human nature is anything to go by, organisational structures in the new, victorious Circle have as high a chance of being a part of the problem as being a part of the solution. One can hope otherwise, but that's not realistic.
Modifié par Red Templar, 21 mai 2013 - 08:09 .
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still uncomfortably intrusive on the lives of mages. This logic cannot be avoided. Either mages are uncomfortably restrained, or the general population is unacceptably at risk. You have so far proven unable to demonstrate an alternative to the templars that isn't necessarily less effective.
