On Jan 19, 2004, at 11:09 , Noam Izenberg wrote: > It could be argued that until he went on the lam, Vlad's entire > purpose was to throw other people's lives away (and to personally do > the throwing whenever possible to further his own (at the time, rather > limited) philosophy. Granted his philosophy has developed and > expanded over time, and not a small amount during the events of Teckla > itself, but I think that Vlad couldn't really feel that way without > acknowledging he'd be throwing stones in his own glass house Well, it could also be argued that those people were throwing their own lives away, and that Vlad was just the mechanism. How is assassination different from rabble-rousing? Well, in one case, you're enforcing someone else's will by choosing to off a person. In the other case, you're being convinced that in order to make an omelet, a few eggs need to be broken and that you, yourself, are an egg that may be called upon to break yourself against a very hot cast-iron pan that happens to have some oil, garlic and chives in it. That is all to say, just to make things pretty unobsfucated, Vlad was part of a system. Everyone else in the system knew that they were doing things that require walking a pretty tight line. If you stray from the extremely tight etiquette of the organization, you may get finalized unless you're tough enough to fight it. So, in other words, you're gonna reap what you sow if you piss someone off. If Vlad chose to be a part of that system, that's not a good moral choice in my world, but in his (that is, within the Jhereg), it was pretty normal. However, the revolutionist movement in Teckla & Phoenix was almost the opposite. The revolutionists decided that they didn't like the system they were in, and gee, look, there sure are a lot of other people who are in their same position. All they needed to do to get out of their situation was to convince everyone else that the system was no good, and that it was worth dying for. The problem that I have with all of this is that the revolutionists looked at all the Teckla and Easterners that they were using to overthrow the Empire as expendable, since those people were giving their own lives. So, really, why is the revolutionist any better than the Empress and her press-gangs? Both were forcing Teckla & Easterners to die, but the revolutionists thought that their situation was more "worthy" of the blood-sacrifice simply because they thought that all of the surviving Teckla & Easterners would be better off afterwards. Now, whether that is true or not is up to debate, BUT, to create conflict & violence to further your own ends at the expense of other people's lives WHILE NOT putting yourself in the same risk is synonymous with "evil" in my book. <cough>Bush</cough> <cough>Bush</cough> Sorry! Wow, that's a nasty cough I have there... -- Matthew S. Klahn Software Architect, CodeTek Studios, Inc. http://www.codetek.com