On Jan 19, 2004, at 12:15 , Noam Izenberg wrote: > > On Jan 19, 2004, at 12:42 PM, Matthew Klahn wrote: >> Well, it could also be argued that those people were throwing their >> own lives away, and that Vlad was just the mechanism. > > I don't think I can agree. The target of an assassination rarely > _asks_ to be such a target. Knowing you're taking risks is one thing, > but I'd bet most of them didn't think they were throwing their lives > away until Vlad came knocking on their skull. Perhaps you're taking me too literally? I don't mean to say that they were asking to be killed, but rather that they ran the numbers on their own little cost-benefit ratio, and decided that the risk of being assassinated successfully was out-weighed by the benefits of more territory/money/etc. Even that may not be correct, as the formula has to be something like: (predicted monetary gain) - (cost of defending against assassin) > (predicted monetary/status loss of other party) - (cost of someone hiring assassin better than my defenses) Though, of course, this is most likely not a linear equation like I put here, and "luck" does have some role in an assassination. And, not to quibble, but at least one of Vlad's targets DID actually ask to be assassinated and spent hundreds of years planning it all out... :) >> 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. > > I take your point. Possibly somewhat to the side. I think > assassination is a) not risk free, and b) in young Vlad's case in > particular the happy confluence of his personal philosophy and desire > (kill Dragaerans) with that of the Organization (kill _specific_ > Dragaerans). In this very simplistic way each was the other's tool in > a mutually beneficial arrangement. That Vlad grew and changed speaks > of his personal development as well as the external forces affecting > him. Ah, but Vlad was risking his own hide while performing assassinations and even when hiring other assassins (since it would be, at least circumstantially, traceable back to himself by anyone in the Jhereg). Kelly & his band (including Cawti) knew that they could be targets after Gregory was killed, but they were actually asking the Teckla and Easterners to face armed Dragonlords in the streets with homemade weapons. Now, I didn't once hear Vlad report that Kelly was out there in the front lines with a sapling-made-spear poking it at Phoenix Guards, and while that may have happened, it wouldn't have been in the character of Kelly to do so. He was an officious prick, and not a leader-from-the-front-lines. So, while Kelly felt justified because he thought he was going to improve the lives of everyone else, he wasn't "thinking it through": it appears that you can't go against the Cycle, and he should have realized that. And, if I'm not mistaken, he may have spoken to Verra about the whole thing, and that would make it even MORE foolish to believe that he could go against the Cycle. But, maybe there is no evidence that those two met, but it seemed to be implied in Phoenix, at least to me. >> 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. > > Here I disagree a bit also. Yes Vlad was part of the system for a > while, but he didn't care for it in and of itself, and bought into it > only so far as it fulfilled is somewhat narrow vision - until his eyes > were forced ever more open by the events around him. He 'used' the > Organization as much as it used him. For a while - actually several > times - it looked to me like he had a serious death wish. He knew > sometime he was going to get himself killed because he _wasn't_ going > to walk the line forever. I had reached this conclusion before Teckla > and Phoenix. True, true, Vlad was doing all of this because he (rationally, or irrationally, consciously or unconsciously) hated Dragaerans with a passion. Then, when he realized that he _was_ at sometime in the past a Dragaeran himself, and came to realize that he didn't _really_ hate Dragaerans, as some of them were his best friends, he "grew up". I'm not saying that Vlad was right to be an assassin, but I am saying that he knew exactly what he was doing, death-wish or no. Kelly was more of a mass murderer than Vlad was, because he was convincing people to, in effect, kill themselves for him. Those innocents didn't deserve to die; Vlad's targets were not nice people, and everyone knew it. I'm not saying they deserved to die, either, but they certainly weren't innocent of anything (as Zerika herself "said" (well, through Aliera, IIRC) herself of the Jhereg Imperial contact that Vlad kills at the end of Phoenix). Though, I guess you could say that the king of Elde Island was pretty innocent, but when a god asks you to jump... >> ...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. > > Heh. I think this is a bit of a quibble. Vlad was certainly putting > himself at risk of his life or worse (and indeed 'worse' happened on a > couple occasions). The risks and stakes were much smaller for Vlad > (money and single lives) than for the revolutionaries (more money and > more lives), but the morality of either can be looked at though > several different color lenses and appear pretty much how you would > like. Again, his _own_ life. Yes, morals are all relative, and I'm sure that Kelly thought he was justified in all of this. I'm saying that to me, he ain't. I guess my view is that if Kelly were alive today, he'd be trying to start a revolution against the US gov't for the massive social injustice that it fosters in this country. While I agree with that argument (i.e. massive inequity between poor & rich, and still growing), I don't think that revolution is yet justified. I also don't see the coming election as one that could possibly fix the problems; perhaps revolution is the only way. BUT, I would recommend exhausting all further means as really-good-tries before you resort to revolution. Just my $0.02. Strayed from the topic a little, haven't we? :) -- Matthew S. Klahn Software Architect, CodeTek Studios, Inc. http://www.codetek.com