"Why are you still alive?"

cthia wrote:Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

It is more of a community; definitely not an autocracy. There are various names mentioned in TEiF, but not one to rule them all.

cthia wrote:A community without a leader? Who makes the sort of rules that says you can't have a bonfire in the middle of the street? Who is responsible for the direction of the "community"? Its bylaws, its purpose, its dos and don'ts?

There has to be someone calling the shots. Or else they never would have deviated from the Detweiler plan.

No mention of a government? Nobody establishing laws? So there is lawlessness? What exactly are their goals?

Could Gail be one of their leaders?

cthia wrote:Something has occurred to me. The Detweilers rule the MA. Who is driving the Benign Alignment or the Engagement?

tlb wrote:It is more of a community; definitely not an autocracy. There are various names mentioned in TEiF, but not one to rule them all.

cthia wrote:A community without a leader? Who makes the sort of rules that says you can't have a bonfire in the middle of the street? Who is responsible for the direction of the "community"? Its bylaws, its purpose, its dos and don'ts?

There has to be someone calling the shots. Or else they never would have deviated from the Detweiler plan.

No mention of a government? Nobody establishing laws? So there is lawlessness? What exactly are their goals?

Could Gail be one of their leaders?

tlb wrote:As was pointed out to me (I cannot find that instance now), they did NOT deviate from the Detweiler Plan; instead they remained faithful to the plan as originally stated by Leonard Detweiler. It was Leonard's heirs that eventually corrupted the plan into one of universal domination.

tlb wrote:As was pointed out to me (I cannot find that instance now), they did NOT deviate from the Detweiler Plan; instead they remained faithful to the plan as originally stated by Leonard Detweiler. It was Leonard's heirs that eventually corrupted the plan into one of universal domination.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Leonard never spelt it out very well want he really wanted. He never did write the Plan. When we talk about the Detweiler Plan, we've all assumed it was the Leonard Detweiler Plan, but we've also been told that it was created after his lifetime.

So maybe it's named for a Richard Detweiler that lived 100 years later or so, and was the one that faked his death.

runsforcelery wrote:Now, it can legitimately be argued that Beowulf, in eschewing a program of direct, explicit, targeted improvement of the human baseline turned its back on the potential to improve the human race as a species. That was, in fact, Leonard Detweiler’s position. And, for those of you who have asked, Leonard Detweiler probably would’ve been horrified by the Alignment’s current strategies and policies. Detweiler never envisioned the horrendous dehumanization of genetic slaves. In fact, he never specifically referred to them as “slaves” at all. Don’t get me wrong — for his time, and considering the culture from which he sprang, he was an incredibly ruthless bastard, perfectly prepared to create thousands or even millions of human beings who would be second-class citizens. He had, however, almost a patriarchal perspective on the genetic “indentured servants” he created, and the Mesa constitution’s provision for manumission of genetic slaves was inserted at his insistence. Moreover, he regarded the creation of the “indentured servants” as a priceless opportunity to incorporate superior characteristics into them and (through them, in the fullness of time) into all the rest of the human race. They were to be his laboratory, in which individually valuable genetic traits would be developed, enhanced, and conserved in the process of solving individual specific needs. In a sense, this was the same logic as the Beowulf code’s willingness to modify colonists to better suit them to their new planetary environments except that by commercializing the process on a large-scale basis, Detweiler was creating a far larger experimental population with a view towards eventually combining all of those individually engineered traits into a single genetically superior species. As part of his mindset, emancipated “indentured servants” were never supposed to become Seccies. Once they were emancipated, they were supposed to have the vote, to see their children fully integrated into Mesan society, etc. To be honest, that was probably the least realistic of his several unrealistic assumptions of what was possible, but it was fundamental to his own thinking and the moral system which justified everything else he was prepared to do.

After his death, the “Detweiler vision” was corrupted, as generally happens in a closed society which sees itself as a threatened/visionary minority surrounded by hostility and threats to its noble purpose. Moderation is normally the first casualty of that sort of environment, and paranoia and megalomania while not necessarily inevitable are certainly likely. Driven underground, confronted by Beowulf’s savage denunciation of genetic slavery (and Beowulf was the first to insist upon that term instead of “indentured servant”) and (in what became the Alignment’s opinion) vilified for simply desiring to improve all humans, the Alignment’s leadership started its gradual but steadily steeper slide into what it has become by Honor Alexander-Harrington’s day.

--- snip ----

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t members of the Alignment who, faced with something like a Francesca and Herlander Simões, wouldn’t turn out to be additional Jack McBrydes. It means that the initial vision of Leonard Detweiler has been not simply corrupted but institutionalized as a conspiratorial, revolutionary organization which measures the moral acceptability of any given act or strategy solely in terms of whether or not it believes that act or strategy advances the achievement of its “noble” goal.

--- snip ----

Ultimately, I’m fairly sympathetic to the Leonard Detweiler view of the possibilities and value of deliberate, targeted genetic “improvement” on the baseline Version 1.0 of humanity. What they’ve accomplished in their own Alpha and Beta lines demonstrates the potential for improving the human genotype. So do Honor Alexander-Harrington, Benjamin Mayhew, Yana Tretiakovna, and a gentleman named Jeremy X. However, despite any sympathy I may feel for Leonard’s original view and objectives for improving humanity’s DNA, I find Beowulf’s more limited view of what is acceptable far more likely to preserve humanity’s humanity.

It’s not my intention to paint the Alignment — or any of its individual members — as cardboard cutout, mustache-twirling Agents of Evil. I think they are agents of evil, but it isn’t because they have knowingly and willingly embraced evil. It’s because they are so consumed by their purpose that they are unable to recognize evil actions when they are the very ones committing them.

munroburton wrote:Wormhole links are unpredictable. One of the things which derailed the Alignment's timetable, if not quite their entire plan, was the discovery of the Manticore-Lynx bridge.

Which brought Manticore about four to six hundred light years closer to Mesa. From that point onwards, much of the Alignment moves have been reactive and probably improvised - the half-baked Talbott resistance, Monica affair, Byng and Crandall's deployments. They were forced to launch Houdini much earlier than intended and even then it did not succeed 100%, costing them their shadow emperor.

The prematurely launched Oyster Bay was also completely reactive(to Apollo), whereas the original OOB would have been completely proactive. This turned it from a total tactical success into a total strategic failure as it planted the seed of a Haven-Manticore alliance.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Leonard never spelt it out very well want he really wanted. He never did write the Plan. When we talk about the Detweiler Plan, we've all assumed it was the Leonard Detweiler Plan, but we've also been told that it was created after his lifetime.

So maybe it's named for a Richard Detweiler that lived 100 years later or so, and was the one that faked his death.

You are wrong, RFC has talked at some length about the argument between Leonard Detweiler and the Beowulf establishment that lead to the creation of Mesa and Manpower Inc. Here is a piece of that: