Yes, we're sure.

Yes, they really do. The UCAS is not the USA in any way, shape, or form. It is a different entity altogether, and it cannot exist if the Revolution are to attain their goal.

Right. Because of course the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was just one big federally funded daycare centre with absolutely no other offices or government organisations based out of there.

Well even if the US did reform I don't think they'd have to give it back. Didn't the US default on and write off all of their debts? I have vague memories of the Dragons sourcebook, or possibly Shadows of Asia, saying that this wiped out massive amount of Middle Eastern government holdings in US Treasury securities so they ended up losing billions if not trillions in assets. If I was Ares I'd simply go round and buy them up at pennies on the dollar, or more likely thousand, and then keep them safe for a rainy day. The US reforms and demands the return of their assets, Ares comes back with their debts and tells them 'Well fine then, that means you owe us some many trillions of dollars. Pay up bitch or we're keeping it as part compensation and suing for the rest.'

Did the Corporate Court agree with and rule for Ares argument that the US was defunct and they didn't have to hand NASA/Ares Space back or did the UCAS simply decide to give up in the face of what they saw as an unwinnable battle before a final judgement was issued? This would have serious repercussions on the whole affair depending on which it was.

I was just speculating.

it remains that history is written by the winners. if McVeigh would never be remembered as a hero, it's only because the battle he tried to fight was unwinnable. if it'd been winnable, and he'd won, the fact that he blew up babies would be quietly shuffled out of sight and mind.

regardless, in every way i can think of, the NR is very dissimilar to McVeigh. McVeigh had no workable long-term strategy--he didn't even plan well enough to evade capture for long. he worked alone with his partner, rather than as part of a larger network. he was completely bereft of patience.

meanwhile, the NR has nothing but long-term strategies. their plan went off without a hitch, to all appearances. not only did they work as a conspiracy, they formed two seperate conspiracies and ran them both with very little in the way of leakage. and they're willing to wait a long time to get what they want.

perhaps most importantly, the NR's battle is winnable--and they're winning it.

And yet people here honestly wonder why I so desperately want to have the power to stab people in the face over TCP/IP.

Well, considering that I alone have written more about it on DS than what has been published since Threats 2, I'd like to think my time and effort wasn't entirely for naught.

The only thing that has kept me from going completely batshit about this is that in spite of the fact that IRL the uprising would have torn North America to shreds, it is acceptable to the extent that horrible things have occured in SR that were never really treated as having much, if any, reprecussions. e.g., the basis for Alamos 20,000 (that is, killing 20,000 people in and around Los Alamos when the GGD caused Redondo Peak to erupt), The Sears Tower explosion, the Night of Rage, the Awakening, Goblinization, both Crashes, Bug City, RA:S, SURGE, etc. People in SR just seem to have the worst case of outrage fatigue imaginable.

A 9/11-scale attack in SR would barely merit mention on the 11 PM news.

Don't conflate moderation and hegemony. Just because the majority of the voting electorate can agree on a sufficiently large number of political, social, and economic issues to make the political life of anyone with new ideas short, doesn't mean that those agreed upon values would be considered "moderate" anywhere else.

Recall that this is a nation that will seriously shoot you right in the face for putting a spirit into a corpse - something which just over the border in Miami is accepted (if creepy) magical and religious practice. There's outstanding death warrants on people who practice Azteca and ghost dancers as well.

This is a country so "moderate" that practicing the national religion of any of its neighbors that has one is punishable by extra-judicial murder. And if you even raise your voice that maybe the country should stop ding that, you're essentially frozen out of politics forever.

The CAS is not seen as a moderate entity anywhere except the CAS. Sure, they don't have vigorous internal debate - but lots of countries in Shadowrun, the present day, and the vividly remembered past have that trait as well. In fact, I don't think you can even talk about countries without a seriously distinct opposition for long without falling into Godwin's Law so I'll leave it at that.

The CAS is a polite society, it has an amicable political system relatively free of polarization. Bu if you come from outside with your foreign ideas, they will actually shoot you. In the face.

-Frank

While I understand the reasoning (somewhat) behind the author's choice of taking out the old Loop, it did bother me that the people of the UCAS were so lackluster in their response when the Sears/IBM Tower was brought down. Little thought seems to go into the reactions that the general populace has, even when it's in their own backyard. The Night of Rage seems to come written off as "just another Rodney King", despite that at the same time the docks of Seattle were aflame, the Sears Tower was crashing down, and little reaction against the metahuman/human communities occured. If anything, I would expect there to be, like in post-Shattergraves Chicago, a ghetto-izing of the different metahumans, even along ethnic lines. Even the fact that Alamos 20k successfully painted the metahumans as the cause of the Shattergraves, it seems like Humanis got little more than a few dollars shunted their way.

exactly--moderate. on the conservative extreme, you've got nations where it's illegal to be an unregistered mage of any stripe. on the progressive extreme, you've got nations that elect a dragon to the presidency. the CAS is in between those extremes--moderate.

CAN YOU TRUST VOODOO-MAN??? NO!!!!!!!

Leading with humor because after this I get snarky.

Well, duh. My simple little brain didn't realize that "moderate" is a term defining a political ideology. Thanks for that.

Super. That doesn't have anything to do with my point that as a society, the CAS political ideology and partisan affiliation is concentrated in a normal curve. What they are moderate about doesn't matter.

The only thing that matters is that while the CAS is a normal curve (or close enough for this discussion), the UCAS on the other hand is skewed to both outliers, creating a distribution curve than can easily be described as the inverse of a normal curve. The ideological affiliations in the UCAS more easily fall towards extremes (yes, this is a very simple premise based on a left-right spectrum, but only because the distribution of general partisanship most easily explains what would also be reflected in other measurements of ideology distribution). Hence my specific reference to the political climate immediately preceding the Spanish Civil War, where the major parties were highly-partisan with virtually no ideological overlap and without any representation by moderate parties or national politicians who advocated less-radical, let alone centrist/moderate, ideologies.

NO!!! I thought that the CAS, like the U.S. was the perfect model of global ideological moderation.

Or, you know, I'd have at least expressed some benchmark for a comparative analysis of the governments and exactly which is moderate if I was discussing comparative politics. I wasn't. It was merely a description of internal politics.

Well, there are various reasons that can most readily fall under the excuse that the designers weren't trying to build a game where everyone hated each other. If that was the case, a mixed-race team would be uncommon rather than the norm. To that end, a tremendous amount of racism, xenophobia, and general fear was downplayed. The intent to build a world that was playable and unique trumped the idea of "realism," which people have been trying to drag, kicking and screaming, into the game ever since SR3 came out with varying, but mostly half-assed, results. There are inconsistencies and plot holes practically built into the setting, especially the pre-2050 background history of the game. There are fairly good reasons why people dislike the NANs. They shouldn't, by almost any metric, exist, let alone function. However, they do not least of all because they (and the balkanization of North America) comprise a fundamental pillar of the setting.

But I digress. As for the Sears Tower bombing, one can intepret the apparent non-reaction as a function of how the public reacted to that when taken in the context of everything else happening around them. Terrorism, including mass-casualty terrorism, is/was quite common in SR's history. Terrorism in general is rampant (NAGNA paints the UCAS as a country where no one ought to want to live). 26,000 dead is almost unimaginable from a RL perspective. However, for many people those numbers have been seen before (e.g., the Alamos 20,000) in a world where nature seems to be on the side of killing off the humans. UGE and Goblinization can easily be seen as such. There was an earthquake in 2005 that leveled New York and killed thousands, and two waves of VITAS decimated the American population. How badly? Well, NAGNA states that VITAS killed off one-third of the United States population. Combine that with the effect of the Crash, witnessing the horrors of wars such as the EuroWars overseas, having a newly-formed and potentially hostile nation on the southern border, acts of constant terrorism, the fact that the Night of Rage was days earlier (and can't be presumed to have just lasted one night), and suddenly 26,000 dead Chicagoans doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

By the current timeline in SR, catastrophic events and terrorism have occured so often with such massive casualty counts that 26,000 is looking tame, and so 3,000 dead is the kind of thing shadowrunners could pull off without much trouble on an almost-regular basis. What's someone unrelated the act going to say? "3,000 dead? There weren't that many survivors of the 100,000 people trapped inside the Arcology." Hell, JTF-Seattle's and the Red Samurai's combined casualty count was probably higher than 3,000.

Yep, the Oklahoma City Bombing was pretty much equivalent to Israel blowing up schools that just happen to be equipped with cruise missiles. Placing civilian children in the middle of a valid military target has always been a way to garner sympathy but the effects are always the same. The people who disagree with the cause will like it even less. The people who agree with the cause won't care about the collateral damage at all.

i would say that people have reacted. the CAS reacted as well as can be humanly expected--they're cautious, and take a dim view of all these newfangled changes, but they're willing to give magic and metahumans a chance rather than condemning them outright. the UCAS responded by basically have a nation-wide psychotic break. they welcome anything Awakened and not visibly unfriendly with wide-open arms. first Awakened threat that comes along and offers the UCAS candy, and the UCAS is going to end up on the back of a milk carton.