The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Denarian Short Story
Bad Alias:
--- Quote from: Kindler on July 29, 2019, 03:27:42 PM ---The Spartans weren't really evil, just brutally utilitarian; some of the stuff they were famous for (such as killing newborn babies with birth defects) are evil by any moral standard from the past several centuries, but not so much for the Iron Age.
--- End quote ---
I was thinking more along the lines of how the elite warriors annually hunted slaves that stood out to keep the populous living in terror, and such.
g33k:
--- Quote from: kbrizzle on July 27, 2019, 07:20:09 PM --- ... Agreed on the Mab being deceptive thing, however not flat out lying to someone shows integrity. Whatever you want to say about the Fae’s deceptive abilities, they are ALWAYS good to letter of their word (not always the spirit)...
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I don't think it shows "integrity" as such. It shows ability. Mab -- like other fae -- cannot break their word.
Does a brick have "integrity" because you can rely upon it to fall when dropped? Does a piece of deliquescing fruit have integrity (it's equally reliable)?
Mab -- like other sidhe -- will twist every nuance and expectation until they have utterly misled and deceived, with identical consequence (to a mortal foolish enough to rely upon them) to an actual lie. Again, that's not a lack of "integrity"... it's a simple matter of what they ARE.
They ARE bound by promises, they ARE incapable of lying, they ARE deceptive.
Kindler:
--- Quote from: Bad Alias on July 30, 2019, 06:18:17 PM ---I was thinking more along the lines of how the elite warriors annually hunted slaves that stood out to keep the populous living in terror, and such.
--- End quote ---
Oh yeah, they did that too, though, again, there's a brutal utilitarian reason for culling the Helot population: they outnumbered the Spartitates several times over. Rebellion was a constant threat, so helots were routinely mistreated and culled. Wrong, but logical, if ice freaking cold.
Mira:
--- Quote from: Kindler on August 01, 2019, 02:54:54 PM ---Oh yeah, they did that too, though, again, there's a brutal utilitarian reason for culling the Helot population: they outnumbered the Spartitates several times over. Rebellion was a constant threat, so helots were routinely mistreated and culled. Wrong, but logical, if ice freaking cold.
--- End quote ---
They also put young people who hadn't married yet naked in a dark room with orders to pair off. All in the name of producing future warriors for the state. Moral by their standards.
Bad Alias:
@Kindler: Just because something makes sense doesn't ameliorate its being evil. For example, slavery usually makes sense from the perspective of the slave owner. That's true for most acts of evil.
@Mira: But not moral (Spartan treatment of the Helots, haven't looked into how other Greeks viewed Spartan sexual practices, many of which we would find abhorrent) by the standards of most Greeks at the time.
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