I can't just walk away from Pearl Harbor and pretend that I wasn't there.
So by your definition, being present is being involved; thus it would not be possible for you or any other player character to be uninvolved in the worlds to which you verse, because once you are there you are involved.
By that definition, of course we forced you to be involved. The moment you appeared on the beach, you were involved.
Eric keeps saying that you can't use reason to win an argument. You're just proving that.
Eric is incorrect. You can indeed use reason to win arguments, provided everyone agrees on fundamental principles. He feels it is otherwise because he fails to recognize that he is arguing with people who have entirely different fundamental principles.
In the case at hand, argument from your side would be:
- To be present in any place is to be involved in that place.
- I was placed by the referee in Pearl Harbor without any control over the fact.
- Therefore, I was forced to be involved in Pearl Harbor.
That is unarguably correct, and if I accepted the first point I would be forced to accept the conclusion. Reason wins the argument.
However, the first point is a fundamental principle. Let me give the argument from my perspective:
- Being involved means making a meaningful effort to impact events in a situation; it is thus possible to be present in a situation and do nothing meaningful, and thus not be involved.
- At no point did anyone take control of your character and cause him to make willful actions which impacted events at Pearl Harbor.
- Therefore, you were not forced to be involved at Pearl Harbor, but rather chose to be involved rather than accept the consequences of non-involvement.
By my definitions, you were never forced to be involved, and reason just proved it.
So the problem is you want to use your own definition of "non-involvement"; but since "non-involvement" is a term I introduced to the discussion as a way of describing your character's attitude, only my definition of the term is relevant. I can say that we wanted to test whether you were genuinely a non-involvement player, by which I mean that no matter how much force is applied to your character you will not interfere with the events of a world in any way, and that by putting your character in a position you found untenable we proved you were willing to become involved if it was to your character's benefit.
Now, you can say that you don't accept my definition of "non-involvement". In that case the entire discussion is meaningless, because I am saying that the light is red and you are screaming at me that no, it is not orange, and I should stop saying so.
So, if "be involved" means "character took meaningful action to impact events or circumstances" and "forced" means "player had no control over the character and could not have caused the character to do otherwise in any way", I think you can see that, by reason, I am correct. You "took meaningful action to impact events or circumstances" in Pearl Harbor because you decided that not doing so would be detrimental to your character, and you were unwilling to accept those detrimental circumstances.
If the choice is between "obey the Prime Directive" and "allow the Enterprise to be destroyed with all hands", and the Prime Directive really is the prime directive, that is, the first rule that is to be followed in every situation in which it is relevant, then you let the Enterprise be destroyed with all hands. To do otherwise is to act as if the preservation of the Enterprise and its crew is more important than that which is stated to be most important, and so to invalidate the sense of the Prime Directive being prime.
If the most important thing is to remain uninvolved and you are taken by an MP and crippled and hospitalized in a location where you are in danger of being killed, and you take action which constitutes involvement, in order to protect yourself from that possibility, then by definition protecting yourself from that possibility is more important than remaining uninvolved.
That is all anyone has said on this side of the argument.
What you have said is that if we wanted to see if you would or would not become involved, we should have made it easy for you to walk away without incident. That would only have proved that you walked away given the opportunity to do so. It does not prove whether you would or would not have become involved, because walking away was easy. In this case, it would have proved nothing, because we might have concluded that your failure to become involved proved you were a non-involvement player, when all it really proved was what we discovered the hard way, that you will do whatever is easiest.
You were not forced to do anything that would alter the events of that world. You were taken into custody and put in a situation where you had the opportunity to alter the events of that world, and pressure was put on you to do so, and you broke under pressure. You never had to tell them anything. You chose to do so--and as I recall I was shocked that you did, because I thought once you were in the hospital it was just a matter of waiting for events to pass, and you surprised me by insisting at that time of warning of the imminent attack. Yes, I understand what motivated you to do this, as you did not realize that being killed would have cured all your injuries. That does not change the fact that you became involved because you thought it would be detrimental to you not to do so, and that means that that potential for detriment was more important than "the most important thing", and you are not a non-involvement player.
I was forced to get involved. PERIOD!!!!! You're just too arrogant or closed-minded or both to see the fallacy in your own logic.
As far as I am concerned, you remained uninvolved up to the moment you insisted on telling someone about the impending attack. Therefore you were not forced, by my definition, to be involved, by my definition. And since my definition of "non-involvement" has been established as the only one which matters when I ask whether you are a non-involvement player by my definition of those words, the fact that you think you were involved before that moment is irrelevant; and since there was at the moment you became involved no pressure on you to do so (you had to ask for them to get someone for you to tell), you did so entirely voluntarily, and were not, by my definition, forced.
I'm sorry you feel as if introducing you to a character in that world forced you to become involved, but the fact remains that it did not force you to take specific meaningful action which was designed to alter the events of that world, and you did not at that moment do so. Sure, I understand that you changed the life of the man you met, and that that might accidentally have altered the future; but we're not talking about the fact that your breathing like butterfly's wings might have been the factor which tipped the balance creating the tsunami that wiped out the Japanese fleet. We're talking about actions which were intended by your character to change the events of the world. Being arrested, being questioned, being tortured and executed, does not count. Telling someone that the Japanese were about to attack was the moment you "became involved" in intentionally changing the world.
--M. J. Young
And if you don't stop being so offensive in your posts I will stop answering.
