Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney

From the New Theleme Club files -- heated taglines and rapidly-quenched flames (whose dragons will remain anonymous):

Rush Limbaugh is the kind of guy who has his head stuck so far up his own fat assumptions that he mistakes his position for high-mindedness.
You Libertarians seem to think a "social contract" is something you take out on someone.
Republicans are in denial of the future; Democrats, of the past. 
Sounds like you're a few bytes short of a checksum. 
Democrats want to play kids; Republicans want to play grownups. 
Here's my diagnosis.  You need a rectal cephalectomy.  See a surgeon NOW. 
Why didn't you get after X for what he wrote?  Why just me?  X is a guy, so you're on his side.  You act like you wouldn't care if he ate me alive as long as he didn't play with his food. 
That's not just a fit of pique, it's a monumental snow-capped pique. 
Talk about your "feminine mystique", huh?  If she'd have created the world, she'd have put ruffles on elephants.

Ruby Arsenic:  Well, now, that's a challenge.  Most of the toxic words I can think of are lergs.  "Lerg" is a word that can only be defined by example:  "This sentence contains a meaningless lerg."  (Thank you, Douglas Hofstadter.)
         Lergs always need that kind of ostensive definition.  The ones in which I'm currently interested are of that inchoate sort that people only use to describe other people, never themselves.  Because lergs can only be defined ostensively, it is completely unkind, unfair and entertaining to ask someone who has just used a lerg to "define his terms."  They will eventually say "That person (trait, group), that's a (lerg)!"  At which point one climaxes the entertainment by asking the lerger why he himself is not a lergee -- because, on examination, all lergs of this type apply to the user as well as to the person initially so described.  In fact, all lergs of this type have only a single unsimple meaning:  "human."  From what was said previously about the need for ostensive definition, it follows that examples must follow.
         "decadent":  Webster's gives us, instead of a definition, an evasive answer worthy of W.C. Fields:  "marked by decay or decline."  This definition is worded with the usual perversity, as the decline of any virtue is always matched by the renascence of the countervailing virtue.  In practice one uses the word to describe societies or people who enjoy things one doesn't understand or benefit from, and who don't worry enough about the fact that one doesn't approve.  In the Slouching Sixties, for example, persons in military uniforms regarded hippies as decadents; they had decayed from rationality, industriousness, pristine fastidiousness, and respect for authority.  Persons in hippie uniforms regarded soldiers and generals as decadents who had decayed from mystical awareness, social justice, lovingkindness, and respect for life.  If both sides weren't right, it wasn't because they were wrong.
         "dilettante":  Says Webster's:  "A person having a superficial interest in an art or branch of knowledge."  The ambiguity herein is that superficiality is in the eye of the beholder (ouch!).  Usage tries to avoid this ambiguity, with about the same amusing results as an inexperienced roller-skater trying to avoid the panicky hippo that has just been teleported onto the skating rink.  The people whom one describes as dilettantes are those who enjoy spending time at things that one thinks of as hard work to be done only for pay or perfectionism.  Thus, critics and professional artists call unremunerated part-time artistry dilettantism.  It's superficial because it's enjoyed, and anyone can do something they enjoy.  But, conversely, surely persons who only consent to "do" art when they can get paid or perfect, and so are compelled to spend all their workaday time at it, have also a certain aura of motivational superficiality.
         "escapist":  And Webster's performs another masterpiece of daring prestidigitational footwork:  "Habitually diverting the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine."  There is, in point of somewhat irrelevant fact, hardly anything more real than a diversion of the imagination (as hypnotic subjects can testify), and hardly anything more routine than habitual entertainment (ask any couch tuber).  But in this definition the real Moebius kicker is that escapists are (watch Webster pull those flying feet out of his hat) people who escape.  Practitioners of popular psychiatry can facilely call any deliberate (that is, enjoyable) focusing of imagination or attention an escape, since it necessarily requires that everything else is (ohmigawd!) ignored.  And so we focus our minds' eye upon the entertaining spectacle of football fans and SF fen calling each other escapists; but we mustn't watch it too long or else we'll slip into esc...
         "materialistic":  As Webster's says, "Preoccupied with or stressing material rather than intellectual or spiritual things."  Unfortunately, the CAT-scan machine has not yet been invented that can distinguish between a material object and its intellectual or spiritual significance, or even between "body" and "soul."  Artists need tools, scientists need machines, intellectuals need books, and saviours and saints need devices of martyrdom.  Given the difficulty of applying a word so inconsistently defined, usage has strayed to terming materialistic those people who enjoy things that one can't or won't afford.  It would be difficult to guess whether the outraged "spiritual" observer or the "materialist" is more preoccupied with the material items in question.

Thalp: I prefer to disagree, not because your examples are unfamiliar to me, but that is not what I meant by the "word poisoning" on which I disport in research.  I hoped to refer to ground-level terms like "growth", "brilliant", "stable", and "deep".  You may see how facilely those words connote on Earth that bigness, brightness, changelessness, and profundity are superior to the other five qualities of each set of meanings.  This kind of ambient word poisoning, usually branching from poetry, does more than fluids-pollution, the currency "morphing" named inflation or deflation, or remagic burden to vitiate a culture without its buds ever recognizing a deterioration or its cause.

Paisley is My Friend:  All I know is that the people who get the furthest in the world are the single-minded people who have the fewest doubts, which explains a lot about the state the world is in, the good points and the bad points too!

Theofe:  GWs don't much encourage aggression.  They refuse to collide with, crush anything, won't move rapidly enough near surfaces to drive a high wind blast.  Their illusions can't glow blinding bright, make a high-gamma dose, a deafening noise.  The ballfield can't extend very far from the wall of a GW.  So you can't catch a hoard of people in it at once, then stifle them by shutting off air.  GW construction doesn't even make it easy to use "strap-on" weapons.  That takes some explanation, I guess.
         The ballfield, always spherical, makes the outermost layer.  A GWer directs his ballfield's selective permeability to matter, all the way up to totally impermeable.  The ballfield allows different permeabilities for different gases, fluids, dusts, different sizes of object.  So it can let some in rapidly, others slowly, others not at all.  It can let some in, not out, vice-versa for others.  It also can block a modest amount of radiant energy, selected frequencies, in about the range of normal daily sapient life.  Sunlight, headlights, heat loss from a living body into deep space, that scale of thing.  It can't block intense radiation, as from weapons.  It can't keep out magic, psi, either.  A ballfield could hold out the shock wave, debris, neutrons, beta, alpha from a nuclear blast, not the heat, light, gamma.
         The outer GW wall makes the middle layer.  This wall blocks everything, matter, energy, gravity, magic, psi.  Only a user who has linked to the GW's controlniche within the last 23 days, establishing his bona fides, can command an opening to form in its outer wall.  A GW opens in two places only.  So it can't change the location of the doors any more than it can change shape.  A GW door opens all the way, not at all, no position between.
         The innermost layer, the GW's internal partitions.  These work like the ballfield, except they can take on more shapes than the ballfield, any non-detached texture.  Grass, velvet, bed of nails, mock-liquid (no detachable splashes), what the user wants.  Like the ballfield, they can carry audiovisual illusions, act as viewalls.
         So say someone wants to fit out a GW as a kind of gunboat.  He has to stay inside the outer wall, if he wants safety from radiation weapons, spells, psi.  So the same goes for any robot, golem type of central controller.  His weapons, communicators have to stay outside the outer wall, they can't work through it.  They have to have some toughness, the ballfield won't much protect them.  The controller can't send any control signals to his weapons without leaving a door wide open, letting in the energies of his opponents.  So that leaves him a choice.  He can go kamikaze if he wants honor.  He can use pre-set time-bomb prox-fuse self-deciding sorts of strap-ons if he wants security.  Then he lacks some flexibility, control.
         Most conflicts between GWers end in groups of GWs completely, mutually surrounding each other, blocking each others' strap-ons.  Until someone feels willing to negotiate for release.  Not an especially useful, common sort of conflict.

Free Meson:  Balderdash.  There is no sufficient reason why GWs, as you have portrayed them, shouldn't do more to intensify interstellar warfare than to stop it.  I have never heard of a more selfish group than your Gregarians, who cannot be bothered in the slightest either to help Earth or to protect it from Gregarian harassment and exploitation, and the selfish people are the ones who make war.

Ruby Arsenic:  Gee whillikers, haven't you noticed that "selfish" is a lerg?  For example, consider the CSICOP guy who condemned yuppies as "selfish" for buying water purification systems for their own homes instead of using up their lifetimes rallying the citizens into political action to improve the metropolitan water treatment system for everyone including HIM.  This is your basic free-rider, pressuring people to help him at their expense (through helping the society he belongs to) instead of helping himself at his own expense.  (Now that I think of it, this demonstration was really something of a departure for CSICOP; usually they confine themselves to demonstrating that "pseudo-science" is a lerg.)

Thalp:  I speculate on a peculiar to us reason why no multiworld wars have yet passed in Gregaria.  Violence, in sapients, is evolutionary though it wastes genomes because it forces fast changes in paradigms and is always ready for use.  When IVE, neurochemicals, free-fall, and the other counterevolutionary ways to transmute paradigms are available, violence declines in usefulness and prevalence both.

Theofe:  So why do sapients fight wars?  Lots of motives.  They get loot, thrills they can't get any other way.  They have only one memon, idea possessing their minds.  They believe everything their leaders tell them.  GW, especially IVE, undercuts all that.
         I see why Earth experience would lead you to think of war as inevitable.  Earth orgs would bleed off if they didn't frequently purge themselves of excess warriors.  Consider bar brawls, gang wars, civil wars, as evidence.  Instead, Gregaria has IVE VR to thrill our belligerent minority.
         GWarriors prefer VR to CR battles.  IVE has denser intersapient interactions than CR, more conflict opportunities.  IVE victories don't depend on spending years learning how to use the tricky inanimate universe.  Only how to trick sapients, a much simpler game.  IVE warnodes change all the time, no one needs to trouble themselves with long-term plans.  If a GWarrior wants it now, he/yt can get it now, bloody raw too.
         Most GWarriors end up submerged in IVE.  Stirring up feuds, spreading rumors, playing strategy games for bloodbody stakes, like that.  Some of them say that VR fights count for more than CR.  IVE telepathy lets you really get at losers.  Simple physical blood means nothing by comparison.
         So belligerents set their emotion filter, transforms, to measure an opponent's feelings, like reading dice, not to receive, delete them.  It shows warrior strength to provoke, not feel emotion.  A receiving transform would only provide useless empathy.  Belligerents leave off the IVE filter on neurosomatic commands, the body's "control codes".  So a winner can command a loser to have a heart attack, a tic, sphincter slam, gangrene, explosive high blood pressure, blindness, lots of possibilities.
         A friend of our family met a VR lamia while he visited onboard our GW.  She coaxed him out of his filters for deepsex, shredded his psyche.  When he came unstuck from IVE, we had to improvise a straitjacket, a gag too for a little while.  He pulled out some of his hair.  It actually did grow in white, something I'd never believed could really happen.
         Overall, GWs make Gregaria act not only more disorganized than you imagine, more disorganized than you can imagine.  Extremely distracting.  A crucial point.  A war of conquest needs constant care, attention even when only on one planet.  So it takes very little distraction to make the war hit the fan.  A shortage of funds, a memon slip, a plague, a new orghead.
         So Napoleon of the Spaceways wants loot, power.  Well, he has to cope with all those distractions, more too.  An invading army gets exposed to all types of infectious diseases, ideas.  It always gets the local equivalent of lice, athlete's foot, boils.  It gets new technologies too.  Some spies have grabbed the data on one combatant world's inventions, misinformed the adversary's generals, called off the war, made their mints.  Also GW shock has sunk several burgeoning interstellar wars.  Especially the very few doctrinal ones.  GWing religions tend to diverge in as many directions as individuals.
         A scenario usually goes like this.  Nappo's culture moves off-planet enough to find out other cultures exist.  They get unmistakably contacted by another weltstamm.  Often they acquire GWs about the same time.  They feel provoked.  Maybe they try to quarantine visitors, alien ideas.  Conflict starts, expansion to other worlds.  Every weltstamm wants its reproductive cells in more than one receptacle.  So the world's entire resources, including any new GWs, get thrown into military, colonial pursuits.
         So now Nappo discovers what he needs to succeed at conquering.  More potent weapons, defenses than the enemy's.  Manageable, by choosing undeveloped planets to attack.  Otherwise, weapons based on planetary local magical specialties pose a terminal problem to invaders.  Undeveloped planets seldom have enough wealth to pay back their conquest.  That resource drain sank nine invasions.  Using GWs to avoid it, Nappo has to avoid mass mutiny, desertion in the enticingly convenient GWs.  Mutinies, in fleet, at home, did in twelve invasions.
         Nappo also needs better soldiers than the enemy's.  Big problem.  Anyone on another planet for the first time gets partly dazed, disoriented even in the best-laid plans.  Some people change to another zauberstamm under a different weltzauber.  The macopave works against offworlders.  So attackers can prevent that by keeping soldiers outside synch orbit, using robotics.  An inflexibility that turned out fatal in two invasions.
         Nappo needs more complete information than the enemy's.  IVE helps while it confuses.  So do the various mancies, clairvoyant psi.  They've shown themselves hard to jam, disinform.  Also Sibylline, cruelly hard to interpret.  The weltzauber determines which mancies work, a different subset on each planet.  Is a puzzlement.
         So, beyond all that, the conquest often gets a visit from one of the Archangels.  Then Fearless Leader Nappo might as well bend over, put his head between his legs, kiss his war goodbye.  Eight times that's happened.
         Some of the Inthit nations had a few GWs some years ago.  The military wholly suppressed civilian knowledge of them, started planning an attack on an intraplanet opponent.  It would have spread off-world rapidly.  Both sides planned to hide their reserves on nearby planets, messing into an uninvolved weltstamm.  Inthit avoided IVE assiduously.  Early in the plan they'd identified IVE as a security breach waiting to rip.  So they lacked good encryption, spell cloaks to keep their plans unknown in Gregaria.  They barely recognized our existence.  They certainly didn't recognize Harvey's.
         He duplicated some Inthit secret weapons, putrefaction catalyst aerosols.  Put the originals, doubles back in the stockpiles, kept periodically adding more duplicate weapons.  A lot like "the loaves and fishes".  The first Inthit reaction, puzzlement.  Next they cashiered the inventory officers.  Next, brief bemused pleasure at the new goodies.  Research scientists and mages agreed that their weapons might could breed.  (Don't laugh till you've lived in magic.)  Finally, terror.  So do the enemies' weapons breed too?  How many of ours might have escaped unknown, with our inventory bollixed?
         So Harvey went on to the illogical next step.  He started duplicating public objects, statues, artworks.  Then a master stroke.  He took a world-famous statue, doubled it, spell-welded its doubles to make it seem to fission like an amoeba.  A little more split every day.
         The Inthit military research teams all turned to the new problem.  They thought their early experiments with GW gemination might have incited the general breeding.  They couldn't decide what to do, couldn't figure out how to conceal it.  So the Inthit security staff conducted massive, debilitating internal purges.  They knew well enough how to do that.  Inthit will probably stay out of the spaceways for fifty years or more.  Long enough for their planetary macopave to swivel, outdating the Inthit space-mages.  By then, Shock will have hit.  Right now, it comes on only about as fast as a snail race on a glacier.
         Other Gregarians don't reach the high level of Archangels like Harvey.  For the last few centuries, some lesser civilisation saboteurs have gone to work.  They infect potential invaders with new ideas, devices, to augment the usual distraction.  Most of the civsabs started out planetbound, became raumstamm.  It gives them insight into what to sabotage.  The civsabs (civSOBs, some say) have delayed six invasions, maybe permanently.  It hasn't required much support from planetside Gregarians.  Hasn't gotten much either, pardon my personal peeve.

NeuroGod:  I like the idea of sabotage, I like it I like it, count me in if you want a recruit...  I've got a cool trick for the IRA, you said you had a relative in it...  I'm qualified, you know I'm Irish, Bill can vouch for it by knowing my password which I will now change... ;-> what the IRA ought to do instead of terrorism is for maybe five years they should do a leprechaun war...  walk up behind English cops and don't shoot them with bullets, shoot them with fake blood, then when the IRA shooters run away they should drop behind them real guns full of real bullets...  like see what I could have done if I wasn't such a nice guy...  put out bombs full of baby powder that look real and blow up poof, and next to them real bombs with dud fuses...  see if the IRA just stopped working everyone would forget about them as a Force...  this way they show good faith, keep their friends amused, and keep the enemy worried and looking really dumb especially if they counter-attack in a heavy cop way...

Sabre:  Wars are for nothing but plunder, nothing.  Look closely at the history of the conquests of any empire and you will see it is a story of gainful attack and nothing more.  Why else would Switzerland have been unattacked during World War Two?  Both sides needed a place to put their loot.  The only reason a nuclear war has not happened here yet is not the loss of life, leaders never care about that, but because it would break the old Hun rule.  "First rape, loot, and pillage, then burn."

Ruby Arsenic:  Okay, okay, let's not go off half-cocked about this topic like people always do.  There are millions of guns in the country, right?  And the almanac says 25,000 homicides a year, of which something like 80% are committed with guns, and 1,400 accidental gun deaths a year.  It follows that an extremely tiny percentage of the local guns are used to kill people.  Probably even fewer than it looks, because a semi-pro killer may use the same gun over and over.  Because he loves it, you see, because it's his second favorite tool.
         Which brings me to my real point.  If we consider that it makes sense to delete guns from society because a very few of them are used aggressively, what about penises?  We have a penis-bearing population of roughly 100 million, and about 100,000 forcible rapes a year.  (Reported rapes, that is.)  The same proportion as for guns and gun deaths, right?  Obviously government needs to step in and exert control over this otherwise hopeless and catastrophic situation, to quote FM.
         With modern sperm-delivery technology, or maybe even without, the penis in its entirety is not needed for fertilization.  Other more innocuous and generally useful devices can be employed, such as turkey basters.  Nor is the complete penis required for pleasure (women get multiple orgasms with less, after all).  The only purpose for which a complete penis absolutely cannot be done without, for which it is de rigueur, is "assault with a friendly weapon".  Therefore the rational socially responsible thing to do, as FM says, the only behavior that is consistent with living in a civilised society instead of in a thug's fantasy world, as FM says, the necessary action from any sane public-health perspective, as FM says, is to trim down all the penises to non-invasive nubbins. 
         Stop cringing your crotches and think about it.  It's an easy law to enforce, easier than gun control, because there's only one place the weapon can be concealed and it can't be smuggled, bought, or sold.  It's a law that might help with birth control (which would please the left-wing).  It's a law that would drastically cut immigration (making the right-wing happy) because penis denaturation would be required to become a naturalized citizen.
         The tubing can be left intact together with some of the tissue and pleasure nerves, equivalent to the statistically average clitoris.  (That should satisfy the "equal rights" feminists.)  The operation would be a bit difficult for existing penis-bearers; some sort of fair and just compensation could be allotted, as in other cases in which the government exercises its eminent domain.  For future generations, however, surgery could be carried out shortly after birth, under anesthesia, in place of the standard circumcision.
         Only one real drawback.  Amputees feel pains in their ghost limbs, don't they?

Major:  Is total disarmament really what is important here?  I am sure all would prefer simply to outlaw "concealed" weapons.

Citizen Paine:  Tell me yer only jokin, gal!

Ruby Arsenic:  Now you're hurting my feelings.  You took Free Meson's gun confiscation plan seriously enough to argue it, why not mine?  You could just as appropriately have asked him if he was joking, couldn't you?  *baw sob*

Thalp:  Insanity:  when the means someone chooses can't put yt ever near yts goals.  Sanity is all of how.  Sanity is recognizing an identity of means and goals.

Theofe:  Mostly the post-Shock peoples don't design machines, they design archecultures.  Cultures designed like architecture, based on archetypes.  Most archecultures aim at performing up to the Ultimate Myth.  A few have some other unified cultural goals.  So both species of the Aailurosi, for example, have chosen to go beyond GW, work to make it redundant.  Not a unanimous choice.  Only closer to unanimous than an unsorted pre-Shock culture could go.
         Archeculture designers, sages want their creations to last.  They almost always try to avoid things that force too many people to lose their recourse, so becoming parts of machines.  Machines don't last, they lack resilience.  The archeculturists agree on six things that make cultures spoil.
         Literacy.  Written knowledge allows hoarding of knowledge, not much recourse to the illits.  Writing stunts memory, imagination, both necessary for the Great Art of Archefaction.  Also people who read forget to distrust the biases, personal context of the writer.  If they listened, IVE'd, they'd keep getting reminded by voice tone, mindpose, all those clues.  So archeculturists call the love of literacy the first, worst of superstitions.
         Altricial divergence.  That comes from raising children in an artificially puerile world.  In a prolonged separation from adults' interests, activities, goals, standards.  Children who don't spend their time mostly around adults can't well recognize why, how to become adult.  So for both literacy, divergence reasons, universal education begins to end a culture.
         Currency.  It has too much leverage.  Everyone all the time wants currency for the sake of its versatility.  By comparison, only a few want any specific barter item, skill, at any given time.  That gives barterers, skilled workers too little recourse, money hoarders too much immunity.  So instead of spending coin, barter with goods that can rot, break, wear out.  The built-in depreciation helps stop hoarding.
         Guaranteed interest on loans.  A creditor who can collect interest despite the failure of the investment, the debtor's poverty, has too much immunity to consequences.  Archecultures mostly ban interest, instead encourage bankruptcy rebirth rituals.  New name, new clan.  Some archecultures also forbid absentee land ownership for the same reasons.  It also concentrates immunity from consequences, giving the land to people who don't take the risks of how they use it to the same extent they take the benefits.
         Mastery of distance.  Rapid travel over distance reduces the recourse of the less mobile people against flyby attackers.  Weapons that act at a distance reduce the recourse of large easy-target groups against small marauders.  So discouraging people from staying in large linkage communities.  Also mobility itself destroys linkages.
         Simple single loyalties.  An archeculture can't hope to last unless it multiplies everyone's loyalties.  Everyone should belong to birth families, larger clans, adoptive families, marriages, guilds, mutual assistance groups, religious brotherhoods, the more links the better.  "Single points of contact are for machines."  The mythomanes say, Fate only comes to the cultures that have not oversimplified.  Fate, meaning the complete exploration of every one of the archetypal variations of the Ultimate Myth.
         To the archeculturists, a pre-GW society looks lifeless, mechanical.  To me, pre-GW societies, archecultures both look like machines.  Ixy, I tend to follow the raumstamm nihilorg way of socializing in coteries, we avoid the archecultures.  Where you sit depends on where you stand.

Thalp:  I must perhaps clear this topic more.  Post-GW Gregarian orgs are, in the main, participating in the attempt to eliminate all economies of "scale".  It is profoundly a counter-quantitative endeavour.

Beach BEM:  The word "millennialism" is one not very familiar to modern opinion; it is generally associated with modern religious "cults" that only occasionally make their presence and beliefs known, or with the Dark Ages and the Crusades.  Familiar or no, millennialism seems to be rising in modern society, as anyone familiar with history, calendars, and powers of ten might have expected given the close approach of the year 2000.
         The clearest evidence for present-day millennialism -- that is, for the belief that with the turn of a millennium vast changes in the world and society will occur -- can be seen not in the writings of religious cults but in the writings of financial advice and science fiction.  Certainly there are various explicitly millennialistic cults and religions, of which the most familiar representatives are probably the Jehovah's Witnesses.  However, these are hardly the most influential of their kind.  More significant are the doomsaying economists, whose repeated predictions of fiscal collapse have been becoming more respectable and plausible with the years.  Probably most significant are the researchers and science bureaucrats heralding nuclear war and winter, stratospheric ozone depletion, greenhouse effect, waste of resources, immune-deficiency epidemics, and other dire plights.  Many of these ideas were first to reach large non-specialized audiences in science fiction, and SF authors are continuing to produce ever new and, unfortunately, ever more convincing scenarios of catastrophe.
         It would not be accurate to say that any scientists or economists are specifying the year 2000 as the essential point of no return, or that they regard the end of this twentieth century as being in any way causative of disaster.  Nevertheless many of the deadlines mooted by the new millennialists are roughly aligned with 2000.  It also would not be accurate to call the new millennialism a phenomenon of this century alone; Malthus has a fair claim to being one of the first of the breed.
         What might be the consequences of millennialism?  We have been told by the historians of the Age of Reason that, in the last millennialist revival, much of the Christian population of the Western world expected the end of the world to arrive at or near the year 1000.  The ascetics demonstrated that extremity of self-sacrifice that, in their view, was the only path to salvation.  Less devoted people made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land in such numbers as to eventually cause "diplomatic incidents" which, in turn, contributed to the onset of the Crusades.  What could be a nobler, more personally urgent, cause than reclaiming the Holy Land, the only source of redemption to stockpile against the coming Armageddon?
         This historical extravaganza, though satisfying to the prejudices of the irreligious, turns out never to have come to pass.  The records of the last millennium show no evidence of any millennialist panic, no chronicles of the civil disturbances or mass pilgrimages of which we have been told.  The whole fable was invented by the rationalists of later centuries as an illustration of the vicious effects of superstition and religion.
         Paradoxically, we with our pervasive telecommunications are probably far more susceptible to a mass panic than were our ancestors.  And our modern religions are far from capable of inoculating us against hysteria.  In this century, Christianity has been largely replaced or adulterated with psychotherapism, sciencism, and productivism, all of which have come to qualify as religions to the extent that they prescribe codes of behavior that depend on the Plan of a non-verifiable entity.
         To the extent that psychotherapy is a creed, the non-verifiable entity is "the well-adjusted personality" and the prescribed behavior may include almost any sort of activity so long as the goal is to make the patient more logical and productive.  In sciencism, the entity is "the consensus of expert opinion" and the enjoined behavior most often centers on "ecologically sound sustainable practices".  In productivism, the oldest of the three modern religions, the entity is "the public welfare" or "economic freedom" and the requisite behaviors are those of efficient production, construction, and instruction.
         It should never be thought that these faiths are anything other than mutually dependent.  For one example, in Soviet Russia "Marxist" productivism was regarded as scientific in basis and the enforcers of purity included psychologists among their vanguard.  For another, "scientific" experiments (frequently behaviorist) are used to "prove" psychological principles, which then are often applied in court cases and criminological techniques.
         Clearly the old-style belief in a particular date for disaster, one that can be determined from numerological analysis of a Holy Book, or one whose particular scenario was revealed in a vision, does not prevail among the believers in our modern faiths.  What we see in its stead is computer modeling of economic or ecological collapse, as foreshadowed by various "indicators", based on a number of unstated, unverifiable assumptions referred to as "parameters".  What we see is not asceticism espoused as a route to spiritual redemption, but the "less is more" advocacy of sacrificing the present for the sake of some indeterminate and unprovable future benefit.
         More even than the threat of total destruction, the link between the new and old millennialism is the aura of moral hysteria.  All of the actions that hypothetically contribute to potential disaster are condemned as morally irresponsible and certain to bring destruction.  The crucial recognition, that moral absolutism cannot be ascribed to decisions made with unavoidably indeterminate evidence, is mislaid entirely.  Only complete confidence in the money supply can prevent destruction of our productive capacity by runs on banks and runaway inflation; only total devotion to the anti-nuclear movement can prevent holocaust; only absolute sacrifice of the uses and comforts of aerosol propellants and combustion can maintain the global climate.
         The spokesmen who advance these ideas do not give details, do not state assumptions or ranges of accuracy, do not maintain the skepticism once thought appropriate for scientific inquiry.  No, this is not inquiry; this is prophecy, inexplicable and authoritative.  The recipients of these words of wisdom have only the choice to believe or disbelieve.
         Alarming as it may seem, the general populace is more ready to believe the dicta of the sanctified experts in this century than were their ancestors to accept the pronouncements of the Pope or Peter the Hermit before the First Millennium.  That modern vulnerability comes, ironically, from the successful track record of the modern religions.  No modern can deny the improvements that have been occasioned by science, therapy, and production, when they are used in a self-testing, self-limiting way.
         If millennialist ideas were found only among a few uninfluential people, or among the illiterate, they would have no great import.  But they are the opinions of reputable consultants, futurologists, and numerous activist movements (most notably the ecological and anti-nuclear factions).  Science fiction and fantasy, which in this century have been the harbingers of many ideological and technological developments, devote more than half their content to post-, pre-, and intra-disaster stories.  Quite a few moderns half expect their normal life spans to be interrupted by a depression, or a nuclear war, or something less definable and probably substantially less pleasant.
         If it were not for this ground swell there would after all be no market for catastrophist financial newsletters, or the news articles, stories, movies, and TV shows to which I have alluded.  And the mood of indefinite panic has been rising continuously since, say, the time of Malthus; it seems unlikely that its crest has yet passed, or that it will pass before the year 2000.
         If the new millennialist movement is in fact soon to be stronger than the old one, will it have an outcome like that imputed to the old one?  Last time, "mass hysteria" was said to have led large numbers of people, nobility as well as commoners, into a long series of wars against infidels who, pragmatically speaking, were little significant threat.  The eventual outcome of the wars was the carrying of the intellectually developed Arab culture and science to the Western world, the weakening of the feudal rulers to the point where such preliminaries to liberation as the signing of the Magna Carta could occur, and the much more than decimation of various populations.  (It has been theorized that the Black Death was brought to Europe from Asia Minor by the physically weakened Crusaders.)  In a sense, the Crusades did not conclude until the Inquisition and the witchcraft trials ended; the trials served the same purposes of ideological purification of society and defense of established authority against scapegoats.
         In order for anything of similar nature or scope to occur in our time, the new millennialists must first find an enemy.  The Crusaders had the Saracens, and their successors had the witches.  Whom might we moderns find to crusade against?  I believe such a victim-to-be class already exists and is beginning to be persecuted, and that we all are far too submerged in our Zeitgeist to recognize the trend.  The group I have in mind is the professional politicians, who have long been the adversaries of the modern secular clergy, the therapists, sciencists, and productivists.
         Ever since Hitler, many psychotherapists have mistrusted politicians as demagogical manipulators of the pathological motivations of the populace.  Many psychological theorists, including Adler and Reich, have inferred connections between the desire for political control over others and a variety of psychological defects.  "Thought control" is one of the most pervasive fears of modern civilisation, and sets the politicians directly at odds with the psychotherapists.  We already have the belief that politicians manipulate our minds with their "spin doctors".  We already possess the published evidence of the CIA's tests of psychedelics on unsuspecting victims; we've heard the elaborate urban legends about psychedelics injected in city water supplies and slum beverages.  The politicians' perceived gain from misuse of the psychological armory is so monumental that it cannot be long before effective accusations begin to be made against them by psychologists.
         The sciencists, as experts on all matters geophysical and medical, have already begun their onslaught on politicians.  Democratic methods of decision are seen as far inferior to the consultations of the trained elite.  If the voters are not educated in the highly technical matters of modern concern -- and they are not, thus far -- then their election of representatives to decide on those matters is a sham, and a dangerous one.  A government by "objective" experts who understand and can objectively analyze the world's problems would be much more "scientific". 
         The productivists work under the names of "tax reformers" and "laissez-faire capitalists".  Their concern with the money drained by taxes from productive enterprises and their antagonism toward regulatory interference with economic efficiency, all for the purposes of politicians' shortsighted campaigns, are ancient, well known, and so cogently explained elsewhere as to require no repetition here.
         Political activity is sin, from the point of view of the modern secular clergy.  Tax-funded welfare removes people from productive labor, or is said to so remove them, an accusation that does not trouble the politicians.  Their disinterest proves their disrespect for productivism.  The asserted beneficial effects of government programs cannot be subjected to double-blind, placebo-controlled tests in which one factor at a time is varied.  Thus the effects of policy vary hugely from case to case, but the politicians do not consider the lack of indisputable proof of policy to be important.  Lawmaking usurps the power to prescribe behavior, a power which should belong only to the experts, doctors and psychotherapists, who increasingly call for rehabilitation (an essentially therapeutic process) as the goal of enforcement.
         Nor can the embattled politicians expect to be defended by the public.  Certainly politicians are unpopular among most of the citizens of the U.S., and, for that matter, citizens of other countries.  The only group more often spoken of as venal, corrupt, dishonest, and incapable of forethought is the lawyers -- who are popularly viewed as mere acolyte politicians.  We hear outcries against the ignorance, self-aggrandisement, and corruption of the political class not only in the U.S. but in England, France, and Italy, even in Russia, among many other nations.  We see the "Singapore system" of enlightened, expert autocracy proposed as the improved model of government for our modern times.
         Politicians and lawyers are consistently portrayed as weak, vicious, unreliable, and irresponsible, apparently irrational, exactly as sinners have classically been depicted.  Politicians, it is claimed, have caused the failure of education, increases in theft and violent crime, paranoia or apathy in the general public, transfer of large undocumented and untaxed sums of money, the failure to stop the spread of AIDS, loss of productivity, threats to national security, unsafe driving, and many other problems that putatively could be solved by experts.
         In short, the pattern of reaction to politicians displays exactly the all-subsuming hysteria needed to found a Crusade, witch-hunt, or pogrom.  The only true support politicians possess is their own and that of a few misguided souls who can readily be ignored as mere idealists.  Everyone, not only the members of the modern secular clergy, has some special cause or interest that is said to be threatened by political manipulations. 
         What form of government would the new millennialists prefer?  They might plausibly aim for a kind of technocracy, in which government is explicitly rather than tacitly performed by an aristocracy of experts.  Let us consider the fashionable practices of "political correctness" and deconstruction, which allow sociological and psychological experts to therapeutically remove from society all linguistic reinforcement of undesirable behavior.  Let us also consider the continuing legal restraints on self-prescription of medical treatments, restraints that convey control of society's bodies to the medical and psychological experts.
         Finally, let us consider what has been called "the cornucopia of scarcity", the mass of ecological laws, activists, even terrorists, whose goal is to ensure that "social resources" are used only in a manner acceptable to geophysical, meteorological, and biological experts.  Do not forget that those "social resources" are the stuff and detail of daily life -- how one travels, what one discards, whether one eats meat or wears fur.  Remember, too, how many of those details will soon be on record as computerized purchases.  Then you will understand how potent and precise the experts' control over us might be.
         An extrapolation of the present millennialist panic, and the trend toward an all-encompassing technocracy, predicts an eventual schism between an expert class and a drudge class.  The two groups will have different ways of life, different knowledge bases, languages, and ideals.  Only the rare individual drudges who display the capacity to learn the complexities of some field of expertise will rise into the expert class.  Educational triage based on IQ testing, and the availability of nootropic treatments only on the expensive and adulterated black market, will widen the gulf between drudges and experts.  The drudges will probably be treated humanely, as the most psychologically productive approach, but will have little say in their way of life, being utterly dependent on the goods and services that they can produce only under the direction of experts.  There is nothing new in this picture; H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, despite their vigorously different worldviews, would have recognized it at once.
         But let us beware:  such catastrophic unfettered extrapolation is precisely what has driven both past and present millennialism.  Trends never reach their asymptote; instead they sideslip, and a new dynamic equilibrium is reached.  Never fail to doubt extrapolation.
         Therefore, if our speculation is to remain sensible, it must end with the next questions:  after the Crusade against Politics, what?  And what will end the Crusade?  While the first Crusades were atrociously oppressive and destructive, their eventual equilibrated results were in some ways beneficial, leading subtly and gradually to the Renaissance.  Might the same be true for this hypothesized new millennialist Crusade?  Could a new, more sophisticated, more benevolent philosophy emerge from the battle of experts against politics, as the Renaissance arose from the infusion of Arab culture into Europe?

Free Meson:  My dear Beach BEM, you've been reading too many of those conspiracy novels.  Scientists working together with psychologists and businessmen (!) to promote a covert pseudo-religious agenda?  Really, now.  I've discussed politics and current events over many years with many educated people, some of them well outside the realm of bourgeois conformism, and none of us have ever found it necessary to propose "explanatory" hypotheses of this kind.

Theofe:  What do you mean, Free Meson?  Gregaria, a utopia?  Have Earthumans redefined that word since I left?  We have much too much piracy, usually to enslave medders.  Too many petty GWarlords, many of them human, mantiaur kids.  Coveteer coteries raid to collect trinkets, slaves, for their potlatches.  So several post-GW worlds have redesigned their bodies, ecospheres to make them toxic to intruders.  Not usually chemical toxicity, bio, magical, contaminating the planetary macopave.  Specifically to protect against GWers.
         I see where your mistake might have come from.  You've heard from me, Thalp, we live raumstamm.  So we have our nihilorg dollhouse "utopias" we've made personally.
         Instead look at Gregaria, GWs from any planet's point of view.  Start with the background, before Gregaria reaches a world, while the GWemlins still semiblock it.  Usually such a world has built to a complexity catastrophe.  Too many interacting legal structures, factional conflicts, technologies' needs, technologies' wastes, potential enemies, allies, advisors.  So decisions become confused, follow-through ineffective.  Simple, easy to understand corruption determines most policies.  Conspiracies grow in the niches.  Most everyone runs scared of their new tech abilities, powers.  They get lonely in their minds because their old rules, methods have little helpful to say.  What happened to our old limits?  Where did they go?  Did we make them all up?  Which of so many once-impossible things do we play with next?  What do we believe next?
         (On human planets A3, antianaphylactic anger, complicates complexity.  In A3, the mind invents excess angers.  Partly to narrow the mind to a single mercifully simple focus.  Partly so fury, resentment will generate adrenalin, epinephrin, to reduce the effects of allergies.  Which appear so much more often, need so much more medicining in a crowded, polluting, stressed, complex world.)
         A few generations of complexity catastrophe precede the fading of GWemlins, the start of GW shock.  It parallels the alcoholism, sex slavery, suicide problems of tribal peoples faced with the more functionally capable, wealthy, culturally incoherent Europeans.  GWemlins, other obstacles, keep all but a relatively few Gregarian impacts off pre-GW planets.  The few contacts that do occur, build up in the pre-GW society, undermine it.  The contactees have viewed a society enviably beyond theirs.  It mars them.  No matter how much hypnotism, IVEils, tricks, hide the evidence from their conscious minds.
         Premature neoteny also harms a complex world.  A few of the orgs grow unprecedentedly rich, safe, comfortable.  So their orglings, next their orgheads, think they can do without the old rules, disciplines, restraint.  That they don't still need adulthood.  That the wealth will last no matter what they do, as if they already had GW.  They grab too soon, waste their hopes with games, gifts, wanderings.  Some one generation smashes all the candy, eats all the toys, then tells its kids to live with self-restraint, moderation.
         This stage ends when dopples, Gregarian Saviours, Pranksters, civsabs finally accumulate some number of GWs at the planet.  GW becomes notorious.  The GWemlins lapse.  Gregaria looms in the wings.  Things get worse for the world...

The two civilizations on the Offset World war on each other not in the waking world but in a dreamworld of their own creation.  The war never ends.  It has gone on for centuries with slaves (mostly dopples or their children) traded back and forth as win-loss tokens in the dream war game.  On the one side, the patterners need slaves only as tributes for the vampires.  On the other, the vampires have uses of their own for slaves.

The Dreamwarld is something wholly separate from dreams of the usual sort that all humans (among others) experience.  It is an entire world with natural laws of its own which mostly resemble those of the real world.  Many dream mechanisms -- like great strength, flying, running or swimming for miles, knowledge that comes without thought, occupying more than one body at once -- are disguised as magic or the actions of gods.

The Dreamwarld has inhabitants of its own who are not merely projections of wakefolk, but persons independent of the wakeworld and wholly native to the Dreamwarld.  They aren't dreamers and lack dreaming powers.  They have no knowledge of the wakeworld or of the real purpose of the conflicts in which they incessantly find themselves caught.  The agents from the wakeworld are the source of the conflicts.  Such agents are born and reborn in the Dreamwarld according to plan, located for each life in whatever identity will make them most useful.  The two civilizations carry out their battles through these agents and their machinations.

The "offset" of the Offset World is not a metaphor for their displaced war.  The planet looks like a ball cut in half with the halves slid a little sideways before gluing them back together, producing two crescent cliff faces of planetary dimensions.  It happened in the first patterner-vampire war, providing a most convincing incentive to keep all further conflict inside the Dreamwarld and out of the wakeworld.

Citizen Paine:  Ya lost me there Major my man.  Sure Slick Willy wants sacrificez, hell he wants CRISES to scare us all into trottin along givin up every right ya ever heard of and if he can't find crises he'll pay genetic engineers to breed some up.  Would Perot been any better?  Not on yer uncle's pink wrinkled pulltoy he wouldn't.  That's all we need iz some rich old dude who made hiz bux in guvment contracts, hey let him run the USA and squeeze it out inta hiz own pocket to dry.  Perot's maybe got ballz but hey hez no different from all the other wannabe handout kings and yeah Wild Willy too.  Give em a chance and they'll "re-invent guvment" to pass the cash to their special buddiez instead of the current big winnerz.  Hey and Slickie wants to join all them Fed pig agenciez inta one big pig, ya wanna bet it ain't so he can appoint some new pig boss and have him grateful and under hiz thumb, ya wanna bet Bush and Perot wouldn't too?  Talk about yer police state.  Ya wanted someone with ballz in November, yer outta luck.

Ruby Arsenic:  O, the balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls... yes, the clamor and the clanging of the balls.  Sorry, EA Poe, but I got a little obsessive this last campaign year.
         People kept and keep saying that Ross Perot should have been elected President because he was the only candidate who really has balls.  Let us break up this tender subject into four parts.  (1) Just what are balls?  (2) Is there firm evidence Perot has them?  (3) Are balls a good qualification for Presidency?  (4) Does the electorate have any balls themselves, and if not how can they elect a President who does?
         What is this thing called balls?  I start by presuming we're using good old American vulgarity here.  The British version has "balls" meaning much the same as Free Meson's favorite word "balderdash", and a "balls-up" is the same kind of snafu as a "cock-up".  Most mysterious, but instead we are talking about US balls, which apparently are the same thing as guts but more so.  So we are referring to courage, daring, the willingness to knowingly face danger, pain or difficulty, as the dictionary says.
         Now with our new-found erudition we can come back to Perot.  Do we have firm evidence that the man has (other than anatomical) balls?  Well, when was he last threatened by danger, pain, or difficulty?  Hmmmmm...  The food sent to POWs held by North Vietnam may have cost Perot some effort and money but did it threaten to ruin him?  The rescue of his employees from Iran, same question.  Was Perot at risk?  Is he at risk now?  Sure, the man has brains, determination, and Texas charm, no doubt of it, he may even have his full complete share of ego.  But balls?  They remain to be shown.
         And, speaking more generally, what about "Balls for President in 1992"?  I have my doubts.  When I think of the grand exemplar of balls I think of your average tomcat.  What balls do for him is make him disdain play and cuddling, vanish for days, fight loudly, consume expensive vet care, cause neighborhood brouhaha by knocking up every feline uterus in town, and finally get run over right outside your front yard.  Not that ovaries look any better on the resume.  Take a gander at pussy dearest in heat, yowling and rubbing blood spots onto the expensive carpet, then sneaking out, producing innumerable misbred doomed kittens and doing nothing more useful with them than lying around licking herself and getting the milk sucked out of her.  No, I do not think any kinds of gonads are a sign of presidential caliber.  Brains and heart I could go for, but that discussion had better be reserved for the recipe area of this BBS.
         Finally, the electorate...  Statistically, the average American has slightly less than one literal ball.  I fear that the figurative allotment is lower still.  In the home, see The American Parents, unwilling to face the difficulties of demonstrating morals to their kids.  So they put the job off on the police to protect "our kids" from porno smut filth violence.  In the office, see The Delicate Americans, unwilling to stand up for themselves against rudeness or vulgarity.  So they put the job off on the "political correctness" harassocrats.  In the factory, see The American Heroes of Production, unwilling to face the work and risk of competing in a free market.  So they put the job off onto import restrictions, duties and tariffs, and flat-out subsidies.  And far from the battlefield but close to the TV, see The Old Glory Patriotism Fans, cheering as high technology conquers Grenada (same population as Sioux City Iowa), Panama (same population as Kansas), and Iraq (population dwindled).  Imagine (if your imagination has a microscope) what balls it took to beat a country into the ground while losing a hundred or so soldiers, or to award 8000 medals to 6000 soldiers for licking a postage-stamp nation.
         Tell ya what I think.  As long as Perot can act like a combination of a strict but protective daddy, talk-show wit, and sports promoter... as long as he can talk like a political "outsider" and maneuver like a highly-seasoned pro... he'll have it made some election year.  Let him actually put some unmistakable balls on display, and the US electorate will run like virgins.

Sabre:  Never mind that.  I only want to know what drugs the politicians were and are taking.  I wanted full disclosure of the candidates' prescriptions and not only that but urine and hair tests.  We know Bush was on downers, which is why he puked in Japan and did the sleepwalk thru his last campaign.  I bet Billary is popping uppers and for all we know cocaine too (in between whippings).  Remember Arkansas is a big drug smuggling port out of Columbia and Mexico.  Perot is another matter.  If he had kept up his lithium salts he would be President today.

Theofe:  About 300 years ago a dopple brought his GW home to Sitnah, a human-type pre-GW world.  Filial to the end, he turned his GW over to his original, his parents.  The dopple's father had died, his mother Tarsh headed the family.  She had a good qual, quantsci education, saw the merits of her new toy.  (The level of AI knowledge on Sitnah included "invited" Sapience in golems.  Primitive neural links to computers a generation further along than present Earth's.  Even less neurochemical science than Earth.)
         Tarsh devised a plan that in its details turned out unique in Gregarian history.  She succeeded in selling GWs.  Selling them!  As flying mobile homes with self-contained "proprietary" power, food generation.  With each GW she supplied a neurolink that supposedly provided full GW control.  Actually, the Tarsh link limited GWs to domestic appliance, in-atmosphere transport kinds of functions.
         (Sitnaian economy depended on scarcity, as on Earth, with some differences.  They could sell sex, mostly with hygienic golemettes.  They couldn't sell ideas, writings, land.  The land-sale shortage drove the sales of "flying" homes.  Pro-patent activists got jeered on the paths.  "Penny for your thoughts, master!"  So inventions typically protected themselves by breaking down, disassembling when examined.  The heart of the device's protective spell they'd located in some secret place.  Like the legends about a sorcerer hiding his soul in a casket guarded by monsters.  Like a programmer putting most of the operating system in ROM, jumping to RAM for some essential self-modifying subroutine.  You can easily guard the central concepts in magical inventions.  Their strong non-local component helps.)
         Tarsh's sept knew the truth about GWs, gave its permission for the sales.  The clan and hyperclan didn't know.  So Tarsh's sept got rich from geminators, Gregarian knowledge, the rest of the family didn't.  That started the break-up within Tarsh's clan structure.  Secrecy, split wealth, dissension, make up much of GW Shock.
         Totally beyond Gregarian precedent, Tarsh's descendants managed to keep the true nature of GWs secret for two generations.  They constantly improved their defenses against tinkerers learning the truth.  They couldn't turn off the native GW VR neurolink.  So instead, they set up a secondary linkniche in each GW with limited access, only enough control to make the GW a "flying mobile home".  Then they ensured that tinkering with access released radioactivity, which made the primary default linkniche unreachable without protection.  So the radsuits would block neural plexus contact, use of the full IVE.  So Sitnaians didn't get offplanet travel, VR contact with Gregaria.
         After two generations of GWs, even Tarsh-limited ones, clans had begun to break up.  Families moved too much to stay looped.  Some hyperclans, Tarsh's loyal opposition, wouldn't allow GW purchase.  Their members got stuck in gravlocked homes.  Renegades bought GWs, grouped up in one region of Sitnah.  The GWing clans went there too, avoiding social pressures.  (That kind of segregation has shown up often in Shock.)
         Rumors spread from Tarsh's sept about deals with strange beings on other planets.  Holograms of cancrines from C-3 reached the public, mostly got their credibility deteriorated.  Tarsh's sept had their own renegades too, second-generation rebel idealists who wanted everyone to have unlimited Galactic Wealth.  So the hologram leak made these grandchildren very urgent to unlock the GWs.  Otherwise the C-3s could help the Tarsh sept leaders rule the planet.  Within ten years, fully enabled GWs had spread over the continent where GW clans had gone to live.
         This meant war.  The GWing Sitnaians appeared estranged, traitorous, alien.  They had provoked the war by deliberately destroying the economies of the non-GWing nations, attacking their citizens.  A few GWers did maraud.  The GWing Sitnaians had the disadvantage of confusion over IVE contact with Gregarian weltstamms, geminators, offworld travel.  They had the advantage, they could defend against anything but infiltration, betrayal.  People made the only weapons delivery systems that could get into GWs.  An especially divisive, elusive, malignant kind of infighting.  Typical in Gregarian Shock histories.
         About eight generations have passed since GW reached Tarsh.  So the population of Sitnah has declined to 1/5 of its peak, which came at the two-generation point.  The few most counter-social Sitnaians have sorted out, gone raumstamm.  Uprisings, wars (biological, contaminative) have cut the warmbody count too.  The effectiveness of Sitnaian medicine has gone down.  For one nullmagic thing, the Sitnaians haven't developed new antibiotic techniques fast enough to block resistant disease strains.
         As usual, IVE addiction has reduced the birth rate, led many people to stay in VR, glued to the slab, let themselves starve.  Sitnaians could avoid IVE addiction, if they had more neurochem practice, psych knowledge.  Sitnaian research, IVE data in those fields have stayed stifled since early days.  The filial, parental traditions still hold at the close family level.  Strong families have a vested interest in preventing the neurotech, chemical "deprogramming" of their progeny, their bodylock on the future.
         Loyalty has kept most Sitnaians planetbound.  Intraracial pheromone addiction has locked others, not that they recognize the reason for their aversion to GWing.  On a high-population world, like the Shocking ones, everyone might as well live in each others' armpits (equivalent).  So some of them start to need others around to generate the addictive pheromones.  "Cabin-fever" in humans comes partly from an inadequate assortment of pheromones in micro-populated environments.  To stay sane, GWers have to tell their GWs to add pheromones to the air.  (Also trace amounts of some dusts, pollens.)  For cancrines, the involuntary clicks and squeaks of the group's chitin take the place of pheromones as addictants.
         A few Cros have something worse than addiction.  They can't breathe right unless they have another human nearby for a pacemaker.  So some infants with poor hearing, ear infections, die of this.  If they live too uncrowded, with too few backup breathers.  Unknowing, some people leave their world, live alone, they die.
         In addition, many feel a violent aversion to IVE, any type of altered-state loss of exclusionary individuality.  That tends to keep them on worlds, where they can hold their VR interaction to the merest molecule.  The Ailurosi handle GWs that way, giving a similar reason for doing so.

An org is a group of sapients that is part of the property of a social memon.  Think of it as a kind of machine made out of people:  an org can strengthen, regulate, and maintain, but not redesign, itself.  Think of it as a kind of organism with people for cells:  it resists the loss of its structure with survival-driven vigor.  A successful org has the effect of supporting more and more of its orglings' pre-sapient common-denominator capacities (breeding, arranging hierarchies, laboring) while distracting more and more of their sapient individual capacities (foresight, empathy, imagination).  The org regards obedience as crucial; ignorance as helpful; comfort as optional; creativity as regrettable.
         Some or another org can't help but overwhelm individuals and their coteries once the population density, or more correctly the unmutual impact density of a population, gets high enough.  A true coterie can't exist where sapients have population or technology that lets them impinge too often or too noxiously on each others' welfare.  Once that happens the social memons start circling.
         What then is the difference between a social memon and a non-social memon?  And what is the difference between a memon and a mere idea?  A non-memonic idea (if such a thing exists) is a homebody.  It doesn't change its host's behavior to spread itself from one host to another.  A non-social memon may attempt to propagate, but doesn't require an organization to do so -- it might be music, an epic poem, a mural, something that possessed its artist and (it hopes) some of its audience.  A social memon, however, depends on producing orgs that spread and sustain the memon, though its hosts the orglings may not benefit.
         From a social memon's gardening point of view, Hitler was a capacious heap of perfect natural compost, and pre-Hitler Germany was a hillside that, conveniently, had already been terraced for farmland by the memons behind German nationalism (militarism and Christian anti-Semitism).  Anyway, that would be the memonic point of view if memons live forward in time, which isn't known.  Supposing memons to live backwards, a social memon might see post-Hitler Germany as an irrigated field channeled by resentment, guilt, and emulation of more Western nations, and Hitler as an enormous sewage outfall for those sentiments (or ressentiments).
         And what's the difference between an org and a coterie?  During yts monolongues Thalp mentioned two distinguishing features.  One arose from the observation that any group, whether org or coterie, breaks down when too much violence is used or threatened.  Something like, but almost unlike, blatant coercion is needed for a social lubricant.
         A coterie is greased by privacy, which in turn requires the patterns of mutual acceptance known as courtesy.  It has to be possible, therefore, for the people who can't stand to courteously accept other people as they are, reformers, chronic dissidents, and other misfits, to leave a coterie and go away to a frontier or a private seedling Utopia.  In short, to "take the omens on the far side of the river", "vote with their feet", start their own new cot. 
         However, unlike the coterie, the org is greased by dis/approval, which doesn't break down when high population densities make it impossible to avoid those discourteous (unaccepting) others.

Thalp:  Dis/approval can be a kind of aweful Genius.  No one should condemn it only in that the few sapients become addicted to it.  Whatever corrupts can also sometimes somehow redeem, even orgs and torture. 

Another feature that distinguishes an org from a cot is that it has its very own resources, which are fenced off from those of its member orglings.  Orglings can't access the org resources except in the org's name, with the org's permission, and for the org's benefit.  An org, whether a hobbyist club or a planetary government, has a Treasury.  And to channel the funds' use it has laws and regulations and procedures and Robert's Rules of Order and the old-boy network and dynastic nepotism (aka Rabbit's Rules of Order).  A coterie has no pooled resources.  Not money, not data, not soil, water, air, or progeny.  The individual cot members each have their own supplies, and transactions between them are carried out as between individuals.

         In a sense, this matter of personal resources -- which are the cause and effect of privacy -- marks the most fundamental difference between a coterie and an org.  The coterie is a means to its members' ends.  The org is an end in itself for its orgling members; to its social memon, of course, it's purely a means. 

         Let's say, for an educational thought problem, a group of good buddies is taken by an egalitarian interest in promoting more equal pollination by subsidizing fruit bats.  They discuss the problem, develop ideas, co-author an action agenda, and seek out other interested people.  This group counts as a coterie, thus far, but it's in the early stages of infection by a social memon. 

         Next they accumulate credits to fund larger-scale action and thereby become an org.  Now the org is distracted from its original batty purpose to an intermediate goal of protecting the fund from misuse.  They set rules for who can use the credits, and how, and they pick special officers to access the fund.  The next distraction that arises is the goal of finding a leader with a Vision.  Some or another orghead promotes ytself, convincing everyone else that they're less qualified than yt is.  Out of the campaign squabble comes the next distraction, that of smoothing or suppressing the newly arisen factions for the good of the org.  (Where have all the fruit bats gone?)  And next the diversion of reserving enough funds to sustain the org during all future exigencies, because the org must survive.  And next the big scandals of how the reserve fund was really used, and the subsequent reform...  (long time passing)...  and the suspicion or discovery of infiltrators from rival orgs...  and how best to present a public image that will get support from larger orgs.  And finally they get their fruit bats.  HooRay! 

         But, but, but, even after the victory celebration the org still has a healthy treasury and political obligations from past deals, so it has to expand the Vision to something They say can never be done.  Weather control, that's it!  Anyone who's really serious about equal pollination has got to do something about those elitist wind patterns, but first the org needs a total reorganization and purge for greater efficiency...  The Org is dead, long live the Org!  May the Org...  live...  forever!

Thalp:  I have a third thought problem.  All the known social memons instill an aversion to that virtual life which is familiarly part of IVE.  One explanation for the full hostility is that worldside VL is unreliable.  Its power source may fail, its owner may disconnect users at yts whim, or it may be shut out by the authority orgs.  A second explanation is that VL is poor.  It contains merely what a few at most hundred sapients could imagine and recreate with limited resources.  It would "stunt" its users thereby immunize them to memonic plague.
         These explanations do not bear fruit because the social memons display the same aversion to IVE VL as to worldside.  IVE VL has functioned for more than one thousand unbroken years and the VRevenants and livers have richened it incomparably to SL and worldside VLs.
         I think the better explanation is that sapients who choose VL have put themselves outside the limits of substantial dis/approval and ambition.  Social memons can't "afford" to permit the uprooting of their orgs and consistently oppose it.  It perhaps makes a clue to a GWing method to bother the memons enough to "draw" their attention and initiate communication with them.

Dis/approval makes the org go round.  Thus the most useful orglings are the ones who are most susceptible to dis/approval, in that they believe they have a duty to make a difference to the world, leave a mark, be remembered.  The orgheads are those few orglings who can easily ignore dis/approval aimed at them, while they make their peers and subordinates feel inadequate, substandard, and desperate to prove and perform.  In both senses of "perform".  For an orghead's purpose any moral criterion will serve, be it love thy neighbor or shove thy neighbor.  All that matters is that the criterion be absolute enough to lead its orglings into "Zeno races", addictive asymptotic attempts to be perfect and make everyone else perfect.  Whether they want it or not.

Ruby Arsenic:  Speaking as one social cog to another, no, this won't do.  We don't really have those daily sempiternal attacks by other people's Doberman expectations and manipulations:  disappointment at failing to obtain approval, shame at the weakness of being disappointed, and the doublebinds that keep us guilty whether we act "selfish" (you didn't give enough) or "selfless" (you still didn't give enough, and besides you got suckered into giving).  I mean, the way Thalp goes on about our dis/approval-centered lives you'd think we had dear old Christmas every day of the year.

By and large, an org (and the social memon imbuing it) depends on recruiting immature sapients.  With bribefests like Christmas, for example.  Proselytization of adults also helps, especially when they've been returned to childlike dependence and susceptibility by illness, hunger, anxiety, and other structured programming techniques, some of which we recognize as brainwashing.  (There are no atheists in foxholes; there are, however, nuns in hospitals -- the better to convert you, my dear.)  But immatures are the staple viand of an org. 

         Thus a social memon, if it's to last, has to indoctrinate its orglings while they're too young to fight back.  It manages by turning its orglings into exactly the types of families that will best let the memon take advantage of a sapient's single-minded willingness to help and obey the family elders.  An org that mimics the form of the families contained in it can keep its orglings trusting and obeying it as a parent for as long as they live. 

         Monotheistic memons arrange for stringent paternalism (or maternalism) to be common in their orgs:  single ruling parent, single king or queen, single god.  Where monotheism blossoms out to henotheism, with hierarchies of angels or saints who each have their own specialty but obey and serve the nominally single main deity, the memon requires large "nuclear families" with lots of tots helping to raise each other.  The memon of polytheism encourages and locates itself among extended families or adoptive clans, where each child lives with many significant adults.  And atheism and agnosticism can best employ orgs where immatures are in frequent, superficial contact with many mutually disagreeing adult contacts (paid teachers and counselors, fictional heroes, an org's role models, and the like).

Thalp:  Org controls on reproduction restrict progeny most often to the uncreative safe orglings.  It is a truismm that the sapient basis, as you say "human nature", and paradigm accessibility are changed by technology and inspiration, seldom by genetic evolution.  Social memons design their orgs down to the smallest ones like families to minimize creators, maximize inertia, hold sapient capabilities constant, and protect selves.  Most effectively, they incent the more creative sapients into religious celibacy, phobias concerning immatures and other intellectual inferiors, or high-effort low-return low-social-impact work such as abstract pure research that drains their roots and keeps them too "poor" to conscientiously incur progeny.

Ruby Arsenic:  Wait just one red-hot herring, CP!  (Incidentally, is it significant that your initials are "PC" backwards?)  In your perfectly comprehensible eagerness to get to the Amazon planet, you have missed the fact that you'll be shooting yourself in the **** by turning all those lovely Amazon wimmin into (whorrors!) mothers.  Wimmin are in a whole different bailiwick from mothers.
         See, the typically mother attack mode is to deny access to goodie treats (like sex) and the typically mother failure mode is to bechild someone, to nurture and protect and advise them into immobility and spoil them with more attention than they've earned.  Translate the mother flaws into a society and you have a communitarian system.  It wouldn't punish dissenters so much as it would exert moral attention on every little thing they do, and it would use ostracism and denied access to community services as deterrents.  And it would constantly be trying to prevent anything that could scare or corrupt the kiddies.  You wouldn't like it at all!  (Or do you like it here and now?)
         See thou further, we don't hear from pathological feminists about mother flaws.  We only hear how the male bashes things and people, and leaves his mark on them "to stand up for his rights", and runs around chest-thumping and boasting about being at the top of the peck(er)ing order.  Little do they realize:  that's not the way a man behaves, it's the way a boy behaves; and where there're too many practicing moms and wannabe moms, a lot of boys never trouble themselves to be men.
         And let's face it, mothering is addictive.  Almost every woman I've known who'd been working for pay and pleasure, but took maternity leave, found it very hard to come back.  Some who'd dearly planned to return never made it.  And every young parent (of either plumbing) has when queried told me, "Oh, I worried about whether I'd be happy as a parent, but once the baby was born it all just came naturally.  It's such a thrill.  Having a baby just changes you." 
         This tells me that childbirth is probably an "altered state" for the parents, and that they really and truly aren't the same people afterwards.  Likely there are some neurochemical changes in the brain:  the baby's pheromones go on the neural record as being sources of highs, and the baby's needs are programmed as THE high priority, higher than any priority the parents already had.  Maybe the neurological re-orientation causes some temporary emotional lability, such as that well-known postpartum depression.
         But there's a word for when a thing becomes essential to your happiness, you can't do without it even though you used to, you put it first even when it really cuts into everything you once thought was important including your physical health.  The word is addiction.  Once you get your pretty little Amazons knocked up, laddybuck, you're going to have just about nothing but addicts around you, I can tell you that right now.

Thalp:  Which Earthuman definition of "addiction" are you meaning?  1) Failed symbiosis that degenerates into parasitism?  2) A symbiosis that excludes all orgs?

Citizen Paine:  Hey hey dont ever mention PC in any connection with yers truly!  I never said I wuz even tryin to be politically erect.  Id rather suck a below-the-belt Slurpee than be that kinda prick!
         If motherin iz addictive that iz how itz gotta be.  What females hafta be lookin out fer iz always the kids and their own hidez so they can take care of the kidz.  Becauz of that females don't have much scruplez or honor.  They kick fer the family jewelz and they do it sneaky and clever becauz the kidz are what matterz.  Look at divorcez and how wimmin will take their exes fer the kidz sake.  Hasta be that way when wimmin have kidz.  They gotta do it and they need that kinda toughness.  But when they don't have kidz and they go into politics or somethin they make a mess becauz they got no natural talent for fairness.
         You can only trust men to run things becauz men, well some of us heh heh, naturally look for idealz like honor, justice and chivalry.  Malez were made to defend the rest of the tribe so we have instinx fer the kind of rulez that protect people from each other.  No free fer all and no me first for real men.

Ruby Arsenic:  Is it possible you and I are actually agreeing even though our words haven't given us permission?

Paisley is My Friend:  It's sad, come to think about it, all the war of the sexes revolves around children.  It seems like some of the really aggressive men feel insecure, maybe I ought to say superfluous, because women can do anything men do and besides have kids and bond with them without really needing all that much guy help.  Back before, us gals used to need guys for protection and money, but not so much now.  I think that's why some men get het up about women doing police work, firefighting, battlefield stuff, women are taking their last special thing away, it makes them feel like no-good wombless women rather than men with their very own guy good points. 
         Along those lines it's too darn bad how many feminists see babies as burdens, just as if it was slavery to have any responsibility men didn't have to have and can't have.  Children are gifts, men lose a lot by getting so little of the special mother-child family tie.  The feminists do too.
         Just off the wall, wonder if it would help if men could have babies?

Ruby Arsenic:  It would help if sex had as high a reward-to-risk ratio for women as for men.  Consider pregnancy.  STDs that are harder to diagnose and treat in women than in men.  Piston-action sex, in bang out, that leaves the man content and the woman barely started.  Rape.

Theofe:  I can't recall any Gregarian human world with such loud sex factions as Earth.  Perhaps paternity dowsing helps, maybe the herms smooth things by living in the middle.

Sabre:  The War Between the Sexes comes down to, neither sex can stand the other one's brain.  Males cannot stand females having even one brain.  It blocks men getting what they want and besides women keep wanting to not do what they are told.  Females cannot stand males having two brains, one at each end.  The second one however you count it keeps women from getting their own way.  Men would be a whole lot more use to women if they were all whopper or all brain, not mixed up.

Aquinas:  Pray accept my apologies, Sabre, if I have trodden as indelicately as you over the verge of solecism, but do you belong to the male or female persuasion?

Sabre:  Persuasion has nothing to do with it.  That is the problem.

The Krij carry out child-stealing raids, usually against large families.  It's a practice that assuages envy of more fertile parents, assists exogamy, and supports the mythic archetype of the bel inconnu, the unknown prince or heir in disguise.  Every child wears a tiny bulla (inserted under the pubic skin) that is removed and opened at his/her adolescence ritual so that he, she, or heshe can find their true parents.

La Belle Dame Sans Souci:  I most certainly do NOT agree that children are better off being bullied to toughen them up!  Any coping mechanisms a little kid comes up with will only be kid games based on kid judgement and no good at all for adult life!  If you had a "fierce" childhood, that is no excuse for your trying to share the misery.  Try letting other people be happy for once!

Major:  "Whatever does not kill us makes us stronger."  I truly believe that.

La Belle Dame Sans Souci:  Well I've heard scar tissue is stronger than healthy skin but it doesn't stretch, it doesn't have any hair, it can't feel anything, and it's ugly!  So don't talk to me about stronger!

Sabre:  The man you misquoted committed suicide.  If you knew that you would know that the corrected quote is "whatever does not kill us makes us kill our selves."

NeuroGod:  don't be silly, get it right...  "whatever does not kill us makes us grateful"...  it's soooo nice when it's finally over...  or do you think grateful is the same thing as strong...

Theofe:  Ixy tried tactfully asking several Krij what made Krig work.  Three of them gave the same answer, perhaps designed for tourists.  "We've found out how to reserve unhappiness for the Fire and Earth tribes, who can appreciate it, and happiness for the other four tribes."  Fire, Earth, meaning male, female teens.
         I quote our Krigi friend Gi.  "When I was tinder-age my eldest friend was in the Metal woods, and being apparently alone he forgot himself and stretched very enjoyably with his wrists crossed over his head.  At once one of the crones came down from a tree balcony behind him.  She accused him of irreverently grasping wildly at Air."
         "What happened?"
         "What always happens, happened.  He lived alone in the Air pasture for a week, fasting that he should have his fill of air."

Ruby Arsenic:  All of these evasions and sophistries about homosexuals as a public health problem, and why can't they just keep to themselves like in the good old days, and so on, are things I hear almost daily in the 14th-Century human-nature-preserve where I live.  Those expedient rationalizations can become amusing, but only when they're transferred to a more normal whitebread group of victims.  Let us then transpose those sour refrains into a minor key, illustrating that absolutely any group of people can be vile when seen through a preconception. 
         Let us imagine the case, not of a gay being mistreated by neighboring and co-employed normals, but of a young child who's been getting insulted and ostracized by a teacher.  And then the mother goes to a friend for sympathy, and what to her wondering ears should appear but...
         "Well, I don't approve of what that teacher is doing but I can't really go along with all these children running around everywhere.  They just seem dirty to me, with their filled diapers and their runny noses.  I've talked to doctors and they've told me just how unsanitary and unhealthy feces and mucus are.  Children are promiscuously active, too, they make hundreds of contacts a year and don't even cover their noses when they sneeze.
         "And children spread nasty diseases, things like mumps that can cripple grown men or strep that puts adults in bed for a week.  Or chickenpox that can give another kid Reyes' Syndrome and kill him.  I mean, they can give you a disease and you just sit there hurting afterwards; all you know is that the kid sat close to you or played with you and had his fun and now you're the one who's hurting.  Not to mention the psychological damage kids do that lasts the rest of their victims' lives.  In fact, I just stopped my subscription to the local newspaper because they wrote about children coming out of the closet here and they didn't say a word about the health problems.
         "Or the crime problem, when everyone knows the link between immaturity and crime.  Kids start by wearing objectionable clothes and behaving offensively in public.  They run out in traffic and cause accidents when the drivers try to dodge them.  They vandalize other people's property and eventually when they get to be teenagers they drive like idiots and kill people.  It just makes me sick to think about all the people who get hurt because kids won't behave responsibly.  And all the money that gets spent on child-related and teen-promiscuity-related illnesses and injuries!  Taxpayers are paying millions for all that!  And they want more all the time, more and more subsidies for their vaccinations and public education, and more censorship of the media so that children and their politically correct activist groups won't get offended!
         "I can work with people who have kids.  I don't have any problem with that.  I don't object to working with people who have kids, as long as they don't try to recruit other people into parenthood or start talking about their kids or bringing them out and petting them in public.  That should stay in private.  And it just grosses me out to think of a child coming up to me and wanting a cuddle.  Even so I can't agree with child-bashing.
         "Back in the Victorian period kids were better.  They were seen and not heard and you didn't run into them everywhere you went.  They stayed in their homes with their parents and behaved themselves and were perfectly happy.  I never heard any of those stories that they were sent away to boarding schools and caned.  I don't really believe it, and it doesn't matter anyway.  Kids just behaved better back then and it would be fine with me if they did now.
         "Besides, I know you won't agree with me, but I believe being a child is immoral."

Major:  I shall say this once and forever after drop the topic.  Homosexuality is completely unnatural as has been proven by all respected anthropologists and psychologists.  It is tied in with sadomasochism and excretion fetishism, if you have ever heard of "rimming" and "golden showers" you know what I mean but I shall not sully the Club with it.  Among animals in a state of nature homosexual acts occur only as part of domination, else they are committed only in captivity.  Not the best precedent for us!
         In politics you never hear a homosexual speak unless he is endeavoring to get money or some kind of special favors, a sure sign of the weakness of their type.  Homosexuals constantly work with eco-squeaks and one-worlders and socialists and secular humanists and all the other L-worders trying to suck our country dry.  They cannot stand on their own.  A completely secular argument that proves their unfitness is their inability to procreate, which thwarts the whole purpose of evolution.
         I have no desire to pay one red cent or wooden nickel to fight AIDS.  Homosexuals brought it upon themselves by their own sin compounded with plain suicidal stupidity.

Aquinas:  Major, albeit you have proven yourself my esteemed comrade in arms by debunking proaberrancy bombast and rodomontade as you have, I must allude to a few, a very few, points of difference between your views and mine.  Distinguo.
         Item.  Surely it is a mere transient oversight in the swelter of argument that has led you to propound your overly encompassing Darwinian argument against homosexual acts.  You cannot have intended to condemn all the monks, nuns, and other worthies who, by preferring the noble burden of celibacy to the (at best) brief carnal animal rewards of sex, have also sinned against our Ur-Father Evolution, as you would have it.
         Item.  I would be the last among all rational men to deny the significance of AIDS:  "Abstinence Is Definitely Safety."  Nonetheless some distinction must be drawn between misfortune, in this case a truly pernicious plague, and sin, lest we inadvertently harden our hearts against our fellow humans' sufferings and bereavements.

Ruby Arsenic:  Heh heh heh.  You know, it occurs to me that men are even more frightened of "domination", and being ogled, and being on the receiving end of unwanted passes, and being raped, than we women are.  But men won't call it fear, real men are never afraid; instead, they call it revulsion and then pretend that the homosexuals deserve it.  Exactly like how the pathological feminists react to men.

Sabre:  We will never get rid of sex perversion until we stop raising children around unneutered animals.  Naturally anyone who has grown up around animals rutting will be drawn to unsanitary back-to-front kinds of sex.  What other training have they had for a sexual turn-on unless they have had the good luck to view straight human pornography?  Why else would so many farmers enjoy animal husbandry?

Paisley is My Friend:  Oh please guys, stop talking about sex and homosexuals like dirt.  My apologies but I can't ever agree with you about that and it makes me sick to read it.
         Sex is a fine thing.  It's real magic.  People turn into something altogether different when they're turned on, something you can't predict from how they usually act.  I tell you this, in some ways werewolves don't have anything on were-hornies and it's wonderful.
         That's why I think sex is good, and private.  It's like all those fairy tales, tell anyone how you got your magic gold and it'll change into leaves and trash.  Sex is like fine music and poetry, it turns into dirt at the touch of anyone else's opinion.
         And when it comes to homosexuals, if I think men are sexy, why shouldn't men think so too?  I don't want to flame you, but you have a lot of explaining to do here.

Free Meson:  Your prejudices astonish me, Major.  Have you ever even met a gay face to face?  I'd guess you haven't.

Citizen Paine:  Hey, face ta face ain't the pozition what worriez him!  Try tattooing yer butt with Do Not Enter, therez yer answer Major!

Major:  No fear!  If I find myself cornered I'll play it safe, I'll fill my rear portal with quicksetting cement.

Free Meson:  Then, while you're at it, you had better seal up your mouth too.

Major:  I wonder if it was anything like my alma mater initiation.  I shall tell it as I recall it.
         We were all clad in gym shorts, our jock straps donned on the outside, plus red lace garters.  The fraternity members stood us out in the alley waiting half an hour in windy November.  Then the biggest guy they had shoved us in and ordered us to silence.  We had to stand with our feet a yard from the wall and our noses on the wall.  I began to think I'd chosen the wrong frat.  But I stayed, like all the rest. 
         First, we all had to dunk ourselves into a bucket of yellow-dyed water (and yes there was real urine in it) and grab fake doggie doo-doo, you know the prankish substances I refer to, by mouth.  This complete, we were compelled to stand nosing the wall while a broom was placed well into the crack of the gluteus to be held there.  (Our shorts were still on, of course, we weren't kinky or anything).
         Then the real fun started.  We stood at attention with our broomsticks for, I hazard, two thousand years.  The fraternity members all carried purple paddles three feet long, inscribed with the Holy Jock, the club initials in big red letters, and the wielder's title.  There ensued countless attacks on the rearward areas, intended to compel us to release the sticks, and many rude comments about the size and color and swelling of the pained regions.  Then we moved on to a relay race tied face to face with each other, with yet more paddles involved.  After that event all the guys wrestled at once, with the full members leaping upon us as though we were their meat, and it was a right up close and personal free-for-all no holds barred combat.
         Everyone was led outside and we were chained to bike racks through our shorts and jocks, and you may believe me those chains were cold!  Then victims began to be heaved back inside.  Whacks with the paddle were heard, and we all were in great dread.  Then, it was my turn.  I was taken by their big boy and blindfolded and there were further applications of the paddle and drenches with the infamous impure water.  Then the blindfold was removed.
         There was the advisor for the frat, flanked by the fraternity officers.  My hand was placed on the Holy Jock (bronzed on a big marble column) and I was ordered to recite the traditional oath.  To defend the Jock and stay pure of mind and precious bodily fluids and keep the faith forever.  Then I kissed the Jock as was ordained.  I was then issued a paddle, which made up for it all for I was encouraged to use it well in subsequent years, and I was ordered to clean the toilets.

Theofe:  Well, if I knew what you meant by anarchy I might agree with you that I'd prefer it to life in the pecking order.  I don't know what you'd call anarchy, CP.  Quite a few archecultures that seldom use physical violence for punishment do use mind-morphing.  You have three choices.  Consume this neurochem the GW steward gives you.  Starve.  Leave.  I also know of tactics like group initiation geases, communal ostracism, bardic harassment.  Most post-GW weltstamms don't use democracy, instead they work like enlightened shamanism.  The pre-GW weltstamms usually clunk along in obscure deep-dish hierarchies like Earth's.
         The Cats have something, call it clanarchy.  All their enforcement duels happen intraclan, come from infringements of courtesy.  Interclan disputes mostly start over hunting territories, get settled by gambling, interbreeding.  Cats set great store by lineage.  They can smell, see, hear, intuit the distinctions between bloodlines.  Genetic connoisseurs.  The Cats resolve their most dangerous interclan fights by beauty contests.  Judged by a local avatar of the macopave.
         You don't hear of mass movements, leaders, among the Cats.  Except on a few planet-scale hunting expeditions.  As a cat you'd have to cope with total intraclan autocracy.  Unless you killed the clan patriarch, matriarch.  Knowing you, you might.  :->
         Ailurosi come closer to anarchy than other human weltstamms.  Probably through the Aa modification.  The Ailurosi, though not the Aa, have a Ranger (Aer'ririsur) with customs, not a government with laws.  The Ranger veers.  To some extent it protects, invents.
         Some number of Ailurosi, nowadays about a thousand, get picked by lottery from people who have volunteered for the Ranger.  Each receives a badge of authority.  The customs allow each lottery winner to pick one helper, who then also belongs to the Ranger.  The helpers' names stay secret even from the lottery bosses.  How much secrecy any particular Rangerite maintains about his status depends on his own skill, preference.
         After eleven local years the lottery chooses a new Ranger.  The old Ranger members lose their privileges.  Ranger "property", the built, geminated things, transfers entirely to the new Ranger.  How much a Ranger accomplishes in "large-scale policy" depends entirely on the members.  Their powers of acquisition, persuasion.  Their imaginations, ability to work together, willingness to build on what the previous Rangers did instead of going off at a new skew.
         The Rangerites (aer'ririxomenech) can use lies, fraud, trespass, theft, incitement to riot, persuasion, blackmail, threats, to accomplish their goals.  They can shame others into giving public charity.  They can use their loot to build industries, spacecraft, artwork, long-range weapons.  Customarily, many of these activities would invoke painful social backlashes.  Duels, starvation strikes, publishing of names, arbitration, artistic mockery.  Divorces from mates, parents, children.  By custom, though, no one may use these methods against a Rangerite without becoming subject to murder, torture by any Rangerite, with no recourse.  Under any other circumstances, a Rangerite who does someone physical harm loses his inviolability.  Any immediately convoked group of witnesses can kill the culprit Ranger on the spot, as they would for any other physically aggressing Aailurosi.
         Aailurosi society, Aa, Ailurosi alike, fiercely protects privacy.  By custom, no one should make publicly available what goes on "within walls".  Most Aailurosi duels start that way, with gossip, attempted guilt loading.  The Ranger, however, by custom can spy into homes without the social duty of dueling if the victim finds out. 
         GW viewalls make such spying infinitely easy.  No one in Gregaria has any privacy except inside a GW.  Nonetheless most Ailurosi (except Rangerites) and all Aa make a point of shunning GWs except for food.  They loathe telepathy, even IVE. 
         The Ailurosi feel the superiority of their Ranger system comes from its blatancy.  They say, admit that government works by force, fraud, threat, goatblather.  Also admit that sometimes those means accomplish desirable goals no one would reach otherwise.  So use them outright.
         The Aailurosi, Aa as well as Ailurosi, duel not so often as Cats, oftener than Americans file lawsuits.  Duels do the ultimate to put risks on the same person as benefits.  The challenged chooses the type of duel, the challenger the specific weapon.  The types include duel to the death, duel to first blood, duel by investigation, rape, public fasting, surgical uglification, ordeal, knowledge, gambling.  Weapons can mean deadly weapons, mock weapons, media in which to publicize an investigation, dildos, pleasure center stimulators, libraries, research topics, casinos, games, sports.
         Children fight duels with adults, too.  Usually the adult receives the challenge.  He rarely picks a seriously damaging type of duel.  Occasionally an adult challenges a child.  If the child picks duel to first blood, duel to the death, mostly the adult asks for some humiliating harmless sort of weapon.  Then thrashes the kid unconscious.  That allows the adult, the winner, to break off the duel.  Otherwise he couldn't end it without the other duellist's consent.  So children get killed in duels, usually by each other.  Every world has children who die of not believing in death.  Why not?  It believes in them, after all.
         The Aailurosi don't see this as a price they pay for their system.  They don't see it as any problem.  Immatures get treated as people, so they live by the same customs as other people.
         It works, to the extent that it does, because the Aailurosi have no respect for sapient life, great respect for sapient behavior.  "Human is as human does."  So animals, trees, mushrooms, have gotten sapient privileges by behaving in a clever, inoffensive way.  When that fails, by duelling, whether they win, lose.
         The Ailurosi see duels as a mutual token of respect.  The challenger says, "Though I think you're wrong I think you're worth risking a combat with, instead of crushing, evading you like an animal, a force of nature."  The accepter says, "I trust you to have the honor to play by the rules though you violently disagree with me."  In contrast to lawsuits, police action, which say "You are trash, I'm going to find the biggest official scoop I can to dispose of you with."

Sabre:  I say good for the Ailurosi even though I do not believe in their system.  Who cares whether child offenders are too young to know what they did?  It is all the same cr*p as animal "rights".  No one understands why animals, kids or loonies do what they do.  That is the only basis of this idea that kids and the others are innocent in some way that gets them released whether the excuse is called a compulsion or his environment.  I say, if we can figure out why someone killed then he is willful and dangerous.  If we and he cannot understand it he is even more dangerous because he cannot stop doing it.  Either reason is good enough to remove him.  So much for the insanity and the poverty defenses.

Theofe:  I know, I don't believe the Ailurosi either.  The Aa, yes, the Ailurosi, no.  If they had less in common with other humans, I'd accept them easier.  The Aa only modified the Ailurosi in a few ways, though, left most of the human traits in place.  The big thing, the Ailurosi no longer have any spirit of emulation.  Deliberate mimicry they have, not instinctive emulation.
         That means hardly any xenophobia.  No Ailurosi implicitly expects himself to act like anyone else.  Correspondingly no Ailurosi expects anyone else to act the way he does.  So no one resents, fears people only because they act different.  Everyone always acts wildly different, fact of life, so what?  Everyone has different muscle twitches, peculiar gestures, ritualized poses, pet phrases they repeat, favorite numbers of times to repeat them, five, seven, thirteen, whatever. 
         The Ailurosi distrust GW, want to learn to do without, partly because they think it forces too much uniformity.  For them, maybe.  For any other breed of humans, the exact opposite.
         Absence of emulation also means no Ailurosi expects anyone to maintain any consistent personality.  If someone who's always acted amiable suddenly starts pinching babies, no one calls it odd.  Why should anyone keep imitating his past self forever?  Hard for a mere Earthuman to cope with that.  Earthumans, many others too, feel frightened if they notice a wild inconsistency in themselves, insulted if anyone calls them inconsistent.  What do "schizoid", "unstable", "unreliable", "hypocrite" mean, if not "inconsistent"?
         So you can't apply Ailurosi ideas about government, trials, to other humans.  Ailurosi can't socialize themselves the same way we do.  Typical human orgs depend on trust, in other words predictability, reliability, in other words emulation. 
         You can't workably compare Ailurosi rules for kids with ours, either.  The lack of persistent imitation slows down Ailurosi childhood learning substantially.  You don't see Ailurosi kids repeatedly making the same moves, striking the same postures as their favorite adults.  Most human kids learn that way, fast, half on automatic mirror.  Ailurosi learn more deliberately, focusedly.  You see the toddlers fire off incredibly intense rapid bursts of mimicry of everyone in sight every so often.  Apparently to test themselves.  It doesn't stick, though.  So you don't see whole families with the same walk, the same shrug, the same phrases, as you do elsewhere.

About 700 years ago the Offset World had already given itself a unified world government and self-optimization, both genetic and neurochemical.  Their qual and quant science were irregularly developed in the extreme.  Offsettian knowledge was much further along than Earth's in genetics and some mathematics, and far less advanced (call it 17th-Century) in any social or non-life sciences.  Accordingly, the Offsettian "instruments" for examining the null characteristics of genes were largely magical, something that could hardly work except in human genetics where Identity is so strongly interrelated with DNA elements. 

Much of the Offsettian knowledge of scientific technique came from querying their planetary macopave, one much more attuned to sapient curiosity than most, and only seldom Delphic in its answers.  It was also much less attuned to destruction than most; some Hexists call it a macopave of the saliens gender.

Then came the GWs.  They spread very rapidly over this unified planet; within a generation every family had one.  And then came the door-to-door optimizers.  These merchants, freed by GW, had decided to take up genome improvement as their vocation.  Usually they had some *special* idea of what changes were best for their customers.  The government, which till this event had retained its credibility and influence, now tried to suppress the genome guilds.  Most citizens supported the idea of control, for fear of losing their social unity.  (Their GWing offworld experiences showed unity to be a strange and seldom thing).

After some oscillations over ten or fifteen generations, there came to be two major optimizands.  People in the other genetic groups either changed over to gain allies or left the planet.  It became more and more "natural" to easily, rapidly change one's nature to fit the social circumstances, rather than make the effort to find other circumstances more suited to one's temporary and mutable nature. 

One of the two factions that has survived came from those self-optimizers who aimed to increase the pleasure of contemplating the patterns of orgs in a society.  The rituals and customary interactions of this optimizand have a nearly instinctual grip on its members, giving a kind of Tantric mutual ecstasy to org life rather than the usual compulsion by law, inertia, or fear of change.  This particular optimization was designed to immortalize social unity.

The enemy, and counterpoint, optimizand is a vampire race.  The vampires originated among self-optimizers who decided the best way to reduce social friction was to implement birth control.  They felt the best way to do that was to change human incentives to make eating much more orgasmic than sex.  This change in the pleasure principle was unavoidably tied into the hunt instincts; vampirism followed.

The two optimizands ended up at war, which dissatisfied both.  The patterners disliked the ugly single-minded oversimplification of patterns in a wartime org, and the vampires wanted more chance to savor their battening than they could get from high-tech battles.  Especially when they were likely to be battles on the genetic level.  Besides, there was the macopave's damping of all destruction spells.  The two groups pulled back to opposite sides of the Offset and negotiated to launch the formal battles of the Dreamwarld.

Maccabee:  At last I have lived to see one other individual acknowledge, even if grudgingly and by pitiably cautious mere extraterrestrial implication, that the cunning obscurantism about vampires' inability to breed is wholly and virulently false!  But it is essential to provide the horrific details to warn us all of the repellent, vitiated nature of vampire life, which has been so irresponsibly glorified in pandering fiction.  I will now supply the prodromata. 
         The male and female vampire reproduce their carnifecial kind in a way that fleers at true spiritual intercourse.  Whilst the two vampires consume their human victim in gluttonous, gorging delight, each of these foul beings extrudes a torose, crepuscular ectoplasmic organ from the pores of his or her heartward axilla.  The male's is termed a "bhuetoir" and to spiritual vision is the dusky red of overweening ambition, the female's is a "deohtr" and has the dark green hue of mendacity.  The two arcane organs interconnect and interpenetrate when the vampires exchange blood with each other after the demise of their prey.  Most corrupt of all, the vampire embryo is nourished in the bellies or brains of mortals beyond number who are hunted down on the astral plane by the combined vampiric organs.  The cankered, malignant, despoiled tissue structures left behind in the victim by the embryos are what the inanely smug medical establishment has misnamed cancer!  Only when the materialistic, fatuous conventions of medical "science" are replaced by the veridical truth will the cancer epidemic be cured once and for all!

Theofe:  Another Shock.  On Immerlind, a major national government opposed GWs.  A typical response, as you can guess.  This org resisted more covertly than any other in history.
         In public, the government spokesmen sympathized with would-be GWers.  They also said, we understand your desire for greater individual autonomy, ability to get things done.  Do you really think this is the best way?  Think of what you'll give up, traditions, customs, families, you'll find your life hollow, soulless without them.  We have a way for you to find more fulfillment without losing your home-thought.
         The government told the citizens about research completed recently.  Now people could take a treatment to release all their suppressed potential.  Intelligence, telepathy, self-healing, magical intuition, transcendence.  The treatment would transform the people, the world to something better.  So no one would feel the need to escape, run away in GWs.
         The local Immerlindesch had a tricky choice to make from three possibles.  Keep their existing situation, take up GWs, take the opportunity offered by this national government.  Remember Goldilocks?  GWs, "too hot", too much change, too much telepathy.  Too much contact with terrifying unfamiliar ideas, aliens.  Too much worry, what the "real owners" of the GWs would want in exchange.  The "too good to be true" complaint.  Status quo, the flaws too familiar, a cold dead thing, "too cold".  By comparison, the government plan tasted "just right".  Though the Immerlindesch, in their cynical complexity, hadn't seemed unusually prone to trust the government up till Shock.
         The government's treatment came in boxes the size of telephone booths, required only a few minutes.  So the government set up booths in all the public places.  Merchants and churches competed to pay the set-up costs.  The citizens stood, rather camped, in miles-long serpents.  People who took the treatment said that it felt like soaring through darkness toward a light, an attractive description.  They felt euphoric, expectant afterwards.  They said that within a few days they could feel their abilities increasing.  A few months later, people began to disappear.  Their clothes, belongings, jawbones, ribs, pelvic girdles lay on the beaches.  An odd echo of that nation's old funeral custom.  Leaving white-skirted embalmed bodies stacked against a sea cliff till the ritual date to deliver them to the ocean.
         The booths hypnotized people into believing in their false new powers, caused a neurochemical swing to mania.  Partly a side effect of the major effect of the treatment, a metamorphosis.  The treated people changed into something like a large sea-otter with hands, a large bullet-shaped skull.  An intelligent giant sea-otter.  The body prepared for the change over a three, four-month period.  Often the changee's health improved over that time.  The more improvement he needed, the longer the preparation period.
         Then the changee would crave the sea, go to the beach.  He'd transform over a few days while lying at the edge of the waves.  The change consumed most of the body's flesh for food, reconstruction.  Jettisoned some large bone structures.
         The government had researched this zauberstamm change for years, using convicted slaves.  So it had planned to adapt conscripts to sea-mining, sea-farming.  It served just as well to keep people out of GWs, which don't work for water breathers.  The people in other Immerlindn nations followed a more usual variant of GW-shock.
         That happened over a hundred years ago.  When I went to an Immerlind beach a few years back, I still found more bone meal than sand.  The sea spiders had built sparkling little nests in the jawbones at the shore-top, back where waves didn't reach.  Rather pretty.
         The otter-folk have gone almost extinct.  Their government hadn't had time to build the submarine infrastructure to support them while they learned how to live in the sea.

Ruby Arsenic:  The Waco Holocaust was Great Art.  Its themes are eternal.  Fire is a good servant but a bad master, and so is government, and so is Reality.  If the only tool you have is a hammer (the hammer of a gun, for example) you treat everything like a nail. 
         Great Art is the only thing larger than life, but it makes a lousy way to die.
         The Waco Holocaust was a very important event.  It was the first time the US government used the same weapons and the same attack techniques and the same media control against its "own" citizens as against Grenadans, and Panamanians, and Iraqis, and Somalis.  Was it a mere oops?  Hollow laughter.  Was it a toe in the sweet warm water, a war game like Grenada, with larger and more profitable operations to follow?  Only your media masseur knows for sure.
         When I talk this way to normals, they simply can't believe the unutterable perversity of my misguidedness.
         Still.  Suppose you showed a normal a news report about a heretofore peaceful Moslem enclave in Bosnia, attacked without provocation by massively overarmed Serbs convoyed by happy news-teams.  The Serbs are in complete control of the information released about the enclave, they claim it might someday have attacked them and retaliation in advance was justified, they spread rumors about the unsavory sex practices and drug manufactures of the Moslems.  They moan over the children (while depriving them of rest, quiet, electricity, sanitation, medical care, and tear-gas-free air).  The children who are released from the enclave are counseled and educated to the glory of Greater Serbia.  And the Serbs say that finally, while they were conducting this calculatedly harmless ethnic cleansing, the imbecile Moslems (not realizing how sweetly they would be treated if they surrendered) decided to kill themselves.  And unfortunately to simultaneously destroy all the evidence that would have proved what terrible human beings they were.
         Tell a hemorrhoid tale like that to a normal and you'll hear the moral outrage and disbelief all the way from here to the purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain.
         But it's not the same, say the normals.  The Branch Davidians broke The Law.  They had weapons.  They were a bunch of religious fanatic loony cultists.  They "asked for it", "deserved what they got", "should have learned their lesson" -- which is what the victors always say about the vanquished.  Very tough hardnosed folks, these normals, so full of a grip on Reality and the Right Stuff, so certain of their fundamental superiority to Davidians and all such abnormal trash.
         And yet there are so many interesting comparisons to make between David Koresh's group, on the one hand, and normals plus their killer-normal dingos the BATFBI, on the other.
         I mean, for example.  What have you basically got in the struggle between the Branch Davidians and the BATFBI?  On one side, you have a small, well-armed group of people with abnormal ideas and a history of being harmless, or mostly harmless as such things are judged in this impulsive world.  On the other side, you have a much larger, much better armed group of people with normal ideas and a history of blackmail, intimidation, confiscation, and successful violence (against Gordon Kahl, for example) plus the effective complicity of all the neighbors and co-workers.  So if I'm supposed to worry about the prospect of being neighbored by a cult whose every orifice is jammed with AK-47s and grenades... how much more worried should I be about being anywhere near the BATFBI?  There goes the neighborhood, all over the country yet.
         But.  That precisely collimated viewpoint of normalcy.  The hum of consensus Reality or what passes for it.  The BATFBI works for the government.  They are here to help us.  They are accountable and under control.  Well now, normals, what makes that control and accountability so bleeding obvious?  There are three types of control that sometimes work on the BATFBI and their ilk.  All three failed in the Waco Holocaust.  Can they be trusted to succeed in any future similar operations?
         Control Type 1.  The Law.  The victims can defend themselves -- not with weapons, which tend to get you shot without trial for "resisting arrest" or "attempting escape" -- but with lawyers, demonstrations, evasions to foreign countries.  It didn't work in Waco.  It never could work, once the BATFBI made their unprovoked D-Day assault on the dangerous and foreign beaches of Waco, Texas.  The victims could only have defended themselves by first losing all their means of defense.  Their weapons would have been confiscated, their leaders imprisoned.  Their church and beliefs would have been purged.  Quite likely RICO and civil forfeiture would have been used to make their assets unavailable for legal defense or anything else.  Quite possibly their children would have been taken from them and re-allocated to relatives or foster parents, if not to the deprogrammers who are now their proprietors.
         Actually the Davidians' decision to shoot the BATFBI looks more as if it was their only choice all the time...  The pity was that David Koresh was wholly entirely incompetent as a defender.  The BATFBI allowed him only a tiny bit of media access -- hmm, just why did the BATFBI close off communications between the Davidians and the big world? -- and Koresh could have used it a lot more effectively.  He could have been a lot more entertaining to the American public, too.  Another poor fool misses his chance at stardom.
         Control Type 2.  The media.  Yes, the media, those stalwart investigative heroes of stage and screen, in other words darlings in their own self-applauding portrayals.  Sometimes you can get the media onto your side and painlessly manipulate them (as with any other soft nerveless growth).  Sometimes they'll get the public stirred up and sometimes the public will make the government reconsider.  There was time for that to happen in the Waco case.  But the media had no use for Branch Davidians successfully negotiating with the government.  As long as the Davidians were besieged, the media could sell stories about those fanatics, those terrifying unpredictable weapons junkies, those loonies who actually thought the government was dangerous.  Many stories were sold.  The media didn't have to spend much on research, because they got their information all neatly delivered to them by the BATFBI along with a convenient pull-tab to open the package.  Then all the Branch Davidians died, which was ideal for the media because it allowed them to sell hindsight stories about just how incompetently and dangerously the BATFBI had behaved, but of course it was a fluke and uh-uh no way could it ever happen again because Congress rebuked them, anyway the Davidians did it to themselves because the incompetent and dangerous BATFBI says so.
         In short.  The media did not work as a control, because they had plenty of money to make no matter what happened, as long as what happened was bloody thrilling.  They did not work as a control, because they are in the business of news, not facts.  This will be the case for future operations as well.
         Control Type 3.  The bureaucracy itself.  Let's not indulge completely in heartless, mindless cynicism.  There are some peace-loving kindly responsible people in Congress and the Administration and the BATFBI, oh yes there are.  They have some rules and policies that really are designed to protect citizens.  All of this system does provide some counterweight or governor to usually keep the BATFBI intermittently under control, if only to keep its reputation slightly unsullied.  But it didn't work when it was most needed.  A large ravening chunk of the BATFBI was hot to play soldier boys.  Not one of those soulful bureaucrats stopped the initial attack.  Not one of them prevented the final attack.  Could they be expected to?  The White House was pushing them for fast results.  And as for accountability?  Tell me about accountability when we see the persons responsible losing something more irreplaceable than just their jobs.
         So the third control can't be trusted either.  It's big, it's clunky, it costs a lot of money, and it doesn't work dependably.
         Anybody who thinks that democracy is a control just hasn't gotten the point.  Democracy didn't work either.  Nothing worked.  We got an end result, a hard-headed realitarian normalistic bottom line that was about 85% as bad as what the nasty undemocratic Serbs would have done to the Moslem enclave.  I mean, I suppose that the Serbs (if they're as bad as our media portray them) would have killed all the adult males of the enclave, destroyed its fortifications, kept the released women and boys as army whores, and brought up the children to despise their fellow Moslems.  What happened in Waco was about a 15% discount on the Serbian solution.  Or maybe a 20% discount.  I'll be generous; why quibble about exactly how little democracy is worth when you really vitally need it?
         There is no control anywhere.  The BATFBI is just about as out of control as the Branch Davidians could ever have been in David Koresh's most grandiose fantasies.
         But of course the Branch Davidians were loonies.  Or, to take the more condescending of the normals' views, David Koresh was a loony and the rest were thugs or dupes.  The BATFBI really was at war only with David Koresh Saddam Hussein, they weren't at war with the Branch Davidian Iraqi people.  But I digress.  Really they were all loonies, they wanted Armageddon, they got it, and (comfortingly) they would have offed themselves no matter what the BATFBI did.
         Well, actually, remember, what the Branch Davidians wanted originally was to survive Armageddon.  That was what the artillery and the watchtower and the farm animals and other implements of de/construction were for.  (Why didn't they have a escape tunnel, though?  Every wannabe survivor needs a back door.  Again I digress.)  If the Davidians had been suicidal pussies like the Jonestown non-contenders, they would have panicked and snuffed it as soon as they saw an unexpected Desert Storm on their doorstep.  After all, Jim Jones and company didn't even wait for their war to arrive.  No, the evidence indicates that Koresh and the Davidians weren't suicidal but made one misjudgment:  they thought that until the real Armageddon came along, they could survive any penny-ante imitations the government could cobble up.  Mass suicide, if it happened, was just a zero-hour option to escape being burned alive or whatever worse things the proven diabolical child-gassing BATFBI might have had in store for them.
         I mean, saying the Davidians meant to kill themselves all along and lie about it afterwards is like saying the BATFBI meant to burn the Davidians out all along and lie about it afterwards.  The characterization is just that inconsistent both ways.  The Davidians spent weeks holding out, instead of killing themselves (which they could easily have done anytime).  The BATFBI spent weeks using slow siege and psychological torture schemes, instead of killing the Davidians (which they could easily have done anytime).  Why would the Davidians have decided to kill themselves all of a sudden?  Maybe they didn't have any chance to do anything else except lose their home, their assets, their leaders, their children, and their church.  And they had a great excuse, the BATFBI drove them to it.  Why would the BATFBI have decided to wipe out the Davidians all of a sudden?  Maybe they didn't have any other choice except to lose their jobs, their reputations, their putative ability to deter malefactors, and an even bigger chunk of their annual funding than was blown already.  And they had a great excuse, the Davidians drove them to it. 
         But the Davidians had to be loonies to store up all those weapons.  Well... they thought things were going to get real bad, and the police couldn't be trusted to protect them, so they'd have to be able to protect themselves.  They were right on all counts.  Lunatics are so clever.
         But they had to be loonies to take up that weird religion (i.e., one without national political influence and official holidays).  And to believe David Koresh was the Second Coming!  Well, honestly, some people.  The funny thing is, the normals have just as little evidence to show that David Koresh wasn't the martyred Second Coming, and they're just as mortally certain of that as Koresh was of the opposite.  Insanity is catching.  Not totally, though.  The Davidians were ready to kill or die for their beliefs, the normals were only ready to kill -- by way of hired badge-folk and keeping themselves at a safe distance, that is -- normals are so clever.
         Look at David Koresh of 2000 years ago.  He was a religious fanatic, a loony.  He got taught a lesson.  He was asking for it.  He broke The Law.  No exceptions can be made.  He deserved what he got.  It was just an assisted suicide.  He wanted to be hung up on a cross to prove something, he'd have found a way to arrange it no matter what the Romans and Pharisees did.  It all goes to show, if you want to die for your beliefs and get respected for it you'd better do it a long time ago.
         The things some people will believe.  You've got one group of people who say their friends didn't commit suicide, and they all agreed on that fable from the moment they came choking out the door.  They pretend the damage from the tank assault caused the fire.  Many of these survivors are Koresh's Mighty Men, his enforcers, who if there was a compulsory "suicide" were probably the ones who did the shooting.  They have everything in the world to gain by lying about what happened, and they had the chance to collaborate on a story, so they mustn't be believed.
         Then you've got another group of people who say they and only they saw and heard the Davidians committing suicide, and they kept the reporters (and the fire-trucks) miles away from the wreakage, and the forensic evidence of which they have complete unreviewed control says the same, and the independent arson investigator who's been hired by them before and whose wife is still employed by them says the same...  Well, the idea of disbelieving this group of people is just so ridiculous that I completely lost track of that sentence.  After all, this group of people are enforcers, violent for a living, and they have everything in the world to gain by lying about what happened, and they had the time and opportunity to collaborate on a story.  The things some people will believe.
         Ho ho ho, from the normals.  You think you know so much.  What do you have the gall to think for yourself happened?  What do you think should have been done?
         I think the Davidians made a strategic misjudgment at the very beginning, under terrible time pressure and under the control of a leader who was freshly wounded and in pain, and they could have been negotiated out by people who had that kind of skill and intention.  But "sanctions don't work", like with Iraq, and the BATFBI and the normals wanted a war.
         I think the Davidians were way far out from any normal Reality, out where the moon shines plaid and the comets bark, but not any further out than any other fundamentalists, the ones who do whatever dirt they think they can get away with to protect zygote "humans", the ones who do ditto to protect animal "rights".  Normally we live with these misfits without exterminating them, but the BATFBI and the normals wanted war.
         I think the Davidians were "asking for" something unpleasant, a slow siege and eventual trials; they weren't "asking for" anywhere near the Holocaust they got as the result of resisting arrest.  Public judgment, due process, and a fair trial are all any loser can be thought to be "asking for" from a sane government, but the BATFBI and the normals wanted their war instead.
         I think the fire started because the BATFBI did what no competent wrecking company would do, started bashing things without watching out for flammables and without having fire engines at hand; they must have known better, they'd debriefed the people who'd been released.  But the BATFBI and the normals wanted their war, and they wanted it right quick, and they wanted to see the instant replays on prime time.
         I think the Davidians died to fulfill the prophecy made by a tagline on Usenet the week before.  "This is David Koresh.  He cannot be seen."  To anyone familiar with the arcana of the Pythonic prophets, that meant the Davidians (who weren't nearly careful enough not to be seen) were going to go up in amusing puffs of smoke, along with their families and habitations.  All the very best prophecies sound pretty funny until yea verily they are fulfilled.
         Or maybe the Davidians died because the Lord thy Government is a jealous Lord, yea a petty Lord, and jealous of petty things.  The Branch Davidians had their own Reality, their own religion, their own way of bringing up children, no doubt their own rules and enforcement.  Worst and most fatal of all, they had their own defenses.  They had seceded from the United States of America, though in the most petty possible way.  For this sin there was zero tolerance.  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of His terrible swift sword.
         Or maybe the Davidians died just because David Koresh liked to paddle and fondle children too much.  Normals would rather see children deprogrammed and reindoctrinated than spanked and molested.  It's all right to ruin kids by boring them in a schoolroom, never by reaming them in a bedroom.
         I began by saying that the Waco Holocaust was great art, archetypal art.  Any Great Art has at least one moral.  Here's your moral, fellow abnormals.
         What the eye doesn't see, the normal doesn't grieve over.  To a normal, Reality means never having to say you're sorry.  Joe Bloe does not see us abnormals as real people.  He has Reality in his grasp, we don't.  We don't understand The Rules.  We lack good will and ponderable reasons for our behavior.  We aren't conceivably like him.  He matters to Reality and vice versa.  We don't.
         Joe Bloe would have to think between the lines to see us as Real.  But his time is short, he has to leave policy and philosophy to the big shots he's paying to be what he thinks is good at it.  After a while it's all a habit for him like trying to sit in the same bus seat every ride.  And if Joe hears the bus wheels go bump over something soft, he knows it had to be an animal, Authority and Democracy would never allow anyone to run over a Real live person.

What fools these morals be!