Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-97.81.240.58-20130603234626/@comment-24400038-20140331040542

Smoking.Chimp wrote: Krow Dawnstar wrote: Smoking.Chimp wrote: I agree with Krow Dawnstar. Imposing equity under law (e.g. anyone can acquire and own land) is not subjugation in the primary sense of being "to bring under domination". This sense of the word would not apply to, for example, the Romans cleaning up the brigands, bringing the Greek Tyrants to heel as well as dealing with other assorted criminals. I agree that it does not apply to the Empire whose law treated everyone equally and prohibited slavery.

However, people who think they are superior to those whom they are subjugating will always play the victim and claim that they are the ones being subjugated whenever their superiority fantasy is "rudely" interrupted as a consequence of being prohibited from subjugating others. Thus the systematic abuse of the word by subjugators has led it to take on an ambiguous diction. Thus, in a not quite so primary sense, subjugation also can be "to bring under control" which does apply, very much, to curtailing criminal activities and sending the gendarmarie out to show special consideration for the claims of assorted brigands - especially at the tip of a nice sharp sword.

I think that this is a very good example of how problematic linguistic ambiguity is simply not clarified by context - which is why further clarification is required wherever the strictly primary sense of a word is not in use.

[EDIT: Note for the techs. I had to use SHIFT-SPACE between the words "with" (plain text) and "Krow" (part of a hyperlink) to prevent the preceding space from being auto-deleted on publication. This may be a bug unless there is a new HTML convention requiring that non-breaking spaces be used between plain text and hypertext elements...?] I had to read your post twice to get the entire sense of it. What I've collected is, "When caught in the act, bad people try to play the victim, even if that means changing the definition of words."

I'm going out on a limb here, but I've made a conclusion that Thalmor = Internet Trolls Well, I was going to disagree with you and then I started remembering all the internet trolls I have ever dealt with. I can say that of all the internet trolls I have known, nearly all of them were political activists engaged in censoring (by burial in cnesure) all those opinions which the trolls disagreed with. Out of 100s of trolls I've encountered, I've come across one or, maybe, two who turned out to be individuals protesting a personal injustice. The rest were all political sock-puppets - which is very tyrannical thing to do, considering that this kind of behaviour sabotages the free expression of publlic forums. I think that your conclusion, equating the Thalmor with Internet Trolls, may not be so far out on a limb as you think. :^)

I posted it as a joke, then thought about taking it down to not offend trolls, then I realised it's pretty much true.