CoreNet Republic In Focus

Welcome to Republic In Focus, a free service of CoreNet Sector Report for Op-Ed pieces and longer articles.

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Esben Sinclair-Saito

Shoemaker System "Dustup" Typical Foundationist Screed

No doubt you've seen the holos. Crowds of shabbily-dressed people with heart-rending banners being shot at by a team of security agents. Every report is the same: Protestors want the planet's central authority to increase the benefits and amenities of every worker, regardless of what business it is or how many hours they put in. They just showed up to let the head offices know, and got shot at in return. And wouldn't you know it, the loudest proponent of this bizarre retelling is none other than Presidium College chair and Foundation Party mainstay Ismael Wroudich.

Of course, someone like Wroudich knows all about the problems of Schuh's beleaguered population, having made not one, but two holovised appearances where he denounced the factory owners and heaped all the planet's problems on Resource One head Bernard Mayflower and Ulmit Industrial Robotics' entire board. The speeches worked - Schuh Planetary Monitoring reported a thirty-one percent spike in crime in the daycycle following Wroudich's second appearance.

What the Foundation-coddling media are loathe to expose are the horrendous problems that the workers themselves have caused. Nineteen factories were rendered unusable by their own workforces within six days. And thanks to Spartan sympathizer and all-around communalist Ashley Tate, the bill for those factories will be paid out of the same pool that those workers rely on for civil benefits.

Should the security team have used lethal means to subdue the rioters and looters? That depends on whether or not you would be willing to sit still and let a frenzied mob ransack your home and murder you for the imagined crime of - what was it again?

Sinclair-Saito writes for the Phoenix Broadwave Company. He is the author of four texts, including Where Did Our Brains Go? and Shaky Foundations.


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Dame Charlotte Lisk

Who holds the monopoly on consciousness?

The beings we call elephants have returned to consciousness, though the motives of their technical progenitors are perhaps misguided. A message from the group that performed the revival indicates that they wish to "release" the beings into a walled and guarded enclosure on Volgograd.

Unlike the people of Cleve that have begun establishing rights for genetic structures that are seen as dissimilar to our own, the Core Systems Presidium refuses to grant any form of sapience rights for any group of beings other than those established by the Holman Sentient Rights Accords. While trillions of beings cease their temporal consciousness from inter-group conflicts every moment, millions more languish in bondage, in genetic laboratories as DNA lines. The names that our groups have called them are numerous - Dolphin, Chimpanzee, Architeuthis, and Whale are only a few of those held without their choosing after their unplanned cessation of consciousness.

In a universe where the ruling groups of galactic culture recognize the sapience of several diverse groups, why are those same groups so reluctant to afford this small courtesy to others? I posit that Cleve's recognition of sentient groups heralds a new era for a pan-galactic community and ask others to consider their actions in a positive context.

Dame Lisk is the host of the Universal Biorhythm feed and the author of three texts, including the best-selling 2490 narrated text A Universe of Thinkers.


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Phineas Kirchoff III

Republic Owes Government Camp's Citizens War Intercession

The Core Systems Free Republic doesn't give out medals for being a good person or standing up for what is right. It's an implied condition of being a Republic citizen, and the foundation of our government, that we must stand up and speak out against injustice in our society wherever we find it. Nowhere in Republic space has the miscarriage of justice been more blatant than in allowing the power factions of Government Camp to carry out their brutal, bloody and senseless Napoleonic war.

Of course, we must be careful not to infringe on any planet's rights of self-realization and self-government, but unlike the similar case of Lemartes, Government Camp has not rejected the Republic's authority. They acknowledge themselves as a member of a greater alliance - they send a representative to the Titan Sector Congress, and help elect Congress' Regent - and they at least claim to adhere to Republic law. As such, they are subject to the same laws of human rights, laws which are flagrantly flouted in the Barlovian and Fostrey clans' medieval and brutish treatment of their subjects which they conscript to fight their tin-soldier war.

The Core Systems Free Republic owes it to itself, and its citizens on Government Camp, to step in and assert a stronger hand on the planet's political situation. If it truly stands for the rights of the common citizenry, then it should step in - militarily, if need be - to stop the violence. Diplomatic solutions never saw the light of day, only the 'nobility's' grievances, and mankind hasn't come so far in the cosmos to devolve back to the tyranny of one man's ambition.

Professor Phineas Kirchoff III is the chair of the Regressive Colony Committee, a university-backed council studying the causes of technological breakdown on abandoned human colonies, normalizing relations with their governments and working with them to re-integrate them into modern Republic life.

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