So, all their successes are actually done by someone else, or don't count. And all the fuckups are their fault. Got it.

>It's like... mmm. Imagine a guy who sticks up a 7-11 and, instead of
>just bailing with the register contents immediately, sticks around
>getting drunk off malt liquor and ordering the cashier and customers
>to dance for his amusement. Now, what are you going to think? "That
>guy has things going all his own way; he got a bunch of money and
>booze and all these people are terrified of him and doing what he
>wants?"

If you're one of the customers getting a gun waved at your face? You'd be shitting your pants, and wondering if someone is going to be able to stop him before he shoots you. The thing about villains isn't 'are they going to win?', it's 'what will happen before someone takes them down?'

>The EA is that drunk stick-up artist, in my mind. Everything they did
>was so obviously, painfully designed, not to build them up into a
>long-lasting, stable, Evil Empire, but to inflame the situation around
>them until they imploded under the weight of their own incompetence
>and arrogance.

So was Nazi Germany. So is North Korea, Zimbabwe and (some would say) Russia. Far too much of the Earth Alliances madness, both in B5 and here in UF, is not that far separated from reality. Governments become regimes because the wrong people have the power to enforce their agenda, and they honestly believe that they can make the system work the way they want it to.

Just because it looks insane from the outside doesn't mean that the people on the inside can see that.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter