On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 01:32:06AM -0400, Richard Aiken wrote:
> However, you are apparently assuming that individual systems within
> a given racial culture will be *aware* of how much other systems
> sharing that original culture are diverging from the baseline (or
> from their own divergent line).

Yes, the outer regions will know via the increasing divergence of
their own culture's mores and assumptions from the central
government's rules and regulations.  The opposite may well not hold --
there is little reason for the central government to be aware of how
they're incrasingly alienating their subjects.

> How did you get all those races living together for thousands of
> years, in the first place?

It's canon that they did, through some of the descriptions of life in
the Ziru Sirka.  I'm contending that even if the relationship begins
as "subject/master", it's going to slowly shift toward "common
oppressed citizens of the distant subjugating state" in quite a lot of
cases.  I.e. some state having multiple species, not through any noble
attitudes, but merely through long generations of familiarity and
having shared a common enemy.  How long that state lasts, I don't know
and don't really care as it's not really relevant to my point.

> Point: For thousands of years, the Balkans have featured several
> separate cultures living in close proximity to one another. The only
> significant period of peace which the region has known was the
> 70-odd years when a strong external state *imposed* such a peace.

Certainly -- and in many other regions as well.  That rather supports
my point that cultures *within* a species can be extremely fractious,
and One State Per Species is ridiculous.  I don't have any real life
examples to support multiple species in a single state, for obvious
reasons, but that's really only something like 1/4 of my argument in
the first place.  I'm primarily arguing that there should be at least
dozens of states per species.  Whether some of those have significant
multi-species membership isn't as important.

> Point: Most of the cases where different intelligent races have
> evolved together on the same world or within the same solar system -
> both in Traveller and in science fiction in general - have resulted
> in near-constant warfare between those races.

That's completely begging the question.  The existence of fiction
exhibiting a point is not evidence that the fiction *should* be
written that way.

- Tim