[dogscoff]

Interesting stuff. however the more you reveal about them, the more I find your Icarans strangely inconsistent.

You say they are quite happy to kill entire communities as "collateral damage" just to wipe out a small minority of hidden enemies.

This proves that they place absolutely no intrinsic value on human life (despite their preachings about the human body as "work's [sic] of art to glorify their creator").

Also, they obviously aren't scared of stirring up dissent on a massive scale- this policy of forced sterilisation and tearing families apart would generate whole armies of highly-motivated, nothing-to-lose underground fighters/ terrorists/ insurgents that would make the PLO or IRA look like the cast of a primary school nativity play.

So if they don't see life as special, they don't care about pissing people off and nobody has a right to anything except free healthcare; why, when confronted by a peacful (but illegal) demonstration by a bunch of buddhists, would they risk their safety and waste their time and resources in an effort to "arrest everyone as peacefully as possible"? Especially when they are only they are going to flog or execute these guys later on anyway. Why not just shoot them all on the spot?

The glimpses we've seen of the Icaran criminal justice system seems focussed entirely on aversion by means of brutal punishment rather than any kind of rehabilitation. With the department of employment already struggling to find streets to sweep and dishes to wash in order to fill their "full employment" policy (presumably the government is actively repressing labour-saving technology that could do these jobs automatically) there seems little benefit to using criminals as slave labour. Bearing these points in mind, what's the point in keeping someone alive once they've been branded a criminal? It'd be cheaper and easier to just shoot the perpetrators dead in the street where an immediate and shocking example can be made of them to any onlookers.

Also, they go to extreme lengths to enforce conformity: Again, I quote the policies on kidnapping children and forced sterilisation, but to be honest the entire system seems bent on churning out an endless stream of factory-moulded citizens designed to do as they're told and not under any circumstances to think for themselves. With this in mind, why would Icaran society bother 'protecting' a sect they see as weak and naive, and who refuse to take on their share of the of the Empire's military risks and responsibilities? It would be interesting to know exactly how the special allowances in Icaran law that allow the buddhists to avoid the military were won in the first place (because they sure as hell wouldn't have gotten very far trying to win rights via peacful protest=-) and just how they manage to keep those special-case rights from being revoked. What happens to a Pathist who is afraid of going to war and tries to dodge the draft by changing his religion?

Given that military service "is considered one of the highest callings in the Empire and every Icaran shows respect to a soldier in uniform", surely those who reject such a calling on some "weak and naive" principle of pacifism would be considered a coward and held in contempt. I can easily imagine gangs of gung-ho teenage pathists sneaking into the buddhist slums at night, finding buddhists and beating them to death. The local police would of course turn a blind eye- After all, service in the police force would be as abhorrent to the buddhists as the military, given the violent excesses of the state, so the police would not look favourably on those who consider law enforcement below them.