I'd appreciate it if the opening music could be balanced to the levels of the actual dialogue. I often have to turn it down for the intro and back up for the speech.
@PeterDuck: People would probably be eating people at that point. So, if they aren't going to respect sapience, they are unlikely to care about sentience (which is actually a rather low cognitive bar.)
Human society is my field and I don't have the loosest idea what human society is.
The short of it is that "society", like "race" and "nations" is an imaginary structure and has no basis in reality except those which we create while perceiving it. The mole people aren't less of a society because they would have trouble integrating into OUR society. This is the egotistical conceit of our contemporary. We are not the end point of human development. We aren't even a "more developed" society, without forcing a normative telos onto our conception of society. All we can say is that we are a different society than... Feudal Europe or the Post-Apocalyptic Mole People.
Maybe Bethesda clarified this is in Canon changes, but a shadow government isn't a sinister term. Well, it IS sort of a sinister term, but in the idea that it is the left hand of government.
In normal world usage, shadow government or shadow cabinet is just the oppositions ministerial critics. The government has a minister of labour so the opposition appoints a shadow minister of labour to follow that policy area closely and inform the opposition's policy alternatives.
Speaking of alternatives, the term also means a set of ministers who are secretly appointed to step in case the sitting cabinet is killed in a surprise attack. Which is more likely for Fallout. I believe the Enclave when they say they are what is left of the federal government. It makes sense. They're not the illuminati (fnord), they're just the descendants of the federal bureaucracy and their attached forces.
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