No, she's rushing to judgement in a case where she does not have all the facts. People who blame Rand for not paying heed to Logain are urging this course of action on him. I am defending Rand for reserving judgement where he does not have all the facts, and I am condemning Egwene for her failure to do the same. Further her accusations at Elaida for her failure to have the city kept clean is hypocritical when she has done far more harm to the city by destroying the harbor chain, and has been planning to do so for a long time. Not only that, given the unnatural phenomena that have long been known to be afflicting the world, who is to say that the filth in Tar Valon is not a similar manifestation, and that she is blaming Elaida as justly as people might blame the cook for the spontaneous rotting of their dinner or the cat for the flourishing vermin in the pantry? Yet it never occurred to Egwene to consider any sort of extenuating circumstances when looking for excuses to maintain her rebellion against a lawfully elected Amyrlin, and "coincidentally" her own claim to power.


We're talking about Egwene, not Verin

As in the case of the Black Ajah, what Egwene did was the only possible judtifiable action. You claim I am the one with blinders and reflexive prejudices, but you want to give her credit for going along with other people's hard-won information and NOT refusing to aquiesce to the only right thing to do. In neither case was there any gain for her in refusal or anyone urging otherwise. In other words, there was no reason or incentive to do differently, and you want to give her credit for going with the flow, and NOT bucking the tide to actively do evil?

You mean the guy who snipes and bitches and challenges him, spreads lies about the Cleansing to undermine Rand, and conceals information from Rand to protect his Aes Sedai captives? Egwene never even expressed that motivation, so you are going even further with this case than your demand that she be praised for carrying out a sentence set in stone for 3 millenia. You are demanding praise for a motivation that never existed! Her real motivation as she STATED to Siuan was to prevent the Hall from executing a known terrorist! For that matter, what exactly has Logain done that was so good? What proof do we have of goodness on his part? All he has done was rat out Taim, but he is the one who stands to gain by Taim's downfall, as the most likely candidate to succeed him to command the Black Tower. Why do you interpret attempts to control a powerful organization of channelers as an altrusitic and selfless action? Why are you so blindly resistant to the notion that self-interest could be a motivation for it?

Furthermore, in her admonitions to Siuan, she shows she thinks of Logain not so much of a "help" as a burden. Her sending Logain to Rand is NOT an act of giving him aid, but rather is one of sloughing off the responsibility for him! She speaks of the hope that Rand will be able to keep him in line. As it turns out, she is saved from the guilt of releasing a war criminal and terrorist on the world only by sheer luck - there was nothing she did that could have prevented it. As long as he didn't harm any of Egwene's minions, he could have carved a bloody swath across the nations to reach the Black Tower, for all the precautions they took.

As for the "best" aspect of that action - sparing him from death, there are too many complications to chalk that up to a love of justice. Freeing Logain was another way to thwart the Hall, and prevent them from taking a unilateral action. Much is said in the series about the art of gaining & keeping authority, such as not letting those you are trying to dominate get in the habit of acting on their own. Egwene's freeing of Logain was in the same spirit as Elayne telling Mat to do what they both knew he was going to do anyway - assert authority by not letting people act on their own. Just as Elayne was thwarted by Mat blowing her off and taking lodging at the Wandering Woman, so the Hall's taking the life or death of Logain into its own hands would have been. Egwene's only recourse to keep her illusion of authority would have been to anticipate the decision to execute him and, like Elayne with Mat, order it done so that it appeared that when it was done, it was at her order. By smuggling Logain out of the Hall's grasp, Egwene preserved her illusion of power, because opposing the Hall openly would have exposed her weakness.

And as for the moral dimension of Logain's death, so what? He was blatantly guilty of crimes that would have resulted in his death in any other hands in the world! Logain, absent his ability to channel and falling into the (false) jurisdiction of the Tower, would have been executed on the same grounds that Hermann Goring was sentenced to die at Nuremburg. Logain had never expressed any remorse, shame or humility, regarding his crimes, aside from some despair over his gentling. He was defiant and unrepentant in their final interview. Egwene had no basis for commuting his sentence, beyond her reluctance to let the Hall have their way.

Because it would result in her having greater power. She wanted to rule ALL the Aes Sedai, and was willing to take a chance that enough of her "enemies" would prevent Elaida from killing her long enough for her to work towards her goal of getting control over them. Praising Egwene for this is like praising Rand's altruism and mercy and courage in going into Alcair Dal without Moiraine. He did it for power, exactly as Egwene did. As far as that refusing rescue goes, she turned her back on the people who elected and followed her, and was allowing factions and splits to grow in her camp, and stood in real danger of having the rebels break off under Lelaine and Romanda, so you can't even say it was all that SMART of a tactic. In any event, even stipulating the most altruistic motivations for the sake of argument, to what end is all of this generosity and self-sacrifice spent? On soothing the ruffled feathers and preventing Aes Sedai egos from raging out of control. Tairens and Illianers must set aside 1,000 years of grievances, Aiel must cooperate with wetlanders, and Cairhienin mus tendure Aiel occupation despite being invaded and victimized twice by them within a generation, all for the greater good and the sake of unity before the Shadow. But heaven forbid Aes Sedai get pushed to the edge of their tolerance! The reasoning behind the extraordinary efforts to avoid bloodshed (of sisters - the consensus seems to pretty much be 'any number of dead soldiers is to be preferred over a single sister harmed' ) is that the Aes Sedai are so spoiled, petulant and recalcitrant that a single casualty will forever estrange them beyond reconcilation! What would people think if the Seanchan took the same attitude regarding their Blood, or any other nation about its' nobles? We would rightly castigate any faction that refused to give way and surrender to Rand because some of their number had died opposing him. The universal attitude toward the renegade Asha'man, even among those who do not know they are Darkfriends is to condemn them for what they believe is rebellion over the casualties and bloodshed of the Altaran campaign. Everyone else is held to be in the wrong when they refuse to put aside such things and bend their necks for the greater good, but the leadership of both factions must take especial care not to cause the sisters to sulk and pout and forever maintain a division of the Tower because they remember playing pranks as young women with one of the sisters who died.

Egwene's altruism, if we were to so stipulate it and ignore the very real benefits for her in pursuing that course of action, is the equivalent of a charity fundraiser for the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Trumps.

She did not do this. She recruited a bunch of people to augment her own power, and when enemies came into her home, she fought back as any cornered rat will do. So she did NOT do the most abject act of cowardice imaginable - you want her to be praised for this, and hailed as worthy and heroic? And you say I have blinders regarding her? You give Egwene credit for pouring water out of a boot, after Verin tells her the instructions are written on the heel, and call me blindly prejudiced for not conceding her accomplishment deserves a Nobel Prize for Physics!

You mean, avoiding having some of her followers leave? How is this ANYTHING other than self-serving? Why are we supposed to applaud her efforts to unify the Tower, when the DISunity of the Tower has been the best thing to happen to Rand and the world? She is doing something that will strengthen Rand's primary rival for supremacy and obstacle to his necessary changes, and her efforts will give her greater power, and again, we are supposed to admire this?


Yes, because ruling and political power are polar opposites. She led the Rebels, initially in name only, later on in fact. Within the Tower, she did what Elaida should have been doing as Amyrlin. Again, so what? First of all, she does these good deeds for an antagonistic power and second, she doesn't do anything that great, merely the bare minimum that she herself says is what should have been done all along.

That is not remotely what I said. You accused me of criticizing her policies, I say that I did not, and you are now saying THAT is what you are attacking me over? What about your own hypocrisy? As for the contradiction you claim to see in me, I was saying that I have not criticized her governance of the Tower, because all she has done so far are political manuevers to get control over it, rather than administer and govern it. The things you cite were part and parcel of her attempts to gain control or were choices forced on her and not part of deliberate governing policy. Attempting to govern when you don't yet hold the office is not remotely rulership, since you don't have the responsibility, but acting like you are governing is a political ploy to affirm and assert your authority.

I criticized her actions, and not her policies. I believe I ommitted a negative modifier in the sentence to which you are refering. "I have criticized her policies, because she hasn't had any yet." - should have read "I have NOT criticized..." You claim elsewhere that my rebuttals are nothing more than grammer corrections, and yet here is a case of a short, simple and plainly contradictory sentence. My grammar correcting (why don't you find the last time I did that, btw? ) is an attempt to clarify such confusing issues when you make similar errors. I wish you would extend the same courtesy instead of trying to claim a strawman position based on an obvious tyopgraphical error.

There you go, once again, attempting to take a figure of speech (metaphor in this case, since you seem to have trouble recognizing it) literally, and structure a straw man argument based on that.

Tell me, then, what is the difference, semantics aside, between "winning a civil war as leader of a rebel faction" and a "campaign for office" ? Both phrases accurrately describe what took place (how WAS her extended overall effort to secure the Amyrlin Seat NOT a campaign for office? ), and I claim superior precision in my phrasing since "campaign" is a far more flexible term, while your use of the term "war" is somewhat odd given not only the lack of battles between the two sides but Egwene's own refusal to hasten the decision in her deliberate avoidance of actual clash of arms? And can you explain your apparent belief that fighting "a civil war as leader of a rebel faction" is an inherently good thing, rather than the other way around?