When somebody goes rogue, their fate is usually pretty simple. They'll be hunted. Maybe they take a few people with them, maybe they last an hour, a day or longer, but eventually somebody catches up with them and puts them in the ground. The harder issue to deal with is what happens afterwards. What happens to their family, their associates and eventually their children? What happens when the next generation carrying that name walks through the door asking for a seat at the table?

Some believe the sins of the parent should die with the parent. Kill the rogue, bury them and be done with it. Their children didn't pull the trigger, so why should they pay the price?

It's a reasonable argument.

However, that's also where a bit of a double standard comes into play. When innocent people die in a purge or because of bloodlining, there's outrage and rightly so. But when a rogue puts a bullet in somebody who's spent a long time earning their place, that same public outrage seems to disappear. Why does everybody suddenly go quiet and just accept it as the way things are? Those people put their time in too. Their lives aren't worth any less simply because they hold a higher rank, surely innocent lives should matter on both sides.

And that brings us to purging and bloodlining both of which come with their own problems.

With purging, the biggest issue isn't necessarily dealing with genuine threats but everybody else caught up in the paranoia. People who've done nothing wrong, people who've kept their heads down or simply prefer to keep to themselves suddenly find themselves a target just because being quiet becomes suspicious and being unknown is downright dangerous.

Bloodlining raises a slightly different question. If somebody's parent went rogue, does that automatically make them a threat? Maybe they've come back looking for revenge, or maybe they genuinely want nothing to do with what happened before them. The problem is that nobody can know for certain until they've been given the opportunity to prove it and usually by then it's too late.

I'm sure we've all seen attempts at peace. People are given second chances and trust is extended, some flourish and make the most of those opportunities, whilst others throw that trust straight back in our faces. However we've also seen the complete opposite happen, a scorched earth approach where anyone and everyone who wasn't part of the "in" crowd was considered fair game.

Both approaches have had their problems and neither has really managed to resolve the underlying issue.

Then there's been the middle ground. Letting as many people as possible prove themselves and earn their second chances, whilst still carrying out smaller purges against those considered born trouble, those whose backgrounds couldn't be verified or those who simply seemed a bit dodgy. Bloodlining has also remained part of that approach, with the argument being that some families have already shown what happens when they're given another opportunity.

But even that comes with its own problems. Who gets to decide when somebody is suspicious enough to be removed? And at what point does being the child of a rogue become enough to condemn somebody who hasn't actually done anything themselves?

Which brings us back to the same questions that's been argued over for years.

If purging and bloodlining are such a problem, what exactly are the other alternatives? And how do we deal with the threat of future rogues without condemning people simply because of who they are or where they came from?

There is, perhaps, one uncomfortable truth buried beneath all of this: neither purging nor bloodlining is really a solution. They're simply convenient ways of pretending that uncertainty can be eliminated.

It can't.

A rogue is a threat because of what they choose to do, not because of the family they were born into. The moment we start treating blood as evidence, we've already abandoned the principle we're supposedly trying to protect. A child doesn't inherit their parent's crimes any more than they inherit their parent's choices.

But I don't think the answer is to simply throw the doors open either.

Second chances are meaningless if they're handed out without consequence. Trust isn't something we're obligated to give somebody simply because they've returned and claim to have changed. If someone wants a seat at the table after their family has spilled blood, then they should expect scrutiny. They should expect questions. They should understand that proving themselves may take years rather than a single conversation.

The distinction, however, is that scrutiny should be based on behaviour.

Not blood.

Not reputation.

Not suspicion.

Behaviour.

I actually agree with quite a lot of what's been said already, particularly the idea that trust should be earned rather than automatically given.

The difficulty I have is with the suggestion that everything should come down to behaviour rather than reputation or suspicion. Surely by the time somebody's behaviour makes it obvious they're going rogue, it's often already too late? We've seen people act perfectly loyal right up until the moment they decide to pull the trigger.

And whilst I agree that somebody shouldn't automatically be condemned because of their bloodline, does that mean we should completely disregard a family's history, particularly if the same thing has happened repeatedly?

Perhaps there's also a bigger question here. At what point do we accept that there might not be a perfect solution to any of this? Purging and bloodlining certainly aren't ideal, but does that automatically mean they aren't solutions at all?

We've seen the consequences of both, but we've also seen what happens when people are given another chance and decide to abuse it. So if nobody can come up with a suitable alternative, what exactly are we supposed to do? Simply accept the risks and hope for the best?

I don't think there is a perfect solution, but that doesn't mean we should accept a bad one simply because it's easier.

Yes, reputation and history matter. If a family has repeatedly produced rogues, I'm not going to ignore that and pretend there isn't a pattern. But a pattern is a reason for scrutiny, not a death sentence.

Matty raises the part of this discussion that is usually avoided. It is easy to condemn purging and bloodlining. It is considerably harder to explain what leadership should do instead when the cost of misplaced trust may be paid by somebody else.

Bobby_Tweaks is right that blood alone should not be treated as evidence. A descendant does not inherit the bullet fired by an ancestor. History does matter, however. People may return carrying old friendships, information, grievances and intentions even when they do not inherit guilt.

To me, a bloodline provides context, not a verdict. It may justify questions, restrictions and a slower road toward trust. It should not, by itself, provide the sentence.

Behavior also does not mean waiting until somebody pulls the trigger. Preparing an attack is behavior. Concealing hostile coordination is behavior. Seeking information unrelated to one’s position, issuing threats and repeating the same pattern after several opportunities are all behavior. Credible intelligence matters too, provided it is examined rather than accepted because somebody important repeated it.

That is where I would draw the distinction. Targeted action against an identifiable threat may sometimes be necessary. Killing quiet people because they are unfamiliar, killing descendants because someone in their line once went rogue, or treating an unverified reputation as a conviction is not careful prevention. It is guesswork carrying a gun.

Ruby also asks a fair question. After several cities have been torn apart, how does anyone know who has returned? The honest answer is that we do not always know. A rogue may lie. So may someone hoping to settle an old score, and so may a person trying to have an innocent rival removed.

That uncertainty cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed. Speak to the person. Compare their account with more than one source. Allow someone trusted to sponsor them. Give them a home without immediately giving them every name, plan and private room connected to it. Then allow access and responsibility to grow with consistent conduct.

There is a considerable distance between unrestricted trust and immediate execution. Leadership has more tools available than those two choices.

A newcomer of uncertain history may begin with ordinary access and no sensitive information. If their conduct remains sound, somebody established may sponsor them. From there, they can earn greater responsibility in stages. If credible concerns emerge, access can be restricted while those concerns are checked. If evidence shows preparation for an attack, leadership acts before the attack.

No system will prevent every rogue. Anyone promising otherwise is selling certainty they do not possess. Spare the wrong person and innocent people may eventually pay for it. Kill the wrong person and leadership may create the resentment, secrecy and future rogue it claimed to be preventing.

Perhaps purging and bloodlining are solutions in the narrowest sense. Dead people rarely become immediate problems. The question is whether removing one possible threat while giving ten innocent people reasons to become enemies has made the world safer, or merely postponed the accounting.

No automatic innocence. No automatic guilt. History informs the scrutiny, credible evidence determines the response, and leadership accepts responsibility for the result.

We have the solutions already, but people tend to not want to accept things how they are, they like to accept things how they want them to be. Matty, I look at it like this. If a person is willing to throw away weeks, months, years of hard work over 10minutes? Not only do you not care about yourself, but you don't care about others. That's dangerous.

In life there are two sides to every coin. When people go rogue they damn well know what they signed up for. One or my favorite quotes in human history is this,"If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it". The current rogues are doing it based off emotions. Then when THOSE emotions run dry they come back to asking for things to go back to normal as if they did not break their oath. Again. Emotions.

I say all that to say this. There is no mercy for a rogue. Fuck them.

I agree with part of what you said, Michael. There should be no mercy for someone while they are actively attacking our cities. Once a person decides to become a rogue, leadership has an obligation to stop them before more innocent people pay for that decision. Where I disagree is with allowing that decision to condemn every descendant who comes afterward.

We speak about emotions as though they are weakness found only in rogues. The truth is that every one of us has acted emotionally, exercised poor judgment or made a decision that looked remarkably stupid after a little sleep. Some mistakes are far more serious than others, naturally, and consequences still matter. But if every foolish decision permanently condemned an entire bloodline, there would be very few respectable families left for any of us to join.

I have read enough of my ancestors’ journals to know that I would not be standing where I am today if certain people had not offered them another opportunity. They were corrected, guided and mentored by people who saw something worth preserving beneath their mistakes. Those chances did not excuse what had happened. They allowed the next chapter to be better than the previous one.

I am not suggesting that we welcome a former rogue back, hand them our private records and politely ask whether they would like another run killing our friends and partners. A second chance should not mean a second opportunity to commit the same offense. Trust can be limited, supervised and earned gradually.

He looked toward Rouge.

Rouge is right to consider the friends, allies and businesses that the leadership is responsible for protecting. A leader does not have the luxury of gambling exclusively with his own life. But I believe there are occasions when gradual trust, restricted access and honest scrutiny protect those interests better than giving someone no safe reason to tell us the truth.

That is the larger problem as I see it. Trust has broken down on both sides. Leaders do not trust unfamiliar faces to disclose their intentions honestly. Those returning do not trust their leaders to keep them alive if they reveal that their ancestors made serious mistakes. They hide their history because they believe honesty will become their death sentence. Leadership eventually discovers the concealment and treats the lie as confirmation that the person was dangerous from the beginning.

Ruby26 expressed both sides of that dilemma rather plainly. She has no sympathy for rogues after seeing the damage they cause, but she would understandably resent being killed for something she did not do. Most people would.

Someone must be able to tell the truth about their ancestry without believing that the conversation has signed their death warrant. Leadership, in return, must be able to ask difficult questions and impose reasonable restrictions without every precaution being treated as persecution.

Not blind trust. Not immediate forgiveness. Enough trust for an honest conversation, enough caution to protect everyone else and enough time for someone to prove that their bloodline is capable of learning rather than merely repeating itself.

Archy paused, looking between those gathered.

If we offer people no believable path toward making things better, we should not be surprised when they decide there is nothing to gain from honesty. These streets became lively because people were given homes, guidance and reasons to contribute. Fear may keep people quiet for a while. It will not make them loyal.

Only July 10th,  Godfather Chairman DetroitSimon of the many, many (too many) Simon clan, came onto the Streets and gave a beautiful "clean slate" speech. He offered a stale mate in the ongoing pandemonium. The moment resulted in a situation of someone not liking how something was said, rather than what was said. The very next day that handsome Godfather was dead. 

There has been a plethora of high profile deaths since that incident. Not only is it the deaths, it' s also the constant mockery. Hit list. Foreign names popping up as insults. There's nothing wrong with having emotions Archy. However, when someone's emotions starts to override their intelligence, in our business things can only go down hill from there.

If I were a descendant of a rogue I would let my actions speak louder than my words. My grandfather was killed for his actions. My father entered this life and died for the actions of my grandfather. He had did nothing wrong. Look at me now, though. Chances are given but what's made of them are up to those who take them. From what I seen people don't want grace, they want attention.

Archy listened carefully while Michael made his case.

I don’t disagree with you about the damage rogues cause, Michael. Los Angeles understands it better than most. Families lost their leaders, businesses lost their protection, and people who had spent a lot of time and effort building something were left to bury it and start again. An active rogue has to be stopped, and anyone knowingly helping one can expect to answer for it.

Godfather Chairman @DetroitSimon is the example I won’t pretend away. He offered a clean slate and was dead the next day. That’s a real cost, and anyone offering a second chance should expect to carry it. It’s why the chance has to be controlled rather than blind: limited access, an established member vouching, and a leader who moves the moment conduct turns.

You said your grandfather was killed for his actions and your father died for them too. Whether that’s your family or the one you imagined, someone gave that bloodline enough room to show it wasn’t required to repeat what came before. That’s all I’m asking leaders to keep possible.

You’re right about emotion, and I’ll give you that one. Revenge is rarely clever. But if somebody returns and learns that honesty will get him killed and peaceful conduct changes nothing, we’ve given him every reason to lie, and that’s how we grow the next rogue we claimed to be preventing.

Some people want attention, and some will waste every chance they’re handed. Others just want to run their business and repair their family’s name. Treat all three the same and we’ve made improvement impossible before anyone takes a first step. A clean slate doesn’t mean forgetting what happened. It means a path real enough that accepting it isn’t just a slower route to the same grave.

Actions should speak louder than words, as you said. For that to mean anything, good actions have to be allowed to speak as loudly as bad ones.

I think there's a difference between having no mercy for a rogue and having no judgement when deciding who deserves to be treated as one.

If somebody knowingly betrays their family, attacks our cities and puts our people at risk, then they should face the consequences. But their children and descendants shouldn't automatically inherit that same sentence.

Archy made a good point about history providing context, not a verdict. I agree with that. A family's past should raise questions, absolutely, but it shouldn't answer them before someone has had the chance to prove themselves. As Archy also pointed out, if we give people no believable path to earn trust, we shouldn't be surprised when they see no reason to be honest with us.

That doesn't mean we blindly welcome everyone back. Trust is earned, access is controlled, and suspicious behaviour should be investigated before it becomes a crisis. Rouge is right that leaders have a responsibility to protect their allies and businesses, and nobody should expect that responsibility to come second to giving someone another chance.

But Ruby26's point matters too. Nobody wants to spend years building something only to lose it because of somebody else's actions, and nobody wants to be killed for a crime they never committed.

Michael, you mentioned that your father paid for your grandfather's actions despite having done nothing wrong himself. Surely that proves the very point we're arguing. If someone can break that cycle and demonstrate loyalty through their own actions, why should we insist on punishing them for the past forever?

We can remember what rogues have done without condemning everyone who comes after them.

Punish the guilty, protect our own, and investigate the uncertain.

This is just a continuous cycle at the end of the day. One group justifies it, thinks it is just. The other side just keeps using side A's justifications to keep doing what they do. Then it just never ends. 

The real and honest truth is, you will never know what anyone will do. Not your closest friends and not your enemies. Why? No one is a mind reader. You can look to patterns but not everyone's kin will meet a certain pattern all the time.  

Not to mention even if someone was killed for a reason most people will agree with, maybe even that person, you just never know what their kin might do. In this logic then everyone is a threat. 

This logic means you are going to see problems no matter where you go, or whom the line is. 

Is this conversation going to have any productive end? Most likely not. The leaders will keep thinking the same people have to be purged, and the people getting purged will either go back to the old shores, work towards shooting those in power through disguises or just keep getting purged no matter how straight a line they cross more often than not. 

That is the cycle we keep seeing no matter who is in charge it seems. It's basically beating a dead horse. 

Archy lit a cigarette while Faye buried the horse, although she had clearly found enough life in it to take another lap.

You're right about one thing, FayeKinnett. Nobody can read minds. Not enemies, not friends and certainly not their grandchildren. That's exactly why a surname makes poor evidence. If we can't know what someone will do, the last thing we should do is pretend their last name tells us.

I'd push back on the cycle being weather, though. Nobody has to kill a man for what his grandfather did, and nobody has to come home just to settle a score. Those are choices, and they repeat because they work often enough to stay tempting. A cycle is just a habit with a body count.

As for everyone being a threat, that's the argument against suspicion by default. If it fits everyone, it tells you nothing about anyone. Bobby_Tweaks had it right: punish the guilty, protect our own, investigate the uncertain. It won't end every conflict, but it beats a hit-list built on guesses.

Purging and bloodlining are not a problem. If anything, they reveal an ultimate reality. So much is revealed to us. We learn where people's allegiances lie, what we are willing to tolerate, who our real friends are, and so much more. I cannot tell you how much I respect the crewleader who chooses their family over central authority's orders to purge. But I can tell you that I would never have known this about them if the order had never been given. I cannot tell you how many bonds I have formed with others who were ostracized alongside me for being unknown. But I can tell you that those bonds might never have existed had we not shared a common enemy. Sometimes, when you push people away, you push them into the embrace of others. Groups form to protect themselves against other groups. That is the ultimate reality.