Well, I'm nothing if not pragmatic

I thought Breen would atleast have a penthouse with slave whores, but all he has is a shitty desk and lifeless guards watching him all the time, he had just as bad a life as anyone

He was trying to save humanity, not abuse a position of power.

>but he didn't have to you know accept the position of human ambassador to make his life super cushy?
what the fuck are you saying you spastic

Greek Tragedy

how powerful was the combine?

imagine not playing half-life 2 and trying to debate half-life 2 lore.

Do you think the same stupid thoughts when you visit your boss at his work office?

He's means, if it got right down to it, and someone stripped him of what made him - bare, you would find his actions were taken in what was the most realistic and feasible. And if it turned out he were not actually as pragmatic as he felt himself to be, there would be little to nothing left of him, because as he percieves it, every decision he makes is centered around what is the most realistic way for humanity to survive

I he hadn't negotiated with the combine, the resistance wouldn't even get a chance fight back

"Villains" who did nothing wrong thread?

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The decision wasn't awful, the status quo is. Buying the earth time was the right move since that allowed fighting back in the first place.

this, breen paved the way for gordon to do what he has to do.

cuck mentality

>He'd rather die than have a chance to rebel again
True cuck. You just want the easy way out.

he would give up ukraine to russia thinking it would be a long term warrant of peace

great

mutt moment

Pragmatism is one of the great evil ideologies: it’s just going along with your circumstances, without taking a moral stance, just because it’s what is ”best” for you personally.

See: German civilians who didn’t agree with nazi ideology but went along with it because of the feared consequences, or collaborators.

>See: German civilians who didn’t agree with nazi ideology but went along with it because of the feared consequences, or collaborators.

You don't need to go that far. Look at Russia today.

He was aware of G-Man, right? It's clear to Gordon that humanity has a chance because of greater players, how did Breen not figure that out when Gordon showed up and try to delay the inevitable.

You criticize people for not standing up to what's right and facing horrible consequences for it, but would you really throw it all away in a suicidal and fruitless attempt to change something? As long as those people took no active part in the atrocities, you can't really blame them for not wanting to become a victim of the atrocities. Rather than bashing those who couldn't stand up, we should shed light onto those who did.

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why did he do it?

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You can absolutely criticize that line of thinking because of the simple fact that it helps the people that organize those sorts of atrocities: it’s a passive mentality to negative developments in society and it lets the actively destructive people get away with their crimes.

That’s not to say that it is easy to be ethical (it’s actually really fucking hard when society is unethical), but that doesn’t mean being passive is being blameless and without responsibility.

if every body stood up, it could have been stopped. You can't commit atrocities if nobody listens to your orders, works on your factories, pays you taxes, arrests your dissidents, etc.

It really isn’t

Who knows? He got too comfortable with the Combine in power so maybe he never thought about pursuing other options.
Other than that I don't think the Combine's fall on earth was inevitable. Breen probably got a glimpse of things to come and didn't think it was worth it fight the enemy. The Saruman of Half-Life so too speak.

Tell that to your ancestors.

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whats the word that means 'the end results justify the means'. it's completely slipped my mind, I though it was pragmatism.

He's alive because his ancestors weren't dead.

Consequentialism.

Utilitarianism?

He's a filthy race traitor
They where being treated as cattle guinea pigs then simple slaves even kept from having kids. Death would be preferable to mind rape

Have you read the novelisation? At Black Mesa his nick name was “Pragmatic” Breen. Because he was so effective in his work. But when he sold out humanity to the combine the scientists took his moniker away; this line is actually a little Easter egg/reflection because he is saying he is nothing if not pragmatic ie. without my title I am nothing- a rare moment of humanity in the character

thank you, these are both correct

G-Man has no stake in humanities survival. His employers care about hindering the Combine, in particular getting access to advanced teleportation tech as developed by Black Mesa and Aperture Science.

>can teleport
>can TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND CHANGE SHIT
>needs some gay teleportation tech

yeah, right

exactly

>this made boomers and millennials shit their pants in terror

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G-Man don't need it, the Combine want it.

>because of the feared consequences, or collaborators.
also because their homes were being bombed and invaded by the same people that forced the weimar hellhole on them.
no matter how bad Germany and Hitler was, they were always the good guys to the German people because the alternative was occupation by foreign powers that have already proved how much they hate you and wish you dead.

Novelisation? Do you mean the "Half-Life 2: Rising the bar" ?

The only thing that fag was pragmatic about was his own survival, that of humanity was just a side effect, and thrown aside when no longer useful.

Slavery with the slight chance that you might RISE UP and become free one day is preferable to death, which is why the smarter systems hold that option out in some form or another.

gman wants to stop the combine getting it

Yes that’s the one, it’s in chapter four I think

lay off the Breen Water bro

Why don't he just go back in time and kill the original whatever that created Combine, or at least stop the Xen crystal from getting tested? It was he who put it in HL1. Why would he bait Combine to find Earth that has a tech they want, if he wants them to never find that tech?

Presumably it's 5-D chess with humanity as one of the pawns. We dont have the information and most likely the background story isn't even fleshed out that far.

Considering they're a cosmic military force that have teleportation technology - very powerful.
However, they have genetic code that makes them behave less like conscious beings and more like parasites. The Advisors have this in their DNA and so do all the members of their military, from transhuman soldiers to the bigger synths. It's how their system stays together - nobody thinks for themselves.
The theme of Half-Life is a conflict between soulless insectoid behavior VS spirituality. The human race and its vortigaunt allies are a tough enemy to the Combine because the Combine are physically incapable of having souls. The behavior and actions of spiritual beings eludes them.
Therefore the Combine are actually surprisingly weak when they're up against beings that are crazy enough to ignore the laws of nature and believe in ghosts instead.

This is why time travel is always a shitty writing device, even if the ending of HL:A was cool. I guess the answer is that his employers don't want him to just do it the easy way, either because it would piss off the wrong people or because time traveling that long ago takes too much resources. He answers to somebody since he had to deal with a couple of "naysayers" that didn't want him to save Alyx from Black Mesa. Maybe it's just some corporate BS.
At the end of the day, we're never gonna get a straight answer because it would probably be dissapointing.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that Gman is using Humanity to defeat, or cripple the Combine. He specifically manufactured a conflict between them, it's a fact. And the last thing we know from Laidlaw, the original writer who made all of this up, is that we were supposed to suicide-bomb their, or one of their Dyson Spheres. It's like when Russia started a war with Ukraine and every body thought that they will get steamrolled (I'm Ukrainian and I was sure it would be the case), but instead the world saw that Russia is incompetent and incapable of even capturing a shitty corruption-ridden neighbor just because they actually tried to resist and didn't want to get butchered.

You’re conflating the state of the nation before and after the war, and the weimar republic wasn’t established by the entente, but through an internal revolution between 1918-1919.