pbluekan
Somethin's Fucky ...
- Location
- Trumpistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No doubt there are a lot of loan words for concepts and things present in cultures that are integrated into the Federation, but I have a feeling you're probably right BV.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
One of the most interesting things we've been hearing about the Romulans lately is that the Tal Shiar is in some deep shit. It seems like their rival organizations are all taking advantage of the crisis to flex their muscles and try to prove that the Tal Shiar way of doing things is inferior. They should watch their back.
Anyone read the Vorkosigan Saga series by Lois McMaster Bujold? In one of the early books, an Emperor has been making use of an oppressive spy agency but in the process he has been giving them more and more power. In a (successful!) attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, he arranges a meeting with all the lead people in the agency. Then with no warning, he burns the building down that they were to meet in and shoots anyone trying to escape.
Brutal, but effective. There's no one left in the spy agency high enough ranking to do anything about it.
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Or maybe it was a Klingon spy undercover at the Romulan Consulate that triggered the whole thing? Like, say, by identifying a high level Romulan spy and spiking his food with Trellium D at the time of maximum impact (like, at a major conference with an aggressive Starfleet captain present). I mean, from the tribbles episode and STVI, the TOS Klingons are perfectly capable of such a thing.
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Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
That was back when they looked like Pureto Ricans and dressed in gold lamé, though. Now they've got those lobsters on their heads. It'd take some seriously radical plastic surgery to pull it off against the Romulans.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There's a C.S. Lewis quote for this:
C.S. Lewis said:
I'm pretty sure the Harmony of Horizon also do their work out of the goodness of their hearts, but we still get rather nervous about them.
al103
Grumpy Russian Bear (SV edition)
- Location
- Russia, Krasnoyarsk
Isn't it like Augment Virus and/or Klingon are more Culture than Race? Those ones didn't gone anywhere.
That said while they manage inner intrigue spying like that is opposite to Klingon culture.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I dunno.
I'm pretty sure people don't walk around with universal translator plugs in their ears literally all the time. There almost has to be some kind of lingua franca that's widely used and accepted on Earth, and it sure sounds like it's English.
Furthermore, the language-learning community is vigorous enough to support people like Uhura, who knew a dozen-plus languages the old-fashioned way. If the practice of adult (and childhood) foreign language learning withered hard enough, people like that would be very rare. Now granted, intellectually lazy people wouldn't bother with bilingualism. But the kind of high-intellect, motivated, scholarly types Starfleet selects for? That's different.
Thaaaat is a good point?
Okay, so just to be clear, this was some kind of disastrous event failure, where "success" would have meant something like "+5pp" or whatever?
Honestly, I can see it. The Shanpurr are a species of super-extroverted pacifist serial hermaphrodites; they are not, to put it mildly, an 'average' species, insofar as uch a thing as an 'average' species of Star Trek humanoids exists.
The odds are good that be remaking the character of their not-entirely-consensually adopted 'child' species in their own image, they have bulldozed a LOT of stuff that just plain didn't fit in the Shanpurr social template.
Imagine if a species like, oh, the Apiata, showed up to "uplift" humanity some time in the 1500s. And they want to make us 'more developed.' As in, they're firmly convinced that we'd be better off as eusocial hive-based societies and proceeded to use all the science and soft-power leverage at their disposal to help us evolve into that?
Would that be doing humanity a favor? Certainly not an unalloyed favor.
So think of this not just as "eh, screw the Prime Directive." Think of this as the Shanpurr carrying out a cuter, softer, fuzzier version of the rather forcible 'Westernization' of the Native American population in the US and Canada.
...
My version of the Amarki would be fucking livid over this, by the way. At least when the Orion Empire visited their planet, all it stole was people. It didn't try to turn the Amarki into a junior-varsity version of or
Gee, I wonder what might have replaced it if they'd been left alone... Guess we'll never get a chance to find out.
Ah, yes, those poor stupid primitives we assume were stupid. They would be bumping into walls and setting their hair on fire if we were not around to show them the way!
We have at least one specific example in this very quest of multiple intelligent species coexisting on a single planet and doing quite well for themselves, without xenocide.
You have literally zero evidence that species-killing genocide was a plausible or even possible outcome of the Shanpurr leaving this planet alone.
That comparison makes a rather interesting juxtaposition with the "some time in the 1500's" date you use as an example. The 1500's would have been about when massive European-introduced plagues were sweeping across the americas, by some estimates killing as many as 99% of the native population. That would sure have been a nice time for bee people to sweep down from the stars with plague cures. You have to wonder whether that ends with more or less culture destroyed.
Certainly not an unalloyed favor. But still. Hard not to think of all the terrible things between the 1500's and tomorrow and wonder how much culture and languages are worth.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
More, if the Apiata restrict themselves to curing diseases and showing off better technologies to people all over the planet.
Less, if the Apiata start trying to Apiatify humanity because clearly their way is "just better" (after all, look at all the virgin-field epidemics and genocidal killings humans were getting up to when left to their own devices!).
See, I totally agree physical genocides are wronger. But just squashing everything the people you've overwhelmed (nonviolently, in this case) ever had or were in the name of 'improving' them is not in itself wrong.
If I were the one writing the Prime Directive, I'd probably try to come up with some complex discretionary system that lets you intervene to prevent catastrophes the locals can't or won't fix for themselves, but doesn't try to rewrite their civilizations insofar as said civilizations aren't going far out of their way to be cruel. Especially because trying to export a social model designed by a bunch of super-extroverted pacifist serial hermaphrodites onto Species XYZ is likely to leave them chronically unhappy for a looong time.
Many do, many don't. Mileage varies. We don't know enough to just declare that oh yeah, this primitive culture would predictably have lead to massive slaughter in three thousand years, and that they're all better off with a culture that builds its value set around the Shanpurr ideals of extroverted pacifist fuzzy gender-ambiguity forever.
Hell, for all we know, the Shenpurr just overwrote the one culture in the damn galaxy that would finally figure out a way to reconcile individual violent impulses, collective competition for resources, and avoiding pointless, destructive, international conflict. We don't know. We'll never know.
Well, if anyone has a dorky conlang that's so easy to learn that you can reliably teach it to anyone, it's the Vulcans.
To be fair, the aforesaid conlang may not be the actual Vulcan language. It's just the one they made up when not everyone on the planet could agree on which language was most logical. They keep the others around because they like the different styles of poetry and whatnot.
[Because seriously, Vulcans do things for reasons that aren't stereotypical logic; they have an aesthetic sense if nothing else]
You know, you're probably right.
Leslie:
"That's a reason to protect the poor outgunned dirtsiders, not to make them dance whatever your favorite tune is. And I know, I know, some of the things we did on the '66 mission don't sound too good when you compare them to General Order One. Some of them I don't regret. Some of them, I do."
Leslie:
"Hey, I remember in the day too, but don't underestimate the Klinks. Most of 'em use their brains for more than holding up all that extra bone. Wouldn't put the plastic surgery past the bastards."
That actually happened on an episode of DS-9. It was a Bajoran 'time bomb' left aboard the station when it was still under Cardassian control; Starfleet had the misfortune of triggering it.
It was PTSD. The Vulcan in question had served aboard the same ship for years, knew everyone personally, and was the sole survivor.
al103
Grumpy Russian Bear (SV edition)
- Location
- Russia, Krasnoyarsk
*distinctly remembers one case of pre-FTL "if things turn sour we will abandon them" right here in the quest*
*and another one for friendly FTL one*
Not to mention that protection can come too short or too late.
This is more "teaching how to fish" because "giving fish" is not workable solution.
PS. For Padani. For friendly uplifters it's "dying at half lifespan, all those diseases, *insert shitton of stuff that would cause locals to see Federation as enemy for trying to prevent uplift* are horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE".
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Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
I hope Captain Korrem recovers from his injuries. I want him fully aware when he gets courtmartialed and drummed out for his idiocy. Why on earth they let a Captain call for a curfew of a major city on Vulcan is a matter for the Vulcan government to review. Seriously, the amount of incompetence on the part of everyone in that debacle is embarrassing.
Well, when you put things that way...
We actually sorta can. Were they killing each other like normal stone age cultures (R.I.P Neanderthals, you were only a subspecies but still) or were they singing kumbaya, like the people who somehow made it to space without developing larger than personal weapons (the Gretarians) would have likely been at the time, because the very concept of violence was probably only invented by them in the Rennaissance?
If they were doing the first, they are probably within the Star Trek violent tendencies average, alongside humanity, but still above the more violent races like Klingons and (somewhat strangely) Vulcans. And considering just how close the Vulcans were to killing eachother before they cracked non violence, how much of their new ways hinges in emotional repression, and the fact that their violent past still haunts the entire quadrant in the form of the Romulan Star Empire... They are not, in fact, a success story.
The fact of the matter is, if there was anything really bad going on down there, Sulu would have probably caught it. Or the Padani would have. There isn't, and so, there's nothing stopping this people from keeping any aspects of their culture that aren't utterly contrary to the Shanpurr ethos, which most certainly does not appear to be restrictive (unlike the Apiata ethos, which being eusocial is the most restrictive ethos to ever impose on a non eusocial species).
Or even developing new ones. Because they are alive and will stay that way.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Because the behavior of Stone Age Vulcans totally predicts the behavior of modern Vulcans, right?
KlavoHunter
THOU SHALT WORSHIP NO GODS ABOVE ENTERPRISE!
Because the Temporal Authority swooped in and nudged changed events to be more severe.
Because otherwise we wouldn't be ready for the [INSERT THREAT HERE].
It indicates a lot as to their basic psychology. Like, for example, tendencies toward violence. Which is what I am talking about. Because at the end, the brain of a human ten thousand years ago was very similar to the brain of a human now.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Which is totally irrelevant, as the behavior of Vulcan society now shows. Behavior is learned.
Romulan Star Empire. Causing so much trouble to so many innocent species in the background. Which is why I say, Vulcans aren't a success story. They are a "one portion succeeds, the other goes on to become a scourge of the quadrant" story. Which is very much below average performance. The Vulcan branch certainly pulls the species up above the Klingons and the Orions on my "Positive impact on the universe" index. But still one of the worse species in the quadrant.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Is just like the Vulcans!
You're positing an absolute ability to predict people's behavior from what they're doing now to three/thirty thousand years later. All your protestations are pointless. The fact you think could predict the Romulans from Stone Age Vulcans is both wrong (the driving factors towards Romulan violence are not present in Stone Age Vulcans, i.e. a xenophobic reaction to alien species, and could not be predicted until such time as Vulcans were at least thinking about alien contact, which probably won't be until their Industrial Revolution at the least) and utterly irrelevant, because your argument only works if you actually have an ability to predict these things accurately.
And it's been show you don't. You can't. It's too long a span of time. Too much random crap can happen.
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Actually I've read of studies claiming our brains are changing noticeably at the moment.
The example given that stuck in my memory is that heavy Google users have a measurable drop in memory retaining, but an increase in multitasking.
Biological determinism is not a road we want to go down. It leads to horrors like "A Night in Sickbay".
Personally, I find that studying history is the best way to approach problems like this. And of course, when dealing with the prime directive it's important to look at this from Roddenberry's point of view rather than from the point of view of random Trek writers who came later.
When the United States rolled into Iraq, knocked over the government and instituted a western style democracy did that result in fewer people dying, or more? It pretty much directly led to the creation of ISIS, and had a role in further destabilizeation around the region and the fighting is now contributing to the European migration crisis which is not only ruining the lives of people in the Middle East and causing more deaths but is destabilizing the political order in Europe, exacerbating nationalist backlashes that threaten to tear the EU apart.
It's possible that, because this is star trek with its single-culture worlds, that they got lucky and happened to find planets where the whole world was a single unified government with a single culture which universally accepted the ways of the new overlords without violence. Otherwise it means they knocked over a whole bunch of governments by force and killed a shitload of people who objected to the new order. And it means they imposed a government that does not actually have the support of the people it is trying to govern. Which means they are going to constantly have to use military force to oppress dissident portions of the population to make them comply. Welcome to the space-Middle East, only the suicide bombers now have anti-matter. If the Middle East is too dysfunctional to be a good comparison how about Ireland vs England, and the IRA bombers? Keep in mind that compared to people from a whole different planet English and Irish cultures were practically identical, and they still had the Troubles.
From an in-universe perspective, here's someone else who's determined to uplift people into the modern era whether they like it or not:
I keep seeing arguments based on the assumption that trying to replace the local culture with a superior culture will actually work. The problem being, that if we want them to have a culture based on consent of the governed, respect for the rights of the individual and freedom we cannot impose that culture with jack boots and phaser rifles. It literally will not work.
If you conquer a planet that still believes in monarchy and force them to hold democratic elections at gunpoint they are simply going to elect the old King. At that point you can either say " I have
This isn't a question of balancing the value of quaint cultural practices against against hardnosed pragmatism of saving people's lives. It's a question of balancing lives against lives, people killed in one way vs. people killed in another.
Now, maybe I'm just traumatized by recent politics, once burned twice shy, and all that. I certainly don't have all the answers to the world's political questions. But at least from my perspective the Prime Directive seems like a pretty smart way to avoid a lot of situations that simply don't have a good solution. I would rather leave space-Afghanistan to it's own devices than try to fix it, because I don't have confidence that it would actually get fixed.
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KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
Not a fan of what the Shanpurr are doing. That BS needs to stop.