Was Picard wrong in I,Borg?

[Rush Limborg]

^And yet they did NOT retaliate when a "virus" of individuality struck the Borg. Surely if the Collective could trace a destructive virus to the UFP, they could do the same with what happened.

And yet...either the Borg didn't know...or didn't care.

[Trekker4747]

Rush Limborg wrote:

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^And yet they did NOT retaliate when a "virus" of individuality struck the Borg. Surely if the Collective could trace a destructive virus to the UFP, they could do the same with what happened.

And yet...either the Borg didn't know...or didn't care.

The "individuality virus" was less an intented attack and more a side-effect of Hugh being out of the collective for a period of time. The Borg likely wouldn't see that as an attack and would do what they did, dispensed with the defective drones.

Attack because of the "individuality virus" would be like Russia attacking us because one of their citizens visited America and then came back singing the Star Spangled Banner and quoting Washington. It was less "attack" as it was just an effect of the change of setting.

[Nardpuncher]

It's a matter of numbers.

If a Borg walks around the corner, you kill it. Then another one comes, you kill it. Another one, you reset the harmonics or whatnot and kill it. What if another one comes? A whole cube? Do you refrain from killing it because you don't want to kill too many?

Picard was hiding behind morals, in the sense that even if he knew it was bad, he could do it as a sacrifice of himself ( not his life but of his conscience) and rid the galaxy of the Borg.
He could go home and cry about it while the rest of the galaxy builds statues and renames whole planets in his honour.

[GalaxyClass1701]

Nardpuncher wrote:

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It's a matter of numbers.

If a Borg walks around the corner, you kill it. Then another one comes, you kill it. Another one, you reset the harmonics or whatnot and kill it. What if another one comes? A whole cube? Do you refrain from killing it because you don't want to kill too many?

Picard was hiding behind morals, in the sense that even if he knew it was bad, he could do it as a sacrifice of himself ( not his life but of his conscience) and rid the galaxy of the Borg.
He could go home and cry about it while the rest of the galaxy builds statues and renames whole planets in his honour.

Exactly and another point is that Janeway did not hesitate to infect the borg with a virus in Endgame.

[Rush Limborg]

^Yup. She leaned from Picard's error--an error he confessed to in "Descent".

I think, in that ep, Picard was shaken into reality. For too long, he was so caught up in Nothing Can Exuse Going Against Our Federation Values, he condemned Riker, in "Silicon Avatar", for advocating killing the chrystaline entity to prevent further attacks.

But as he found out, sometimes the "moral" thing isn't necessarily the "right" thing.

[GalaxyClass1701]

Rush Limborg wrote:

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^Yup. She leaned from Picard's error--an error he confessed to in "Descent".

I think, in that ep, Picard was shaken into reality. For too long, he was so caught up in Nothing Can Exuse Going Against Our Federation Values, he condemned Riker, in "Silicon Avatar", for advocating killing the chrystaline entity to prevent further attacks.

But as he found out, sometimes the "moral" thing isn't necessarily the "right" thing.

Yes this adittude was shown very well in FC where he said the crewman assimilated by the bor are as good as dead and by killing them, you are doing them a favor!

[Timo]

Defeating the brutal, evil, genocidal dictatorship that was running Germany and creating as a result the peaceful coalition of nations that now comprises Europe (eventually) seems to me in every way worth the blood spilled, on both sides.

Yet the direct consequence of taking the war to unconditional victory was to create a brutal, evil, genocidal dictatorship for half of Europe. That happened exactly because everybody was so eager to wage war. Giving the Nazis a little bit of that famed Western thing they call mercy would have saved millions from the horrors of communism, while still winning the war, ending the Nazi evils, and making the world think a bit.

Except in WW2, where the allied powers as a whole lost vastly more lives.

Not really "except". The victors spilled more blood. Much of it just happened to be their own.

..war itself is a brutal abomination, but to just let the Nazis win would have been horrific.

Who said anything about letting the Nazis win? Suffering would have been avoided by not letting the Allies win. That's completely different from giving victory to Hitler.

Armies up till the 19th century understood that perfectly well. But it seems that when the United States got to play real war for the first time, on somebody else's turf, it didn't bother to find out how it's properly done. "Unconditional surrender" is not a valid goal of war, and is completely unassociated with "victory".

Most of the suffering in the big 20th century wars really comes from the US not knowing how to wage war. "Winning" is a goal for little children, and for the deranged who think war is a game.

The war could have ended in 1944 had the Nazi leadership been removed, but the damage would have been almost as bad.

By 1944, said leadership would have been perfectly willing to negotiate with the West, in the unlikely situation where the West would have stopped to think and listen. They were humans, after all, not Borg. A cease-fire for negotiations where the Nazis would be crushed would have had the side effect of stopping war on the other front as well, through stiffening German resistance and then through political pressure. The result: one Europe saved from most of the destruction, which had been minimal during Germany's expansion phase. In Europe, that is.

Somebody from Ukraine or Russia, hurt by that expansion phase already, would be far from satisfied with such an outcome, of course. I'm just telling why the eventual outcome really sucks from my European point of view, and why the idea of "taking wars to their conclusion" is not the antithesis of Nazi atrocities for me, but their direct continuation.

Timo Saloniemi

[Anwar]

Rush Limborg wrote:

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^Yup. She leaned from Picard's error--an error he confessed to in "Descent".

I think, in that ep, Picard was shaken into reality. For too long, he was so caught up in Nothing Can Exuse Going Against Our Federation Values, he condemned Riker, in "Silicon Avatar", for advocating killing the chrystaline entity to prevent further attacks.

But as he found out, sometimes the "moral" thing isn't necessarily the "right" thing.

Picard had weapons armed and ready to go if their attempt to communicate with the entity failed. He was willing to kill it, but he figured they may as well try to talk to the damn thing first.

[J. Allen]

After just watching the episode, I can honestly say I don't know. Both sides have a good point, but I just can't decide at the moment. I do want to note that hearing the words "race" and "species" from Crusher was just annoying.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

No. For a single human being to unilaterally decide to destroy an entire species would be not only abhorrent but dangerous.

Arguably, if any other species recognized afterward that human beings granted authority and agency to individuals capable of such things, that species would be fully justified in committing genocide against humanity and wiping us out to the last man, woman and child - for their own protection against us.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Admiral Shran wrote:

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But they re-intergrated him into the Collective. How is that any different than assimilation?

Assimilation is only for individual life forms who aren't already part of the Borg. Reintegrating an errant drone is, I'm sure, quite different.

It'd be like a soldier returning from leave, versus a new recruit going through boot.

[Pseudo]

Admiral Shran wrote:

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But they re-intergrated him into the Collective. How is that any different than assimilation?

I'd take this to be that as he was already a Borg they would be uploading the information that he had accumulated while he was separated from the collective.

Whereas assimilation seems to involve installing the physical components necessary to link an individual to the collective and then downloading the necessary information to the individual drone.

To my mind it's basically the difference between backing up 'My Documents' and installing Windows.

[neozeks]

Timo wrote:

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Giving the Nazis a little bit of that famed Western thing they call mercy would have saved millions from the horrors of communism, while still winning the war, ending the Nazi evils, and making the world think a bit.

Um, how exactly would it end Nazi evils if you left the Nazis in power, with their armies intact (as you'd have to, or the Soviets would overrun them)? You'd rely on their word?

Who said anything about letting the Nazis win? Suffering would have been avoided by not letting the Allies win. That's completely different from giving victory to Hitler.

And I thought 'appeasment' was one of the mistakes that lead to the war in the first place...

A cease-fire for negotiations where the Nazis would be crushed would have had the side effect of stopping war on the other front as well, through stiffening German resistance and then through political pressure.

Or not. It's just as likely that Stalin would have felt betrayed, paid no heed to the West and continued the drive to Berlin (stiffening resistance? the Soviets crushed the Germans with 70 percent of the forces already there, I seriously doubt what the Germans had in the west would have changed a thing). And the confrontation between the West and the Soviets would have been ever more tense after that.

Though this doesn't really have much to do with Picard and the Borg...

[Neutral Zone]

I think if Picard had gone through with the plan it would have only slowed the Borg down, they always had a knack of surviving. I always thought the early introduction to the Borg by Q was wrong. Up to then they never knew we exisisted and they were busy eating up the Delta Quadrant.

[Anwar]

If Q hadn't done so, then the Feds wouldn't have upscaled their weapons tech and new ship designs as well as fleet numbers. The Dominion would have easily defeated them.

Q's thing was that his actions ultimately were for the benefit of humanity, no matter how nasty those actions were. He said that the Romulans and Klingons were nothing compared to future Fed enemies, and he was right (and he DIDN'T just mean the Borg).