One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. DS9 didn't have a pro-terrorist stance, it had a "push back against the oppressor" stance. The Dominion, the Cardassians; both agencies that wished to conquer and subjugate. Sisko himself spoke out against the Maquis's tactics. So there is no "pro-terrorist" stance, and anything to the idea that there is, is just filling in the blanks with things that simply are not there.
She wasn't a reformed anything. IF she was a terrorist, she was an ex-terrorist, not a reformed one. She never showed any regret for her past actions, and even helped train Cardassians in the same sedition techniques. Not judging mind, the Bajorans were fighting a violent occupying force. I'm not sure Terrorist is even the correct description.
I don't think one could state that with any certainty. They are an alien race and their joining process is complex and goes beyond anything we could imagine. We know they have the memories in some capacity. We know the memories get more intense when a part often of their past lives is present or triggered. But we have no idea where their mind goes when those memories become more intense than the current host can handle. Are they thinking, "wow, I was a man, but now I'm a woman and she is hot and this is hot," ...or, is it something much more complex where the memories become so intense that the personality takes over and the host's inhibitions and preferences, and even the thoughts of the host take a back seat temporarily. And when those past life thoughts are not front and center, perhaps those memories are there but not truly accessed in the same way that our memories are. Our past is fully our past. When we did something, we really did it 100%. When we have sexual memories and sexual thoughts, they are all ours. Not so when a trill has a worm inside. I don't think we can assume anything about their sexuality unless we were to experience it ourselves. How cool and scary would that be?
What you're saying, though interesting, is not supported by facts. When Jadzia is arguing with Lenara Khan, it is made quite obvious that both their respective recollections are vivid and quite accurate. In fact, one would think, that they are talking about events that happened to themselves and not other people, and events still fresh in their memories and not something that happened a century before. We don't see them making any special effort to recall these memories, nor do we see any shift in their personality. It's as if they had these memories, present in their minds all the time. Same thing with Beverly's lover, (I don't remember his name), when he changes bodies, his feelings for Beverly stay the same exactly. I think a truly heterosexual person, couldn't stand being a joined Trill. It would make him/her crazy with disgust. Not that there is anything wrong about being either. It is just two different kinds of people. I know I couldn't stand it but I am sure that some of my friends (who experimented both ways) would have no problem with it. The Trill, the JOINED Trill that is, have to be non bothered by bisexuality or they probably wouldn't be selected. I mean, imagine someone who's adamantly heterosexual and is joined with Dax. They'd be overwhelmed by images of sexual intercourse with a gender that they find repellant on that level. It would make them crazy. Something akin to post traumatic stress syndrome, just like a rape victim.
I've watched DS9 all the way through twice and I never once thought of Kira as a terrorist. She is a freedom-fighter, plain and simple. The Cardassians are presented as a ruthless, militaristic race with almost no shading. To compare the Cardassian Occupation to real-world problems is absurd. TV shows may present black/white Manichean worlds but real life simply isn't like that.
The crippled guy in "The Darkness and The Light", though a bit crazy (with no doubt some extenuating circumstances given what he'd been through), made a compelling case, in spite of the fact that he was portrayed as the bad guy, and I wasn't fully on Kira's side on that one. I am saying that things are not as clear cut as you make them to be.
The closest equivalent to a purely evil race humanity has been able to muster is The Nazis and even they loved their children. I'm sure there were many "innocent" Cardassians (children and mindless sheep) but its really hard to weep tears for the occupying force cheerfully ignoring a horrifying injustice.
What I'm saying is the human perspective on sexuality is possibly way different than the trill perspective. The labels are likely different. The experience itself is surely different. There are too many differences to do a direct comparison or make any conclusions based on our own human experiences.
Meh. Everyone's "pro-terrorist" for someone or other, as long as they're also called "freedom fighters" and aren't fighting someone uncomfortably reminiscent of you. Just think of the Bajorans as being something familiar and totes okay to like; American revolutionaries, say, or the military wing of the ANC, or the French Resistance. Easy-peasy, that's how the original version worked.
IMO, the one thing that marks a terrorist is the willingness to disrupt public life with violence. Only if Kira had said that she bombed a market place might I call her a terrorist. The institutions and residences of the occupying powers are otherwise fair game for a member of a resistance movement.
1) Introduce controversial subject matter into non-controversial thread to immediately derail it. 2) Don't defend your position. 3) Toss in a passive-aggressive smiley after each post. 4) Profit. You're the one who first insinuated the American/Cardassian comparison with your Iraq non sequitur in a thread about CGI sets being used on a speculative reboot of DS9, so you have to own it now. Judging solely by your implied opposition to Team America here in this thread, I bet you're one of those misguided progressives whose policies turned Tasha's home into "Planet Detroit", aren't you? Or was that just another lame attempt to insert a personal political non sequitur into a thread followed by a passive-aggressive emoticon?
It was always pretty well done, tbh. But they could definitely add a little "pop". The space battle scenes would be terrific too, well that is if DS9 was being produced with HBO-level money.
From "Defiant": KIRA: You're really not cut out for this, are you? Being a terrorist, I mean. You're not very good at it. RIKER: Really? KIRA: You're acting more like a Starfleet officer who's more interested in intelligence reports and Cardassian politics than in actually hurting Cardassians. You have one of the most powerful ships in this quadrant under your command. Why aren't you out attacking every Cardassian outpost along the border? RIKER: Because these stakes here are far greater than border outposts. KIRA: Not for the Maquis, they're not, because the Maquis are terrorists and the only thing terrorists care about is attacking the enemy. I know. I was a terrorist. And if I'd had this ship then, I would've destroyed Deep Space Nine. I would've hit the Cardassians so hard they would have screamed for peace, but I certainly wouldn't have gone flying off into the middle of Cardassia on some wild goose chase. RIKER: I guess we're different kinds of terrorists. KIRA: No, you're trying to be a hero. Terrorists don't get to be heroes. T'Girl was kinda trolling, obviously, but in fact she wasn't entirely wrong. Kira is a self-admitted "terrorist" whose past and cause are sympathetically portrayed on DS9, an installation she admits she would have blown up in her role as a terrorist given a chance. DS9 did in fact have something interesting to say about terrorism and didn't shy away from complexity, or retreat into incoherent banalities artificially demarcating "resistance fighters" from supposedly demonic "terrorists." This was actually one of the show's major virtues.
Quick! Call all the Ivy League colleges! They got their definitions wrong! Kira Nerys said she was a terrorist! Sorry, but the fact is that the writers were careless in their use of the word. Certainly, there are political motivations for occupiers to call those in the resistance--as in the (French) Maquis or the Shakaar Resistance Cell(notice the shift in terminology)--terrorists. Conversely, those who are in resistance movements might use that as a badge of honor. Nonetheless, clear distinctions can be made between what we know of the means, methods and intentions of the Shakaar Resistance and groups that we label today as being terrorists. ETA: in the episode Shakaar, the group to which Kira belonged is invariably referred to as a resistance cell or resistance movement. Unless Kira did some stuff on the side or just didn't get what the group was about, her fighting the Cardassians should be labelled in the same way as the group.
Not really, because there actually isn't a good, fixed and widely agreed-upon definition of the word "terrorist" in the "Ivy League colleges" or anywhere else. That's why there's so much controversy, confusion and contradiction about the use of the label. Hezbollah got labelled a "terrorist" organization for attacking a military target, for instance, not a civilian one, and is still routinely called such in the American press today, though other countries have been reluctant to follow suit. The ANC was officially branded "terrorist" by many Western governments for the bulk of its existence prior to the end of apartheid, and did after all carry out attacks like the Church Street bombing. Its image has been rehabilitated today because its cause was sympathetic and it proved to be on the right side of history... but there's little difference between something like the Church Street bombing and what Kira describes herself as willing to do to Deep Space Nine. Her self-designation as a "terrorist" is not implausible at all, it's just unusual in its honesty since most people use "terrorist" to describe What The Other Guy Does, not as a term with any real prescriptive content.