Bread and Circuses: General Order 24

[Timo]

Was Fox trusting? Perhaps, for the sake of diplomacy. Factually he did get caught by Anan 7, while none of our heroes in those circumstances would have fallen for it.

But him then being surprised that Anan would want him dead was not indicative of softness or pacifism - it was sheer arrogance, over him being indispensable rather than a mere pawn. And arrogant and forceful he was, breaking into Eminiar but also out of the Enterprise, and then gunning his way to victory while little minding the casualties left and right. (Okay, only left, but his assistant got hardly a sneer for falling dead.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

Fox's assistant really cracked me up during the episode! He looked like he should be combing and cutting hair rather than being a space diplomat on a mission to a hostile planet!
JB

 

[Solariabsg25]

I'm not a car guy, but aren't those NOT white sidewall tires? The ad specifically claims that each of these unexcelled cars has white sidewall tires. How am I supposed to believe there's really a super flow auto transmission and super glide suspension now? Sure, it's a pretty car, but you can't trust these Jupiter 8 guys...

--Alex

A shame they could not offer the Jupiter 9, it comes with so much more eagle...

 

[johnnybear]

More Eagle? That's only if the moon is in the vicinity of planet 892 IV, Solar!
JB

 

[kkt]

The Jupiter 8 looks like a speedboat that grew one set of wheels.

 

[Timo]

One wonders... Would a car named "Jahweh 8" be a big hit today? Or one named "Ezekiel Turbo Salon Convertible", say?

Claudius' folks were not monotheists, it appears. But what they worshipped or believed in was left a bit unclear. Does anybody have any idea on whether good old Romans would actually have used the names of their gods as trade names, the way they do in Asterix comics?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Albertese]

One wonders... Would a car named "Jahweh 8" be a big hit today? Or one named "Ezekiel Turbo Salon Convertible", say?

Claudius' folks were not monotheists, it appears. But what they worshipped or believed in was left a bit unclear. Does anybody have any idea on whether good old Romans would actually have used the names of their gods as trade names, the way they do in Asterix comics?

Timo Saloniemi

Perhaps. Religion permeated Roman culture in a way none of us alive today have ever truly experienced. These people knew the gods were out there and running the show in the same way that we know that the world operates according to the laws of physics. To them, the gods were the laws of physics. And so much more.

How the Romans of the equivalent of the 20th Century would view the classical gods is an interesting question. I suppose it could be not unlike modern Christians, who often acknowledge the science around them but tie it back to a divine first cause and the guidance of Holy Spirit. I can easily image a culture who views a whole pantheon who are driving the various wheels, by means of what we would view as natural law. (I suppose that this must also happen in modern Hinduism--which is the only modern polytheist faith I know of off hand.)

If a majority of people on Magna Roma respected the idea and tradition of the gods without necessarily "believing" in them as such then I could easily see the names of the gods being used to invoke a good brand image.

What I wonder is how exactly the Maga Roma timeline lines up with Earth's? Since they are so much the Roman Empire, then they must be a duplicate of our own Earth. Is it a duplicate that has always been 300 years out of sync with Earth? or did they have their Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ at the same time as we did and it took them until the 23rd Century to manage to get to where we got three hundred years earlier? If so then what does this imply about their attitudes to science and progress?

An interesting line to examine.

--Alex

 

[Timo]

I gather the simplest setup would be the one from "Patterns of Force", that of an Earthling meddling with the local culture in the fairly recent past to provide the external trappings of a "superior" alien cultural model for the reorganizing of local rule. The more totalitarian the makeover, the more recent it might have been; the meddler at Magna Roma could be from a few centuries back, telling the already authoritarian local rulers that dressing up as Romans and speaking modern English would be a class act to enthrall the masses. Meanwhile, the meddler would introduce the latest in magical technology and set himself up as the local boss. And almost immediately afterwards, a local would make a quick move with a dagger or a submachine gun squad and become the next boss - a turn of events all but dictated by the imitation of the imperial Roman model.

This could be applied to just about every near-Earth in TOS ("Miri" excluded), giving rise to incorrect interpretations such as the Hodgkins' Law. Sometimes a time machine would be required; not so in the Magna Roma case.

If we instead trust Hodgkins, we could see here a revival movement, perhaps of the local Britain going totalitarian and resurrecting some of its glorious Roman-occupied past that goes (and already once went) so well with its other imperial past. On our Earth, there were many New Romes; on Magna Roma, the latest might have had the greatest resources for enacting the pretentious inheriting of power and glory, introducing appropriate costumes and neo-architecture and all.

That the movement would be reviving a past culture, imperfectly and purposefully, would conveniently hide the fact that the local past was not quite identical to ours. The coincidental similarities would be jarring enough to grab all the attention, and Kirk and the audience would fail to notice that the locals had never spoken Latin, had in fact been plains dwellers rather than rulers of a peninsula in an inshore sea, etc. The thrice-damned UT would have to take the blame on the local language being English (perhaps Spock misset the controls for a rare once); the perversion of local names to old Roman/British ones would then automatically follow.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[UnknownSample]

The problem with Romans naming cars after their gods would be that it's blasphemous.

 

[Shawnster]

The problem with Romans naming cars after their gods would be that it's blasphemous.

That's the question. Would the Romans have viewed it as blasphemous or not?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

What I suspected about planets like Miri's world and Magna Roma - and which, non-canon though this may be, has actually been put to use in @Christopher's "Department of Temporal Investigations" novels - is that planets like this aren't just copies of Earth, they literally ARE Earth, from different timelines which somehow got briefly linked with the main one. (Actually I think that's only true with Miri. Magna Roma, IIRC, is the Preservers' doing.)

 

[Timo]

The real Romans did name lots of things after their gods, but the exact question here is consumer products. Cities, buildings or other infrastructure don't count. Presumably, Rome of old did have consumer products, and the businessmen pushing the stuff would have used marketing the best they could. Would that have included brand names featuring gods and demigods (Wine of Dionysos, the Heracles Brothel, etc)?

I trust somebody here knows. Perhaps the Pompeii dig would be revealing?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[johnnybear]

Who says The Preservers were responsible for the inhabitants of planet 892 IV? And if they were, were they the ones that created the idea of a Roman civilization and imposed it on them and us?
JB

 

[Timo]

The Preservers were only ever accused of creating the native American settlement in "Paradise Syndrome", and their trademark was an "impossible" (i.e. recently terraformed) near-Earth combined with constant peril to the settlement. None of the other near-Earths quite fit the bill: they aren't physically implausible (save for "Miri") and are never in cosmic peril.

Yet there are some near-Earths where the population is suspiciously low for the technology level, perhaps suggesting Preserver-style transplantation. Or at least our heroes and villains/plot complications all end up in the same little village for no apparent reason, more or less establishing the village as the only one of its kind. I doubt Magna Roma would be such a case, though: if a handful of Romans were dropped there back in the Roman days, they wouldn't remain Romans if growing to fill the planet, nor survive to grow if remaining Romans (you need a Mediterranean-wide infrastructure to be a proper Roman).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Who says The Preservers were responsible for the inhabitants of planet 892 IV?

Ex Machina puts forth that theory.

 

[BillJ]

What I suspected about planets like Miri's world and Magna Roma - and which, non-canon though this may be, has actually been put to use in @Christopher's "Department of Temporal Investigations" novels - is that planets like this aren't just copies of Earth, they literally ARE Earth, from different timelines which somehow got briefly linked with the main one. (Actually I think that's only true with Miri. Magna Roma, IIRC, is the Preservers' doing.)

Magna Roma's land masses were different though, IIRC.

CHEKOV: Definitely class M, somewhat similar to Earth.
KIRK: Yes, similar. But the land masses and oceans are quite different, however.
SPOCK: Different in shape only, Captain. The proportion of land to water is exactly as on your Earth. Density five point five, diameter seven nine one seven at the equator, atmosphere seventy eight percent nitrogen, twenty one percent oxygen. Again, exactly like Earth.
KIRK: Exactly in some ways, different in others.

 

[johnnybear]

Forgive my ignorance but what exactly is Ex Machina? And I'll bet it's not canon!
JB

 

[BillJ]

Forgive my ignorance but what exactly is Ex Machina? And I'll bet it's not canon!
JB

Post-TMP novel by TrekBBS poster @Christopher.

 

[uniderth]

What would be a normal situation to use General Order 24?

Also, would Hodgkin's Law necessarily require historical natural development? Meaning, all these other planets wouldn't have to have the exact same history to qualify for Hodgkin's Law to be true. Though a planet like Magna Roma would be an extraordinary example.

The Memory Alpha entry on this plays a bit loose for my taste. It says that even the Ferengi's development of capitalism is and example of this law. That just seems a bit too wide of a net for me.

 

[Timo]

What would be a normal situation to use General Order 24?

Probably not a conventional invasion/reduction of a planet, because the plans for those could and should be case-specific and detailed: "we will achieve our goals in this war by making their frammistat manufacturing capability disappear, so we strike HERE and HERE" or "we can force them to surrender by killing their citizens, because it always has worked so well in the history of war, so we start HERE with THIS many and then proceed HERE with THIS many more if necessary".

What we see is a likely scenario: a snap decision on whether to use the full potential of a single starship to terminate a civilization or not. A peacetime decision, then, because snapping in war is frowned upon. The likes of Kirk are likely to encounter threats that can blow away the Federation in a heartbeat, so Kirk should be empowered to at least respond in kind, and in practice to preempt as well.

Also, would Hodgkin's Law necessarily require historical natural development? Meaning, all these other planets wouldn't have to have the exact same history to qualify for Hodgkin's Law to be true. Though a planet like Magna Roma would be an extraordinary example.

Spock says as much. Whether our heroes actually believe in Hodgkin or not remains debatable: they have seen nothing but extraordinary examples in their adventures so far...

The Memory Alpha entry on this plays a bit loose for my taste. It says that even the Ferengi's development of capitalism is and example of this law. That just seems a bit too wide of a net for me.

Since the theory is only quoted in one episode, it might have lost all credibility during TOS already - but should still remain in existence as such, just like there's worth in occasionally taking a step back and thinking whether the Cosmological Constant or the Aether Theory or the Phlogiston Model in fact have some merit in explaining the latest discoveries. Of course, this would then require Hodgkin to stretch and bend to accommodate the new findings in parallelism.

Timo Saloniemi