Let's look back:
RIKER: Yes. If you believe those accusations, then you certainly should act on them.
LETEK: And there is even more. We can prove that the humans are destroyers of legal commerce, and that they selfishly withhold vital technology from backward worlds.
MORDOC: And necessary defensive weapons, too. We Ferengi now challenge this human madness.
RIKER: I admit we withheld modern technology from some worlds.
KAYRON: You see? They are demented. Their values are insane. You cannot believe the business opportunities they have destroyed.
LETEK: Proof of their barbarism. They adorn themselves with gold, a despicable use of a valuable metal. And they shamelessly clothe their females.
MORDOC: Inviting others to unclothe them. The very depth of perversion.
TASHA: Paws off, Ferengi.
MORDOC: No female, human or Ferengi, can order Mordoc around! Submit!
TASHA: Just try it, shorty.
RIKER: At ease, Lieutenant!
RIKER: And we still have more faults
DATA: They should add that Starfleet has permitted several civilisations to fall. We have at times allowed the strong and violent to overcome the weak.
The Federation could always do bad things, they cloth women after all.
Since I can't stand anything Berman related, I choose to believe that instead of "Humanity is Special" ala Enterprise, that the Vulcans solved 90% of our problems and fixed our environment too.
Humans like Archer just pretend they did it on their own.
I always took it in a practical matter, that finding aliens united humans like an outside threat, without being an actual threat based situation. The Vulcans give us aid and guidance to recover quickly, and we do it even faster than the Vulcans expect. I ilke to think humanity saw so much out there and the only way to get there is through unity, so that's what was done.
I'm getting two versions of this according to the dialog. One is that 14 Federation members threatened to leave the UFP if they helped the Romulans, even before the Mars attack. Which meant the Federation were already thinking of not helping them.
Plus if those 14 members left, the Federation would have "imploded" which sounded pretty serious. As in the Federation collapsing from within.
The other is that after the Mars attack, the Federation had to pull its resources to deal with the Mars situation, and not help the Romulans. They didn't have enough resources to help although they seemed like they were about to. But then it changed to "let's look out for ourselves first".
So, the dirty reality of maintaining Paradise is revealed. The story got so caught up in the Synth stuff, we forgot all about this issue. Suggesting the Federation is not what it once was or should be (according to Picard).
Wait, something doesn't make sense. The Tal Shair or it's subgroup (Romulans) orchestrated the Synth attack which resulted in the Fed abandoning the aid effort, which resulted in nearly a billion Romulan deaths.
Because they were afraid the Synths would bring about the end of everything?
I think we have to assume there were already objections to helping the Romulans from the start, and that losing the fleet made those voices even stronger, because the only alternative to the rescue fleet would be to use Starfleet's normal vessels. That would have stripped Federation defenses
That's what I wanted stated outright not the crewing issue, not the mothball fleet, but the use of existing ships and personnel would require reducing defenses to dangerous levels.
The bigger issue is it is never clear whether Starfleet decided on its own, or whether the Federation council made an order which Starfleet command followed.
I think even in Berman's writing that Archer was just really racist.
If Earth did not have that stupid anti genetic tampering policy, his father would lived long enough to see his project through. I never saw the logic in Earth being a de facto colony of Vulcan for 100 years unless during those years Vulcan was a military dictatorship or something.
I think he was racist too. It makes it better when he drops his general hatred of the Vulcans, having realized none of it was personal, the Vulcans aren't monolithic, and even the Vulcans were getting screwed with by their own government. T'Pol and others humanized the Vulcans for him enough that he finally saw them as just more people.
Either way, I think it's pretty clear that Vulcan was engaging in some neo-colonialism vis-a-vis its relationships with client states like Earth and Coridan. And there's plenty of logic in neo-colonialism -- the wealth of the client states gets sent back to the hegmon, but the hegmon doesn't have to undertake the costs of actual annexation and can just outsource the job of direct governance to local elites.
I think it i less colonialism than keeping other species in line, since trade seems pretty minimal in that period. Vulcans were slowing humans down probably in equal parts because they thought humanity would wipe itself out with some crazy experiment, and Vulcan along with them. They state outright that humans did in a 100 years what it took Vulcans 1800 years.
Indeed, this naturalistic fallacy irks me, and "having developed a method of f.t.l.-travel" strikes me as a most arbitrary threshold.
On The Orville, they had a somewhat more sensible approach — their rules were that they were forbidden from making contact with any civilization that did not requæst it, but if a civilization sent into the cosmos the quæstion "is there anyone out there?" much like S.E.T.I. is doing, then they were at liberty to answer and establish contact.
But yet again, we thread upon the idea of what constitutes "a civilization". If but one member of a civilization asks that, is that enough for that one member to decide the fate of all the others and "contaminate" them? is there a requirement that they have some form of democratic government, that at least the decision be made in a manner that ensures the majority of the civilization wishes it so? All these quæstions were never raised, nor answered, probably because merely raising them would highlight the problems with these rules.
I think the Prime Directive's issue is when it is taken to the level of dogma of not getting involved, rather than seeing it in terms of helping vulnerable societies and in practical terms of future involvement and historical examples. At its worse it is an excuse not to help people, but at its best it instructs the Federation not to dictate terms to newcomers.
