Woah. Two resurrections in one thread.
Yeah, I totally missed this last year. It happened in August the first time so I must have been on vacation. Yeah, that's the ticket!
decision regarding Rugal incomprehensible!
- Thread starter Dal Rassak
- Start date
Yeah, I totally missed this last year. It happened in August the first time so I must have been on vacation. Yeah, that's the ticket!
No. They didn't do that. They simply raised him to know the truth of what the Cardssians had done to the Bajorans. How could they not? They had adopted him when the Occupation was still ongoing; he could see with his own eyes what the Cardassians were doing to Bajor.
Ultimately, I do have to agree that Kotan's fundamental right to raise his own child was violated and superseded everything else. However, I think Proka and his wife also should have been given some form of shared custody or visitation rights.
And I just can't accept the idea that the foreign commander of a military base should have had the right to make this kind of decision. This should have been decided by a Bajoran court of law.
Given his immense self-loathing, it's clear they never taught him that he's not a monster simply for being the same species.
Even if they didn't directly tell him to hate himself, they did so quietly and subtlely by sitting back and watching him adopt such views of himself without attempting to correct them.
Also a Bajoran court would in all likelihood not be able to give an objective ruling in this matter. Having Sisko arbitrate was the right call.
1) Yes. It is rank bigotry to imagine that a judge cannot do their job without bias just because of their heritage.
2) Even if that weren't the case, it doesn't matter. The Bajoran Republic is a sovereign state, and they have the inherent right to adjudicate custody disputes on their territory -- and Starbase Deep Space 9 was established repeatedly throughout the series to still be Bajoran territory. No one else gets to decide whether or not they're "allowed" -- that's what sovereignty means.
Teenagers are more than capable of falling into self-loathing even when loving parents try to teach them self-esteem. You have no evidence of this claim whatsoever.
No. 1) Again, that is rank bigotry. 2) Bajor has an inherent right to adjudicate custody disputes on their territory no matter what any other power thinks of the decisions they reach. 3) The Federation is not superior to Bajor. The Federation is not more mature than Bajor. Federation military officers are not more mature or more impartial than Bajoran judges. The idea that they are is itself a form of imperialism -- that attitude is exactly what would drive Bajor to not join the Federation if it were widespread.
The Bajorans clearly didn't have a problem with Sisko acting as a third party for a ruling. Arbitration was the best solution, given the circumstances.
And the Provisional Government of the Bajoran Republic had the right to make that call, but I don't agree with it. If I were the Bajoran First Minister, I would have demanded Starfleet turn over Rugal to Bajoran Child Protective Services for a Bajoran court to decide the issue.
I want to go back to the idea that a Bajoran court somehow couldn't be trusted to do its job without bias by pointing out that an analogous argument would appear absurd in an analogous situation: Change the setting to France in the 1940s just after the German occupation has ended. In a scenario where a German child is accidentally left behind during the occupation and adopted by French parents, and then the biological father discovers the child is still alive and fights for custody? No reasonable person would claim that a French court could not be trusted to reach an unbiased conclusion.
Teenage self-loathing is usually over stuff like their appearance, height or social standing. Not internalized racism. That's something that has to be beaten into you. There's every reason to believe his adoptive parents did this to him, either directly or indirectly.
Having a Federation officer arbitrate decreased the chances of a biased administrator. Sure maybe they could have found an unbiased Bajoran, but when it comes to custody of a Cardassian child being contested by their natural parent, that's not a risk I'm willing to take.
While it's certainly possible a Bajoran judge might make an unbiased decision, there's two things that make it difficult for people to see this.
First, the Occupation. It ended only about a year or so before the events of "CARDASSIANS". Before that, Bajor was occupied for 50 years... you'd be hard pressed to find ANY Bajoran not affected by it.
Your France example has merit, but not every French person was affected by the Nazi occupation. (By this, I mean not all French people were in France during that time. Many took refuge in other countries, or simply happened to live in another country at the time.) France is a country. Bajor is an entire planet. There were many places in the world the Nazis didn't set foot on. There was nowhere the Cardassians didn't touch.
Second, from a political standpoint, it gives off a huge look of bias by having the hearing in a Bajoran court. At the very least, Bajor was probably glad to not have to go through the mess of what that would look like by having Sisko be the third party.
I'm sure it had nothing to do with him living on the planet that was brutally occupied by his species for decades.
A teenager who sees how his species is brutally oppressing the people he loves might become self-loathing even if his adoptive parents do everything they can to teach him not to.
Hell, it's more likely he came to hate his species as a result of prejudice from his fellow students in school.
There is no reason to believe his adoptive parents did that to him.
Nope, and the assumption that a Bajoran judge can't be unbiased is bigotry. It resembles Donald Trump's racist belief that a U.S. judge of Mexican heritage could not be unbiased towards him because of his stated policy goals re the U.S.-Mexico border.
Tough shit. It's not your call to make -- it's the Bajoran Republic's.
So if an analogous situation had occurred in India a year after the U.K. ended its centuries-long occupation, you would claim an Indian court could not be trusted to adjudicate the issue without bias?
I'm sorry, but this is false. Everyone in France was affected by the war. And just like not all French people were in France during that time, not a Bajorans were on Bajor during the occupation; we learned that in TNG "Ensign Ro."
And there was nowhere in France that wasn't harmed by the Nazi invasion and occupation of their country.
If a French court could be trusted to adjudicate an analogous situation in the immediate aftermath of the German occupation of France, then a Bajoran court could be trusted to adjudicate the Rugal custody issue.
And, again, it is the right of the Provisional Government of the Bajoran Republic to delegate to a third party its sovereign right to adjudicate the issue.
But it was, indeed, a delegation of a right that naturally belonged to the Bajoran Republic and no one else.
His adoptive father quite literally says "They won't hurt you. They're not Cardassians." What did he think he was doing in saying that, especially to a child? The best case scenario is he's hopelessly naive.
It's quite clear his parents helped feed into it.
And we know why.
Ah yes, bigotry is okay as long as it comes from the "correct" side.
No one said bigotry is "okay".
But to expect survivors of the Occupation to have a perfectly balanced, neutral view of their oppressors is ludicrous.
That might constitute evidence that his parents are transmitting some level of anti-Cardassian prejudice, but that's a far cry from "brainwashing him into self-loathing bigotry" as you claim. An alternate possibility is that they know he is fearful of anyone who isn't biologically Bajoran as a result of seeing Bajorans he identifies with harmed by aliens, and they're just trying to mitigate his feelings.
You absolutely do not have evidence for that.
Then don't adopt a Cardassian child if you hate Cardassians that much, especially if you're unable to hold back from brainwashing him into self loathing.
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