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Another Lit Wish List Thread

I don't know about the second Elite Force game, but I don't see any way to reconcile the first one set aboard Voyager with canon. I mean, Voyager wasn't that big a ship. If it had actually had some kind of special "Hazard Team" aboard it, you'd think we would've seen them from time to time. Especially if their job was to tackle particularly dangerous stuff, the sort of stuff Voyager dealt with in quite a few episodes.
 
I don't know about the second Elite Force game, but I don't see any way to reconcile the first one set aboard Voyager with canon. I mean, Voyager wasn't that big a ship. If it had actually had some kind of special "Hazard Team" aboard it, you'd think we would've seen them from time to time. Especially if their job was to tackle particularly dangerous stuff, the sort of stuff Voyager dealt with in quite a few episodes.
I remember that there was some thought at the time that the Hazard Team was going to appear in a Voyager episode, though, now that I think about it, maybe that was just marketing spin out of Activision to give people a hook so they'd buy the game.
 
Yes, all Federation Members need to be democracies. If they're not, then the Federation itself is not a democracy -- and not worth a damn.
Where has it been stated that all Federation members must be democracies? That's a more stringent requirement than even states in the United States must meet; the Constitution merely requires a "republican form of government." For example, a state governed by a military junta would, technically, be a republic since, in poly-sci terms, a republic is a state not governed by an hereditary monarch. Even China is a republic.
 
Yes, all Federation Members need to be democracies. If they're not, then the Federation itself is not a democracy -- and not worth a damn.
Where has it been stated that all Federation members must be democracies? That's a more stringent requirement than even states in the United States must meet; the Constitution merely requires a "republican form of government." For example, a state governed by a military junta would, technically, be a republic since, in poly-sci terms, a republic is a state not governed by an hereditary monarch. Even China is a republic.

I can see no reason why an anarchic state could not be a member (apart from the fact that anarchists aren't great 'joiners' !) or why a truly benevolent dictatorship would necessarily be excluded.

IDIC.
 
I just watched Redemption I and II, and I noticed that there is actually a gap of at least several weeks, if not months, between them were The Klingon Civil War went on. Have there been any stories set during that gap?
 
I just watched Redemption I and II, and I noticed that there is actually a gap of at least several weeks, if not months, between them were The Klingon Civil War went on. Have there been any stories set during that gap?
Unless there's a Strange New Worlds short story set in that three-month (or so) period, I'm not aware of any.
 
Where has it been stated that all Federation members must be democracies? That's a more stringent requirement than even states in the United States must meet; the Constitution merely requires a "republican form of government." For example, a state governed by a military junta would, technically, be a republic since, in poly-sci terms, a republic is a state not governed by an hereditary monarch. Even China is a republic.

I thought in poli-sci terms a republic was a government where the people had some say in its functioning - perhaps not democratic, but they have some form of influence?

Yhere half billion sects that retconned it.

Even the catholic church did a couple of retcons.

I've got no idea where this quote came from, but:

"[Abrahamic] Religion is like a movie trilogy. Jewish people liked the first movie but think the last two suck. Christians liked the first movie but thought the second movie was the best. Muslims think the third movie is the best. Mormons liked the second movie so much they wrote a fan-fiction. "
 
I just watched Redemption I and II, and I noticed that there is actually a gap of at least several weeks, if not months, between them were The Klingon Civil War went on. Have there been any stories set during that gap?

The dialogue in "Redemption II" suggests only 2-3 weeks since the first part. And Worf still seems to be early in his learning curve about Klingon behavior, such as being surprised to discover that Kurn drinks amiably with his enemies when off-duty. So I really don't think it could be months.
 
I'm would suggest that twice now, this thread has turned into a discussion of the nature of Federation governance, and that this debate should probably be carried over into a new thread. But should this thread be in TrekLit or Gen Trek?
 
I don't know about the second Elite Force game, but I don't see any way to reconcile the first one set aboard Voyager with canon. I mean, Voyager wasn't that big a ship. If it had actually had some kind of special "Hazard Team" aboard it, you'd think we would've seen them from time to time. Especially if their job was to tackle particularly dangerous stuff, the sort of stuff Voyager dealt with in quite a few episodes.
Elite Force 2 opened by retconning the Hazard Team into the final moments of "Endgame", when Voyager was trapped inside the Borg sphere. They beamed over to disable a dampening field which had crippled Voyager, thus playing an essential part in getting the crew home.

I guess we're to believe they were there all along, doing important things just off-camera.
 
They got separated during a battle and they had to run after Voyager.

They catched up with it before Endgame.

Retcon done.
 
I don't know about the second Elite Force game, but I don't see any way to reconcile the first one set aboard Voyager with canon. I mean, Voyager wasn't that big a ship. If it had actually had some kind of special "Hazard Team" aboard it, you'd think we would've seen them from time to time.
You mean, like those Equinox crewmembers, or Joe Carey? :p
 
^That's different. Those characters could plausibly blend into the background, but the so-called Hazard Team was supposed to take the point on hazardous missions, and they never did in any of the hazardous missions we saw onscreen. Not to mention that they had variant uniforms that were never seen onscreen.
 
What about randomly chosen jurors? Surely determining guilt or innocence in a crime is every bit as important as making laws, yet we believe the fairest way to do it is to put the decision in the hands of the people. Essentially we've been crowd-sourcing justice for centuries, although with only a small crowd at a time. The idea is that it's fairer if the choice is made by peers of the defendant, people who are part of the general public rather than some kind of entrenched elite, people who can recognize that it could just as easily be themselves affected by the verdict in a court case and that they therefore need to be as fair as they'd want the jury to be if they were the ones on trial.

So the idea is to treat legislative service the same way as jury service -- a civic duty that every member of the population is obligated to take on at some point in their lives (unless they have valid reason to bow out). They serve for a single term, maybe a year or two, and then go back to their lives. They don't make a career out of politics, they aren't there because they want to win elections or gain in status or solicit huge donations from special interest groups, so their priority is to help the general public that they'll be going back to in a year or two, rather than to help themselves become richer or more powerful.

And sure, you need professional-level skills, but there could be advisors put in place for that. The equivalent would be the lawyers, judges, bailiffs, etc. in the legal system -- people who have expert understanding of the system and its workings, and whose job is to provide the benefit of that expertise to the people who have the actual power to make decisions.

I always used to think that you couldn't trust the masses to make decisions as well as the experts, but there have been a lot of crowd-sourcing experiments in recent years that have shown that you can often get better solutions to intractable problems by tossing them out there to the general public -- like that computer game that let the mass of players on the Internet discover a solution to a protein-folding problem that scientists and their supercomputers couldn't crack. You've got a lot of people trying out a lot of different logical or intuitive responses to a problem, and some of those people are geniuses, so the odds of turning up a solution that actually works are considerable. So maybe if we could figure out a mechanism for crowd-sourcing solutions to the economy and health care and foreign policy and the like, we might find more solutions that actually work rather than just suiting some political party's self-serving ideology.



2. I think it's pretty clear that the Federation let Ardana in without really figuring out the basics of their political system or even having all that many Federates on the ground, be they governmental, Starfleet, or just regular civilians. Ardana was clearly in violation of the provision of the Federation Charter prohibiting caste-based discrimination (established in DS9).

It's possible the membership standards were more lax in the 23rd century. Given the "Cold War" situation they were in with the Klingons, the fierce competition for strategic resources or locations, the Federation might've been willing to relax its standards or suspend its review processes and fast-track membership for worlds they wanted to keep the Klingons from getting to first. (Or, to interpret it more benevolently, they wanted to bring those worlds under UFP protection before the Klingons could conquer and oppress them.)




The council chamber in The Voyage Home has 60 seats -- two sets of bleachers, each with 3 tiers of 10 seats each.

For the purposes of DTI: Forgotten History, I went through the canonical and literary sources to compile a list of known or probable UFP members as of c. 2270. My list came out to under 50 worlds, some of which were colonies. So it's plausible that they'd have 60 members as of 2285.

In the Unitede States judges are elected although the Supreme Court is appointed. In Canada, all jusges are selected by either the provincial or federal government. As a consequence, the judicial system in the US seems to be much more politcized than in Canada. Which system is better? Depends on your point of view.

In the council chamber of TVH I see two Andorians (both Starfleet), five Vulcans (counting Sarek who is also wearing the medal so he may be there in an official capacity and not just as an observer, two men seated together, two woman by themselves), 2 bald people who I would assume are Deltans, one cat like (assumed to be Caitian, also Starfleet), 2 with gold metallic masks with a blue stripe at eye level, two with the large head that look somewhat like porcelain (unlike the other races, these two aren't seated next to each other), 2 with the metallic masks with tubes out the bottom, as well as what appears to be a Tellarite and a numbe that we don't get a really good look at.

Given the presence of two or more of the various races and the large number of Starfleet I would assume that we're not seeing the actual Council but rather a smaller body, perhaps one dedicated exclusivly to Starfleet. You would have civilian and Starfleet members much like the National Security Council in the US. The actual judgement may have rested entirely with the three people on the dias along with the president. Not counting the president we would have two civilians and one Starfleet hearing the case.
 
In the United States judges are elected...

That actually varies state by state. In some they're directly elected, in others they're appointed, and in still others they're appointed, but have referendum elections to determine if they keep their position every few years. The last one is supposed to be a compromise, keeping the public accountability of elections while avoiding the politicization of campaigns, but it's almost always a rubber stamp because the man on the street can hardly keep track of all the judges and all the cases they see to decide which ones he thinks are doing the right things and which ones should be kicked off the bench.
 
^That's different. Those characters could plausibly blend into the background, but the so-called Hazard Team was supposed to take the point on hazardous missions, and they never did in any of the hazardous missions we saw onscreen. Not to mention that they had variant uniforms that were never seen onscreen.

They got separated during a battle and they had to run after Voyager.

They catched up with it before Endgame.

Retcon done.
 
Since the Genesis Incident was a Federation Security matter (read National Security) why couldn't those present be the Federation Security Council. IIRC, the Security Council is made up of five members.

The others present would likely be Commander, Starfleet and some of the Command Council or Security for Commander, Starfleet, and observers such as Ambassadors whose expertise might be needed to defuse tensions or whose areas of responsibility are affected.
 
^Plausible. The Security Council, like the other councils, would be a subset of the whole council (like US congressional committees), so some of the group there woudl've been councillors. But it does make sense that the people in Starfleet uniforms would not have been members of the Council.
 
One of them was probably the Starfleet advisor/liaison to the Federation President, one of the civilians perhaps the Secretary of Defense, and Federation Security itself. Also, since time travel had been involved, a bureaucrat from the DTI?
 
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