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Next Titan novel announced

Cool, now I can hand out handguns to all the drug addicts in town. Not my fault. They're the ones that pulled the trigger.
 
No, because under English Law at least that would potentially make you a murderer, and I would be able to make a strong case in favour of it.
 
We'll have to agree to disagree on whether Federation values helped in the creation of the Borg. But I do think that we can all agree that Federation values accelerated contact with the Borg in 2364...

Which was the first domino to fall in what ended in sixty plus billion people dead.
 
Not really...because contact with the Borg came with them destroying the Neutral Zone bases...and was arguably caused by the events in Enterprise...so I think it's all a time-travel mess that doesn't really have a beginning...it just sort of happened...
 
No, because under English Law at least that would potentially make you a murderer, and I would be able to make a strong case in favour of it.

But there's no chain of responsibility. All I did was give a bunch of down and out people a gift they they could use to defend themselves. Just because some or most or even all of them decide to commit crimes with them doesn't make me responsible for their actions any more than giving them food kept them alive long enough to beat someone to death with their bare fists.

If I miscalculated how likely it would be that they would misuse the guns doesn't make me responisble for their actions, it just makes me bad at math.

</Sarcasm>

You may not be able to trace the chain all the way back to the beginning but that doesn't make the people one or two or more links up that same chain totally blameless.
 
Cool, now I can hand out handguns to all the drug addicts in town. Not my fault. They're the ones that pulled the trigger.

If you sell someone a gun, you are not responsible for their subsequent decisions.

You are responsible for selling guns to people whom you know have bad judgment, and, if it is illegal for you to sell those guns to them, for violating that particular statute.

But even if you violate a statute against selling guns to someone, you are not responsible for their subsequent statute violations.

ETA:

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether Federation values helped in the creation of the Borg.

No, we won't. The Federation's values are not responsible for the creation of the Borg and anyone who says they are is wrong.
 
There's a massive difference:

You said "If I give a gun to a person it's not my fault what they do when they pull the trigger"

So you're aware that they're going to use the gun as a weapon, and you've just admitted you know theyd use them to commit crimes...

There's a doctrine in English Law called "Oblique Intention" which is "Was the Unlawful act a virtually certain consequence?" And we have that so that someone who leaves a bomb in a public place can't say "well all i intended to do was blow shit up, I didn't set out to kill people" it doesn't matter, because death is a VCC of the bomb, just like crime is a VCC of the gun

if you're in England we can throw your ass in prison for just having the handgun...that's a weapon designed to kill people and we're better off without them in my honest opinion
 
Cool, now I can hand out handguns to all the drug addicts in town. Not my fault. They're the ones that pulled the trigger.

If you sell someone a gun, you are not responsible for their subsequent decisions.

You are responsible for selling guns to people whom you know have bad judgment, and, if it is illegal for you to sell those guns to them, for violating that particular statute.

But even if you violate a statute against selling guns to someone, you are not responsible for their subsequent statute violations.

I don't know the level of their judgement at all, I just handed them out randomly. Since I don't know that they have good, bad or indifferent judgement then I'm not on the hook at all.

If a woman leaves an abusive relationship and I later tell him, while he's in a drunken rage over her, that she's staying at such and such motel then I am an accessory to whatever happens to her even though all I did was give him an address.

Actions have consequences beyond the direct.
 
Yeah, now give an example where you don't know what the outcome will be...

your argument basically is like saying "The Queen is the same as Barack Obama because they've both been mocked for their ancestors not being from the country they are head of state of..."
 
Looks like it's that time again...

ST-OnNotice3.jpg
 
Yeah, now give an example where you don't know what the outcome will be...

your argument basically is like saying "The Queen is the same as Barack Obama because they've both been mocked for their ancestors not being from the country they are head of state of..."
Exactly. The situation that led to the birth of the Borg was an extreme one, and nobody could have possibly known what the final outcome would be. I can guarentee you that it never would have crossed anyone's mind that their actions would have led to the birth of a cybernetic race that would over the next X years assimiliate trillions and then in a massive invasion of the Alpha Quandrant kill over 60,000,000,000 people.
And I really think that with the way the Borg spread out over the galaxy, running into them was an inevitability.
 
Technically if the MACOs hadn't gone trigger happy none of it would have happened..

A lot of people have that impression, but it's completely inaccurate. The MACOs' actions did not cause the time displacement or the destruction in any way. The only thing it did was to put the MACOs in the wrong place when the predestined attack happened.

Okay, maybe you could argue that if the MACOs hadn't been there for Sedin to feed on, then she would've died before any of the natives found her and there wouldn't have been a Borg Collective. But that was just bad luck.
 
Well if we are to put the blame at anyone's feet, it ultimately falls to Zefram Cochrane. After all, if he hadn't invented warp drive the MACOs wouldn't have been on Erigol in the first place.

In fact, all the bad things that have happened to humanity in space are all his fault. The Romulan War, the Federation-Klingon war, the Dominion War, and the Borg. Plus all the conflicts with the Tholians, Cardassians, Talarians, Tzenkethi and all the other myriad forehead aliens of the week™ that have wiped out various federation colonies.

Cochrane is history's greatest mass murderer and the Federation erects statues of him and even names high schools after him. Shameful.

Aaron McGuire
 
I'm just waiting for somebody to find a way to pin the Borg on George W. Bush and/or Barack Obama.
 
Unlike the creation of the borg, the borg attack on the alpha/beta quadrants that killed so uncountably many most definitely was caused by federation values and actions - Picard and Janeway's actions, especially Janeway's destruction of a transwarp hub.
 
These two extreme options - doom and gloom and yours - are not the only ones in existence, Therin.

Not even close.

Yeah, but I'm not complaining about novels I haven't even read yet. ;)

As Therin commented, if it was all about dance classes and fingernail filing, we wouldn't have any books.

Hehehehe. Actually, I wrote tapestry. I realised when typing I'd accidentally picked something close to looking like I meant tap dancing, but Bev can already do that.

Crusher giving Data dancing lessons and Geordi building a model ship were both interesting character moments. Not every story has to deal with the ship firing it's weapons.

No, but while Data was dancing, a Romulan, posing as a Vulcan, was completing an espionage task.
 
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