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Tylervo
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post deleted since it's a direct copy/paste of one from earlier by a different poster. -- Rosalind
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Another Lit Wish List Thread
- Thread starter ryan123450
- Start date
Yeah, I'd definitely want to see more comic/novel interconnectivity.
Oops I forgot that was actually a video game first. I was just thinking about the comic that was based on that.
Oops I forgot that was actually a video game first. I was just thinking about the comic that was based on that.
Yeah, I think the two Elite Force games had enough story depth and character development, that it probably wouldn't be that hard to incorporate elements of them into the novelverse.
I'd love to see that too as long as it's not written by Peter David. I've had my fill of him.
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I still want to see a Secret of Vulcan Fury novelization by D.C. Fontana!
Looks to me like it's a representative democracy.
Except that Athenian Democracy was not a real democracy in the modern sense; only a small elite of Athenians could vote or serve in office, even if chosen by lot.
Besides, the idea of randomly-chosen legislators never makes any sense to me. That's like saying you want randomly-chosen neurosurgeons, or randomly-chosen pilots. Representing people is a profession, and it requires professional-level skills. It's not like waiting tables -- which, by the way, even that requires skills not everyone possesses.
The canon has made it pretty clear that the Federation is made up of smaller states that have to have authority over at least one unified planet. There's no evidence that sectors are anything other than a navigational concept.
Except that he's explicitly established to be democratically elected in "Paradise Lost," not legislatively elected. Further, a head of government chosen from amongst the members of the legislature by that legislature is usually known as a Prime Minister, not a President. (The big exception to that rule is the President of the Republic of South Africa.)
Actually, it was his A Time for War, A Time for Peace that featured the 2379 Federation Presidential Election, not Articles of the Federation.
1. 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.
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). Kirk and company seemed to be under the impression that Ardana's working class consented to their status as workers and had no idea the kind of discrimination they faced. And Kirk made it very clear that the Federation government would be further intervening in Ardanian society at the end of the "The Cloud Minders." So I think it's safe to say that the Federation forced Ardana to change.
I agree that there would necessarily be legal traditions in the Federation that would seem odd, but to argue that the Federation would not be fundamentally democratic, I think, is a mistake.
There could have been political changes to the Federation between the time of TOS and TNG, DS9, etc. American women didn't get the vote until 1920. Was America not democratic before that time? What about when black men, but not women, got the vote in 1869? Democratic yet? How about when the voting age was dropped to 18? Was the US not a democracy until 1971? Times change and governemnts change with it. Just because DS9 establishes something does not necessarily mean that that is the way the system was in the time of TOS.
The United Nations is a body with democratic underpinnings and yet the Security Council has the real power and five of it's members have veto power. The General Assembly can vote on various subjects but one country on the Security Council and stop anything. What if the Federation Council functions more like the Security council. Judging by the large number of Star Fleet personnel we see in the trial scene of TVH it certanly appears so.
http://db.tt/7tLR2vA2
http://db.tt/eoPlNY5c
http://db.tt/mKOWWfLa
Notice the Starfleet officers wearing the same medal as the President and Sarek.
Just how much of the Federation government is actually Starfleet?
And who are the three people in the dias with the President, one of whom in in uniform?
http://db.tt/qJDaYjAZ
This small room, the Council Chamber, doesn't look like the government of an interstellar entity that exists on hundreds of planets. If it is, Starfleet looks to make up about half of the government. If not, and we're seeing a subset of the actual governing body, just how big in the Federation government?
An Athenian Democracy could have requirements for entry into the lottery. You must have a certain amount of education, or have reached a ce.rtain age or any number of combinations. Perhaps it's only people who have served in some capacity in a planetary government whose names are put into the pot. As you say, a small elite of Athenians could serve or vote. Maybe that's why there's such a large percentage of Starfleet officers in the council chambers, reaching a certain rank within Starfleet would qualify you.
Just because an Athenian Democracy wouldn't look like our representative democracies doesn't mean that it's not a valid democracy. It can take many forms.
Kirk's response to being told he was going to face charges for interfering in the affairs of a local government was to threaten to bring charges of assaulting a Starfleet officer. Hardly equal in severity and doesn't really show that Ardana doesn't have the right to run their planet as they see fit. Kirk's suggestion is mediation by the Federation Bureau of Industrialization, essential making the issue a labour dispute, not one dealing with voting rights. Nothing appears to say that the Ardanans can't keep the Troglytes mining zenite, just that they have to offer them better health care.'
The United Nations is a body with democratic underpinnings and yet the Security Council has the real power and five of it's members have veto power. The General Assembly can vote on various subjects but one country on the Security Council and stop anything. What if the Federation Council functions more like the Security council. Judging by the large number of Star Fleet personnel we see in the trial scene of TVH it certanly appears so.
http://db.tt/7tLR2vA2
http://db.tt/eoPlNY5c
http://db.tt/mKOWWfLa
Notice the Starfleet officers wearing the same medal as the President and Sarek.
Just how much of the Federation government is actually Starfleet?
And who are the three people in the dias with the President, one of whom in in uniform?
http://db.tt/qJDaYjAZ
This small room, the Council Chamber, doesn't look like the government of an interstellar entity that exists on hundreds of planets. If it is, Starfleet looks to make up about half of the government. If not, and we're seeing a subset of the actual governing body, just how big in the Federation government?
An Athenian Democracy could have requirements for entry into the lottery. You must have a certain amount of education, or have reached a ce.rtain age or any number of combinations. Perhaps it's only people who have served in some capacity in a planetary government whose names are put into the pot. As you say, a small elite of Athenians could serve or vote. Maybe that's why there's such a large percentage of Starfleet officers in the council chambers, reaching a certain rank within Starfleet would qualify you.
Just because an Athenian Democracy wouldn't look like our representative democracies doesn't mean that it's not a valid democracy. It can take many forms.
Kirk's response to being told he was going to face charges for interfering in the affairs of a local government was to threaten to bring charges of assaulting a Starfleet officer. Hardly equal in severity and doesn't really show that Ardana doesn't have the right to run their planet as they see fit. Kirk's suggestion is mediation by the Federation Bureau of Industrialization, essential making the issue a labour dispute, not one dealing with voting rights. Nothing appears to say that the Ardanans can't keep the Troglytes mining zenite, just that they have to offer them better health care.'
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Why? The most important lessons, about inclusion and egalitarianism and democracy, should have already been learned by Earth and its partner worlds before they created the UFP, and by subsequent Member worlds before they joined the UFP.
I would argue that America was not a genuine democracy until the 1960s.
Got the vote for a brief time, and then lost it until the 1960s.
But that's such an obvious thing, banning caste-based discrimination. It makes no sense to presume it wouldn't already be a built-in founding principle.
No, it is not. The United Nations is an international organization designed to include in its membership every sovereign state in the world. It is not a state, it is not a government, and it is not a democracy. The General Assembly is democratic; the Security Council is not.
False comparison. The U.N. is not a sovereign state; the Federation is, as I argued earlier in this thread.
I'm not convinced that the people we saw in ST4 were supposed to be Federation Councillors. They were all awfully surprised at Kirk's verdict; if they were Councillors, they should have already been aware of the verdict.
Weird question. How much of the United States government is actually the Armed Forces?
Besides, wearing a uniform doesn't necessarily mean they're active-duty Starfleet officers. It's entirely possible that they're current Federation Councillors but retired Starfleet officers who like to wear their uniforms at important ceremonies and functions. That's not wholly implausible, and it could, again, represent a non-Earth tradition in the Federation.
We do not know. But given that this is a high-profile court-martial of a Federation Starfleet Admiral, I wouldn't consider it inappropriate for the Commander, Starfleet, to attend.
You'd be surprised how small legislative chambers can be. I've stood on the floor of the United States House of Representatives -- it's almost shocking how much smaller it looks in real life.
Besides, the idea that the Federation has hundreds of Members is only current as of 2373. Star Trek IV is set in 2385 or thereabouts; it's entirely plausible to assume that the Federation only has around 70 Members or so by that point.
Again, I think you're relying on two assumptions that can't be verified -- 1, that the people in the stands are Federation Councillors (in spite of how surprised they seem by the verdict they supposedly just voted upon), and 2, that wearing a Starfleet uniform means you're an active-duty Starfleet officer. We already know from Star Trek: Generations's opening sequence that retired officers get to wear the uniform at important functions.
Canonically, we don't know, but AotF established that there is a single Federation Councillor for every Federation Member, and that as of December 2380, there are 155 Members.
How the Borg Invasion has impacted the political makeup of the Federation is unclear. We know from Losing the Peace that the Denevan state seems to still exist, legally-speaking, even without its capital planet; that the Federation Councillor from Deneva still holds office after the destruction of Deneva; and that the Federation is actively assisting the Denevans in establishing a new homeworld. So it's possible that the 155 Members number still stands after the Borg Invasion, even if some of those Members' populations have been drastically, drastically reduced.
Which is all well and good, but why should someone get to hold office if he does not in some manner hold a democratic mandate (be it through direct elections or appointment by a democratically elected government)? I'm sorry, but a lottery isn't genuine democracy, especially if it starts discriminating against people on the basis of education or work experience. I'm the first to agree that the electorate shouldn't chose people at random and that the electorate ought to chose people who are qualified -- but it should be the people who decide, not random chance.
Then the Federation would be a military junta. Lovely.
You're right, it's not the fact that it's different that makes it not a valid democracy. It's the fact that it involves small elites holding office without an actual mandate from the people that makes it not a valid democracy.
All that means is that Kirk's legal options are limited as a result of standing. It doesn't mean that the Federation's legal options are so limited. Kirk may not have the right to essentially take over a Federation Member's government (in the same way that, say, the captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise aircraft carrier would not have had the right to take over the Florida state government during the era of Jim Crow), but that doesn't mean the Federation Council cannot pass legislation banning the practices of the Ardanian government in the same way the United States Congress passed the Voting Rights Act banning practices of U.S. state governments.
Were voting rights even mentioned?
Oh, come on, be real. If people start pushing for their rights in one direction, they keep pushing if they're oppressed in another. If the Federation intervenes in one issue, they're going to intervene if they see working classes being oppressed in another issue. That's just how it works -- oppression cannot be sustained if it starts to fracture.
If we know that caste-based discrimination is a violation of the Federation Charter, and we know that the UFP was unaware of the oppression of the Troglytes, and we know that the Federation began intervening to stop one form of oppression, then we can logically conclude that the Federation would not allow Ardana to stay a Member in the long term without changing. They'd either force the Ardanian government to change, or kick it out.
Perhaps Ardana was the case that brought in the change to the
Federation that banned caste based discrimination. Kirk doesn't seem
to be saying "You've got bigger problems with the Federation that you
do with me". No mention of anyhting other than working conditions
seems to be made.
A military Junta would involve the military seizing power rather than
having members chosen by a lottery.
The medal worn by the various members of whatever body is shown
doesn't seem to include Gillian Taylor. It seems to indicate
membership in some way.
The people sitting in the main part of the chamber may be the councel
members and the three people on the dias may be the actual people who
heard the case and decided on the punishment with the President acting
in some role with the tribunal. A tribunal couldn't have a tie vote
except in the case of one yes, one no and one abstain in which case
the president could cast the decding vote. The council members may be
surprised because they didn't vote on the case.
A true Athenian Democracy, where everyone of legal age is elegible to
be drafted, wouldn't be discriminatory. Or are you saying that only
large groups of people can discriminate based on age or education
level?
The President may have been elected but there's no indication of who
exactly elected him. When Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple he
was elected as Chairman of the Board. I own stock but I didn't get a
ballot. The only people that get to vote on Chairman are the board
memebrs themselves.
Having a position of President yet being what we would normally call a
Prime Minister would work if they specifically adopted the South
Africa model as an example of a discriminatory state embracing full,
equal representative democracy. In that case the President could be
elected by and from the Council without having a Federation wide
election for the position.
How many unique races can we see in the council chamber? There's
Sarek and at least three other Vulcans, an Andorian, what may be a
Tellarite, a couple of bald people which may be Deltans. Where's the
short, copper guys from Journey to Babel? Is this actually representative of the Federation in the 2280's?
Federation that banned caste based discrimination. Kirk doesn't seem
to be saying "You've got bigger problems with the Federation that you
do with me". No mention of anyhting other than working conditions
seems to be made.
A military Junta would involve the military seizing power rather than
having members chosen by a lottery.
The medal worn by the various members of whatever body is shown
doesn't seem to include Gillian Taylor. It seems to indicate
membership in some way.
The people sitting in the main part of the chamber may be the councel
members and the three people on the dias may be the actual people who
heard the case and decided on the punishment with the President acting
in some role with the tribunal. A tribunal couldn't have a tie vote
except in the case of one yes, one no and one abstain in which case
the president could cast the decding vote. The council members may be
surprised because they didn't vote on the case.
A true Athenian Democracy, where everyone of legal age is elegible to
be drafted, wouldn't be discriminatory. Or are you saying that only
large groups of people can discriminate based on age or education
level?
The President may have been elected but there's no indication of who
exactly elected him. When Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple he
was elected as Chairman of the Board. I own stock but I didn't get a
ballot. The only people that get to vote on Chairman are the board
memebrs themselves.
Having a position of President yet being what we would normally call a
Prime Minister would work if they specifically adopted the South
Africa model as an example of a discriminatory state embracing full,
equal representative democracy. In that case the President could be
elected by and from the Council without having a Federation wide
election for the position.
How many unique races can we see in the council chamber? There's
Sarek and at least three other Vulcans, an Andorian, what may be a
Tellarite, a couple of bald people which may be Deltans. Where's the
short, copper guys from Journey to Babel? Is this actually representative of the Federation in the 2280's?
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.
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.
Very likely. After all, the councillors would represent the governments and peoples of those worlds, not the dirt and rock. Take the land away and the nation still exists. Just ask the Jews or the Roma or practically any Native American nation. A nation isn't a place, it's a people.
nope, but Dayton's expressed interest in doing something.
I'd be thrilled just with Choudhury or Kim mentioning "Lieutenant Monroe's team in security." It doesn't have to be any big thing (in fact, it would probably help if it wasn't, since most of the details in EF2 don't fit well with the novel continuity, and the rest of the sequel was a bit of an idiot plot. EF1 was great, though).
because Geordi and Bev aren't on the ship, Tuvok's subbing for Worf as security chief and Scotty has a grand-daughter.
i'd just be happy to get a mention of a Lt. Munroe and Lt. Murphy getting married...
i'd just be happy to get a mention of a Lt. Munroe and Lt. Murphy getting married...
