^ Where do you get the idea that it isn't?
Can a colony separate from the Federation?
- Thread starter The Overlord
- Start date
every one is free...as long as you follow the rules
I'd assume there are things in place in order to allow some species to continue their weird sex rituals that are illegal everywhere else. For instance I'm sure there would be a line about sexual relations with species that come to maturity at a "younger" age than others in order to avoid having a species that comes to maturity at 5 Earth-years old from getting a human in trouble for pedophilia or something.
Or the Federation is too controlling and the Maquis actually formed to have sex with whomever they wanted.
That's just common sense. Without that, you have anarchy.
As for "The Disease" and the list of medically approved species: That's a Starfleet regulation, not a Federation rule.
Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security deserve neither.
Warren Ellis had something fantastic to say about alien STDs.
"She was beautiful, and he loved every second of it, but three days later, his junk fell off and then he shat out all his internal organs."
There's differences between interspecial sex being approved as "safe" by medical science, the church making claims about spiritual purity if you try to bang the unclean, and the the State Department throwing down a fuck embargo to get a better trade deal on space corn.
Interracial marriage has only been (completely) legal in America since 1967.
Wait?
That law just had to be about any other race hooking up with whitey, right? Sure technically it covered every one, but it must have probably only been enforced whenever a white person felt like living dangerous?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage
Are you saying it isn't?
If platitudes like that had any relevance to the current discussion, I'd be more willing to listen.
(The Federation is hardly the most authoritarian government we've ever seen, at any rate. Apart from "no caste based discrimination" and "member worlds must have one government", individual Federation planets are left to run their own local affairs pretty much as they see fit. That seems a rather healthy attitude to have...)
In any case, remember what I just said. The rule about interspecies sex in "The Disease" (and also the Deltan oath of celibacy) is a Starfleet regulation. It applies to Starfleet personnel. Normal citizens of the Federation can have (consensual) sex with whoever they want - there's never been any indication they can't. But Harry Kim, being a Starfleet officer, must follow Starfleet regs. Are you suggesting that since Starfleet (like any other military) puts down regulations its personnel must follow, therefore IT doesn't love freedom?
The Starfleet regulation "seems" to be don't stick your dick into anything UNKNOWN that might be a sentient woodchipper, and that everything might as well be a sentient woodchipper until we have proof otherwise.
After the dangerousness can be accessed and judged, rules and then laws can be figured out that step hand in hand with public safety.
Remember the butthurt of ANIS?
If there actually was a species who was toxic, or dangerous to any particular species in the Federation, there would be laws against doing something so foolish or dangerous to risk a possibly terminal health hazard for no better reason than love, ignorance or stupidity.
CNN reported a few dozen cases of Humans with feline AIDS recently.
Never mind.
You're probably safe.
After the dangerousness can be accessed and judged, rules and then laws can be figured out that step hand in hand with public safety.
Remember the butthurt of ANIS?
If there actually was a species who was toxic, or dangerous to any particular species in the Federation, there would be laws against doing something so foolish or dangerous to risk a possibly terminal health hazard for no better reason than love, ignorance or stupidity.
CNN reported a few dozen cases of Humans with feline AIDS recently.
Never mind.
You're probably safe.
Would the Federation wage war to prevent a colony from establishing independence?
The Ocampa, for instance.
Kor
The Ocampa, for instance.
Kor
If platitudes like that had any relevance to the current discussion, I'd be more willing to listen.
(The Federation is hardly the most authoritarian government we've ever seen, at any rate. Apart from "no caste based discrimination" and "member worlds must have one government", individual Federation planets are left to run their own local affairs pretty much as they see fit. That seems a rather healthy attitude to have...)
In any case, remember what I just said. The rule about interspecies sex in "The Disease" (and also the Deltan oath of celibacy) is a Starfleet regulation. It applies to Starfleet personnel. Normal citizens of the Federation can have (consensual) sex with whoever they want - there's never been any indication they can't. But Harry Kim, being a Starfleet officer, must follow Starfleet regs. Are you suggesting that since Starfleet (like any other military) puts down regulations its personnel must follow, therefore IT doesn't love freedom?
The Fed doesn't love freedom. The Fed doesn't love or hate anything. Its members, civilian and Starfleet, love or hate or are indifferent to freedom w varying degrees of hope and cynicism. The Fed is a governmental bureaucracy that has a lot of plates to keep spinning. One of the themes of ST from the very beginning is how optimistic people balance hope with reality and the understanding that are those who aren't interested in or ready for freedom. those who distrust each other. Quite often, the best one can hope for is a sort of peace and quiet between The Fed, like all governments, doesn't have the luxury of "loving" freedom, much less allowing it. It has to settle for a kind of benign dictatorship.
Trip was probably the poster boy for this particular regulation!
It's off topic a bit, but I always wondered what if there's a pre-warp civilization very close or among the core worlds of the Federation, that are a warrior and xenophobic people. What would the Federation do when they achieve warp capability? Deny them any chance to colonize outside of their star system as their nearest neighboring star systems are already populated with colonies, outposts and other Federation members or protectorates?
Benjamin Franklin wasn't an anarchist. Societies have rules, and he's one of the people who helped set up the rules for American society.
No, but he was a traitor to the British Crown.
Ben helped create a weak system of government that could easily be overthrown if it got uppity.
Anarchy was unecessary.
Anarchy was unecessary.
Last edited:
Yeah, so? He still believed in rules, just not their rules. Societies having rules is not "sacrificing freedom". Your freedom to swing your arms ends where the other person's nose begins.
Wasn't there an episode of TNG where the writers wanted a colony to be wanting to leave the Fed and they were being, um, discouraged from doing so. Roddenberry said essentially what was said here: It doesn't happen, people don't want to leave. The writers (Snodgrass IIRC) asked "But what if?" and GR repeated "It doesn't happen." So it became another planet with a colony.
Ask my mommy if she has a rule about flying kites during thunderstorms.
The Federation is remiss to identify the existence of post warp culture to prewarp cultures, which has to be bloody hard after the invention of radio telescopes but still decades or centuries before the invention of warp.
Truman? (That Jim Carey Movie.)
It has to be easier to cloak an area in space (a prewarp culture at our level of technology.) with some benign masking agent (like frosted glass coating an entire solar system, but obviously not actually literally frosted glass) that diffuses the presence of millions of occupied worlds out there as occupied, without having that prewarp culture thinking that their science is bad or that right science is wrong.
Although if there is only a few dozen hard core telescopes, in each of the dozen worlds inside Federation space who are being infantalized, it wouldn't be too hard to Britta the results whenever Astronomers noticed something they shouldn't have.
Similar threads
