Equinox... I'm missing something.

[Refuge]

Yeah but Ransom didn't act in an unempathetic, rash, and irrational manner. He acted in a calculated, murderous, and sociopathic manner. He repeatedly, with full ethical awareness, trapped and sacrificed sentient beings to be used as fuel and momentum for his own purposes.

I would have thrown the bastard out into space to die a horrible death.

 

[Voth commando1]

Yeah but Ransom didn't act in an unempathetic, rash, and irrational manner. He acted in a calculated, murderous, and sociopathic manner. He repeatedly, with full ethical awareness, trapped and sacrificed sentient beings to be used as fuel and momentum for his own purposes.

I would have thrown the bastard out into space to die a horrible death.

Then I would have mutinied against you.

 

[Anwar]

Then I would have mutinied against you.

If it had been Kirk or Sisko, I doubt anyone would've cared over what they did to the Equinox crew.

 

[Refuge]

If it had been Kirk or Sisko, I doubt anyone would've cared over what they did to the Equinox crew.

I tend to agree. Janeway had that crewman on the ropes and when she had him facing one of the creatures he had been complicit to their torture and death.. he was sweating! Chakotay, second ranked Chakotay, deserved to be thrown in the brig for spoiling payback and er, information gathering. I suspect Jaenway would have intervened before blood was drawn but I would like have liked the human to be wetting himself. He deserved it.

 

[Voth commando1]

The Equinox incident is such an incident of Janeway's more totalitarian and irrational behavior.

If she actually let that crewman die I might have been tempted to shoot her.

 

[Refuge]

So the murderous bastards from the Equinox can pillage and destroy at will but should be respected and coddled with kid gloves, held up as an example for Federation rules to prevail? Poor misunderstood babies? Yet if Janeway had allowed one of those creeps to be delivered to their tormentors you'd shoot her. Isn't that hypocritical?

Sorry mate but you wouldn't make a commanders left foot ; )

 

[Voth commando1]

Indeed I'd probably do better in the mirror verse.

 

[Guy Gardener]

So the murderous bastards from the Equinox can pillage and destroy at will but should be respected and coddled with kid gloves, held up as an example for Federation rules to prevail? Poor misunderstood babies? Yet if Janeway had allowed one of those creeps to be delivered to their tormentors you'd shoot her. Isn't that hypocritical?

Sorry mate but you wouldn't make a commanders left foot ; )

Okay so why don't you go into your nearest prison with a flame thrower and save the county a few hundred dollars in hot meals over the next year, but be careful that you don't charbroil enough prisoners that they have to fire any of the guards, increasing unemployment and possibly homelessness statistics, which would be rude.

It's not Federation "rules", it's Federation LAW.

Don't worry.

Noah got paid for his bad juju in the end.

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[Refuge]

You know what they say. Live by the sword die by the sword. The Equinox crew lost their rights to be given Federation consideration, rules, laws, meals, time of day once THEY chose to screw with those rules themselves.

 

[Voth commando1]

Careful with that self-righteous judgement. By what standards you judge you will be judged.

 

[Anwar]

Careful with that self-righteous judgement. By what standards you judge you will be judged.

Like I said, Kirk played Judge Jury and Executioner himself and no one minded.

 

[Voth commando1]

Because we don't dare have anything called accountability. I mean it's not like we want our good guys to have any sense of moral center because that wouldn't reflect the decadence and immorality of the audience and hence convict them of their sins.

 

[Guy Gardener]

You know what they say. Live by the sword die by the sword. The Equinox crew lost their rights to be given Federation consideration, rules, laws, meals, time of day once THEY chose to screw with those rules themselves.

No. The Equinox Crew committed knowable crimes, that must be on the books. There was an appropriate legal response for everything that the Equinox Crew did which Tuvok said was prison.

Those crimes were Vivisection or torture depending on how smart these space dolphins are, topped off with murder, if again each dolphin was a living being and not a drone to a larger conciousness.

Seriously, if the Dolphins were just a tiny itty bit dumber, it wouldn't be illegal. No different than hunting deer or rabbits. Bang! Yum! Dinner!

flip-side.

The space dolphins killed 40 Starfleet officers and skuttled a ship, which sounds like an act of war, by rights complete extermination of the Federation's enemies was in the cards, if the space Dolphins refused to surrender to Starfleet.

Imagine if there were thousands of trillions of Space Dolphins two dimensions over, following Ransom to Earth. All the way to Earth. What else should have been in the cards for Ransom was activating the self destruct, so that the Dolphins would never know where Earth was, where they could kill billions and billions.

 

[Refuge]

If I commanded a ship or was crew to that vessel and I took it upon myself to deem a whole species as being fodder for my own purposes, and then I was stupid enough to be captured, oh I don't know.. after previously trying to takeover the ship of my captors, kidnapping a couple of their crew, where one was about to be lobotomised.. would I expect a hot cup of tea and scones and a nice little reading from Chakotay about humanity and the Federation? Hell no. So I'm sitting there and Janeway offers me up to the non humans. Geeze that Janeway is a meanie. Surely I would have to be man enough to face what I expected others to. Apparently that is too precious for the likes of Chakotay even at scare tactics level.

The surviving Equinox crew were demoted. They got off easy. The others self-destructed. They got off easy too.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Kathryn was not bluffing.

She was having a psychotic episode.

Chakotay was a wuss for not relieving her of duty.

One of the Equinox 5, Brian Sofin, did show up again, as a security officer in the episode repentance, which was about a serial killer who had brain surgery and then wasn't a serial killer any more, but still had to answer for his past crimes.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Brian_Sofin

You'd think that Brian would have had a valuable contribution to the plot of this episode, but no, he was just there to guard soup.

That was his punishment for murdering all those space dolphins.

Crewman Soffin was Neelix's valet.

 

[Voth commando1]

Because we don't dare have anything called accountability. I mean it's not like we want our good guys to have any sense of moral center because that wouldn't reflect the decadence and immorality of the audience and hence convict them of their sins.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Prison.

The punishment for their crimes was prison.

That's their accountability.

Problem is that Janeway invented a special sort of prison where the Equinox 5 became Voyager's unclean, because she didn't have enough facilities to keep 5 crewmen locked down for the next 40 years, especially when 1/4 of her crew were already terrorists responsible for the deaths of an unspecified number, possibly thousands of Cardassians, who rationally may have been worse criminals than than the Equinox 5.

 

[Refuge]

Because we don't dare have anything called accountability. I mean it's not like we want our good guys to have any sense of moral center because that wouldn't reflect the decadence and immorality of the audience and hence convict them of their sins.

I see selective accountability as a theme here. Accountability toward naughty Janeway giving someone the tiniest little threat of a taste of their own medicine. And Chakotay for all his spirituality turned an interrogation into a personal pissing contest with a higher rank. Where was his Federation sensibilities for the victims of the Equinox crew? Define the sentient species as being dumb or a lesser animal and it justifies their fate? Too stupid to deserve to exist but smart enough to be seen as a threat. Can't win can they? How dare they demand accountability, their way. Let's project selective Federation hypocrisy onto them after they have been abused by it. They apparently weren't that dumb after all to be buying that.

I would have disprespected Janeway if she hadn't got tough. That didn't make her immoral or by default make Chakotay moral. Yet I have zero problems viewing the suriving Equinox crew as being ehtically corrupt and long term offenders. My heart broke for them as they were lined up in their fresh uniforms with the horrors of being demoted. This accountability stuff is cruel.

 

[Voth commando1]

Sometimes as much as it pains you(or me) you have to look the other way.

Janeway couldn't do that.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The rule of thumb is that you do not eat anything smart enough to ask you not to eat them.

Space dolphins have language, so they are sentient, but they will never invent fire or the wheel. Millions of them can co-ordinate to attack a star ship, so they have a strict societal structure, and clearly not animals, even though ants and bees can perform similar tasks in microcosm.

I wasn't saying that they are dumb enough to be treated as animals, I was asking what if they were animals? If they were not talkative and sentient. One of the producers decided that the Dolphins would talk in broken English, so that it would seem like they were dummies, when almost everyone else except the Pakleds sounded like a 20th century American.

Here's the drone argument.

If they are killed by phaser fire, from a hand weapon how on earth do they survive colliding against the ships shields causing enough damage to reduce the shields? Every Space Dolphin that struck the shield must have died. Hundreds, maybe thousands of space dolphins striking the shields per second for dozens of hours, and days, and if the ship had made it to Earth, hundreds, maybe thousands of dolphin strikes per second for years.

Dead. All of those millions dolphins died, to try and break Equinox and Voyager's shields, when Ransom only needed 66 more of space dolphin corpses to get home.

Did the Dolphin Commander ask for the suicides of millions to avenge the deaths of 10s? Or are we misunderstanding the nature of Spacedolphin life? Is it possible that there was no loss of life as each Dolphin exploded into paste colliding with federation shields?

We have seen hive minds before.