Things like starving people on Bajor don't make much sense

[Destructor]

It's easy to say things like "we have the resources to feed the world right now", but there's really no proof that we can really do this. Do we have enough money to pay for all this? Do we have the ability to distribute this food amongst every human being on Earth? How would we ensure it gets there? Do we have that kind of infrastructure to make sure everyone gets their share? Do we *really* have enough food to go around? There's no answer to any of these questions.

there is. the world produces more than 650 million tons of each rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes per year, that translates to roughly 100 kg of each crop per year for every human alive. not counted the 1,000s other eadible things, there should be no hunger.

Yeah, this. Plus think about the MASSIVE amount of money and resources we spend on, well, pointless shit. The money it takes to sustain the luxuries of the west FAR outweighs what it would cost to feed the third world, by many magnitudes. Hell, the budget of 'Avatar' alone would feed half a billion people (for a day), and that's just one movie. I'm not even taking into account military spending, which is a third of the entire federal budget in the US. That alone could feed the third world if used effectively.

Now, I'm not placing a moral judgment on these facts. But they are facts.

 

[Timo]

Show me one matte painting of a large Bajoran metropolitan area.

Umm, all of them?

Really, whenever they used mattes on Bajor, these conveyed scale and grandeur with massive domed (supposedly governmental) buildings and well-organized waterworks. This was true of the establishing shots of "Emissary", still showing some scars of the occupation; of the later shots of recovering Bajor; and even of the artwork on ancient Bajoran cities (although "ancient" only in the relative sense, being a few thousand years old when the Bajoran civilization supposedly spans hundreds of millennia).

When we saw location shots, these were naturally of "desolate" areas since it would have been prohibitively expensive to fake Bajoran cities. But there was story logic to this, as the location shoots related to Kira's history as a resistance fighter; the resistance either operated in desolate areas, or then got captured.

Bajor seems to feature lots of small villages, for sure. And Bajorans seem to have psychological blocks against expansion and exploration, as there are still mountain ranges on the planet that have never been properly surveyed despite the hundreds of millennia of history - and even a perfectly habitable moon that was never settled, despite centuries of spaceflight history! None of this means Bajor would be lacking in urban settings, industrial infrastructure or technological knowhow.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[James Pike]

I actually just got done watching The Emissary about 30 minutes ago. They clearly state that the Cardassians stripped Bajor of all it's natural resources, and that was the key factor for them leaving. Bajor was no longer usable by them.
As far as slave labor, it makes sense when you don;t value the lives of the slaves. It's cheaper than automation. You don't have to build advanced machines and move them and have skilled laborers maintain them, and it keeps the oppressed busy so they don't have the time/energy to revolt on you.

 

[Timo]

But again, where are the actual references to Bajoran slave labor?

Bajoran prisoners were put to work, yes. But we don't hear that they would have been imprisoned for their labor; rather, Cardassians would have had plenty of reasons to imprison Bajorans for their resistance activities, or for their civic crimes for that matter (we don't know if the occupiers allowed a native Bajoran justice system to continue operating, although they didn't hesitate to create "Constable Odo" when it fit their plans). Rather than let them sit in their cells watching threedee and knitting, Cardassians might impose punishments more familiar from their own culture - punishments a Cardassian criminal back home would be subjected to if caught. These could well include hard labor.

Cardassians were relatively consistently portrayed as the Space Nazis, I guess, but it's quite possible to examine the evidence in different light as well. Not everything the Cardies did need have been the work of moustache-twirling villains (especially since moustaches seem to have gone out of fashion on Cardassia after "The Wounded").

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

But again, where are the actual references to Bajoran slave labor?

The flashback sequences on DS9 ("Necessary Evil")

Kira describing the labor camp she helped liberate ("Duet")

 

[1hi]

I'd think it's a political problem more than a technological one.

If a government is organized badly, and they prevent goods from being sold, i could see starvation even with replicators.

 

[Timo]

The flashback sequences on DS9 ("Necessary Evil")

There are Bajorans working aboard Terok Nor (which sounds like an unbelievable security risk), but no actual hints of slavery there.

The PA system mentions a "work detail" tomorrow for, I suppose, some of the Bajorans, impying they don't get "work detail" every day. Also, Kira previously "held a job she wasn't supposed to quit", rather than being forced to work; she lost the job when she hit a supervisor (or at least that was part of her cover story for infiltrating Terok Nor). For all we know, those Bajorans who reached Terok Nor were privileged Cardassian pets rather than lowly slaves.

At most, one might speculate that the people working on the mines dirtside might be slaves, because Kira's mission of sabotage against the station (with a little assassination on the side) was supposed to give those poor miners a day off...

Kira describing the labor camp she helped liberate ("Duet")

But that could easily fall under the clause of "prisoners are put to work", rather than the "workers are kept imprisoned" one. Gallitep could have been an example of a planetwide system of forced labor - or then a rare maximum punishment facility.

In "The Homecoming", we learn that Cardassians just love to make their prisoners do meaningless manual work, such as the rock-picking they subjected Li Nalas to. We don't learn that places like Gallitep would have been of actual significance to the mining industry that channeled its products to Terok Nor for refinement and export...


Timo Saloniemi