"Oh dear, my great great great great great grandson is a liberal."
As much as I love Picard, you have to admit his liberalism is frustrating as hell sometimes.
honestly he really isnt, he lives in the context of his times. he lives in a utopia, of course he wouldn't think that political power should be seized by force.
also i feel like his lack of liberalism is highlighted in the first episode and 'A Measure of a Man' where he realizes he was being racist to Data, rectifies it immediately, and later defends him against institutional racism and effectively alters policy
janeway is a fascist and a war criminal tho
You think he just fell out of a coconut tree? Picard exists in the context of all in which he lives, and what came before him.
"Oh dear, my great great great great great grandson is a liberal."
could be worse
Show
Peter, did you propose my public transportation overhaul like I asked?
LAY OFF ME DAD!!Pete's dad looks over his extensive collection of USSR railway memorabiliaSon, how's the railway industry under your leadership? Is it improving the conditions of the working class?
Pete stares blankly at a picture of a bicycle wondering what parts could be removed to make it more efficient. Maybe if you took off the handelbars? He grumpily turns back to his father and saysLook, you blow up one town
I'd say use it for media attention and publicising marxist thought but let's be real if they get too much attention there'll be an attempt on their lives.
Remember that Picard canonically and tragically believes that political power does not flow from the barrel of a gun.
Which is a weird thing for the Captain of the Federation's flagship to believe tbh. Like, he is specifically in direct command of the gun from whose barrel political power flows.
Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun.
Yes, Federation ships are technically almost all science vessels but they are science vessels which can and frequently do go toe to toe against peer nations' warships and win.
And they serve the purpose of a warship whenever they get told to even if some have families and civilians onboard. Starfleet needs to have a separate military and science/exploration divisions. Having a ship be both a capable warship and an exploratory science vessel and everyone just had to tske your word that your mostly the latter seems dangerous
Starfleet does start to make that shift in the later part of the Dominion War with the Defiant and then the Akira and Alita classes, but the introduction of dedicated Federation warships also gets mixed up in the darker shift that the Picard show brings to the timeline.
But I don't think having ships which are both warships and science/exploration vessels and even having civilians aboard is not necessarily a bad thing. Starfleet ships are frequently expected to operate independently far beyond the reaches of Federation space for extended periods of time. That's the whole premise of the Five Year Mission. They can't rely on the Federation's reputation when meeting new life and new civilization and can't expect backup or rescue when going where no human has ever gone before. That does pretty much necessitate the exploration ships be armed. And the sheer length of the missions does make the crew bringing their families along a perfectly reasonable thing for the pampered postscarcity Federation crews to want.
The 5 year mission was TOS. In TNG the enterprise barely leaves federation space, it's not on a deep space exploration mission. Even in TOS there's plenty of times where they go back to earth, or are called to a colony or starbase. They never really seem all thst far from home. And yeah, you should probably have some degree of armaments on your exploration vessels, they use em to get rid of debris or to technobabble away anomalies by shifting the phase variance, so some degree is good. But they also really should have been building stuff like The Defiant way earlier for home defense. There's a lot of dangerous assholes out in star trek space.
The Federation abolished fr*nce several generations before his birth
Weirdly, it is canonical that the br*tish royal navy still existed alongside the United Earth Starfleet as late as the mid 2100s since Malcolm Reed mentions having considered joining it instead.
Keeping the British safe from Portuguese Man-O'-Wars and the dreaded Sea Lion
I like to think they have that coastgard because they have to defend their coasts from relentless waves of orcas that are taking revenge on humanity for killing all the whales.
he lives in a utopia, of course he wouldn't think that political power should be seized by force. also that relation would likely no longer exist, at least for the average citizen of the federation
