• DroneRights [it/its]
    hexagon
    ·
    10 months ago

    The entire point of the Borg is that they're what the federation would be without the prime directive and a value placed on consent. If the Borg asked nicely, they'd be the Federation.

      • DroneRights [it/its]
        hexagon
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        The Federation initially rejected Seven's attempt to officially join because of their Borg implants

        I've never heard of that, source? It sounds like you might be misremembering "you can't become a starfleet officer based on information you downloaded from the internet, you have to actually go to class".

        Also, the Prime Directive is sus. "Oh, you can only access post-scarcity once you achieve warp travel." What the fuck?

        Warp drives and replicators are not a prerequisite to post-scarcity, nor are they a solution to scarcity. As we all know on this site, capitalism manufactures scarcity. Earth became post scarcity when it transitioned to communism, not when it invented the replicator or the warp drive. If you are talking about giving post-scarcity to primitive planets, then what you are talking about is invading their planet, dismantling their government, and setting up a socialist state. That's what the Borg do. If you want to discuss whether the Federation ought to move over to the Borg way of doing things, then I'm happy to have that conversation.

        • Abraxiel
          ·
          10 months ago

          Capitalism didn't bring scarcity into being and communism won't end it. It might be better at distributing resources equitably and preserving them longer, but the physical reality of the universe is that there's e.g. only so much grain you can get out of the ground every year and so many years at a certain level of production that the soil can sustain, so much land to be cleared for agriculture etc. The Earth is functionally a closed system and as much as communism might allow for technology enabling its matter to remain in a state useful for human social reproduction for far longer than under a capitalist mode of production, there's no solution to physical phenomena being fundamentally irreversible reactions. Even if we were to expand the reach of our species to the stars, that's still just kicking the can really far down the road.

          • DroneRights [it/its]
            hexagon
            ·
            10 months ago

            Picard Season 2 established that Starfleet (not the Federation, oops) rejected Seven specifically because of the implants

            Oof. That sucks.

            and I don't believe there's a sound reason to force people to go through the misery of historical development by themselves

            Because if you let capitalist species climate change themselves back into the stone age then you limit the number of fascist empires running around in space making problems for everyone else. Gene Roddenberry was a big believer in the idea that a closed minded people does not deserve to go into space and meet the diversity that is out there. Honestly, I wouldn't want the humans of the real world going into space either. They'd fuck everything up. Aliens, if you're spying on us right now: please go away. We're not ready to meet you.

              • DroneRights [it/its]
                hexagon
                ·
                10 months ago

                Something just feels gross to me about that kind of manifest destiny thinking. Starfleet's reasoning on the subject is that if you don't allow cultures to develop independently, you end up with less diversity, which can have terrible consequences down the line if the One Way your civilisation does things can't cope with a novel situation. We actually have that going on on Earth. Every country is pressured to do things the capitalist way, and that's why none of them is taking appropriate action on the climate crisis. There aren't any countries left that have novel solutions to offer. In Australia, the white people took over the running of things from the indigenous by force and it didn't go well. They suck at it.