Ragnell

They would have to call cubes back from where they are pushing territory on the other side of their territory.

The Borg were not just fighting one species when they came to get the Federation, they were expanding outwards on all sides. So they committed the lowest level of resources they believed were necessary, and because the Queen was an arrogant fool, that was just one cube.

For First Contact, you can argue that having been thus far unable to assimilate the Federation they are unaware of the speed of human advancement. In the Star Trek Universe it has been implied that humans are EXCEPTIONALLY inventive especially when faced with a problem, and that the Federation is even FASTER than humanity alone because of the additional viewpoints added to human inventiveness. Basically, the Human Problem of Fantasy Games where the humans are an average, all-around boring species while Elves and Dwarves and others all have specialties? That’s not applicable to Star Trek Universe, where humans are especially well-suited to be engineers, and highly valued for their social abilities which foster teamwork. The presence of humans in the Federation is one of the ingredients that makes the Federation uniquely effective at technological advancement. Not only is the Federation large and powerful, it advances more quickly than the species that the Borg have assimilated, and has advanced to a level that the Borg never allow other species to advance to, AND it advances the way the Borg do by peacefully trading and adding technologies when it admits new member species.

The Queen never dealt with a society like the Federation before, and she didn’t expect them to advance very far beyond their capabilities at Wolf 359. She figured her cube was better, and that should be good enough and if by some weirdness it wasn’t she would destroy the Federation by going back in time and destroying its weirdest, least predictable species: humanity.

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Actually, that money goes to the Welsh and other Celtic peoples and ALSO comes from the British Royal Family, who is descended from invaders.

@Fazoo Your comment is just “The Rape of Nanking.” You were commenting in response to me not wishing to comment on Japanese War Crimes. Yes, I’ve heard of it. Yes, I had to look up the details.

My original point was that it didn’t matter what a country’s government had done before when weighing the morality of dropping an atomic bomb on a city, and because I don’t know details about Japan I used Britain as an example because I can list off colonization sins by the British Empire. Your response implied that I should specifically address Japan and Nanking. I did. I clarified to you that the US dropping an atomic bomb on a city had fuck-all to do with Nanking, so Nanking has nothing to do with the conversation at hand–the morality of the US dropping a bomb on an atomic city. Then I told you that war crimes in retaliation are still war crimes even if it had.

If you meant something else… What was it? That I had to be qualified to comment on Nanking? I’m actually not, because I didn’t know the details until I looked it up on Wikipedia.

It was a joke to lighten the tension but mine really didn’t cover much of anything in Asia. All right. Let’s get serious.

I can’t comment on Japanese crimes, though, because while yes I am not as well-versed in the history as I am in Western history, I’m still not going to comment because I’m actually not in the group that suffered from Japanese war crimes.

I’m also not about to get into a body count contest because that way lies madness and a whole bunch of “well, this justifies this” arguments.

But if you must know what I think about your Nanking argument, it’s this. The atomic bomb was not intended as retaliation for Japan’s crimes against China. The uS did not have the right to retaliate against Japan for crimes done to China. Pretty sure the Chinese, if asked, would not have voted to have a nuclear detonation so close to their country given the risk of enviromental destruction.

It wasn’t retaliation for anything, it was entirely about prevention. So, it can’t be justified by well… ANYTHING Japan did because it wasn’t a response to anything Japan did. It was, pure and simple, a show of force on the part of the United States to establish that “Hey, we will END this war.”

Furthermore, if it was justified well… it wouldn’t be by virtue of the fact that those are civilian cities. We all agreed on the Geneva Conventions and the other treaties making up the Law of Armed Conflict that war crimes don’t justify other war crimes, and the principles of military necessity, humanity and proportionality tell us it’s a war crime to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian-occupied city. All of these treaties came after World War II, of course, but they were informed by the events on the Pacific Front.

Basically, the actions of Japan and the actions of the United States in World War II were so terrible that International Law was agreed upon to make sure that people who performed any such action in the future even during wartime would be tried and imprisoned, and that any attempt to use actions like that to retaliate for actions like that would also be prosecutable.

Which is to say, the world as a WHOLE agreed that Japan’s military behavior, while horrible, did not justify retaliation against civilians and did not justify the atomic bomb and so on. The entire world agreed that war crimes retaliating for other war crimes were not justified.

This did not stop the nuclear arms race, of course, because everyone involved knew from Mutually Assured Destruction no one would be around to try the guys who started a nuclear war in the end. But suffice it to say, any use of a nuclear weapon is wrong.

I went to public school.

I didn’t intend for this to devolve into Whataboutism.

I don’t want to get into it with the guy from lemmygrad, but the idea that the US behavior can be compared only to colonized countries is ridiculous. We’re in the tier of countries like Australia, New Zealand and such where the colonizers split off from the greater colonial power, and we’re also in the tier of colonizers like Britain, Spain, Japan and France for our activities in the Pacific and South America.

I can’t comment on Japanese crimes, that’s for another continent, or if they were better or worse than the US’s or say, Britain’s. Still, if atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in Britain it would be a travesty and a crime no matter what Britain’s done. Same as if we exploded a bunch of atomic bombs and poisoned the earth near where Native Americans live. Which we did.

I still don’t think we’re in denial. Umm, the previous poster might be. But as a whole I think we know these decisions were immoral. I just think that, as a nation, we don’t have the political will built yet to make reparations. I think the left group is larger. The right is a minority, it’s just a minority where the money and power is concentrated. Concentrated in many cases by generational wealth, which means the same people stopping us from enacting any meaningful reparations are the descendants of the people who made the decisions. Which makes sense, those decisions got them the power they have now. It’s a hell of a thing to fight against.

But the difference between us simply may be optimism on my part.

I suppose I am being too optimistic.

I also have a major problem whenever I get the sense a European is trashing the US for problems and a history that are absolutely being ignored in Europe. There’s been a glut of that making me over-sensitive perhaps. My Brit-sense was tingling for the original comment, but it may be off.

Ugh, look. I don’t want to fight because clearly you are in a different environment and social circle and you’re right that stuff like the practice of overthrowing governments in South America to benefit businesses and a large number of horrors are not discussed.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not among them. And when it comes to racism, we are actually talking about it unlike Europe. The most powerful people in the country want to kill this discourse, but they CAN’T except in pockets of the most brainwashed home-schooled isolated people in the country.

But I resent being called delusional. Because we are earnestly and honestly struggling with this stuff as a nation. It’s just that we’re struggling against all the powers you name, and the dark history of the United States is not hidden like it is in other countries. It’s present and on most people’s minds.

I’ve been out of the country and we are lightyears ahead of other countries when it comes to reckoning with our past. No, we’re not perfect, but we’re a hell of a lot more open. You know how I know?

Because I was raised in Trumpland, PA and I joined the military and served in Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma and Europe and I was able to learn about the Native American genocide, slavery, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki at school, and managed to absorb the rest through pop culture. We had a variety of differing assumptions when we talked, but we still talked. Yes, I heard that Lee was a gentleman but a trip to Gettysburg easily discarded that notion. My history teacher was quick to point out the founding fathers were opportunists.

There is stuff, like the bullshit we’ve been pulling in South America, that hasn’t gotten discussed. That’s true. But it’s not just the radical minority that’s aware the country is basically built on rivers of blood. The awareness is all over our pop culture.

You’re not hearing what’s good enough in your liberal state, but I have been knee deep in conservatism since birth and I’ve still managed to pick up on the horrors of our national history.

Now, just for comparison, go ask a Brit or a Frenchman about the Native American genocide and their country’s role in it.

I saw those pictures in school. We know that Truman signed off on dropping the bomb on two civilian cities and it was a horror that had never been seen in the world before or since.

Dude, we talk about our atrocities all the time. The current push to whitewash Native American genocide and slavery is actually getting a huge pushback, because we talk openly about this stuff in the US and it’s only a minority that tries to silence it. We talk openly about the atrocities during the Vietnam War, and about the invasion of Iraq, and about prosecution for war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

You can say a LOT about the US, and even the amount of denial we have about our standing in the world, but you can’t call us in denial about stuff like that. We’re in conflict within ourselves about it, but it’s a well known and well discussed thing in the US.

And wait… are you from lemmygrad? The tankie server?

Yeah, it’s gonna be “too soon” on this one for another century or so I think.

It’s not the coffee, she smiled when she saw Spock’s backside. She leaned back to check him out.

Everyone who called Firefish stupid needs to come see this and reconsider.

This is known as “ruining the song.”

Twitter started out just following people you know, then famous people got into the mix, then you got to cuss out the POTUS, then Elon bought it and it tanked.

Zuck seems to think that Twitter is just a Facebook feed of famous people when no, your friends were there too.

Beautiful Day would have been worse, I think.

Mysterious Ways would have been interestingly ironic.

Yeah.

Now you have me thinking of other movie songs that might’ve fit Enterprise, though. For some reason “Don’t you forget about me” comes immediately to mind.

Wow. Thanks.

I think I like the Enterprise version different. It’s an arrangement that does what the better themes like TNG do, where you start off gentle and build to something more exciting. Not as good to me as TNG, but it accomplishes the task of getting you into the mindset for the show.

Really? Wow.