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 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, asking first before enslavement doesn't make you better. It just means you don't want to waste resources fighting. The Imperium at least is honest about being pricks.

Tau remind me a lot of the Aschen from stargate. Oh sure, they may seem nice, talking about cooperation and sharing their tech and all, especially compared to those Goa'uld donkey-caves, but that's just because they are playing the long haul, gaining their "ally's" trust and getting them dependent on their tech, until they are deemed no longer necessary and slowly killed off through sterilization. Could take 50 years, could take 1000. In the end the pawns are always disposed of.
"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts", I believe the saying goes.

Not sure I'd agree that that is always going to be their end goal for the various other species within the Empire. They would retain, protect and support any race within the empire if it benefited the greater good of the Tau themselves.

The Greater Good principle has the same moral flaws as Utilitarianism really, such that it can be used to justify any negative act if it provides a benefit to the majority (or in this case for the Tau themselves). So a race that provides no long term benefit to the Empire (again, the Tau themselves more accurately) would potentially/feasibly be "phased out" or at least abandoned in the future once their usefulness had expired. But the Tau are pragmatic enough to keep onside the races whose usefulness lasts.


Not that this is trying to say that the Tau are better or worse than the Imperium, just that their moral failings are their own.