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Yup. DS9 delved into other cultures properly.

Federation stuff. Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians and Bajorans in particular.

We saw them as more than antagonists and occasional allies. We were shown them as independent cultures, and explored how they interact with The Federation.

Part of the issue with the other series, which Voyager really showed, was that moral high grounds and such were easier when you didn't have to build the series with the after effects. We saw them appear, deal with issues around a world and people and then up and vanish.

With DS9 what happened has ramifications to the people and we had to see that in latter episodes. The Ferengi are a prime example where we see the continued erosion of their pure capitalist male dominated society starting to crumble into a more equal opportunities capitalist system.

Yup.

And for the Ferengi, it was how Quark of all people rationalised it whilst impersonating his Mam.

Women were an untapped resource. A market unserved. Assuming they’ve a similar 50/50 gender thing to humans? That’s a definite appeal to the purely greedy.

New fashions. New jewellery. New marketing campaigns for a market leader.

Yes the end result where Rom becomes Grand Nagus is a bit of a stretch, but the whole arc really works.

And since then? Sod it. Over There, or Back Then. That’ll do. No follow up at all. What. A. Waste. Like building someone a really nice summer house and pool, making the most of their garden, only to return and find it piled up with any old crap.

Which is why I’m hopeful for Picard. If it works, it might prove encouragement to continue pushing further forward in the timeline.

What I really liked and felt was very mature is that Quark of all the characters was very set in his ways but not in a malicious way. He never outright "hated" his mother and instead showed the very real emotions related more toward her causing trouble and upsetting the boat with her push toward change along with his resistance to change because it was change away from how thing were as he grew up.

I felt it was a really good display of how many people can often be in the face of change, esp major social changes within their country. People who weren't "evil or nasty" but who still resisted the changes all the same.

I always felt Quark was torn between sheer respect for his Mum, and sheer respect for The Rules of Acquisition.

He wasn’t a diehard as such, just someone who never questioned The Way Things Are.

He seems genuinely shocked when it turns out it was Ishka that masterminded his family’s fortunes. And whilst he complains and whines and mithers? He always did right by her. Always.

And the reforms Zeke introduced weren’t ‘now I are surshulist’, as a shrewd businessman seeing advantages in another approach. Employee loyalty, increased productivity, less chance of them ripping you off etc. Closer to have your cake and eat it than sweeping, selfless reformation.

But it’s the Klingon arc that really tweaks my nips. It builds on everything that came before, and feels organic. Like the stuff now being shown hasn’t been hammered into place, but is very much ‘oh they’ve always done this, we just haven’t had a chance to show it’.

Now, to tangent a bit, but within the topic? Voyager. Such a wasted opportunity. As others have said, it could’ve been a study in how The Federation, well, Federates. They offer warp capable species brotherhood, and share their technology. To see a lone Starfleet vessel hit a new, unexplored frontier, and start spreading the message of ‘hey, cooperation is good, everyone gets something of value’ to an otherwise conflicted quadrant could’ve been fascinating.

And, again without attacking the cast, we get ‘Captain Bellend and nobody advances for seven sodding years’.

Even if you included the Maquis part of the crew, to show a different Alpha Quadrant perspective on the proceedings? It could’ve been really, really good.

Instead? Floor sweepings of the TNG reject script room.

I mean, Harry Kim. Harry Bloody Kim. The Ensign Eternal. The Burger Flipper of Starfleet. He never advances. Never achieves a new rank. In seven years. Seven years of one of the toughest voyages Starfleet has ever know. That’s two years longer than the initial Enterprise mission! TWO YEARS LONGER.

How can you not get a rank up in that time? It’s not as if it’s a case of ‘he’s an incompetent boob, but he’s the only Ops Officer we’ve got, so guess we’re stuck with him, eh?’. He’s actually pretty good at his job, is put through hell (not as much as O’Brien, obvs) and not a single official recognition.

If I was Kim? And Janeway was my Captain? I’d have mutinied after three years, tops. And I’m pretty sure the rest of the crew would be with me on that.

 Overread wrote:
Part of the issue with the other series, which Voyager really showed, was that moral high grounds and such were easier when you didn't have to build the series with the after effects. We saw them appear, deal with issues around a world and people and then up and vanish.

With DS9 what happened has ramifications to the people and we had to see that in latter episodes. The Ferengi are a prime example where we see the continued erosion of their pure capitalist male dominated society starting to crumble into a more equal opportunities capitalist system.

A line I love more and more as time goes on:

"You're a philanthropist!"

*Qwark's look of horror*

Because there is nothing worse in Ferengi society than selling medicine to children at "slightly above cost." Truly, Qwark was Ferenginar's greatest monster

To be fair how can you advance up the ranks when there's not another ship to jump onto at a higher rank - plus I doubt there's any real perks or pay that you can get on Voyager for being promoted. It would purely have been lip-service to advance ranks for most of the crew at that stage when there was no where really for them to move onto.


I agree it would have been really neat to see them start anew, perhaps even ending up like the Vulcans were to humans. Seeing it from the other side of the coin and many generations removed from that time when Vulcans were mystically powerful to the early humans of the Federation. By the time we hit DS9 and Voyager the humble Vulcan is interesting but nothing really that special. A bit like the Klingons, they sort of stagnated as a people once they became involved with the Federation; though come the end of DS9 we start to see some of that old Imperial Klingon power wanting to rise up again

The other side that is only tangentially noted here, DS9 is the only series since STOS where humans are played as humans. In TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise they are, at best, two dimensional WASPs. They are what the body snatchers would have been had the body snatchers won, tea sipping and emotionless.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
What I really liked and felt was very mature is that Quark of all the characters was very set in his ways but not in a malicious way. He never outright "hated" his mother and instead showed the very real emotions related more toward her causing trouble and upsetting the boat with her push toward change along with his resistance to change because it was change away from how thing were as he grew up.

I felt it was a really good display of how many people can often be in the face of change, esp major social changes within their country. People who weren't "evil or nasty" but who still resisted the changes all the same.

The actor who played Quark remarked in an interview that the Ferengi were us, 20th Century humans in the 24th century.

I rather liked the part in the episode where they're under siege on a planet and Quark explains to Nog that humans as they usually know them are pretty affable, but put enough stress on them, make them hungry and angry, and they're worse than the most bloodthirsty Klingon. Of course, we get to see that in O'Brian's virtual-lifetime prison sentence.

The episode where the Vulcan Captain and his baseball team beat the DS9 crew is good too.

 Frazzled wrote:


The actor who played Quark remarked in an interview that the Ferengi were us, 20th Century humans in the 24th century.

Which is funny, given the attitude he holds towards humans in some episodes. When he's captured at Roswell, and in the episode where Nog loses his leg, he remarks that humans are as savage as a klingon if they don't have all their creature comforts, and is surprised at how violent humans were in the past. He always states that Ferengi are superior, because they never engaged in the mass world wars of humans.

 Horst wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:


The actor who played Quark remarked in an interview that the Ferengi were us, 20th Century humans in the 24th century.

Which is funny, given the attitude he holds towards humans in some episodes. When he's captured at Roswell, and in the episode where Nog loses his leg, he remarks that humans are as savage as a klingon if they don't have all their creature comforts, and is surprised at how violent humans were in the past. He always states that Ferengi are superior, because they never engaged in the mass world wars of humans.

Kind of wonder why he was even involved in anything against the Dominion. Ferengi would have made a killing if the Dominion controlled the Alpha Quadrant.

Presumably, because the Ferengi saw quickly in their dealings with the Karama how the Dominion exerts tight controls over economic activity. Such a level of regulation would be anathema to the Ferengi who fully embraced free enterprise. Even Zeke's reforms didn't extend to telling other Ferengi who they could and couldn't trade with and what they could trade-in, just how they managed their businesses and affairs.

Yeah, DS9 is the best Trek since TOS and it's because of Ira Steven Behr.

Butttttt Enterprise is an order of magnitude more enjoyable than Voyager. At least Enterprise has a sense of adventure, which Voyager - somehow - completely lacked, despite it being seven years of exploring the unknown. The characters in Enterprise are also eminently likable, unlike Voyager, whose characters with ultimately interchangeable. Even the few interesting story arcs in Voyager were entirely irrelevant to the actual plot (Year of Hell, for example).

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Can't watch The Orville.

It's written by and stars He That Shall Not Be Named.

Will Ferrell?

 judgedoug wrote:
Yeah, DS9 is the best Trek since TOS and it's because of Ira Steven Behr.

Butttttt Enterprise is an order of magnitude more enjoyable than Voyager. At least Enterprise has a sense of adventure, which Voyager - somehow - completely lacked, despite it being seven years of exploring the unknown. The characters in Enterprise are also eminently likable, unlike Voyager, whose characters with ultimately interchangeable. Even the few interesting story arcs in Voyager were entirely irrelevant to the actual plot (Year of Hell, for example).

The few enterprises I watched. It felt like I was watching seaquest...Which isn't exactly a bad thing. If I wanted to watch seaquest I would just watch seaquest you know?

Are you talking Roy Scheider Seaquest or Michael Ironside Seaquest?

I am going to give DS9 another chance, since I kind of get turned off by how whiny some of the characters are.

Though some of these Quark moments seem pretty epic, so maybe it'll be good.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Are you talking Roy Scheider Seaquest or Michael Ironside Seaquest?

Roy Scheider Seaquest ofc. The uniforms - the look of the ship - the film quality....Enterprise looks so similar.

Disclaimer, I actually REALLY like Deep Space 9.

However ... I think Yodhrin makes a very interesting point about DS9 and its connection to late 90s US culture. Yodhrin calls this “third way American liberalism” but the more accurate term is probably neoconservativism because the primary distinction between DS9 on the one hand and TOS/TNG on the other is political, and particularly in the sense of foreign policy and its impact on domestic politics, rather than economic.

But before further criticizing DS9, let’s keep in mind that TOS and TNG are not uncomplicated pacifist fantasies. To the extent that each show imagines peace, it does so in the context of “the end of history,” by which I mean the resolution of all important social and cultural and exonomic conflicts in favor of an allegedly unassailable conclusion that one way is objectively better than all others. In both TOS and TNG, the Federation is portrayed as either already substantially realizing this “correct way” or, at the very least, as more open to the “correct way” than its rivals.

The “correct way” is pretty obviously late 20th-century liberal democracy and especially the notion that the materialist “truth” traced out by Marx and Weber (among others) renders all cultural divisions irrational. There is also the IRL argument that liberal democracies do not make war on one another, which Rodenberry extended, with the shaky conceit that economy could be assumed away, to the conclusion that liberal democracies would in fact inevitably join together as a federation. From a Soviet perspective in the real world, this kind of thinking was just another form of Western imperialism, albeit not as paternalist as its previous form. From NATO’s perspective, this was simply “peace.” Once everyone adopts our assumptions, there will be no reason to fight. The fictional Federation of Star Trek definitely embraces this maternalist imperialism and it is never critically examined in either TOS or TNG. To be sure, the characters in these shows do sometimes run into murky situations. But they live on starships and, when a particular issue is not fully resolved, they can simply fly off to the next adventure.

That’s something the DS9 cast cannot do. They are stuck with and in unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, situations.

By the late 1990s, after nearly a decade after the collapse of the Soviet global rival, the West and America in particular found that it was likewise nonetheless “stuck” in history, i.e., the fall of the USSR had not actually ended history. Conflicts driven by ideological differences, up to and including war, did not come to and end. This is the realization that eventually saw the rise to power of neoconservative ideas, principally the notion that the conflict with USSR had been resolved not through liberal democracies simply existing themselves but rather through those powers, especially the US, aggressively leveraging the supposed superiority (especially economic, including via spending on arms and developing military technologies) of liberal democratic societies to pressure their rivals out of existence. Sanction regimes, military intervention, and ultimately even preemptive attacks became the accepted foreign policy tools of neoconservative government.

This is the attitude that came to characterize the Federation as portrayed on DS9 precisely because the challenges and threats in that series did not simply dissolve in the face of the presumptive superiority of Federation culture. Joining the Federation was not really a solution to the Bajoran trauma at the hands of the Cardassians, merely a (transparently neurotic) reaction to that trauma. The Founders had their own cultural presumptions that were not obviously inferior to the Federation’s, at least in terms of efficacy — which explains why the Dominion was ancient and unchallenged in the Gamma Quadrant.

More subtly, the DS9 show runners also realized that the real reason that the Federation had done so well in the last couple of centuries wasn’t about ethics and morals. It was actually a matter of geopolitical realism. Detente and eventual alliance between the Federation and the Klingon Empire essentially created a bloc that could not be realistically challenged by any other Alpha or Beta Quadrant powers. While the Klingon Empire declined during this period, the safety of the alliance allowed the Federation to thrive and expand. This unsettled the Romulans and the Cardassians to the point that the former were extremely hesitant to oppose to the invasion from the Gamma Quadrant and the latter ultimately welcomed it.

DS9 cleverly introduced non-Federation characters who realized all of this — that is, people who did not just assume everything assumed by the characters in TOS and TNG. And by the end, even some of the Federation characters were forced to consider these issues. They were not comfortable doing so, which was the “next level” of Star Trek’s relevance: if this is really a show about confronting ourselves then why pull punches just so we can end on a morally self-satisfying note?

I don't see STOS as a Pacifist fantasy. Its Wagon Train / Horatio Hornblower in space.

Manchu wrote:This is the attitude that came to characterize the Federation as portrayed on DS9 precisely because the challenges and threats in that series did not simply dissolve in the face of the presumptive superiority of Federation culture. Joining the Federation was not really a solution to the Bajoran trauma at the hands of the Cardassians, merely a (transparently neurotic) reaction to that trauma. The Founders had their own cultural presumptions that were not obviously inferior to the Federation’s, at least in terms of efficacy — which explains why the Dominion was ancient and unchallenged in the Gamma Quadrant.

Interesting point, and one that feeds nicely into Quark's Root Beer Hypothesis.

See, Bajor was shattered and vulnerable. And here comes Uncle Federation 'yeah, we'll look after you. As we not-so-silently judge your society by our own standards'. It is quite insidious.

Is there that much difference between The Federation and The Dominion? One uses force/the threat thereof. But both are extremely adept at imposing their own morals upon other cultures.

I think the key difference is that the Federation would like you to join but otherwise doesn't force you. It just won't help you out if you don't make moral and social changes to fit in with their views.

The Dominion though don't give you a choice, they march in and take over through military might and force your society to serve their interests without question.


Of course the Federation is capable of taking military action where needed, but otherwise unless you threaten it or others; its happy to sit by and trade with other races. The Ferangi are not part of the Federation and yet the Federation trades with them extensively. Meanwhile its more the isolationist polices of the Cardassians and Romulans that hinders heavier trade and exchange of ideas between them and the Federation.


In the end races like the Bajorians are sort of up against the wall; too small to stand on their own and thus forced to accept the Federation in order to survive even if it means they have to make changes. I actually liked that there was some hostility in the early series toward the Federation; that they weren't shown nor seen as the shining knights who came in to save the day.

It's just the 'Federation Is Always Right, And You Can't Join Until You Are Like Us'.

It's a trope we often see in Star Trek. The half human/half X character must choose between those two factors. And the human half is almost always shown to be the better choice.

Which is, kinda dodgy. I'm not saying this is intentional by the script writers, or some kind of hidden agenda.

But it helps show that The Federation is fairly insidious, even if that's not its intent.

I'm almost certainly reading too much into it though Of course, if it wasn't for DS9 being the besterest Star Trek ever, we wouldn't even have the info to have this conversation


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Consider the episode where Vedek Winn kicks off about Keiko O'Brien teaching of the 'wormhole aliens' rather than profits.

Yes, Wynn is a reprehensible religious extremist. One who seemingly only follows a given path for the promise of power and influence.

But she still actually has a point. Bajorans are a pretty religious society, and with good reason given their deities most definitely exist, and most definitely do interfere in the mortal plane. But The Federation is more 'no no no, strictly secular' - despite there being no real contradiction in discussing the wormhole aliens and Prophets as being one and the same. It's literally just a title to The Federation, so what difference should it make?

That's a sign of the Federation favouring it's own morals, over those to whom they are no more than guests. Yes, Winn deliberately blows it out of all proportion.

Indeed, Winn is possibly one of the undersung lynchpins of the entire series. Whilst The Federation and Starfleet put few barriers to an individuals Faith, this was the first time we saw a sustained butting of heads over the issue.

We're getting into a sticky moderation area here, as the next logical step would be to compare to modern religions. If we could avoid that, it'll save a thread lock and telling offs

They had money (or equivalent) in TOS it is just seems that the Federation didn't use it internally. There were a few episodes where Kirk said the Federation was willing to pay for something. There were other human, non-Federation organizations around then as well, like all those mining groups, it was just that the Federation was the 800lb gorilla in the area. By the time of TNG it seemed more homogeneous on the Fed side.

I have no doubt I'm forgetting something though.

There is a huge difference between the Dominion and the Federation, fundamentally.

The Dominion was founded because one species became obsessed with protecting itself from alleged, as well as hypothetical, persecution by all others. Its solution was to dominate every other species or else exterminate any that proved indomitable.

While the cultural imperialism of the Federation merits critique, especially if we want to understand non-Federation perspectives, the Federation doesn’t post the stark ultimatum Join Or Die to every other culture.

But for the sake of exploring new ideas, let’s consider the Dominion more closely: The Founders created the Vorta and Jem’Hadar to administer, expand, and secure their empire because they themselves have no interest in exerting power over others. The Dominion itself is just an incredibly extensive “home security system,” from their point of view. The Founders’ doctrine of bottomless racial paranoia holds that solids inherently want to eradicate Changelings and that, if Solids are left to their own devices, they will naturally attempt to do so. Therefore, the basic “foreign policy” assumptions of the Dominion are (1) that all non-subjugated Solids are racially hostile toward Changelings and (2) the only viable safeguard against this racial hostility is the subjugation of Solids. But what does this “subjugation” really entail?

Because Dominion policy is essentially a matter of countering a supposed existential threat to a single species rather than a matter of the usual political or economic considerations, one could reasonably expect that Dominion member cultures enjoy a great deal of practical liberty — Vorta and Jem’Hadar aside, of course. Those two races were genetically and socially engineered by the Founders as their instruments. And by implication, the role that each plays in the Dominion would necessarily be foreclosed to all other member species. So, no one but the Vorta are allowed to administer the political relationships among and between the other Solids of the Dominion and no one but the Jem’Hadar are allowed to organize as a military.

The Dominion forms a political constitution that, in its most fundamental sense, is ordered to the good of a “master race” served by “slave races.” But there are races apart from the masters and slaves; there are races which are merely members. The Founders don’t appear to require much specifically from Solids other than Vorta or Jem’Hadar. The basic ethos of the Dominion is certainly morally offensive to the Federation, inasmuch as the only beings that the Founders seem to believe have natural rights are they themselves. The Dominion is built entirely around the most extreme form of racism imaginable: that one people’s rights trump those of all others’, to the point that others have may have none.

But here’s the wrinkle: why offer an ultimatum at all? Join Or Die should just be Die. It may be difficult to exterminate every Solid one comes across but it is probably less difficult than administering a whole empire full of them over the course of millennia. Here we can see that the Founders believe that Solids do have conditional natural rights, something like how we humans view animal rights. As long as Solids exist they will potentially try to exterminate Changelings. But Changelings are willing to allow Solids to continue existing, from their perspective at great risk to themselves. Why? This is speculative, but I think it is because they have no external ambitions. They are content in contemplation within the Great Link.

Again, the Dominion as an interstellar state is first and foremost a “home security system” for the Changelings. They really just want to be left alone. But the only way they can be safe is to create a giant infrastructure of government, commerce, and war. This infrastructure itself is not even “of them” but rather is just another manifestation of the world of Solids. In other words, the Founders have no concept of Manifest Destiny. They do not in any sense believe that who they are is to be found “out there” — “out there” is a burden. The frontier is just dangerous, not exciting or wondrous.

This is the real sense in which we need to compare the Dominion with the Federation. The Dominion is expansionist in a self-contradictory manner. It has to keep spreading so that the Founders can be safely isolationist. By contrast, the Federation is willfully expansionist. The in ermost logic of the Dominion is un-imperial, yet paradoxically the goals of the Founders require empire building. The innermost logic of the Federation, however, is actually imperialist.

 Manchu wrote:
The innermost logic of the Federation, however, is actually imperialist.

I'm not really sure that's apt in that imperialism comes with a lot of insinuations the Federation explicitly rejects. The Federation in practical terms has few actual demands of members. The only one that really gets named in any part of the franchise even is opposition to caste systems. The Federation at no point expresses discomfort with Bajoran religion (only Sisko's position as a religious figure, which is something that I think reasonably concerns them).

The Federation system is expansionist, but I don't think it's imperial, at least not in the sense of all the connotations that come with that word. In the technical sense of being a "polity that expands its power and influence through diplomacy and military force" sure, they're imperial, but no one really thinks of that when the word "imperial" comes up in a conversation. Most people today implicitly link Imperialism with Colonialism, and the Federation overtly rejects the notions of Colonialism. They have an entire standing policy that is basically "no colonialism over anyone who can't reasonably tell us no." Federation members are all "as far as we know" equal under the law, are afforded the same commercial, educational, and professional opportunities by law, just by the act of joining the Federation. There is no apparent hierarchy of race or the dominance of one species over the others. The only things they explicitly disallow are legal discrimination, which isn't really enough to declare the Federation a culturally hegemonic system.

Even as DS9 explored the practical implications of Federation idealism in a world where you can't warp away at the end of the episode, it never really tore the fundamental idealism of the Federation down, merely subjected it to problems it needed to solve.

And for the Dominion, I'd point out that it's true of most oppressive regimes that average everyday people typically have a lot of practical liberty. I'm not sure that's a meaningful distinction to make (though I think your analysis overall is great). The purpose of liberty with regard to the state is fundamentally to tell the state "no." People in the Dominion can't do that.

This is backed up in DS9, though never given that much attention. The people in Shadowplay describes the annexation of their world by the Dominion as alienating and completely altering their way of life. The Karama are saddled with oppressive tax and trade regulations so extensive they have to "cheat" to trade even with neutral parties (arguably because the Dominion does not recognize neutrality outside of immediate practicality). We never get any confrimation of how the Dosi fit into the Gamma quadrant's politics, but they also seem to be heavily limited in what they can do by the Dominion. Resist the forced take over of your world, and the Founders unleash biological weapons to genocide your entire species (as seen in The Quickening).

I don't personally see much liberty in the "practical liberty" of do as your told or get genocided.

I certainly don’t mean to argue that the Federation and Dominion are morally equivalent. Rather, I hoped to point out the fundamental difference between coercive and persuasive power.

All the same, I maintain that the Federation is an imperial power. Imperialism does not necessarily entail colonialism or racial hierarchies. It does, however, entail a hierarchy of values.

I have an idea for a Star Trek show called “Frontier” that would follow the crews of three different ships, one Federation, one Klingon, and one Romulan. The ships would be jointly responsible for the safety of a reverse-neutral zone, a free territory where the three great powers which triumphed in the Dominion War would work together in colonization, exploration, and defense. I’ve daydreamed about the relationships between the characters and can imagine a conversation between a Romulan character and a Starfleet officer about these kinds of issues.

The Romulan would say, “There is a Romulan Empire. There is a Klingon Empire. But there is apparently no Human Empire.” The Starfleet officer would respond, “The Federation is a community of many species.” The Romulan would reply, “So is the Romulan Empire, but the vassal races are fully aware of their place. They are not invited to pretend otherwise.”

Now, this would be vastly overstating the point, for the sake of illuminating the Romulan perspective (which implicates a pretty severe superiority complex). But there is some truth to that perspective, nonetheless. The Federation is not really an assembly of many different cultures. It has its own culture. Many other cultures have influenced it, but it is nonetheless a unity in itself — and it is the dominant unity within Federation polity. Fully accepting it is not a requirement of joining nor is it violently forced on new members. But it dominates member cultures, nonetheless. Over time, the traditional priorities and perspectives of every member culture are supplanted by Federation culture in all aspects where there might be contradiction and, one supposes, in other areas besides.

In the Federation hierarchy of values, there are non-negotiables and there are incidentals. When Ensign Ro first beams aboard the Enterprise D, Commander Riker immediately reprimands her for wearing a d’ja pagh — this despite that Lieutenant Commander Worf is allowed to wear a Klingon sash. Clearly, Starfleet and the Federation more generally are not against some incorporation of ethnic costume into the duty uniform. And indeed, Captain Picard is authorized to dispense with regulation in Ensign Ro’s case (and presumably Worf’s). But note carefully how this goes: a human has the power to allow a non-human to express her culture. One could say, but there are non-human captains who have the same authority. Certainly so. But the issue is, the regulation uniform itself, the default, is a human cultural artifact — the ornaments, allowed by exception, are non-human.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As to “practical liberty” — all I mean is, there is in reality a certain amount of space for Dominion members to do as they please, although that space is merely practical and not conceptually guaranteed.

 Manchu wrote:
I have an idea for a Star Trek show called “Frontier” that would follow the crews of three different ships, one Federation, one Klingon, and one Romulan. The ships would be jointly responsible for the safety of a reverse-neutral zone, a free territory where the three great powers which triumphed in the Dominion War would work together in colonization, exploration, and defense. I’ve daydreamed about the relationships between the characters and can imagine a conversation between a Romulan character and a Starfleet officer about these kinds of issues.

Sounds better than anything CBS is currently throwing out.

One could say, but there are non-human captains who have the same authority. Certainly so. But the issue is, the regulation uniform itself, the default, is a human cultural artifact — the ornaments, allowed by exception, are non-human.

I find that less surprising in that, while undefined, Starfleet is ostensibly a human endeavor. It predates the Federation and it lets anyone join, and is the largest of many independent fleet organizations within the Federation and probably works most closely with the government owing to its size and weight of support. There's probably something to be said for how the human-based fleet came to be the most powerful, rather than the Vulcan Science Academy or the Andorian Guard, but I'm not sure Starfleet's status as a human artifact is sufficient to say much about the Federation as a whole, especially since pretty much all races in Startrek are humanoid, and the uniform is no more a distinct human artifact than any other unform. It's a unitarian, almost devoid of any personality, manner of dress.

As you say, Starfleet predates the Federation, including Starfleet uniform conventions (e.g., tricolor-coded branches). The uniform is definitely a human cultural artifact.

I like your theory that Starfleet is human-dominant, culturally as well demographically. That certainly fits with what we see on the shows. It has its own implications as to our discussion, however.

I should hope my idea sounds better than dog gak.

 LordofHats wrote:
" Federation members are all "as far as we know" equal under the law, are afforded the same commercial, educational, and professional opportunities by law, just by the act of joining the Federation. There is no apparent hierarchy of race or the dominance of one species over the others. The only things they explicitly disallow are legal discrimination, which isn't really enough to declare the Federation a culturally hegemonic system.

One of the things that has always sort of stood out to me in regards to this is that, one the one hand you have Starfleet Academy, which is integral to joining Starfleet. . . And yet, we have the Vulcan Science Academy, which is almost exclusively a Vulcan organization. I mean, you basically need to be born Vulcan to get in, and its a fairly major plot device for the few non- or not-purely Vulcan members of the shows. I mean, I guess we could make a rough comparison to MIT, however one merely needs to test in to MIT, whereas one needs to be Vulcan to get into the Vulcan Science Academy.

Obviously it never really came up in the shows, but we don't exactly have a "Tellerite Engineering School" that is the "exclusive" domain of Tellerites where only people from there are capable of entering it (except for a plot device half-Tellerite half-human character).