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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I found this episode of The Ready Room made me feel less good about the main episode. For example, at the end they’re recapping why eugenics is banned in the Federation, and they say it’s because of “potentially violent impulses”. But in Doctor Bashir, I Presume it’s established that it is not just because of the eugenics wars, but because if you allow genetic augmentation it creates a medical arms race where parents feel compelled to genetically augment their children to keep up. Is that being retconned or was just it just a badly written summary? We really don’t need Star Trek to be making the case for eugenics, you guys…


  • I agree with this. It was clear from when the lawyer called the eugenics laws “race laws” that Number One was going to get off somehow, but I really missed seeing in the courtroom somebody make the case that genetic augmentation is meaningfully different from genetic modification – in particular in the case of Illyrians, that they modify themselves to exist harmoniously with their environment and not to breed superhumans. Eugenics is bad, and genetic augmentation is also bad and I think corrosive to society, as is covered in Doctor Bashir, I Presume.

    Overall, I thought it was good Star Trek, but missing a robust engagement with the issue at hand which was disappointing. A better episode than last week, though.

    Oh also – it was very exciting to see a Tellarite! We barely see any of them, especially compared to the other three founding members.

    EDIT: Thinking about it more, I do actually think it’s a bit objectionable to call anti-eugenics laws “race laws”. I get that Starfleet is fictional, but in our actual universe, “race laws” have tended to go hand in hand with eugenics, so it really feels a bit … unfortunate. And based on this episode’s Ready Room, they seem pretty comfortable with the idea that Starfleet and the Federation are in the wrong about genetic augmentation, and I don’t feel like they drew the line in the episode or in the Ready Room episode between augmentation and modification.




  • Oh I love this explanation, thank you for writing this all up!

    With regard to their relative level of machiavellianism, I think being able to see clearly all the consequences of all their decisions makes it both a given that they would be more machiavellian as well as making it fairly ethically “clean” so to speak. We as humans can’t see the consequences of our actions so we have just to rely on what our ethics tell us is the right course, since we don’t really have a better guide. The prophets, otoh, do have a better guide, and we do have a fairly broad evidence base of them seeming genuinely to care about the wellbeing of, at least, the Bajoran people. So for me anyway, I am happy to assume that their judgement was sound, being that they are operating with a level of knowledge and within an entire framework that is completely unfathomable to me and I can’t really assess any individual decisions they make fairly.