Thread: Section 31...
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Old February 19 2013, 12:00 AM   #128
Sci
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Re: Section 31...

Dale Sams wrote: View Post
One: Child Founders, and that Section 31 essentially tried to destroy the Founders *Before* the war had even properly started. It's not my fault that writers didn't emphasize this and it's left to us (mostly you) to fanwank this.
It is not fanwank to bear in mind that there are child Founders. The fact that there are infant Founders is in the fact very first thing we ever learned about them -- they had to explain their connection to Odo, after all.

"Fanwank" is, however, a good way to describe the idea that all Founders are the same individual and that there are no innocent civilian Founders.

I'm not excusing Section 31. Or painting them as heroes or even justifying their existance. I'm saying the situation the writers gave us doesn't justify the moral hand-wringing over "OMGGENOCIDE".
I am consistently astonished that you can describe what is literally the worst crime anyone could possibly commit in such dismissive terms as "OMGGENOCIDE."

The Founders are not so much a race as they are 'the head of the Dominion'
No. This is fanwank. They are a race.

Again, just give us one line of dialogue about the other 98 kid founders...say there's a minority section of The Founders who want nothing to do with the AQ...say The Founders are all that's keeping the GQ from the Borg...anything, and I think it helps paint a more interesting picture
This goes to the question of how well-written DS9 is, not to the question of the justification of genocide against the Founder species.

T'Girl wrote: View Post
Mr. Laser Beam wrote: View Post
I don't care if Section 31 even saved one life - the mere fact that they don't answer to anyone, makes them automatically worthless and extremely dangerous.
That statement is insane. If a individual runs into the street and pulls a child from in front of a oncoming truck, the fact that the individual wasn't official authorized (and over sighted) to do so make their action wrong?
You cannot compare an individual to an institutions. Individuals have the inherent right to exist; institutions only have the right to exist if they submit to the authority of the legitmate democratic government, and, through them, to the authority of the people at large.

The idea that the individual 's action could (and should) only be undertaken by a government employee is again insane.
No one has said this.

Hartzilla2007 wrote:
Becuase all I'm getting is unprovable crap about how they would never ever do that for some reason or other.
What you're actually getting is provable crap that by canon, they never have, they never did..
Where? How do we know Section 31 has never tried to blackmail or otherwise control or influence the Federation government? No such factoid has ever been established canonically.

If they were going to do all these dastardly things
The question is not, "Are they going to?" The question is, "What insurance do I have that they won't?"

S31 saw the long range problem that was the Founders some three years in advance. And Starfleet Intelligence?
All of Starfleet was dealing with the problem represented by the Founders; all you have to do is watch a typical episode of DS9 Season Four to see that.

And Odo was infected in 2372, not 2371. The war itself started at the end of 2373.

And other than those hundred, is the average Founder offspring also born ignorant of the great link and all the other knowledge of the existing adults?
Are you seriously going to argue that Founder infants are magically born knowing everything and bearing the same responsibility as moral agents as any adult? Talk about fanwank.

What makes you think that there are any "children" within the link?
The fact that the first thing we learn about the Founders is that they have children.

T'Girl wrote:
Sci wrote:
T'Girl wrote:
Correction, the Federation's security, and safeguard the Federation.
So they say. I for one see no reason to take Section 31's statements about their purported loyalties at face value
In that case Sci, Section 31 if fully authorized by the Federation Council. There is oversight of all their action and deed. The plan to infect the Founders was actually thought up by the Federation Intelligence Agency, which S31 is a classified part of.
Okay. That eliminates my objection to the idea that Section 31 has a right to exist; if it is answerable to the Federation Council, its institutional existence is legitimate. We can therefore trust that its first loyalty is to the Federation and not to itself.

The question about the moral legitimacy of any particular operation is entirely separate from the legitimacy of the institution's existence itself.

The problem with you basic statement there Sci, is the only reason to think S31 isn't accountable, is because Sloan said it.
Sloan's goal was to recruit Bashir. Recruiting Bashir would have been more probable had Bashir believed Section 31 to be answerable to the Federation government. Sloan had no incentive to falsely claim it to be unaccountable, and had a strong incentive to claim it to be accountable. Given this, the fact that he claimed Section 31 to be unaccountable strongly supports the idea that he was speaking honestly about that facet of the institution.

If we disbelieve the statement that S31 is looking after the Federation, then how can we not also disbelieve their statement about being unaccountable?
Because he has an incentive to lie about his goals; one can justify all sorts of horrible things if they don't in the name of patriotism.

Package deal.
Nonsense. No one has claimed that if they lie about one thing, they must therefore lie about all things.

So you're saying that Great Britain would have been morally justified in killing every single German during World War II?
No, I'm saying that Great Britain would have been morally justified in killing the entirety of the Nazi leadership group.
Let me put it this way:

If Section 31's goal had been to assassinate the Female Shapeshifter, Weyoun, Dukat, and Damar? I wouldn't have had a problem with that.

They were the Dominion War leadership group. Not the entire Founder species.

Genocide is not justifiable.

And, no, the Nazis were not the entirety of the German people, so you can't compare the Nazi leadership exclusively to the entire Founder species.

The Nazi leadership certainly saw themselves as a "ethnic and racial group,"
No, they saw Germans as an ethnic and racial group. (Or, rather, as they called them, "Aryans.") They did not identify the exclusive political leadership group as a distinct racial or ethnic group from the rest of German society.

RPJOB wrote: View Post
Sci wrote: View Post
No, the final episodes make it clear that she's mad with grief and come unhinged. "It's not my death, it's my people's." Damar's resistance movement would not have inspired that level of reprisal were the Female Shapeshifter in her normal mental state.
From the script of What You Leave Behind

<SNIP>
She may be PO'd about being sick and dying but what rea;;y has ticked her off is betrayal by The Solids.
And she would never have become so enraged as retaliate so disproportionately had she not been facing her own species' extinction. It made her enraged and irrational, far from the cool and detached monarch she had once been.
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