ENT - Bound

[clearspira]

Did you miss the part where he used ''killing kittens'' as an example as to why the lawful thing to do is by no means the same as ''the correct thing to do?'' You have just explained exactly what he was talking about just in a more long-winded way.

No, I explained why his argument that Archer should have started with the moral viewpoint on slavery was immaterial.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-in-the-21st-Century-715992

Slavery is alive in the 21st century despite the fact that it's been illegal for around a century pretty much everywhere. Even places that still had in on the books as it were haven't been practicing it officially, which is why it was still on the books, nobody was a slave so nobody cared to have the law changed. And the people that are slaves, well, they're being kept that way illegally.

Slavery has been driven underground, and yet, despite that the estimated number of slaves alive today is larger then the total number of slaves estimated to have left Africa, and not just for the colonial US or even the Americas but throughout the continent's entire history.

Making something legal or illegal doesn't stop something from happening if the people don't want to fallow or respect the law. If people didn't want to "kill kittens" then they wouldn't, except, you know, if you had somebody with a gun at the back of your head with the options of getting shot or killing the kittens - in that case most people would kill the kittens, law or no law. The thing about morality though is that if you have an immoral law that is being enforced, it doesn't matter what the moral position is, similarly, if you have a moral law that is not being enforced that law might as well not be there - as is the case for the anti fox hunting law in the UK. It's been illegal to organize and partake in a fox hunt for over a decade, that hasn't stopped them from happening. Why? because most people don't really care about fox hunts.

The morality of the issue only matters if Archer is pro slavery and the law forbids it or if the law permits it but he's against it. Since the episode wasn't discussing Archer's viewpoint on slavery the legality of the matter is, well, all that matters. Those women were free the moment they stepped on a Starfleet ship... or is it Terran in that era.

The first thing should have been informing them that they were now free, the second why - Starfleet/Earth doesn't recognize the institution of slavery, and then third, if you must, the moral question behind why Earth no longer recognizes slavery as a valid legal institution. But again, the morality of the issue doesn't really factor in, not like Chuck wants it to factor in. Basically, there are two ways to view this: slavery is illegal because it's immoral, and slavery is immoral so it's illegal. It's all a matter of what you think should be more important, and on a military ship I'm afraid the first view should be more important - desertion, gun behind the back of the head and whatnot.

I still think you are explaining what Chuck has already said. Archer's wording made it sound as if it was only wrong because someone had made it illegal and not because it actually is wrong. Where is the issue here?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Allucard the thing about murdering kittens wasn't a critique on the writing in terms of plot and theme, it was just writing that established Archer as a douchebag through the wording it employed.

[AllanO]

For whatever it is worth, saying something is illegal can imply that it is immoral given the context of how it is brought up etc. [even thought the implication is not by necessity/true by definition]. If a visitor says to me "Oh I'm going to do some dynamite fishing at the lake" and I say "I'm pretty sure that is illegal here." I would also be trying to communicate that it is you know generally viewed as a bad thing in these parts. Likewise if I say "There should be a law." about something (like dynamite fishing), the implication is not merely that I think there should be a change to the legal code, but that I think such a changed legal code better reflects my moral judgement of the situation.

Or if I say "Chuck is a dynamite video maker" and someone said "I don't think Chuck makes videos about a nitroglycerin based explosive." and I say "It is metaphorical, look definition 2. of dynamite at dicitonary.com is any person or thing having a spectacular effect." I am saying that to back up my take on how the word is used, being in the dictionary is no guarantee that that definition is how the word is used in the time and place we are having the discussion, there are plenty of anachronistic definitions in the dictionary and plenty of uses of language specific to a time, place or profession, but the dictionary often reflects and explains common usage and corroborate my sense of usage and by implication that would be what I am doing in that case.

So if I visit an alien world and meet a local alien and they told me "Oh long winded semantic debates have been illegal on this planet for hundreds of years." I assume they are implying that "and that state of affairs has been considered right and proper by most of us." So I am not going to bring any of this up, after all when in Rome do as the Romans do.

[Thebestoftherest]

Does no one want to talk about the episode?

[AllanO]

Yeah I really didn't get what that "killing kittens" thing was all about. Is this some kind of cancer research experimental thing, that been going what out me knowing it?

I think Chuck was referring to this https://www.businessinsider.com/us-government-to-stop-killing-kittens-bred-tgondii-parasite-study-2019-4 Apparently a US Agriculture Department lab studying the cat parasite T. Gondii used kittens as hosts to get eggs of the parasite for study and then killed the kittens when they got to old to be useful as hosts, but they have agreed to stop now.

Of course there is still plenty of animal testing going on by government labs or mandated by health and safety laws etc. around food and drugs, but probably not on kittens. There is a whole interesting debate to be had on the pros and cons and ethics of animal testing and so on, but has limited applicability to the episode and review.

Does no one want to talk about the episode?

The review seems pretty accurate in its assessment that the ideas, images etc. behind this episode were bad in the 60s from which they originate, bad at the time the episode was made and continue to be bad now and that they are poorly executed making the crew look really incompetent etc.

I liked the analogy of asking Cookie Monster to guard the Kebler Elves.

I think the unfortunate implications should probably include that the idea of the women in charge via sex appeal seems to be a magnification of the reactionary idea, "Bah, women really run society with their sex appeal and being mothers etc, they don't need jobs or the vote or whatever the issue of the day is to make them equal." Although I guess that is implicit in what Chuck said.

[AlucardNoir]

Archer claimed that he didn't want to take the slaves because Earth outlawed it. The point was that Archer himself should have recognized it as a moral issue and not an issue pertaining to legal protocol.

The issue wasn't a matter of not bringing up moral context, but neglecting it by simply referring to it as a legal contradiction.

No, no he doesn't, and I don't know where you get that from. The first time we hear Archer talk about the slave girls he is asking T'Pol for advice on how to deal with them. I don't recall him ever claiming he didn't want to to accept the slaves as gifts because Earth outlawed slavery.

I'm sorry but this whole "but neglecting it by simply referring to it as a legal contradiction" argument sounds like the kind of bullshit you'd see on twitter from people that would unironically self describe themselves as SJWs. She isn't free by virtue of differing moral values, she's free by virtue of Earth's laws. There might be a different set of values behind those laws, but it's not the values that give and guarantee her freedom but the laws those values are enshrined in. The only pertinent information at that time is her legal status - namely that she's free. The only moral quandary at that time is the one she brings up, namely that she and her sisters have been slave all their lives, what will happen to them now that they aren't slaves any more, how would they integrate in a society they have no idea how to navigate - a question that has actually been asked more then once historically when it came to the mass freeing of slaves.

For Archer, and for the viewer back when the episode first aired the issue of the morality of slavery had already been resolved - slavery was considered universally bad. Hell, in my own country the constitution outright forbids slavery. There is a literal clause that says slavery is illegal. Not just a lack of laws to regulate slavery but the outright enshrining of the illegality of slavery in the law.

As I said before, you can be of the opinion that something is illegal because it's immoral or of the opinion that something is immoral and as such was made illegal. Grammatically, the positions should be one and the same, but whichever descriptor you put first makes all the difference. You think the morality of the issue is what matters, I think the legality is what matters. Ideally they are one and the same, as is the case with slavery, but as can be seen from out little chat here, the difference still matters. I'm going to end this by saying why I think the legality or illegality of something matter more then the morality of something: the state's monopoly on violence. Under the present social contract, the state is the only party that can force you to do something by exercising violence against you. Now, that violence is meant to protect you against other individuals that would use force themselves - robbers, thieves, murderers, etc. by forcibly removing them from society, but it can also be used to against you to make you pay taxes that should theoretically go towards improving things for everybody. Ideally, morality would be the governing factor behind every single law, but as I mentioned before that has not always been the case. Sometimes the law and the morality of people don't align, and we end up with things like the Bloody Code, a code so violent and deadly it made people outright reject it as unjust and made jurors refuse to apply it via jury nullification. But that only happened because England had trial by jury. Things might have been different if it only used judges. Similarly, as I mentioned before, despite fox hunting being illegal in the UK for over a decade now it still happens quite regularly and nobody ever gets arrested because the people employed as cops don't really care, and the people leading them tend to be in the pocked of the people actually hunting foxes. Most people in the UK will be for keeping the anti fox hunting laws around. There is a law, it is moral from the perspective of most UK voters and it is not being enforced, meaning it might as well not be there. Morality doesn't matter, legality doesn't matter, even the force the state can bear against those that break the law doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the force the state WILL bear against those that break the laws the state governs by. Thus, the only thing that really matters are those laws the state will enforce and. Thus, my point that the morality of the situation was irelevant, the legal situation was not.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I don't know what the deal is with you giving page responses at a time, but you seem to misunderstand my position. it seems you're claiming this this to be a morally relativistic circumstance as opposed to universal. I'm certainly fine with the review operating under the stance that we can judge Archer for not calling it morally wrong.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

For whatever it is worth, saying something is illegal can imply that it is immoral given the context of how it is brought up etc. [even thought the implication is not by necessity/true by definition]. If a visitor says to me "Oh I'm going to do some dynamite fishing at the lake" and I say "I'm pretty sure that is illegal here." I would also be trying to communicate that it is you know generally viewed as a bad thing in these parts. Likewise if I say "There should be a law." about something (like dynamite fishing), the implication is not merely that I think there should be a change to the legal code, but that I think such a changed legal code better reflects my moral judgement of the situation.

Or if I say "Chuck is a dynamite video maker" and someone said "I don't think Chuck makes videos about a nitroglycerin based explosive." and I say "It is metaphorical, look definition 2. of dynamite at dicitonary.com is any person or thing having a spectacular effect." I am saying that to back up my take on how the word is used, being in the dictionary is no guarantee that that definition is how the word is used in the time and place we are having the discussion, there are plenty of anachronistic definitions in the dictionary and plenty of uses of language specific to a time, place or profession, but the dictionary often reflects and explains common usage and corroborate my sense of usage and by implication that would be what I am doing in that case.

So if I visit an alien world and meet a local alien and they told me "Oh long winded semantic debates have been illegal on this planet for hundreds of years." I assume they are implying that "and that state of affairs has been considered right and proper by most of us." So I am not going to bring any of this up, after all when in Rome do as the Romans do.

There are correlations between legality and morality, but that doesn't go so far as to equivocate them to the point of just differences in nomenclature.

[MerelyAFan]

This episode really made me realize this Trek series probably has the absolute worst amount of episodes revolving around sex. The franchise in general is pretty lousy in treating it as a focus for story, but Enterprise in particular is awful at it.

-The light hearted treatment of Trip's rape in Unexpected
-Archer's sexual tension based idiocy in Night in Sickbay
-Pon Farr nonsense in Bounty which managed to be both hackneyed and misogynisitc
-Botched attempts at an AIDS metaphor via Fusion & Stigma
-Risa in Two Days, Two Nights veering between bad comedy & boring filler

That's not even getting into the sophomoric excuses for titillation via the decontamination chamber being utilized far too frequently or the fact that any interesting sexual commentary by the creators didn't go beyond sticking Jolene Blalock in a catsuit.

Its a sad sign when the least embarrassing example of it being featured is Mirror Hoshi dropping her pants for anyone in authority.

[CrypticMirror]

This episode really made me realize this Trek series probably has the absolute worst amount of episodes revolving around sex. The franchise in general is pretty lousy in treating it as a focus for story, but Enterprise in particular is awful at it.

Yeah, at least the older series had the excuse of being in different times. Although DS9 and VOY less so than 60s and 70s TOS and TAS, and the 80s TNG had the excuse of being written in more assholic times.

-Risa in Two Days, Two Nights veering between bad comedy & boring filler

And don't forget the borderline transphobia in that episode too. Yes, the aliens that shanghied Trip and Reed were men, wasn't that so funny... god . Where is the headsmacking a wall smilie?