Voy - Renaissance Man

[Thebestoftherest]

Just to be clear, while we would never need to register people with superpowers, people with guns should be registered so that when someone starts displaying redflag behaviours, their guns can be removed before they escalate. That is my position on gun control. Also, nobody in the UK outside licensed professionals needs a gun anyway. Not even farmers need personal weapons, in fact, especially not farmers. They can subcontract to a pest controller if they think they have too many rabbits, and that pest controller can do a proper risk and biodiversity assessment first. The UK has some of the most biodegraded ecosystems in the world, thanks to leaving farmers to self regulate.

Oooo. I thought when farmers were mentioned there were still wolves etc that threatened farm animals.

We exterminated all of our wolves and big cats centuries ago - precisely because they were threatening lifestock and people back then didn't have the same animal laws holding us back from take the appropriate action. This is going to be a controversial statement i'm sure, but Britain is better off without them. I wonder how many people who cry about such things would be happy to have a pack of hungry wolves cross their back yard.

We have a saying in Britain - NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). It refers to people who want more cell towers or schools or big vicious animals in the world just as long as it takes place in someone else's street.

I do wonder how that effect the environment outside of the farms.

Given the population of Britain, it seems necessary. Britain is about the size of Oregon, and has a population density like Connecticut.

I guess.

[AllanO]

Basically anything any technological marvel like the Doctor can do any person with access to ship systems or the portable emitter etc. should be able to do equally easily. However that will only happen if the plot requires it.

So to put a bit more meat on my comment the obvious example I came up with that demonstrates that anyone in Star Trek (certainly anyone with access to the Doctor's mobile emitter) could do what the Doctor does in terms of shape changing. That would be Ardra from the TNG episode Devil's Due she uses holo powers to disguise herself as the devil etc. So if such shape changing is a super power that requires a police state as suggested then I guess Star Trek would require a police state (some might say it already is).

On the registration thing guns, mutants etc. The most obvious parallel is with cars we register cars and license drivers and somehow the car can still be the ultimate symbol of freedom to many. Even though I think most jurisdictions ban vehicles that don't conform to their basic standards from the roads. The point is more how we register and with what sorts of implications we attach both legal and cultural.

If you wanted to register all mutants, well everyone who can digest lactose as an adult is a mutant, so that list sounds pretty useless as everyone is a mutant probably on at least on criterion. Of course in X-men mutants really means those with the magical x-gene, but as depicted even the x-gene may only give you ludicrous amounts of body hair or something, the only reason to register everyone with the x-gene is prejudice/irrational fear (sure she is just really hairy and can't walk through walls today, but what about next year or the year after that?). Also the clear implication is "registration" is actually creating a separate legal status with fewer civil liberties not just putting a file in the DMV computer on your car kind of thing, but like changing your legal recourse on huge swaths of stuff kind of thing.

Registration of some super powered people has to happen as a matter of course in some cases, like if your superpower is being 9 feet tall that is showing up on your driver's license and so is registered. The question is should we create some extra special registry not based on what functional powers you actually have (being tall, controlling magnetism etc.) but based merely on our fearful perception of something like your genetic potential (has the x-gene).

Like no one seems to worry that the government has huge files on Magneto, that they built special prisons for him and so on. No matter what happens to the Mutant Registration the Magneto registration is going strong. Like the don't register all mutants movement really does not seem to be the don't register any mutants in terms of writing down in the appropriate police, military and medical files relevant characteristics and so on. However sometimes in the rhetoric they get very confused by this probably on the basis of not wanting to get the story bogged down in minutia.

Anyway as far as I can tell the average crew member of Voyager has to worry almost as much about Ensign Extra going rogue and using Voyager's system (communications, internal sensors, internal forcefields, the holodeck etc.) for nefarious purposes (including identity theft etc.) as the Doctor doing something sus. Tuvok has his work cut out for him, what he needs in terms of a police powers to keep everyone in-line we can only guess.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I don't know if I posted this story here before, so please bear with me. I chose not to own firearms because of this. Twenty-seven years ago, damn that makes me feel old, I got out of the Air Force. I was living in an apartment with a friend and an acquaintance of ours worked at a gun store. He loaned us a pistol to see if we wanted to buy it. (Yes illegal and stupid, I was young) My friend was enamoured with the idea of a full clip and then that extra bullet in the chamber, ooh ahh. We had no where to go fire this thing. It was not kept close for home defense. And we had none of the tools to clean or maintain it. So he loaded the gun with the extra round, then set it on the table by the door and went to the bathroom. I went around the table, unloaded the clip and chamber. Put the empty clip back in the gun and went back to my seat to put the bullets back in the box. A friend of my roommate came in as my roommate was coming out of the bathroom. (He never locked that door) Said arriving guy picked the gun up off the table. Pointed it at my roommate and pulled the trigger. My roommate was shocked and said if he had not just used the toilet he would have soiled himself. (I cleaned up the language for this post.) The guy that came in? Yeah he thought it was a lighter and thus funny. When he found out it was a real gun? Didn't care. No harm no foul man.

that story made my testicles retract so hard and fast my throat hurt. Holy fucking Hecate

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Just to be clear, while we would never need to register people with superpowers, people with guns should be registered so that when someone starts displaying redflag behaviours, their guns can be removed before they escalate. That is my position on gun control. Also, nobody in the UK outside licensed professionals needs a gun anyway. Not even farmers need personal weapons, in fact, especially not farmers. They can subcontract to a pest controller if they think they have too many rabbits, and that pest controller can do a proper risk and biodiversity assessment first. The UK has some of the most biodegraded ecosystems in the world, thanks to leaving farmers to self regulate.

Oooo. I thought when farmers were mentioned there were still wolves etc that threatened farm animals.

We exterminated all of our wolves and big cats centuries ago - precisely because they were threatening lifestock and people back then didn't have the same animal laws holding us back from take the appropriate action. This is going to be a controversial statement i'm sure, but Britain is better off without them. I wonder how many people who cry about such things would be happy to have a pack of hungry wolves cross their back yard.

We have a saying in Britain - NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). It refers to people who want more cell towers or schools or big vicious animals in the world just as long as it takes place in someone else's street.

It's not just a British phrase, though maybe the connotation is different here. It's usually used to describe people who want the benefit of some public good without dealing with the consequences of it for them, personally. Cell towers would be a good example, but another is airports. Lots of people who love to fly and travel will raise a huge stink about noisy airplanes near them. Also people who actively lobby to prevent homeless shelters from being built where they might ruin the tone of the neighborhood.

[chaos42]

would be interesting, though i think that since so few episodes are left he should have some sort of big count down to the end for it, same for the other massive series hes doing.

other wise i like this episode, it does make the doctor out to be quite the bad ass when it comes to doing anything as hes able to keep this going so long

[Muzer]

I know there's been talk on reintroducing wolves to places like the remote parts of Scotland. While Britain is generally quite densely populated, not all of it is. Suspect the thinking is it'll do quite a lot of good for the ecosystem, as similar reintroductions in American national parks have. Reintroducing wolves in populated areas? Yeah, I don't think anybody is suggesting that.

[Thebestoftherest]

I mean unless every square inch is a city on that island there got to be some ecosystem.

[Muzer]

I mean unless every square inch is a city on that island there got to be some ecosystem.

Quite, though most of England and Northern Ireland, and much of Wales, is of course farmland, which (as I'm pretty sure sfdebris points out in one of his reviews — maybe Insurrection or possibly DS9's Paradise?) is very much not a natural ecosystem. It's only Scotland that has a majority of natural ecosystem, because of its large areas of wilderness especially in the highlands.

[Rocketboy1313]

We have a saying in Britain - NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). It refers to people who want more cell towers or schools or big vicious animals in the world just as long as it takes place in someone else's street.

That phrase exists in the US, but it is kind of flipped.
It refers to people who begrudgingly acknowledge that certain things need to exist, but that it should not be near them.
They are not trying to develop anything (schools, cell towers, etc), they mostly just bitch about stuff and block its development.

[CrypticMirror]

I mean unless every square inch is a city on that island there got to be some ecosystem.

Quite, though most of England and Northern Ireland, and much of Wales, is of course farmland, which (as I'm pretty sure sfdebris points out in one of his reviews — maybe Insurrection or possibly DS9's Paradise?) is very much not a natural ecosystem. It's only Scotland that has a majority of natural ecosystem, because of its large areas of wilderness especially in the highlands.

Grouse moors, which make up the majority of the highlands, are not natural ecosystems. They are, if anything, even more intensively managed than actual farmland. But for historical-political reasons are not recorded as such.