ONEG video: Hide And Q

[Xess]

Great review, love the Trekified Fallout 3 intro.

[Samuel]

I should clarify again before someone accuses me of dishonesty. We are covering several different scenarios here- the main ones I am concentrating on are Federation as is and Federation as should be. As is would be the plan involving Section 31- mostly because they would be the only group that could get away with it secretly. That would be the puppet state plan with extreme secrecy. For a more sane version of the Federation, a more blatant approach would be done.

As for my position on culture- you can have any culture you like, as long as it isn't oppressive and doesn't hurt other people. Needless to say, most of them will be slightly bulldozed over.

[Wyrm]

His point about Japan is they can learn... but it won't change them socially.

Of course they can learn. But the Japanese can only learn what the Japanese society knows about. In a closed, stratified society that the Japanese were living in at the time, there was no new, fresh knowledge coming in from outside or generated internally. As it was absent both internal and external forces that create genuinely new things to learn about, nobody learns anything different than what was known last time.

Almost certain it is false- the Japanese certainly changed in the example- just not in the ways that were good for their neighbors.

Quite. The Meiji restoration abolished the Shogunate, but it didn't assign any power at all to the emperor or the parlament, and lead to the Daimyo controlling everything. (Apparently, the prinicple that the parlament of a country should have some sort of real power was missed by the Japanese.) Of course, these Daimyo had ambitions of their own, and now that the world was opened up to them, they could pursue them without stepping on each other's toes as they would have to do in the past. And they had new goodies to do it with, too.

[Patrick Degan]

His point about Japan is they can learn... but it won't change them socially.

Of course they can learn. But the Japanese can only learn what the Japanese society knows about. In a closed, stratified society that the Japanese were living in at the time, there was no new, fresh knowledge coming in from outside or generated internally. As it was absent both internal and external forces that create genuinely new things to learn about, nobody learns anything different than what was known last time.

Which does not, no matter how much the both of you think it does, invalidate the point: Japan gained advanced technology from outsiders who fostered their material development, but had zero effect upon their social development. Because they did not learn any of those lessons which would have loossened the grip of a feudalist worldview on their culture.

Almost certain it is false- the Japanese certainly changed in the example- just not in the ways that were good for their neighbors.

Quite. The Meiji restoration abolished the Shogunate, but it didn't assign any power at all to the emperor or the parlament, and lead to the Daimyo controlling everything. (Apparently, the prinicple that the parlament of a country should have some sort of real power was missed by the Japanese.) Of course, these Daimyo had ambitions of their own, and now that the world was opened up to them, they could pursue them without stepping on each other's toes as they would have to do in the past. And they had new goodies to do it with, too.

Not quite. The Japanese took the Prussian system as their model, which favoured the conservatives and the military. But the old system of control by the Daimyo was long extinct. And you only reinforce the point about how Japan's society remained stunted.

[Patrick Degan]

And a response to what is becoming Samuel's multipage bullshit will be forthcoming.

[Wyrm]

Of course they can learn. But the Japanese can only learn what the Japanese society knows about. In a closed, stratified society that the Japanese were living in at the time, there was no new, fresh knowledge coming in from outside or generated internally. As it was absent both internal and external forces that create genuinely new things to learn about, nobody learns anything different than what was known last time.

Which does not, no matter how much the both of you think it does, invalidate the point: Japan gained advanced technology from outsiders who fostered their material development, but had zero effect upon their social development. Because they did not learn any of those lessons which would have loossened the grip of a feudalist worldview on their culture.

Your point was that there was a process of cultural development that was "pre-empted" by contact with the Europeans at large. It was my argument that there was no such process to pre-empt. The Japanese were in a state of cultural stasis all that time and would never develop away from the feudalist worldview without a swift kick in the cultural derierre.

Quite. The Meiji restoration abolished the Shogunate, but it didn't assign any power at all to the emperor or the parlament, and lead to the Daimyo controlling everything. (Apparently, the prinicple that the parlament of a country should have some sort of real power was missed by the Japanese.) Of course, these Daimyo had ambitions of their own, and now that the world was opened up to them, they could pursue them without stepping on each other's toes as they would have to do in the past. And they had new goodies to do it with, too.

Not quite. The Japanese took the Prussian system as their model, which favoured the conservatives and the military. But the old system of control by the Daimyo was long extinct. And you only reinforce the point about how Japan's society remained stunted.

And would remain stunted as long as it was left to its own devices. The stratified, isolationist culture the Japanese labored under has been seen before — in China, where basically all the goodies that the Europeans used to become masters of the Earth were not used by the Chinese similarly.

Technological development has always preceeded social development, because it is technological development that triggers social development. Let's take a section from one of your previous responses:

We already have examples from human history to demonstrate the point: the dominant events of the Middle Ages in Europe were the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague. Half the population of Europe dies as a result of those horrors. Yet at the end of it, feudalism was broken and the first cracks in the power of the Church began to appear, which allowed at an ever increasing pace the Rennaissance, the Reformation, the Copernican system of astronomy, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and the withering away of monarchism, the Industrial Revolution and the death of chattel slavery. But it all starts off when a century long war and the plague which accompanied it devastates a fossilised social order placing God and King at the head of a world predicated upon keeping the impoverished masses down, and dedicated to suppressing knowledge to secure its power. The Europeans draw lessons from their past and start not only the process of scientific advancement but the development of the entire theory of secularism and representative government based upon the concept of the Rights of Man.

You seem to think that the Black Death and the Hundred Years War caused a direct social change that killed feudalism and weakened the Church enough for the Rennaissance and further modern developments to take hold. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the weapons introduced during the Hundred Years War that made feudalism futile, because they knocked down the armored knight, and it was the redistribution of wealth the Black Death caused —as well as some foreign influence from the Turks— that triggered the Rennaissance and the rest of all that.

Let me explain the first part. Before this period, the armored knight on horseback was the absolute last word in battle technology. They were like the main battle tank of modern armies — they could annihilate anything in their path, except another knight. However, they were expensive. The war horses alone had to be massive creatures to support an armored knight, the knight's armor was of course heavy and expensive, and it took a lot of practice to use the lance properly. It took the kind of wealth that comes from land to support a knight. Thus, you get feudalism, which is a system that produces as many nobles as is sustainable, because only nobles could be knights (that's why you have to be knighted before you can join the House of Lords in the UK), and the more mounted knights you have, the stronger your army.

The Welsh longbow was the beginning of the end for the armored knight, and firearms using gunpowder was the end of the end. An archer with a longbow could pick off targets at will, penetrate a knights' armor at shorter ranges, and there was also a nice, big, juicy target in the form of the knight's horse underneath. The Battle of Agincourt pitted ~5,000 English archers and ~1,000 dismounted men-at-arms against ~1,200 French mounted knights and ~10,000 dismounted men-at-arms, and it was a rout of the French. Gunpowder weapons were even better at penetration and killing, even the primitive examples at the time, and required far less training to use right. The balance of power shifted from the mounted knight to mercinaries. Now the strength of an army depended on the number of mercinaries you could pay and equip, not the number of nobles you had under your loyalty. The mounted knight and the feudalism that enabled them were obsolete. The nobility withered away, but the crown strengthened, because now all the king needed to kick ass was money. Lots of money. And strong nobles were now in the way. (You'll notice that European kings lasted well into the 18th century.)

And we got the Welsh longbow from the Welsh and gunpowder from the Chinese.

So much for the Hundred Years War, what about the Black Death? Well, no direct social upheval here, either. Just a bunch of dead people leaving their property to those who still living, so when the horror was over, people went spend crazy. That included clothes, and especially linen — which generates lots of linen rag, which is an excellent raw material for paper. Meanwhile, half the clerks were dead. With the cost of paper low and the cost of the person writing on it high, the solution is printing. That's another idea we got from the Chinese; it was only adapted by Gutenburg with movable type and a press.

So now you have the ability to churn out books, what do you fill them with? Well, when Constantinopile fell to the Turks in 1453, all the Greek christian consolates overseas negotiating with the Pope over silly worlds like "filioque" were left stranded in Italy with no job. But they could speak Greek, and so they got to translate those interesting Greek books they brought with them for their Itallian hosts. Our inheritence to the ancient Greek philosophy, science and technology was thus restored, including democracy.

So you have ancient Greek knowledge flooding in, and a way to diseminate it through the whole of Europe in books by the million. Also, paper was cheap enough to write letters to anyone else in Europe, so you get international mail. The Church and Kings could hardly prevent the knowledge explosion at that point. There were just too many damn books around, and with the invention of italic (which makes practical a book you can fit in a saddlebag), you had too many damn mobile books around. Also, Martin Luther would have been nowhere without the printing press to disseminate German-language Bibles.

So we got the Rennaissance and the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment, thanks to the Chinese, the Mongolian steppes (whence came the black rat and plague), the Turks, and the Greeks.

All that money flying about is going to stimulate trade and capitalism along with it. All that knowledge flooding in from the Greek texts means everyone wanted to try out the gizmos described, and adapting them for more practical uses. Furthermore, after the Black Death, mechanical clocks spread all over Europe, making towns more efficient, so production went up. Time was becoming money. The Crown didn't care: the more ways for citizens to make money, the more ways it could tax them. The new banking systems meant that the Crown could borrow money for wars (which solved their liquidity problems), and then use that money to buy the new-fangled weapons sold. Nuremberg had both banking systems and weaponsmiths, so it was the daily double for them, and the boast started that the average Nuremburger lived better than a king.

The Copernican system came into prominence because Europeans adapted the astrolabe (which came to us by the Arabs) into sextants and other skywatching instruments (made by abovementioned Nuremburgers, who were also the best damn watchmakers in Europe) were good enough to tell them something was wrong with the Ptolemaic universe. Astrologers all over Europe noticed this, and everyone up north was talking about it. Nobody close to the Pope was talking about it, except Galileo. However, he was smacked down because he was an asshole, not because the Church was dead-set in their views. After all, the Church had officially sanctioned the Ptolemaic system, which had a round earth, and came from the Greek astrologer Claudius Ptolemy. It was also the basis for astrology, which said your fate was fixed by the stars. The Church just wanted some time to ease everyone into the Copernican system, except Galileo was being a jerk about it, and so the Church said, "You know what, fuck you and your system too!" While they could silence Galileo, distance mattered. A contemporary, William Gilbert of England, made some of the same kind of statements as Galileo (such that it is the Earth itself that turns) to no ill effect.

The Industrial Revolution was possible because John Wilkinson made cannon-boring very accurate, and so you could make good enough cylenders for James Watt's steam engine, and we got the cannon by adapting Chinese bell-making techniques. Good cylender metal was possible a generation previous because Abraham Darby was using coke instead of coal to make iron pots. The coke was clean so the iron was strong enough and cheap enough to make the Watt engine's immediate predecessor, the Newcomen engine. And people knew steam could push things around from Hero of Alexandria, coming to Europe by way of those Greek texts.

And chattle slavery? That was restricted to the Americas, and the only reason it lasted so long is because the slave-owners couldn't afford to free their slaves. Most of their capital was in slaves, and they wanted to keep their hands on it. And slavery was not abolished in the states because of social maturity; the Republicans were abolisionist because they were the party of the free white worker, and black slaves were unfair competition. And the free white worker had such lucritive jobs because of the Industrial Revolution.

So all your examples above of social change were actually preceeded by technological changes. Europe was able to go through the cultural changes you cite precisely because it was open — it was being proturbed from the outside, and welcoming each new technological idea, which shaped its society. You would have it that Japan would remain closed and isolated until it learned to shed the primitive ways of thinking that kept it back before it would be allowed technology, but that puts the cart before the horse; Japan would never change until some new development invalidated their ideas.

[open_sketchbook]

I just want to thank you for that awesome historical summary. I've got a couple of huge history books I'm grinding through, and summaries like that would be invaluable in half these tomes. Really, I appreciate these writer's attention to detail, but would it kill them to back up every once and a while and go "ok, so basically, this guy died, it made these people angry, war war france wins. Go france".

Sorry for the off-topicness, but Wyrm deserves a medal or something.

[Patrick Degan]

Which does not, no matter how much the both of you think it does, invalidate the point: Japan gained advanced technology from outsiders who fostered their material development, but had zero effect upon their social development. Because they did not learn any of those lessons which would have loossened the grip of a feudalist worldview on their culture.

Your point was that there was a process of cultural development that was "pre-empted" by contact with the Europeans at large. It was my argument that there was no such process to pre-empt. The Japanese were in a state of cultural stasis all that time and would never develop away from the feudalist worldview without a swift kick in the cultural derierre.

A wholly unfounded assumption on your part. It assumes you can project into an alternative future to reach that sort of conclusion that Japan would never have developed without outside intervention. No regime lasts forever and neither would the Tokugawas, whether the punitive expeditions of the 1860s which helped to eventually touch off the War of the Restoration had occurred or not.

Quite. The Meiji restoration abolished the Shogunate, but it didn't assign any power at all to the emperor or the parlament, and lead to the Daimyo controlling everything. (Apparently, the prinicple that the parlament of a country should have some sort of real power was missed by the Japanese.) Of course, these Daimyo had ambitions of their own, and now that the world was opened up to them, they could pursue them without stepping on each other's toes as they would have to do in the past. And they had new goodies to do it with, too.

Not quite. The Japanese took the Prussian system as their model, which favoured the conservatives and the military. But the old system of control by the Daimyo was long extinct. And you only reinforce the point about how Japan's society remained stunted.

And would remain stunted as long as it was left to its own devices. The stratified, isolationist culture the Japanese labored under has been seen before — in China, where basically all the goodies that the Europeans used to become masters of the Earth were not used by the Chinese similarly.

And yet, somehow, someway, the Chinese managed to develop without being ruled by an outside power to set the process into motion or being fostered.

Technological development has always preceeded social development, because it is technological development that triggers social development.

There is a marked difference between technological and social development which proceeds with close proximity, timewise, between the two, and technological advancement being thrust upon a backward culture.

We already have examples from human history to demonstrate the point: the dominant events of the Middle Ages in Europe were the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague. Half the population of Europe dies as a result of those horrors. Yet at the end of it, feudalism was broken and the first cracks in the power of the Church began to appear, which allowed at an ever increasing pace the Rennaissance, the Reformation, the Copernican system of astronomy, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and the withering away of monarchism, the Industrial Revolution and the death of chattel slavery. But it all starts off when a century long war and the plague which accompanied it devastates a fossilised social order placing God and King at the head of a world predicated upon keeping the impoverished masses down, and dedicated to suppressing knowledge to secure its power. The Europeans draw lessons from their past and start not only the process of scientific advancement but the development of the entire theory of secularism and representative government based upon the concept of the Rights of Man.

You seem to think that the Black Death and the Hundred Years War caused a direct social change that killed feudalism and weakened the Church enough for the Rennaissance and further modern developments to take hold. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the weapons introduced during the Hundred Years War that made feudalism futile, because they knocked down the armored knight, and it was the redistribution of wealth the Black Death caused —as well as some foreign influence from the Turks— that triggered the Rennaissance and the rest of all that.

And had the Black Death NOT occurred, there would have been no wealth redistribution. And the weapons developed directly because of the Hundred Years War, which accelerated that development —which would have not happened at anywhere near the pace it did had there NOT been a Hundred Years War.

Let me explain the first part. Before this period, the armored knight on horseback was the absolute last word in battle technology. They were like the main battle tank of modern armies — they could annihilate anything in their path, except another knight. However, they were expensive. The war horses alone had to be massive creatures to support an armored knight, the knight's armor was of course heavy and expensive, and it took a lot of practice to use the lance properly. It took the kind of wealth that comes from land to support a knight. Thus, you get feudalism, which is a system that produces as many nobles as is sustainable, because only nobles could be knights (that's why you have to be knighted before you can join the House of Lords in the UK), and the more mounted knights you have, the stronger your army.

The Welsh longbow was the beginning of the end for the armored knight, and firearms using gunpowder was the end of the end. An archer with a longbow could pick off targets at will, penetrate a knights' armor at shorter ranges, and there was also a nice, big, juicy target in the form of the knight's horse underneath. The Battle of Agincourt pitted ~5,000 English archers and ~1,000 dismounted men-at-arms against ~1,200 French mounted knights and ~10,000 dismounted men-at-arms, and it was a rout of the French. Gunpowder weapons were even better at penetration and killing, even the primitive examples at the time, and required far less training to use right. The balance of power shifted from the mounted knight to mercinaries. Now the strength of an army depended on the number of mercinaries you could pay and equip, not the number of nobles you had under your loyalty. The mounted knight and the feudalism that enabled them were obsolete. The nobility withered away, but the crown strengthened, because now all the king needed to kick ass was money. Lots of money. And strong nobles were now in the way. (You'll notice that European kings lasted well into the 18th century.)

And we got the Welsh longbow from the Welsh and gunpowder from the Chinese.

And the driver for this same development at the same pace without the extant fact of the Hundred Years War would have been...?

what about the Black Death? Well, no direct social upheval here, either. Just a bunch of dead people leaving their property to those who still living, so when the horror was over, people went spend crazy. That included clothes, and especially linen — which generates lots of linen rag, which is an excellent raw material for paper. Meanwhile, half the clerks were dead. With the cost of paper low and the cost of the person writing on it high, the solution is printing. That's another idea we got from the Chinese; it was only adapted by Gutenburg with movable type and a press.

So now you have the ability to churn out books, what do you fill them with? Well, when Constantinopile fell to the Turks in 1453, all the Greek christian consolates overseas negotiating with the Pope over silly worlds like "filioque" were left stranded in Italy with no job. But they could speak Greek, and so they got to translate those interesting Greek books they brought with them for their Itallian hosts. Our inheritence to the ancient Greek philosophy, science and technology was thus restored, including democracy.

So you have ancient Greek knowledge flooding in, and a way to diseminate it through the whole of Europe in books by the million. Also, paper was cheap enough to write letters to anyone else in Europe, so you get international mail. The Church and Kings could hardly prevent the knowledge explosion at that point. There were just too many damn books around, and with the invention of italic (which makes practical a book you can fit in a saddlebag), you had too many damn mobile books around. Also, Martin Luther would have been nowhere without the printing press to disseminate German-language Bibles.

So we got the Rennaissance and the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment, thanks to the Chinese, the Mongolian steppes (whence came the black rat and plague), the Turks, and the Greeks.

All that money flying about is going to stimulate trade and capitalism along with it. All that knowledge flooding in from the Greek texts means everyone wanted to try out the gizmos described, and adapting them for more practical uses. Furthermore, after the Black Death, mechanical clocks spread all over Europe, making towns more efficient, so production went up. Time was becoming money. The Crown didn't care: the more ways for citizens to make money, the more ways it could tax them. The new banking systems meant that the Crown could borrow money for wars (which solved their liquidity problems), and then use that money to buy the new-fangled weapons sold. Nuremberg had both banking systems and weaponsmiths, so it was the daily double for them, and the boast started that the average Nuremburger lived better than a king.

And the driver for this same redistribution of wealth at this same pace without the extant fact of the Black Death would have been...?

The Copernican system came into prominence because Europeans adapted the astrolabe (which came to us by the Arabs) into sextants and other skywatching instruments (made by abovementioned Nuremburgers, who were also the best damn watchmakers in Europe) were good enough to tell them something was wrong with the Ptolemaic universe. Astrologers all over Europe noticed this, and everyone up north was talking about it. Nobody close to the Pope was talking about it, except Galileo. However, he was smacked down because he was an asshole, not because the Church was dead-set in their views. After all, the Church had officially sanctioned the Ptolemaic system, which had a round earth, and came from the Greek astrologer Claudius Ptolemy. It was also the basis for astrology, which said your fate was fixed by the stars. The Church just wanted some time to ease everyone into the Copernican system, except Galileo was being a jerk about it, and so the Church said, "You know what, fuck you and your system too!" While they could silence Galileo, distance mattered. A contemporary, William Gilbert of England, made some of the same kind of statements as Galileo (such that it is the Earth itself that turns) to no ill effect.

The Industrial Revolution was possible because John Wilkinson made cannon-boring very accurate, and so you could make good enough cylenders for James Watt's steam engine, and we got the cannon by adapting Chinese bell-making techniques. Good cylender metal was possible a generation previous because Abraham Darby was using coke instead of coal to make iron pots. The coke was clean so the iron was strong enough and cheap enough to make the Watt engine's immediate predecessor, the Newcomen engine. And people knew steam could push things around from Hero of Alexandria, coming to Europe by way of those Greek texts.

And chattle slavery? That was restricted to the Americas, and the only reason it lasted so long is because the slave-owners couldn't afford to free their slaves. Most of their capital was in slaves, and they wanted to keep their hands on it. And slavery was not abolished in the states because of social maturity; the Republicans were abolisionist because they were the party of the free white worker, and black slaves were unfair competition. And the free white worker had such lucritive jobs because of the Industrial Revolution.

So all your examples above of social change were actually preceeded by technological changes. Europe was able to go through the cultural changes you cite precisely because it was open — it was being proturbed from the outside, and welcoming each new technological idea, which shaped its society. You would have it that Japan would remain closed and isolated until it learned to shed the primitive ways of thinking that kept it back before it would be allowed technology, but that puts the cart before the horse; Japan would never change until some new development invalidated their ideas.

The difference is: the technological changes which worked in Western society were followed not very long after by a gradual evolution, at a pace with material development, of social development as well. At the same time the machines were being invented, so were the new ideas which gradually reshaped society at large, each following step-by-step. In Japan's case, they got radically accelerated technological and material development, but had not even begun to take the first steps away from a cultural worldview which had endured for centuries when they suddenly found themselves a modern industrial and military power. Indeed, the traditionalists became hardened in their determination to preserve the purity of Japanese culture from the lure of modernity. Hence, the trouble they eventually made for themselves and millions of other people in Asia and the Pacific.

[Patrick Degan]

Magick has nothing to do with it. You are dealing with people who do not understand fully the concept of secrecy, and have no means of really keeping anything well and fully hidden. This isn't even a 20th century CIA we're talking about with the sort of regime a primitive world would have.

If they understand the concept of lying, it is good enough for me. All we need to do is make sure all the people we work with have an incentive to lie- I'm pretty sure being considered the creator of a new invention or being "The Magnificent" is good enough. This does mean we will have to work with an extremely limited pool of people... which is what I have been advocating.

How... incredibly simpleminded of you. We're talking about medieval-level primitives at best who may understand the concept of lying but not the concept of security as we know it. People who would not understand the reason for ensuring that nobody talks, nor have any realistic chance of doing so, since it was impossible to monitor every person's actions or words in that sort of society. The first nobleman who blabs to his mistress, or carelessly talks while the servants are nearby, provides a channel for word to get out to the general populace. Nevermind that people are bound to notice the appearance of "strange lights" in the night sky —orbiting starships reflecting sunlight off their hulls.

I HAVE said why, and you just continue to blithely ignore the objection so you can keep repeating the same fucking argument. Who gave you the right to impose your rule and kill people who didn't ask for your rule so you can impose your notions of right and proper development upon them?

Ah yes, the classic "it is imposed by force so must be bad!" The right I am using is the fact that inaction will cause more harm than action. You seem not to be able to understand that is a valid justification.

"Valid justification?" By what standard? By whose authority? By what logic? Your entire case comes down to you assuming your right to invade their world, impose your rule and your standards, and change their culture, because of your self-declared duty to do so. Basically: "X gives me the right to do Y, because doing Y is good and therefore justifies X". Circular Reasoning Fallacy.

Once again, you presume to use my words out of context. Risible considering that the course of action you advocate and one probable outcome is summed up by the very passage you lift.

Yeah, an entire paragraph is out of context. And the point I was making is you AGREE that they can't be trusted. The hilarious thing that you don't understand is that I am aiming for a that, but preferably with less atrocities. Your "rebuttal" is my goal.

I am not responsible for your fantasies. The entire point of the Japan example is to illustrate just why your proposed course of action is more likely to whipsaw and produce the opposite result of what you're aiming for. Which was in the overall context of my argument but which you dishonestly expropriated for your purposes. Stolen Concept Fallalcy, that.

Cram it, you arrogant little prick. So somebody decided to define a slight variation of the False Dilemma. I'll concede that tiny scrap of a point. What's laughable here is you presuming to lecture anybody about doing research when confronted with new information considering how little you can be bothered to research anything when confronted with inconvenient facts —as has been demonstrated multiple times in the course of this thread. Especially when you trumpet your own ignorance as if it's some sort of virtue.

The fact that I mentioned a logical fallacy and you immediately decided it didn't count because it wasn't listed in your resources does suggest you aren't bothering to do the research. Given that you literally just had to plug it into google...

Nice ad hominum by the way. When confronted by the fact I was wrong, did I immediately claim "it doesn't really count", like you? No, I admitted I was wrong.

NOT an ad-hominem. I did not dismiss your argument wholesale (in fact, I clearly said I conceded that small point) simply by means of a personal attack, which I would have done if I had said "You're wrong because you're just an arrogant little prick".

As for my ignorance, I am not proud of it. I am admitting it because I know that the factual information and the conclusion I make based of them might not be true because I have missed something. It is called honesty.

And yet you continue to make the same arguments despite having contrary facts which undermine your premises demonstrated to you. That is not honest.

Has nothing to do with "sample size" but the swiftness of the conclusion you state with only a simplistic read of a very broad stretch of history.

The conclusion I made was that bad stuff occurs continuously throughout history. It doesn't have to be "indepth" or sophisticated to realize that people being killed dying from disease or starving to death occured throughout history often and was preventable.

In HINDSIGHT, anything is possibly preventable. The issue before the bar is whether solving every problem for your primitives will do good, or by robbing them of their own process of maturation you end up doing more harm in the long run by either rendering your primitives a permanently dependent people or end up unintentionally giving them the means of self-destruction by producing a technologically advanced but culturally immature society. Either way, you've locked yourself into an open-ended commitment with no foreseeable termination.

There is dispute as to whether the label "genocide" applies, since the causes of death in the Darfur region blur between that of the drought-induced famine that was already underway and the present war now taking place, as opposed to a deliberately systematic targeting of an ethnic population for elimination.

So we only had two in the last 20 years?

Which provides a cogent argument on any point in this discussion... how, exactly?

I have already stated that short-term intervention to prevent a disaster like Darfur is a perfectly acceptable course of action for a power like the Federation to undertake. That is very different from your construction of the White Man's Burden

Because there will be absolutely no long term consequences from landing peacekeeping troops on a primitve world. Have you considered what you are proposing? This would require a large investment of resources, construction of planetary bases to house the troops, etc.

Then there is the consequences. First off is the technological contamination as the natives borrow/steal/buy/beg for the items that your men have. Which then results in the most unstable areas having the best equipment... a recipe for disaster.

Than there is the fact the natives aren't idiots. These people come here whenever our crops are burnt and give us food to help prevent us from starving to death...

Do that and you get perpetual flower wars. You encourage total war on the part of losers in order to bring in your peacekeepers and stop the killing, AND immuninize states to war- they can be as oppresive and detached from reality as they want and no one will topple them.

First, you assume a global genocide taking place, which is a wholly unfounded assumption on your part (nevermind that a medieval society wouldn't have the capability to carry out anything of that scale). Next, you assume the peacekeepers allowing the natives to simply trade for advanced weaponry and equipment —something which does not happen in present-day PK operations on our own world. From there, you proceed to yet another Appeal to Consequence Fallacy on your part, and one based upon the ludicrous notion that the natives will from that point onward deliberately commit multiple genocides just to get the space aliens to come back with the goodies. The motives for genocide stem from deep-seated hatreds, not from avarice for goodies from the outside world.

NOT a Red Herring —you stated that efforts at peacemaking had been nothing but failure since the UN was formed; an argument which is demonstrably false on its face.

I'll rephrase from:

It isn't working for the UN and it appears the only way to keep the peace in some cases is... full scale occupation.

To "doesn't always work and may have unintended consequences that spiral out of control". Better.

Of course, given that my plan would lead to worldwide peace it isn't a false dilemmia.

I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing something more concrete than your fantasies here. Especially as wishful thinking is not a generator of valid predictions.

YES DISHONEST, Gracie —particularly as you continue to offer the False Dilemma of White Man's Burden or Letting Them All Die.

Explain how they will learn from conflicts if you keep on preventing them from killing each other.

Are you saying that our own civilisation has not learned from it's past mistakes? What accounts for the abandonment of such abominations as the Divine Right of Kings, chattel slavery, human sacrifice, among many others which were once considered normal aspects of the everyday world? Why did the United States and the Soviet Union back off from the precipice of nuclear war not once but three times during the course of the Cold War? Why did India and Pakistan back off from that same precipice? What accounts for this unless we humans have been doing what you insist is impossible —namely, learning from our past conflicts and mistakes? Or do you allege that we've actually been under the secret guidance of the Space Brothers from Algol? And if we have managed to reach some degree of maturation as a species on our own hook, by what presumption do you declare that primitive people on another world cannot accomplish that same feat, therefore we do it for them?

Wrong. I recognise that outsiders presuming to decide the destiny of an entire people are more likely to produce a result which is very opposite of the one they desire because those people never had the chance to learn some painful lessons on their own hook —especially when those same outsiders know next to nothing about the people they presume to rule for their benefit. Further, you continue the False Dilemma of White Man's Burden or Letting Them All Die and ignore the observation that, while genocides and ethnic cleansings have been local disasters, they have not, nor necessarily must be, global disasters —as even a casual read-through of human history in the last 5000 years can demonstrate. The entire Earth has not been a large-scale Darfur. But you seem to think that any primitive world can be likened to that tragedy and try to extend the analogy to a global scale as justification for long-term intervention: "It could be like that, and one day they might become that, so we'll go ahead and treat them as if they are that. Sure, we'll have to kill some of them, but they'll thank us in the end".

No, global disasters are things like disease or the planets climate changing. Guess what? They happen as well! There is a reason that I keep on refering to life expectancy.

Really? Name the last pandemic that actually swept through on a global scale and threatened species survival. Give the source for your prediction that climate change is leading inevitably to our extinction when that question is very much beyond the projection of even the worst-case scenario. So, can we have this Red Herring out the way then?

As for "not learning the lessons"... have you ignored they could learn the WRONG lessons? What about the lesson of the value of the nation-state, which has been nothing but trouble. The lessons they will learn from war are those that make them most effective at fighting- some will help them as a society and some will hurt them.

Ah, so we must act on the basis of a big "What If?" Appeal to Consequence Fallacy yet again.

As for "deciding their own destiny", sounds real pretty, doesn't it? TO bad the majority of the people we will be helping will be illiterate peasents whose "destiny" is to be bossed around by the upper class.

Funny, but I fail to see how your argument has any validity considering that we can look at the history of our own world and see that, despite your blatherings on the subject, humanity as a species has indeed advanced and has indeed abandoned abominable ideas which were once considered pillars of wisdom and, guess what, without the Space Brothers from Algol invading our world to show us the Way to Enlightenment back in the 14th century. That we have not attained perfection as yet does not invalidate this basic fact of human history.

"Could be, if, maybe, possibly, suppose..." I don't see anything resembling an underlying factual or logical support for the proposition "X will happen if we don't do Y" to justify your White Man's Burden course of action. All I see is an Appeal to Consequence. You have no argument.

Yeah- I am appealing to the consequences to inaciton. There is the possibility things could go much, much worse if we don't intervene.

Do you not understand that a logical fallacy invalidates any argument using it as it's basis? That's sort of why it's called a fallacy. I really don't know how to make this any simpler for you to grasp.

Lets look at what your site says:

X is true because if people did not accept X as being true then there would be negative consequences.

X is false because if people did not accept X as being false, then there would be negative consequences.

X is true because accepting that X is true has positive consequences.

X is false because accepting that X is false has positive consequences.

I wish that X were true, therefore X is true. This is known as Wishful Thinking.

I wish that X were false, therefore X is false. This is known as Wishful Thinking.

Wow, these are all about the truth value of the proposition... have I been arguing that something is true or that something is moral?

A thing is not moral simply because you declare it so to your personal satisfaction. And it is certainly not true either. I'm sorry that this doesn't suit you.

Again, look who's talking.

Actually that is accurate about my person, but not my argument.

No, both you and your argument are full of shit. Again, sorry if that doesn't suit you.

Keep tapdancing for as long as you think you can manage it.

If you had a point there, I would respond.

My response was based on the fact that you had no point to start with.

The fact of the matter is that not all societies the Europeans have intervened in have had their cultures erased.

The only societies in which that statement is remotely true are ones in which the cultures had endured for 4000 years or more before Europeans ever came along. But even in those cases, it's observable that Europeans wrought consequences on their societies which, but for their intervention, would never have happened.

That's remarkably similar to the Rush Limbaugh pseudo-argument that there are now more indians today than there were a hundred years ago —which blithely ignores the inconvenient fact that there would have been a whole lot more without the near-genocide carried out against them in the first place. The fact remains that, except for a few ritual practises and the production of trinkets for the tourist trade, the American Indian culture has been extinguished as a practical matter. Nitpickery does not erase this no matter how much you desperately need it to.

The Rush Limbough argument is there are more natives than there were 400 years ago.

And ignores wholesale the demonstrable math that the native population would be larger than it is now had not a programme of genocide and ethnic cleansing been carried out in the first place. Indeed, according to estimates for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are actually 3 million less Native Americans than lived at the time of Columbus. So he's wrong even on the terms of the timeframe from the day Columbus discovered that he was lost.

As for "culture being extinguished aside from some rituals and trinkets"... what more do you want me to keep?

Who says anybody ever had the right to take any of it away in the first fucking place?

You declared that the natives couldn't adapt using other people's cultures because their own was erased. I'm sorry I didn't immediately go "that is the dumbest thing I have heard in some time" and went about showing that they groups still had culture even after intervention.

It won't happen again.

Oh yes it will, because you have clearly dedicated yourself to a fundamentally broken and dishonest position.

Christianity did not help inspire Islam. The Arabs invented their new religion on their own, drawing from their own monotheistic and prophethood traditions which had existed for centuries before Muhammad ever came on the scene. That is very different from natives making a religion out of extraordinary things they see being carried out by far more advanced occupiers of their land and which they can't understand.

I actually didn't know that there was so much contact with Christians in Arabia. Thanks for the link! Of course, given that the polytheism was completely wiped out... yeah I guess that culture was replaced by another.

Missed the point yet again. The Arabs invented their own religion long before first contact with Christians. And it was they who supplanted polytheism on their own.

As for "people making religions out of things they can't understand"... that is how ALL religions start.

Wrong yet again. There is a distinct difference between religions based on analogy to the natural world or made up from wholecloth by alleged revelation, and the cults like the Tanna islanders.

We have religions based on UFOs. How on Earth is this relevant?

I know you think you're making a point, but you blather as usual. I don't recall any UFO cult displacing Judaeo-Christianity or Islam in the last sixty years and becoming the One True Faith. But you're right —your bringing up the UFO cults that have been trendy among maybe less than a fraction of 1% of the American population is irrelevant, even to discussion of the Tanna Islanders.

The natives will form a religion based on my agents... how? I am advocating a puppet state with minimal contact- your objection applies to DBZ not me.

Since you obviously did not pay attention: the Tanna Islanders ended up forming their Cargo Cult on the basis of mere observation of the American activities on their island, with only minimal contact with Navy officers.

They "don't know" because the Japanese have been in active denial of their war guilt ever since the Emperor broadcast the surrender rescript. Something you would know if you weren't, by your own admission, so out of touch with basic history.

... the US media and school system are controlled by the Japanese? I guess the more you know...

Yet another of your stupid Strawmen.

You proceeded to strawmander my argument on this point by saying that I was, somehow, declaring the U.S. and the European powers to be "neo-feudal" on the simple basis that they and Japan had colonial empires or that Japanese colonialism was driven solely by neo-feudalist ideology, which is an outright, bullshit lie on your part. I had argued, and this point was put forth by Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattle, Ching-Chih Chen, and the Joint Committee on Japanese studies, in the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1) as well as other sources, that Japan's drive for empire was fueled in part by it's viewpoint that colonialism was the mark of modernity, and that this motive was wedded to their pre-existing national self-image as the holders of an Divine Destiny, as observed in the aforementioned work:

You declared the reason they are neofeudal and Germany wasn't is because Japan hasn't apologized... which means they are currently neofeudal! I'm pretty sure that is a groos oversimplification of Japanese society and politics, but one you seem to hold as per their "refusal to admit or apologize" criteria.

No, their lack of an apology was NOT the basis of my argument that the Japanese were driven by a neofeudal worldview, you lying little asshole. You deliberately redacted the very passage from the book I cited to make that dishonest strawman and I'm calling you on it right now.

Has the US apologized over Vietnam yet, or do we continue to write about the mistakes we made?

That neocon wankers continue to spew bullshit about how we could have won the war "if we had just done X" is beside the point. The Vietnam War is not taught in school as some grand project which should have worked. The U.S. government entered into a joint effort with the Vietnamese government to study the effects of Agent Orange bombardment during the Clinton Administration, and the U.S. is rendering assistance for decontamination of former U.S. military depots where Agent Orange was stored. That's more than Japan's government has ever done toward acknowledging any responsibility for their war crimes in China and Korea.

Are you an American? Because if you were, you might have heard of something called "Manifest Destiny". Totally differant than divine destiny of course.

Yes it is, because Manifest Destiny (an ideology we abandoned by 1920, BTW) was not based upon the idea that the American people were specifically created by a particular god as opposed to all other peoples and retain a mystical link to that god through his avatar on the throne, and allowed for compromise, which the Japanese ideology did not.

While it is observable that the European colonial powers were also racist, in no way do any of them, or the United States, can be said to have undertaken the drive for empire on any feudalist belief that their races in particular had some sort of mystical link to a god-emperor or that it was "stylish" of modernity instead of strictly material concerns, either economic or military.

So no, dishonest one, I never made any such argument that the U.S. or any of the Europeans were "neo-feudalist", or that neo-feudalism was the sole driver of Japanese colonialism. Clearly, though, Japanese imperial ambitions were not "exactly the same as everybody else", as per your simpleminded formulation.

Right, so Christianity is more rational? We are going to Christianize the natives as a motivation and God wants us to expand are not equivalent to Japanese belief? Their belief in destiny is not equivalent to the Europeans belief they were the pinacle of progress and they were chosen for this course by God?

The difference is that the Japanese viewpoint went far beyond the idea of doing "God's Work" and straight to the notion that they themselves were the Children of God (or in their case, Amatersu) and the Emperor was the very avatar of Amatersu and all his ancestors on the Crysanthemum Throne on Earth and therefore are the Superior People fit to rule all others.

As for their expansion being "stylish"... the European drive for colonization was partially over prestige which is the same thing. The US drive for colonies was exactly the same thing.

Really? I thought it was over things like control of overseas raw materials, overseas markets, and strategic military objectives such as control of chokepoints of the Pacific sea lanes, with the whole "prestige" thing merely lending a patina of respectability to the whole venture.

Honestly, this all seems to boil down to is that somehow the Japanese were differant from everyone else... despite displaying the same exact behavior.

NOT the same exact behaviour, as per the extracted passage from The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945, which you redacted and hope will go forgotten.

Well:

On the one hand, the Japanese Empire resembled its European counterparts in that its authority was based on an assumption of the superiority of the colonial rulers over the subject peoples. To a degree this basic perspective stemmed from the fact, common to all colonial systems, that the empire had been imposed by a conquest of force by a stronger, more materially advanced race upon the weaker, more materially retarded peoples. Yet, in part, this assumption also derived from credos that were uniquely Japanese. These included Japanese beliefs in the mythic origins of the Japanese race, the divine creation and inherent virtue of the Japanese Imperial House, and the mystical link between the emperor and his people. The relative isolation of the country throughout most of its history, as well as a cultural deference toward China, had in centuries past prevented these beliefs of racial uniqueness from transmogrifying into a theory of racial supremacy. But a few decades of expanding dominion over neighbouring Asian peoples, reinforced by racial notions of Social Darwinism, inevitably released the virus of racial assertiveness into the Japanese ideological bloodstream and quickened the Japanese sense of superiority to the rest of Asia.

As I have pointed out in my essay on Japanese colonial ideology, these contrasting Western and Asian —Japanese— patterns of empire thus formed the perimetres for an evolving and contrasting set of Japanese attitudes toward colonialism, their own and that of other nations. As such they provoked two quite dissimilar Japanese approaches to the relations of colonial ruler and ruled.

You have a hard time getting what the heck I am talking about! I wasn't talking about Ethiopia- I was talking about how they could take over Japan if it remained a backward country.

You mean the way the Kingdom of Siam was —oh, wait, it wasn't taken over by Europeans despite the fact that it was about as "backward" as Japan i.e. non-industrialised and traditionalist. In fact, they quite cleverly managed to maintain their own independence despite being in the bailywick of four major colonial empires carving out Asian territory at will.

What was that you said, exactly? "And individuals have never made concession to help secure them victory"? Exactly what did Emperor Menelik "concede" after he kicked the Italians asses?

In World War II, the liberation of Ethiopia was part of the Allied East African Campaign of 1940-41 and Ethiopian troops fought with British and Commonwealth forces to kick the Italians out.

Once again, I was refering to Japan. How you could have missed it is beyond me.

You made a direct comparison between Japan and Ethiopia, and thus opened the door to attack on that point since you tried to say that without industrialisation, they'd have ended up the same way as the Ethiopians allegedly did —a conquered people. Which they did not. Now you try to backpedal and hope everyone will ignore how you tried to use the example of Ethiopia as support for your Japan argument. Typical.

Well, a little context-restoration will take care of that.

On page five of this discussion, YOU said:

Ethiopia had a population of 18 million when it was conquered by the Italians. Japan had a population of about 27 million in 1850. The nation had the advantage of central rule... except it was later engulfed in a civil war later on which the European powers could have exploited to make a puppet state.

And:

If Ethiopia had industrialized, it wouldn't have been conquered. The other shit might have happened, but the conquest wouldn't have

To which I necessarily pointed out:

BTW, the Ethiopians successfully drove the Italians out twice in their history: in 1896 and 1941 —a point I believe has already been made to you in this thread but which you have chosen to ignore. By all means, keep parading your ignorance

You then attempted THIS rebuttal:

Yeah- Europeans have NEVER used puppet states to rule a country for them. And individuals have never made concession to help secure them victory.

To this response of mine:

A Japanese population of 27 million was far larger than any army that could have been landed to conquer and occupy the island, which is why none of the European powers nor the Americans never attempted anything beyond establishing treaty ports and trading rights. And a European invasion would have solved the civil war as the Japanese would have been faced with the problem of invading gaijin. And BTW, the Ethiopians successfully drove the Italians out twice in their history: in 1896 and 1941 —a point I believe has already been made to you in this thread but which you have chosen to ignore.

To which I posted the inconvenient facts of Ethiopian history (Emperor Menelik's army crushing Italy's in 1896, Ethiopia's successful liberation with British and Commonwealth allies in 1941) you now try to handwave away by saying you were only ever talking about Japan.

Oh, and BTW, as a sidebar, there is no guarantee that industrialisation would have spared Ethiopia from invasion. It didn't work that miracle for either France of Czechoslovakia.

Moral issues, along with history and politics, at least require a better basis than your admitted ignorance for discussion to proceed.

I may have a shallow understanding of many issues (there was actually a thread by someone who was thought they were dumb because of that), but I do know that when you make an argument, you actually need... an argument. You just asserted this.

It helps when that argument is not based on ignorance.

Bull shitting and wall of ignorance are two different things.

Sometimes, the comedy just writes itself.

We are talking about a fallacy that one of us is commiting and you can't see in yourself... and your immediate reaction is "it isn't me". I never have that level of self confidence unless I am grandstanding.

Uh uh, you are NOT getting away with that one. You have continued, despite being presented with diverse evidence contradicting your points, your half-assed constructions of "fact" and your "logic", and yet simply repeat the same argument as if nothing was ever said. That is constructing a Wall of Ignorance and that is you in this thread.

A lot more than you, actually. I'm not the one who's justifying the "logic" of the White Man's Burden here.

It is white mans burden... in space! Ya got me- we are secretly there for their tri-lithium.

And the reason the argument for the white man's burden was flawed... is because they were screwing over the natives. Where exactly did I have them paying us off for the priveledge of us helping them?

The White Man's Burden was flawed because it's baseline premise —the necessity of civilising the Childlike Native™ whether they want it or not— is a fundamentally broken one.

You oversimplify grossly. America would never entertain again the idea of chattel slavery because of how it's injustice was made manifest and led to a bloody civil war to finally excise it from any concept of constitutional government. It is a different matter when an outside force attempts to impose solutions to other peoples' problems, since inevitably it is looked upon as interference and is undone by the traditionalists at the first opportunity they gain power —because that notion was never soundly destroyed, merely suppressed by a foreign (or alien) occupation force.

Supreme Court.

Wrong again. If you're talking about the Plessy decision and Jim Crow, that was not the same thing as returning the blacks to the plantations as property, with their children to be legally recognised only as property and 3/5th persons for taxation. And those were undone by Truman desegregating the Army in 1948, by the Brown decision in a later Supreme Court, and Jim Crow killed by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 —which enforced the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and reinforced the 13th and 15th Amendments as well.

Congratulations, you make an even bigger fool of yourself than before.

[Samuel]

How... incredibly simpleminded of you. We're talking about medieval-level primitives at best who may understand the concept of lying but not the concept of security as we know it. People who would not understand the reason for ensuring that nobody talks, nor have any realistic chance of doing so, since it was impossible to monitor every person's actions or words in that sort of society. The first nobleman who blabs to his mistress, or carelessly talks while the servants are nearby, provides a channel for word to get out to the general populace.

We are putting people in a position where they don't want to admit they are getting help. Do you think they would want to admit that all the neat innovations they have made they got from some one else?

If that doesn't work, you can simply use bugs to make sure they don't blab, use memory wipes to make them believe it is their own idea, etc.

Nevermind that people are bound to notice the appearance of "strange lights" in the night sky —orbiting starships reflecting sunlight off their hulls.

Paint.

"Valid justification?" By what standard? By whose authority? By what logic? Your entire case comes down to you assuming your right to invade their world, impose your rule and your standards, and change their culture, because of your self-declared duty to do so. Basically: "X gives me the right to do Y, because doing Y is good and therefore justifies X". Circular Reasoning Fallacy.

Actually, Y is pretty evil. I mean, lets be honest. I'll have the planet unified by force and have a forced industrial drive. I'm pretty sure the second is rather hazardous to peoples health, with the whole cramming people in hastily erected urban centers that are filled with disease.

My standard is harm to sapients.
My authority would be the Federation charter or, in a different universe, the governing contract for said body.
My logic is that some damage is acceptable if it leads to greater benefits in the long run.

The entire point of the Japan example is to illustrate just why your proposed course of action is more likely to whipsaw and produce the opposite result of what you're aiming for. Which was in the overall context of my argument but which you dishonestly expropriated for your purposes. Stolen Concept Fallalcy, that.

My goal is to get a culture that aggressively conquers the planet. Japan is only a rebuttal because they proceded to commit wanton atrocities. I'm sure a proxy can be found that doesn't do that.

And yet you continue to make the same arguments despite having contrary facts which undermine your premises demonstrated to you. That is not honest.

Your "contrary arguments" butress my claim.

In HINDSIGHT, anything is possibly preventable. The issue before the bar is whether solving every problem for your primitives will do good, or by robbing them of their own process of maturation you end up doing more harm in the long run by either rendering your primitives a permanently dependent people or end up unintentionally giving them the means of self-destruction by producing a technologically advanced but culturally immature society. Either way, you've locked yourself into an open-ended commitment with no foreseeable termination.

Which is entirely different from landing peacekeeping troops.

Also, I value certain good over potential problems.
-Permant dependancy is out because I will have them doing the industirialization.
-Self-Destruction is in... but no more so than any other time in history. Sure, they can kill each other more efficeiently, but societies have destroyed themselves with even less technology.

Which provides a cogent argument on any point in this discussion... how, exactly?

Not exactly rare. I'm counting Rwanda and Yugoslavia of course. Others probably exist I don't remember.

First, you assume a global genocide taking place, which is a wholly unfounded assumption on your part (nevermind that a medieval society wouldn't have the capability to carry out anything of that scale). Next, you assume the peacekeepers allowing the natives to simply trade for advanced weaponry and equipment —something which does not happen in present-day PK operations on our own world. From there, you proceed to yet another Appeal to Consequence Fallacy on your part, and one based upon the ludicrous notion that the natives will from that point onward deliberately commit multiple genocides just to get the space aliens to come back with the goodies. The motives for genocide stem from deep-seated hatreds, not from avarice for goodies from the outside world.

Congradulations! You made English the planets new official language.

No, I assume genocide or massive warfare will be taking place on multiple parts of the planet.

As for the peacekeepers trading tech to the natives... it depends on the situation. With a fast FTL you can rotate them often. Slow FTL they are in for the long haul- months. With poor to no FTL they are there for the duration.

And, the longer they are there, the more likely they are to get attached to the natives and willing to help them. Of course, if the planet has something valuable like your "white man's burden" retort implies, it just takes enough corruption and we can have a gangster world.

Seriously, you are going to garrison troops there for an extended period of time and if they empathize with the natives, they probably will help them. It may not be weapons, but if they start supplying medicine to stop a plague you get similar results. Or one of your troopers wants to be a good samaritan or has delusions of grandeur and provides them some textbooks and teaches them the language.

Or you could troops that don't speak and are entirely outfitted in body armor do all the heavy lifting- I'm sure there is no possibility that the natives will form a religion around that.

As for people killing each other to get the Gods involved... the Aztecs waged flower wars to get human sacrifices to insure rain. I'm sure that getting care packages to fall from the sky will do something similar.

I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing something more concrete than your fantasies here. Especially as wishful thinking is not a generator of valid predictions.

Getting one planetary state does end warfare. Of course, there is still civil unrest, but that tends to be smaller and can be dealt with by local garrisons.

Are you saying that our own civilisation has not learned from it's past mistakes? What accounts for the abandonment of such abominations as the Divine Right of Kings, chattel slavery, human sacrifice, among many others which were once considered normal aspects of the everyday world? Why did the United States and the Soviet Union back off from the precipice of nuclear war not once but three times during the course of the Cold War? Why did India and Pakistan back off from that same precipice? What accounts for this unless we humans have been doing what you insist is impossible —namely, learning from our past conflicts and mistakes? Or do you allege that we've actually been under the secret guidance of the Space Brothers from Algol? And if we have managed to reach some degree of maturation as a species on our own hook, by what presumption do you declare that primitive people on another world cannot accomplish that same feat, therefore we do it for them?

Do you even bother reading my responces? You have declared that if genocide occurs, you will step in to stop them... even while you insist that large scale violence is a required learning experience.

Really? Name the last pandemic that actually swept through on a global scale and threatened species survival. Give the source for your prediction that climate change is leading inevitably to our extinction when that question is very much beyond the projection of even the worst-case scenario. So, can we have this Red Herring out the way then?

Flase dilemnia. I'm not saying they will kill everyone- just a shit load of people. Given that past societies have been erased form the planet due to disease and climate change (mayans and sumerian from climate, much of the Americas from disease), it is a valid point. Your continued strawmanning is getting ridiculous.

Ah, so we must act on the basis of a big "What If?" Appeal to Consequence Fallacy yet again.

Obviously shooting someone isn't wrong because pointing out the bullet would hit them and kill them is pointing out the consequences

Do you not understand that the "lessons" people learn from war are- not surprisingly- the ones that let them fight more effectively? The social changes tend to be ones that make them more capable at getting their population mobilized for war. Needless to say these are not always good changes.

Funny, but I fail to see how your argument has any validity considering that we can look at the history of our own world and see that, despite your blatherings on the subject, humanity as a species has indeed advanced and has indeed abandoned abominable ideas which were once considered pillars of wisdom and, guess what, without the Space Brothers from Algol invading our world to show us the Way to Enlightenment back in the 14th century. That we have not attained perfection as yet does not invalidate this basic fact of human history.

I guess all the people who died to bring you to this point were necesary casulties. Sure, less people could have died using a different method, but it wouldn't feel right. And we wouldn't learn because societies are incapable of coping lessons from other societies. Even though having the space aliens tell you what you need to fix is a really good incentive.

Do you not understand that a logical fallacy invalidates any argument using it as it's basis? That's sort of why it's called a fallacy. I really don't know how to make this any simpler for you to grasp.

It only applies when you are asserting the truth of a statement.

A thing is not moral simply because you declare it so to your personal satisfaction. And it is certainly not true either. I'm sorry that this doesn't suit you.

No, it is moral because it improves the lives and wellbeing of sapients. Which my plan does.

Truth is mostly irrelevant for this discussion because preferance statements are always true (unless a person is lying about their preferance).

The only societies in which that statement is remotely true are ones in which the cultures had endured for 4000 years or more before Europeans ever came along. But even in those cases, it's observable that Europeans wrought consequences on their societies which, but for their intervention, would never have happened.

For those who use simpler lingo, change happens. Truely a dangerous and disturbing threat that must be put down.

And ignores wholesale the demonstrable math that the native population would be larger than it is now had not a programme of genocide and ethnic cleansing been carried out in the first place. Indeed, according to estimates for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are actually 3 million less Native Americans than lived at the time of Columbus. So he's wrong even on the terms of the timeframe from the day Columbus discovered that he was lost.

I'm aware of that. I just find it pathetic that you are misquoting a person who is noted for misquoting people.

Who says anybody ever had the right to take any of it away in the first fucking place?

Slavery is a cultural practice. Morality trumpts culture every single time.

Wrong yet again. There is a distinct difference between religions based on analogy to the natural world or made up from wholecloth by alleged revelation, and the cults like the Tanna islanders.

Which you are going to say... oh wait, you don't. You simply assert it!

Since you obviously did not pay attention: the Tanna Islanders ended up forming their Cargo Cult on the basis of mere observation of the American activities on their island, with only minimal contact with Navy officers.

Come on- you are supposed to be good at the history stuff. Lets not forget the previous occupation by the British and their missionaries who first documented the cargo cults you are talking about. Then came the Japanese who they welcomed... before realizing they were going to be screwed over. The Americans bumped up in the mythology because they had blacks and kicked the Japanese out.

This isn't "minimal contact"- the whole cargo cults were started up because the natives were told they could get stuff by working for it, while they say the British get stuff by simply writing out requisition forms.

Yet another of your stupid Strawmen.

Except you asserted the reason the mass media and the school systems don't know is because the Japanese deny it. Which means the Japanese have enough power and influence to set cirriculum and decide news stories. Which would be controlling the system. I prefer less insane theories.

No, their lack of an apology was NOT the basis of my argument that the Japanese were driven by a neofeudal worldview, you lying little asshole. You deliberately redacted the very passage from the book I cited to make that dishonest strawman and I'm calling you on it right now.

So the Japanese were using a "semi-feudal mindset", but the Germans were modern? The only difference I can find is the proliferation of war crimes... which Germany matches.

The difference is that the Germans, to this day, assume responsibility for their crimes of the war. The Japanese, however, deny it.

That neocon wankers continue to spew bullshit about how we could have won the war "if we had just done X" is beside the point. The Vietnam War is not taught in school as some grand project which should have worked. The U.S. government entered into a joint effort with the Vietnamese government to study the effects of Agent Orange bombardment during the Clinton Administration, and the U.S. is rendering assistance for decontamination of former U.S. military depots where Agent Orange was stored. That's more than Japan's government has ever done toward acknowledging any responsibility for their war crimes in China and Korea.

I'd hardly call Shep a neocon. He is a militist.
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 2&t=129115
So it is helping people recover that is the criteria... so the US fails the criteria for the first 20 years after the Vietnam war.

Yes it is, because Manifest Destiny (an ideology we abandoned by 1920, BTW) was not based upon the idea that the American people were specifically created by a particular god as opposed to all other peoples and retain a mystical link to that god through his avatar on the throne, and allowed for compromise, which the Japanese ideology did not.

Analogies don't have to be exactly the same. The fact is the US followed a belief that it was chosen by God to be a beacon of light for democracy... which we still follow.

The difference is that the Japanese viewpoint went far beyond the idea of doing "God's Work" and straight to the notion that they themselves were the Children of God (or in their case, Amatersu) and the Emperor was the very avatar of Amatersu and all his ancestors on the Crysanthemum Throne on Earth and therefore are the Superior People fit to rule all others.

Which is entirely different then the European belief that they were at the top of the volutionary ladder. Except it isn't. The only difference is Japan was one country and Europe was many countries.

Really? I thought it was over things like control of overseas raw materials, overseas markets, and strategic military objectives such as control of chokepoints of the Pacific sea lanes, with the whole "prestige" thing merely lending a patina of respectability to the whole venture.

So when the Europeans do it for prestige, it is to make it seem respectible. But when the Japanese do it for prestige, they are serious. Despite the fact that Japan is resource poor.

NOT the same exact behaviour, as per the extracted passage from The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945, which you redacted and hope will go forgotten.

Well:

Lets appeal to authority!

Yet, in part, this assumption also derived from credos that were uniquely Japanese. These included Japanese beliefs in the mythic origins of the Japanese race, the divine creation and inherent virtue of the Japanese Imperial House, and the mystical link between the emperor and his people.

Christianity has God creating man in his own image.
Europe has the belief in the divine right of kings and was still heavily monarchist.
The last one sounds similar to nation state and the justification for facism- that the dictator was the "will of the people" and the state was an expression of the nation and its culture.

You mean the way the Kingdom of Siam was —oh, wait, it wasn't taken over by Europeans despite the fact that it was about as "backward" as Japan i.e. non-industrialised and traditionalist. In fact, they quite cleverly managed to maintain their own independence despite being in the bailywick of four major colonial empires carving out Asian territory at will.

Buffer state probably.

You made a direct comparison between Japan and Ethiopia, and thus opened the door to attack on that point since you tried to say that without industrialisation, they'd have ended up the same way as the Ethiopians allegedly did —a conquered people. Which they did not. Now you try to backpedal and hope everyone will ignore how you tried to use the example of Ethiopia as support for your Japan argument. Typical.

And Ethiopia ended up conquered. The fact they managed to throw the invaders out, after other European powers declared war on Italy does not invalifdate my point. Because if you have to rely on foreign powers to save you, it really isn't you succeddin even though you lack industry, but succedding because of outside intervention.

To which I posted the inconvenient facts of Ethiopian history (Emperor Menelik's army crushing Italy's in 1896, Ethiopia's successful liberation with British and Commonwealth allies in 1941) you now try to handwave away by saying you were only ever talking about Japan.

Oh, and BTW, as a sidebar, there is no guarantee that industrialisation would have spared Ethiopia from invasion. It didn't work that miracle for either France of Czechoslovakia.

If France hadn't been industrialized, they wouldn't have even been a speed bump for the Germans.

Czechoslovakia had the problem that Germany had more industry, more men and more guns. Industry isn't a cure all- if your opponents have a ton more, they will win.

Nice strawman though. If it doesn't always bring victory, it is useless

Sometimes, the comedy just writes itself.

Like right now. They are two seperate failings. One is to assert things that are false, and one is to repeat yourself again and again without regard to the facts. That ou don't know this is sort of bad,

Uh uh, you are NOT getting away with that one. You have continued, despite being presented with diverse evidence contradicting your points, your half-assed constructions of "fact" and your "logic", and yet simply repeat the same argument as if nothing was ever said. That is constructing a Wall of Ignorance and that is you in this thread.

And any responce to that will be considered part of a "wall of ignorance". You have put yourself in a position where nothing I can say will change your mind.

It is too bad we don't have other people in this thread who could decide

The White Man's Burden was flawed because it's baseline premise —the necessity of civilising the Childlike Native™ whether they want it or not— is a fundamentally broken one.

Asserting a point doesn't make it true. I don't consider the natives child like- just extremely amoral. Obviously, getting them to drop slavery would be horribly wrong because trying to civilize people is evil.

Wrong again. If you're talking about the Plessy decision and Jim Crow, that was not the same thing as returning the blacks to the plantations as property, with their children to be legally recognised only as property and 3/5th persons for taxation. And those were undone by Truman desegregating the Army in 1948, by the Brown decision in a later Supreme Court, and Jim Crow killed by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 —which enforced the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and reinforced the 13th and 15th Amendments as well.

Congratulations, you make an even bigger fool of yourself than before.

So to rebut my claim that using outside force to impose change is bad... you show that they used outside force.

You do realize that the South did not vote on the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments? They were added to the consititution and ratifying them was a prerequisite for joining the Union. Given the fact that the Supreme Court had to jsutify intervention it is pretty clear such an action would not have been approved democratically in the United States.

[Wyrm]

A wholly unfounded assumption on your part. It assumes you can project into an alternative future to reach that sort of conclusion that Japan would never have developed without outside intervention. No regime lasts forever and neither would the Tokugawas, whether the punitive expeditions of the 1860s which helped to eventually touch off the War of the Restoration had occurred or not.

Of course the Tokugawas wouldn't last forever. It took over from another Shogunate. But without interference, the likely replacement would be... another Shogunate. Wow, that's cultural development for ya!

And yet, somehow, someway, the Chinese managed to develop without being ruled by an outside power to set the process into motion or being fostered.

And in what way did they develop? Were they on the way to shedding their succession of Emperors? The last emperor of Imperial China was Puyi, whose reign ended in 1912... the fucking twentieth century, and we already had our fingers deep inside Chinese politics before then (opium, anyone?). Did they have their own, independent Rennaissance or Industrial Revolution?

Japan wasn't really ruled from the outside, either. Yet you cite it as an example of harmful interference by the Europeans.

There is a marked difference between technological and social development which proceeds with close proximity, timewise, between the two, and technological advancement being thrust upon a backward culture.

Except we (that is, you and me) are not really talking about that difference, are we? We're talking about total isolation (the Federation TNG-style Prime Directive) verses involvement of any sort. Japan was essentially totally isolationist before Perry's fleet. Before, they'd only trade with the Dutch, who weren't interested in giving Japan technology.

And had the Black Death NOT occurred, there would have been no wealth redistribution. And the weapons developed directly because of the Hundred Years War, which accelerated that development —which would have not happened at anywhere near the pace it did had there NOT been a Hundred Years War.

The Hundred Years War was a long period of conflict within the European nations, where battles would flare up every so often. But when in European history had that not been true? The thing unifying the Hundred Years War under that name was that matter of the succession of the French king. Had the new weapons not arrived, it would have been just another feud of succession (remarkable only because of its length), and feudalism would've gone on undisturbed. But the new weapons did arrive — the idea of the Welsh longbow and gunpowder came and were refined — and eventually changed the very way wars were fought, and with it, the society that was purpose-built to support the old way of war.

Hell, when Europe got the stirrup (from the Chinese yet again), they used it to create the mounted knight and the feudalistic system in the first place.

Similarly, the Black Death would've redistributed wealth with or without paper, and people would've bought linen in their buying spree, but... what do they do with all the thrown-away linen? Burn it? It was only because we got the idea from China to turn it into paper did the Black Death make any real difference in our development. Otherwise, Europe would have had to take it in the gut and soldier on, smoothed over by the lovely money from inheritences.

And we only got the Black Death in the first place because we were trading all over the place. The black rat isn't native to Europe, and neither was the bubonic plague. Furthermore, because of all that trade, people got packed into Troyes and other trading towns — perfect pandemic fodder. No trade, no Black Death. (Or a Black Death not nearly as bad.)

And the driver for this same development at the same pace without the extant fact of the Hundred Years War would have been...?

The introduction of gunpowder was it's own driver, Patrick, feeding off the Europeans' talent for finding new ways to kill each other. The Hundred Years War almost reverted to knights on horseback again without it. See, during this time, there was so much food availible that the peasants had surpluses. And when you have a surplus, you had better things to do on a Sunday than obey the law and practice archery: you could go into business, trade, take produce to market, ect. It was so bad a generation after Agincourt, there weren't enough archers in England to form a company, let alone an army — it took a lot of training to get a good archer who would go out and get himself slaughtered for you, and those silly peasants weren't getting the practice! Without gunpowder, the armored knight and feudalism would've had a resurgence, and the Europeans would've been right back where they started.

The Hundred Years War is fingered as the war that ended feudalism, because it happened to be the war that was being fought when the new weapons that would end feudalism were introduced. Nothing more.

what about the Black Death? Well, no direct social upheval here, either. Just a bunch of dead people leaving their property to those who still living, so when the horror was over, people went spend crazy. That included clothes, and especially linen — which generates lots of linen rag, which is an excellent raw material for paper. ...

And the driver for this same redistribution of wealth at this same pace without the extant fact of the Black Death would have been...?

Don't strawman, Patrick. As the helpfully bolded text points out, the redistribution of wealth because of the Black Death was one of the triggers of the Rennaissance. My point is that it wasn't the social upheaval you pretend it is (the increased spending is not a social upheval by any stretch of the imagination): the lower classes were still lower classes, middle classes the middle classes, and the upper crust still flaky. If it weren't for the introduction of paper, the effects of the Black Death would've basiaclly ended there, Europe would've settled down and gone on much like before. Just with a lot of linen rag about.

But we got paper from the Chinese. If it wasn't for the Chinese connection, the Rennaissance would not have happened then, and would never have happened unless there were a European equivalent to the Taoist philosopher-priests bouncing around.

Furthermore, had Europe been isolated from the rest of the world the same way Japan was, there would have been no Black Death. And even if somehow some plague rats gotten ashore and caused the pandemic, the change wrought would've ended with a temporary and minor redistribution of wealth. It took the Chinese idea of paper to turn the Black Death into the Rennaissance and all that came after.

The difference is: the technological changes which worked in Western society were followed not very long after by a gradual evolution, at a pace with material development, of social development as well. At the same time the machines were being invented, so were the new ideas which gradually reshaped society at large, each following step-by-step. In Japan's case, they got radically accelerated technological and material development, but had not even begun to take the first steps away from a cultural worldview which had endured for centuries when they suddenly found themselves a modern industrial and military power. Indeed, the traditionalists became hardened in their determination to preserve the purity of Japanese culture from the lure of modernity. Hence, the trouble they eventually made for themselves and millions of other people in Asia and the Pacific.

While I quite agree that the introduction of technology to Japan needed to be done more gradually, with a healthy dose of the philosophy of handling it, I do not support the kind of total isolationism that the Federation Prime Directive insists on. The Japanese needed to be kicked off their high chair. The Europeans would never had gotten as far as they did, as fast as they did, without foreign influences to shake them up. Also, the social structure of Europe wasn't as stratified; people could move up (and down), so they tried it, which causes its own form of change. Isolationism impledes the flow of ideas and impedes social development, as does social stratification.

[eyl]

We are putting people in a position where they don't want to admit they are getting help. Do you think they would want to admit that all the neat innovations they have made they got from some one else?

You're relying on everyone involved - out of a pretty large group - not talking.

If that doesn't work, you can simply use bugs to make sure they don't blab, use memory wipes to make them believe it is their own idea, etc.

Can Federation technology even do that reliably (I'm honestly asking, I don't know)?

Paint.

Wouldn't that cause the ship to heat up unacceptably (not to mention it doesn't solve occlusion of stars)?

My goal is to get a culture that aggressively conquers the planet. Japan is only a rebuttal because they proceded to commit wanton atrocities. I'm sure a proxy can be found that doesn't do that.

And just how are you planning to wean them of using violence as a first resort afterwards?

[Uraniun235]

Memory wipes are not reliable - in TNG Who Watches The Watchers?, an attempted memory wipe against one of the natives was almost completely unsuccessful.

Also if I remember right, the dialogue in that episode suggested that the technique was experimental and not widely practiced.

[Samuel]

You're relying on everyone involved - out of a pretty large group - not talking.

The secrey plan doesn't require a large group. And I am relying on their self interest and the competance of my agents to not grab an alchoholic or some other person with loose lips.

Wouldn't that cause the ship to heat up unacceptably (not to mention it doesn't solve occlusion of stars)?

They have cloak devices. I'm sure they can dump their waste heat fine. If they can't, just get giant black sails infront of the ships.

As for blocking the stars... well, the easiest solution would be to have the ship positioned over the daylight side or over the polar region.

And just how are you planning to wean them of using violence as a first resort afterwards?

That is a goal?

Memory wipes are not reliable - in TNG Who Watches The Watchers?, an attempted memory wipe against one of the natives was almost completely unsuccessful.

Also if I remember right, the dialogue in that episode suggested that the technique was experimental and not widely practiced.

It is hit or miss. Other groups are shown to have extremely good memory control techniques, capable of laser guided amnesia or mind control. Of course, it works in Pen Pals although it carries the risk of brain damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conundrum_(TNG_episode)

[Patrick Degan]

A wholly unfounded assumption on your part. It assumes you can project into an alternative future to reach that sort of conclusion that Japan would never have developed without outside intervention. No regime lasts forever and neither would the Tokugawas, whether the punitive expeditions of the 1860s which helped to eventually touch off the War of the Restoration had occurred or not.

Of course the Tokugawas wouldn't last forever. It took over from another Shogunate. But without interference, the likely replacement would be... another Shogunate. Wow, that's cultural development for ya!

And who says at what pace a culture should develop? Who says it must be at the pace we think is appropriate? And who's to say a feudal regime must last forever, considering that none of them did?

And yet, somehow, someway, the Chinese managed to develop without being ruled by an outside power to set the process into motion or being fostered.

And in what way did they develop? Were they on the way to shedding their succession of Emperors? The last emperor of Imperial China was Puyi, whose reign ended in 1912... the fucking twentieth century, and we already had our fingers deep inside Chinese politics before then (opium, anyone?). Did they have their own, independent Rennaissance or Industrial Revolution?[/quote]

Yes they did. The Communists brought it about.

Japan wasn't really ruled from the outside, either. Yet you cite it as an example of harmful interference by the Europeans.

Who accelerated their material development far beyond their social development. Well-meaning it was, but the results proved disasterous down the line.

There is a marked difference between technological and social development which proceeds with close proximity, timewise, between the two, and technological advancement being thrust upon a backward culture.

Except we (that is, you and me) are not really talking about that difference, are we? We're talking about total isolation (the Federation TNG-style Prime Directive) verses involvement of any sort. Japan was essentially totally isolationist before Perry's fleet. Before, they'd only trade with the Dutch, who weren't interested in giving Japan technology.

Yes we are talking about that difference, whether you chose to acknowledge it or not. It did happen. And the results unfolded in a way that could be expected for a culture which had not shed a feudalist world view and acquired modern weapons and industry to pursue that vision to its logical end.

And had the Black Death NOT occurred, there would have been no wealth redistribution. And the weapons developed directly because of the Hundred Years War, which accelerated that development —which would have not happened at anywhere near the pace it did had there NOT been a Hundred Years War.

The Hundred Years War was a long period of conflict within the European nations, where battles would flare up every so often. But when in European history had that not been true? The thing unifying the Hundred Years War under that name was that matter of the succession of the French king. Had the new weapons not arrived, it would have been just another feud of succession (remarkable only because of its length), and feudalism would've gone on undisturbed. But the new weapons did arrive — the idea of the Welsh longbow and gunpowder came and were refined — and eventually changed the very way wars were fought, and with it, the society that was purpose-built to support the old way of war.

Thank you for demonstrating yet again how well you can regurgitate an encyclopedia. You still don't answer the basic question —had the Hundred Years War NOT occurred, what would have been the driver for the development of weapons and warfare at the pace driven by the exciegences of that war?

Similarly, the Black Death would've redistributed wealth with or without paper, and people would've bought linen in their buying spree, but... what do they do with all the thrown-away linen? Burn it? It was only because we got the idea from China to turn it into paper did the Black Death make any real difference in our development. Otherwise, Europe would have had to take it in the gut and soldier on, smoothed over by the lovely money from inheritences.

Thank you for demonstrating yet again how well you can regurgitate an encyclopedia. You still don't answer the basic question —had the Black Deatn NOT occurred, what would have been the driver for wealth redistribution at the pace driven by the depredations of the plague upon society and the nobility?

And we only got the Black Death in the first place because we were trading all over the place. The black rat isn't native to Europe, and neither was the bubonic plague. Furthermore, because of all that trade, people got packed into Troyes and other trading towns — perfect pandemic fodder. No trade, no Black Death. (Or a Black Death not nearly as bad.)

Um, no. The Black Death spread in the wake of Genoese merchants fleeing a siege of the Crimean city of Caffa in 1347 by the Mongols, who hurled disease-infected corpses over the walls by catapult. Their ships brought the rats and their fleas with them. The rest s history.

And the driver for this same development at the same pace without the extant fact of the Hundred Years War would have been...?

The introduction of gunpowder was it's own driver, Patrick, feeding off the Europeans' talent for finding new ways to kill each other. The Hundred Years War almost reverted to knights on horseback again without it. See, during this time, there was so much food availible that the peasants had surpluses. And when you have a surplus, you had better things to do on a Sunday than obey the law and practice archery: you could go into business, trade, take produce to market, ect. It was so bad a generation after Agincourt, there weren't enough archers in England to form a company, let alone an army — it took a lot of training to get a good archer who would go out and get himself slaughtered for you, and those silly peasants weren't getting the practice! Without gunpowder, the armored knight and feudalism would've had a resurgence, and the Europeans would've been right back where they started.

And why were the Europeans driven to find those new ways to kill each other? What fueled the search for those methods? What motivated the production of gunpowder? These things don't happen in a vacuum. Nice False Cause Fallacy on your part, BTW.

The Hundred Years War is fingered as the war that ended feudalism, because it happened to be the war that was being fought when the new weapons that would end feudalism were introduced. Nothing more.

A silly non-rebuttal.

what about the Black Death? Well, no direct social upheval here, either. Just a bunch of dead people leaving their property to those who still living, so when the horror was over, people went spend crazy. That included clothes, and especially linen — which generates lots of linen rag, which is an excellent raw material for paper. ...

And the driver for this same redistribution of wealth at this same pace without the extant fact of the Black Death would have been...?

Don't strawman, Patrick.

Nobody is doing that in this thread, except Samuel. You however are handwaving.

As the helpfully bolded text points out, the redistribution of wealth because of the Black Death was one of the triggers of the Rennaissance. My point is that it wasn't the social upheaval you pretend it is (the increased spending is not a social upheval by any stretch of the imagination): the lower classes were still lower classes, middle classes the middle classes, and the upper crust still flaky. If it weren't for the introduction of paper, the effects of the Black Death would've basiaclly ended there, Europe would've settled down and gone on much like before. Just with a lot of linen rag about.

In a word, bullshit. The population drop, the failure of the nobility, and especially the Catholic Church, in the wake of the crisis which broke down the structure of European feudalism made it impossible to retain the system of landed peasantry upon which the economy and society pre-plague was based. Labour became a scarce commodity and for the first time had to be bargained for. The fall of the landed nobility cleared the way for the rise of the trade and labour guilds. And a lot of the property which was abandoned had no one to inherit it afterward —the families either having all died or their remnants fleeing the stricken areas of the countryside.

But we got paper from the Chinese. If it wasn't for the Chinese connection, the Rennaissance would not have happened then, and would never have happened unless there were a European equivalent to the Taoist philosopher-priests bouncing around.

Paper was hardly an exclusively Chinese invention, especially as the Egyptians had discovered it first. The Arabs had discovered how to make linen-based paper in the 10th century which was finer in quality than the bamboo-based stock the Chinese had been using, and Europeans had begun their own independent papermaking in the 12th century, two hundred years before the Black Death.

BTW, here's a picture of the oldest known linen-based paper book produced on the European continent:



The Mozarab Missal of Silos, copied out by the monks of the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, near Burgos, Spain and dating to the 11th century CE.

What you're reaching for is the invention of the printing press —which essentially married woodblock printing with the mechanical screw-press used for centuries for winemaking and the production of olive oil.

Furthermore, had Europe been isolated from the rest of the world the same way Japan was, there would have been no Black Death. And even if somehow some plague rats gotten ashore and caused the pandemic, the change wrought would've ended with a temporary and minor redistribution of wealth. It took the Chinese idea of paper to turn the Black Death into the Rennaissance and all that came after.

Nevermind that the Arabs had discovered how to produce better quality paper by CE950 and that papermaking had spread to Europe by CE1250. Again, False Cause Fallacy on your part.

The difference is: the technological changes which worked in Western society were followed not very long after by a gradual evolution, at a pace with material development, of social development as well. At the same time the machines were being invented, so were the new ideas which gradually reshaped society at large, each following step-by-step. In Japan's case, they got radically accelerated technological and material development, but had not even begun to take the first steps away from a cultural worldview which had endured for centuries when they suddenly found themselves a modern industrial and military power. Indeed, the traditionalists became hardened in their determination to preserve the purity of Japanese culture from the lure of modernity. Hence, the trouble they eventually made for themselves and millions of other people in Asia and the Pacific.

While I quite agree that the introduction of technology to Japan needed to be done more gradually, with a healthy dose of the philosophy of handling it, I do not support the kind of total isolationism that the Federation Prime Directive insists on.

The TNG Federation's PD insists upon the sort of non-involvement which entails letting whole peoples die "if destined to". Nobody is advocating that in this thread. But neither is there any sort of imperative to force a culture's development as you and Samuel advocate.

The Japanese needed to be kicked off their high chair. The Europeans would never had gotten as far as they did, as fast as they did, without foreign influences to shake them up.

Really? Who says the Japanese "had" to be kicked off their "high chair", as you phrase it? Who says they "had" to be shaken up? By what standard? Who says what pace a culture must evolve at? Why? Smells like a Begging the Question Fallacy here.

Also, the social structure of Europe wasn't as stratified; people could move up (and down), so they tried it, which causes its own form of change. Isolationism impledes the flow of ideas and impedes social development, as does social stratification.

Feudal Europe was a dead-end for the landed peasantry, and there was no middle class; a situation which did not start to change without the twin disasters of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague impacting upon European society.

[Samuel]

And who says at what pace a culture should develop? Who says it must be at the pace we think is appropriate? And who's to say a feudal regime must last forever, considering that none of them did?

As fast as it can without killing the occupants. Progress isn't just good for the balance sheets- it gets us things like medicine and military power to resist your foes.

People don't like change. Particularly people in power. WIth no incentive to change, why should they?

Yes they did. The Communists brought it about.

After being invaded and humiliated.

Who accelerated their material development far beyond their social development. Well-meaning it was, but the results proved disasterous down the line.

The same goes for the Europeans. After all, once they got the technology they proceded to go on a spree of conquest and bathed the world in blood.

Yes we are talking about that difference, whether you chose to acknowledge it or not. It did happen. And the results unfolded in a way that could be expected for a culture which had not shed a feudalist world view and acquired modern weapons and industry to pursue that vision to its logical end.

So the Europeans advanced at a resonable pace?

Um, no. The Black Death spread in the wake of Genoese merchants fleeing a siege of the Crimean city of Caffa in 1347 by the Mongols, who hurled disease-infected corpses over the walls by catapult. Their ships brought the rats and their fleas with them. The rest s history.

How is this a rebuttal? History tends to have multiple threads that combine.

Nobody is doing that in this thread, except Samuel. You however are handwaving.

Basically pain, violence and death will cause social change. Which is something that 1984 made pretty clear. You need those for repressive societies to change- non-repressive ones can do it by non-warfare means.

Nevermind that the Arabs had discovered how to produce better quality paper by CE950 and that papermaking had spread to Europe by CE1250. Again, False Cause Fallacy on your part.

They got that from the Chinese. They had contact during their expansion and captured a bunch of paper makers and set up operations from that knowledge.

The TNG Federation's PD insists upon the sort of non-involvement which entails letting whole peoples die "if destined to". Nobody is advocating that in this thread. But neither is there any sort of imperative to force a culture's development as you and Samuel advocate.

Your plan requires the equivalent of the black plague and the one hundred years war- more than that, it requires constant warfare in order to spur innovation and the constant threat of disease in order to get something like the plague to be possible.

Basically, it is their destiny to suffer in order to become civilized. Not their destiny to die from natural disasters, but their destiny to suffer and die so they can be civilized. Real different.

Really? Who says the Japanese "had" to be kicked off their "high chair", as you phrase it? Who says they "had" to be shaken up? By what standard? Who says what pace a culture must evolve at? Why? Smells like a Begging the Question Fallacy here.

Because if they don't, eventually an asteroid comes and we all die. Or the climate changes and said civilization collapses.

Feudal Europe was a dead-end for the landed peasantry, and there was no middle class; a situation which did not start to change without the twin disasters of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague impacting upon European society.

Artisans? The free towns?

[Patrick Degan]

And who says at what pace a culture should develop? Who says it must be at the pace we think is appropriate? And who's to say a feudal regime must last forever, considering that none of them did?

As fast as it can without killing the occupants. Progress isn't just good for the balance sheets- it gets us things like medicine and military power to resist your foes.

People don't like change. Particularly people in power. WIth no incentive to change, why should they?

Circumstances change. Environments change. No condition remains stable. And I must again stress that accelerating a culture's technological development far beyond it's moral and social capacity to absorb those changes is a recipe for disaster.

Yes they did. The Communists brought it about.

After being invaded and humiliated.

After kicking the invaders out. After taking destiny in their own hands. They didn't remain "humiliated" for long. The fact that they fought against foreign invaders at all shows the Chinese were far from a "humiliated" people.

Who accelerated their material development far beyond their social development. Well-meaning it was, but the results proved disasterous down the line.

The same goes for the Europeans. After all, once they got the technology they proceded to go on a spree of conquest and bathed the world in blood.

No, the same does not go for the Europeans, Simple Simon. Since they also gradually developed concepts such as democracy, human liberties, laws of war, to limit the scope of warfare and government in the intervening centuries; lessons the Japanese did not take from their mentors. Nor did they "bathe the world in blood" as you have it. Really, hyperbole does not convince.

Yes we are talking about that difference, whether you chose to acknowledge it or not. It did happen. And the results unfolded in a way that could be expected for a culture which had not shed a feudalist world view and acquired modern weapons and industry to pursue that vision to its logical end.

So the Europeans advanced at a resonable pace?

Imagine a Europe which had received an accelerated advance in industrial and military technology but still retained at its core a feudalist worldview; in which no limits to warfare would be recognised, in which religiously-motivated slaughter was a principle, in which no such concept as human liberty was recognised, and in which no quarter would be shown either to the defeated armies or the enemy populations. We had a glimpse into that sort of situation with the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s. There is a benefit in allowing time to absorb new methods of doing things and discovering a context of action and consequence in the process.

Um, no. The Black Death spread in the wake of Genoese merchants fleeing a siege of the Crimean city of Caffa in 1347 by the Mongols, who hurled disease-infected corpses over the walls by catapult. Their ships brought the rats and their fleas with them. The rest s history.


How is this a rebuttal? History tends to have multiple threads that combine.

Wyrm, who you have decided to act for in proxy, tried to make the simplistic argument that the mere fact of trade allowed the spread of the plague. The Mongols however were using a crude form of biological warfare which concentrated the infection within a besieged city both in the form of corpses and the multiplying rat and flea populations within the walls that picked up the disease and acted as carriers. In other words, the Black Death spread from a hot zone —something you might have figured out on your own had you paid attention.

Basically pain, violence and death will cause social change. Which is something that 1984 made pretty clear. You need those for repressive societies to change- non-repressive ones can do it by non-warfare means.

Excuse me, but 1984 was not about social change; it was about —in part— the effort of an oligarchy to halt change of any sort for all time. And given how such efforts are doomed when a static society can no longer cope with shifts in either material support or environment, the oligarchy's collapse is inevitable; though Orwell didn't project that far.

Nevermind that the Arabs had discovered how to produce better quality paper by CE950 and that papermaking had spread to Europe by CE1250. Again, False Cause Fallacy on your part.


They got that from the Chinese. They had contact during their expansion and captured a bunch of paper makers and set up operations from that knowledge.

Uh huh. Nevermind that the Europeans and the Arabs had vellum-based papermaking for centuries. They discovered from the Chinese the idea of paper based on vegetable fibre —and then improved on it. What's pertinent in this part of the discussion is that Wyrm's attempted argument regarding the impact of paper on European society is out by at least a couple centuries before the time of the Black Death, and four centuries pre-plague by way of the Arabs, and had far less of an impact towards spurring the spread of knowledge than the invention of the mechanical printing press.

The TNG Federation's PD insists upon the sort of non-involvement which entails letting whole peoples die "if destined to". Nobody is advocating that in this thread. But neither is there any sort of imperative to force a culture's development as you and Samuel advocate.

Your plan requires the equivalent of the black plague and the one hundred years war- more than that, it requires constant warfare in order to spur innovation and the constant threat of disease in order to get something like the plague to be possible.

Basically, it is their destiny to suffer in order to become civilized. Not their destiny to die from natural disasters, but their destiny to suffer and die so they can be civilized. Real different.

Lie. My plan is simply to leave the inhabitants of a world to find their own way to advancement, with as little outside interference as possible —ideally none, but intervention in case of a serious enough emergency. It is not at all a given that every society on every planet will automatically follow the same pattern as Earth did —a baseless assumption you have put as the cornerstone of your entire argument in this increasingly silly discussion and one which has already been shown to be defective by the example of the Mintakans.

Really? Who says the Japanese "had" to be kicked off their "high chair", as you phrase it? Who says they "had" to be shaken up? By what standard? Who says what pace a culture must evolve at? Why? Smells like a Begging the Question Fallacy here.

Because if they don't, eventually an asteroid comes and we all die. Or the climate changes and said civilization collapses.

What the fuck are you babbling about?

Feudal Europe was a dead-end for the landed peasantry, and there was no middle class; a situation which did not start to change without the twin disasters of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague impacting upon European society.

Artisans? The free towns?

In which a middle class as we know it still did not exist, and despite which did not break the monopoly of wealth held by the nobility and the Church. Between the bourgeoise of the towns and the peasantry, there still existed a very steep drop.

[Patrick Degan]

Oh, and there's this bit as well

How... incredibly simpleminded of you. We're talking about medieval-level primitives at best who may understand the concept of lying but not the concept of security as we know it. People who would not understand the reason for ensuring that nobody talks, nor have any realistic chance of doing so, since it was impossible to monitor every person's actions or words in that sort of society. The first nobleman who blabs to his mistress, or carelessly talks while the servants are nearby, provides a channel for word to get out to the general populace.

We are putting people in a position where they don't want to admit they are getting help. Do you think they would want to admit that all the neat innovations they have made they got from some one else?

And why would they want to admit that? Those new toys make them more powerful than any other warlord in the region. What's their incentive to conceal anything?

If that doesn't work, you can simply use bugs to make sure they don't blab, use memory wipes to make them believe it is their own idea, etc.

Screw with the brain chemistry too many times and you end up with an idiot rather than a useful leader and his councils. And how do you know who to bug and where?

Nevermind that people are bound to notice the appearance of "strange lights" in the night sky —orbiting starships reflecting sunlight off their hulls.

Paint.

Um, paint does not prevent orbiting objects from giving off reflected light in space, moron. Furthermore, you really don't want to darken your spaceship's hull to make it a more efficient blackbody absorber of heat, for rather obvious reasons.

"Valid justification?" By what standard? By whose authority? By what logic? Your entire case comes down to you assuming your right to invade their world, impose your rule and your standards, and change their culture, because of your self-declared duty to do so. Basically: "X gives me the right to do Y, because doing Y is good and therefore justifies X". Circular Reasoning Fallacy.


Actually, Y is pretty evil. I mean, lets be honest. I'll have the planet unified by force and have a forced industrial drive. I'm pretty sure the second is rather hazardous to peoples health, with the whole cramming people in hastily erected urban centers that are filled with disease.

Which obviates against the alleged good you're doing.

My standard is harm to sapients.

Which your actions are performing, whether you wish to admit it or not.

My authority would be the Federation charter or, in a different universe, the governing contract for said body.

That may give you the power, not the right to do what you propose.

My logic is that some damage is acceptable if it leads to greater benefits in the long run.

Ah, the Ends justify the Means argument. Your morality becomes more suspect with each post in this thread.

The entire point of the Japan example is to illustrate just why your proposed course of action is more likely to whipsaw and produce the opposite result of what you're aiming for. Which was in the overall context of my argument but which you dishonestly expropriated for your purposes. Stolen Concept Fallalcy, that.

My goal is to get a culture that aggressively conquers the planet.

Which means... you've brought on the same cycle of war for conquest, mass death, and mass suffering you originally said you wanted to prevent for the natives with your well-meaning intervention in their cultural development. Your morality becomes more and more suspect.

Japan is only a rebuttal because they proceded to commit wanton atrocities. I'm sure a proxy can be found that doesn't do that.

That you do not see how ludicrous a concept this is makes you either a complete bumbling imbecile or hopelessly naive. Either way, it's pathetic.

And yet you continue to make the same arguments despite having contrary facts which undermine your premises demonstrated to you. That is not honest.


Your "contrary arguments" butress my claim.

In Opposite-World, perhaps. In the Real World, where the rest of us live, that statement makes you look like an idiot or a liar.

I value certain good over potential problems.
-Permant dependancy is out because I will have them doing the industirialization.
-Self-Destruction is in... but no more so than any other time in history. Sure, they can kill each other more efficeiently, but societies have destroyed themselves with even less technology.

The problem, moron, is that your "certain good" is going to lead to the very problems you think you're going to prevent, since your stated goal is a culture which aggressively conquers the planet. You've only sped up the timetable and done so with a force which knows only power and its ruthless application and nothing about little niceties like human rights.

Which provides a cogent argument on any point in this discussion... how, exactly?

Not exactly rare. I'm counting Rwanda and Yugoslavia of course. Others probably exist I don't remember.

That you can name only two (and one of those did not meet the standard of a genocidal action) and can't remember if there have been any others in the 63 years since the end of the Second World War demonstrates that genocide is a comparatively rare occurrence.

First, you assume a global genocide taking place, which is a wholly unfounded assumption on your part (nevermind that a medieval society wouldn't have the capability to carry out anything of that scale). Next, you assume the peacekeepers allowing the natives to simply trade for advanced weaponry and equipment —something which does not happen in present-day PK operations on our own world. From there, you proceed to yet another Appeal to Consequence Fallacy on your part, and one based upon the ludicrous notion that the natives will from that point onward deliberately commit multiple genocides just to get the space aliens to come back with the goodies. The motives for genocide stem from deep-seated hatreds, not from avarice for goodies from the outside world.


Congradulations! You made English the planets new official language.

Congratulations! You show that you're a dissembling little moron who thinks mockery nullifies an argument.

No, I assume genocide or massive warfare will be taking place on multiple parts of the planet.

And just how "massive" did warfare get to in medieval times? Up to World War II level? How about World War I level? How about Seven Years War level? Even that? Try for some standard of measure to sustain your point, you little twit, otherwise your statement is functionally meaningless.

As for the peacekeepers trading tech to the natives... it depends on the situation. With a fast FTL you can rotate them often. Slow FTL they are in for the long haul- months. With poor to no FTL they are there for the duration.

What do impoverished primitives have that peacekeepers from space would want to trade for? Here's a clue: nothing. See if you can work the rest of it out on your own.

And, the longer they are there, the more likely they are to get attached to the natives and willing to help them. Of course, if the planet has something valuable like your "white man's burden" retort implies, it just takes enough corruption and we can have a gangster world.

If the planet has something valuable, the more advanced culture can simply take it and the natives can't do fuck-all about it. Or they trade trinkets, food and medicines for their shiny rocks if they're a bit more careful about things like the Federation are and still get the planet's valuable substance for virtually nothing.

Seriously, you are going to garrison troops there for an extended period of time and if they empathize with the natives, they probably will help them. It may not be weapons, but if they start supplying medicine to stop a plague you get similar results. Or one of your troopers wants to be a good samaritan or has delusions of grandeur and provides them some textbooks and teaches them the language.

You can supply medicines and even teach the natives how to read and write without also fostering any radical alteration of their culture. We do that all the time right here on Earth and have done for the past sixty years.

Or you could troops that don't speak and are entirely outfitted in body armor do all the heavy lifting- I'm sure there is no possibility that the natives will form a religion around that.

Which brings us right back to the Tanna Islanders and the damage wrought on their culture by the Americans putting their supply depot in their backyard.

As for people killing each other to get the Gods involved... the Aztecs waged flower wars to get human sacrifices to insure rain. I'm sure that getting care packages to fall from the sky will do something similar.

There is considerable dispute amongst scholars that human sacrifice was the purpose of the Aztec wars; they already had a ready-source of victims amongst the general population and from slaves. That captured war prisoners were used for human sacrifice is not disputed, but there is no definitive body of fact which demonstrates that the Aztecs specifically waged wars to collect sacrificial victims as opposed to any other motivation. As it is, your "argument" here is hardly demonstrable by any example of post-World War II genocide that can be pointed to.

Getting one planetary state does end warfare. Of course, there is still civil unrest, but that tends to be smaller and can be dealt with by local garrisons.

Getting one planetary state by conquest brings about the results you say you wish to avoid: mass death, mass suffering, and the additional harm of political repression for the ruling regime to maintain control.

Really, this is the sort of state you see as an eventual Federation member? Not only your morality but your sanity becomes more questionable.

Are you saying that our own civilisation has not learned from it's past mistakes? What accounts for the abandonment of such abominations as the Divine Right of Kings, chattel slavery, human sacrifice, among many others which were once considered normal aspects of the everyday world? Why did the United States and the Soviet Union back off from the precipice of nuclear war not once but three times during the course of the Cold War? Why did India and Pakistan back off from that same precipice? What accounts for this unless we humans have been doing what you insist is impossible —namely, learning from our past conflicts and mistakes? Or do you allege that we've actually been under the secret guidance of the Space Brothers from Algol? And if we have managed to reach some degree of maturation as a species on our own hook, by what presumption do you declare that primitive people on another world cannot accomplish that same feat, therefore we do it for them?

Do you even bother reading my responces? You have declared that if genocide occurs, you will step in to stop them... even while you insist that large scale violence is a required learning experience.

My entire point has been: that if a people are going to make it as a stable and mature culture which won't destroy itself or carry it's legacy of violence to the stars, they have a better chance if the process of learning from their own mistakes is not preempted by outsiders making all their decisions for them. There is even the possibility that said culture will manage to develop without the same degree of bloodshed and suffering —a possibility you blithely dismiss in your ongoing campaign to justify your ideology. The Mintakans from the STNG episode "Who Watches The Watchers" underscores this point. By contrast, outsiders can and often have in history wrought more damage than they sought to repair. Stepping in to stop a genocide, an exceptional intervention if one is occurring, does not negate a culture's self-development, just makes sure that it will take place at all.

YOUR approach has been stated baldly by you to bring about a culture that will aggressively conquer it's own planet, which means steamrolling over all opposition, which means bringing about the very cycle of warfare and mass death you say you want to avoid, and putting at the head of that world-society a culture that is still saddled by the ideology of power and conquest that you have just cemented into their basic thinking and which they now know to be successful as opposed to any ideology based upon peace and cooperation between peoples and rejection of violence and repression. Congratulations, moron, you've helped to create the next Cardassia Prime.

Really? Name the last pandemic that actually swept through on a global scale and threatened species survival. Give the source for your prediction that climate change is leading inevitably to our extinction when that question is very much beyond the projection of even the worst-case scenario. So, can we have this Red Herring out the way then?

Flase dilemnia. I'm not saying they will kill everyone- just a shit load of people. Given that past societies have been erased form the planet due to disease and climate change (mayans and sumerian from climate, much of the Americas from disease), it is a valid point. Your continued strawmanning is getting ridiculous.

A hint for you, moron: don't spew fallacy names when you have no clue of what the fuck you're talking about. Asking you to name examples to support your assertions is neither a False Dilemma (If it's not all X, it will necessarily be all Y) nor a strawman (a false and weak version of another's argument to rebut and score a cheap point). You were asked to support your assertions. Either do so or shut the fuck up.

Obviously shooting someone isn't wrong because pointing out the bullet would hit them and kill them is pointing out the consequences

Imbecilic non-rebuttal of anything. Ignore.

Do you not understand that the "lessons" people learn from war are- not surprisingly- the ones that let them fight more effectively? The social changes tend to be ones that make them more capable at getting their population mobilized for war. Needless to say these are not always good changes.

People have also learned to not use certain weapons, certain tactics, which may not only needlessly increase death and suffering for no purpose but backfire on the perpetrators. This is why nuclear weapons have not been used in actual warfare since Nagasaki, why agreements on the just treatment of war prisoners are in effect, why there are exchanges for prisoners and wounded, why chemical and bioweapons are outlawed and why bomblets and cluster-mines are being banned by international convention even as we speak. This is why bombing campaigns, as are carried out in modern day warfare, are targeted as precisely as possible to AVOID causing collateral damage and civilian casualties as much as possible. This is why there are limits on the rules of engagement in present-day warfare. This is why there is such a thing as a defined set of war-crimes. Things which you are either ignorant of or are dishonestly ignoring so you can flog your ideology.

Funny, but I fail to see how your argument has any validity considering that we can look at the history of our own world and see that, despite your blatherings on the subject, humanity as a species has indeed advanced and has indeed abandoned abominable ideas which were once considered pillars of wisdom and, guess what, without the Space Brothers from Algol invading our world to show us the Way to Enlightenment back in the 14th century. That we have not attained perfection as yet does not invalidate this basic fact of human history.

I guess all the people who died to bring you to this point were necesary casulties.

I grow tired of this strawman of yours, and your repetition of it shows what a thoroughly dishonest little shit you have become in the course of this discussion.

Sure, less people could have died using a different method, but it wouldn't feel right. And we wouldn't learn because societies are incapable of coping lessons from other societies. Even though having the space aliens tell you what you need to fix is a really good incentive.

To turn your own arguments back on you, what if we would have learned the "wrong" lessons from the space aliens? Just as Meiji Japan did? Just as the Tanna Islanders did?

Do you not understand that a logical fallacy invalidates any argument using it as it's basis? That's sort of why it's called a fallacy. I really don't know how to make this any simpler for you to grasp.

It only applies when you are asserting the truth of a statement.

No, moron, it applies when you try to base an argument on the fallacy at all. It makes the entire chain of logic proceeding from it suspect.

A thing is not moral simply because you declare it so to your personal satisfaction. And it is certainly not true either. I'm sorry that this doesn't suit you.

No, it is moral because it improves the lives and wellbeing of sapients. Which my plan does.

By creating a culture "that aggressively conquers it's planet"?! Your words.

Truth is mostly irrelevant for this discussion because preferance statements are always true (unless a person is lying about their preferance).

What sort of utter bullshit blather is THAT supposed to be?!?!

The only societies in which that statement is remotely true are ones in which the cultures had endured for 4000 years or more before Europeans ever came along. But even in those cases, it's observable that Europeans wrought consequences on their societies which, but for their intervention, would never have happened.

For those who use simpler lingo, change happens. Truely a dangerous and disturbing threat that must be put down.

Man of Straw yet again, you dishonest little shit.

And ignores wholesale the demonstrable math that the native population would be larger than it is now had not a programme of genocide and ethnic cleansing been carried out in the first place. Indeed, according to estimates for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are actually 3 million less Native Americans than lived at the time of Columbus. So he's wrong even on the terms of the timeframe from the day Columbus discovered that he was lost.

I'm aware of that. I just find it pathetic that you are misquoting a person who is noted for misquoting people.

No, I was drawing a comparison between his "reasoning" and yours, not using him as an authority on anything.

Who says anybody ever had the right to take any of it away in the first fucking place?

Slavery is a cultural practice. Morality trumpts culture every single time.

Morality is part of culture, imbecile, and evolves with culture, imbecile. That is different from going in and wiping out another culture because you've decided it doesn't suit you.

And as for the indians: not all tribes practised slavery, and in those that did, the possibility of a slave buying his freedom existed. Some tribes, such as the Houma and the Seminole, by contrast harboured fugitive black slaves, adopted them into their tribes, and permitted or even welcomed intermarriage with the tribeswomen. And in all cases of indian tribes that did have the practise, it was nowhere near the sort of dehumanising, permanent, generational slavery which was peculiar to the American south's ideology.

Wrong yet again. There is a distinct difference between religions based on analogy to the natural world or made up from wholecloth by alleged revelation, and the cults like the Tanna islanders.

Which you are going to say... oh wait, you don't. You simply assert it!

An "assertion" I backed in previous postings with fact and argument, you dishonest little shit.

Since you obviously did not pay attention: the Tanna Islanders ended up forming their Cargo Cult on the basis of mere observation of the American activities on their island, with only minimal contact with Navy officers.

Come on- you are supposed to be good at the history stuff. Lets not forget the previous occupation by the British and their missionaries who first documented the cargo cults you are talking about. Then came the Japanese who they welcomed... before realizing they were going to be screwed over. The Americans bumped up in the mythology because they had blacks and kicked the Japanese out.

This isn't "minimal contact"- the whole cargo cults were started up because the natives were told they could get stuff by working for it, while they say the British get stuff by simply writing out requisition forms.

You're conflating different phenomena, different tribes and even different island groups. For a start, the New Hebridies Islands (present-day Vanuatu) were never occupied by the Japanese —the Americans got to Tanna in May, 1942, the same month the invasion group headed to Port Moresby was turned back by the Battle of the Coral Sea. Theirs was the first large-scale presence of Outsiders on their island. A small fraction of Tanna's population were recruited to work on the bases at Efate and Espiritu Santo. For the most part, the Americans offered relief but did nothing to encourage the Tanna Islanders beliefs —indeed, an attempt was made to discourage the cult by the Navy in 1943. The John Frum movement displaced the previous imported Christianity and, of all the cargo cults which sprang up in Melanesia during colonial times and through World War II is the only one to have endured so long.

Except you asserted the reason the mass media and the school systems don't know is because the Japanese deny it. Which means the Japanese have enough power and influence to set cirriculum and decide news stories. Which would be controlling the system. I prefer less insane theories.

Excuse me, but we do know about Japanese atrocities and the Japanese certainly do not control our school system or our media. Nor anybody else's. What the fuck are you babbling about? That the Japanese themselves censor or alter the history of the war to deny their own guilt within their own country is not at issue here. That is well known.

No, their lack of an apology was NOT the basis of my argument that the Japanese were driven by a neofeudal worldview, you lying little asshole. You deliberately redacted the very passage from the book I cited to make that dishonest strawman and I'm calling you on it right now.





So the Japanese were using a "semi-feudal mindset", but the Germans were modern? The only difference I can find is the proliferation of war crimes... which Germany matches.

The difference is that the Germans, to this day, assume responsibility for their crimes of the war. The Japanese, however, deny it.

You have again lifted my words out of their proper context, as you have done at least twice now in this thread, liar. Especially as how I made extensive argument regarding the Japanese ideology and cited a scholarly article as introduction to a general work on the subject as its support. Which you have chosen to again ignore. Well, to once more quote the relevant passage from the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1):

On the one hand, the Japanese Empire resembled its European counterparts in that its authority was based on an assumption of the superiority of the colonial rulers over the subject peoples. To a degree this basic perspective stemmed from the fact, common to all colonial systems, that the empire had been imposed by a conquest of force by a stronger, more materially advanced race upon the weaker, more materially retarded peoples. Yet, in part, this assumption also derived from credos that were uniquely Japanese. These included Japanese beliefs in the mythic origins of the Japanese race, the divine creation and inherent virtue of the Japanese Imperial House, and the mystical link between the emperor and his people. The relative isolation of the country throughout most of its history, as well as a cultural deference toward China, had in centuries past prevented these beliefs of racial uniqueness from transmogrifying into a theory of racial supremacy. But a few decades of expanding dominion over neighbouring Asian peoples, reinforced by racial notions of Social Darwinism, inevitably released the virus of racial assertiveness into the Japanese ideological bloodstream and quickened the Japanese sense of superiority to the rest of Asia.

As I have pointed out in my essay on Japanese colonial ideology, these contrasting Western and Asian —Japanese— patterns of empire thus formed the perimetres for an evolving and contrasting set of Japanese attitudes toward colonialism, their own and that of other nations. As such they provoked two quite dissimilar Japanese approaches to the relations of colonial ruler and ruled.

Eat it.

That neocon wankers continue to spew bullshit about how we could have won the war "if we had just done X" is beside the point. The Vietnam War is not taught in school as some grand project which should have worked. The U.S. government entered into a joint effort with the Vietnamese government to study the effects of Agent Orange bombardment during the Clinton Administration, and the U.S. is rendering assistance for decontamination of former U.S. military depots where Agent Orange was stored. That's more than Japan's government has ever done toward acknowledging any responsibility for their war crimes in China and Korea.


So it is helping people recover that is the criteria... so the US fails the criteria for the first 20 years after the Vietnam war.

Strawman. I said what we are doing towards Vietnam is more than anything Japan has ever done to acknowledge its responsibility for it's atrocities. That is not me saying the U.S. has issued anything like a formal apology or failed to meet some criteria and I am growing tired of your expanding dishonesty in this discussion.

Yes it is, because Manifest Destiny (an ideology we abandoned by 1920, BTW) was not based upon the idea that the American people were specifically created by a particular god as opposed to all other peoples and retain a mystical link to that god through his avatar on the throne, and allowed for compromise, which the Japanese ideology did not.

Analogies don't have to be exactly the same. The fact is the US followed a belief that it was chosen by God to be a beacon of light for democracy... which we still follow.

In this case, the analogy isn't even close. Manifest Destiny doesn't come up to even a small measure of the Japanese myth about themselves and their direct descent from Amatersu. And for your information, we do not follow Manefest Destiny. Even our present misadventure in Iraq hardly qualifies as an expression of that ideology.

The difference is that the Japanese viewpoint went far beyond the idea of doing "God's Work" and straight to the notion that they themselves were the Children of God (or in their case, Amatersu) and the Emperor was the very avatar of Amatersu and all his ancestors on the Crysanthemum Throne on Earth and therefore are the Superior People fit to rule all others.


Which is entirely different then the European belief that they were at the top of the volutionary ladder. Except it isn't. The only difference is Japan was one country and Europe was many countries.

To once more quote the relevant passage from the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1):

On the one hand, the Japanese Empire resembled its European counterparts in that its authority was based on an assumption of the superiority of the colonial rulers over the subject peoples. To a degree this basic perspective stemmed from the fact, common to all colonial systems, that the empire had been imposed by a conquest of force by a stronger, more materially advanced race upon the weaker, more materially retarded peoples. Yet, in part, this assumption also derived from credos that were uniquely Japanese. These included Japanese beliefs in the mythic origins of the Japanese race, the divine creation and inherent virtue of the Japanese Imperial House, and the mystical link between the emperor and his people. The relative isolation of the country throughout most of its history, as well as a cultural deference toward China, had in centuries past prevented these beliefs of racial uniqueness from transmogrifying into a theory of racial supremacy. But a few decades of expanding dominion over neighbouring Asian peoples, reinforced by racial notions of Social Darwinism, inevitably released the virus of racial assertiveness into the Japanese ideological bloodstream and quickened the Japanese sense of superiority to the rest of Asia.

As I have pointed out in my essay on Japanese colonial ideology, these contrasting Western and Asian —Japanese— patterns of empire thus formed the perimetres for an evolving and contrasting set of Japanese attitudes toward colonialism, their own and that of other nations. As such they provoked two quite dissimilar Japanese approaches to the relations of colonial ruler and ruled.

Eat it.

Really? I thought it was over things like control of overseas raw materials, overseas markets, and strategic military objectives such as control of chokepoints of the Pacific sea lanes, with the whole "prestige" thing merely lending a patina of respectability to the whole venture.


So when the Europeans do it for prestige, it is to make it seem respectible. But when the Japanese do it for prestige, they are serious. Despite the fact that Japan is resource poor.

Except the Japanese didn't have to conquer an empire to acquire raw materials when trade would have garnered them the same materiel for far less of a military cost. Indeed, that they set forth on such a venture at a time when overseas colonial empires were starting to be recognised as burdensome rather than beneficial is another example of the Japanese learning the wrong lessons from the Europeans.

NOT the same exact behaviour, as per the extracted passage from The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945, which you redacted and hope will go forgotten.

Well:


Lets appeal to authority!

Citing a scholarly work is NOT an Appeal to Authority, you dishonest little shit. Again, do not speak of fallacies you really have no fucking clue of.

Christianity has God creating man in his own image.

Europe has the belief in the divine right of kings and was still heavily monarchist.
The last one sounds similar to nation state and the justification for facism- that the dictator was the "will of the people" and the state was an expression of the nation and its culture.

False Analogy Fallacy at its worst. Christianity has all mankind created in His image. Japanese mysticism has only Japanese created as the direct heavenly descendants of Amatersu. And absolute monarchism —which is based upon Divine Right— was a dead ideology in Europe by the beginning of the 19th century. The last European country to cling to that system was Imperial Russia, and it began to abandon it by 1905.

You mean the way the Kingdom of Siam was —oh, wait, it wasn't taken over by Europeans despite the fact that it was about as "backward" as Japan i.e. non-industrialised and traditionalist. In fact, they quite cleverly managed to maintain their own independence despite being in the bailywick of four major colonial empires carving out Asian territory at will.

Buffer state probably.

Siam retained its independence because it's kings were able to cleverly play their diplomacy with the greater powers and play them off against one another. They gradually absorbed western reforms and technology, albeit at their own pace.

You made a direct comparison between Japan and Ethiopia, and thus opened the door to attack on that point since you tried to say that without industrialisation, they'd have ended up the same way as the Ethiopians allegedly did —a conquered people. Which they did not. Now you try to backpedal and hope everyone will ignore how you tried to use the example of Ethiopia as support for your Japan argument. Typical.


And Ethiopia ended up conquered. The fact they managed to throw the invaders out, after other European powers declared war on Italy does not invalifdate my point. Because if you have to rely on foreign powers to save you, it really isn't you succeddin even though you lack industry, but succedding because of outside intervention.

It does so invalidate your point, moron, because the Ethiopians did not acquiesce to Italian rule and at the end of the day it was still Ethiopians fighting and succeeding to regain their own independence.

To which I posted the inconvenient facts of Ethiopian history (Emperor Menelik's army crushing Italy's in 1896, Ethiopia's successful liberation with British and Commonwealth allies in 1941) you now try to handwave away by saying you were only ever talking about Japan.

Oh, and BTW, as a sidebar, there is no guarantee that industrialisation would have spared Ethiopia from invasion. It didn't work that miracle for either France of Czechoslovakia.

If France hadn't been industrialized, they wouldn't have even been a speed bump for the Germans.

Czechoslovakia had the problem that Germany had more industry, more men and more guns. Industry isn't a cure all- if your opponents have a ton more, they will win.

Nice strawman though. If it doesn't always bring victory, it is useless

The only strawman is your own. I did NOT say that industrialisation was "useless" if it didn't "always bring victory". That is your construction entirely.

Sometimes, the comedy just writes itself.

Like right now. They are two seperate failings. One is to assert things that are false, and one is to repeat yourself again and again without regard to the facts. That ou don't know this is sort of bad,

Pot, kettle, black.

Uh uh, you are NOT getting away with that one. You have continued, despite being presented with diverse evidence contradicting your points, your half-assed constructions of "fact" and your "logic", and yet simply repeat the same argument as if nothing was ever said. That is constructing a Wall of Ignorance and that is you in this thread.


And any responce to that will be considered part of a "wall of ignorance". You have put yourself in a position where nothing I can say will change your mind.

It is too bad we don't have other people in this thread who could decide

From what I see, your "logic" is under attack by at least two other posters in this thread who also see its glaring weaknesses manifest. Not that I'm using it as a support for my position; I simply find the fact amusing in the wake of your stated wish here.

The White Man's Burden was flawed because it's baseline premise —the necessity of civilising the Childlike Native™ whether they want it or not— is a fundamentally broken one.


Asserting a point doesn't make it true.

Once more, look who's talking.

I don't consider the natives child like- just extremely amoral.

Because they don't advance at the pace you decide they should. So you take it on yourself to decide things for them. That is rendering them as childlike in your ideology.

Obviously, getting them to drop slavery would be horribly wrong because trying to civilize people is evil.

Trying to civilise them at the cost your method would entail is. That you do not see this makes you a moral imbecile as well.

Wrong again. If you're talking about the Plessy decision and Jim Crow, that was not the same thing as returning the blacks to the plantations as property, with their children to be legally recognised only as property and 3/5th persons for taxation. And those were undone by Truman desegregating the Army in 1948, by the Brown decision in a later Supreme Court, and Jim Crow killed by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 —which enforced the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and reinforced the 13th and 15th Amendments as well.

Congratulations, you make an even bigger fool of yourself than before.


So to rebut my claim that using outside force to impose change is bad... you show that they used outside force

The operation of the machinery of constitutional law is NOT "using outside force", imbecile.

You do realize that the South did not vote on the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments? They were added to the consititution and ratifying them was a prerequisite for joining the Union. Given the fact that the Supreme Court had to jsutify intervention it is pretty clear such an action would not have been approved democratically in the United States.

The South, recall, had withdrawn itself from representation in Congress, and it's legislatures from voting on constitutional issues. As they had engaged in rebellion against the lawfully constitutional government of the United States, they had placed themselves outside the machinery of the law until such time as they rejoined the Union by re-ratifying the constitution, which then included the new amendments. Furthermore, the Supreme Court's job is to interpret the law and it thus had every right to reverse it's earlier decision on Plessey and confirm the rights to equal protection under law with Brown. While the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were not actions of the Supreme Court but of Congress exercising its power to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments "by appropriate legislation". The only "force" involved was that of law, not of arms.

[eyl]

You're relying on everyone involved - out of a pretty large group - not talking.

The secrey plan doesn't require a large group. And I am relying on their self interest and the competance of my agents to not grab an alchoholic or some other person with loose lips.

IOW, you're betting on everything going right? And I might point out that, depending on their position, you may not have a choice but to work with that "alchoholic or some other person with loose lips".

And just how are you planning to wean them of using violence as a first resort afterwards?

That is a goal?

You do realize that sooner or later (your entire plan makes it "sooner") you'll end up with these guys as spacefaring neighbors? Do you want to end up in a situation where the Federation is constantly sending peacekeeping missions there (at best)

Memory wipes are not reliable - in TNG Who Watches The Watchers?, an attempted memory wipe against one of the natives was almost completely unsuccessful.

Also if I remember right, the dialogue in that episode suggested that the technique was experimental and not widely practiced.

It is hit or miss. Other groups are shown to have extremely good memory control techniques, capable of laser guided amnesia or mind control. Of course, it works in Pen Pals although it carries the risk of brain damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conundrum_(TNG_episode)

So again, you're relying on everything working right. And since you'd probably need to mindwipe the people involved more than once, if there's a risk of brain damage, you'll eventually have to replace them which makes keeping secrecy harder.

[Samuel]

Many of my rebuttals are sarcasm.

Circumstances change. Environments change. No condition remains stable. And I must again stress that accelerating a culture's technological development far beyond it's moral and social capacity to absorb those changes is a recipe for disaster.

And when these happen, why do you think a rigid society will adapt? There have been plenty of cases where they simply died.

After kicking the invaders out. After taking destiny in their own hands. They didn't remain "humiliated" for long. The fact that they fought against foreign invaders at all shows the Chinese were far from a "humiliated" people.

Bullshit. The Russian Army kicked the invaders out. The Japanese were advancing in China until 1945.

No, the same does not go for the Europeans, Simple Simon. Since they also gradually developed concepts such as democracy, human liberties, laws of war, to limit the scope of warfare and government in the intervening centuries; lessons the Japanese did not take from their mentors. Nor did they "bathe the world in blood" as you have it. Really, hyperbole does not convince.

You mean like the expansion into the Americas? Or the fact they had repeated and incesent warfare throughout most of their history with occasional pauses? Or the fact that the social innovations let them develop more effective ways of killing each other? Or the fact they nearly destroyed all that progress in one fell swoop?

By the start of WW2, only France and England were democracies in Europe. This isn't an inevitable cumulative rise to civilization.

Imagine a Europe which had received an accelerated advance in industrial and military technology but still retained at its core a feudalist worldview; in which no limits to warfare would be recognised, in which religiously-motivated slaughter was a principle, in which no such concept as human liberty was recognised, and in which no quarter would be shown either to the defeated armies or the enemy populations. We had a glimpse into that sort of situation with the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s. There is a benefit in allowing time to absorb new methods of doing things and discovering a context of action and consequence in the process.

Except they did that in the Americas.

Wyrm, who you have decided to act for in proxy, tried to make the simplistic argument that the mere fact of trade allowed the spread of the plague. The Mongols however were using a crude form of biological warfare which concentrated the infection within a besieged city both in the form of corpses and the multiplying rat and flea populations within the walls that picked up the disease and acted as carriers. In other words, the Black Death spread from a hot zone —something you might have figured out on your own had you paid attention.

And it managed to continue spreading because it got taken to Genoa, which was a trade port. Without trade, its movement would have been slower and burned out.

Excuse me, but 1984 was not about social change; it was about —in part— the effort of an oligarchy to halt change of any sort for all time. And given how such efforts are doomed when a static society can no longer cope with shifts in either material support or environment, the oligarchy's collapse is inevitable; though Orwell didn't project that far.

I know- it is like Shoganate or other stagnate societies. It is static until some outside pressure acts on it. However, there is no guarentee that it will survive the change.

Lie. My plan is simply to leave the inhabitants of a world to find their own way to advancement, with as little outside interference as possible —ideally none, but intervention in case of a serious enough emergency. It is not at all a given that every society on every planet will automatically follow the same pattern as Earth did —a baseless assumption you have put as the cornerstone of your entire argument in this increasingly silly discussion and one which has already been shown to be defective by the example of the Mintakans.

Obviously, using personal cloaking devices and teleporters is a bad idea. We will aim for simpler tools- the ones we are intorudcing them to.

And the whole "leaving them be" is my entire point. Do you not get "people will die by your inaction"?

As for following the same pattern
If you say they will be magically different, than you can't bring up how they will not adjust and be savages because they could be different.

What the fuck are you babbling about?

Planets are not permanently habitable. If they stay stuck in a pattern forever, they will eventually be wiped out.

In which a middle class as we know it still did not exist, and despite which did not break the monopoly of wealth held by the nobility and the Church. Between the bourgeoise of the towns and the peasantry, there still existed a very steep drop.

And this would be permanent, even though the emergence of artisans was an internal change of the sort you are advocating we let occur for Japan.

And why would they want to admit that? Those new toys make them more powerful than any other warlord in the region. What's their incentive to conceal anything?

You have never heard of pride? WHo wants to be a patsy when they can say they are the brilliant inventor or great leader or skilled diplomat or...

Screw with the brain chemistry too many times and you end up with an idiot rather than a useful leader and his councils. And how do you know who to bug and where?

Bug your friends so they don't squel.

As for messing with their minds, you do it once at the start so they think they are responsible for the things they "discovered".

Um, paint does not prevent orbiting objects from giving off reflected light in space, moron. Furthermore, you really don't want to darken your spaceship's hull to make it a more efficient blackbody absorber of heat, for rather obvious reasons.

Have you heard the phrase "albedo"? If you increase the albedo of an object it reflects less light.

As for heat absortion, if it is too dangerous, use a sail painted black between you and the planet. Or hid infront of the plante. Or over the poles.

Which obviates against the alleged good you're doing.

Which is why no one gets shots. I mean they hurt, some people will die and the benefits are further down the road.

Which your actions are performing, whether you wish to admit it or not.

My actions are not occuring in a vaccuum, but being judged against the alternatives. I'd rather do 50 years of suffering than 600.

That may give you the power, not the right to do what you propose.

That is covered by morality.

Ah, the Ends justify the Means argument. Your morality becomes more suspect with each post in this thread.

Yeah- lets ignore the ends. After all, the effects of our actions are irrelevant, right? Who cares if people die as long as we have clean hands.

Which means... you've brought on the same cycle of war for conquest, mass death, and mass suffering you originally said you wanted to prevent for the natives with your well-meaning intervention in their cultural development. Your morality becomes more and more suspect.

Your stupidity knows no bounds. I intend to have the planet unified. People will die, but it will be short and sharp, not long and continuous.

That you do not see how ludicrous a concept this is makes you either a complete bumbling imbecile or hopelessly naive. Either way, it's pathetic.

Yeah, it is impossible to find decent people in such conditions. I mean, we could never get a leader who would unify an area in a bloody campaign, be so disgusted by the slaughter and dedicate the rest of their reign to improving the welfare of their subjects and promoting tolerance.

Case your curious, my rhetorical questions have affirmative answers.

In Opposite-World, perhaps. In the Real World, where the rest of us live, that statement makes you look like an idiot or a liar.

The Japanese industrialized and proceded to conquer. Which is my goal. I just don't want people as brutal as they were. Given the carrots my proxy will have as well as reputation, that will be less of a problem.

The problem, moron, is that your "certain good" is going to lead to the very problems you think you're going to prevent, since your stated goal is a culture which aggressively conquers the planet. You've only sped up the timetable and done so with a force which knows only power and its ruthless application and nothing about little niceties like human rights.

So what? Speeding up the timetable is my goal- it reduces the amount of pain and suffering that occurs. As for having a brutal civilization that has no respect for human rights, that can come later.

That you can name only two (and one of those did not meet the standard of a genocidal action) and can't remember if there have been any others in the 63 years since the end of the Second World War demonstrates that genocide is a comparatively rare occurrence.

Ethnic cleansing is really very different because... what exactly? If they starve to death, they are still dead.

Counting genocide and politicide gives us 39 since 1955
http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/genocide/

Not all of them are equally bad, but a large number are mass slaughters.

Congratulations! You show that you're a dissembling little moron who thinks mockery nullifies an argument.

Lets ignore the entire rest of my argument, shall we?

Given your concern about their culture, it is odd you just brush it off.

And just how "massive" did warfare get to in medieval times? Up to World War II level? How about World War I level? How about Seven Years War level? Even that? Try for some standard of measure to sustain your point, you little twit, otherwise your statement is functionally meaningless.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat0.htm

And WW1 and WW2 have such high numbers because there were more people- ancient wars had much higher percentages. Things like putting enitre enemy cities to death. Or exterminating hostile groups.

The list I have shows the devestation the Mongols wrought. They killed 40 million people when the world had about 400 million.
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/FAQ/WorldPopulation.aspx

One in ten... and they didn't cover the whole planet.

What do impoverished primitives have that peacekeepers from space would want to trade for? Here's a clue: nothing. See if you can work the rest of it out on your own.

Sex comes to mind.

If the planet has something valuable, the more advanced culture can simply take it and the natives can't do fuck-all about it. Or they trade trinkets, food and medicines for their shiny rocks if they're a bit more careful about things like the Federation are and still get the planet's valuable substance for virtually nothing.

So we manage to create a state that is completely dependant on us, poor and will never change because the oligarchs control everything. Wonderful.

You can supply medicines and even teach the natives how to read and write without also fostering any radical alteration of their culture. We do that all the time right here on Earth and have done for the past sixty years.

Population boom says otherwise.

Which brings us right back to the Tanna Islanders and the damage wrought on their culture by the Americans putting their supply depot in their backyard.

I'm mocking you and your "peacekeeper" plan.

There is considerable dispute amongst scholars that human sacrifice was the purpose of the Aztec wars; they already had a ready-source of victims amongst the general population and from slaves. That captured war prisoners were used for human sacrifice is not disputed, but there is no definitive body of fact which demonstrates that the Aztecs specifically waged wars to collect sacrificial victims as opposed to any other motivation. As it is, your "argument" here is hardly demonstrable by any example of post-World War II genocide that can be pointed to.

Aztec social mobility was based on warfare- specifically captives captured. As for internal sacrifice, they would run out of people doing that.

Of course not! We don't provide people aid for killing their neighbors!

Getting one planetary state by conquest brings about the results you say you wish to avoid: mass death, mass suffering, and the additional harm of political repression for the ruling regime to maintain control.

Really, this is the sort of state you see as an eventual Federation member? Not only your morality but your sanity becomes more questionable.

Yeah, the first is totally different than previous conditions due to... nothing at all. Of course, there is the added benefit of peace, trade, etc that you leave out.

Because states are perfectly static and will never change, even after they industrialize. Right.

My entire point has been: that if a people are going to make it as a stable and mature culture which won't destroy itself or carry it's legacy of violence to the stars, they have a better chance if the process of learning from their own mistakes is not preempted by outsiders making all their decisions for them. There is even the possibility that said culture will manage to develop without the same degree of bloodshed and suffering —a possibility you blithely dismiss in your ongoing campaign to justify your ideology.

Obviously, being confronted by other civilizations which are more peaceful after they get into space will have zero effect on the culture.

As for developing without bloodshed... you have maintained they need it to develop.

By contrast, outsiders can and often have in history wrought more damage than they sought to repair. Stepping in to stop a genocide, an exceptional intervention if one is occurring, does not negate a culture's self-development, just makes sure that it will take place at all.

Because making it so societies are insulted for the threat of violence denies them the whole "learning experience".

YOUR approach has been stated baldly by you to bring about a culture that will aggressively conquer it's own planet, which means steamrolling over all opposition, which means bringing about the very cycle of warfare and mass death you say you want to avoid, and putting at the head of that world-society a culture that is still saddled by the ideology of power and conquest that you have just cemented into their basic thinking and which they now know to be successful as opposed to any ideology based upon peace and cooperation between peoples and rejection of violence and repression. Congratulations, moron, you've helped to create the next Cardassia Prime.

Yes- empire building works by killing everyone and ruling by fear- even though we are providing alternate tools. But the natives would be too stupid to consider using them, no?

We will use the carrot AND the stick. And they will have to cooperate with the natives- otherwise they can't hold the new territory.

A hint for you, moron: don't spew fallacy names when you have no clue of what the fuck you're talking about. Asking you to name examples to support your assertions is neither a False Dilemma (If it's not all X, it will necessarily be all Y) nor a strawman (a false and weak version of another's argument to rebut and score a cheap point). You were asked to support your assertions. Either do so or shut the fuck up.

If a disease kills 20 million people, we shouldn't bother intervening because it won't kill them all. Only alot of them. And the society is more important than the composite individuals. because people don't matter.

Imbecilic non-rebuttal of anything. Ignore.

You are ignoring the points I make on the grounds it isn't a rebuttal... because you say so. Your dishonesty grows with every passing moment.

People have also learned to not use certain weapons, certain tactics, which may not only needlessly increase death and suffering for no purpose but backfire on the perpetrators. This is why nuclear weapons have not been used in actual warfare since Nagasaki, why agreements on the just treatment of war prisoners are in effect, why there are exchanges for prisoners and wounded, why chemical and bioweapons are outlawed and why bomblets and cluster-mines are being banned by international convention even as we speak. This is why bombing campaigns, as are carried out in modern day warfare, are targeted as precisely as possible to AVOID causing collateral damage and civilian casualties as much as possible. This is why there are limits on the rules of engagement in present-day warfare. This is why there is such a thing as a defined set of war-crimes. Things which you are either ignorant of or are dishonestly ignoring so you can flog your ideology.

Except all of those exist because they favor the stronger conventional powers. Which increases their ability to defeat their enemies.

I grow tired of this strawman of yours, and your repetition of it shows what a thoroughly dishonest little shit you have become in the course of this discussion.

Your rebuttal is to refuse to answer the question.

To turn your own arguments back on you, what if we would have learned the "wrong" lessons from the space aliens? Just as Meiji Japan did? Just as the Tanna Islanders did?

Japan learnt the right lesson- exactly the ones the Europeans were pushing, as did the Islanders. They just had it backfire because the lesson they were pushing was wrong.

No, moron, it applies when you try to base an argument on the fallacy at all. It makes the entire chain of logic proceeding from it suspect.

You never tire of simply asserting things without any backing. You can't ignore consequences in a moral argument.

By creating a culture "that aggressively conquers it's planet"?! Your words.

Yes. You have no real argument to counter it as I fully embrace that.

What sort of utter bullshit blather is THAT supposed to be?!?!

Saying something is good is a preference statement.

Man of Straw yet again, you dishonest little shit.

You keep saying strawman without saying how. In fact, my statements are accurate- you just can't admit it.

No, I was drawing a comparison between his "reasoning" and yours, not using him as an authority on anything.

Ah, truth is irrelevant if the story is good enough.

Morality is part of culture, imbecile, and evolves with culture, imbecile. That is different from going in and wiping out another culture because you've decided it doesn't suit you.

Morality is NOT relative.

And as for the indians: not all tribes practised slavery, and in those that did, the possibility of a slave buying his freedom existed. Some tribes, such as the Houma and the Seminole, by contrast harboured fugitive black slaves, adopted them into their tribes, and permitted or even welcomed intermarriage with the tribeswomen. And in all cases of indian tribes that did have the practise, it was nowhere near the sort of dehumanising, permanent, generational slavery which was peculiar to the American south's ideology.

Strawman. I never said anything about the Native Americans.

An "assertion" I backed in previous postings with fact and argument, you dishonest little shit.

Wrong yet again. There is a distinct difference between religions based on analogy to the natural world or made up from wholecloth by alleged revelation, and the cults like the Tanna islanders.

The facts must be cloaked. Oh, wait this?

I know you think you're making a point, but you blather as usual. I don't recall any UFO cult displacing Judaeo-Christianity or Islam in the last sixty years and becoming the One True Faith. But you're right —your bringing up the UFO cults that have been trendy among maybe less than a fraction of 1% of the American population is irrelevant, even to discussion of the Tanna Islanders.

Which is totally different than how Christianity and Islam spread. Because you say so.

You're conflating different phenomena, different tribes and even different island groups. For a start, the New Hebridies Islands (present-day Vanuatu) were never occupied by the Japanese —the Americans got to Tanna in May, 1942, the same month the invasion group headed to Port Moresby was turned back by the Battle of the Coral Sea. Theirs was the first large-scale presence of Outsiders on their island. A small fraction of Tanna's population were recruited to work on the bases at Efate and Espiritu Santo. For the most part, the Americans offered relief but did nothing to encourage the Tanna Islanders beliefs —indeed, an attempt was made to discourage the cult by the Navy in 1943. The John Frum movement displaced the previous imported Christianity and, of all the cargo cults which sprang up in Melanesia during colonial times and through World War II is the only one to have endured so long.

So the cult no longer exists?

Excuse me, but we do know about Japanese atrocities and the Japanese certainly do not control our school system or our media. Nor anybody else's. What the fuck are you babbling about? That the Japanese themselves censor or alter the history of the war to deny their own guilt within their own country is not at issue here. That is well known.

They "don't know" because the Japanese have been in active denial of their war guilt ever since the Emperor broadcast the surrender rescript. Something you would know if you weren't, by your own admission, so out of touch with basic history.

You have again lifted my words out of their proper context, as you have done at least twice now in this thread, liar. Especially as how I made extensive argument regarding the Japanese ideology and cited a scholarly article as introduction to a general work on the subject as its support. Which you have chosen to again ignore. Well, to once more quote the relevant passage from the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1):

Appealing to authority isn't a valid argument.

Strawman. I said what we are doing towards Vietnam is more than anything Japan has ever done to acknowledge its responsibility for it's atrocities. That is not me saying the U.S. has issued anything like a formal apology or failed to meet some criteria and I am growing tired of your expanding dishonesty in this discussion.

You were the one who made up the criteria.

In this case, the analogy isn't even close. Manifest Destiny doesn't come up to even a small measure of the Japanese myth about themselves and their direct descent from Amatersu. And for your information, we do not follow Manefest Destiny. Even our present misadventure in Iraq hardly qualifies as an expression of that ideology.

Difference of degree is not a rebuttal. We don't follow it now because we succeeded- we spread from sea to sea.

Except the Japanese didn't have to conquer an empire to acquire raw materials when trade would have garnered them the same materiel for far less of a military cost. Indeed, that they set forth on such a venture at a time when overseas colonial empires were starting to be recognised as burdensome rather than beneficial is another example of the Japanese learning the wrong lessons from the Europeans.

So they didn't realize who costly it could be- which shows they were wrong, not their motives were different.

Citing a scholarly work is NOT an Appeal to Authority, you dishonest little shit. Again, do not speak of fallacies you really have no fucking clue of.

Except I pointed out how the Europeans did the same thing and you simply chanted the Litany of Stealth louder.

False Analogy Fallacy at its worst. Christianity has all mankind created in His image. Japanese mysticism has only Japanese created as the direct heavenly descendants of Amatersu. And absolute monarchism —which is based upon Divine Right— was a dead ideology in Europe by the beginning of the 19th century. The last European country to cling to that system was Imperial Russia, and it began to abandon it by 1905.

Mormons. Not all Christians have those beleifs- in fact many thought that others where made inferior and it was their duty to lead them.

Absolute monarchy and divine right are two different things. You don't rebut the latter.

Siam retained its independence because it's kings were able to cleverly play their diplomacy with the greater powers and play them off against one another. They gradually absorbed western reforms and technology, albeit at their own pace.

Just like a buffer state.

It does so invalidate your point, moron, because the Ethiopians did not acquiesce to Italian rule and at the end of the day it was still Ethiopians fighting and succeeding to regain their own independence.

With allied aid.

The only strawman is your own. I did NOT say that industrialisation was "useless" if it didn't "always bring victory". That is your construction entirely.

Strawman. I said that for Ethiopia.

From what I see, your "logic" is under attack by at least two other posters in this thread who also see its glaring weaknesses manifest. Not that I'm using it as a support for my position; I simply find the fact amusing in the wake of your stated wish here.

You mean the one who conceded the point and admitted I was right? Or the one who thought my plan was justifying something else entirely? Or eyl who is pointing out that my plan might fail? None are attacking the idea.

Because they don't advance at the pace you decide they should. So you take it on yourself to decide things for them. That is rendering them as childlike in your ideology.

That describes most of government policy.

Trying to civilise them at the cost your method would entail is. That you do not see this makes you a moral imbecile as well.

Alternative costs would be higher.

The operation of the machinery of constitutional law is NOT "using outside force", imbecile.

And neither is doing this to these worlds. They are Federation protectores. Yeah- the South agreed to the Amendments... because that was a requirement to renter the Union.

The South, recall, had withdrawn itself from representation in Congress, and it's legislatures from voting on constitutional issues. As they had engaged in rebellion against the lawfully constitutional government of the United States, they had placed themselves outside the machinery of the law until such time as they rejoined the Union by re-ratifying the constitution, which then included the new amendments. Furthermore, the Supreme Court's job is to interpret the law and it thus had every right to reverse it's earlier decision on Plessey and confirm the rights to equal protection under law with Brown. While the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were not actions of the Supreme Court but of Congress exercising its power to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments "by appropriate legislation". The only "force" involved was that of law, not of arms.

Deploying military units no longer counts as force. This is new.

I'm not arguing the validity of the decision.

Note the US government rebeled against Britian- and won. If the South had one, the change wouldn't have applied.

IOW, you're betting on everything going right? And I might point out that, depending on their position, you may not have a choice but to work with that "alchoholic or some other person with loose lips".

Than they get an alteration. Or a tail. Or their underling gets promoted.

You do realize that sooner or later (your entire plan makes it "sooner") you'll end up with these guys as spacefaring neighbors? Do you want to end up in a situation where the Federation is constantly sending peacekeeping missions there (at best)

Why would we need peacekeepers? The plan is for them to be able to get far enough they can do that themselves.

So again, you're relying on everything working right. And since you'd probably need to mindwipe the people involved more than once, if there's a risk of brain damage, you'll eventually have to replace them which makes keeping secrecy harder.

Just once for inventors. In other cases it is mostly useless.

[Samuel]

I need to sleep rather than respond. Well, some fixes.

By the start of WW2, only France and England were democracies in Europe. This isn't an inevitable cumulative rise to civilization.

I forgot about the Swiss and a couple others. However, Europe brought back private armies, torture and people openly attacking the idea of democracy during the post war period. They basically slid back into barbarianism. If circumstances had been different, they might have slid all the way down.

Obviously, using personal cloaking devices and teleporters is a bad idea. We will aim for simpler tools- the ones we are intorudcing them to.

I should point out we probably won't be using these tools on the natives. There is no reason to use transporters for people or claoking devices when other, less magical looking and cheaper tactics would work.

Congratulations! You show that you're a dissembling little moron who thinks mockery nullifies an argument.

And you are to dense to get the point my mockery is driving at. Each time I mock you there is a point it is driving at, one you repeatedly don't get.

You're conflating different phenomena, different tribes and even different island groups. For a start, the New Hebridies Islands (present-day Vanuatu) were never occupied by the Japanese —the Americans got to Tanna in May, 1942, the same month the invasion group headed to Port Moresby was turned back by the Battle of the Coral Sea. Theirs was the first large-scale presence of Outsiders on their island. A small fraction of Tanna's population were recruited to work on the bases at Efate and Espiritu Santo. For the most part, the Americans offered relief but did nothing to encourage the Tanna Islanders beliefs —indeed, an attempt was made to discourage the cult by the Navy in 1943. The John Frum movement displaced the previous imported Christianity and, of all the cargo cults which sprang up in Melanesia during colonial times and through World War II is the only one to have endured so long.

Which sounds exactly like your peacekeeper plan and different from my proxy plan. Where do you think people are going to have contact with advanced tech in mine? They aren't!

False Analogy Fallacy at its worst. Christianity has all mankind created in His image. Japanese mysticism has only Japanese created as the direct heavenly descendants of Amatersu. And absolute monarchism —which is based upon Divine Right— was a dead ideology in Europe by the beginning of the 19th century. The last European country to cling to that system was Imperial Russia, and it began to abandon it by 1905.

Aside from Mormons, there was the ideology that each group of humans were created seperately and placed in different areas by God. Which you had people believing into the 1970s in the US.

You mean the one who conceded the point and admitted I was right? Or the one who thought my plan was justifying something else entirely? Or eyl who is pointing out that my plan might fail? None are attacking the idea.

So far, all of them are attacking my methodology, not my rationale.

I should point out that the plan I am proposing is high risk and has lots of things that can go wrong because it is extremely limited resource-wise due to being illegal in the Federation. A less incompetant government would have a different and more workable plan.

[Patrick Degan]

Congratulations! You show that you're a dissembling little moron who thinks mockery nullifies an argument.

And you are to dense to get the point my mockery is driving at. Each time I mock you there is a point it is driving at, one you repeatedly don't get.

Well, that's just nice isn't it? We can claim we're making any argument we like by saying the mockery's making a point. Or we can simply see that you're really handwaving.

You're conflating different phenomena, different tribes and even different island groups. For a start, the New Hebridies Islands (present-day Vanuatu) were never occupied by the Japanese —the Americans got to Tanna in May, 1942, the same month the invasion group headed to Port Moresby was turned back by the Battle of the Coral Sea. Theirs was the first large-scale presence of Outsiders on their island. A small fraction of Tanna's population were recruited to work on the bases at Efate and Espiritu Santo. For the most part, the Americans offered relief but did nothing to encourage the Tanna Islanders beliefs —indeed, an attempt was made to discourage the cult by the Navy in 1943. The John Frum movement displaced the previous imported Christianity and, of all the cargo cults which sprang up in Melanesia during colonial times and through World War II is the only one to have endured so long.

Which sounds exactly like your peacekeeper plan and different from my proxy plan. Where do you think people are going to have contact with advanced tech in mine? They aren't!

I'm sorry, I thought we were arguing what is actually being said in this thread and not your parallel-universe version of it.

False Analogy Fallacy at its worst. Christianity has all mankind created in His image. Japanese mysticism has only Japanese created as the direct heavenly descendants of Amatersu. And absolute monarchism —which is based upon Divine Right— was a dead ideology in Europe by the beginning of the 19th century. The last European country to cling to that system was Imperial Russia, and it began to abandon it by 1905.

Aside from Mormons, there was the ideology that each group of humans were created seperately and placed in different areas by God. Which you had people believing into the 1970s in the US.

An ideology which was not part of the Bible or the main Christian creed of belief, which is not held by the major denominations and appears to be a minority belief entirely. Try again.

I should point out that the plan I am proposing is high risk and has lots of things that can go wrong because it is extremely limited resource-wise due to being illegal in the Federation. A less incompetant government would have a different and more workable plan.

Which means it has every potential for leaving a worse disaster than what you're aiming to avoid. You just exposed another defect in your argument. Congratulations.

[Patrick Degan]

Many of my rebuttals are sarcasm.

Which means they are worthless.

Circumstances change. Environments change. No condition remains stable. And I must again stress that accelerating a culture's technological development far beyond it's moral and social capacity to absorb those changes is a recipe for disaster.

And when these happen, why do you think a rigid society will adapt? There have been plenty of cases where they simply died.

And plenty of other cases where they did survive and adapt. So what does that non-rebuttal of yours demonstrate?

After kicking the invaders out. After taking destiny in their own hands. They didn't remain "humiliated" for long. The fact that they fought against foreign invaders at all shows the Chinese were far from a "humiliated" people.

Bullshit. The Russian Army kicked the invaders out. The Japanese were advancing in China until 1945.

Your bullshit, you mean. The Japanese were never able to gain control of the entire countryside, nor were they able to wipe out either the Kuomingtang or the Communist forces. The Russians drove the Japanese out of Manchuria in August Storm but did not sweep them out of the rest of China —not thier priority since they were aiming for an invasion of Japan proper.

No, the same does not go for the Europeans, Simple Simon. Since they also gradually developed concepts such as democracy, human liberties, laws of war, to limit the scope of warfare and government in the intervening centuries; lessons the Japanese did not take from their mentors. Nor did they "bathe the world in blood" as you have it. Really, hyperbole does not convince.

You mean like the expansion into the Americas? Or the fact they had repeated and incesent warfare throughout most of their history with occasional pauses? Or the fact that the social innovations let them develop more effective ways of killing each other? Or the fact they nearly destroyed all that progress in one fell swoop?

I like how you just totally ignore every positive achievement so you can simply focus upon every negative aspect of European history to prop up your argument. Biased Sample Fallacy.

By the start of WW2, only France and England were democracies in Europe. This isn't an inevitable cumulative rise to civilization.

And Belgium, and Denmark, and Norway (constitutional monarchies), and Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and Austria. Just no end to your ignorance, is there?

Imagine a Europe which had received an accelerated advance in industrial and military technology but still retained at its core a feudalist worldview; in which no limits to warfare would be recognised, in which religiously-motivated slaughter was a principle, in which no such concept as human liberty was recognised, and in which no quarter would be shown either to the defeated armies or the enemy populations. We had a glimpse into that sort of situation with the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s. There is a benefit in allowing time to absorb new methods of doing things and discovering a context of action and consequence in the process.

Except they did that in the Americas.

Really? I don't recall that outcome to the French and Indian War. Or the Mexican American War. Or the purchase of Louisiana. Or the War of 1812.

Wyrm, who you have decided to act for in proxy, tried to make the simplistic argument that the mere fact of trade allowed the spread of the plague. The Mongols however were using a crude form of biological warfare which concentrated the infection within a besieged city both in the form of corpses and the multiplying rat and flea populations within the walls that picked up the disease and acted as carriers. In other words, the Black Death spread from a hot zone —something you might have figured out on your own had you paid attention.

And it managed to continue spreading because it got taken to Genoa, which was a trade port. Without trade, its movement would have been slower and burned out.

And without the Mongols' biological warfare, the plague infection would not have been so concentrated, and there would not have been a panic evacuation which carried it out from Caffa in such concentration of rats and infected carriers.

Excuse me, but 1984 was not about social change; it was about —in part— the effort of an oligarchy to halt change of any sort for all time. And given how such efforts are doomed when a static society can no longer cope with shifts in either material support or environment, the oligarchy's collapse is inevitable; though Orwell didn't project that far.

I know- it is like Shoganate or other stagnate societies. It is static until some outside pressure acts on it. However, there is no guarentee that it will survive the change.

And no guarantee that it won't. Your entire premise hangs on a "what-if".

Lie. My plan is simply to leave the inhabitants of a world to find their own way to advancement, with as little outside interference as possible —ideally none, but intervention in case of a serious enough emergency. It is not at all a given that every society on every planet will automatically follow the same pattern as Earth did —a baseless assumption you have put as the cornerstone of your entire argument in this increasingly silly discussion and one which has already been shown to be defective by the example of the Mintakans.

Obviously, using personal cloaking devices and teleporters is a bad idea. We will aim for simpler tools- the ones we are intorudcing them to.

You mean like the way the Klingons did on Neural in "A Private Little War"(TOS), which forced the Federation to arm the Hill People likewise and got that world a nice civil war.

And the whole "leaving them be" is my entire point. Do you not get "people will die by your inaction"?

And you have conceded that people will die by your action. In fact, you put it forth as an acceptable price for your objectives. Which means you are actually proactively involved in the causation of deaths on the world you have chosen for your programme of advancement.

As for following the same pattern... If you say they will be magically different, than you can't bring up how they will not adjust and be savages because they could be different.

Mintaka III. "Who Watches The Watchers" (TNG). At least one example in ST canon which demonstrates the point. Vulcan is another.

What the fuck are you babbling about?

Planets are not permanently habitable. If they stay stuck in a pattern forever, they will eventually be wiped out.

Which supports your hyperactive bloviations... how, exactly?

In which a middle class as we know it still did not exist, and despite which did not break the monopoly of wealth held by the nobility and the Church. Between the bourgeoise of the towns and the peasantry, there still existed a very steep drop.

And this would be permanent, even though the emergence of artisans was an internal change of the sort you are advocating we let occur for Japan.

And you know this would be a permanent condition... how, exactly?

And why would they want to admit that? Those new toys make them more powerful than any other warlord in the region. What's their incentive to conceal anything?

You have never heard of pride? WHo wants to be a patsy when they can say they are the brilliant inventor or great leader or skilled diplomat or...

The only thing that will matter is that they're now top of the heap. That's enough of a generator of pride along with actual power to satisfy any warlord's ego.

Screw with the brain chemistry too many times and you end up with an idiot rather than a useful leader and his councils. And how do you know who to bug and where?

Bug your friends so they don't squel.

That doesn't ensure anything, actually.

As for messing with their minds, you do it once at the start so they think they are responsible for the things they "discovered".

Which is nice until they have to demonstrate that they truly are responsible, or have to demonstrate the new secrets to the artisans they need to keep producing the new tools. And it's been pointed out to you how the Federation's memory-erasure techniques are not foolproof and we have at least one demonstrated case of failure on the record for what was an "experimental" procedure ("Who Watches The Watchers").

Um, paint does not prevent orbiting objects from giving off reflected light in space, moron. Furthermore, you really don't want to darken your spaceship's hull to make it a more efficient blackbody absorber of heat, for rather obvious reasons.

Have you heard the phrase "albedo"? If you increase the albedo of an object it reflects less light.

Wrong, moron. Increased albedo increases an object's reflection of light. We can add ignorance of basic science to your general catalogue of ignorance already recorded in this thread.

As for heat absortion, if it is too dangerous, use a sail painted black between you and the planet. Or hid infront of the plante. Or over the poles.

The sail will interfere with your scanners. And you can't really "hide in front of the planet" since your ship has to maintain an orbit. And a circumpolar orbit will do nothing towards protecting the ship from solar radiation either.

Which obviates against the alleged good you're doing.

Which is why no one gets shots. I mean they hurt, some people will die and the benefits are further down the road.

A few deaths now don't matter, since it's all to their good in the end with your programme. And you call my morality suspect?

Which your actions are performing, whether you wish to admit it or not.

My actions are not occuring in a vaccuum, but being judged against the alternatives. I'd rather do 50 years of suffering than 600.

And who says you have the right to condemn them deliberately to those fifty years to further your aims in the first place?

That may give you the power, not the right to do what you propose.

That is covered by morality.

"Might Makes Right" is not moral by any definition.

Ah, the Ends justify the Means argument. Your morality becomes more suspect with each post in this thread.

Yeah- lets ignore the ends. After all, the effects of our actions are irrelevant, right? Who cares if people die as long as we have clean hands.

The means shape the ends, moron. And you are the one actively prompting a cycle of killing to achieve an end you personally can feel good about.

Which means... you've brought on the same cycle of war for conquest, mass death, and mass suffering you originally said you wanted to prevent for the natives with your well-meaning intervention in their cultural development. Your morality becomes more and more suspect.

Your stupidity knows no bounds.

Once more, look who's talking.

I intend to have the planet unified. People will die, but it will be short and sharp, not long and continuous.

Your programme of unification entails "aggressive conquest" by your favoured faction over it's lesser-able opposition. I'm sorry that you are too dense to understand the implications of your own proposal.

That you do not see how ludicrous a concept this is makes you either a complete bumbling imbecile or hopelessly naive. Either way, it's pathetic.

Yeah, it is impossible to find decent people in such conditions. I mean, we could never get a leader who would unify an area in a bloody campaign, be so disgusted by the slaughter and dedicate the rest of their reign to improving the welfare of their subjects and promoting tolerance.

You see, that sort of thinking only started coming about after centuries of warfare in our own history and people actually started counting the cost, and often after wars between evenly-matched opposition. For a superior-armed force sweeping down upon lesser-able opposition, the only thing they see are people fit for conquest and enslavement. I must say at this juncture that your plan hinges upon finding an ideal warlord who won't want to be too savage in his conquests is most amusing. Infantile as well.

Case your curious, my rhetorical questions have affirmative answers.

It's just that your answers are complete bullshit. That's the problem.

The Japanese industrialized and proceded to conquer. Which is my goal. I just don't want people as brutal as they were. Given the carrots my proxy will have as well as reputation, that will be less of a problem.

Unfortunately, given a rulership which will see no problem with ruthless conquest and the imposition of their will over the conquered, you are going to get people as brutal as the Japanese acted.

The problem, moron, is that your "certain good" is going to lead to the very problems you think you're going to prevent, since your stated goal is a culture which aggressively conquers the planet. You've only sped up the timetable and done so with a force which knows only power and its ruthless application and nothing about little niceties like human rights.

So what? Speeding up the timetable is my goal- it reduces the amount of pain and suffering that occurs. As for having a brutal civilization that has no respect for human rights, that can come later.

Words do not exist to describe your stupidity here.

That you can name only two (and one of those did not meet the standard of a genocidal action) and can't remember if there have been any others in the 63 years since the end of the Second World War demonstrates that genocide is a comparatively rare occurrence.

Ethnic cleansing is really very different because... what exactly? If they starve to death, they are still dead.

It is different because at least the people driven out of an area are still living and still have some chance of survival. The victims of a genocide are only ever one thing: dead.

Congratulations! You show that you're a dissembling little moron who thinks mockery nullifies an argument.

Lets ignore the entire rest of my argument, shall we?

If only we could, considering how shockingly poor it's reasoning actually is.

Given your concern about their culture, it is odd you just brush it off.

Sayeth the man who's just said he's perfectly willing to live with creating a ruthless dictator who will "aggressively conquer" his planet. That's comedy.

And just how "massive" did warfare get to in medieval times? Up to World War II level? How about World War I level? How about Seven Years War level? Even that? Try for some standard of measure to sustain your point, you little twit, otherwise your statement is functionally meaningless.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat0.htm

And WW1 and WW2 have such high numbers because there were more people- ancient wars had much higher percentages. Things like putting enitre enemy cities to death. Or exterminating hostile groups.

So... your "point" here pins its support upon lumping together the aggregate casualties of medieval warfare over a roughly 500-700 year period.

The list I have shows the devestation the Mongols wrought. They killed 40 million people when the world had about 400 million.
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/FAQ/WorldPopulation.aspx

One in ten... and they didn't cover the whole planet.

And it took the Mongols roughly 90 years to wrack up that casualty count in multiple wars and invasions. As a sidebar, I can't help noticing how your quest for a dictator to unite your primitive world in "aggressive conquest" of their planet would be more or less of the same character as the Mongol rulers —who you'd give advanced material aid to.

What do impoverished primitives have that peacekeepers from space would want to trade for? Here's a clue: nothing. See if you can work the rest of it out on your own.

Sex comes to mind.

So... your peacekeepers would trade phasers for sex? They can get that with beads and pretty words. No need to trade any technology for a bit of booty.

If the planet has something valuable, the more advanced culture can simply take it and the natives can't do fuck-all about it. Or they trade trinkets, food and medicines for their shiny rocks if they're a bit more careful about things like the Federation are and still get the planet's valuable substance for virtually nothing.

So we manage to create a state that is completely dependant on us, poor and will never change because the oligarchs control everything. Wonderful.

As opposed to your alternative of a brutal world-civilisation with no code of human rights and run... by oligarchs? And what makes you automatically assume permanent dependence?

You can supply medicines and even teach the natives how to read and write without also fostering any radical alteration of their culture. We do that all the time right here on Earth and have done for the past sixty years.

Population boom says otherwise.

The population increase would be occurring anyway, so again, you have no point.

Which brings us right back to the Tanna Islanders and the damage wrought on their culture by the Americans putting their supply depot in their backyard.

I'm mocking you and your "peacekeeper" plan.

Translation: you don't have a real argument, so you'll just handwave.

There is considerable dispute amongst scholars that human sacrifice was the purpose of the Aztec wars; they already had a ready-source of victims amongst the general population and from slaves. That captured war prisoners were used for human sacrifice is not disputed, but there is no definitive body of fact which demonstrates that the Aztecs specifically waged wars to collect sacrificial victims as opposed to any other motivation. As it is, your "argument" here is hardly demonstrable by any example of post-World War II genocide that can be pointed to.

Aztec social mobility was based on warfare- specifically captives captured. As for internal sacrifice, they would run out of people doing that.

And that rebuttal is based upon... your surmise?

Getting one planetary state by conquest brings about the results you say you wish to avoid: mass death, mass suffering, and the additional harm of political repression for the ruling regime to maintain control.

Really, this is the sort of state you see as an eventual Federation member? Not only your morality but your sanity becomes more questionable.

Yeah, the first is totally different than previous conditions due to... nothing at all. Of course, there is the added benefit of peace, trade, etc that you leave out.

Sayeth the man who is willing to foster the creation of a ruthless world dictatorship with no regard for human rights to advance his own aims. You yourself said you were perfectly willing to live with that condition if it brings about planetary unity.

Because states are perfectly static and will never change, even after they industrialize. Right.

Japan between the Wars Of The Restoration and Nagasaki.

My entire point has been: that if a people are going to make it as a stable and mature culture which won't destroy itself or carry it's legacy of violence to the stars, they have a better chance if the process of learning from their own mistakes is not preempted by outsiders making all their decisions for them. There is even the possibility that said culture will manage to develop without the same degree of bloodshed and suffering —a possibility you blithely dismiss in your ongoing campaign to justify your ideology.

Obviously, being confronted by other civilizations which are more peaceful after they get into space will have zero effect on the culture.

You mean like the Klingons? The Romulans? The Cardassians? The Dominion? They confronted more peaceful civilisations after reaching space.

As for developing without bloodshed... you have maintained they need it to develop.

Lie. I said a people are best left to learn the lessons of their history on their own. That does not automatically entail on other worlds the consequences you continue to insist is a given to justify your argument a priori.

By contrast, outsiders can and often have in history wrought more damage than they sought to repair. Stepping in to stop a genocide, an exceptional intervention if one is occurring, does not negate a culture's self-development, just makes sure that it will take place at all.

Because making it so societies are insulted for the threat of violence denies them the whole "learning experience".

And here's yet another of your stupid Strawmen.

YOUR approach has been stated baldly by you to bring about a culture that will aggressively conquer it's own planet, which means steamrolling over all opposition, which means bringing about the very cycle of warfare and mass death you say you want to avoid, and putting at the head of that world-society a culture that is still saddled by the ideology of power and conquest that you have just cemented into their basic thinking and which they now know to be successful as opposed to any ideology based upon peace and cooperation between peoples and rejection of violence and repression. Congratulations, moron, you've helped to create the next Cardassia Prime.

Yes- empire building works by killing everyone and ruling by fear- even though we are providing alternate tools. But the natives would be too stupid to consider using them, no?

We will use the carrot AND the stick. And they will have to cooperate with the natives- otherwise they can't hold the new territory.

So when you said: "As for having a brutal civilization that has no respect for human rights, that can come later", you actually meant a "brutal civilisation that will learn to cooperate with the natives" —after fostering a medieval-level culture that knows only the rule of Might making Right to a programme of "aggressive conquest" —again, your words— of their planet. And once they get their empire and refuse to go along with your plan any further (a distinct possibility), what then? You'll cease giving them aid? You can't take back what they've already got now and they've already gotten more than they dreamed of before you came down with your offers of assistance. Suppose they tell you to go fuck off. What then? They've already conquered the natives, who don't have the means to throw off their new rulers. Let me guess —you'll give aid instead to the conquered natives, who will use it to make war on their oppressors. Which means you've gotten the very state of affairs you said you wanted to prevent.

A hint for you, moron: don't spew fallacy names when you have no clue of what the fuck you're talking about. Asking you to name examples to support your assertions is neither a False Dilemma (If it's not all X, it will necessarily be all Y) nor a strawman (a false and weak version of another's argument to rebut and score a cheap point). You were asked to support your assertions. Either do so or shut the fuck up.

If a disease kills 20 million people, we shouldn't bother intervening because it won't kill them all. Only a lot of them. And the society is more important than the composite individuals. because people don't matter.

Insane babble.

You are ignoring the points I make on the grounds it isn't a rebuttal... because you say so. Your dishonesty grows with every passing moment.

Oh, now you're going to copycat and handwave at the same time. What a pathetic little bullshitter you've degenerated into.

[bPeople have also learned to not use certain weapons, certain tactics, which may not only needlessly increase death and suffering for no purpose but backfire on the perpetrators. This is why nuclear weapons have not been used in actual warfare since Nagasaki, why agreements on the just treatment of war prisoners are in effect, why there are exchanges for prisoners and wounded, why chemical and bioweapons are outlawed and why bomblets and cluster-mines are being banned by international convention even as we speak. This is why bombing campaigns, as are carried out in modern day warfare, are targeted as precisely as possible to AVOID causing collateral damage and civilian casualties as much as possible. This is why there are limits on the rules of engagement in present-day warfare. This is why there is such a thing as a defined set of war-crimes. Things which you are either ignorant of or are dishonestly ignoring so you can flog your ideology.[/b]

Except all of those exist because they favor the stronger conventional powers. Which increases their ability to defeat their enemies.

Then why have we not used those methods and those weapons? Why have we not engaged in indiscriminate warfare despite having a vastly enhanced abilitiy to do so? Why are we not waging warfare with the same ethos of six decades past? Why are even minor combatants like India and Pakistan unwilling to cross the line past a certain point? If you say all we're learning is better ways to kill, why aren't we? Why are we actually recognising limits to warfare?

I grow tired of this strawman of yours, and your repetition of it shows what a thoroughly dishonest little shit you have become in the course of this discussion.

Your rebuttal is to refuse to answer the question.

Asked and answered —REPEATEDLY, liar.

To turn your own arguments back on you, what if we would have learned the "wrong" lessons from the space aliens? Just as Meiji Japan did? Just as the Tanna Islanders did?

Japan learnt the right lesson- exactly the ones the Europeans were pushing, as did the Islanders. They just had it backfire because the lesson they were pushing was wrong.

The Europeans did not push the lesson of aggressive conquest. The Americans did not push the idea of the Cargo Cult. Just more bullshit spew on your part.

No, moron, it applies when you try to base an argument on the fallacy at all. It makes the entire chain of logic proceeding from it suspect.

You never tire of simply asserting things without any backing. You can't ignore consequences in a moral argument.

I have backed my position, as the last several pages of this thread demonstrate, liar. And meanwhile, you never tire of thinking you can ignore the rules of logic and honest argument in a debate. This however is no longer surprising for you.

By creating a culture "that aggressively conquers it's planet"?! Your words.

Yes. You have no real argument to counter it as I fully embrace that.

I am not responsible for your fantasies.

Man of Straw yet again, you dishonest little shit.

You keep saying strawman without saying how. In fact, my statements are accurate- you just can't admit it.

Again, I am not responsible for your fantasies.

No, I was drawing a comparison between his (Rush Limbaugh's) "reasoning" and yours, not using him as an authority on anything.

Ah, truth is irrelevant if the story is good enough.

What would you know about truth, bullshitter?

Morality is part of culture, imbecile, and evolves with culture, imbecile. That is different from going in and wiping out another culture because you've decided it doesn't suit you.

Morality is NOT relative.

Oh, but it is. I know that must be a shock for somebody with as evidently a sheltered upbringing as you seem to display here. But despite whatever you had drummed into your head in Sunday School or wherever, morality is demonstrably relative, since no two situations are exactly alike under all circumstances: killing is considered wrong —unless self-defence is involved and you have no choice if you're going to save your own life. Just one example of moral relativity. That's the way the real world works —by degrees, scales, and circumstances; not by absolutes.

And as for the indians: not all tribes practised slavery, and in those that did, the possibility of a slave buying his freedom existed. Some tribes, such as the Houma and the Seminole, by contrast harboured fugitive black slaves, adopted them into their tribes, and permitted or even welcomed intermarriage with the tribeswomen. And in all cases of indian tribes that did have the practise, it was nowhere near the sort of dehumanising, permanent, generational slavery which was peculiar to the American south's ideology.

Strawman. I never said anything about the Native Americans.

Except we were talking about the indians in that part of the discussion, liar. Or have you forgotten?

Wrong yet again. There is a distinct difference between religions based on analogy to the natural world or made up from wholecloth by alleged revelation, and the cults like the Tanna islanders.

The facts must be cloaked. Oh, wait this?

Yet another bullshit non-rebuttal.

I know you think you're making a point, but you blather as usual. I don't recall any UFO cult displacing Judaeo-Christianity or Islam in the last sixty years and becoming the One True Faith. But you're right —your bringing up the UFO cults that have been trendy among maybe less than a fraction of 1% of the American population is irrelevant, even to discussion of the Tanna Islanders.

Which is totally different than how Christianity and Islam spread. Because you say so.

Christianity and Islam spread by conquest. The John Frum Cargo Cult spread amongst the Tanna Islanders by mere observation and wishful thinking amongst a simple people. But I am not aware of any UFO cults in our society which have anywhere near the power, influence, and numbers of adherents as any of the major religions. But your laughable attempt at a comparison is vaild... because you say so?

You're conflating different phenomena, different tribes and even different island groups. For a start, the New Hebridies Islands (present-day Vanuatu) were never occupied by the Japanese —the Americans got to Tanna in May, 1942, the same month the invasion group headed to Port Moresby was turned back by the Battle of the Coral Sea. Theirs was the first large-scale presence of Outsiders on their island. A small fraction of Tanna's population were recruited to work on the bases at Efate and Espiritu Santo. For the most part, the Americans offered relief but did nothing to encourage the Tanna Islanders beliefs —indeed, an attempt was made to discourage the cult by the Navy in 1943. The John Frum movement displaced the previous imported Christianity and, of all the cargo cults which sprang up in Melanesia during colonial times and through World War II is the only one to have endured so long.

So the cult no longer exists?

And where do I say the cult no longer exists? And how is that an argument about anything, you dissembing little shit?

You have again lifted my words out of their proper context, as you have done at least twice now in this thread, liar. Especially as how I made extensive argument regarding the Japanese ideology and cited a scholarly article as introduction to a general work on the subject as its support. Which you have chosen to again ignore. Well, to once more quote the relevant passage from the book The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945 (ISBN13: 978-0-691-10222-1):

Appealing to authority isn't a valid argument.

We'll try this again, shall we? "Appeal to Authority" is where you say "X is true simply because Mr. Y said so", and offer nothing beyond that as it's support. Citing scholarly works or the expert opinion of quailfied persons is not an Appeal to Authority because their work and their expert opinions can be verified by corroborative research and evidence. If you argue about Relativity, it is not an Appeal to Authority to cite Albert Einstein's writings or words on the subject.

So take your wrongheaded fallacy accusation and shove it up your ass, you dissembling little shit.

Strawman. I said what we are doing towards Vietnam is more than anything Japan has ever done to acknowledge its responsibility for it's atrocities. That is not me saying the U.S. has issued anything like a formal apology or failed to meet some criteria and I am growing tired of your expanding dishonesty in this discussion.

You were the one who made up the criteria.

No, I did not. I did not equate U.S. actions at remediation as a criteria for "offering" an apology. You are now outright lying about statements that are in plain sight and not even trying to hide it anymore.

In this case, the analogy isn't even close. Manifest Destiny doesn't come up to even a small measure of the Japanese myth about themselves and their direct descent from Amatersu. And for your information, we do not follow Manefest Destiny. Even our present misadventure in Iraq hardly qualifies as an expression of that ideology.

Difference of degree is not a rebuttal. We don't follow it now because we succeeded- we spread from sea to sea.

If you say so, Gracie. Nevermind that we gave up the notion of empire after the 1920s and have not really attempted any similar programme, especially one fashioned on a recognisably outmoded ideal.

Except the Japanese didn't have to conquer an empire to acquire raw materials when trade would have garnered them the same materiel for far less of a military cost. Indeed, that they set forth on such a venture at a time when overseas colonial empires were starting to be recognised as burdensome rather than beneficial is another example of the Japanese learning the wrong lessons from the Europeans.

So they didn't realize who costly it could be- which shows they were wrong, not their motives were different.

Their motivations have been demonstrated at length in the couse of this thread. It is not my fault that you are too stupid or dishonest to learn your lessons.

Citing a scholarly work is NOT an Appeal to Authority, you dishonest little shit. Again, do not speak of fallacies you really have no fucking clue of.

Except I pointed out how the Europeans did the same thing and you simply chanted the Litany of Stealth louder.

As you wish, liar.

False Analogy Fallacy at its worst. Christianity has all mankind created in His image. Japanese mysticism has only Japanese created as the direct heavenly descendants of Amatersu. And absolute monarchism —which is based upon Divine Right— was a dead ideology in Europe by the beginning of the 19th century. The last European country to cling to that system was Imperial Russia, and it began to abandon it by 1905.

Mormons. Not all Christians have those beleifs- in fact many thought that others where made inferior and it was their duty to lead them.

Mormons are not Christians, and Mormons did not exist at the time kingship was claimed on the basis of Divine Right.

Absolute monarchy and divine right are two different things. You don't rebut the latter.

No, they are not two different things —especially as the concept of absolute monarchy is based upon the concept of Divine Right to rule. Again, you proudly display your ignorance.

Siam retained its independence because it's kings were able to cleverly play their diplomacy with the greater powers and play them off against one another. They gradually absorbed western reforms and technology, albeit at their own pace.

Just like a buffer state.

No, just like a state with capable rulers. Conquering Siam would not really have garnered any advantage for the major colonial powers in the region, and Siam hardly acted as a buffer between powers which had territories and claims elsewhere in the region which were adjacent and all potential hot spots.

It does so invalidate your point, moron, because the Ethiopians did not acquiesce to Italian rule and at the end of the day it was still Ethiopians fighting and succeeding to regain their own independence.

With allied aid.

By that ridiculous non-argument, Yugoslavia didn't successfully shake off the Nazis due to getting "allied aid" as well.

The only strawman is your own. I did NOT say that industrialisation was "useless" if it didn't "always bring victory". That is your construction entirely.

Strawman. I said that for Ethiopia.

Oh REALLY?

I had said this:

Oh, and BTW, as a sidebar, there is no guarantee that industrialisation would have spared Ethiopia from invasion. It didn't work that miracle for either France of Czechoslovakia.

To which your rebuttal was this:

If France hadn't been industrialized, they wouldn't have even been a speed bump for the Germans.

Czechoslovakia had the problem that Germany had more industry, more men and more guns. Industry isn't a cure all- if your opponents have a ton more, they will win.

Nice strawman though. If it doesn't always bring victory, it is useless

To which I replied:

The only strawman is your own. I did NOT say that industrialisation was "useless" if it didn't "always bring victory". That is your construction entirely.

Keep deluding yourself that you can outright lie about what's actually being said in this discussion, little shit. The record is all too easy to call up.

From what I see, your "logic" is under attack by at least two other posters in this thread who also see its glaring weaknesses manifest. Not that I'm using it as a support for my position; I simply find the fact amusing in the wake of your stated wish here.

You mean the one who conceded the point and admitted I was right? Or the one who thought my plan was justifying something else entirely? Or eyl who is pointing out that my plan might fail? None are attacking the idea.

SO, eyl is not attacking your "logic" when he says:

And just how are you planning to wean them of using violence as a first resort afterwards?

Or when Junghali pointed out:

Or you just fell afoul of the demon Murphy. Dragging a Midaeval civilization into the modern era will be an incredibly complicated task to make the democratization of Iraq look like child's play by comparison.

—while interrogating your entire plan's feasibility of accomplishing it's aim in a convenient timeframe and keeping your intervention secret?

Because they don't advance at the pace you decide they should. So you take it on yourself to decide things for them. That is rendering them as childlike in your ideology.

That describes most of government policy.

Give specifics, dissembling little shit. Assuming that this isn't going to turn out into what I think it will as an "argument".

Trying to civilise them at the cost your method would entail is. That you do not see this makes you a moral imbecile as well.

Alternative costs would be higher.

An a priori assertion you just make over and over and over again as if it had the force of truth.

The operation of the machinery of constitutional law is NOT "using outside force", imbecile.

And neither is doing this to these worlds. They are Federation protectores. Yeah- the South agreed to the Amendments... because that was a requirement to renter the Union.

Declared protectorates by pure fiat. That is not lawful except by a very twisted definition of the term.

The South, recall, had withdrawn itself from representation in Congress, and it's legislatures from voting on constitutional issues. As they had engaged in rebellion against the lawfully constitutional government of the United States, they had placed themselves outside the machinery of the law until such time as they rejoined the Union by re-ratifying the constitution, which then included the new amendments. Furthermore, the Supreme Court's job is to interpret the law and it thus had every right to reverse it's earlier decision on Plessey and confirm the rights to equal protection under law with Brown. While the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were not actions of the Supreme Court but of Congress exercising its power to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments "by appropriate legislation". The only "force" involved was that of law, not of arms.

Deploying military units no longer counts as force. This is new.

The Federal authorities have the full right and power under the constitution to enforce the laws of the land where the state or local authorities can't or won't do so. I would point out that the National Guardsmen used in these operations operated under the limitations of Posse Comitatus laws as well.

Note the US government rebeled against Britian- and won. If the South had one, the change wouldn't have applied.

Red Herring.

[Samuel]

An ideology which was not part of the Bible or the main Christian creed of belief, which is not held by the major denominations and appears to be a minority belief entirely. Try again.

You missed the "aside" part, didn't you? I was refering to the case of Loving v Virginia where the Judge stated that God had put people of different races in seperate places for a reason.

Which means it has every potential for leaving a worse disaster than what you're aiming to avoid. You just exposed another defect in your argument. Congratulations.

Not being perfect isn't usually considered a telling defect.

Which means they are worthless.

Because you say so. I'm getting tired of your constant bullshit and refusal to back your assertions.

And plenty of other cases where they did survive and adapt. So what does that non-rebuttal of yours demonstrate?

I have to spell it out?
Situations occur that can destroy civilizations.
Sometimes civilizations can adapt.
Sometimes they can't.
Having a higher technology level improves the odds they can adapt by allowing them to figure out what is wrong.

You seem to think something has to always work for it to be worth considering. Nothing is 100% except logic.

Your bullshit, you mean. The Japanese were never able to gain control of the entire countryside, nor were they able to wipe out either the Kuomingtang or the Communist forces. The Russians drove the Japanese out of Manchuria in August Storm but did not sweep them out of the rest of China —not thier priority since they were aiming for an invasion of Japan proper.

Strawman. I never stated the Japanese controlled the countryside- only that they continued advancing. I never said the Chinese didn't fight- only that it would have come to nothing without outside intervention.

I like how you just totally ignore every positive achievement so you can simply focus upon every negative aspect of European history to prop up your argument. Biased Sample Fallacy.

Pointing out bad stuff on the grounds that you can eliminate it is wrong because there is the potential for good stuff? Which must be pointed out similtaneously because we are apparently not constrained by paragraphs and words? The amount of bad things vastly exceeds the good stuff. You know- war, famine, disease?

And Belgium, and Denmark, and Norway (constitutional monarchies), and Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and Austria. Just no end to your ignorance, is there?

You ignored where I said "opps- lack of sleep- there are others".

Interestingly enough all of those countries were conquered. WW2 was a nadir for democracy.

Really? I don't recall that outcome to the French and Indian War. Or the Mexican American War. Or the purchase of Louisiana. Or the War of 1812.

Yeah- lets forget what the Spanish did. Or things like King Philips war which the colonists won by exterminating their opponents.

And without the Mongols' biological warfare, the plague infection would not have been so concentrated, and there would not have been a panic evacuation which carried it out from Caffa in such concentration of rats and infected carriers.

Plagues have reached Europe before without warfare and going only on trade routes. It is nice to see you are aware historical events can have multiple causes.

And no guarantee that it won't. Your entire premise hangs on a "what-if".

The Mayans didn't make it. Or the Greenland Norse. Or the people of Ur. Or the inhabitants of Pitcaran and Henderson. Or...

And yes, it is a what if. Because the consequences of failure are important as you yourself stated just minutes before.

You mean like the way the Klingons did on Neural in "A Private Little War"(TOS), which forced the Federation to arm the Hill People likewise and got that world a nice civil war.

Sort of. Would you like details on how it will be different or do you want to enjoy your strawman?

And you have conceded that people will die by your action. In fact, you put it forth as an acceptable price for your objectives. Which means you are actually proactively involved in the causation of deaths on the world you have chosen for your programme of advancement.

I'm not seeing an actual argument here, which is pathetic as this is your main point.

Mintaka III. "Who Watches The Watchers" (TNG). At least one example in ST canon which demonstrates the point. Vulcan is another.

It also shows societies being radically transformed by simply receiving books (Gangster World).

We have people being malable in completely different fashions. I might also add that the population of Mintaka changed their minds- something that would not occur with a modern human population.

Which supports your hyperactive bloviations... how, exactly?

If they stay permanently static they will die. Failing natural disasters, we have people enslaving them, occupying them, assimilating them, etc. Not helping them leaves them vulnerable to predetorations.

And you know this would be a permanent condition... how, exactly?

Because the situation only changed due to outside pressure.

The only thing that will matter is that they're now top of the heap. That's enough of a generator of pride along with actual power to satisfy any warlord's ego.

You don't realize that revealing they were responsible for their success is going to ruin their image?

That doesn't ensure anything, actually.

I'm being intentionally vague here because it involves alternate measures. Things like the Ferengi thought control device, brainwashing, a friendly reminder from a stranger or killing them. Or other actions.

Which is nice until they have to demonstrate that they truly are responsible, or have to demonstrate the new secrets to the artisans they need to keep producing the new tools. And it's been pointed out to you how the Federation's memory-erasure techniques are not foolproof and we have at least one demonstrated case of failure on the record for what was an "experimental" procedure ("Who Watches The Watchers").

I was going more along the lines of having them get false memories implanted. Or having them learn how to make it and then having the knowledge they learned it from another erased. Or gratuitious amounts of alcohol... okay, bad idea.

Or we can find some way to inspire them- have people have a way to suggest the idea to them or have them think it up.

Or failing that, convince the ruler to subsidize research, get a bunch of scientists, doctors, engineers, inventors, etc together and slip in some of your men to help they go along promising routes.

It isn't impossible- just annoyingly hard. Downside of cloak and dagger.

Wrong, moron. Increased albedo increases an object's reflection of light. We can add ignorance of basic science to your general catalogue of ignorance already recorded in this thread.

Obviously no one ever makes mistakes and flips scales or forgets which end is which. Because they are perfect.

The sail will interfere with your scanners. And you can't really "hide in front of the planet" since your ship has to maintain an orbit. And a circumpolar orbit will do nothing towards protecting the ship from solar radiation either.

1
2 And you have to orbit the planet... why exactly? You could orbit the Sun as easily.
3 No, but from being spotted.

A few deaths now don't matter, since it's all to their good in the end with your programme. And you call my morality suspect?

Once again, your rebuttal shows NOTHING. You think it is clinching, but it says nothing. You need to give a reason why it is wrong. Yours is wrong because it leads to greater overall suffering.

And who says you have the right to condemn them deliberately to those fifty years to further your aims in the first place?

Because it is the right thing to do.

"Might Makes Right" is not moral by any definition.

Strawman. I said morality gives me the right to intervene- to prevent people from suffering and dying.

The means shape the ends, moron. And you are the one actively prompting a cycle of killing to achieve an end you personally can feel good about.

First sentance is pointless due to the lack of an actual argument.. Second is true- yes, I have the flaw of empathy. As for cycle of killing, thatis what I am breaking.

Once more, look who's talking.

You still fail to see the irony. How do you know it isn't you who is screwing up?

Your programme of unification entails "aggressive conquest" by your favoured faction over it's lesser-able opposition. I'm sorry that you are too dense to understand the implications of your own proposal.

People die. Lots of them, but many don't suffer. Those who surrender don't. Those who ally don't. Those who join don't.

You see, that sort of thinking only started coming about after centuries of warfare in our own history and people actually started counting the cost, and often after wars between evenly-matched opposition. For a superior-armed force sweeping down upon lesser-able opposition, the only thing they see are people fit for conquest and enslavement. I must say at this juncture that your plan hinges upon finding an ideal warlord who won't want to be too savage in his conquests is most amusing. Infantile as well.

Asoka did it.

Unfortunately, given a rulership which will see no problem with ruthless conquest and the imposition of their will over the conquered, you are going to get people as brutal as the Japanese acted.

Even though they don't have unlimited might and so will have to use carrots to hold the land they are taking.

Words do not exist to describe your stupidity here.

Except it is the same as what you are proposing. I just think their learning doesn't have to be direct experience, but can be through learning from other civilizations.

It is different because at least the people driven out of an area are still living and still have some chance of survival. The victims of a genocide are only ever one thing: dead.

Until they starve. Where do you think they will get food now that they are displaced?

Sayeth the man who's just said he's perfectly willing to live with creating a ruthless dictator who will "aggressively conquer" his planet. That's comedy.

You are the one who cares about culture, not me. I'm poining out your hypocricy, which you implicately admit.

So... your "point" here pins its support upon lumping together the aggregate casualties of medieval warfare over a roughly 500-700 year period.

And disease and famine and other preventable causes of death.

And it took the Mongols roughly 90 years to wrack up that casualty count in multiple wars and invasions. As a sidebar, I can't help noticing how your quest for a dictator to unite your primitive world in "aggressive conquest" of their planet would be more or less of the same character as the Mongol rulers —who you'd give advanced material aid to.

Nope. The Mongols weren't empire builders. I'd go for a group like the Persians.

And remember, that 90 years was just the Mongols. Other people still died from other wars and other preventable causes.

So... your peacekeepers would trade phasers for sex? They can get that with beads and pretty words. No need to trade any technology for a bit of booty.

I was actually implying medicine and other aid- I doubt troops would be dumb enough to sell their own guns.

As opposed to your alternative of a brutal world-civilisation with no code of human rights and run... by oligarchs? And what makes you automatically assume permanent dependence?

Because once you make it so that it is easier to work for you than anything else, everyone will go into the business. Crops may gfail, suppliers may dry up, brigades may attack, but the paychecks keep coming. Why bother developing when you can get stuff for alot less effort?

The population increase would be occurring anyway, so again, you have no point.

It is only occuring because you intervened.

Translation: you don't have a real argument, so you'll just handwave.

Except your peacekeepers are like the Americans to the natives Tanna.

And that rebuttal is based upon... your surmise?

The fact that killing their own citizens would weaken them substanatially.

Sayeth the man who is willing to foster the creation of a ruthless world dictatorship with no regard for human rights to advance his own aims. You yourself said you were perfectly willing to live with that condition if it brings about planetary unity.

This doesn't actually answer anything I said.

Japan between the Wars Of The Restoration and Nagasaki.

You are telling me Japan was entirely static even though it was undergoing an industrial revolution

You mean like the Klingons? The Romulans? The Cardassians? The Dominion? They confronted more peaceful civilisations after reaching space.

Except they will be in our territory and under our wing. While they are still weak enough to not be a threat.

Lie. I said a people are best left to learn the lessons of their history on their own. That does not automatically entail on other worlds the consequences you continue to insist is a given to justify your argument a priori.

Except you don't think they can learn it by eeing others do it. That doesn't leave many options.

So when you said: "As for having a brutal civilization that has no respect for human rights, that can come later", you actually meant a "brutal civilisation that will learn to cooperate with the natives" —after fostering a medieval-level culture that knows only the rule of Might making Right to a programme of "aggressive conquest" —again, your words— of their planet. And once they get their empire and refuse to go along with your plan any further (a distinct possibility), what then? You'll cease giving them aid? You can't take back what they've already got now and they've already gotten more than they dreamed of before you came down with your offers of assistance. Suppose they tell you to go fuck off. What then? They've already conquered the natives, who don't have the means to throw off their new rulers. Let me guess —you'll give aid instead to the conquered natives, who will use it to make war on their oppressors. Which means you've gotten the very state of affairs you said you wanted to prevent.

The Romans managed to be extremely brutal AND able to work with natives.

As for refusing to go along, the boss dies. Heart attacks are so unfortunate.

Insane babble.

I was refering to Influenza, which killed as many as WW1. You can sto it if you aid them.

Oh, now you're going to copycat and handwave at the same time. What a pathetic little bullshitter you've degenerated into.

Quick- get this man a mirror!

Then why have we not used those methods and those weapons? Why have we not engaged in indiscriminate warfare despite having a vastly enhanced abilitiy to do so? Why are we not waging warfare with the same ethos of six decades past? Why are even minor combatants like India and Pakistan unwilling to cross the line past a certain point? If you say all we're learning is better ways to kill, why aren't we? Why are we actually recognising limits to warfare?

Because total war leaves the states fighting it weakened. If you go to far, someone else will take you down.

Asked and answered —REPEATEDLY, liar.

No, you haven't. You simply assert your position is true.

The Europeans did not push the lesson of aggressive conquest. The Americans did not push the idea of the Cargo Cult. Just more bullshit spew on your part.

The European lesson was "the weak get conquered". The lesson the natives got was applies to New Guinea. Tanna is different. Of course, Tanna wasn't permanent.

I have backed my position, as the last several pages of this thread demonstrate, liar. And meanwhile, you never tire of thinking you can ignore the rules of logic and honest argument in a debate. This however is no longer surprising for you.

And, again, you claim that you have done so. Except, unlike me, you don't bother showing an example of when you did it or how.

I am not responsible for your fantasies.

This doesn't even apply to my argument.

What would you know about truth, bullshitter?

So lying is okay if other people do it more. Do you even listen to yourself anymore?

Oh, but it is. I know that must be a shock for somebody with as evidently a sheltered upbringing as you seem to display here. But despite whatever you had drummed into your head in Sunday School or wherever, morality is demonstrably relative, since no two situations are exactly alike under all circumstances: killing is considered wrong —unless self-defence is involved and you have no choice if you're going to save your own life. Just one example of moral relativity. That's the way the real world works —by degrees, scales, and circumstances; not by absolutes.

"The philosophized notion that right and wrong are not absolute values, but are personalized according to the individual and his or her circumstances or cultural orientation."

Next time, learn the definition.

Except we were talking about the indians in that part of the discussion, liar. Or have you forgotten?

Just because they are both called Indians doesn't mean they are the same! I use Native Americans for the ones here- Indian for people from India.

Yet another bullshit non-rebuttal.

Burden of proof is on you to show that cargo cults are unlike normal religion.

Christianity and Islam spread by conquest. The John Frum Cargo Cult spread amongst the Tanna Islanders by mere observation and wishful thinking amongst a simple people. But I am not aware of any UFO cults in our society which have anywhere near the power, influence, and numbers of adherents as any of the major religions. But your laughable attempt at a comparison is vaild... because you say so?

http://www.elc-elyria.org/images/romanempiremap.jpg

You can just see the conquest, can't you?

And where do I say the cult no longer exists? And how is that an argument about anything, you dissembing little shit?

The John Frum movement displaced the previous imported Christianity and, of all the cargo cults which sprang up in Melanesia during colonial times and through World War II is the only one to have endured so long.

If it is temporary, it isn't the huge problem you make it out to be.

We'll try this again, shall we? "Appeal to Authority" is where you say "X is true simply because Mr. Y said so", and offer nothing beyond that as it's support. Citing scholarly works or the expert opinion of quailfied persons is not an Appeal to Authority because their work and their expert opinions can be verified by corroborative research and evidence. If you argue about Relativity, it is not an Appeal to Authority to cite Albert Einstein's writings or words on the subject.

So take your wrongheaded fallacy accusation and shove it up your ass, you dissembling little shit.

Except when I attacked it, you simply repeated it again.

No, I did not. I did not equate U.S. actions at remediation as a criteria for "offering" an apology. You are now outright lying about statements that are in plain sight and not even trying to hide it anymore.

You did that for Nazi Germany- the difference between them was that the Germans apologized and the Japanese didn't which shows how neo-feudal they are. I have posted the quote twice already.

If you say so, Gracie. Nevermind that we gave up the notion of empire after the 1920s and have not really attempted any similar programme, especially one fashioned on a recognisably outmoded ideal.

No, it was simply easier to set up puppet regimes.

Their motivations have been demonstrated at length in the couse of this thread. It is not my fault that you are too stupid or dishonest to learn your lessons.

"It already happened. No, I am not going to quote it. Why show that I did?"

Mormons are not Christians, and Mormons did not exist at the time kingship was claimed on the basis of Divine Right.

First, they are two seperate traits. Second, they are Christians. If you say you are a Christian, you are a Christian.

No, they are not two different things —especially as the concept of absolute monarchy is based upon the concept of Divine Right to rule. Again, you proudly display your ignorance.

Absolute monarchy needs divine right. Divine right does not need absolute monarchy.

No, just like a state with capable rulers. Conquering Siam would not really have garnered any advantage for the major colonial powers in the region, and Siam hardly acted as a buffer between powers which had territories and claims elsewhere in the region which were adjacent and all potential hot spots.

Except the colonies were also for prestige.

And Russia and China had a big border, so Mongolia wasn't a buffer state.

By that ridiculous non-argument, Yugoslavia didn't successfully shake off the Nazis due to getting "allied aid" as well.

Correct. Your rebuttals are pathetic if I actually agree with many of them.

Oh, and BTW, as a sidebar, there is no guarantee that industrialisation would have spared Ethiopia from invasion. It didn't work that miracle for either France of Czechoslovakia.

I did screw up here. Of course, this is also wrong- it won't spare them from invasion- it will insure they don't get conquered.

SO, eyl is not attacking your "logic" when he says:

Nope. Those are attacks on my methods, not my right to do it in the first place.

Give specifics, dissembling little shit. Assuming that this isn't going to turn out into what I think it will as an "argument".

Automatic organ donor registries- any policy based on people being irresponsible and dumb really.

An a priori assertion you just make over and over and over again as if it had the force of truth.

Given that medievel level populations would be swallowed up by 20th century kill counts, yeah it is true.

Declared protectorates by pure fiat. That is not lawful except by a very twisted definition of the term.

It isn't fair. It IS lawful.

The Federal authorities have the full right and power under the constitution to enforce the laws of the land where the state or local authorities can't or won't do so. I would point out that the National Guardsmen used in these operations operated under the limitations of Posse Comitatus laws as well.

They used force. It doesn't have anything to do with legitamacy, but with the means that were used.

Red Herring.

Obviously I don't think so. Care to explain?

[Wyrm]

A wholly unfounded assumption on your part. It assumes you can project into an alternative future to reach that sort of conclusion that Japan would never have developed without outside intervention. No regime lasts forever and neither would the Tokugawas, whether the punitive expeditions of the 1860s which helped to eventually touch off the War of the Restoration had occurred or not.

Of course the Tokugawas wouldn't last forever. It took over from another Shogunate. But without interference, the likely replacement would be... another Shogunate. Wow, that's cultural development for ya!

And who says at what pace a culture should develop? Who says it must be at the pace we think is appropriate?

They're humans, right? The Europeans seemed to weather an ever increasing rate of change pretty well. Hell, the tools it had imported and developed made it a necessity. However, I don't really care how fast a culture develops, as long as it is developing. As long as things are changing within the society that would eventually bring it to modernity, it's cool. But there was nothing originating within Japan itself to push it towards a modern society.

And who's to say a feudal regime must last forever, considering that none of them did?

A feudal regime is not the same as a feudal society. Regimes are temporary, but Japan had a history of feudal society from the beginnings of its history up until the Meiji reformation. It probably started in the Kofun period (~250 AD) and was definitely established by the Heian period (794 AD), and lasted until 1853. That's about a thousand years at its very least, longer than the post-Rennaissance period. Chinese feudalistic government was the most enduring form of government ever! Imperial China lasted from 221 BC to 1911. That's over two thousand years! If we include Ancient China, no doubt a feudal society, it began at about 2100 BC. Four thousand years.

All the "eventual collapses of feudalism" you appeal to happened for specific reasons, Patrick. The fall of feudalism in Europe came with the obselecence of the mounted knight with the Welsh longbow and gunpowder. We didn't get rid of monarchies until much later. You haven't yet pointed out specific changes within Japan that would bring down that feudal society that didn't come from outside.

And in what way did they develop? Were they on the way to shedding their succession of Emperors? The last emperor of Imperial China was Puyi, whose reign ended in 1912... the fucking twentieth century, and we already had our fingers deep inside Chinese politics before then (opium, anyone?). Did they have their own, independent Rennaissance or Industrial Revolution?

Yes they did. The Communists brought it about.

You mean they imported their Rennaissance and Industrual Revolution from Russia. Sorry, chum, but the Chinese Rennaissance and Industrual Revolution were just a continuation of the European ones. Note the bolded text in my quote. There were no Newcomen-type engines in China, nor its version of Issac Newton.

Japan wasn't really ruled from the outside, either. Yet you cite it as an example of harmful interference by the Europeans.

Who accelerated their material development far beyond their social development. Well-meaning it was, but the results proved disasterous down the line.

"Well-meaning"? The Japanese had something Europeans wanted, and the Europeans were willing to trade technology for what they wanted from Japan. Wasn't that one of your theses, that more advanced cultures don't interfere with less advanced ones because they were "well-meaning"?

Except we (that is, you and me) are not really talking about that difference, are we? We're talking about total isolation (the Federation TNG-style Prime Directive) verses involvement of any sort. Japan was essentially totally isolationist before Perry's fleet. Before, they'd only trade with the Dutch, who weren't interested in giving Japan technology.

Yes we are talking about that difference, whether you chose to acknowledge it or not. It did happen. And the results unfolded in a way that could be expected for a culture which had not shed a feudalist world view and acquired modern weapons and industry to pursue that vision to its logical end.

I have never once advocated foisting all the trappings of modern society on a primitive culture all at once, like the Japanese got. My overarching point was that social development cannot proceed without technological development because the former is a response to the latter. The kind of technological development I was talking about was the exchange of ideas you get with trade, where people take seemingly innocuous inventions and take advantage of them for their own reasons, and in doing so, change their world. But you've blown the magnitude out of proportion.

Thank you for demonstrating yet again how well you can regurgitate an encyclopedia. You still don't answer the basic question —had the Hundred Years War NOT occurred, what would have been the driver for the development of weapons and warfare at the pace driven by the exciegences of that war?

Do you really think Europe at the time was some peacenik-stuffed land, full of Medival Woodstocks, broken only by the Hundred Years War? If it wasn't the Hundred Years War that caused the refinement of gunpowder weapons, it would have been the half-dozen OTHER wars that would've no doubt occured on the continent during that time.

And gunpowder is what made wars exigent. The gunpowder made possible for mercinary armies, and while they were very effective, they had to be paid. With lots of money. Large, sudden expenses is something that kings had problems with. They could only collect taxes at certain times of year, but the mercinaries had to be paid now, so they had to borrow money at exhorbitant interest rates. War became ruinously expensive. The Hundred Years War was exigent because of gunpowder.

Thank you for demonstrating yet again how well you can regurgitate an encyclopedia. You still don't answer the basic question —had the Black Deatn NOT occurred, what would have been the driver for wealth redistribution at the pace driven by the depredations of the plague upon society and the nobility?

Patrick, did I once NOT include the Black Death in my chain of causes and effects of the Rennaissance? Did I once NOT acknolwedge the Black Death as one of the triggers? Answer to both is 'No'; I simply denied that it was an upheval that specifically disrupted feudalism. You may now abandon this strawman.

Um, no. The Black Death spread in the wake of Genoese merchants fleeing a siege of the Crimean city of Caffa in 1347 by the Mongols, who hurled disease-infected corpses over the walls by catapult. Their ships brought the rats and their fleas with them. The rest s history.

And what were the ships doing there in the first place, hmmm? They were trading. They were merchant fleets, right? And unless Caffa had something to offer the Genoese merchants, they wouldn't be there to get all those plague rats.

And why were the Europeans driven to find those new ways to kill each other? What fueled the search for those methods? What motivated the production of gunpowder? These things don't happen in a vacuum. Nice False Cause Fallacy on your part, BTW.

What are you talking about? The constant state of war in Europe was pre-existing, and of course that situation would lead to weapons development, so I felt no need to explain it. But no previous war caused feudalism to fall. The trigger was gunpowder.

And the driver for this same redistribution of wealth at this same pace without the extant fact of the Black Death would have been...?

Don't strawman, Patrick.

Nobody is doing that in this thread, except Samuel. You however are handwaving.

You were asking me for a cause for the redistribution of wealth "without the extant fact of the Black Death", as if I was proposing some other cause for that redistribution. You are the only one pretending that the Black Death was NOT in my list of triggers for the Rennaissance. I only stated that it was not the social upheaval you pretend it was, although it was a significant social disruption.

In a word, bullshit. The population drop, the failure of the nobility, and especially the Catholic Church, in the wake of the crisis which broke down the structure of European feudalism made it impossible to retain the system of landed peasantry upon which the economy and society pre-plague was based.

I agree that such a crisis would make feudalism shrink, but why is it rendered impossible under such a scenario? The population had more than doubled during the 700 years before, so it's not as if feudalism couldn't exist with less peasents; they'd just have to work less land. Some lords would be shit out of luck as their peasants plummited to zero or nearly so, and couldn't afford their mounted knights. But that just means wars had to be fought with fewer knights, a shortage that would hit everybody.

It's not as if the Black Death made the mounted knight any less of an effective war machine.

Labour became a scarce commodity and for the first time had to be bargained for. The fall of the landed nobility cleared the way for the rise of the trade and labour guilds.

You mean, a peasant could get more land as a fief for the same promise of loyalty, service, and duty? And how does the presence of landed nobility prevent trade and labor guilds?

And a lot of the property which was abandoned had no one to inherit it afterward —the families either having all died or their remnants fleeing the stricken areas of the countryside.

That implies only shrinkage of feudalism and a lot of down-and-out lords, not its outright destruction.

Paper was hardly an exclusively Chinese invention, especially as the Egyptians had discovered it first.

That's papyrus. True paper comes from pulped plant fibers. Papyrus was never used outside the tropics.

The Arabs had discovered how to make linen-based paper in the 10th century which was finer in quality than the bamboo-based stock the Chinese had been using, and Europeans had begun their own independent papermaking in the 12th century, two hundred years before the Black Death.

Yes, and we used wood stock paper in the 1800, automated the process and made paper really cheap. That doesn't mean we invented paper. The Arabs improved on the idea they got from the Chinese. When I say "we got paper from China," I mean that we got the idea of paper, ultimately, from the Chinese and adapted it to the use we would put it. (And no matter which way you cut it, linen paper came from someone else.) Same story with printing. In case you haven't noticed, Chinese script isn't really conducive to the kind of movable-type printing that the European scripts are, thousands of characters vs 23 (at the time). Thus, China didn't get beyond wood blocks, whereas Guttenburg turned it into the remarkably modern movable-type printing press. Yet there is a clear ancestory of the idea between the two, again by way of the Arabs.

The TNG Federation's PD insists upon the sort of non-involvement which entails letting whole peoples die "if destined to". Nobody is advocating that in this thread. But neither is there any sort of imperative to force a culture's development as you and Samuel advocate.

I would thank you not to confuse Samuel's position with my own. I do not advocate forcing any government to do anything. I propose an extraplanetary civilization to be in contact with the natives, a source for ideas that would change their world just by their mere introduction.

Hell, I probably wouldn't interfere at all with a planet with vigorous intercultural trade and a few key technologies scattered here and there until it reached something like the modern age. With the right caveats, I'd think at that point they'd be able to handle anything I could throw at them.

Really? Who says the Japanese "had" to be kicked off their "high chair", as you phrase it? Who says they "had" to be shaken up? By what standard? Who says what pace a culture must evolve at? Why?

Any pace other than zero, because at zero, it ain't getting anywhere. I have made no further refinements to my requirement. A feudalistic culture can last for thousands of years, and only fall under identified foreign influences. Yet we know that feudalism need not last that long.

Feudal Europe was a dead-end for the landed peasantry, and there was no middle class; a situation which did not start to change without the twin disasters of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague impacting upon European society.

The social order of feudalism formed to take full advantage of the mounted knight. If the mounted knight remained the last word in war, then feudalism would simply reorganize under new management. As to the "landed" peasents, peasents didn't own their own land in a fiefdom. And you've yet to explain why the Black Death and the Hundred Years War enabled the development of the middle class.