The idea of deliberately creating otherwise illegal augmented people purely for the purpose of making it easier to systemically identify other augmented people is so brazenly unethical, I am at a loss for further comment.

it does explain why Bashir’s father was imprisoned but the Darwin station researchers were not.

Does it?

The Darwin Station researchers are human, as are their augmented subjects. Julian Bashir does not live on Earth at the time his augmentation is discovered. The Bashir family did not get this treatment done on Earth, and given the extreme lengths they went to get Julian treated, alongside Richard's documented inability to keep a job consistently, it would have been utterly insane not to move to a different world (instead of a different city on Earth, as they actually did) after they got the treatment if this would also free them from any risk of legal repercussions.

Further, Strange New Worlds explicitly refers to this as a Federation law, and the principal reason why Illyrians are not welcome in the Federation.

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently... I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V's whole "don't build too many cities, we don't want to have an actual empire here" deal, which definitely isn't my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like "how much research have I put into this tech", "how much production overflowed off this completed build", and "how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it." They haven't opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it's not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very "stop having fun meme", but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

I think you're probably on the right track here, but I think your takes are on the charitable side. The Ferengi would clearly like to believe their attitude is “If you’ve got the lobes and you’ve got the Latinum, I don’t care what you do,” but in practice they are very committed to some massive societal disparities which are not financially profitable.

In a society so deeply stratified by sex (and far from egalitarian in other regards), MtF trans folks would likely be looked down upon for apparently abandoning a way of life which Ferengi males clearly consider both morally superior and far more pleasant than the lot of a woman. In practice I suspect very few would condemn themselves to the legal status of a Ferengi woman by openly transitioning. They'd seek out secret treatment, and private expression, but publicly continue to appear as men.

Conversely, FtM trans people would be viewed with intense suspicion: a conniving, cynical Ferengi would likely view such a case as a woman attempting to escape from her rightful lower place in society. Frankly, given the horrific situation Ferengi women are placed in, if FtM trans folks were accepted as men even in the minimal legal sense, I'd expect at least a few cis women to attempt to take that avenue out of the societally mandated hellhole they would otherwise be condemned to. Perhaps the Ferengi have reliable tests for gender dysphoria that would doom these efforts, or perhaps not.

As for non-binary folks, I don't think they'd get it. Either you're a normal (male) Ferengi, or you're an inferior and powerless woman. How could someone possibly fall between those two states?

In short, the incredibly pervasive and legally enforced sexism of Ferengi society creates significant complications for trans folks of any kind. It's a really horrible and frankly depressing setup, which the Ferengi themselves are willfully oblivious to.

Post Rom, I would expect the women's liberation movement to be a watershed event for trans folks of all sorts, and lead to a fairly rapid normalization of Ferengi publicly being their true selves. It's still going to be a rough road socially, but clearing the legal barriers will go a long ways.

The only logical argument I can find in all of this, is that choosing a mate based on feeling/preference, instead of logic, might demonstrate that an individual is more emotional and therefore less logical. And I think we all know how Vulcans feel about things that are not logical and/or things that act upon their feelings....

Personally, I don't see that having a preference in a mate, even one that steps outside the heteronormative, is a flaw in their logic. If you enjoy your time with your mate, and that makes you a better, more productive individual, then I fail to see a problem.

I don't see any evidence that Vulcans don't completely agree with your own personal stance here.

Vulcans clearly do act upon personal values, desires, preferences, etc, that we as humans would view as emotional responses. "I want [a cookie/you to live long and prosper/to have galactic peace/to solve this math equation/etc]" is, for a human, a statement inherently rooted in an emotional assessment. The Vulcans themselves, however, clearly do not view these things as emotional expression.

We see partnerships which don't produce children, and despite Vulcans having no filter whatsoever when it comes to criticizing others for being "illogical", nobody seems to have anything to say to Sarek for apparently having no children with his last wife Perrin. When Tuvok is separated from his wife, he acknowledges on multiple occasions that he misses her because he wants to be able to spend time with her; he certainly doesn't bemoan the missed opportunity to fulfill a societal obligation to pop out more babies.

We don't have explicit counterfactuals here, but we all know that ultimately comes down to Doylist reasons. There's no reason we should assume that Vulcan society shares Rick Berman's personal sense of morality in this area.

That (non)response leaves those Vulcans without acknowledgement of what they are and trapped in a society constructed around heteronormalcy. They may find one another and form groups, but still be expected to take heterosexual mates and be part of a “logical” family structure.

Can you cite any evidence of this? 90s Trek presents all societies as relatively heteronormative because it was the 90s and Rick Berman was a homophobe, but I see little evidence that Vulcans society should be considered any more or less heteronormative than Humans, Klingons, etc. Nor can I recall evidence that the Vulcans would consider one man and one woman to be the singular "logical" family structure.

Katra is how Vulcans rationalize the different opinions/desires/preferences each Vulcan has and just lumps them all into what must be one’s “soul”, rather than acknowledge the emotional identity such things emerge from.

Likewise, I'd like to know where this description of Katras as a catchall cause for personal preference is stated.

Reproductive organs are for reproducing and reproducing only. If you have a penis you’re a male of the species, if you have a vagina you’re a female of the species. Anything else is a genetic abnormality that should be fixed.

There’s no room for emotion, no room to feel like you’re in the wrong body or to identify as something other than what you physically present.

I see little grounds for this assessment.

Vulcans not only recognize the immense complexity of the mind, but they also recognize people have a soul (their Katra). Why would it be "ice cold logic" to decide that the physical body, not the mind or soul, determines what a person truly is? Especially in a technological context where elaborate reconstructive surgeries are trivially easy.

Vulcans have preferences, desires, and needs that we would describe as emotionally driven. Vulcans clearly do not consider these to be emotional in nature. Despite practicing arranged marriages, the actions of those Vulcans whose lives we see into (Spock, T'Pring, Sarek, T'Pol, etc) clearly show that they are not strictly beholden to such arrangements, and value forming romantic partnerships with people they are attracted to. Likewise, the need to occupy the correct type of body, and by referred to by the correct name and correct terms, would surely be understood and accepted without difficulty.

I feel compelled to note that being promoted from Ensign (O1) to Lieutenant Commander (O4) would be a triple promotion, skipping both Lieutenant Jr. Grade and Lieutenant.

Of course Kurn is victimized by bad kerning.

Touching on the actual character moments for a bit here: the events of this episode do not reflect well on Chapel.

She'd been hitting on Spock literally since the beginning of the show, and openly pining after him for most of that time. Four episodes ago, she winds up breaking down in tears explaining to an alien telephone receptionist how much she cares about him. Two episodes ago she is extremely distraught when Boimler accidentally lets slip that Spock is famous in the future, and her relationship with him almost certainly will not last. And now, she gets into a three month fellowship that she didn't think she had much of a chance at, doesn't say a word to Spock until she has no other choice, and then busts out a (involuntary, but reflective of genuine emotion) musical number about how "free" she feels. What the hell.

We already know Chapel has some problems with commitment, but this is a whole 'nother level. Throwing away a relationship she spent most of this show obsessively wishing for, without any apparent consideration for Spock's feelings or non-breakup solutions to spending a couple months apart, is just wild. I'm sure the finale will touch on this with a little more nuance than a musical number was likely to give, but whatever else is said this is not a good look.

Poor Christine Chapel! Now she knows what the audience has always known: her relationship with Spock is ultimately doomed. Plus a delightful mix of guilt and fear that she could unwittingly cause Spock to never measure up to the vague but crucial future that Boimler mentioned to her in the turbolift, simply by trying to make the two of them happy.

That suuuuuucks.

Much to my own surprise, I'm a complete sucker for this budding Spock/Chapel romance. I just want these two beautiful people to be happy together, damn it! We all know it's doomed, unfortunately, and I hope that whatever inevitably destroys it doesn't turn out to be too painful for the characters involved. Spock and Chapel are obviously not engaged in a romantic relationship in TOS, most obviously in Amok Time when such a pairing would have rendered the entire story trivial.

Someone mentioned in a previous thread that Spock's Pon Farr (seven years before Amok Time) is closing in. I was skeptical in that thread that they would choose to touch on it then, but the events of this episode do make that seem quite a bit more likely, if (again) increasingly difficult to square with Amok Time.