Perhaps I need a "Jys watches too much TV" tag.

[actourdreams]

Fandom - that is to say, Alexander Siddig fandom - has found A Dangerous Man, and is at least on Tumblr all atwitter about it. You literally do not know how happy this makes me. There were almost tears, and I am not joking. Lawrence is one of the few subjects that I still go full-on, let-me-tell-you-everything-about-this-ever special interest

Comments

[actourdreams]

Okay, this is where I put on my Knows Too Much And Overthinks hat - and I promise you, I'm not trying to be bitchy. I just think about this stuff.

The following splooge should be read assuming my "the Cardassians didn't give a damn about public health" comment is correct, and I probably should have qualified that I'm not talking about the Western universal healthcare model, I'm talking about very basic things. For example, you have just had a significant segment of the population living in refugee/labor camps, and even if you assume they were vaccinated for herd immunity, that still means you're dealing with a high incidence of, well, pretty much everything that can be spread person-to-person. IRL this would be stuff like TB, Hep B, HIV, etc. Now, they could go "Well, this is too bad, but sorry, we'll get to it later," but, well, that would be monumentally stupid not only for letting people go untreated but also for letting it spread freely. Even assuming that a shot from the right hypospray can cure anything in one go, and even assuming that there are somehow no mutated or drug-resistant strains, those people almost certainly went straight back into the general population - because they were being liberated by a guerrilla army in the middle of the war, the infrastructure to screen and treat an entire camp of people just wasn't there. So, now you've got to get people on the ground with aforesaid hyposprays - again, I know, future technology, but it seems to be implied that the amount of energy to beam a few hundred thousand people from where ever they are to whatever big city hospitals there are would be highly impractical. That's the sort of thing I mean by public health system. Also, sanitation (because, even assuming free water-purifying tablets, someone's gotta coordinate and distribute them), continued vaccinations, emergency treatment. The basic things that keep a population running so they can work. (I do apologize if that came off as bitchy, or "gee, you read Paul Farmer when you were seventeen, didn't you" - I'm not running on much sleep and this is sort of A Thing for me).

YES. THIS. :D Fieldwork would be potentially really awkward, but also really awesome. I want ethnographies on allllll the aliens, too. Like, right here right now because it would make for really delightful reading, but also the actual possibility of meeting a nonhuman race and being able to actually study what's biologically driven, what's just human nature, and whether the universal systems we see in Earth cultures really are that universal just makes me get all starry-eyed. :P

I'm pretty certain they've done stuff like that that ticked me off before, but this was just really egregious, and I felt like it was indicative of... a stance that is culturally relativistic in a really weird way. Which is actually something I've felt before, but I think I need to see more stuff to put my finger on exactly what it is.

I feel like he's really shaped up well through the series, too. In the first season I would get excited when his name showed up in the credits because it meant that we would have some continuing plot, and now I get excited because it means that I'm going to spend a large part of it staring at the screen and going "I cannot BELIEVE this guy."

[solo_by_choice]

Ah, well, that makes sense. I'd think if you were using a population for slave labor and wanted to keep doing so, keeping them from dying would probably be good. The logistics problems seem fairly insurmountable though.

I'm imagining some future "anthro"-pologist going and trying to figure out the Cardassians and they're just messing with her head at every turn.

I actually kind of like the stuff about Worf and Jadzia trying to help Kurn commit ritual suicide because it's such a different culture and that's wonderfully uncomfortable. I also like that Sisko puts his foot down. But when they wipe his mind...that was odd. Did he consent? I don't remember.

Whenever the credits include Dukat or Garak, I clap and grin because I know whatever follows will probably be awesome. Especially if both of them are listed :D