North Korea, the IRL boogyman

So if you’ve been watching the news as of recent, then you’re probably aware of the North Korean “Missile” threat. You see after the death of their leader Kim Jong-il, his son took the reins of the country. As of recent Kim Jong-Un has been working in quite a dedicated manner to prove his is capable of running his nation. Most recently, despite warnings from all members of the international community, North Korea continued it’s Nuclear Test on February 13th, and not something of the peaceful variety either. This test was very clearly the detonation of a small nuclear device somewhere underground.

This isn’t exactly the first time that North Korean’s have proven that they know how to split the atom, but it would be the first instance under the new leadership of Kim Jong-Un. The North Koreans in fact had not tested a nuclear weapon since May of 2009. So of course the national media outlets decided that outside of the pope, this was the most fascinating thing they could talk about. Nightmare scenarios not called for since the Cuban missile crisis were being thrown around. Listing (against my better judgment) to talk radio this notion that the Koreans would hit the coast of Alaska were thrown around, and as I’m watching CNN today I see they’ve brought on a military expert to talk about the missile defense shield.

That’s when it hit me like a brick wall; because, here’s the thing, The North Koreans are wholly unprepared and incapable of engaging the US in any sort of major conflict. Even being incredibly generous with North Korean artillery placements, they could wage a full scale assault for perhaps three to five hours at worst killing several thousand in Seoul.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive of South Korean lives on this matter, quite the opposite really. The truth of the matter is that even if we assume that all of the 13,000 odd north Korean artillery placements can actually fire (given that the North Koreans can’t keep the lights on, assuming that their military has been maintained is a fragile hope at best), the initial strike would likely cause those citizens not injured during the attack to seek out shelter, and given that Seoul has been preparing for just such an event for the past 50 years we can safely assume the North Koreans might give the South Korean capital a bloody nose, but full scale destruction is highly unlikely.

In the time it would take for the North Koreans to even begin prepping a second round of attacks, a joint operations conducted by US and South Korean forces would decimate the largely untested and poorly equipped North Korean military.

Here’s the thing about the North Korean military that I don’t think a lot of people realize. Even though the North has sunk the majority share hold of whatever amount of profit they can manage into it, it’s ultimately still just posturing. There are also assumptions that China may step in to defend it’s border state; however, this is becoming increasingly hard to justify. Where China once saw the North Korean buffer state as a handy stop gap between the democratic South Korea and itself, the North Korean’s growing tradition of causing unrest is making the Alliance look less and less useful.

The truth of the matter is that the North Korean government simply can’t afford on any level to start or maintain a war. The United States, who would likely be the primary opponent, attacked the much more heavily armed Iraq and decimated it’s ground forces in less then a matter of hours. Even assuming that dense jungles made the North Koreans more difficult to spot, their military capabilities simply are not a match for the far superior US Air Force.

The thing is, there wouldn’t be a ground war in Korea, the US isn’t going to cross the DMZ because it doesn’t need to. The US is operating with Generation 5 stealth aircraft that are more then capable of taking out any ground to air installations and possible airbases. When that is all said and done the US would being using it’s infamous A-10 Thunderbolt II’s to take out the remaining ground forces.

You see, for all the criticism of the US military expenditures, there are advantages to having the single most sophisticated air force on the planet. The only countries on the planet right now that have even the faintest chance against the US in the sky are the nations that compose the EU. Russia and China have both been delayed in rolling out Gen 5 aircraft to counter the US F-22 Raptor / JSF 35 Lightning 2 Programs, not unlikely do serious budget constraints related to the technology.

North Korean Missile Range

So, the North Koreans don’t have a military or even a missile program that can get out of the sea of japan. Even their longest range missile, the Taepodong can barely reach Alaska, and that assumes the missile even works. You see, the North Korean’s aren’t actually stupid enough to test such a missile because they know the moment they have a weapon traveling into the pacific the US will react.

So why is the US media so horny over a Korean Missile attack? Well that’s where the conspiracy theorist in me has to pull out a tinfoil hat. You see, there’s this project called the Patriot Missile Defense system. We began deploying the system in Israel to help them ward off any potential SCUD or similar launches from Iraq and Iran. The problem of course is that it didn’t work… even on the best of days. Continued testing of the defense system revealed that it was incredibly lacking at actually catching missiles.

It was part of this really big project in the US to create a series of “Rings” at which different missile defense systems could be activated. Patriot was part of the long – Medium range, where other projects like the the CIWS systems deployed on carriers currently (also only mildly successful at their jobs). In fact in the case of the CIWS, the one time it managed to be used in combat, it ended up shooting down the Chaff of another ship in the carrier group meant to ward an incoming missile.

Seeing the results of the various mildly successful projects, even the defense spending Pentagon came to the conclusion that the budgets on these projects probably wasn’t worth it. At the time, the US was engaged with counter terrorist / counter cyber terrorism attacks. The chance of a nation with an actual missile system attacking were becoming increasingly unlikely.

Step in the North Koreans. Proudly proclaiming they are in the mood the nuke the US, should they get the chance, the Defense Department’s ears pined happily. Now the US defense department has a reason to roll out those lovely Missile Defense Systems, and thus we can continue the US military industrial complex.

The thing is, the US population has begun to get wind of the fact that US defense spending is egregious. When you factor in growing unrest among the general populace with things like the Occupy Wall Street over there being a shrinking number of social projects, it becomes really tough to justify spending money on a laser to shoot down non existent missiles.

So what you need is something people can be afraid of, you need a threat to justify the billions of dollars you’re continuing to sink into the most advanced military force on the planet.

Thus the North Koreans, a non threat with barely the power to strike at South Korea half most likely any other target on the planet, posturing so someone will pay attention to them, and the US desperately needing a boogyman to continue it’s Military Industrial Complex.

The internet Boogeyman or what is SRS?

The acronym “SRS” ring a bell with you? If so it’s probably because you spend more than your fair share of time browsing the internet and have bumped into what is quickly becoming the boogyman of the internet. What was once isolated to a small subsection of reddit has now spread to 4chan, Something Awful, Tumblr and more. Well… spread is a strong word, there’s no actual evidence or proof that members of “SRS” are moving about the internet, but they’ve become a sort of shadow that scares the children at night.

As a little background, reddit.com is a social bookmarking site. You go in, find links you like, vote on the best ones, and those get put on a front page of sorts. Inside this social bookmarking site you can create your own specialized communities with their own individual focuses. One of those communities was something called “Shit Reddit Says”. The subreddit started off as a place much like reddit’s “Circlebroke” or the like as a place to point out the less than fashionable things that reddit votes to the top of the page.

So the subreddit focused on instances of racism, casual misogyny, homophobia, etc. and pointed them out as instances where a lot of people were promoting that sort of behavior. It’s not an innoble goal and it certainly stands to make a point about how we as a society have weird boundaries over what you can say but shouldn’t, and if only the story had ended there.

Well rumor has it (and I don’t know how true this is because quite frankly I’m to lazy to browse Something Awful), that Shit Reddit Says was actually a puppet subreddit created by members of Something Awful as a way to mock reddit. Why Something Awful would give two shits as a community about reddit you can be the judge of, but that’s what the rumor mill says. It further goes out on a limb that Something Awful created shit reddit says as a way to get reddit destroyed (again for whatever reason).

Now this complex social history would be fascinating but it doesn’t even stop there. To understand this fascinating little rabbit hole we have to go even deeper because 4chan and tumblr get dragged into this clusterfuck too.

Let’s cover a little background. 4chan is an image board that was born on Something Awful back in 2004. It was high internet conspiracy theory that Something Awful has looked down on 4chan for being a shit hole (can’t really contest that fact). There have always been claims that Something Awful has been out for 4chan, trying to destroy it, whatever else. As best as my research goes, 99% of this is patently untrue.

Anyway, 4chan is a community that builds itself up for some time growing internal culture / memes / whatever else. Then Reddit rolls in around 2006ish as a social bookmarking site. The site does moderate successful until Digg (another social networking site) moves the bulk majority of its traffic from just technology to all kinds of social content. With that move Digg began to bleed user’s to reddit culminating in a massive migration with Digg’s v4.

So you think to yourself “Ok how does 4chan factor in”. Well the user’s at 4chan began to join reddit because it offered an influx of technology content mixed with a semi-interesting user base that was old digg user’s and content. The two mingled and basically created what we might call the reddit of today.

So anyway, here you have reddit sitting as this mixture of Digg.com and 4chan.com users browsing for news. Easy enough right? Well shit reddit says starts getting active. They start taking on a few Social Justice projects that were gaining a fair amount of speed at Something Awful at the time and would later be what tumblr ended up becoming so popular for.

As part of this switch to Social justice, SRS wanted to create a safe space. They were talking about topics that could possibly offend and they didn’t want to derail the conversation too much with people getting upset over the topics being discussed  At the same time they wanted to do it in a bit of a light-hearted manner.

So then.. the banning starts. SRS figured the only way to make it clear they weren’t going to deal with the nonsense was just to ban offenders on site, which given 4chan and subsequently Reddit’s very pro “Free Speech at any and all Cost” rubbed some folks the wrong way. The problem was that SRS didn’t stop by cleaning up their own house, they set their sights on bigger targets.

Reddit at the time, you see, was hosting a subreddit called /r/jailbait. There’s no beating around the bush on this one, /r/jailbait was a place that redditors were exchanging pictures of clothed but sexually suggestive photos of young girls (as in young enough to warrant a visit from the FBI young).

Now let me be clear, the Reddit community was always sort of 2 sided on this matter. On one side you had the folks that stated that as long as it wasn’t technically illegal it should  be protected as free speech and the other side that stated that it was quite frankly fucking creepy. I’ll let you guess where my position lies on that one.

Anyway SRS and coincidently Something Awful both make these large pushes and threads discussing the creepy nature of /r/jailbait and begin running campaigns to bring it to the attention of major media outlets. Well just so happens shorty after Something Awful’s thread and SRS’s continued efforts a major news company did pick up the spot. CNN’s own anderson cooper ran a piece about /r/jailbait much to the chagrin of the Reddit Admin’s and no doubt the publishing company which runs the show Conde Nast / Advanced Publications.

Shortly after that the Reddit admins made the call to nix /r/jailbait. The uproar was somewhat explosive to say the least… BUT the story doesn’t end there. No instead SRS taking this sort of victory in their book figured if they could knock out one major creep factory why not knock out a few more. In the following months their campaigns managed to get additional subreddits (such as /r/creepshots) also knocked out by bringing the issue to public attention and forcing Advanced Publications / Reddit to save face on the matter.

This all culminates in tracking down and exposing the great father perversion, a Mr. ViolentaCrez. So this fellow, ViolentaCrez was the moderator for /r/jailbait and a number of other less than sexually healthy subreddits (/r/deadteens or something similar at one point) . Anyway allegedly [no confirmation that I could find], SRS worked with the Gawker Agency (which had previously gotten in a tussle with Reddit over a fake cancer AMA) to reveal ViolentaCrez’s actual identity.

One CNN trip later, Mr. Crez’s perverted life was national news and Reddit’s admins were once again sour that they were being dragged into the light.

So you have this proactive group on Reddit with a very strong Social Justice twist born out of the same mentality that you see on Tumblr (A site 4chan got into a tussle with several times [and I believe I wrote about]) and Something Awful (Reports from SA tell me goons either really have a hard on for social justice or couldn’t care less, but judging from things like Retsupurae and their whole PewDiePie spiel I can’t imagine that it’s not at least somewhat part of the culture).

Anyway, to move further along this rabbit hole I need to give a brief history of the 4chan board /pol/. So /pol/ is the politics board on 4chan. It’s version 3 (perhaps 4) in a line of boards focusing on politics because for some strange reason that moot no longer cares about, the board is incredibly racist (trolling or unironically you be the judge).  As a response each time moot blew away the board as to try to prevent the racism that was running so rampant. It went from /n/ -> /new/ -> /pol/ each time getting more and more rampant with the apparent racism.

Now this is where the fun begins with this whole boogyman thing. Now on /pol/ as well as 4chan’s /q/, /b/, and /v/ boards a great deal of discussion has been brought up about Reddit’s SRS. You might ask yourself why the hell a group calling itself Shit Reddit Says would care about 4chan to which the response is something along the lines of “Yeah why would they care?”

You see /pol/’s convinced itself somehow that threads and topics counter to libertarian or conservative agenda’s are actually just SRS agents trying to spread New Age feminist ideas. Actually it’s entirely possible that /pol/ is just trolling itself and in on the joke, but let’s assume for the sake of this boogyman theory that even a few believe that SRS legitimately wants to interfere with /pol/’s operation despite evidence as far as I can find to verify the matter.

Then of course consider that anytime an opinion with a slightly Social Justice Rage invoking stent gets downvoted, the response is almost immediately ”SRS is in here downvoting” on reddit. In some kind of fascinating twist of fate, SRS was morphed into a boogyman of Social Justice.

/r/lgbt being taken over (a theory I, myself had in a previous thread), clearly an SRS takeover.

Being downvoted for saying something racist but funny to some? Clearly SRS

Posting liberal ideas on /pol/? Clearly SRS

In what I’m not sure to label as trolling or legitimate concern. Reddit’s SRS has turned into a specter of some sort. Used as a strawman to derail conversations about topics like social justice or the likes. Keep in mind the subreddit officially only boast a member count of around 25 / 30 thousand (as of this post). Quite a busy bunch given Reddit’s overall numbers [as well as 4chan]s are both in the millions.

If anyone’s got any more conspiracy stew to throw in the pot feel free to contribute, I just thought it interesting.

What pretending to be a girl on World of Warcraft has taught me about myself.

So a little history here, some years ago I started a new character with some friends on World of Wacraft. We all rolled Night Elf Druids on the US Frostmane server. We also all had some innate knowledge that female characters usually ended up having people send them gifts just because of the way the WoW population works out. Anyway needless to say, if you ask me today I’d probably respond that I rolled a female toon for one of the two reasons:

• Male Night Elves are ugly anyway and who wants to stare at that for extended periods of time.
• I lost a bet.

These are of course lies, but it’s how I’ve always responded to the question; because, honestly I’ve never had a good answer outside of “Seemed like a good idea a the time”. Needless to say, this was during the late days of the Burning Crusade, and that druid went from just a character that I rolled up with some friends being my Main (The character I primarily play if I’m playing WoW). Over the years I’ve done server transfers, moved from Alliance to Horde back to alliance again, seen every type of server (PvE, PvP, RP), and met a few friends along the way.

It’s been a long history of getting used to the WoW culture and the people within it, going from a keyboard turning Hunter who used to roll need on shields to someone who prides themselves on doing decent with the Feral Kitty rotation.

About a year ago, after Cataclysm, I had grown tired of the “WoW Hustle and Bustle” and decided that I would move over to an RP real to see what all the fuss was about. I am a big fan of D&D outside of World of Warcraft, so one of the things that I always missed from WoW was letting the “Character be a Character” so to speak, to really take on a life outside of simply an avatar which I attached purple clothes to.

I was fearful of moving to a role playing server, on the basis of a myriad of factors including the recent horror stories of the US Moon Guard server’s “PornShire”, but after seeing a reddit post about Emerald Dream, I thought I might at least give it a shot. I was initially unimpressed with everything at hand, but it would seem that the RP Community is one of those things that you sort of have to break your way into rather then it just inviting you in.

So anyway, I’ve been on the server for I guess a few months now, settling in and enjoying the scene. And in truth, I have actually enjoyed the Role Playing aspects of the game a great deal more then I thought I would. In a lot of ways it allows one to escape the “Grind for the next reputation or purple” and just sit down and enjoy the lore and nature of the Warfcraft World.

Playing a Night Elf Female though has… taught me something. It’s interesting, because when I transferred back to the Alliance, I could have very well changed Alnarra’s name and Gender easily, even made her a Worgen Male or something similar, but I didn’t. At the time, I think it’s because I thought it would be dishonest to the character. It’s not that I think on some level that a series of entries in a database, or gathering of pixels on a screen has feelings of opinions on the matter, but just like my cat is who she is and I would never change that, in the same way I feel like the character has it’s own sort of mythos internally that can’t be replaced.

It means a lot more then just a simple collection of achievements  It’s the memories of running Naxxramas and Ulduar with is Naughtier then you, making fun of Faz’s burst DPS on Anub, or even sitting on the cliff side of a virtual mountain having a campfire with a friend of mine in Oregon after his girlfriend returned home to the east coast. All of those elements compose to me the character and what it means to me. It became more an avatar of my personality then I think somedays I like to admit.

Now I sit on Emerald Dream being a girl, which is interesting in it’s own rights. The thing is that I was raised by the internet so to speak. So a natural side effect of that has been a natural  skepticism of almost everything, including a person’s purported gender in a video game. As such, my mind had automatically assumed that all women were men, and that’s where this RP’s server fist oddity caught me off guard.

The sheer number of women playing male characters was staggering to me. I knew that some women played male toons for various reasons, but to see it again and again began to unnerve the very foundations of the assumptions I make about people online.

You see, Gender’s always been a weird subject online. In some ways it is the ultimate escapism for people, a chance to shake off not only their physical shackles (Being overweight, leading a dull life, etc), but the very basic foundations of who and what they are. One of those basic foundations is the concept of gender. I suppose perhaps these issues have become more apparent to me in the recent timeline because the transgender movement has become a very prominent issue within the online social justice circles.

To see my stereotypes so easily shattered on a community like Emerald Dream has caused me to start looking at not just how I view women, but how men view women, how women view men, and even the depth of how do men think women view them and vice versa.

The natural side effect is that gender behind the keyboard while still relevant in it’s own ways  is largely dismissed in favor of the gender of the character on the screen. In such a way you learn to interact not as yourself, but as this idealized version of the character you are playing.

And so I started ending up on the “Other Side” so to speak. Now I don’t for a moment pretend that playing a girl online in any way equates at any level of magnitude to the things that happen to actual women on a daily basis, BUT it does provide some amount of insight into the sort of perceived social interactions that go on. It’s not just male characters giving you free things, it goes to an entirely different level.

People will treat you quite differently under the assumption that your female. Now part of me just assumes that they don’t suffer from the same skepticism as I do and think that people are actually the gender that their onscreen character suggest and that has to be kept in mind as a factor, that they are acting this way because at some level they believe they can win an “Actual Girlfriend” out of all of this.

Yet, this introspection remains, as the character I “play” is for all intents and purposes a widower and just the sorts of comments that people will make in that line of reasoning fascinate me. It provides unique insight into a wide variety of how “My People” (Males) act when around women. I suppose I can see it in myself, but sometimes it is better to see perspectives from outside the mirror. All the classic ideas of relationships, gender roles, all neatly packaged into short online conversations.

Every variety of person exist and you interact with such a large variety of ages and mindset that you are forced to step back for a moment and think to yourself “Oh yeah that’s how people interact”. I suppose that’s strange on it’s own right, mostly because as an MMO, it has to at some level enforce social stereotypes for the average nerd. As they say you wouldn’t be chasing a girlfriend in a video game if you could get one in the real world… or do you?

Again my evidence is purely anecdotal and I make no assertions that this is any kind of proper social study,  but WoW’s social and family aspects are often highlighted, and all to often I am seeing ACTUAL real world couples who’s characters have nothing to do with each other. That kind of thing is simply mind blowing to me, people who after getting done with WoW will go back to sitting on the couch loving each other, that while Role Playing aren’t in any way affiliated. It’s strange… a departure from the accepted cultural perception.

It makes me look at second life with a second glance and think “Oh… that’s what they were getting at…” truly shedding that shell of “Who Am I” and trading it for an idealized version of self, even if it is constrained by the limited technology available.

These small things, these bits of anecdotal evidence have forced that introspection I spoke about above, the “How do I view women?” question to the forefront. Now obviously there are factors outside of WoW that have to be influencing my thoughts on the matter, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t play a part in shaping at some level my own thoughts on the matter. The question of when I’m writing a small story, how do I write women? Do I write them differently from men? If so, how do I do that? When I’m DM’ing a campaign do I assign the traditional gender roles, how do I have the characters respond?

After several suggested that I would make a good Mother, I can only assume that either I write women well enough that people find them believable, or there is a massive conspiracy of assholes out there working to feed me the same set of lies. It does make me step back and wonder though, what templates have I been applying to women? What has my upbringing brought me?

Suddenly you can start to see all the same relationship ploys working across both sides of the line. You see the traditional gender roles so much clearer, this notion that it is the Man who initiates things, the expected responses from Women, the notion of the “Friendzone”, all of that put into perspective from both sides. In some ways it’s been like an explosive gender equalizer where you have to step back and go “Oh… we’re both playing the same god damn ball game, they just told me I’m using a different rule book”.

The social structures, the irritation from both sides about the other, the presumed stereotypes, all of it so clear when you position yourself as a sort of neutral party. I’d like to think it’s taught me to be more socially aware of my interactions with women, and on some level more “aware” of the social queues, but I’ve never really been great in those fields to begin with anyway.

I’m not sure what kind of insight I was aiming for in this post outside of “Gee this is fascinating  look at the tree monkeys all interact in the virtual world”, but I thought it worth posting, and perhaps I can get some thoughts out of you guys.

Have you learned anything profound from interacting in a simulation like WoW? 

Shows I think everyone should watch

QI – A show put on by the BBC, featuring Stephen Fry quizzing guest on various tidbits of knowledge, this show is truly a delight, and filled with lovable British Humor. A vast array of seasons to choose from, and it comes in at about 45 minutes a pop. 

Farscape – A dash of Science Fiction and Comedy all mixed into one, this show follows the life of one John Crichton as he’s tossed onto a ship of aliens. The show is pretty consistently  good and can provide a healthy dose of Science Fiction. 

Star Trek (The Next Generation / Deep Space 9) – These are the two primary shows. There’s a mixed bag of nuts in terms of good and bad episodes, but it is some truly great science fiction. With 14 seasons between them, you’ll be watching them for quite a while

Doctor Who – Again put out by the BBC, Doctor Who has an illustrious history and nearly 35 seasons of material. Of course there’s a sharp division as of recent with the “9th” incarnation of the Doctor starting the modern era. This show focuses on exploring Time and Space in a whimsical and enjoyable manner

Babylon 5 – Much like Deep Space 9, this show focuses on some brilliant military – political drama. It is has some dated graphical styling, but is otherwise a great watch. 

Supernatural – A show running on the WB (or whatever it’s calling itself these days), focusing on the lives of 2 Brothers chasing after monsters, ghost, and what have you. The constant nerdy humor and emotional roller coaster never stops. I highly advice watching this show. 

Avatar the Last Airbender – A cartoon produced by Nickelodeon following the tale of a young man who learns that he must quintessentially save the world. With amazing attention to detail and a fair amount of subtle adult humor I can’t help but mention this one. 

My Little Pony: Friendship is magic – A cartoon put out by the Hub with a surprisingly exceptional style of animation in addition to having an incredibly positive message. It’s one of those nice feel good shows. 

Torchwood – A spin off of Doctor Who with a much darker tone. Featuring a slightly more realistic approach to how humanity would deal with aliens, it’s consistently good. 

Firefly – You have no excuses for not watching this. It’s 1 season long and has some fantastic characters. A classical Western Science Fiction. 

Gundam Wing – Politics, Giant Robots, and all those things that make you jump up and down like a small child. This series has a special place in my heart. 

Ghost in the Shell – An anime exploring the nature of a post information society, in which a cybernetic society rules over land. A great exploration of humanity

Stargate (SG1 / Atlantis) – With 14 seasons, this series has hefty weight in the Science Fiction universe, and for good reason. With lovable characters and a rooted understanding of classic science fiction themes taken with a modern show. 

Battlestar Galactica – I didn’t used to like this show, but watching it without having a week’s gap has made it far easier to follow (this is a show I feel you needed to have on DVD in order to catch it all correctly). Defiantly worth watching for some darker tones on the human condition. 

Archer – A brilliant comedy following a Spy as he works for his Mother’s agency. Filled with endless humor this show always has a good adult laugh in there. 

The Daily Show – A comedy news show with well over 10 years of shows going for it under Comedian Jon Stewart and crew. Though it’s better to watch while it’s on topic, the humor is generally good year round. 

Whose Line is it Anyway – A improvisation comedy show, I personally suggest the American Version rather then the British version, but that is likely a matter of personal taste. 

Kitchen Nightmares – Formulaic but enjoyable show following a Scottish chef coming in and getting kitchens into order by any means necessary. I’m not generally a fan of reality TV, but I have to say I like this one. 

I’m sure there are of course more out there, but I thought I might share a sample of the media that I consume on a regular basis, in case you should ever get bored and want to watch something interesting. Of course this entire post is a matter of personal taste, but I thought someone out there might enjoy. Next week I’ll go down a list of video games I think everyone should at the very least try. 

I like Voyager’s Portrayal of the borg

The Best of Both Worlds

Oh god, now I feel dirty. I think I need to take a bath. That said, I was recently watching Collective, and while the episode may have it’s own issues, I couldn’t help but to be left to ponder something about the nature of the Borg. For those not sure, Collective isn’t actually that bad an episode. That is not to say it’s a great episode, but it certainly has some strong points. I have to admit that the poker game during the teaser was amusing and hearkened back to the TNG days of the crew sitting around enjoying a good game of cards. When the Borg cube snuck up on the Delta Flyer the script actually addressed how they managed to do so, with notions of technobabble obscuring their approach.

I have to admit I also liked the fact that there was a moral debate between using a weapon to commit a form of Borg Genocide (again hearkening back to TNG’s use of Hugh in order to destroy the collective). To me it was an overall acceptable episode without to many real plot holes that managed to introduce a bit of character into how the Borg deal with their young. Many; however, see the episode as yet another stab at the Borg, making them weaker and less powerful. Reading the debates online about how stupid it made the Borg to have them do X or Y it hit me like a Borg Cube so to speak.

When you talk among the fans, you’ll get various different opinions on exactly when it was that the Borg began to go downhill. For some, it was the moment that Jean Luc Picard was assimilated as a precursor to Wolf 359, making the Borg less a force of nature and more interested in biological aspects. Yet more still at the introduction of Hugh, with each progressive episode about the Borg tapering off until you have this culmination of hatred at Voyager’s last episode, in which the Borg are dealt a massive blow.

I thought about this for a very long time, as I’ve always been happy to defend the Borg in one way or another throughout the Star Trek franchise. I suppose being an apologist for Berman and Braga is just my own little way of getting by in the day. I’ve even gone so far as to say that the Exact moment Voyager became a disappointment to me was Scorpion’s introductory scene. The thing is that as I think about it more and more, the thing I was angry about with regards to the Borg was not making them a weaker enemy, but instead making them a more complete race with it’s own flaws and issues.

You see, in Q Who, the Borg had been presented not as a race, but as a force of nature. They were portrayed as this entity that wonders the universe and gobbles up technology. They were unstoppable and uncontrollable. What Star Trek did over the years was morph that unstoppable force into not a force of nature but a true hive-mind. They made the Borg into some incredibly advanced Wasp.

And when you re frame the Borg as a really big, advanced Wasp colony, their actions across the board becomes far more understandable. If you frame them as a force of nature, then yes almost every episode after Q Who is going to be an insult to their very existence. But when you start looking at their behavior as more like that of an insect, they become approachable in the sense of what happens to them.

Yes they still have that bit about assimilating and having incredibly powerful ships, but you start looking at the strange things. For instance, why did that Borg Cube sneak up on the Delta Flyer in Collective rather then just blow it up outright, or if the Borg have had that capability, why didn’t they use it all the time? The answer is of course simple, they’ve never needed to sneak up on their enemy before. In the past they could simply use sheer force of will to overwhelm the opponent, so there was no need to hide and play games with their prey. You don’t need to hide in the grass if you have more stamina and can easily outrun your opponent. But the cube in Collective was damaged and piloted by only a few drones. They couldn’t take their opponents on in a fair fight, so they needed to even the odds.

Or take for instance the commentary about the Borg only sending a single vessel to fight the Federation on it’s home soil. Again, if you frame this as a wasp colony that is simply scouting out prey it makes a great deal more sense. The first cube got a whiff of the Enterprise and was intrigued, so they followed her home only to discover a culture with a wealth of technology, but still with the capability to destroy their scout. So just to check things, you send another scout to find out exactly what their capabilities are, investigating and poking to determine the strengths and weaknesses.

This of course brings up the issue of why didn’t they just travel back in time and assimilate humanity, and I think the answer there is that unlike what seems be general consensus, going back in time was never a plan, it was a panicked response to being suddenly overwhelmed. I mean if you look at the fleet in comparison to the cube, it was still doing quite well on it’s own accord. Then all of the sudden, someone shows up and knows how to cut off your head with surgical precision and you have to think of something…

In the case of the Borg, the easiest place to hide would be in the past, where they could lick their wounds. Of course the Borg aren’t simply mindless beast, why not turn a crushing defeat into a victory. So they think about it, and they decide that if they’re going to be forced to go back in time, they might as well kill two birds with one stone. I mean realistically there were plenty of points in human history where they could have gone back and met minimal resistance. In fact the original script called for the Borg to head back to the feudal age to fight with Knights. The idea was thankfully scrapped in favor of the First Contact storyline.

I like to think that Voyager and the subsequent Borg episodes expanded the race, not diminished it. It was fascinating to get a peak into the monster. To take a fundamental human unknown, a force of nature, and to explore it to discover that perhaps the great beast isn’t so inhuman after all. It has it’s own flaws, it’s own enemies, and it’s own issues to deal with. It anthropomorphizes the borg into an actual culture.

It is certainly understandable why someone might find this change to the Borg to be disagreeable but I think it may actually speak more to Gene’s vision of the future. The notion that there is no true evil in the universe, there are simply things that Humanity doesn’t understand and the Borg are one of them. That is not to say what the Borg are doing isn’t fundamentally wrong, but much like Arturis in Hope and Fear noting that he did not blame the Borg, they were just doing what it is that Borg do, I think that it should be noted that they are at the very least not Choatic Evil.

They are an alien race with slightly different methods of procreation (assimilation in their case), making them not to unlike the often parasitic wasp. They have a queen, a hierarchical but hive oriented structure, and they suffer from a serious case of Galaxy wide OCD. I would like to think that the Borg would have eventually discovered a way to deal with Species 8472, but like a wasp colony facing a bit of bug spray, they were panicked and looking for answers. So when a Federation ship comes wondering into your field of view and tells you the thought of the answer you are bound to think about the consequences of trying to kill them.

I’ve heard criticism about how strange it was that the entire collective didn’t come up with the same idea as a Hologram who represented all of humanity’s medical knowledge, and I think there is a key point about innovation here. It’s not that the Borg aren’t innovative, we know from other scripts they like to run experiments of their own all the time. I think they may have genuinely just not thought of the the solution the Doctor proposed. It’s not about lacking imagination, it’s about not imaging the same thing. The Borg were approaching them like an invading empire, Voyager approached them like individuals. That is to say, in trying to cure Harry Kim (something the Borg weren’t really all about, looking after their fallen isn’t a priority). The Borg didn’t think of a medical approach to destroying species 8472 because it was never really an alleyway they decided to chase or dig at.

I’m sure there are still instances where the Borg do in fact get written in a poor manner, but I am hoping that my re-framing the Borg as a big Wasp Nest rather then techno zombies might better make their actions seem more in character in the later episodes then perhaps they were previously viewed.

As always leave your commentary, I love nerdy discussion.