By happy accident, I caught a re-run of an episode I'd missed: Then, I caught: Then I recognized the Borg are just one side of Central Planning vs Democracy Liberty: Borg - in their world, the "collective" works as one under a single/common command node. non-Borg - individuals free to seek optimum resistance to the Borg to prevent "assimilation." Putin's claims to Russify Ukraine is an analog to Borg nano-probes. In effect, Putin kills as many Ukrainians as needed to get the remainder to become "Russians." It seems to be a common theme of those who "love the uneducated." Donald Trump famously uttered the phrase "I love the poorly educated" during his Nevada caucus victory speech in February 2016. Celebrating a broad coalition of support, he stated, "We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. We're the smartest people, we're the most loyal people." These are real life examples of the conflict between those who follow dictators versus Democratic freedom lovers. It also explains how one side blames "fake media" while repeating the lies and disrespectful messages from their 'current' leader. They remain oblivious to looking in the mirror at their own slavish subservience. Ukraine has brought Democratic innovation to their military in defense of their very existence. They refuse to be Russian "assimilated" and use capitalistic tools to engage their native intelligence and energy to win. It doesn't mean Russians are incapable of innovation but Russians prefer to be "centrally approved." So our Borg-like, Trumpist have a weakness, their slavish subservience that "holding up the mirror" erodes. They make noise about Democratic freedom lovers following what they were seduced by. We only have to focus on today's reality, the one they can try to lie about but not ignore. Facts and data are our defense. Bob Wilson
I throw as many Star Trek analogies around as most PC-ers but I really tapped out after the Enterprise series (2001-2005.) Wars are really tough on secrets and power imbalances going all the way back to the Longbow - and....'long' before that. Think about it..... Something as simple as a hunk of wood and some flax linen enabled peasants to defeat wealthy, heavily armored knights - theretofore considered to be invincible on a battlefield. HOWEVER (comma!!) It only took about ten minutes for those knights to figure out what was going on and why it was happening back in the 11th century while serfdom hung on a little longer than that. Face it..... The Russians picked the wrong people to take land from. They picked......RUSSIANS - or at least the same "Russies" that the Germans broke their teeth on back during WW1, Part 2. Ukraine is a unitary semi-presidential constitutional republic - much closer to the US than their neighbors (brothers and sisters) to the east. Russia never really got a chance to get a constitutional republic off the ground after their departure from a Marxist-Leninism regime cosplaying as a federal socialist republic with an elected legislature.
