Alternately, and with at least as much justice, one could say that it was typical of the condescending elite of conservativism.
It depends. If the Alliance was telling people that they had to abide by safety and labor regulations, or hire minorities and let them settle on your planet, then they were liberal according to the contemporary US political spectrum. If they were telling people who to fuck, and who could get married, and what kind of healthcare they could access, and spying on them, then they were conservatives. The idea that only one side meddles and wants a strong government that controls people is itself a political canard of one party. It isn’t true in the slightest. It also doesn’t have much to do with this thread.
I think they wanted the best profit margin, and that was folks living with 19th century technology, and dying in mines from lung disease.
Probably. Wasn’t Miranda an experiment in forced docility, that didn’t work?
I didn’t say it was liberal. I said it was progressivism, defined as the desire to make society or people ‘better’ through the imposition of force.
And I didn’t say anything about “liberal”, either. I said that it was conservativism, defined as the desire to make people or society ‘better’ through the imposition of force. And that definition fits at least as well as the one you gave.
Or it could just be normal trade sanctions. People smuggle all kinds of ordinary things when there are sanctions, or even tariffs. Maybe there was an outbreak of bovine spongiform disease on that planet that we didn’t hear about.
Now explain the matrushka dolls, which Inara said were quite profitable for them.
The lacquer paint contained cadmium, and the Alliance classifies the dolls as children’s toys, which have tightly restricted heavy metal content. Inara knows that they’re mostly purchased by collectors (hence the high price) and so they aren’t a real danger to children, but that’s bureaucracy for you.
Damn, that’s some good wank!
You guys paid attention to this like it was Trek.
Hell, I just like to see villains kicked into the engine and come out Bad Guy Pate’.
In my view it is liberal versus libertarian. Since it is based on 19th century America. The alliance are like the yankees, desiring more power for the state. The rebels are like the Appalachian countries, desiring individual freedom. Mal also follows an Appalachian-like honour culture, with his ridiculous dueling for instance.
I prefer “fanonanism”.
Yep, they put aerosolized G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate into the terraforming plants. Most people they calmed down too much, until they just lay down and starved to death. The rest snapped like twigs and became the Reavers.
There is reference to a Parliament, and there does not seem to be a dictator bossing everyone around. So the Alliance is at least putatively democratic. But it is an “officious and bureaucratic” state, as you say, with occasional corruption, and some unpleasantly lethal and amoral covert ops.
The dialogue, the cast, the characters - all good. For a 'Verse that was supposedly jointly settled by the U.S. and China, though, I found it quite odd that we never saw any prominent character of Chinese descent.
=Sigh= Would that it were so!
Never made sense to me that they’d test it on an entire planet’s population like that. Any error has huge consequences. Even if you have no ethical sense or policy of informed consent, controlled studies on smaller groups would be a lot smarter.
Which shows that they hadn’t done even preliminary tests. The drug didn’t have a 1% failure rate-- It had a 100% failure rate.
Don’t forget that there weren’t actually any “good guys” in that scene. Mal and Niska are just varying degrees of villain.
So was Robin Hood. 
Who himself probably wasn’t much better than The Hero of Canton, the Man they Call Jayne.
I bet you don’t like Admiral Janeway, either.