Trope-a-Day: Animal Wrongs Group

Animal Wrongs Group: More than a few of the baseline-supremacist, deep green, or luddite ones, who support policies including exterminating all neogens, uplifts, and genemod animals as an affront to precious Nature.  For starters.

(There are perfectly respectable animal rights groups – say, the Galactic Friends of Life, who are willing to go to bat for habitat preservation, the avoidance of suffering, and the subsetted natural rights accorded to prosophont and merely sentient animal life according to its nature – and who have even dabbled with applying the same principles to wild a-life – but there’s also a lot of idiots out there who value the naturalistic fallacy a lot more than they do any actual animals.)

Trope-a-Day: The Federation

The Federation: Well, that would be the Voniensa Republic, an essentially conscious Expy of Star Trek‘s Federation.  Unfortunately, the Voniensans have to contend with the lack of the scriptwriters on their side; thus, their baseline-fetishism and naturalistic-fallacy-ridden philosophy (“our insert-species-here-anity”), heavy restrictions on personal augmentation (including ephemeralism, because, y’know, people were meant to die), and information control of dangerous ideas filtering in from the extranet make them relatively technologically backward; their biochauvinism (and even carbon chauvinism) and stance against AI personhood (guess where quite a few of the Silicate Tree’s renegades come from) also doesn’t help in that regard; their strong-central-government system makes them a tottering giant, steering a thin line between collapse and the Regional Governors Being Given Direct Control Of Their Territories; and their dodgy non-agorist economics make them actually one of the poorest – they have rationing, even – purportedly near-post-scarcity civilizations in the Galaxy.  Which takes real talent, let me tell you, when you have even restricted cornucopia machines.

While their volume is enough to keep them at least notionally within the Great Powers club by dint of mass of metal and economic leverage, in practice they’re the Sick Man of the Galaxy in exactly the same way as the Ottoman Empire was the Sick Man of Europe.  And the clock is ticking…

In short, a classic example of how to purportedly-benevolent yourself to death, statist-style.  The Imperials call them “the Land of Murdered Dreams”.