I would hope that Ea-Nasir’s grave would be where machine shops drop copper shavings, just to show that guy what high quality copper is supposed to be.

Does leaving the ship to it’s fate count as cowardice?

That decision technically saves the most lives.

Honestly, the scenario here is illuminating more for seeing how the cadet would respond. it’s also a great way to develop new tactics. In that sense, setting a "new high score"is a “Win”, even if you get blown up in the scenario. I still stand by saying that the excercise was a recruitment tool for selecting possible operatives for Section 31 (or whatever the agency was called then,)

I agree that it could be, but is there any canon evidence that they even assign scores? What would the score even be based on? If you take any action other than leaving the ship to its fate, you’re destined to die anyways. So is it based on how long you survive?

I’m sure starfleet officers go through hundreds or thousands of tactical sims to train tactics and encourage tactical creativity etc. From what I know, Kobayashi Maru is specifically not for that purpose. It’s useful in getting cadets to see what it feels like to be in a no-win situation, and to get them to think about it, but this purpose for it and the specific way its framed opens it up to Kirk criticism in this post.

Don’t cadets “fail” either way?

…is that James Carville?

A concept doesn’t become acceptable just because the French have a term for it. Usually that’s a red flag.

It’s an interesting discussion. Not really what I expect from a meme sub but something out of r/daystrominstitute .

I think Kirk’s argument (essentially that there’s no ethical or moral justification for not even attempting to save them) is predicated on the fact that no-win situations of that specific type don’t exist in reality.

That kind of situations happen, Jim”

Kirk takes a sip.

“Do they, Bones? We’ve been at this for three years. Tell me bones, how many times have we faced a real no-win situation? A certain death in face of helping people? I write the logs, Bones. The answer is never. Not once. Sure, we lost feathers, and couldn’t always save everybody. But each time we made it, Bones, and each time, we saved people. The only reason the Maru is a no-win situation is because someone decided it should be. To make a point.”

He is of course right in that if you attempt rescue, the Kobayashi Maru sim will literally keep spawning enemy ships until you’re dead. So it was designed to be unwinnable in logical sense that goes beyond the practicalities of tactics and crew competence.

Kirk’s argument is that making the pragmatic choice of just leaving the ship to it’s fate is not justifiable because such scenarios (infinitely spawning enemies) don’t exist, and even making cadets take this course and conditioning them to make the pragmatic choice is therefore immoral.

I think there’s more detail that can be added to this though - in the Kobayashi Maru sim every cadet knows what the sim is before they go in there. It’s not some secret - they all know it’s unwinnable. If you somehow knew that it was unwinnable then the ethics of leaving them are tenable depending on your beliefs. But in reality you can’t know. You shouldn’t pretend to know.

I think a key part of what Kirk is trying argue here is that in reality, you cannot ever truly know that the situation is truly hopeless, and your duty as a Starfleet officer should be to try. Try your hardest. Do what you can. Save who you can. Fight. Try.

The thing that offends Kirk so much about this scenario is that it gives officers a ethical license to not even try, something that is completely antithetical to his conception of being a Starfleet officer.

On that count, I think he’s right.

Is commander in chief an active military position?

I think it’s specifically not a military position. The president being a civilian is how in theory the military must operate under civilian control.

Here’s my plan to stop the war in Ukraine. Start up a massive industrial effort to mass produce printed copies of that photo. Absolutely absurd numbers of them. Cut down forests if necessary. Load them into B52s and drop them on the front lines from high altitude to get a good scatter. Keep doing this every day for 6 months. Like 50 tones of that photo dropped every day.

I will now take exactly zero questions.

I didn’t watch the whole thing but Paul’s shots didn’t even seem like they had any power behind them. He won on points obviously because Tyson was drained but it felt like even old man Tyson could have just stood there and tanked those weak-ass punches.

Disclaimer: all I know about boxing I learned from Rocky movies.

Know more.

That’s the only time I’ve ever seen Sean get utterly outplayed. An immortal moment for Jimmy.

“the greatest argument against democracy is a conversation with the average voter”

I think this is just a roundabout way of blaming the Jews.

You would be too after suffering the effects of the TaintBuster 5000.