Obviously Garak is opposite of Space Karen. Dude's just a simple tailor!
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
346 points (98.3% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
7107 readers
832 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags.
Use spoiler tags in comments, and NSFW checkbox for posts.
This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Poisoning whole planets for personal vendetta is the "balance of good and evil"?
They were asking for it.
I found the Section 31 operative!
Good in Dukat? The sect leader nazi rapist? Ok, sure.
There was a little nugget of good in him before Ziyal died. He actually loved her and it truly broke him when she was killed.
Yeah, but it's like trying to find a nugget of good within Hitler, you can probably succeed but why would you? At some point, nugget or not, it doesn't make a difference.
The meme is about evil and good having the capacity for the other. Which Dukat had.
Hitler had some good in him too. (Can’t believe i just typed that but it is what it is). He loved animals especially his dogs.
He was a horrible genocidal dickbag but still had a tiny bit of good in him. Remember, people aren’t born evil, they learn it.
I still feel like a Garak or even Quark would have fit better. Because overall there was very, very little good in Dukat.
Because if the point is to say that "evil having the capacity for good" means 99.9% evil and 0.1% good, well to be honest it doesn't really change much.
I mean, I know that this isn't really a post made to be highly philosophical but still.
Garak and Quark aren’t really evil imho. Opportunists, sure. But truly evil? Nah.
Garak was in all likelihood a spy and assassin working for the cardassians, that has absolutely no problem murdering someone if that's the easiest solution.
Quark is a ultracapitalist that would betray any value for money, is extremely misogynistic, does things like dealing weapons if I remember properly, and is fine with doing illegal porn holodeck programs of people without their consent. He is maybe less evil than he could have been, but on the scale he's definitely more on the evil side.
Obviously it all comes down to the definition of good or evil, which being undefined here makes things more blurry and up to interpretation.
I think you need to go watch DS9 again if that’s all you got from their characters.
Neither of them are evil. Garak is a spy but spies aren’t evil. He killed people but so do soldiers.
Quark isn’t evil at all. He has multiple episodes where he realizes his wrong thinking and changes his ways. Ultracapitalism isn’t great but it isn’t evil per se.
Yeah so I think we have a definition of what good and evil is that differs.
Killing is immoral, and if you don't feel any problem being ordered to kill, I see that as evil. Yes, it includes soldiers.
Quark has multiple episodes where he changes slightly, and multiple episodes where he absolutely doesn't. He is less obviously evil but still is. And ultracapitalism definitely is evil, I don't see how it could not; capitalism on its own falls towards the evil side, ultracapitalism is quite obviously evil for me. And I don't see how a system made to take advantage of others at any opportunity you get, with nothing else mattering more than materialism and money, wouldn't be evil.
After all, treason, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Well, he did ...
spoiler
kill Kai Winn in the end.
that's like crediting hitler for stopping hitler.
technically correct but inherently wrong
I was actively avoiding Godwin's law here, but you fasttracked us right to it. 😀
why avoid the obvious, the cardassians are space nazis.
Because it lets people simply horrendous actions as "Nazi" and ignore it. People say "Nazis are bad" (true BTW!), but then think no further. Many of the Cardassians actions against Bajor mirror closer to European colonization during the 15th and 16th centuries.
Many of the Cardassians actions against Bajor mirror closer to European colonization
ok, also terrible horrible people, so still fitting the theme
Not really out of moral reasons though
Not really out of moral reasons though
Now we're going down a rabbit hole.
What is the true definition of "good" or "bad"? Further, is either best measured by word or by deed? If person A simply says "we should stand up and prevent rape", and person B intentionally kills 100 serial rapists, who did the most good?
It is for sure a philosophical debate.
But there is a difference between saying that someone did good, and that they are good. When you say that they are good, it implies that their moral stance is good.
In your example, if the person B did it out of loving to kill people for fun, and picked those victims randomly or to be able to use it as an excuse, is there any way to say that B is good? I don't think so. You can say or not that they did good, but not really that they are.
Followup on the spoiler
In the case of Dukat, he killed Winn out of purely selfish reasons, and couldn't care less about her being evil. If anything, he probably would have otherwise liked her. It's hard to count something as good, when Dukat had not even a gram of a sense of good when he killed her, and only did it for his personal benefit. He would have absolutely not have done differently (or on the contrary, would have enjoyed it more) if Winn was the most good and benevolent person in the universe.
If your definition of good and bad is purely based on results and not on intentions and morals, then maybe someone like Trump would retrospectively be considered a good person, because he would lead to insurrection and revolutions that would end up making the world better. With this logic, Hitler did a lot of good because now a lot of people hate fascism and nazis. For me, this cannot work, the results can only be considered good if the intentions were good. If you do something good out of bad intentions, then the result might be objectively good, but I won't count it as something good from you. That's where my definition of good and evil stands in this case.
Tl;dr: I don't count as good, something that is basically a side effect of bad intentions.
For me, this cannot work, the results can only be considered good if the intentions were good. If you do something good out of bad intentions, then the result might be objectively good, but I won’t count it as something good from you.
We're bordering on reinventing Kantianism vs Utilitarianism arguments here because there is no objective definition of "good". Each of us subjectively decides what is "good". To illustrate with your position that the intent to do good is the deciding factor, then that would follow that Hitler would be good because his intent was to do "good" as he saw it. Obviously neither one of use would consider Hitler or his actions good.
Here's your statement with the extra dimension of intent we're discussing added:
If you do something good (and good by my standard) out of bad intentions (good by your own standards), then the result might be objectively bad, but I won’t count it as something good from you (because even though your intent was good by your standards your result was bad from my standards).
Doesn't this seems to negate the "intent" element argument returning judgment purely base end result judgment?
Well, you are right.
The thing is, the definition of "good by my standard" that I'm applying here is quite a basic one: what impacts people positively, without impacting other people negatively. It doesn't work for the most grey or ambiguous areas, but as a default baseline it works fine I would say.
So Hitler wasn't having "good" intentions because his intentions were to impact people negatively.
Obviously, if you start digging deeper, this core standard requires additional rules and such. Fighting against rich people would be bad according to this core, but I don't believe that it is bad; the reason for that is that rich people decide to be rich, and have a negative impact that is too important to neglect. Taxing them would then be good, because it helps people who are living poorer than they should be, by taking from people who are richer than they should be -> this adds a rule/exception of equity and of treating "bad" people under different rules (if you initiate something bad, then you stop counting as much in the balance of things, which varies depending on what you did).
And yeah, this all ends up pretty subjectively, but I don't think that there is such a thing as an objective definition of good and evil, it depends on the scope. The scope that I'm trying to have is one that leads (or so I believe) to a fair and harmonious society, where people don't suffer (or as little as possible). Then you can even nitpick that wanting a fair society is also a subjective opinion (typically, capitalism wants the opposite, since the concept is to advantage some people by disadvantaging others), but there will never be a 100% consensus. Sometimes subjectivity is unavoidable, but I think that generally, decent people will at least have the idea of "feeling happy is good, suffering is bad" and the rest can be built on top of that.
So with this whole thing, in the case of Dukat:
he was a gigantic nazi rapist (which is bad according to my definition, and for anyone that I deem worthy of respect), that ended up killing someone that he didn't really see as evil (or didn't care) purely for personal gain. None of those fall in the scope of having intentions of "good" (trying to impact others positively), so the action itself isn't good from Dukat's scope, even if it has a good result.
If you analyse, let's say, Sisko committing crimes of war, he also falls a bit in the evil side for example: he decides to basically destroy a whole planet's worth of people, just to satisfy a personal vendetta. You could try to argue that the population can be moved, and that the guy would have caused issues down the road if he didn't get arrested, etc, but when it comes down to it, Sisko didn't care about that, he was just ready to sacrifice anything and anyone for his personal satisfaction. Therefore his intentions were bad, and the action is bad.
They couldn’t find a picture of a nice innocent tailor, before his, hem, "redemption"
My child, that's not really fair. Winn was ambitious and power-hungry, yes, and that made her corruptible, true, but that's not the same as being evil. I also think she redeemed herself at the end, using her last breath to tell the Emissary how to defeat the Pah Wraiths.
Winn was ambitious and power-hungry, yes, and that made her corruptible, true, but that’s not the same as being evil.
Bruh, that's what evil is.
Bro, I'd drop kick her into a volcano for less than it would take me to admit that I am a very robust admirer of feet.
She is very hatable. Not wanting to kick her into a vulcano means you should get checked into a psych ward.
But.
She is not evil. Power hungry, corruptable, arrogant, and generally a massive cunt: yes. But not inherently evil.
Just be happy we never get to see her feet.
I'd cut her dog ears off and eat them for breakfast like dan Langley didn't even fuck me in the jabooter
And then there's this bitch
The balance between good and evil
I can't help but feel that they did the Sisko wrong here.
theological question how much hell do you think i'd earn for punching god in the face?
I don't think Senator Vreenak would agree with you.
It's a faaaaaake!
Good in Ducat? A rapist who doesn’t conceive of himself as such? Ducat and Kilgrave should get together and have coffee.
honestly? dukat seems capable of pretending he can get along if conditions permit it.
i have not finished all of ds9 yet (I'm on season 6 at the moment)
winn has never done a single thing that was selfless. ever. she only has served her own purpose in the show. there's never negotiating with her. she just does evil shit constantly. so badly she got railed into by Kira for being a coward and weak in her faith.
dukat at least has moments of clarity and is a great villain. winn is honestly just...concentrated raw evil. (at least imho)
There is an episode in season 6 where Dukat’s true feelings are laid bare. My opinion of him was never good, but that episode locked it in. He ain’t good, at all.
from a villain perspective, he is amazing. and yeah I know what episode you mean =( it was the scariest he has ever been in an episode.
fantastic and terrible at the same time. the writing in ds9 is great!
I feel, as villains go, Dukat and Kilgrave are similar. What you’re talking about is his depth as a character. The best villains have depth, spiraling down and understanding just how bad they are is great.
And then there’s Winn. Historically, religion has been a difficult play in fiction, getting a little too black and white in many cases, such that the depth is not there. Many works lack depth. DS9 manages to pull it off. It’s part of why it’s the best of the series(es?) out there.
Winn feels like “there was an attempt”. The religion worked, but she wasn’t fleshed out enough. Her deal is I’m trying to have faith, but I’m not sure I do because the prophets don’t believe in me, so I’ll go for the power instead. There’s spite there, which is ordinary and boring. Gets better final season, but it wasn’t quite there for making a great character. She serves the plot and that is all.
Ignoring this, a daoist reading of ds9 and sisko eventually following wu wei while dukat fails in forcing control would be interesting. Inherently absurd, but interesting.