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Land is historically far more valuable when peasants run out of options for defection. If abusing your farmers means that they gently caress off and join the local hill tribes, it's not enough to just own the land and tell the peasants they pay you or die. You have to manage the labor more explicitly, which frequently means slavery (e.g. iron age Myanmar), but just as often means complex rights/obligations setups (e.g. Sumeria).
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Feb 19, 2020 16:04
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| # ¿ Sep 17, 2024 12:48 |
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Hodgepodge posted:Even with slavery, the broke relatives you forced into debt and took the families of have often tended to gather into communities, make alliances with locals, and come back for them. I mean, those iron age Myanmar kingdoms had a life expectancy of like a century on average before the mix of bailing peasants, inefficiency of slavery, and angry hill tribes became completely apocalyptic. It was a bad solution. Nog thinking little of land is a marked inconsistency given that Ferengi economic thought is usually like 100% exchange theory of value, so anything that is valuable to someone is self-evidently valuable, regardless of its utility. Hodgepodge posted:at one point a cardassian characterizes humanity with a paraphrase of von mises' principle of action and it's unchallenged, so i wouldn't be too generous with my assumptions about the writer's grasp of economics lol yeah It's pretty messed up that we basically only see the Federation through the military lens.
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Feb 19, 2020 17:10
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The only good part of Graeber's utopia of rules is where it goes deep on political dissent in Star Trek - dissent happens largely along ethnic lines, which is a fairly heavy handed mirror for the USSR's weird thing where "this is a bad policy because Marxist reason" was a dangerous game of potential party splitting but "this is a bad policy because of my ethnic groups' particular interest" was relatively safe, even if it was the same policy and largely the same objection.
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Feb 28, 2020 14:38
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"Ferengi" is pretty obviously derived "Ferengi," a Turkish term for "white person" that has variations as far away as Malaysia. It's derived from "Frank," referring to the French crusaders, but definitely gets used to refer to Jews (oddly, a derivative is used as a pejorative for Mizrahi Jews in Israel).
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Feb 28, 2020 14:49
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Are the holodeck creations independently sapient or are they characters being played by the holodeck?
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Mar 1, 2020 19:57
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The ‘transporter’ turns all your atoms into energy, which is what you might call a controlled detonation. This read requires deliberately discarding the text.
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Mar 1, 2020 20:17
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The reason the transporter problem is good is because the real life version of it - is the person who wakes up in the morning at all the same as the person who fell asleep in that body the night before aka do you just 100% die when you fall asleep - is pretty rad as philosophy questions go.
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Mar 2, 2020 05:17
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Ok. You also get turned into a moving body when you're in a car. The transporter problem is an interesting problem arising from Star Trek fan fiction that's perfectly reasonable for a philosophy class but wholly irrelevant to analyzing Star Trek as a piece of text. If you're caught up on the literal atoms being the same, then cellular regeneration, or drinking water and then pissing it out, raise the same issue.
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Mar 2, 2020 19:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:If the argument is that it’s a just a fantasy series, that’s avoiding the issue: why this specific fantasy? Whose fantasy is it? Except that the federation was born in the ashes of devastating wars (Earth-Romulan) and the political organizations are more Soviet than Keynesian. It is above all the fantasy of 60s counter culture, not the fantasy of 60s hegemonic culture.
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Mar 2, 2020 20:05
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| # ¿ Sep 17, 2024 12:48 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You’re the first person I’ve ever encountered to characterize the Federation as Soviet. That demands some explanation. David Graeber goes into fairly great lengths in Utopia of Rules, mostly in the (much better) latter parts. Also the reason why "60's counterculture" is valuable here and why I invoked it: 60s mainstream was Keynes. Star Trek is part of a (quite mild) attack on Keynes from the left. It's easy to forget that such a thing existed, given that the Keynesian consensus collapsed to the right, but the most obvious issue with treating Star Trek as Keynesian is the lack of mixed economy. The Keynesian practice of running an economy means admitting that large corporate interests are a part of the deal, and you just gotta live with them, at best you can make some industrial policy that pushes them in socially useful directions. Star Trek does not propose a balance of forces between large dictatorial private corporations and a notionally democratic public sphere, it proposes a total domination by a semi-scientific military bureaucracy. DS9 has Quark's bar, which is tolerated as a quaint embassy from a foreign power, useful for its secondary diplomatic and security applications rather than being necessary to the basic function of the station. Ultimately treating Star Trek as a Keynesian fantasy means either substantially misunderstanding Keynesian political economy, substituting fanfiction for text in Star Trek, or both.
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Mar 3, 2020 06:33
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