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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:star trek's greatest value as a setting was its attempt to depict individuals who came from a substantially more just society the people who decide what people who want to make tv shows and movies get to make think that brands are magic runes that people will respond to by giving them rents because they don't know how to do anything but receive the result of other people's work roddenberry at best half understood the ideas he was working with, but by dreaming of a better world he at least made a contribution to humanity Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 05:58
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section 31 is CIA propaganda; that it is not portrayed in a positive manner is irrelevant because the point is to depict the CIA as an inevitable and indispensable necessary evil, a sort of structural part of reality more fundamental than mere physics it is everyone involved in star trek cheerfully agreeing that there are five lights Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 13:59
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:Star Trek peaked around 1992, there I said it. Had a decent plateau until DS9 ended but it's been downhill ever since. voyager at least tried to be interesting, and sometimes succeeded. i've also ran into at least one fan opinion (janeway being a psychopath) which isn't entirely without truth but is mostly just misogyny after that there's nothing. there are no star treks after that.
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Feb 19, 2020 07:42
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Tulip posted: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). 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. Fegengi somehow accumulating vast capital but not understanding the value of land is mostly an example of writers not u understanding the concepts they were working with.
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Feb 19, 2020 16:36
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Squizzle posted:maybe nog was an idiot child at the time 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
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Feb 19, 2020 16:47
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CainFortea posted:I thought Janeway was one of the most interesting captains. Yea, there were problems with the writing of her because sometimes she'd go hard on some regulation, but often she very frequently compromised. Yeah. And the decision about how to interpret and apply the Prime Directive is always about either the effect on the Federation as a whole and/or the impact on the contacted society. There's never a matter of personal sacrifice for those principles in the other shows.
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Feb 19, 2020 23:58
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galagazombie posted:The problem with the Prime Directive is that no two writers have ever portrayed it the same so it never has a consistent meaning. Sometimes it's an extremely sensible policy to not give nuclear bombs to cavemen. Other times it's about already space traveling civilizations be genocided because "We can't play God". At the core it's amazing, because it seems to be fundamentally a total rejection of imperialism, and has been interpreted as a reaction to America's actions in Vietnam. Not every writer has been on board with the notion of not being an imperial power and by DS9 the entire premise had shifted to being about the Federation as an empire in conflict with competing imperial powers. History, of course, had recently ended, so there was no reason to imagine the future would be any different from the present. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 12:39 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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Feb 20, 2020 12:36
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:All emphasis is on the military because Star Trek depicts a Keynesian utopia, based directly on Keynes’ 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Nearly everything about Star Trek’s setting is in those few pages. in real life it turns out that the carefully measured tapering plan to be administered by qualified professionals party suffered repeated loses to the nah this poo poo is good for you here ill attach a hose directly to your brain party
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Feb 21, 2020 18:08
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Tulip posted:"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). I was feeling it until that took a sudden turn from satire (white person) to antisemitism and now I feel really uncomfortable about Star Trek.
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Feb 29, 2020 05:59
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there are two Rikers because he was accidentally cloned by the teleporter. every character in star trek is the ship of theseus
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Mar 1, 2020 00:46
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A Gnarlacious Bro posted:Magic door would be equally problematic Its just a wormwhole, though? Bending space is something that per our current understanding is the only thing keeping us attached to Earth, not a philosophically problematic impossibility.
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Mar 3, 2020 04:34
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Researching some scenes from the episode where Data's right to self-determination is put on trial, it's kind of funny how obvious it is that the admiral lady set the whole thing up so she could be the one who got to make the landmark ruling in favour of android rights.
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Mar 4, 2020 07:57
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Dismissing major aspects of the narrative to merely bad writing is no different from attributing them to magic. Well, by DS9 the fantasy was very firmly that nothing had actually changed after the End of History in the late 1980s. I'm not sure that deconstruction of yet another utopia is actually contrary to that agenda, though.
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Mar 5, 2020 00:40
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hakimashou posted:Ds9 is about the federation being the bad guys. They side with the bajorans against the cardassians because bajorans look more like humans. please ds9 is how americans are the good guys and nothing can be better... forever the cardassians and ferengi are just liberal bureaucrats and libertarians who haven't jumped on board with the newly reimagined "federation as good fascists" of course, the fascism is only good because of heroic, principled folk joining the military and knowing where to draw the line.... folk like you, perhaps?
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Mar 5, 2020 05:37
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This is a little like attributing the ST to George Lucas. Roddenberry had an idiosyncratic ideology and would have characters regularly argue that capitalism is bad. This became just capitalism in space (but not bad Ferengi capitalism (which is a now just in need of reform) after his death.
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Mar 6, 2020 09:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Characters in Star Trek never argue that capitalism is bad, only that materialism and greed are bad: They don't use the term capitalism, but they outright say things like "we've eliminated poverty" to Mark Twain as he characterizes 19th Century America as a hellhole where power and wealth are acquired "on the backs of the poor" and grills them on whether they're actually imperialists. Or explain to an investment banker that his job is obsolete because its entire purpose was found to be a burden on humanity. By DS9 the vestiges of the idea of some sort of better world that was fundamentally different from America are reduced to segments where Nog makes Jake question whether money is really that bad. Go ahead and critique them. Like, Roddenberry leans heavily on a grand narrative of progress and liberal values, etc, in a mystical new age sense. And yeah, TNG's take on the "prime directive" is basically an insane reading of Franz Boaz' cultural relativism as a perverted defense of indigenous cultures being destroyed by imperialism. But if you can't tell the difference between someone who didn't want the Federation to use any sort of money (though "credits" ended up in the show) and writers quoting straight from Von Mises' principle of human action to contrast our "nature" with that of aliens, what the gently caress are you even doing? Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Mar 7, 2020 |
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Mar 7, 2020 09:28
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2house2fly posted:Surely the computer could create a holographic horse that doesn't have a mind of it's own, and thoughts and passions? Are we making the leap from "the holodeck can create thinking creatures" to "the holodeck can't not make thinking creatures"? We know from the Moriarty episodes that the Holodeck does just what you tell it to, and accurately simulates even superhuman intelligence. I've always found it weird that the Federation views Androids like Data as a rare achievement that cannot yet be replicated, but its starship computers are casually capable of creating a similar but more capable AI replicant out of solid light. So making what is essentially a real horse is trivial in comparison.
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Mar 8, 2020 07:54
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Zane posted:there is no effective historical analogy to prime directive. pre-warp non-federation peoples are not analogous--as suggested by these examples--to low-status and/or working-class minorities within an integral (hierarchical) social order. these peoples instead constitute entirely discrete social orders. all historical analogies break down because knowledge of other societies has always historically been accompanied by some kind of regularized social interaction. but there is not even the most primitive of exchange. and without regularized social interaction there is nothing that could be called a social power relationship. the purpose of the prime directive is to regularize social interaction and the social power relationship is that one side has a starship and can ignore the non-starship having people unless they accidently hear their cries for help, then they have to act. but they have no obligation to listen for cries for help in any fashion and doing so is discouraged
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Mar 10, 2020 09:35
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Zane posted:the classical marxist tradition does not have any rights language. i am doing my best to work within the terms you've proposed. and i will no longer indulge any more babbling about the penchant of liberal capitalism towards total isolationism -- a position you've already half abandoned. how do you explain the us intervention in bosnia? or the us wars in vietnam and korea? or the us intervention in ww2? or the us civil war? or the british opium wars? or really any major war over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? come back when you've learned the most basic rudiments of political economy. rights as such don't really fall into the realm of marxist analysis directly because they're inherently metaphysical but like, dude, no marxist has ever discussed the idea of rights ever never happened
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Mar 13, 2020 18:41
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Leaving aside that this is obviously not the least-worst option, you are asserting that the Mintakans are still suffering negative 'impact'* at the end of the episode, after Picard leaves. If so: The crux of the matter is that the Federation already is composed of gods- beings which possess the potential for agency. So we're really discussing how they should act, and the show presents the ideology which guides their actions and non-actions as good and the result of wisdom gained through experience. But it is not really either of those things. Picard is confronted with the contradictions of Federation ideology, but as cool as Jean-Luc Picard is, he's not Christ or Buddha, he's a military leader acting as a representative the local hegemonic state. So he, with complete sincerity, reproduces the very conditions which produced the contradictions he encounters. e: it should be noted that God (beings which could destroy the ship and crew on a whim) appearing to test the Enterprise crew is a surprisingly regular occurrence in TNG. This most explicitly takes the form of Q, who mainly trolls the crew and sends the Borg against the Federation as a test of worth. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Mar 16, 2020 |
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Mar 16, 2020 22:11
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The Mintakans are going to end up with some really Social Darwinistic ideas about free will from all this. Like they know that the skies are full of nearly omnipotent beings who don't help them because interfering in the development of lesser beings is wrong, and could decide to just kill all of them at any time if they feel like it (imagine, for example, their planet being ceded to the Klingons). And Picard, their leader, wants them to seize this power for themselves. What goals would you organize society around if you knew that? Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Mar 18, 2020 |
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Mar 18, 2020 23:09
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Of course, this entire species is seemingly identical in culture across their entire planet despite being organized in small autonomous villages with no evidence of even like iron age transportation and communication technologies. A common problem in sci-fi, but the assumptions are pretty ugly when the context is "hegemonic powers interacting with indigenous societies."
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Mar 18, 2020 23:21
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reignofevil posted:One last thing. Disregarding the feelings of the individual Mintakans who met with picard and were very visibly thrilled to meet him and offering gifts because you think you know better about how that entire population thinks and behaves is prejudiced as all hell. quote:Now, within this exchange formula there is one notable quirk: it is up to the god if they accept or reject the offer. We’ll get to all of the ritual aspects in a moment, but they mostly hover around this principle: you do the ritual very carefully because you want to exactly replicate the formulas which had led to the god accepting the bargain in the past. We’ll get to taking omens in a later post, but often the sacrifice itself has a mechanism (like examining the organs of the slain animal in animal sacrifice) to determine if the sacrifice was accepted or not. https://acoup.blog/2019/11/01/collections-practical-polytheism-part-ii-practice/
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Mar 19, 2020 00:10
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reignofevil posted:They genuinely don't seem to think he is a god at that point quote:The fundamental ingredient in the relationship between humans and gods in these religions is one of an imbalance in power: the gods have it and we don’t. That power is expressed in the numen, the sort of influence to change the world – in large ways or in small ones – through merely a will, or a whim, or (literally) a nod. Ritual – through do ut des exchange – provides the means by which humans might manage that power imbalance and even persuade the gods to use some of their power for our benefit. https://acoup.blog/2019/11/15/collections-practical-polytheism-part-iv-little-gods-and-big-people/ Ultimately the psychology of giving gifts to a god isn't any different from that of giving to a human being.
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Mar 19, 2020 00:26
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CainFortea posted:Do you only give gifts to gods and emperors? I hope not. Or subjects are gods, emperors, and Picard. They all share a common element in their relationship with the people giving gifts. I don't think you're stupid so you can probably find it in the quotations.
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Mar 19, 2020 01:00
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Ferrinus posted:No, no. Spying is bad to reignofevil, so it's really weird that he's willing to turn around and excuse someone's spying in basically the same breath so long as it's done to helpless indigenes for supposedly scientific purposes. It would be rational for their society to henceforth discard the notion of privacy altogether. After all, why shouldn't the church, the state, or your neighbors refrain from watching you when you know that you're subject to constant surveillance anyhow? It would make no sense to even develop a notion of privacy in a world in which you know you're being watched by people you cannot see. What this reveals is that, contrary to Picard's perspective, the discovery of this fact by the Mintakans is a good thing. And indeed, this is why they're so grateful to Picard- they now know the truth about their situation and have been given considerable (if deeply flawed) assistance in forming a useful and accurate interpretation of that information. What's wrong is that he gives them an excuse for just leaving them with that and nothing more- he only does the bare minimum to help them, and what he does is compromised by his actual priority, which is maintaining the power imbalance between their people and the Federation. The problem is the Prime Directive.
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Mar 20, 2020 00:36
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reignofevil posted:This was the 'star trek is all hosed up' thread and the answer is we filled it with this
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Mar 25, 2020 04:47
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