Recently had an argument with my conservative father, he's always been big into Trek and Wars, and I had just started really watching Trek again, never watched a lot of the shows all the way through. So this father of mine started going on about how woke Trek was now, and I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the "anti-woke" nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation. So I was like "oh no, not woke Star Trek, the series about a socialist utopia, the series that holds the title of "the American show with the first interracial kiss", the show where Kirk throws his dick at every species with a quim, the show that had a Ruskie character in the middle of the f'n Red Scare." Star Trek was always woke, and my father was always too dumb, racially biased, and narcissistic to pick up on the lessons that they were trying to teach us when he watched it as a child in the 60's.
I have not even tried to bring up Star Wars since the Disney acquisition, I'm sure my father has an insufferable take on that series now as well.
It is worth noting that the rapist Bill O'Reilly knew, because it was so blindly obviously a parody of him, and whatever else you might say of him he isn't outright stupid.
The interesting bit is Ol Rapey Bill has quotes about Jan 6th saying his Fox would never have downplayed or enabled it, and yet, he's now supporting Trump in 2024.
It's almost like the actual truth doesn't matter to them. Like they just want a comfortable lie that benefits them personally, some kind of "Truthiness" perhaps.
Any echo chamber can produce illusory truth effect. Repeated exposure to misinformation can result in a person failing to identify it as a lie, and begin to register it as fact and the lie gets amplified.
One of the smartest people i knew was a former systems designer for NASA, I live close enough to the Cape to watch every launch from my backyard, anyway, this guy definitely worked for NASA, had his office decorated with the Patents that he held, really smart guy, complete conspiracy nut who was immediately on the Trump train.
I've always loved conspiracies too and we got along through that stuff, but then he went down the rabbit hole of Right wing and Russian propaganda/disinformation and no matter how much i tried to prove everything wrong, with good evidence, he went deeper down that hole, he died during COVID and one of the last things he sent me was about the "stolen election", it was after January 6, to which my reply was "do you mean the 2016 election or the 2000 election?" and never got a response back and I'd heard he passed away a few months later from a mutual friend.
My dad navigated satellites and exploration probes for NASA his entire career, even doing work in getting better climate data. He's a total MAGA and FOX loyalist now. Misses Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson.
The educated laborers that perform highly skilled labor convince themselves that they have it better than everyone else because Capitalism worked and selected for them, it's a comfy and delusional position to hold that requires having absolutely zero self-awareness. Unfortunately common.
Same with conservative Fallout fans that somehow unironically think it's pro-Capitalism, despite nearly every instance of actual Capitalism and not just bartering being absurdly evil.
The base satire that none of this would have happened under socialized medicine. Enjoyed the show despite hating all of the characters in it. It's hard for me to watch but I know quality when I see it, the personalities portrayed are just so fucking aggravating. Some episodes of Star Trek i don't mind, I find the socialist utopia underpinnings childish and vapid, hand wavery, but that's just the backdrop, theyve some good actors depending on series, occasionally good scripts. Discovery can suck my ass though.
There is no “base satire” in Breaking Bad about socialised healthcare. You didn’t understand the show at all - he was given an opportunity to work his way out but chose to be a meth dealer because Walt couldn’t stomach further hits to his ego. Sure, there are valid comments it makes about the nature of being up against a heartless system but it doesn’t blame Walt’s decision on that system.
The non-woke Trekkies (or do they call themselves Trekkers? ) didn't think about interracial kisses or the post-scarcity society in which capitalists were small-time traders. They see Captain Kirk running roughshod over other societies and turning them into America (see The Apple and A Taste of Armageddon ) which was more about 60s Hollywood imagining cold war United States as the height of civilization.
The Next Generation dared to imagine a more internationalist sense of culture and got into the notion that even extremely weird aliens might be deserving of civil rights. But by DS9 the Federation was reimagined as a failing coalition with multiple rising renegade factions and worlds teeming with disregarded peoples. The story became less about rising to ideals and more about dealing with grimdark realities and compromising principles to preserve status quo.
Then the Kelvin Timeline Reboot got J. J. Abrams'd and Paramount got litigeous about fan films it previously endorsed and I became so disgusted with the state of Trek, I divested myself from it. Star Wars would suffer a similar fate, and I don't watch many movies these days.
It was mostly indignation over me not kissing his ass and telling him he's right, I'm generally one of the few in my family that will stand up to him at all never the less consistently, he's pretty charming and the family that have never lived with him all think he's just great usually, but he always has this condescending way of telling me "you weren't alive then so you don't know" as if there aren't interviews with Roddenberry that confirms these things, or if it's broader politics, as if encyclopedias and news article didn't exist back then. Then when I knocked down that argument he just defaulted back to "well it's too woke and preachy now" while citing examples of preachyness that are just examples of inclusivity in the show.
I'll say this, my pop apparently helped do clean up at ground zero after 9/11, he was a guard at Rikers at the time and I could see him volunteering for it, but he's also kind of a bullshit artists so we're never sure what's fully the truth. However fact or fiction he's never been the same since that day, we all lost a bunch of people we knew, and we all have a lot of friends who lost close relatives and it impacted not only us but our community, because it's a fire firefighter town we live in, we live next to the former chief and down the block from the station house and my pop hangs out at the bar near the station house. After 9/11 he fell down the Fox News hole and never was the same again, and now i gotta hear some "woke" bullshit every time he talks about something he seems to not understand.
So overall the reaction was a lot of indignation, a little bit of arguing followed by a hasty hang up.
I'd say the latest trilogy was complete garbage, and I would put that just as much on JJ Abrams, who produced it while also completely f'ing up the Star Trek movies he did, so honestly the problem was probably him he has a reputation for this things.
Rian Johnson was the director, but he also directed what's considered the best star wars movie to come out, Rogue One, which also spawned one of the best Star Wars series, Andor, so it probably wasn't his fault, plus he's the Guy that created the Knives Out series which was also fantastic.
First of all you obviously don't know my father, and you sound like a dipshit trying to misuse "ablist", mental illnesses like narcissism aren't handicaps and thus can't be ablist.
Second of all people who try to dictate who can watch what are gatekeeping morons.
You're no psychologist or therapist. Nor do you know OP or their father. Which is how we know you're no psychologist. You're not qualified to speak at all. But you find yourself compelled to. Because you identify with the father. And defending him is defending yourself. Which uuuuh says volumes about you, but no one else.
There is a weird right-wing contingent of Trekkies who think it's all about pew pew fights with the Borg and they confuse the rest of us who love the idea of a socialist utopia where indigenous cultures are respected and people try to talk things out before shooting in hostile situations.
Trek has no money in the Federation; no barter. Nobody who's watched a season of any Trek show can avoid noticing that. It might be a bit murky with characters like Harry Mudd, or the Ferengi, but those operate outside the Federation; you'd have to be daft to miss that. TNG was more careful with their "capitalist" characters like Kivas Fajo, who was clearly a collector and trader rather than a travelling salesman.
Right-wing free-market Trekkies are self-deluding.
That's why I prefer Picard over the others. He represented the best of those ideals while respecting the history that led humanity to the Federation. They even took the time to reveal his humility when he went too far, by his choice or no.
I mean yah, the vertical integration, means tested everything, nostalgia bating and assembly line techniques that Disney does sure do ruin otherwise fine properties.
“No, I don’t mind that, that’s just good business. I just hate the gay people who kissed in the background”
I was gonna say, "what kind of fucked up Shekhinah is that???" That hands gesture symbolizes the Hebrew letter "shin," which is the first letter of the feminine name of God in Judaism. The female form of God is believed by Orthodox Jews to be so powerful that seeing her can blind a human, therefore they cover their eyes when the rabbi does this symbol while they invoke the dwelling of God, or something like that. I'm quite fuzzy on this part.
So, this moron is calling Star Wars, the bra strangulation movie, too woke and is trying to troll Star Wars fans with a Star Trek symbol that she got wrong? The incredible irony of her being a bigot unfit for Leonard Nimoy's Shekhina project while she's blasting her own face with some Jewish mysticism girl power is beyond hilarious.
I’m not trying to undermine the idea that Star Trek was progressive for its time, far from it, but since no one else has pointed this out, I thought I’d say it. Star Trek was NOT the first interracial kiss on television. In fact, the actors’ lips never touched in the shot.
Well, sort of. I’ve been reading William Shatner’s autobiography, and they had to fight really hard to include an interracial kiss. The network was going to forbid it, telling Rodenberry that televisions across the South would rather black out their televisions for an hour than allow something so highly offensive. When he insisted upon it, they kept making concessions Rodenberry wouldn’t agree to, like instead having Uhura kiss Spock, since it there would be a little more disconnect between reality. Eventually, Rodenberry offered to film the kiss both ways—one way with their lips actually touching, the other with Uhura’s back to the camera as they embraced, giving the illusion that they kissed without their lips ever touching.
The actors were really upset about it, because It was originally going to be a passionate kiss, but the only way they allowed it to be filmed on television was if the actors displayed clear discomfort—which could be used to reinforce the idea that interracial relationships were bad.
Soo…yeah! That’s your Star Trek history lesson for the day! (I’ve never watched the original episode, I’ve only watched TNG and Discovery for myself, so this is all secondary info, but if you watch the episode, you can see for yourself.)
I think with Disney and a lot of companies now it's more obvious that they are consciously trying to "look good" vs Star Trek was a lot more genuine and authentic with it's intention to include these things, and it was challenging status quo back then whereas today it's very mainstream (which is a good thing). This is also what I think is (sometimes intentionally) misinterpreted with the "woke" concerns from the right, cause criticizing the company for morally branding themselves can be legit, but only if the actual idea of including and respecting people isn't lumped in with it. A legit issue with these huge companies that exploit workers is how they commodify their visibly "diverse" employees and claim the virtue for themselves rather than all the effort it took from workers to actually be treated with dignity. Amazon may very well be welcoming and inclusive but they're gonna fight their diverse employees when they want better conditions and pay. DEI doesn't erase the inherent conflict between employers and employees.
Disney did accidentally turn the two part story arc of space liberals restoring the status quo after it fell to space fascism into a three part warning that liberalism will always fall to fascism by allowing it to thrive in the first place by refusing to address wealth inequality and outright complacency in spite of all the warnings in the galaxy so that's fun.
It has an alien species where the religious group has quotes that are directly from Carl Sagan (and they're have more of a philosophy than a religion, at least in most ways). It generally treats religion with more respect than Roddenberry did, in a "all religion has some good parts to it, but extremism is a problem" kind of way.
One of its major plot arcs is all about how democracies fall into fascism. I thought it was a bit heavy handed at the time, but now it feels too real.
Skirts around a pair of characters in a lesbian relationship, but like most shows at the time, it doesn't come right out and say it. They 100% banged one night, though.
It's also military science fiction. That always seems to invite right wingers who love the asthetic but ignore the themes. Same problem with Star Trek and Star Wars.
Well let's see, there's an episode with a dockworker's strike, in which a "negotiator" is sent in who's position is basically "I'll pretend to ask nicely but the only tactic I have is this in-universe law that says I can use the military to force you back to work." The letter of that in-universe law (the "Rush Act") is "The local military commander can break strikes by any means he deems necessary." And Commander Sinclair decides to pay the dockworkers what they demand out of the military budget of the station. So the union ultimately wins.
There's several times when some character, often a human but sometimes an alien, walks up to some other kind of alien and says "We don't want you FREAKS coming in and stealing our JOBS!" and they're always depicted as obviously in the wrong. Basically in the script it says "A Republican happens, and gets dealt with."
There's a whole episode with a religious exchange, all the various aliens are invited to demonstrate their planet's "dominant religion." When it's the human's turn, Sinclair takes the alien crew down a hallway with a long line of various different kinds of priests, ministers, monks, etc. The first guy in line is an atheist. The point being "Earth is diverse as fuck, yo."
The show just barely glances off a lesbian relationship, and the show's attitude says "What? You didn't have a problem with the five other romantic couples we've seen so far, what's your problem with this one?"
Oh, then there's the whole major plot of a socially conservative president sliding Earth's entire government into totalitarianism with the backing of a hostile alien race thing.
Not at all, in fact I'd rather "woke" be defined by what they really mean - feminism, inclusivity, equality, etc. Let's make them say what they actually mean without hiding behind a nebulous term like "woke".
This is just a world building issue that comes with hundreds of writers over the decades. Who knows how money works. Someone will say something, then ten years later, another writer wont get the note and write something that conflicts.
That's the greatest accomplishment of the Federation, tricking the Ferengi! Internally money isn't used anymore, but to trade with the Ferengi they use these Non Federation Tokens, which have no real value.
I know she's smarter, better, and stronger than I and would find a way to help explain and educate this woman on how she's pissing into the wind wrong....
But I can't help but imagine Janeway just kicking the shit out of that foxbot on principle and for the security of the federations reputation.
Post scarcity societies can't be approached in any meaningful way with modern economic theories.
Star Trek is neither socialist nor capitalist, as both are systems designed to manage and portion out scarcity, and are based on economic theories that lack any predictive abilities in systems that don't work in a context of scarce resources that need administration.
Neither the labour theory of value nor marginal utility theory make any sense when all resources are trivial to obtain for individuals and whatever resources your community uses can be reused virtually endlessly within the limits of entropy.
Are we really dealing with "scarcity" at this point?
Supermarkets throw away literal millions of tonnes of food annually. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" has become a hollow mantra that cannot be truly adopted by the profit driven design philosophies of consumer products. Sustainability is being treated like some chic perk rather than a critical topic that must be taken seriously if we want any hope for our futures.
All these things are profoundly capitalist problems. Of course, it's not like marxist-leninist 'experiments' fared any better, devolving into their own variants of capitalism, but there are many other socialist ideologies to consider (such as anarchism...)
We are, because people want luxury goods too. Post-scarcity is about being able to produce most goods with barely any human labor (would absolutely be true for food if every person on earth only worked in food production or to produce machinery needed for it), which we aren't even close to. AI and automation might get us there (though it's questionable when the cycle of just investing the newfound labor capacity into more luxuries will stop, if ever), but people are actively resisting that (reasonably so) because the current economic system basically everywhere is horribly rigged towards funnelling the excess wealth to rich individuals rather than improving the living standards of society as a whole.
Idk, I'd say we want quality goods, and are lead to believe that these desires can be fulfilled by the lofty luxury goods market which is founded more on artificial scarcity than material scarcity. Even when rare materials and expensive labour are involved the fact that this simply makes them "more valuable" seems more important than any actual need, or lack of alternatives. Meanwhile, affordable products get enshittified, shorter lifespans, etc.
though it's questionable when the cycle of just investing the newfound labor capacity into more luxuries will stop, if ever
Which is precisely why "post-scarcity" can only be reached with actual societal change, not just technological advancement.
I don’t think you can discount first contact’s affect on that shift. Finding out you’re not alone in the universe would surely have a massive societal impact.
Star Wars is literally space conservatives rebelling against the galactic communist (1970s US propagandized version of invented communism-fascist aesthetic*) empire...
Firefly is to an even greater degree, like libertarian Browncoats rebelling. I love the fan fic take that the Alliance were the "good guys."
Yeah it's not actual communism but more like a reflection of the fears of communism in pop culture from the time when it was written in the late 70s. Comment was a bit inprecise but amended.
well i did say "derived from" and not "the exact same word" but as it turns out the connection to vater was a rumor george lucas himself started, likely to make originating vision for the series appear stronger and more planned. there is evidence that the name existed in the scripts before he was changed to be lukes father, so that does contradict the later assertion.
I'm not sure about Vader being more than a coincidence, but the roots of the word for "father" goes a lot further back than German. Linguists have traced it back through many cultures into prehistory. It's probably more ancient than we can ever discover. This blew my mind the other day.
It's just based on what other's have said about the Vietnam allegory but it's also whatever, I'm sure Lucas' wasn't thinking of it as a primarily political mission to produce Star Wars, since it's very much a standard plot with your usual archetype characters and roles.
There's a similar fan take on Lord of the Rings too which is interesting.
George Lucas has said that it was the Vietnam War that inspired the conflict in Star Wars, with the Empire representing the US, but also the rebels could represent the US against the British Empire from the Revolutionary War.
The Empire was in no way representative of Communism, it's a fascist Empire with literal "Stormtroopers." Lucas has shown more antifascist sentiment, and no anti-socialist sentiment. Lucas said the Empire represents the US, and the rebels the Viet Cong, in inspiration.
One time, he even said despite the censorship in the USSR, he felt that move directors and writers were more free to make what they wanted without the profit motive getting in the way, specifically citing artistic freedom being higher (in his words).
You know, it's totally possible that George Lucas has no fucking clue about history and just said "it was a metaphor for Vietnam" to sound smart. There is no version of Star Wars where the Empire does communism. Fanfic take that the Alliance were the good guys? Did we watch different movies? One side literally makes all their decisions based on the whims of an ancient evil wizard, and the other side are trying to stop the evil wizards from destroying planets.
That's where I got this view from but I'm not personally into Star Wars, I just know this very timely Vietnam influence but Lucas could be bullshitting who knows.
Just say you don't watch sci fi movies. Sheesh so desperate to fit in. Why does everyone want to be a nerd now? Didn't boomers invent beating up nerds???
As far as I can tell, you're not missing much. A ragtag bunch of sci-fi misfits led by Kevin Sorbo as Kevin Sorbo go on a series of cliche space adventures.
It has some interesting ideas and chapters. But when the creator of the show and the actor playing the Nietschean first officer leave due to Sorbo's ego, the show really turns into a dumpster fire.
Does Starfleet not? Besides literally all of their ships. Because every ship that can go to Warp Speed is a planet killer based on the information in the show.
Have you seen human history?
Untrustworthy savages, the lot of them. A rogue species just temporarily acting reasonable for some nefarious plan no doubt.
Now, before you explain that "No, the Xindi really did have it coming," I have not watched Enterprise, and I never will.
Enterprise Season 3 opens with a Xindi ship coming out of warp over Earth and cutting a 20 mile wide trench across Florida. Earth didn't know the Xindi existed at the time, had no idea it was coming or why.
Spoiler alert: the Xindi had been given faulty/false information that Earth was planning to attack them, by some other mutual enemy. IIRC it had to do with that "temporal cold war" thing they tried to push, which I'm convinced was someone in a writing room saying words without thinking about what they meant. What ensues is basically the Hell episode of Voyager stretched across a season.
The xindi were lied to by a faction of the temporal cold war that was trying to keep them from joining the federation in the future. From there perspective they thought humans were trying to genocide them so they were defending themselves. I actually enjoyed Enterprise even if it's not close to my favorite trek series
I've overall enjoyed enterprise, even if it's not my favorite. I don't like how many multiparty storylines there are, but they weren't so terrible that I stopped watching.
I think Fox corporation is butt hurt they sold Disney TV & movie rights they didn't know how manage to make money on. 🍵 so they vent it through Foxnews. haha.
I got a lot of "we're facing an exitensial threat, therefore the ends justify the means" out of the 3rd season. It seemed really out of place in a star trek show. Maybe it wasn't an implicit endorsement of the Bush doctrine but it sure smelled like one to me.
It's been so long that I'd have to watch it again, to be honest. To me, the only good season of Enterprise was Season 4 when Manny Coto took over and just made it a season-long tribute to TOS. Ironically, Coto is a Republican. That said, he also made another terrific short-lived sci-fi TV show called Odyssey 5 with Peter Weller. I highly recommend its one season despite the cliffhanger ending.
No problem. It was part of Showtime's sci-fi block which also had a pretty good post-apocalyptic show called Jeremiah, which showed that Malcolm Jamal-Warner had range beyond sitcoms. Showtime axed all of their sci-fi shows and it died. Stargate SG-1 was the only one that got saved by moving over to the Sci-Fi Channel, I think because it was being co-funded by Canada.
I wish he'd continued to story in a book or something. Everyone I've recommended it to has liked it. Looks like all of the episodes are on YouTube. Here's the pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWGbfQOFN60
Recently watched a couple of episodes and it definitely felt old-fashioned in a way that didn't feel appropriate for show about an utopian society from the early 2000s. At least the original series was progressive for the 1960s, which doesn't necessarily feel "woke" from a 2020s rightwinger perspective.
Or republicans just root for the enemies, that's always a possibility.
They don't have money but they do have the classic authoritarian hierarchy of SciFi.
Want to travel the galaxy? You need a starship. How do you get a starship? Join the federation.
Picard retired to a grape farm in France. How did he get that perk? Can anyone have a grape farm in France?
SciFi has an inherent power imbalance between the fleet and grounders. This comes from the ability to move around and drop bombs on people. As much as they try to stay in a socialist paradise, they still have tons of incidents that end up being solved the starfleet way.
It's a quote from starship troopers, but the idea of "Service guarantees citizenship" is what draws fascists to SciFi. It's a tough problem to fix in fiction and most of the time it's overlooked because spaceships are cool on paper. They make great entertainment.
The reality is that serving in the federation usually would mean you've never been on a starship bridge. You're 20 levels down in a maintenance hold with no outside view. Nobody tells you shit and all you know is the ship is being fired at and you're fucking terrified.
Even if you can pull up an external view on your tablet (which is a massive security problem), you still don't have any control over the fight. Now you can watch torpedoes coming straight at you and realize the captain can't stop it, and you can't either..
Morale would be constantly in the toilet, and without a bigger reward than to explore strange new worlds you can't see from the hold, people would be constantly quitting.
In conclusion, I'm not saying that star trek is fascist. I'm just saying it hand waves away 90% of the problems with their alleged utopia and people like watching action packed SciFi adventures.
I have a whole separate rant about weapons like lasers that travel at the speed of light. In the real world most fights would happen across distances, with ships being undetectable against the blackness of space, until a beam comes out of nowhere and instantly destroys your ship. But because it's fiction you can ignore this.
FRIENDLY NOTE: I don't mean this to sound combative, I just want to offer a different (more optimistic) perspective.
What's missing here is the central conceit of Trek: that humanity grew up. We could have a utopia now if people would just stop being greedy little shits, and decided to embrace empathy and forgiveness. There's nothing stopping every single person in a modern conflict from dropping their weapons, but we still want vengeance and punishment. and I'm not saying I'm above that: someone kills someone I love, and I'm going to want blood. On paper I'm against capital punishment, but I know if I was faced with a war on my doorstep, bombs being dropped, my morals may not hold.
In Star Trek, they had WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and after that...humanity finally had enough. Never again, but for all the ills of humanity, in a way.
So very few people in the Trek world would actually complain about working a shit detail, because they're in it for the greater good. We saw in TNG episodes that randos from the 20th century could just waltz around the ship at their leisure, and how lax security is...because people just generally behaved well. Humanity really did bind themselves to a stronger social contract, if that's the right term.
As for needing ships: there seem to be plenty of civilian ships out there, from trading and light exploration to proper science vessels. Not all Starfleet, though the shows have focused on them. So I can only imagine there's plenty of opportunity for non-Starfleet folks to get out there.
Granted, DS9 pushed back on all this a little, as the Maquis are comprised of a lot of Federation members that went feral/colonial and don't hold themselves to the Federation ideals that seem to keep the rest of humanity and others acting in good faith at almost all times. Likewise still plenty of BadMirals out there, and they do show the Tom Paris-es of the world in some kind of prison, so it's not all roses, and could definitely be spun as drops of dystopia in a utopia, but we're also told (and have no reason to doubt) that it's all well-above board, humane, and focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment.
Also, all that said, I do wish it wasn't so hierarchical, but that's my anarchist streak flaring up.
To reply to myself, because it merits its own giant text box: for anarchist-minded folks like myself, I'd highly recommend reading Homage to Catalonia, because it gives some glimpse of how things might work in a less-hierarchical military (in the cases like in Trek's Starfleet that weapons are sometimes unfortunately needed).
The essential point of the system was social equality between
officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay,
ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of
complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the
division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and
no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a
democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be
obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave
it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were
officers and N.C.O.s but there was no military rank in the ordinary
sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had
attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working
model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality,
but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I
would have thought conceivable in time of war.
But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front
horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type?
It was what everyone was saying at the time, and though it was true it
was also unreasonable. For in the circumstances the militias could not
have been much better than they were. A modern mechanized army does not
spring up out of the ground, and if the Government had waited until it
had trained troops at its disposal, Franco would never have been
resisted. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and
therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training
and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly
raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the
officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are
always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic
'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be
expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It
is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois
conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias
the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have
been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed,
but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused
to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first
appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no
experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never
'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The
discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time
went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the
mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was
acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish.
We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest
difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for
a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political
consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it
takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into
an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the
militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line
while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to
the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in
the field at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep
them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be
shot--were shot, occasionally--but if a thousand men had decided to walk
out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript
army in the same circumstances--with its battle-police removed--would
have melted away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they
won very few victories, and even individual desertions were not common.
In four or five months in the P.O.U.M. militia I only heard of four men
deserting, and two of those were fairly certainly spies who had enlisted
to obtain information. At the beginning the apparent chaos, the general
lack of training, the fact that you often had to argue for five minutes
before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and infuriated me. I had
British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were very unlike
the British Army. But considering the circumstances they were better
troops than one had any right to expect.
The oligarchs and billionaires who own the corporate mainstream media and both political parties are the ones stirring up WOKE issues. Why? So you all hate each other and take your eye off the billionaire thieves stealing everything. This is why we can't have nice things.
Recently had an argument with my conservative father, he's always been big into Trek and Wars, and I had just started really watching Trek again, never watched a lot of the shows all the way through. So this father of mine started going on about how woke Trek was now, and I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the "anti-woke" nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation. So I was like "oh no, not woke Star Trek, the series about a socialist utopia, the series that holds the title of "the American show with the first interracial kiss", the show where Kirk throws his dick at every species with a quim, the show that had a Ruskie character in the middle of the f'n Red Scare." Star Trek was always woke, and my father was always too dumb, racially biased, and narcissistic to pick up on the lessons that they were trying to teach us when he watched it as a child in the 60's.
I have not even tried to bring up Star Wars since the Disney acquisition, I'm sure my father has an insufferable take on that series now as well.
I have met conservative Trek fans. I think some people really do watch stuff without ever thinking about it beyond its superficial spectacle.
It’s like conservative Always Sunny fans.
It’s like conservatives with [insert 99% of media they consume, excluding Fox “news”]
Lol yeah fair enough
They thought Colbert wasn’t playing an absurd caricature of a right wing pundit when he was doing the Report
It is worth noting that the rapist Bill O'Reilly knew, because it was so blindly obviously a parody of him, and whatever else you might say of him he isn't outright stupid.
The interesting bit is Ol Rapey Bill has quotes about Jan 6th saying his Fox would never have downplayed or enabled it, and yet, he's now supporting Trump in 2024.
It's almost like the actual truth doesn't matter to them. Like they just want a comfortable lie that benefits them personally, some kind of "Truthiness" perhaps.
Any echo chamber can produce illusory truth effect. Repeated exposure to misinformation can result in a person failing to identify it as a lie, and begin to register it as fact and the lie gets amplified.
Best White House Correspondents Dinner ever.
It's like he's writing trumps speeches for him there!
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I appreciate your avatar
I appreciate you!
They view the show as a documentary, not a comedy.
IASP is a pretty funny show. Even the most recent season was gold, covering inflation during covid.
There are a surprisingly high number of educated conservatives in the high tech fields, engineers/programmers/etc.
It's sad :/
One of the smartest people i knew was a former systems designer for NASA, I live close enough to the Cape to watch every launch from my backyard, anyway, this guy definitely worked for NASA, had his office decorated with the Patents that he held, really smart guy, complete conspiracy nut who was immediately on the Trump train.
I've always loved conspiracies too and we got along through that stuff, but then he went down the rabbit hole of Right wing and Russian propaganda/disinformation and no matter how much i tried to prove everything wrong, with good evidence, he went deeper down that hole, he died during COVID and one of the last things he sent me was about the "stolen election", it was after January 6, to which my reply was "do you mean the 2016 election or the 2000 election?" and never got a response back and I'd heard he passed away a few months later from a mutual friend.
My dad navigated satellites and exploration probes for NASA his entire career, even doing work in getting better climate data. He's a total MAGA and FOX loyalist now. Misses Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson.
The educated laborers that perform highly skilled labor convince themselves that they have it better than everyone else because Capitalism worked and selected for them, it's a comfy and delusional position to hold that requires having absolutely zero self-awareness. Unfortunately common.
Fear and prejudice transcends all education.
Same with conservative Fallout fans that somehow unironically think it's pro-Capitalism, despite nearly every instance of actual Capitalism and not just bartering being absurdly evil.
Because muh rugged individual
It's worse than that, it's the unironic Legion, House, and Enclave support that's absurd.
Sheesh. Satire really ain't shit to a fascist
"You know those Ferengi really have some good ideas..."
I couldn't imagine not being able to enjoy a show without believing in it.
"This show is phenomenal, I will describe myself as a fan. I hate its ideology and the vision that drove it."
I can't name a single show like that for me.
Breaking Bad
What underlying ideology or vision did you not care for, though?
The base satire that none of this would have happened under socialized medicine. Enjoyed the show despite hating all of the characters in it. It's hard for me to watch but I know quality when I see it, the personalities portrayed are just so fucking aggravating. Some episodes of Star Trek i don't mind, I find the socialist utopia underpinnings childish and vapid, hand wavery, but that's just the backdrop, theyve some good actors depending on series, occasionally good scripts. Discovery can suck my ass though.
There is no “base satire” in Breaking Bad about socialised healthcare. You didn’t understand the show at all - he was given an opportunity to work his way out but chose to be a meth dealer because Walt couldn’t stomach further hits to his ego. Sure, there are valid comments it makes about the nature of being up against a heartless system but it doesn’t blame Walt’s decision on that system.
The non-woke Trekkies (or do they call themselves Trekkers? ) didn't think about interracial kisses or the post-scarcity society in which capitalists were small-time traders. They see Captain Kirk running roughshod over other societies and turning them into America (see The Apple and A Taste of Armageddon ) which was more about 60s Hollywood imagining cold war United States as the height of civilization.
The Next Generation dared to imagine a more internationalist sense of culture and got into the notion that even extremely weird aliens might be deserving of civil rights. But by DS9 the Federation was reimagined as a failing coalition with multiple rising renegade factions and worlds teeming with disregarded peoples. The story became less about rising to ideals and more about dealing with grimdark realities and compromising principles to preserve status quo.
Then the Kelvin Timeline Reboot got J. J. Abrams'd and Paramount got litigeous about fan films it previously endorsed and I became so disgusted with the state of Trek, I divested myself from it. Star Wars would suffer a similar fate, and I don't watch many movies these days.
Corporations have a tendency to ruin all art for the sake of profit. It's infuriating.
Not understanding how anything works, and being angry about it, is a core tenet of conservatism.
"when did star trek get all woke?!" "1966"
I think the best response to that kind of crap is what you said, with the addition of "and when did you start caring? When Fox news told you to care."
If you're feeling extra spicy you can add a comment about being a sheep lol
This is what I mean when I think "everything is political" is BS. That statement doesn't mean one has to talk about politics 24/7.
Yeah but his reaction? Don't leave us hanging.
It was mostly indignation over me not kissing his ass and telling him he's right, I'm generally one of the few in my family that will stand up to him at all never the less consistently, he's pretty charming and the family that have never lived with him all think he's just great usually, but he always has this condescending way of telling me "you weren't alive then so you don't know" as if there aren't interviews with Roddenberry that confirms these things, or if it's broader politics, as if encyclopedias and news article didn't exist back then. Then when I knocked down that argument he just defaulted back to "well it's too woke and preachy now" while citing examples of preachyness that are just examples of inclusivity in the show.
I'll say this, my pop apparently helped do clean up at ground zero after 9/11, he was a guard at Rikers at the time and I could see him volunteering for it, but he's also kind of a bullshit artists so we're never sure what's fully the truth. However fact or fiction he's never been the same since that day, we all lost a bunch of people we knew, and we all have a lot of friends who lost close relatives and it impacted not only us but our community, because it's a fire firefighter town we live in, we live next to the former chief and down the block from the station house and my pop hangs out at the bar near the station house. After 9/11 he fell down the Fox News hole and never was the same again, and now i gotta hear some "woke" bullshit every time he talks about something he seems to not understand.
So overall the reaction was a lot of indignation, a little bit of arguing followed by a hasty hang up.
It's crap, not woke. Sorry for necroposting.
Lol necroposting.
I'd say the latest trilogy was complete garbage, and I would put that just as much on JJ Abrams, who produced it while also completely f'ing up the Star Trek movies he did, so honestly the problem was probably him he has a reputation for this things.
Rian Johnson was the director, but he also directed what's considered the best star wars movie to come out, Rogue One, which also spawned one of the best Star Wars series, Andor, so it probably wasn't his fault, plus he's the Guy that created the Knives Out series which was also fantastic.
Best to come out under Disney. These (R1 and Andor) do borrow in atmosphere from the parts of the EU I like ("Dark Times" comic books etc).
First of all you obviously don't know my father, and you sound like a dipshit trying to misuse "ablist", mental illnesses like narcissism aren't handicaps and thus can't be ablist.
Second of all people who try to dictate who can watch what are gatekeeping morons.
Now fuck you and have a nice day.
You're no psychologist or therapist. Nor do you know OP or their father. Which is how we know you're no psychologist. You're not qualified to speak at all. But you find yourself compelled to. Because you identify with the father. And defending him is defending yourself. Which uuuuh says volumes about you, but no one else.
Innocent narcissist, wow. You go from bad to worse LMAO.
Narcissists are the worst to debate. You just keep self incriminating. Taking all the fun out of it.
Yeah fuck your concern trolling. Go back to the chans.
At this point media illiteracy is a requirement to be a Republican.
than*
There is a weird right-wing contingent of Trekkies who think it's all about pew pew fights with the Borg and they confuse the rest of us who love the idea of a socialist utopia where indigenous cultures are respected and people try to talk things out before shooting in hostile situations.
Trek has no money in the Federation; no barter. Nobody who's watched a season of any Trek show can avoid noticing that. It might be a bit murky with characters like Harry Mudd, or the Ferengi, but those operate outside the Federation; you'd have to be daft to miss that. TNG was more careful with their "capitalist" characters like Kivas Fajo, who was clearly a collector and trader rather than a travelling salesman.
Right-wing free-market Trekkies are self-deluding.
It's a special case of the more general rule: right-wing free-market anyone is self-deluding.
That's why I prefer Picard over the others. He represented the best of those ideals while respecting the history that led humanity to the Federation. They even took the time to reveal his humility when he went too far, by his choice or no.
Username checks out
Username checks out. Not sure if you were waiting for that...
I'm waiting to enjoy your appropriate meme for this topic.
“ Star Wars is bad now”
I mean yah, the vertical integration, means tested everything, nostalgia bating and assembly line techniques that Disney does sure do ruin otherwise fine properties.
“No, I don’t mind that, that’s just good business. I just hate the gay people who kissed in the background”
Oh, OH ok, you’re just an idiot…
She's so much of a Trekkie she did the LL&P sign backwards
WESSSST SIIIIIIDE
(Of the beta quadrant)
Live long and peace out, bitches.
Is this how Vulcans flip people off?
Only the british ones.
It's a Vulcan gang sign.
A long time ago, Vulcans and Romulans were known as Bloods and Crips.
I was gonna say, "what kind of fucked up Shekhinah is that???" That hands gesture symbolizes the Hebrew letter "shin," which is the first letter of the feminine name of God in Judaism. The female form of God is believed by Orthodox Jews to be so powerful that seeing her can blind a human, therefore they cover their eyes when the rabbi does this symbol while they invoke the dwelling of God, or something like that. I'm quite fuzzy on this part.
So, this moron is calling Star Wars, the bra strangulation movie, too woke and is trying to troll Star Wars fans with a Star Trek symbol that she got wrong? The incredible irony of her being a bigot unfit for Leonard Nimoy's Shekhina project while she's blasting her own face with some Jewish mysticism girl power is beyond hilarious.
Star Trek first interacial kiss on screen. Star Trek early with minorities in major roles without calling attention to it.
First black/white kiss. There was an earlier white/Asian kiss.
Asians aren't people! /S
Although, tbf in the US, because of slavery(then segregation). Black/White race relations trends to overshadow everything else.
Interestingly, the first interracial kiss also featured William Shatner, when he kissed France Nuyen on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Doesn't count because Asians are "good" minorities. /s
George Takei might not agree since he was kept in a camp as a child.
I’m not trying to undermine the idea that Star Trek was progressive for its time, far from it, but since no one else has pointed this out, I thought I’d say it. Star Trek was NOT the first interracial kiss on television. In fact, the actors’ lips never touched in the shot.
Well, sort of. I’ve been reading William Shatner’s autobiography, and they had to fight really hard to include an interracial kiss. The network was going to forbid it, telling Rodenberry that televisions across the South would rather black out their televisions for an hour than allow something so highly offensive. When he insisted upon it, they kept making concessions Rodenberry wouldn’t agree to, like instead having Uhura kiss Spock, since it there would be a little more disconnect between reality. Eventually, Rodenberry offered to film the kiss both ways—one way with their lips actually touching, the other with Uhura’s back to the camera as they embraced, giving the illusion that they kissed without their lips ever touching. The actors were really upset about it, because It was originally going to be a passionate kiss, but the only way they allowed it to be filmed on television was if the actors displayed clear discomfort—which could be used to reinforce the idea that interracial relationships were bad.
Soo…yeah! That’s your Star Trek history lesson for the day! (I’ve never watched the original episode, I’ve only watched TNG and Discovery for myself, so this is all secondary info, but if you watch the episode, you can see for yourself.)
I think with Disney and a lot of companies now it's more obvious that they are consciously trying to "look good" vs Star Trek was a lot more genuine and authentic with it's intention to include these things, and it was challenging status quo back then whereas today it's very mainstream (which is a good thing). This is also what I think is (sometimes intentionally) misinterpreted with the "woke" concerns from the right, cause criticizing the company for morally branding themselves can be legit, but only if the actual idea of including and respecting people isn't lumped in with it. A legit issue with these huge companies that exploit workers is how they commodify their visibly "diverse" employees and claim the virtue for themselves rather than all the effort it took from workers to actually be treated with dignity. Amazon may very well be welcoming and inclusive but they're gonna fight their diverse employees when they want better conditions and pay. DEI doesn't erase the inherent conflict between employers and employees.
StAr tReK is TOO DIVERSE, tHatS wHy I lIkE Babylon 5!
[insert heavy breathing and unchecked drooling]
she probably cheered for the bajor occupation or the government during the bell riots
Eugenics program? So this Khan guy is a good guy?
Babylon 5 is too liberal, that's why I like Farscape
Farscape isn't horny enough. That's why I like LEXX
Lexx isn't british enough, that's why i watch red dwarf.
Red Dwarf isn't wet enough, that's why I watch SeaQuest DSV
Red Dwarf doesn't have enough main cast members die, that's why I prefer Blake's 7.
Blake's 7 doesn't have enough weird courtroom scenes at the end of the series, that's why I prefer The Prisoner
Farscape is cool. Star Trek is cool. Star Wars is okay too I guess; not hating, I just don't like them as much as the rest of the world seems to.
Obviously. Because Firefly is the superior show, right?
I mean Firefly is ok, but the original Battlestar Galactica is still supreme.
I believe you are all wrong. Commando Cody is the most excellent science fiction program ever made.
severe lack of stargate in this thread
ronon dex > aquaman
Commando Cody? Bah. The 1935 film The Transatlantic Tunnel is the height of science fiction on film.
I loved the original BG!! But man it didn't age well :(
Disney did accidentally turn the two part story arc of space liberals restoring the status quo after it fell to space fascism into a three part warning that liberalism will always fall to fascism by allowing it to thrive in the first place by refusing to address wealth inequality and outright complacency in spite of all the warnings in the galaxy so that's fun.
Farscape is too queer, that's why i like Lexx
Hey, Babylon 5 gave us
BesterMirror Chekov.Talk to me about Babylon 5. What all is woke in it. Never watched it so I don’t know.
It has an alien species where the religious group has quotes that are directly from Carl Sagan (and they're have more of a philosophy than a religion, at least in most ways). It generally treats religion with more respect than Roddenberry did, in a "all religion has some good parts to it, but extremism is a problem" kind of way.
One of its major plot arcs is all about how democracies fall into fascism. I thought it was a bit heavy handed at the time, but now it feels too real.
Skirts around a pair of characters in a lesbian relationship, but like most shows at the time, it doesn't come right out and say it. They 100% banged one night, though.
It's also military science fiction. That always seems to invite right wingers who love the asthetic but ignore the themes. Same problem with Star Trek and Star Wars.
Well let's see, there's an episode with a dockworker's strike, in which a "negotiator" is sent in who's position is basically "I'll pretend to ask nicely but the only tactic I have is this in-universe law that says I can use the military to force you back to work." The letter of that in-universe law (the "Rush Act") is "The local military commander can break strikes by any means he deems necessary." And Commander Sinclair decides to pay the dockworkers what they demand out of the military budget of the station. So the union ultimately wins.
There's several times when some character, often a human but sometimes an alien, walks up to some other kind of alien and says "We don't want you FREAKS coming in and stealing our JOBS!" and they're always depicted as obviously in the wrong. Basically in the script it says "A Republican happens, and gets dealt with."
There's a whole episode with a religious exchange, all the various aliens are invited to demonstrate their planet's "dominant religion." When it's the human's turn, Sinclair takes the alien crew down a hallway with a long line of various different kinds of priests, ministers, monks, etc. The first guy in line is an atheist. The point being "Earth is diverse as fuck, yo."
The show just barely glances off a lesbian relationship, and the show's attitude says "What? You didn't have a problem with the five other romantic couples we've seen so far, what's your problem with this one?"
Oh, then there's the whole major plot of a socially conservative president sliding Earth's entire government into totalitarianism with the backing of a hostile alien race thing.
Haven't watched it in years myself, but unless you can define "woke" I'm not going to make any assumptions.
"Woke" has come to mean "Not completely adhering to Republican culture war dogma."
Even that doesn't really define it.
Just making sure here, you want me to rigorously define the political position and identity of platformless reactionaries?
Not at all, in fact I'd rather "woke" be defined by what they really mean - feminism, inclusivity, equality, etc. Let's make them say what they actually mean without hiding behind a nebulous term like "woke".
the concept of science fiction is way to librul, since it suggests that science is real
But it says right in the name science fiction!
I would have thought they’d be more of a Starship Troopers fan, since the satire would fly over the fash’s head.
Nice one! I'm ultra-progressive but love that movie.
I mean, so long as you see the satire of the film, that's not incompatible.
TBF Heinlein didn't mean for it to be a satire, Verhoeven just turned it into one.
Money doesn't exist in Star Trek but credits do in Star Wars.
Money exists in Star Trek, the Federation just doesn't use it. the Ferengi love the stuff though
They occasionally reference "Federation Credits", but I think it's mainly for use outside the Federation.
Federation credits? Federation credits are no good out here. I need something more real.
This is just a world building issue that comes with hundreds of writers over the decades. Who knows how money works. Someone will say something, then ten years later, another writer wont get the note and write something that conflicts.
That's the greatest accomplishment of the Federation, tricking the Ferengi! Internally money isn't used anymore, but to trade with the Ferengi they use these Non Federation Tokens, which have no real value.
My latinum! It's a fake! It's all worthless gold!!!
Star Wars never got replicators, but they did get sweet laser swords
Fuck laser swords, i want food without cooking.
Best I can do is different colored milk, but I will throw in some space wizards and what the hell personal starships for everyone.
Star wars kind of has that, if 'just add water' counts as 'without cooking'
Pressed latinum bars?
update even got dragged by george takei
Attempts and fails at Vulcan greeting.
Two in the pinkie, two in the stinky...
The Klingon way!
It does take a bit of practice let not gatekeep here /s
I know she's smarter, better, and stronger than I and would find a way to help explain and educate this woman on how she's pissing into the wind wrong....
But I can't help but imagine Janeway just kicking the shit out of that foxbot on principle and for the security of the federations reputation.
I don't know, man. She killed Tuvix. I could see her kicking the shit out of this lady.
Post scarcity societies can't be approached in any meaningful way with modern economic theories.
Star Trek is neither socialist nor capitalist, as both are systems designed to manage and portion out scarcity, and are based on economic theories that lack any predictive abilities in systems that don't work in a context of scarce resources that need administration.
Neither the labour theory of value nor marginal utility theory make any sense when all resources are trivial to obtain for individuals and whatever resources your community uses can be reused virtually endlessly within the limits of entropy.
Are we really dealing with "scarcity" at this point?
Supermarkets throw away literal millions of tonnes of food annually. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" has become a hollow mantra that cannot be truly adopted by the profit driven design philosophies of consumer products. Sustainability is being treated like some chic perk rather than a critical topic that must be taken seriously if we want any hope for our futures.
All these things are profoundly capitalist problems. Of course, it's not like marxist-leninist 'experiments' fared any better, devolving into their own variants of capitalism, but there are many other socialist ideologies to consider (such as anarchism...)
We are, because people want luxury goods too. Post-scarcity is about being able to produce most goods with barely any human labor (would absolutely be true for food if every person on earth only worked in food production or to produce machinery needed for it), which we aren't even close to. AI and automation might get us there (though it's questionable when the cycle of just investing the newfound labor capacity into more luxuries will stop, if ever), but people are actively resisting that (reasonably so) because the current economic system basically everywhere is horribly rigged towards funnelling the excess wealth to rich individuals rather than improving the living standards of society as a whole.
Idk, I'd say we want quality goods, and are lead to believe that these desires can be fulfilled by the lofty luxury goods market which is founded more on artificial scarcity than material scarcity. Even when rare materials and expensive labour are involved the fact that this simply makes them "more valuable" seems more important than any actual need, or lack of alternatives. Meanwhile, affordable products get enshittified, shorter lifespans, etc.
Which is precisely why "post-scarcity" can only be reached with actual societal change, not just technological advancement.
I don’t think you can discount first contact’s affect on that shift. Finding out you’re not alone in the universe would surely have a massive societal impact.
Star Wars is literally space conservatives rebelling against the galactic communist (1970s US propagandized version of invented communism-fascist aesthetic*) empire...
Firefly is to an even greater degree, like libertarian Browncoats rebelling. I love the fan fic take that the Alliance were the "good guys."
ok but the empire were literally fascists trying to rule the imperial senate with absolute authority......
Yeah it's not actual communism but more like a reflection of the fears of communism in pop culture from the time when it was written in the late 70s. Comment was a bit inprecise but amended.
Even the empire's uniforms were pretty obviously based on nazi uniforms, what makes you think the empire is supposed to represent communism?
George Lucas said Vietnam inspired the writing, and communism in American pop culture was synonymous with basically every "bad" thing.
He said the Ewoks were inspired by the Viet Cong. Were the guerilla fighters fighting against the guerilla Empire?
The empire was the US
is it a coincidence that vader is derived from the german word for father?
Is that the case? It's both written and pronounced differently
well i did say "derived from" and not "the exact same word" but as it turns out the connection to vater was a rumor george lucas himself started, likely to make originating vision for the series appear stronger and more planned. there is evidence that the name existed in the scripts before he was changed to be lukes father, so that does contradict the later assertion.
I'm not sure about Vader being more than a coincidence, but the roots of the word for "father" goes a lot further back than German. Linguists have traced it back through many cultures into prehistory. It's probably more ancient than we can ever discover. This blew my mind the other day.
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Why are you spreading this around like it's true? Also, this is you:
George Lucas mentions Vietnam as an influence
Fascism is clearly represented as well
Star Wars is not a politically consistent universe or critique
It's a typical story arc where the antagonist is an amalgamation of things that were considered bad at the time
It's Star Wars so I ultimately don't care that much
that makes sense! fair point!
It's just based on what other's have said about the Vietnam allegory but it's also whatever, I'm sure Lucas' wasn't thinking of it as a primarily political mission to produce Star Wars, since it's very much a standard plot with your usual archetype characters and roles.
There's a similar fan take on Lord of the Rings too which is interesting.
Not really. It's still just a surface level depiction of space nazis.
Space Nazi aesthetic is definitely key to Star Wars.
George Lucas has said that it was the Vietnam War that inspired the conflict in Star Wars, with the Empire representing the US, but also the rebels could represent the US against the British Empire from the Revolutionary War.
I don't recall reading that anywhere. I do remember seeing WW2 referenced, especially with respect to the dogfights.
Very interesting! I knew the Vietnam thing but I'm not into Star Wars.
It's also heavily Nazi coded with the uniforms and marching formations. And you know, Stormtroopers.
The Empire was in no way representative of Communism, it's a fascist Empire with literal "Stormtroopers." Lucas has shown more antifascist sentiment, and no anti-socialist sentiment. Lucas said the Empire represents the US, and the rebels the Viet Cong, in inspiration.
One time, he even said despite the censorship in the USSR, he felt that move directors and writers were more free to make what they wanted without the profit motive getting in the way, specifically citing artistic freedom being higher (in his words).
You know, it's totally possible that George Lucas has no fucking clue about history and just said "it was a metaphor for Vietnam" to sound smart. There is no version of Star Wars where the Empire does communism. Fanfic take that the Alliance were the good guys? Did we watch different movies? One side literally makes all their decisions based on the whims of an ancient evil wizard, and the other side are trying to stop the evil wizards from destroying planets.
Palpatine isn't ancient, although you could argue he represents the apex of the rule of two thus dating back to at least Darth Bane.
That's where I got this view from but I'm not personally into Star Wars, I just know this very timely Vietnam influence but Lucas could be bullshitting who knows.
The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one
Tell me you're not really a fan of either franchise without telling me.
Also, she's giving the LL&P sign backwards.
Why does it feel so much like a white person trying to throw a gang sign?
Just say you don't watch sci fi movies. Sheesh so desperate to fit in. Why does everyone want to be a nerd now? Didn't boomers invent beating up nerds???
Nerds became cool once they realized they could exploit their autism at tech companies
Many tech companies are led by neurodiverse people, too. Zuckerberg is definitely not just the typical billionaire sociopath.
I've seen the anti-woke Star Trek.
I had to stop when they invaded space Iraq due to WMD's.
Yeah but the xindi actually did have planet killing weapons so
I'm not talking about Enterprise.
Then what are you talking about?
Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda
Neat, I've never heard of that show before
The first season is okay sci-fi. The rest is awful.
As far as I can tell, you're not missing much. A ragtag bunch of sci-fi misfits led by Kevin Sorbo as Kevin Sorbo go on a series of cliche space adventures.
And each adventure is more Sorbo than the last.
It has some interesting ideas and chapters. But when the creator of the show and the actor playing the Nietschean first officer leave due to Sorbo's ego, the show really turns into a dumpster fire.
The star of the show is definitely anti woke
Does Starfleet not? Besides literally all of their ships. Because every ship that can go to Warp Speed is a planet killer based on the information in the show.
Have you seen human history?
Untrustworthy savages, the lot of them. A rogue species just temporarily acting reasonable for some nefarious plan no doubt.
Now, before you explain that "No, the Xindi really did have it coming," I have not watched Enterprise, and I never will.
Enterprise Season 3 opens with a Xindi ship coming out of warp over Earth and cutting a 20 mile wide trench across Florida. Earth didn't know the Xindi existed at the time, had no idea it was coming or why.
Spoiler alert: the Xindi had been given faulty/false information that Earth was planning to attack them, by some other mutual enemy. IIRC it had to do with that "temporal cold war" thing they tried to push, which I'm convinced was someone in a writing room saying words without thinking about what they meant. What ensues is basically the Hell episode of Voyager stretched across a season.
But I wanted the Hell Episode stretched across a season...
The xindi were lied to by a faction of the temporal cold war that was trying to keep them from joining the federation in the future. From there perspective they thought humans were trying to genocide them so they were defending themselves. I actually enjoyed Enterprise even if it's not close to my favorite trek series
I've overall enjoyed enterprise, even if it's not my favorite. I don't like how many multiparty storylines there are, but they weren't so terrible that I stopped watching.
Do these people think before they fucking talk?
Not before, nor during, nor after.
They hardly think at all.
A good video exploring how conservatives enjoy star trek.
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A good video exploring how conservatives enjoy star trek.
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I think Fox corporation is butt hurt they sold Disney TV & movie rights they didn't know how manage to make money on. 🍵 so they vent it through Foxnews. haha.
Is that a bowl of pea soup?
She's a cylon sympathizer
I maintain everyone on Battlestar Galactica was a Cylon.
That or Cylonism can spread as an STD.
This solves all plotholes, no further questions.
Space socialists who are always right are less woke than Wookiees?
You serious, Clark?
🤣 My dad and I say this to each other whenever one of us is gullible. I never see anyone quote it out in the wild.
hey! ENT was awesome
They went heavy on Bush doctrine apologism during the xindi storyline though
I think it was more of a 'this is a great opportunity for metaphoric storytelling' than 'let's celebrate the Bush Doctrine' though.
I think it failed, but that's another issue.
I got a lot of "we're facing an exitensial threat, therefore the ends justify the means" out of the 3rd season. It seemed really out of place in a star trek show. Maybe it wasn't an implicit endorsement of the Bush doctrine but it sure smelled like one to me.
It's been so long that I'd have to watch it again, to be honest. To me, the only good season of Enterprise was Season 4 when Manny Coto took over and just made it a season-long tribute to TOS. Ironically, Coto is a Republican. That said, he also made another terrific short-lived sci-fi TV show called Odyssey 5 with Peter Weller. I highly recommend its one season despite the cliffhanger ending.
RoboCop huh? Sounds interesting, I'll have a look. Thanks for the suggestion.
No problem. It was part of Showtime's sci-fi block which also had a pretty good post-apocalyptic show called Jeremiah, which showed that Malcolm Jamal-Warner had range beyond sitcoms. Showtime axed all of their sci-fi shows and it died. Stargate SG-1 was the only one that got saved by moving over to the Sci-Fi Channel, I think because it was being co-funded by Canada.
I wish he'd continued to story in a book or something. Everyone I've recommended it to has liked it. Looks like all of the episodes are on YouTube. Here's the pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWGbfQOFN60
Recently watched a couple of episodes and it definitely felt old-fashioned in a way that didn't feel appropriate for show about an utopian society from the early 2000s. At least the original series was progressive for the 1960s, which doesn't necessarily feel "woke" from a 2020s rightwinger perspective.
Or republicans just root for the enemies, that's always a possibility.
They don't have money but they do have the classic authoritarian hierarchy of SciFi.
Want to travel the galaxy? You need a starship. How do you get a starship? Join the federation.
Picard retired to a grape farm in France. How did he get that perk? Can anyone have a grape farm in France?
SciFi has an inherent power imbalance between the fleet and grounders. This comes from the ability to move around and drop bombs on people. As much as they try to stay in a socialist paradise, they still have tons of incidents that end up being solved the starfleet way.
It's a quote from starship troopers, but the idea of "Service guarantees citizenship" is what draws fascists to SciFi. It's a tough problem to fix in fiction and most of the time it's overlooked because spaceships are cool on paper. They make great entertainment.
The reality is that serving in the federation usually would mean you've never been on a starship bridge. You're 20 levels down in a maintenance hold with no outside view. Nobody tells you shit and all you know is the ship is being fired at and you're fucking terrified.
Even if you can pull up an external view on your tablet (which is a massive security problem), you still don't have any control over the fight. Now you can watch torpedoes coming straight at you and realize the captain can't stop it, and you can't either..
Morale would be constantly in the toilet, and without a bigger reward than to explore strange new worlds you can't see from the hold, people would be constantly quitting.
In conclusion, I'm not saying that star trek is fascist. I'm just saying it hand waves away 90% of the problems with their alleged utopia and people like watching action packed SciFi adventures.
I have a whole separate rant about weapons like lasers that travel at the speed of light. In the real world most fights would happen across distances, with ships being undetectable against the blackness of space, until a beam comes out of nowhere and instantly destroys your ship. But because it's fiction you can ignore this.
FRIENDLY NOTE: I don't mean this to sound combative, I just want to offer a different (more optimistic) perspective.
What's missing here is the central conceit of Trek: that humanity grew up. We could have a utopia now if people would just stop being greedy little shits, and decided to embrace empathy and forgiveness. There's nothing stopping every single person in a modern conflict from dropping their weapons, but we still want vengeance and punishment. and I'm not saying I'm above that: someone kills someone I love, and I'm going to want blood. On paper I'm against capital punishment, but I know if I was faced with a war on my doorstep, bombs being dropped, my morals may not hold.
In Star Trek, they had WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and after that...humanity finally had enough. Never again, but for all the ills of humanity, in a way.
So very few people in the Trek world would actually complain about working a shit detail, because they're in it for the greater good. We saw in TNG episodes that randos from the 20th century could just waltz around the ship at their leisure, and how lax security is...because people just generally behaved well. Humanity really did bind themselves to a stronger social contract, if that's the right term.
As for needing ships: there seem to be plenty of civilian ships out there, from trading and light exploration to proper science vessels. Not all Starfleet, though the shows have focused on them. So I can only imagine there's plenty of opportunity for non-Starfleet folks to get out there.
Granted, DS9 pushed back on all this a little, as the Maquis are comprised of a lot of Federation members that went feral/colonial and don't hold themselves to the Federation ideals that seem to keep the rest of humanity and others acting in good faith at almost all times. Likewise still plenty of BadMirals out there, and they do show the Tom Paris-es of the world in some kind of prison, so it's not all roses, and could definitely be spun as drops of dystopia in a utopia, but we're also told (and have no reason to doubt) that it's all well-above board, humane, and focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment.
Also, all that said, I do wish it wasn't so hierarchical, but that's my anarchist streak flaring up.
To reply to myself, because it merits its own giant text box: for anarchist-minded folks like myself, I'd highly recommend reading Homage to Catalonia, because it gives some glimpse of how things might work in a less-hierarchical military (in the cases like in Trek's Starfleet that weapons are sometimes unfortunately needed).
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201111.txt
The main sections I want to quote are:
The oligarchs and billionaires who own the corporate mainstream media and both political parties are the ones stirring up WOKE issues. Why? So you all hate each other and take your eye off the billionaire thieves stealing everything. This is why we can't have nice things.
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We’re in the mirror universe, aren’t we?
She can't even vulcan salute correctly, that's gang sign
No fucking way.