Did Somebody Say "Star Trek"?

[mindysan33]

Okay, now he’s talking about the captains as “philosopher kings” (Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway) who “forego” family to be a part of a “higher elite” who go into Star Fleet…

Um… Did he not watch DS9 AT ALL… Family is an incredibly important part of DS9, in fact…

not just the Siskos, but…

Who is also, it will be remembered by us here, a lower decker, who was an enlisted man who had fought in a war…
And let’s not forget the surrogacy arc with Major Kira, too, and how that challenges the notion of the nuclear family… They named the baby Kirayoshi, even! Remember that episode where the b plot was Chief O’Brien carrying Kirayoshi around because he wouldn’t sleep if he wasn’t holding him? REMEMBER THAT… But sure, these are people who “forego family”… OH, AND THAT WHOLE ASS EPISODE WITH JUST JAKE AND THE CAPTAIN IN A FUCKING SPACESAILBOAT…

Also… LOL, it’s funny cause it was…

honeslty, he seems to be phoning this in in all sorts of ways. He pretty much wants to make the argument that it’s liberalism, but he doesn’t want to interrogate some of the more complicated parts of Star Trek that pop up in the later series (or the later seasons of TNG, for that matter) after Roddenberry passed away…

Also, he had a clip quoting Roddenberry talking about the accident he was a commercial pilot, and then he just mentions his WW2 service record? As if what he was describing was from the war? This is basic trek-knowledge 101, I’d think, the plane going down in the Syrian dessert, is it not?

Pan Am Flight 121

Think is, I think him arguing that Star Trek was something of propaganda with regards to modernatization theory and liberalism could easily be on solid footing here, but he’s really fucking sloppy with some important details and with the way he just rejects out of hand the post-scarcity socialism argument, as if it’s self-evident that it’s a configuration of liberalism…

[KathyPartdeux]

[mindysan33]

RIGHT?!? I doubt he’s seen that series because he called it “Below Decks”… I mean, Steve Shives didn’t like the show, but at least he actually WATCHED TEH THING before he made a video critical of it…

And now he’s going on about how the characters are like “men of antiquity” rather than men of the future…

[KathyPartdeux]

Men of antiquity? Yet every time they talk about the federation society it’s about how they left earth’s less developed time behind.

He doesn’t watch the show on the screen; just the one inside his skull.

[mindysan33]

I guess that’s so… to some degree we all bring our views and preconceived notions to the culture we consume, so that’s not a huge surprise. I think they did work in references to ideas of the past, but I would hardly call the captains “philosopher kings”… he mentions at one point that you don’t get much about the non-star fleet part of the federation, and there is a lot of vagueness about how humanity got from Zephram Cochran’s flight to space utopia… fortunately, some of that got filled in by later iterations of Star Trek. All the stuff around the Maquis for example in TNG and Ds9 (and to some extent Voyager) fills in some of those gaps, as did Enterprise. I also think that there is still a strong argument to be made for fully automated luxury space communism/socialism, too. Either way, it’s a show that does in fact show a sort of “end of history” of enlightenement struggles that started way back in the 17th century… I think the discussion is the most interesting part, rather than some side being more right than the other… Isn’t THAT what good culture does? Not give you answers, but give you space to imagine answers and debate and discuss that?

The thing is, I’m not entirely adverse to the sort of argument he’s making, that it was a sort of propaganda about American liberal values and the direction it could take us in the future. I see Roddenberry as ultimately an institutionalist, who saw that American democratic system could be a model for future global development.

He did argue that TNG is the sort of actual realization of Roddenberry’s vision, but I suspect that he found series since lacking, especially the post-JJ Abrams Kelvin Universe movies.

He wraps it up by praising Roddenberry but noting that Trek is flawed, and that people should check out Iain Banks…

So… I don’t know… it’s not all trash, but he has some real blind spots that seem to be driven by a kind of arrogance about his expertise on sci-fi. If people are interested in want to see it, here ya go… If you can get past the AI bullshit at the beginning, it’s not all bad…

Star Trek is propaganda

[Sorry… borked a part of my answer and had to reconfigure]

[FGD135]

Maybe he actually means the federalist society. And got this name wrong as well.

[Lexicat]

And let’s not forget Quark and Rom are family!

[mindysan33]

No, he doesn’t seem to have any love for right wing bullshit either. I’m thinking he’s one of those “rational centrists” types, which I did not really get from his earlier videos. Since he did one about Stanislaw Lem and Solaris, he’s really had lots of criticism for social/communism, but not in a neo-reactionary kind of way…

[mindysan33]

And don’t forget Nog!

Or Leeta!

He just sort of dismissed them based on the old argument about the Ferengi being “space Jews”… Which… I guess, but DS9 really rescued them and “humanized” them, all while not dismissing their criticism of star fleet and the Federation out of hand.

[Lexicat]

Err… right! (I was actually thinking of Nog, but wrote “Rom”… was there a ‘Rom’ character?).

[mindysan33]

Yeah, Rom was Quarks (the bartenders) brother, and Nog was Rom’s son from his first marriage. Leeta was his Bajoran wife later in the series… and let’s not forget their feminist mother, Moogie, or rather Ishka, who became the power behind the Ferengi throne and got the laws changed to where women could wear clothes and earn profit!

[KathyPartdeux]

You reminded me of one of my favorite scenes.

- YouTube

[mindysan33]

Good old Quark!

[sqlrob]

[fiddlingfrog]

- YouTube

July 17!