CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]

they are peas

kamala’s influence on politics is ever present

for a company that loses money with every transaction, this will be the kursk offensive of business deals

by deciding what charlemagne was you just re-triggered the franco-prussian war

Most gazans are minors and Lancet estimates of the famines/killings we saw put total deaths at close to 200k. That was in Oct 2023 EDIT: 2024, thanks for the correction truthcarp.

Liz Truss killed the Queen. JD Vance killed the Pope.

the bad part about living in south america is that you’re in here. the good part is that i dunno i think people will just forget to nuke us.

milei accused of not lying when he called himself a libertarian

Pillars of Eternity’s Chanter is all about summoning, with the sequel adding more options there as well. You have many different types of Summons, and on the side you also juggle some active spells and buffs as ‘Chanter’ in this universe is kinda like a ‘Bard’: their songs and poems is how they summon things.

I can sympathize with your position. I wasn’t there for the older backlashes, but I wouldn’t have avoided Enterprise for an instance just because its more or the same or not as good. For one, I was actually amused by the Bush Era America Fuck Yeah militarism that managed to seep into it even if slightly.

That said if I was to act as a filter for all the feedback: there is indeed an undercurrent of cruelty in modern trek. With Discovery it seemed like it was just the writer’s inability to imagine an aspirational future. But it slowly mutated to something more malevolent with what I described from Picard and Section 31. Which is why Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks is worth a watch. The cruelty isn’t the point there.

I wouldn’t put it past good ol’ Bill.

I think that at one point Shatner was gearing up to Act and make this heartfelt speech before the cameras - only to be cut off by Bezos summoning women from the ether for a champagne bottle opening. It felt like the guy was allergic to even performative introspection and it’s not like I can’t buy that Shatner was genuinely moved by going to space.

As a non american, one of the things I find most interesting about Star Trek is that it has been running for so long that it betrays the american zeitgeist and the writers’ cultural milieu for every decade it is written in. So you learn a lot about these people (and the american people as a whole) just by looking at the sorts of things they put into these stories.

The stories of how Star Trek came into being have changed over time, even though certain fundamental truths remained there. Take the formation of Earth’s utopia for an instance. In the original series the mainstays were a trial by fire in WW3, the eugenics dictatorships and vulcan solidarity. These are quite revealing for an american population that just came out of WW2, was plunged into the Cold War and was in the grips of a form of neo-great awakening that involved amongst other things alien worship. 90s Trek kept all of those plot points, but shifted the emphasis just a bit as it revisitted everything. The biggest contribution of 90s Trek comes from DS9 and Enterprise because they made it clear that the rise of the human utopia was a political affair, not a technological one. Things like the Bell Riots and neither the Humans nor the Vulcans having replicators make it clear to the audience that it wasn’t magic that solved Humanity’s material conditions, it was work.

Current Trek stumbled into all of that with jaded cynicism, so it couldn’t help but ruin it all. Rolling back the acquisition of Replicators because they are Star Trek iconic was bad. Where it crosses into outright evil however is in the premise behind Star Trek Picard. The series decided to ‘tackle’ current issues like deportations and climate collapse. As naive as the Bell Riot storyline was, in Picard humanity can either find a magical microbe Jupiter’s moons or whatever - that solves all disease, hunger, climate collapse and so on - or it is fated to become the biggest genocidal fascist dictatorship of all time. This reflects the writers’ preconceptions about the world they live in. There’s no politics. There’s no redistribution. There’s no caring for each other. Either americans magically solve all their problems with an app or, well, its genocide time. C’est la vie.

Think I’m inferring too much? They spelled it out during promos for the Section 31 movie. DS9 introduced Section 31 as a rogue agency, antagonist and villain both. Their actions were Not Good. You can at best argue that the actual heroes won the Dominion War regardless of what Section 31 did and then, at the end, capitalized on Section 31’s actions to avert a massacre. Which would still be in spite of Section 31’s beliefs: because Odo couldn’t have cured the Great Link of Section 31’s virus if Bashir and O’brien hadn’t stolen the cure against Section 31’s wishes. If Section 31 had gotten their way, the Federation would have won the war without their help, the Changelings would have gone down fighting and the final battle for Cardassia would still have ended with the genocide of the Cardassians. Arguably the Alpha Quadrant could have lost so much in that final battle that whatever was left of the Dominion could still pour in and do irretrievable damage in retaliation. All because the rogue agency just knew better.

What does current Trek say about this? Well Section 31 is good and based actually. They are the heroic CIA, keeping the world safe so the dumb liberals in the audience can enjoy the good things in life. That’s what the promos said. That’s what the story is about. Good spies making the tough choices, for the benefit of all.

Excuse me its not a waste of money. Its years of fruitful work. You wouldn’t hire an intern out of community college, would you? Someone without any connections a good family?

I think that besides all that its also a… weird suggestion? ‘Go to the shame corner and look at the wall!’ sounds like something an alien would say when managing children. It comes across to me that they’re not actually engaging with a discussion about permissive parenting, they’re defending a specific practice which they think is legitimate. Without stopping and thinking about whether it makes sense.

I can imagine some hyperactive children I know hating the silence corner for all of 5 minutes before they forget it was even a thing. But the parents I know wouldn’t even think of using it. They’d retract phone/toy/game privileges instead.

It’s the need to own culture. Liberal Conservatives and Conservative Liberals in the USA are used to being pandered to by the dominant culture. So it stands to reason that something as revered and aspirational as Star Trek agrees with their beliefs. And let’s face it: Star Trek has always been a creature of the american zeitgeist. From Captain Kirk reading the Declaration of Independence (or was it the Constitution) to a bunch of aliens to the very fact that Star Trek is a high mindedly liberal military outfit in space. There’s a lot of room there to accomodate americans of every kind. It’s just that the series goes just a little bit farther than everything else, and so there’s a need to own it and all possible interpretations of it.

I think TOS and TNG era Star Trek were just american liberalism 20-30 years into a future, hopefully more generous form. Current Trek is outright evil and testament that Star Trek was a bit too hopeful. But in the end of the day, it was hopeful in an all american form.

I think that’s when you get a Thatcher instead of a Reagan.