It still gets me that the Ferengi were mostly unknown to the Federation, yet by the time of DS9 they’re almost a widely known cornerstone of economics in the Alpha Quadrant.
There were many people who supported Mao in the 60s and 70s, mainly because the terrors of the Cultural Revolution and the failure of the Great Leap Forward were not really known in the West.
China was a closed society. Academics didn’t even travel there. That’s what they mean when they say Nixon “opened up” China in 1972. Prior to that, people only knew what the Chinese government told them about the country.
Huey Newton visited China in 1971, he knew what it was like before 1972. Many other revolutionaries from many other countries also visited China before 1972.
The U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 comes across a lost Earth colony during a survey beyond Federation space; a few generations after its establishment, a group of religious zealots take over the operations of the colony, creating a feudal society in which power is held by a select few “holy” families and the vast majority of colonists are little more than slaves. How would Kirk and crew handle this situation?
Earth and the Federation was communism. Admittedly an idealist version of it, came about because it was voted in by enlightened voters. But even then the Bell Riots showed that it was capitalism that caused conditions to arise in which the oppressed rose up against the failures of capitalism, and finally end it.
Not sure if you specifically meant something about Mao, but at least be aware of this. It’s the most basic theory of communism that capitalism fails, turns into barbarism, and the working class have no option but to revolt to resolve the crisis.
Star trek doesn’t really have a working class though, they achieved Marx’s earlier hypothesised state of the deprecation of manual labor (in the technical sense). Interestingly, most of the philosophy is around how to get to Star Trek, where Star Trek itself is kind of the biggest thought experiment we have for what we would do once we’re there.
Marx later evolved to believe only a revolution would destroy capitalism, and that’s what Mao focused on, the getting there. Through violence.
Mao took that to heart, and succeeded, despite his best efforts, in ultimately setting the stage for a China that’s more capitalist than it’s ever been.
That’s kind of the magic of star trek. Theres a violent past, a billion deaths, and it isn’t a new political system or a different economy that changes everything, it was a newfound hope that things could be better if people were better, and they worked together to make that happen.
I think younger Marx would have loved Star Trek. I’m not sure about older Marx or Mao.
Yeah I mean specifically that Mao killed millions of people through a combination of ineptitude and taking the lessons from the wars he fought in into government. The Federation is built on principles that run counter to Maoism in important respects like allowing differences of opinion and anti-authoritarianism.
like allowing differences of opinion and anti-authoritarianism
Getting steamrolled by nazis after inviting them to the table under pompous pretenses of “allowing differences of opinion” isn’t even a viable starter for a government. The Weimar Republic comes to mind.
The in-setting excuse for why the Federation survived at all, shaky as it was, is that it employs cryptofascists already and gives them unchecked privileges to surveil, harm, and murder on a whim to maintain the status quo: Section 31. You might be a fan.
Well I don’t think the federation government would be idiotic enough to try and make every farmer into an industrialist by forcing them to meltdown their own tools in the hopes of creating mechanised farming equipment only to end up with piles of unusable pig-iron slag, and thus contributing to another famine.
Says the Stalinist who’d be the first lined up at the wall and shot by the very ideology they support.
And for the record, fuck the Nazis, fuck the Tories, and fuck every single fascist rightwing or leftwing.
Democracy isn’t perfect, but it gives people a voice and if they work hard to maintain proper democratic institutions, it offers the better outcomes for the majority.
To be fair they wanted to execute a child for tripping. Fuck the Prime Directive in that case and fuck that planet. There should very much be a clause for protecting your own citizens provided they’re literal children.
Yeah, you could just remove that part. There’s no sense on holding the non-intervention principle so high that you comply with every crazy request from the natives.
Well, no, it must be left in because if you stick with your part of “every crazy request” then it completely ignores the entire spirit and purpose of the Prime Directive. Starfleet isn’t the be all and end all of morality. Their decisions affect them and the people within it but they’re not “Team America: Space Police.” They don’t go around judging which laws are good and which aren’t. ESPECIALLY when that perspective comes from them and them alone. Different cultures have different beliefs. Ignoring them and imposing your own on everyone is imperalistic as hell and directly against what Starfleet stands for.
Adding a clause to children works for me because the only purpose is to protect the children. The Prime Directive is still able to stand and work between cultures but this way Starfleet is able to say “Our cultures matter too and our culture says children whos brains aren’t done developing shouldn’t be executed for a mistake.” Sure it’s still fucked up that they’d do it to adults but they’re adults. They made their decision and their decision led to them doing stupid shit on an alien planet, fucking around and finding out.
Not complying with requests is not the same as imposing your morality. Nopping out of the contact with some population because they believe your people must be killed won’t destroy their culture.
But then, yeah, the show would have to contain hard decisions, and would be completely different from Star Trek (at least the newer ones).
If you want to make a point you can do so without needing to bash newer Treks for absolutely no reason. Just tired of this petty behavior. I’m out. I’ve got no time for this nonsense.
Yeah but the principle of it is to let them evolve on their own, when you’re already on their planet and they try to kill one of you then it’s different rules.
If it wasn’t then the romulans could just announce their new law makes being human illegal and Starfleet would just have to power down their shields and let them kill us all.
I think you’ve considerably misunderstood what the Prime Directive is… It doesn’t just apply to unevolved people. It also applies to civilizations that have warp too.
Also literally no, that is not what it means and is an insane comparison.
No you’ve just got it compartmentalized in your head into happy little feel good boxes because you don’t want to think about the actual complexity of reality (well fictional reality)
It’s insane not because it’s a bad comparison but because it makes clear the insanity in your worldview (or galactic view I guess)
Which is a real thing in canon. Bajor’s application was put in jeopardy when they briefly reinstated a caste system, which violated Federation equality rules.
They’re actually a republic. The Vedek Assembly has a lot of influence, but they’re fully separate from the Provisional Government. And they only have that much influence because the vast majority of the population follows the Bajoran faith. Think of the Assembly like the Vatican - powerful when everyone cares (Pope during the Middle Ages), but virtually powerless when nobody does (Pope now).
Wrong. I dunno why so many people falsely believe this. The Prime Directive applies to EVERY civilization. Not just pre-warp ones. By that logic, Picard wouldn’t have had a problem taking Wesley in that episode because those people had warp access.
That episode always kinda bothered me, because the universal translator was able to make English phrases out of it, which suggests a base language that would have to exist for the Tamarians themselves to understand their language. Surely, they could have shared some set of learning matirials that they would use to educate their young?
They should have sent the federation their history books. The only thing missing from the language is context. The fact that they speak in metaphors means that these stories exist somewhere for them to be referenced.
The thing is... do they? We don't know that they're actually referencing anything at all. I always thought that, once you got the vibe, you could contribute to the conversation with the phrasing and use the implied story of the phrase for the context.
I might say to you, "Kyle, when Janet left him." You don't need to know who Kyle or Janet are to infer that this might not be a good thing. Alternatively, I might say that, and mime like I'm wiping sweat from my brow as of relieved, and it might change the meaning.
We have no real way of knowing what history they might be referring to. Or if there even is one.
How would the Tamarians ever develop any advanced technology? Can you imagine an engineering discussion in Tamarian? Like, what is the word for capacitor? “Edward, when he enclosed conductive foil and electrolyte in a metal cylinder”? What would a Tamarian technical manual even look like?
I mean, they seem to have basic grammar for items and people and actions (“eyes”, “walls”, “fell”), it’s possible that they only use that weird allegory reference pattern when speaking formally to strangers or whatever. It’s also possible that their language in the original version makes more sense and is more practical and it just gets mangled by the universal translator.
it’s possible that they only use that weird allegory reference pattern when speaking formally to strangers or whatever
It seems like an awfully bad idea to use a communication method that doesn’t transfer what you mean if you have a better option available.
It’s also possible that their language in the original version makes more sense and is more practical and it just gets mangled by the universal translator.
I doubt that’s the case. I don’t see how a non-metaphor based language would get turned into a metaphor based one through a software bug. Some big hand waving would need to happen for that.
IMO the Tamarians probably have brains that are structurally different such that their metaphors come far more naturally.
“Our communication happens through references to well-documented historical events and figures, but still uses the same vocabulary and grammar as the federation and most of the galaxy’s civilizations. Maybe we should share a short summary with the captain, to assist in establishing relations.”
“No! I wanna wrassle the monster like Darmok and Jalad!”
The translator is able to translate the words themselves, but not the context needed to actually understand the translated phrases.
I find it no different than the translation weirdness in the Voyager episode “Nemesis” where the people are understandable, but all the words they choose are just slightly off of what’s normally spoken in English. Like… Nemesis instead of enemy. Glimpses instead of eyes. Trunks instead of woods. Why would the translator use those words instead of more common words that mean the same thing?
frankly i feel that most social species should be able to create a pidgin even if they have basically nothing else in common.
like… if we can communicate basic things with bears and deer, i think the idea that we somehow wouldn’t be able to communicate at all with aliens is a bit wack
They may have tried that in the past to no avail. The episode specifically mentions there was several failed attempts at first contact.
A guide only works if you understand the guide. Think of it like this, if I sent you all 1679 ones and zeros from the arecibo message to you, but you didn’t understand the concept of zero, you’d have a hard time understanding what the message meant, even if the message itself was self explanatory.
Their language isn’t just grammatically different, it is uses a fundamentally different structure, and the Tamarian brain might be structurally different as well, able to easily account for language when young. So there may not be much of a “base language” that the metaphors are built on so to speak.
Take a look at the Pioneer spacecrafts’ plaques. NASA scientists have broken down our abstract expression of distance to language-agnostic universal constants. I refuse to believe that a space-faring civilization with friendly intentions wouldn’t do everything in its power to find a common language, no matter how far removed from their spoken language.
They’ve also run things like the pioneer plaques (or maybe it was arecibo) past other scientists, who often have difficulty discerning the meaning behind them. If human scientists have difficulty discerning the meaning, I can only imagine what kind of difficulty aliens who speak in metaphor would have, let alone if they weren’t linguists/scientists, which appear to be the case in the episode.
We evolved to hunt, and so it is suspected that as a result of that, we understand arrows to indicate direction. A species that hasn’t evolved in such a way might not understand the meaning of arrows. Apply that same principle to language and you potentially have your problem.
Yeah Star Trek is so silly about manual tasks. You’d think they’d have Phaser Roombas (Phoombas). Like it’s either get a crew member to do it or you end up with an evil AI and barely any in between.
These are the voyages of the meme-ship Enterprise.
Its continuing mission: to explore strange new fads; to seek out new life and bring them into our fold; to boldly shitpost where no one has shitposted before!
To be fair, the whole plot point is that their species appears androgynous, but they aren’t always. The one he falls for is explicitly female, which he noticed subconsciously, and comments on once she reveals that she is actually female.
So I’d say he so much into women he sniffed out the estrogen in a species that tries their hardest to appear genderless. The ultimate heterosexual.
i had a thought about this.. ive been watching lower decks
the emergence of new life forms seems almost trivial to everyone.. its something that happens all the time.
for some perspective, humans are pulled out of other humans at hypothetical, but totally realistic rate of something like 1000 babies/hour... the 'miracle of life' at volume.
for each one of these humans, its clearly a momentous occasion. in aggregate, not so much.
edit: duuude its actually closer to 16,000/hour. damn
I feel like there’s a difference between a worker robot deciding it doesn’t want to live or die at the command of its humanoid creators, or a collections of nanites establishing an emergent intelligence, and a Federation Starship locking out its crew of 1,014 people and seeking out a white dwarf star like a salmon swimming upstream so it could give birth to an entirely new lifeform.
Even setting aside the ethical implications of using a ship capable of such a thing as transport, and putting into dangerous combat situations, is Starfleet prepared for similar events to happen on all their ships? What happened to the emergent lifeform after it left the Enterprise? Is it still out there? Why did it look like a screen saver from 1992?
But the crew of the Enterprise are fundamentally uncurious about the wider implications of the event.
“Amazing, isn’t it captain? An entirely new lifeform brought into being by the very ship we sail through the stars.” “Quite so, Number One. Tell me, what’s our next stop?” “We’re going to rendezvous with the USS Hood to pick up lieutenant Ro; she just finished her advanced tactical training.” “Excellent! We’ll have to throw her a ‘Welcome Back’ party in Ten Forward.”
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