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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
While that may be true about Star Trek after the fact, the truth is that in order to get the federation off the ground, and the world economy in line to create the first Enterprise and crew and all the scientific advancements they made, required the entire world moving to a purely socialistic platform/agenda to achieve.
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.
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.
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.
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???
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.
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.