But the Olympia medicinal mushroom company has responded by hiring costly union-busting firms OLYMPIA (May 3, 2024) — The on-site workers at Fungi Perfecti, which produces gourmet and medicinal mushrooms marketed as Host Defense Mushrooms, have announced their intention to form a union with Labore...
Meant to post this in main star trek community, not ten forward, d'oh.
If this is the wrong place for this, I apologize in advance and it's okay if it gets removed.
First, it was bad enough for Elon Musk references, but now...
The real life Paul Stamets, for which the character is named, hired union busters at his business, Fungi Perfecti.
But rather than recognizing and respecting these workers’ right to join together free from management interference, the union reports that Fungi Perfecti has responded by hiring the union-busting firms of Littler Mendelson P.C. and the American Labor Group. These firms represent clients such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks, all of which have faced multiple Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board for illegally interfering in their employees’ freedom to unionize.
These firms have attempted to slow the momentum of Fungi Perfecti workers’ organizing drive with typical union-busting tactics like “unrequired” meetings that are heavily encouraged.
“ALG has been distributing anti-union propaganda that, in some cases, are outright lies,” said Derek Sewell, a warehouse worker for Fungi Perfecti. “But we will not be discouraged. It’s just unfortunate that they are spending thousands of dollars on union-busting to try to discourage us rather than investing in making Fungi Perfecti and better and more sustainable place to work.”
Anyway, my opinion is firmly that if they're going to make references, it needs to be about people who are already dead, whose negatives are known, and who can't come back and fuck your reference up by becoming a horrible person as your life goes on.
Because these living people keep revealing how Un-Star-Trek they are, imho.
Despite taking place in the future, Star Trek can't predict the future. And they have definitely used problematic people who were already dead (Sigmund Freud) or portrayed them in a pretty racist way anyway (Genghis Khan).
Edit: On top of that, you have actors in Star Trek who are thoroughly loathsome people like Whoopi Goldberg and Joe Piscopo.
Subtle reminder that our own culture still repeats the lie that Edison "invented the lightbulb" and teaches children about how Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin revolutionized the American textile industry without mentioning how it also created a massive boom in demand for enslaved labor. And we all tend to ignore the fact that Einstein was a serial adulterer and a monster to his first wife, or that James Watson was a racist ass. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a terrible person and died because of his belief in quackery, but his contribution to tech history will outlast those footnotes. Henry Ford was one of the worst humans on the planet, but he changed the course of the manufacturing industry forever, and he gets credit for that in spite of him being a huge piece of shit.
The overall effects of Elon Musk's contributions to the culture have yet to be fully litigated, but his influence on the direction of private space travel is undeniable, and is probably the one thing about him that will outlive him, especially with regard to a space-oriented future society like the Federation. To them, his idiotic and toxic antics on Twitter/X/whatever-dumb-shit-he-renames-it-to-next are probably a long-forgotten historical footnote.
Sure, we expect the enlightened future of Star Trek to be better with its historical revisionism, but the personalities of famous innovators or self-proclaimed luminaries often fade into obscurity while the lasting consequences of their influence remains. People on Star Trek are meant to be an idealized version of what we strive for, but they are far from perfect, and the veil of history often obscures the ugly truth of how society-shifting change often comes about.
First Contact touches on this very topic by portraying the legendary Zephram Cochrane as a philandering drunk who lets his colleague Lily Sloane do much of the hard work while he gets all the credit.
History is messy and posterity doesn't always get it right.
And I'm saying that is not something done even when picking dead people. Read what Freud did to Emma Eckstein sometime. I doubt whoever wrote Phantasms was aware of it.
I'm aware that Whoopie once said that the holocaust "wasn't about race, but man inhumanity towards man." For which she apologized. Is there something else that makes you say she's thoroughly loathsome?
Maybe the better approach is that we as audiences should understand that no real person is a saint and that whether or not it leaves a bad taste in our mouths, otherwise morally reprehensible people can still be responsible for profound achievements and progress.
Somebody else brought up Freud already, who many would call a deeply unethical man and whose conclusions are often debunked or thought better of in the modern era... Yet the impact of Freud, despite these shortcomings, remains basically inarguable.
I think the problem is that in the past 20 or so years we've started to read acknowledgement in media as endorsement by media, but those are two very separate things.
The thing is, when you look at Musk, he personally does not have any real accomplishments. He’s a wealthy man (inherited wealth that was made by exploiting black workers in South Africa’s emerald mines) who happened to fund existing projects that happened to have some semblance of success; in other words: any rich guy could have done the same thing. Worse yet, he is also a well-known man-child who supports wild conspiracy theories that are only popular with an unpopular segment of the population. Not to mention him being a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who has a penchant for suppression g free speech that does not align with his beliefs.
I fully agree with all of this and will add that he's also obviously a nazi or at least nazi-sympathizer as well.
I definitely wasn't speaking about Elon fucking Musk here because he has never been directly responsible for anything of value in the world, far as I can tell.
But still abstractly my point stands, assuming we're identifying people with actual contributions to society rather than just the money to buy the contributions of others.
I suspect if social media has been what it is now when Edison or Jobs were alive, they might have self-immolated just as badly as Musk has. Both of them were by all accounts terrible people who history paints as visionaries because the force of their personalities gave them the weight of the innovations which occurred under their watch. Taking credit for the achievements of your underlings and business partners is a long tradition across many industries.
People in the future got it wrong, that's all. It happens more often than most of us want to admit.
I think the problem is that in the past 20 or so years we’ve started to read acknowledgement in media as endorsement by media, but those are two very separate things.
Bingo. It's infuriating listening to people think they're smart, that can't seem to grasp that characters aren't always there to be lionized. People saying something like "Homelander is an awesome character" gets interpreted by morons as endorsement, and often these same people complain the creators let villains have a sort of charm or charisma (not that Homelander has either, that's a weird one, the actor is fascinating to watch and I don't even know what you call that)
I actually really like this topic here in 10 Forward. It becomes more of what 10F really is anyway: a place to talk about stuff. Sometimes it’s comedy night (memes), sometimes it’s murder-mystery night, sometimes it’s slam-poetry night. It’s all good, let’s talk about all things Star Trek.
I will add my voice to the chorus, real life isn't a cartoon where good people are morally, ethically and physically in the right. Real people and real situations have layers, and are rooted in fundamentally human wants, needs and limitations.
I get that if you're a brand, and living only in a symbolic sense, you might want to distance yourself from symbols that don't align. But us humans, actually having experienced reality, should know that some or even most actions aren't perfectly informed, selflessly good from every perspective, for all of time.
And frankly, I think wanting and needing that unambiguity is dangerous as you're dehumanising people and disempowering yourself from reflecting upon behavior and setting proper boundaries. That, and/or a sign of considerable stress (compare with black & white thinking or catastrophic thinking).
People can be flawed and make awesome contributions. The theory of gravity is good, useful, and a significant discovery forming the basis of much of industrial and modern society, even though it was made possible only by colonialism and systematic oppression.
Socrates/Plato made astounding work contributing to the development of every field of knowledge, despite being weirdo homeless hermits before forming a cult.
Be inspired by the greatness in people, not the flaws.
Elon Musk is literally only successful because he started out with tons of money. His vision is putting the letter X in every company he's involved in. He's not only personally a piece of shit, he also actively tries to stop transit projects from happening to potentially bolster his sales a tiny bit. I'm thinking of hyperloop which was vaporware from day 1 explicitly designed to halt California HSR.
Not only that but he is the SOLE reason twitter is a Nazi shithole now. He is an actual Nazi sympathizer and frequently boosts their messages on his massive platform.
The real visionaries of this world are the political activists that are pushing for change.
That's not how people are using the term. They prefer to claim if people enjoy art that is based on/conveys a different viewpoint than the viewer, the viewer didn't understand it, rather than the viewer not being a mental midget that can't understand/enjoy something without agreeing.