“Star Trek Has Always Been Woke”

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Jun 012022
 

And here it is, the dumbest thing you can say about Star Trek:

Fox News is wrong, Star Trek has always been “woke”

No, it hasn’t. Let me illustrate with a fairly famous scene:

An alien takes on the guise of Abraham Lincoln. The alien does it well enough that it seems that “Lincoln” actually thinks he’s Lincoln. Lincoln then goes on to use the term “negress,” which is not only a term describing race, but also sex. That in and of itself would be enough to set off the baying hounds of wokism… he’s “assuming her gender,” as well as using a word that was probably pretty cringey even back in the 1960’s, never mind 2022. And how does Lt. Uhura respond? By *not* being offended. By not *taking* offense, by not assuming that offense was intended. Nobody gets mad, nobody tries to police speech or teach “Lincoln” about his privilege or in any way demonstrate the sort of unhinged lunacy that defines wokism. Those characters just smiled and went on about their day. They were all about free speech.

“We’ve learned not to fear words.” Try to square that with wokism.

Also note in that clip above, Kirk points out that humans have finally learned to be delighted with what they are. Can you think of any concept more transphobic?

Honestly, that one clip above utterly refutes most of the world view of the woke. If people thought as suggested above… the woke would find no purchase and they’d be about as relevant as theosophists.

Also: Yes, the bridge of the Enterprise was multi-ethnic, certainly “progressive” for its time. But it was also *mono* cultural. Everyone spoke the same language, had the same basic values. They didn’t bow to “other ways of knowing;” they relied exclusively on objective reasoning and hard science. The only two who even had non-American accents were two white guys (Scotty and Chekov).

They all packed heat when they went someplace new and unknown. They didn’t freak out about other people packing heat. They kept and bore arms.

They worked within (and accepted) a hierarchical command structure. When the Captain ordered, you obeyed.

It was a meritocracy. You didn’t rise through the ranks based on identity politics.

They guarded borders and prevented, sometimes violently and lethally, illegal border crossings. Whether it was Romulans or Klingons trying to sneak across the Neutral Zone, or Borg trying to migrate en masse into the inner Federation… the cops showed up to shoo ’em off.

Capitalism was alive and well. Private traders and private property were not loudly touted as they would have been had Ayn Rand written the scripts… but you had asteroid prospectors like Cyrano Jones plying his trade; space yachts like the SS Aurora out there being stolen by dipshit space hippies (who, like modern wokies, abandon objective reality for mystical nonsense, and end up being injured and killed by their ignorance); con men like Harcourt Fenton Mudd trying to make their fortunes dishonestly in a system that does not seem to mind if you make a fortune *honestly.* Yes, “Next Generation” tried to portray a post-capitalist future, but that only worked insofar as they were a post scarcity society: anyone could have a desktop fusion reactor and a desktop food replicator. Even in Next Gen, average schmoes could own their own stuff, including ships and plots of land. The Ferengi were depicted as despicable capitalists… and yet, they were legally allowed to be as capitalist as they liked, so long as they didn’t cheat. *Everybody* did business with the Ferengi. Because capitalism gets stuff done.

Related: private property is sacrosanct. And more to the point, you are your own property, and nobody can tell you what to do with you (outside the bounds of following the legal orders of your superiors, of course). And “you” include artificial people like androids and sentient computer programs. You do not belong to the village or the society or the state. Anyone tries that crap and Kirk will phaser the bejeebers out of the control system.

The favorite episode of those claiming that Star Trek was “woke” back in the sixties is “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which shows irrational race hatred. As if irrational race hatred and modern progressive/woke politics are somehow mutually exclusive. These people love to hate white people, white history, white culture… and they hate ’em so much that they have expanded the franchise to hating Asians because they are “white adjacent.” Wokies *want* the government and society and businesses and regular people to treat people differently based on race. Captain Kirk and company not giving a rats ass about someones race? That sort of thinking is alien to wokism.

Numerous episodes deal with time travel, and they make great efforts to not change history. There’s an entire department of the Federation devoted to making sure that history remains unchanged. How about the woke? They make every effort to change history every chance they get. Whether it’s tearing down statues or re-naming institutions or *eliminating* institutions or destroying national pride by claiming that the founders or national heroes were actually evil or that the principals upon which this or that nation were built are evil and corrupt, the woke do everything they can to re-write history, the facts be damned. Modern wokies with access to time machines would be the Department of Temporal Investigations worst nightmare.

Related: the great works of western literature, philosophy, politics and science are still highly venerated. They have not been memory holed or retconned. Scotty is proud of his Scottish heritage. Chekov is proud of Russia. Kirk is clearly enamored of America and American history and virtues.

Numerous times humans are shown to have adopted the dress, food and customs of other races (Vulcans and Romulans spring to mind). And yet… nobody screeching about “Cultural Appropriation.” Everybody makes use of whatever they find that they like, that works for them, that profits them.

Several episodes deal with insanity. How does the federation, Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise deal with the mentally ill? They send them to high-tech looney bins which work to MAKE THEM SANE. They do not try to convince them and the people around them that their “emotional interestingness” is Stunning And Brave. They do not go along with delusions. They cure people who are bugnuts. Doctor McCoy would take one look at the blue haired weirdos who populate Twitter and Libs of TikTok and start mass injectiosn of anti-whacko meds.

And… colonies. Colonies galore. Colonialism on a galactic scale. Small colony vessels, vast colony armadas. Worlds getting terraformed to suit *our* needs.

 

Feel free to add to the list.

 Posted by at 12:32 am

Idiots in power

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 302022
 

First up: “President” Joe Biden says that a 9mm bullet from a pistol is “high caliber” and will blow a lung out of your body.Consequently, there’s “no rational basis” for having something as “high caliber” as a 9mm for “self protection” or hunting

He lies and says you couldn’t buy a cannon when the 2nd Amendment was written, when the government was also handing out letters of Marque and Reprisal, allowing private ship owners to work as armed privateers. He also says “you couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons” when the 2nd Amendment was written (“citation needed”).

The man who fled from Afghanistan goes on to say that in order to take on the government you need an F-15 or an Abrams tank. Which is why the Ukrainians, lacking F-15s and Abrams tanks, were conquered overnight by the Russians, I guess?? Then he goes on to say that “everybody’s getting more rational” about gun-grabbing.

And then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau goes ahead and gives a damn fine reason for Quebec to declare independence, opening the door for the western provinces to go their own way. A semi-autonomous region from from Alaska through BC and Alberta and Saskatchewan and Yukon down through Montana, the Dakotas to Texas  through Iowa and Nebraska  and New Mexico is looking better and better. Persuade Cook County to secede from Illinois and boy, do we have a deal.

To all those who would have citizens surrender their right to self defense to the same party that supports defunding the police, collective punishment for grievances from generations ago and wiping out vast swathes of their own offspring… how about “no.”

 Posted by at 9:37 pm

Planning for the future in space: 1963

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, projects, rockets, spacecraft, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 302022
 

HA! Found ’em. Well, there’s the better part of a day’s theoretical productivity flushed down the obsession s-hole. I’d *swear* I’d shared these before, but I can’t find evidence of that. Either I imagined it or I did so elsewhere. It *may* have been in support of “Man Conquers Space,” many long years ago, an exercise as dead and buried as the dreams of manned missions to Neptune by 2000. Anyway…

Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASA budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.

This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.

Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.

Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get? Facebook? Twitter? Weirdos and vanity and decay?

Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:

The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.

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 Posted by at 4:42 pm

This Twitter thread is *hilarious*

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, humor, politics, weapons  No Responses »
May 302022
 

There’s just entirely too much mockable hand-wringing authoritarian panic-mongery gibberish in here to really pick from. It’s *all* just the worst, from some of the worst people on Earth:

 

Basically it boils down to “Oh Noes! A child is being taught how to use a mechanical object that I’m afeared of!”

Imagine being offended by Autumn’s Armory. Getting outraged by a little girl possibly being able to fend for herself? Buzz off, groomer.

 Posted by at 1:06 pm

And now he was shot

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 292022
 

So much has changed in those two years. Two years ago, he died because he had taken a fatal dose of fentanyl, and now he’s been shot. But even more has changed:

Sigh.

 

 

 Posted by at 4:51 pm

“American Candy Shops”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 262022
 

This is a damned odd thing: across London (and apparently much of the rest of Britain), an inexplicably vast number of shops have opened up that purport to sell American candy and treats and junk food. I say “purport” because the prices are apparently insanely high, and they seem to always be empty. This is not the sort of thing that can be supported by any reading of free market capitalism; it’s really only explained by either criminal activity or socialism (but then, I repeat myself). A lot of locals believe them to be some sort of money laundering operation, but it’s vague on how that works. Perhaps someone comes in now and again and buys an armload of Oreos for the street price of, say, a trunkload of Afghani opium. If so, fine. But why are all these stores almost the exact same thing, that close to each other? And if they are a front for a criminal enterprise, why aren’t the British cops doing anything about them? Oh, wait… these are the same police who were scared of the grooming gangs and let them murder and traumatize vast numbers of British children rather than risk being called names…

 Posted by at 2:06 am

Another mass shooting at a school

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., news, politics, weapons  No Responses »
May 242022
 

Here we go again:

15 killed in shooting at Uvalde elementary school; gunman dead, Gov. Abbott says

Rather amazingly, they’ve already released the ID of the shooter: 18 year old Salvador Romas. I suspect that might be an attempt to get ahead of the inevitable political narrative that pops up about this sort of thing. A narrative that’s usually wrong, but serves a purpose.

If you were thinking about buying an AR-15 and/or mags and/or ammo… it’s *really* time to get on that. The politighouls will be all over this; there’s nothing professional gun grabbers love more than dead children. It’s unclear what weapons were used… a handgun almost certainly and *perhaps* a rifle. He seemed to have at least two AR-15’s, based on the social media posts he made.

Salvador Ramos: Suspect in Uvalde Elementary School Shooting

 Posted by at 5:05 pm

Eating their own in leftist sci-fi

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May 242022
 

This makes for an interesting read:

SFWA eats their own: Mercedes Lackey is made Grand Master, banned from Nebulas on same day

The SFWA is the formerly respected “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” presenters of the formerly respected Nebula Award. Mercedes Lackey is a… well, I guess now *formerly* respected writer of left-leaning science fiction, quite popular and successful, and now her reputation and potential future career could be trashed because she off-handedly referred to a black guy as “colored” rather than “person of color.” She’s 72. I suspect she spent a good many formative decades in a time when “colored” was the preferred term. So now the SFWA and the baying ghouls who populate it and Twitter are out for the blood of an old lady who many of them, five minutes earlier, considered a hero because she had gay characters in her stories back in the 80’s.

According to her husband, whose Twitter account virtue signals at a professional level, she has been badly emotionally damaged by the treatment she’s received. You tear up old people, sometimes you break them. I wonder just how happy and proud these bargain bin revenants will be if they manage to bring her to an end. I suspect “a lot.”

Here’s a potential explanation as to why so much of modern science fiction seems so awful: the gatekeepers have changed from the people who know what they’re doing and are good at it… to just whoever. And that invites the political whackaloons.

As the creep of leftist identity politics has spread throughout the organization, a startling erosion of quality came with it. This is perhaps most objectively apparent in their membership qualifications, which were changed in May of 2014. Until then, to be considered for “Active membership”, an applicant had to have sold three pieces of short fiction at a 8c per word or one book for $2,000 or more in a Qualifying Professional Market (in other words, a top-tier publisher like Tor or Del Ray). 

It was after this time that the “Associate Member” tier was introduced, which came with a gallingly low bar for entry – one paid sale of short fiction at a pro rate OR one that has been self-published, or published by an indie or small press for an amount equivalent to 8c per word. In other words, slap a thousand words or more up on Kindle, fork over your $90 annual fee, and you get to vote on the finalists for the Nebulas.

 Posted by at 1:54 pm
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