¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m not particularly keen on projecting artists onto the finished product, particularly compared with the average outrage culture of US terminally online people. Even if I was, she isn’t a presence in my local media, so “generally unpleasant” wouldn’t be a factor anyway.
I think in-canon there are exceptions for medical treatment, although writers seem to forget about that depending on what metaphor they’re trying to put on top of augments. Not that it’s particularly consistent anyway, early in TNG there is a whole federation colony of genetically altered psychic rapidly aging children with infectious progeria and nobody seems particularly outraged by this.
And yeah, it doesn’t work in DS9, either, but that’s why you shouldn’t be trying to make a prequel to DS9 where you debate that specific issue in court. It just doesn’t work to give the episode a feel good ending to then leave the issue unresolved for centuries for nerdy lore reasons.
Hard disagree. The entire point of the episode is reflecting on how “we” (as in, presumably the US, which is what the Federation has always been a stand-in for) dehumanize people for convenience. Very much in the first person. There’s a reason it’s Goldberg making the slavery argument and not, say, Troy.
If you turn it into something that happens to a different, less “evolved” society it suddenly is no longer a metaphor of acknowledging the faults it suddenly isn’t self reflection and instead becomes gloating about how the US fixed racism.
So yeah, no, it’s pretty fundamental to the point that it’s Starfleet’s legal system that is threatening to dehumanize a sentient being, and not anybody else’s.
Nah, it’s a pretty consistent issue with the writing in SNW, honestly. And it’s not like they had another option, given that the show is very early in the timeline and the lore is all set.
The problem is wanting to do Measure of a Man around this idea for the character in the first place. It didn’t fit but they went for it anyway. They could have come up with a different, interesting sci-fi setup, but they just had to be referential. Which, admittedly, does seem like an issue with how the show is conceptualized, at least as of S2.
Absolutely the hell not. Ad Astra Per Aspera actually has all the issues people sometimes attribute to Measure of a Man with the added problem of being effectively a rehash of Measure of a Man with a much worse script.
I mean, in Ad Astra they are literally having a hearing about an officer having illegal genetics because she was modified by her parents. The entire notion is absurd, as the implication is that had she disclosed her mods she would have been rejected while hiding her mods is itself illegal. So suddenly Starfleet doesn’t just outlaw making genetic modifications, it straight up makes people WITH genetic modifications illegal.
Which is crazy and wouldn’t even fly on any semi-reasonable legal system today. It’s straight up genocidal, as presented. At the very least it’s actively racist. And for lore reasons they end up needing to simultaneously let her off the hook while keeping what is now recontextualized as outright apartheid stand because it needs to remain in place to still not make much sense when it applies to a different character later in the lore.
I get what they were going for, but man, it was one of the early instances of SNW wanting to do a thing and not quite getting the point of the thing they were trying to do.
Man, okay, I’m being pedantic, but it’s a pet peeve of mine, so bear with me. It’s “court-martial”, not “court marshall”. “Martial” means “pertaining to war” or, by extension, the military.
Apparently the process of setting up a hearing and appointing advocates that way is borrowed from US navy processes, which is a fun factoid I read somewhere, but it does raise questions about why Starfleet seems to model its legal system and a bunch of other stuff on an archaic national military tradition despite being neither American nor the military. But then again, it actually isn’t the first time Trek sets up that bit of lore, since it’s also the framing of the flashbacks for The Menagerie in TOS. Where, by the way, they outright say Starfleet has the death penalty, which just seems insane and barbaric.
The legal argument makes less sense, and I sympathise with the impulse to want a specific standard for sentience. But again, Trek shows a bunch of times they don’t have one. TNG alone has like what? Three, four examples of episodes where the plot hinges on whether a nanomachine or a non-humanoid entity or some other random hostile thing is sentient or not.
Man, it always gets me.
Not even the Picard speech, although it’s a good Picard speech.
It’s the slavery bit with Guinan. Goldberg is gut-wrenchingly good in that scene. She defines the character, the episode, the subject and the entire show with the energy of a “very special episode” but the gravitas and emotional punch of genuinely all-timer good sci-fi.
Somehow still less horny than TOS.
It was such a thin sliver of time, and yet it’s still so pungently 2023.
Look, I was there when email was a ISP thing. All emails looked the same everywhere because there was no support for anything but text, so that’s a supremely nerdy nitpick that doesn’t apply to the conversation.
Likewise to your other point. Nobody cares about all the mental gymnastics, the “it’s like email” explanation doesn’t work because no, it isn’t, I can tell it isn’t and no I’m not choosing anything, what are you talking about, I’m either signing up to a social network or I’m not.
Federation is a back end feature, it’s transparent to users, users don’t care about it. They will sign up for a thing and use it. Just like they signed up for gmail once and never thought about it again.
In any case, I’m not particularly keen on relitigating that. My solution to the concept of a social media endlessly repeating this argument and literally nothing else was to go elsewhere, so I’m good for now.
Well, for one, like the guy says below, it was often said to people as a means to explain how federation works, which immediately failed by way of people not thinking about or knowing how email works, either.
For another, my emails look like emails everywhere, both on source and destination. I don’t have a different character limit or feature set about what I can slap into my emails depending on what client I’m using, and I’m reasonably sure my email looks the same on the other end, no mater what client the recipient is using.
So the back end may work like email (not really, but it may approximate it), but the front end sure as hell doesn’t, so the explanation is more confusing than anything else.
Also, not the part of Mastodon specifically that people didn’t understand, they just tried to log in, were presented with a thousand instances, told choosing which one to use was super important but also that it didn’t matter and they should keep changing instances later, but also that migrating instances was not an easy process, but don’t worry, it’s just like email.
It was a hilarious endless loop of a conversation, like a Monty Python sketch. Or seeing people try to tell normies to use Linux.
Oh, man, I hadn’t heard the “it’s like email” nonsense since I stopped daily driving Mastodon. Real nostalgia going on here.
And DS9 is the conservative one with all the religion and the baseball and the war crimes and stuff.
TNG was run by a Frenchman who thought allowing bronze age species to believe in God was a barbaric act and went to bat as a human rights lawyer for an android who in turn let his first child pick their gender at will. All that while his polyamorous first officer was busy arguing against conversion therapy when pushed upon his trans nonbinary partner.
Yeah, sorry for being pedantic about it, it really isn’t a big deal.
You WOULD think the Prime Directive would include better definitions for both upper and lower bounds, right? And yet it remains one of the most inconsistent, arbitrarily applied fake regulations throughout the entire show. They can’t decide if it applies to direct contact, interference, interference but only if it’s widely known or whatever the hell.
Most of the fanbase seems to interpret it as “no direct contact unless they have warp”, but that is definitely not what is consistently implied at all.
And don’t get me started on the lower bound problem. Somehow it’s not cool to rescue a child from certain death, but it’s cool to quietly divert a comet, but also it’s cool to take a freshly born AI or nanomachine cluster you just created yourself and tell them everything about Starfleet.
My read on the intent is certainly that while Starfleet is all high and mighty they’re a bad week away from enacting dehumanizing regulations, and that this is something they’ve done multiple times in their history (as far as humans are concerned, anyway).
Which is a super enlightened argument to make in TNG. It gets a bit murkier now that the canon is that they did indeed end up creating a race of slaves out of Data’s template. But hey, I can pretend that Picard didn’t happen and so can you.