Posted on 08/19/2012 3:56:19 PM PDT by EveningStar
Sorry to all you Star Trek fans out there. I may be the only science fiction fan in the universe that really hates his guts. He stands in the annals of history with Karl Marx as one of the most vile perpetrators of socialism and communism this planet has ever known. I call him the used philosophy salesman…. and he was good at that job, one of the best.
Today is the anniversary of his birth and I have been constantly reminded of this all morning. Tributes everywhere I look to the man who turned the brains of a generation of science fiction fans to utter mush. If only he had passed on ten years earlier. We would never have had to put up with the inane techno-babble ramblings and neo-communist preaching of the Next Generation.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefreehold.us ...
There’s no wealth but some certainly are more equal.
God would forgive you. If it existed.
Not really, but take a college course at a liberal college and that is what they spew.
Communism had a history before these two kooks came along. Plato tried it with his Republic and the Perfect Society. Didn't work out so well in 380 BC either.
read
Star Treck was pathetic. I remember trying to explain to a Trecky why why the Enterprise was a bad design. I gave up trying to convince him that inertia still existed without gravity.
who gives a crap?
Many scifi writers are/were of the socialistic, utopianistic, kumbayaic persuasion, as those themes ran through their works.
Lighten up Francis! I was a Trekkie in 1970 and I still am. I laugh at the economy of the United Federation of Planets because the near limitless energy of the antimatter reactor, combined with the matter replicator actually make communism work.
In the Star Trek universe, you really can make Marx’s dream come true and that’s actually a good thing. It illustrates the folly of trying to make it come true in a world where energy comes largely from buring fossil fuels and every manufactured product must start out as a specific set of raw materials processed by labor on expensive, high maintenance machinery and then shipped to the consumer by mechanical transportation.
When a Leftist starts telling me about the “freedom” of communism because people don’t have the profit motive anymore, I usually talk about Star Trek as the reason why it doesn’t work and what kind of technological advances it will require to actually make their dream work.
I’m glad Rodenberry was such a progressive because he proved that communism only works when you can ignore Newton’s Laws of Physics.
Gah, I am such a freakin nerd.
I’m more irritated with the idiotic idea that if its even seen we’ll be somehow infected and incapable of making our own decisions.
The are a lot of other laws you have to ignore also.
>>Star Treck was pathetic. I remember trying to explain to a Trecky why why the Enterprise was a bad design. I gave up trying to convince him that inertia still existed without gravity.
He was a very lame Trekkie. “Mr Scott’s Guide To The Enterprise” explains exactly why that design works. If the warp field was real, the shape of the Enterprise is the most efficient shape possible. (Yeah, its all fiction...I’m just pointing out that your Trekkie friend was not very knowledgeable in his Trek lore.)
I don’t think his problem is Gene so much as people, including himself, that grossly miscomprehended Trek. It’s not communism in Trek. The Federation has very little commerce but they also have replicators, so they don’t have much need for commerce. Meanwhile outside of the Federation commerce is apparently very big, there’s two full races that are commerce masters. Now as for the folks that studiously ignore the implications of replicators and Orions and Ferengi well that happens, but don’t blame the source, some people are just confused no matter what they watch.
Not to mention they used inertial dampening fields.
The Star Trek TV shows are full of contradictions themselves. In one you hear there is no more currency, that “we work to better ourselves”. In the next one, you hear about gold-pressed latinum. All the science is fake, anyway. Roddenberry had a staff of people who actually knew some real science, but rarely listened to them.
Although it boggles my mind how you dampen 'inertia'!
...or a greenophobe.
My response would have been, "Then talent, skill, and a better you is your currency."
At least the Pilgrims gave us a bitchen Holiday, Thanksgiving!
>>Although it boggles my mind how you dampen ‘inertia’!
It uses the same basic principles as the warp field, di-lithium crystals, FTL subspace communications, and time travel by slingshotting past the sun.
It’s FICTION. Superman can’t really fly either. :-(
Star Trek existed in a post-scarcity society. I don’t think you could really compare it to our current situation.
Exactly. Any force not acting equally on all parts of the craft would cause terrific stress focused on the attaching points of the spindly struts between them. OMG! I’m turning into Sheldon Cooper!
P. S. I am honored to have received two replies from you since you became a celebrity.
Firefly was better.
Try Firefly.
The anti-Star Trek.
Beat me by 4 seconds!
GMTA.
My mother turned off the TV during that episode.
I did manage to watch it during re-runs.
Star Trek was pure liberal fantasy.
They always spouting off about “The Prime Directive”
(non intervention into other planets affairs for you non Trekkies)
Then,in nearly every other episode, they violate it.
Otherwise they’d have no show and be aimlessly drifting in space!
I did mention it was liberal fantasy, didn’t I?
While I agree with you it has never stopped me enjoying it!
Yeah I do love me some firefly.
Oh, man - the Orion Slave Girl! I wish I had a buck for every time I’ve had (and still do have) nasty thoughts about her...
It always struck me that it was “after-the-fact” that Roddenberry started embracing a kind of mushy philosophical we-are-the-world liberalism, sort of catering to the youthful fans who kept applying pretentious liberal contexts to “Star Trek” (which in his mind was conceived as “Wagon Train” in space... hardly something more).
Anyway, Roddenberry’s rarely-seen earlier series, “The Lieutenant,” about the military in peacetime, is coming out on dvd this very month. I suppose the episodes can now be scanned for attitudes and ideologies. But like Roddenberry’s “Have Gun Will Travel” scripts, I doubt much will be found in those terms.
That's Dr. Sheldon Cooper!!
“...folks that studiously ignore the implications of replicators...”
So where do they the parts and energy(especially the energy) for the replicators when the replicators break down?
(I know, I know The Hologram?)
“...folks that studiously ignore the implications of replicators...”
So where do they get the parts and energy(especially the energy) for the replicators when the replicators break down?
(I know, I know The Hologram?)
“Plato tried it with his Republic and the Perfect Society.”
Plato’s Republic was never put into practice anywhere. He may have wrote the work in 380 B.C., that did not make it an introduced practice of any government anywhere; none of the Greek governments or the Romans.
That does not excuse the governments that were in practice at the time - tyrants most often; it’s just that they did not attempt to copy Plato’s Republic.
Or her sister...
Hates his guts? Really? Not, oh, a strong dislike? Maybe, not a big fan? I mean, it sounds a little silly to hate someone’s guts because they created a tv show, that apparently, the author only has a passing familiarity with.
Now hating the guts of George Lucas for the “Phantom Menace”, that’s not silly at all.
Original Star Trek series had its good moments...Check out “The Omega Glory” from 1968...
But Next Gen was a disappointment...
For any science fiction fan looking for a change from such socialistic fare...
Give Heinlein a try...
Breath of fresh air!
Well that’s the QUESTION of the replicators. But there’s a lot of good and bad implications to replicators that people ignore. The obvious one is that in a replicator society needs are solved, people get to eat and be entertained and get clothes and all those other basic needs that fit in a microwave for free. The big BAD implication is that about 60% of the world is now out of work, the entire subsistence providing retail supply chain just died.
You combine providing for all of society’s basic needs with 60% unemployment you get a world where not can communism work, you HAVE to have it. You basically wind up in Judge Dredd world. Which goes a long way to explain why so many people are willing to colonize random planets, and also why so much of the population is attached to the military in some way.
You could argue that Marx and Engle never put their theory into practice either.
Uncle Joe did and we see how that worked.
My point is, communism has been tried, both in theory and in practice and it has never worked unless you fudge the numbers, or as another posted said, ignore the laws of physics.
You beat me to it. Star Trek NG had two things; dilithium crystals (almost limitless energy) and replicators. But people still bought things. Remember when Dr. Crusher wanted to buy fabric? (Far Point?) Also holodecks could supply any experience one could want and it was only a matter of “first come, first serve.” It’s impossible to say what effect these technologies would have on a society.
Very gently, and spinning in the opposite direction while moving laterally using the 'left thumb' rule. ;^)
“Not really, but take a college course at a liberal college and that is what they spew.”
actually no - the published written theoretical principals of communisim/socialism, according to most Liberal poli sci professors today, began in Germany about the same time as Marx was writing Das Capital but before that work was published;
some regard the early German writing as closer to todays “democratic socialism” - the kind of socialism much of western Eureope sees itself as practicing, than to the “communism” spawned by Marx as taught by Lenin.
To us that distinction makes no difference.
“Demcratic” or not, both forms ascribe to the idea of state ownership, or complete controlf (or a combination of the two) of the “means of production” and “social equality” in the distribution of the proceeds therefrom.
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