/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
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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.
Guiñan is an awesome character and I throughly wish they’d fired Whoopi from that role in Picard. I thought Ito Aghayere did a great job in the role.
All the Musk references in Discovery are so cringe. I just try to pretend that in that universe, Musk was a decent human.
in the kelvin universe someone time traveled back and replaced him with a talking pie for some reason and that's why everyone thought he was a saint
Disco doesn't take place in the Kelvin universe, and even if it did, Musk lived before the timelines diverged.
Well, you see, um, the reason it still works this way is because shut up.
Fair enough.
Let’s all just pretend it’s a movie. You can get away with a lot more if you do that.
Can his best friend be a killer robot driving instructor?
Kirk and crew traveled back in time to our own past on multiple occasions, ipso facto the Kelvin timeline split causes ripples both directions in time.
Kirk and crew traveled back to our past from the prime timeline, though. We have no evidence that the Kelvin timeline Kirk did the same thing.
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.
The point is about making better decisions in the future, not an expectation that existing problematic choices will be magially undone.
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.
Having to research the entire biography of a historical figure before putting them in a TV show is a bit much. And if you're only going to accept angelic historical figures with no known wrongdoing, the pickings will be slim. Mister Rogers can only be depicted in so many shows before we run out of ideas...
That was kind of my point, but also I would say that A) Emma Eckstein isn't some secret, it's just not talked about much and B) that's a hell of a lot worse than what the real Paul Stamets is involved with. The only real difference is that Paul Stamets hasn't been dead long enough for a writer in the 1990s to not realize what a colossal piece of shit he actually was.
That's the whole point, isn't it? We shouldn't cherry-pick living figures as something that future people should universally loathe, because there are many, many examples of historical figures whose loathsomeness they (and we) also gloss over.
Freud was at the time under the influence of his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Fliess, whom Freud had called "the Kepler of biology", had developed theories today considered pseudoscientific, including the belief that sexual problems were linked to the nose by a supposed nasogenital connection. Fliess had been treating "nasal reflex neurosis" by cauterizing the inside of the nose under local anesthesia. Fliess conjectured that if temporary cauterization was useful, surgery would yield more permanent results. He began operating on the noses of patients he diagnosed with the disorder, including Eckstein and Freud. His surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; Fliess had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity, the subsequent removal of which left her permanently disfigured. Though aware of Fliess's culpability, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror, he could only bring himself to delicately intimate in his correspondence to Fliess the nature of his disastrous role and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein's hysteria. Freud ultimately reasserted his full confidence in Fliess's competence, making Eckstein responsible for the catastrophe by concluding that her post-operative haemorrhages were "wish-bleedings", caused by her hysterical longing for the affection of others.
face-saving
Talk about poor choice of words.
I'm out of the loop. What's the problem with Whoopy?
TL;Dr she's old and rich so problems that don't happen to her don't matter
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?
She said it, apologized, then said it again and apologized again.
It's fine, not like there's an alternative non-meme Star Trek discussion community anyways.
It's completely dead.
I agree it would be nice if people would post there more, which is why I’m suggesting it
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.
Agreed