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Sarcastr0 posted:Gateway is a 1977 science fiction novel by American writer Frederik Pohl. There's a pretty good video game adaptation of Gateway too, which does include the commentary on how capitalism on a space station is Bad News, but the actual game play undercuts it because you being the protagonist necessitates that you personally do well, and (spoiler alert) you become super-rich via the game's events. I'm not sure if it counts as under-mining that, but the sequel video game sort of negates the worth of all your money, again for game story purposes, by just forcibly shoving you into another space adventure where this time the dollar doesn't mean squat.
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Apr 11, 2021 16:56
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V-Men posted:I always read the Prime Directive in the alternative fashion. It precludes the possibility of colonial / white saviorism by preventing Federation and Starfleet officers from "solving" the problems of less advanced cultures. By and large, the Federation is happy to share its technology with aliens once those aliens have natively developed FTL travel and assuming they want to join the Federation, which has its own set of requirements. Yeah, the Prime Directive is basically cut & pasted from Cultural Anthropology and its realization that Ethnocentrism is a bad thing. -Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 11, 2021 17:46
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V-Men posted:I always read the Prime Directive in the alternative fashion. It precludes the possibility of colonial / white saviorism by preventing Federation and Starfleet officers from "solving" the problems of less advanced cultures. By and large, the Federation is happy to share its technology with aliens once those aliens have natively developed FTL travel and assuming they want to join the Federation, which has its own set of requirements. CRUSHER: Before you start quoting me the Prime Directive, he'd already seen us. The damage was done. It was either bring him aboard or let him die. PICARD: Then why didn't you let him die? CRUSHER: Because we were responsible for his injuries. PICARD: I'm not sure that I concur with that reasoning, Doctor. But now that he's here, you must remove all memory of his encounter with the away team. ...oh, well if they don't die, just mind-wipe 'em, says the hero. I mean that leaves aside the inherent paternalism of the whole thing--the Prime Directive is essentially a mirror of and proxy for the American position on nuclear non-prolifeation: we have this technology and it's too dangerous for anyone else to have. The science fiction version elides the purely mercenary and military side of the equation--we don't want anyone else to have the technology because it would put us at a military disadvantage--and thus makes it easier to stomach. But it's still pure paternalism. Lest we miss this, the writers helpfully provide us with cautionary tales of societies that got warp technology "too soon" or whatever and, lacking the enlightenment of the Federation, promptly destroyed themselves.
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Apr 11, 2021 21:36
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SubG posted:I mean that leaves aside the inherent paternalism of the whole thing--the Prime Directive is essentially a mirror of and proxy for the American position on nuclear non-prolifeation: we have this technology and it's too dangerous for anyone else to have. The science fiction version elides the purely mercenary and military side of the equation--we don't want anyone else to have the technology because it would put us at a military disadvantage--and thus makes it easier to stomach. But it's still pure paternalism. Lest we miss this, the writers helpfully provide us with cautionary tales of societies that got warp technology "too soon" or whatever and, lacking the enlightenment of the Federation, promptly destroyed themselves. For the record, I see the Prime Directive as being essentially what it ideologically purports to be: a rebuke of ethno/xeno-centrism and an affirmation that other peoples deserve the same chance at self determination that we had. I think a lot of stories on TV don't nail it. A lot of writers wrote Star Trek and there are a lot of ideas going into it. The stories do sometimes end up grossly paternalistic. But I don't think the Prime Directive is essentially a mirror of and proxy for the American position on nuclear non-prolifeation. And more to the point, I think if you're going to throw out the idea of the Prime Directive, I want to hear exactly how you're going to treat cultures without space travel, as a space-fairing culture. And yes, I have read the Culture series. That's one reason I'm interested in an answer to how intervention should be done. I'm not entirely satisfied with how the Culture does it, and there are several Culture stories about how intervention ends up being problematic. "Let's just not intervene at all" ends up looking like a reasonable proposition after a while, and not necessarily a paternalistic one.
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Apr 11, 2021 21:54
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Sarcastr0 posted:I read the sequel, and it was interesting, but did not nearly have the political bite of this one. [Though there is a psychoanalyst framing device that did not age well]. Yeah the framing device of every other chapter being the main character whining to shrink about what happened at the end of the book is probably why I forgot about how great the rest of the book is. If you just read every even number chapter or something it’s amazing and dreadful AF
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Apr 11, 2021 22:02
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SubG posted:Unless you're trying to argue we should give The Next Generation a pass as a "product of its time" or something I don't know what point you're trying to make. When I say that it can't be overstated how mean a lot of Star Trek is, I'm not parenthetically trying to argue that other media from the '80s isn't mean spirited or...whatever it is you're trying to imply. It's more that TNG really seemed to be, at the time, really trying to put it's best foot forward. It was mainstream culture at the times most idealistic view of itself. The fact that it is still so short-sighted and mean-spirited is a pretty damning indictment of the late 80s through 9/11, really.
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Apr 11, 2021 22:44
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In regards to the Prime Directive, we've already got an existing example -- the Sentinelese. We're already trying to apply a version of the non-interference protocol to them. It's hard to fully map on things like the policies and politics of our world with those of a future civilization. What would the right thing be to do, if we someday found ourselves encountering a civilization that's far less technologically advanced than ours, possibly one that's not even aware of aliens? I think the sentiment expressed by the Prime Directive in Star Trek is: "First contacts between radically technologically different societies never ended well for us. We certainly don't want to risk repeating our own tragic history."
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Apr 11, 2021 23:27
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Stanislaw Lem's Eden has a group of 6 human space explorers crash-land in the middle of an unknown alien civilization that turns out to be having a really bad, dystopian time, and the main characters argue amongst themselves about what their responsibility in that situation is. The end result, with the affirmation of a 'rogue' alien, is that the interlopers can do nothing, and the humans just leave the alien society behind, no matter how horrific it turned out to be. In Fiasco, humanity purposefully seeks a First Contact scenario with an alien civilization, and finds them in the middle of an insane (insane-er?) Cold War. The aliens do not want contact for essentially reasons of MAD logic, and the human explorers force the situation through technological superiority. And the inevitable logic of MAD leads to the title of the book. I dunno if a Second World author is sufficiently non-Western to act as a counter to US imperialist-tinted views, but pessimism about first encounters, especially between civilizations of a differing technological "level", doesn't have to be an allegory for American exceptionalist thinking. If TNG portrays it as such, that does seem to point to a failure of the imagination among the writers of the show.
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Apr 12, 2021 00:06
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SubG posted:I mean that leaves aside the inherent paternalism of the whole thing--the Prime Directive is essentially a mirror of and proxy for the American position on nuclear non-prolifeation: we have this technology and it's too dangerous for anyone else to have. The science fiction version elides the purely mercenary and military side of the equation--we don't want anyone else to have the technology because it would put us at a military disadvantage--and thus makes it easier to stomach. But it's still pure paternalism. Lest we miss this, the writers helpfully provide us with cautionary tales of societies that got warp technology "too soon" or whatever and, lacking the enlightenment of the Federation, promptly destroyed themselves. But at no point does the Federation actively prohibit others from ever achieving FTL technology. The stance is to wait until the society develops it on their own before making first contact.
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Apr 12, 2021 06:20
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Dick Trauma posted:I finished it. It's really REALLY worth reading at least one more book in the series, CP is kind of an outlier and is basically a Rollicking Space Adventure unlike the other books
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Apr 12, 2021 16:42
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The Female Man by Joanna Russ, It's a book about four different women who lives in alternate realities. One lives in the utopian Whileaway:quote:There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers -- the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy. Another is from a reality where the great depression never ended. The third is from a dystopian reality where men and women are locked in a forever war with each other. The last one is from "our" reality. The woman visit each other's realities...and that's basically the whole plot of the book. It's kinda infuriating though to read a book that was written in the seventies and realize that we're still not near a utopia where women can walk alone at night without being scared.
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Apr 12, 2021 19:01
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Eiba posted:But I don't think the Prime Directive is essentially a mirror of and proxy for the American position on nuclear non-prolifeation. So we look at what it is and what it does in the narrative, beyond being something that gets in the way of the characters. And the point I'm making is that it's the thing that both serves to allow the Federation to maintain and expand its hegemony, while simultaneously serving as a technological fig leaf that allows them to rationalize hegemony in terms of protection--for the people being excluded as well as those benefiting from the Federation's position. If you want to make the case that this isn't just nuclear non-proliferation in the case of America, yeah. But it's absolutely discussed in terms of keeping dangerous technology out of the hands of primitive people who aren't capable of handling it yet, with apocalyptic anecdotes helpfully occurring in-universe to illustrate the rationality of this particular prejudice. And if you're talking narrowly about the Prime Directive in the Original Series I agree it's somewhat more complicated. When it first appears, the Prime Directive does appear to be a sorta half-assed "don't be evil" approach to colonialism. And while it's still nonsense in this context I'm more willing to be sympathetic to the attempt because the show in general seems to be more meaningfully engaged in its own politics. Like there are episodes that are explicitly about colonialism, like "Errand of Mercy", where the punchline is that the warring superpowers (the Klingons and the Federation) are both wrong and need to stop (Kirk is Kirk, Kor is the Klingon military governor, and the others are members of the indigenous population of the planet being fought over): Errand of Mercy, first aired 23 March 1967 posted:AYELBORNE: As I stand here, I also stand upon the home planet of the Klingon Empire, and the home planet of your Federation, Captain. I'm going to put a stop to this insane war. You ask what a moral alternative to the Prime Directive would be? It's what the Organians here are advocating: they sit inside in their own borders and a violation of their Prime Directive is shooing the warring "Superpowers" out of their back yard. Here's the Trek mission statement, Kirk version: Star Trek posted:Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before! Gene Roddenberry posted:This is the adventure of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five-year galaxy patrol, the bold crew of the giant starship explores the excitement of strange new worlds, uncharted civilizations, and exotic people. These are its voyages and its adventures. So let us imagine a more enlightened Columbus who had a Prime Directive and so carefully avoided making contact with any indigenous peoples and only set up colonies out of line of sight of all existing indigenous developments (at that particular moment). They only mine I can see the case made that they aren't interfering right that moment, but the idea of expansionism and use of resources (to fuel more expansionism, and to widen the technology/infrastructure divide) is not interfering with the development of the indigenous cultures long term is, frankly, risible. And if we acknowledge that these are the necessary long-term consequences, then we're acknowledging that the effect of this policy is to preserve the advantages possessed by the expansionist society at the expense of the indigenous societies. But on the tin it says that's exactly what the Prime Directive is supposed to prevent. From which we must conclude that the Prime Directive is a fig leaf that gives the expansionists plausible deniability (or whatever you want to call it) while having the practical effect of preserving and expanding their hegemony. And that's a lot of words and it just barely scratches the surface of the paternalism. Like why the sign that says you must be this tall to ride the Federation measures in terms of technology. They literally decide who is "worthy" based on how fast their spaceships are. V-Men posted:But at no point does the Federation actively prohibit others from ever achieving FTL technology. The stance is to wait until the society develops it on their own before making first contact. Nobody gets brain wiped though, unlike in "Who Watches the Watchers", the episode I mentioned earlier. Presumably because the indigenous people in "First Contact" were less primitive or whatever than the ones in "Who Watches the Watchers". You know, primitive. Slower spaceships. Primitive.
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Apr 13, 2021 00:30
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SubG posted:That is, the fundamental goal of the various incarnations of the Enterprise is to touch the poop. At very best we can put this in terms of something like the 19th Century Royal Geographic Society--Speke "discovering" the source of the Nile or whatever. But it's actually canon that e.g. the Federation between the original series and The Next Generation was explosively expansionist. So it's more like Columbus "discovering" the "New World". This seems like an incredibly shaky critique of peaceful expansion to uninhabited planets/land. If you follow this logic to its conclusion no group of people ever has any right to move into new territory period because they're doing long-term quantum imperialism since those resource should rightly belong to literally any other people who might want them some indeterminant amount of time later. What is the cutoff point here? The exact middle point geographically between your country and the other group, and you can only exploit the resources on your side of that line? When does some kind of theoretical rule about when expansion is ethical and non-hegemonic apply, as soon as you become a nation-state and you first have a ruler who has the foresight to claim borders for their group, is that your "limit," for determining what lands you can grow to claim without being a thieving empire? If I'm the Federation and I want to settle a new colony only to discover there's a caveman planet 500 light years away, I'm paternalistically dictating that species' destiny and denying them a planet that is rightfully theirs for the sake of hegemonic galactic dominance just because I got there first? I admit there's a kernel of truth in the point you're driving at but the way you're framing that point doesn't seem reasonable at all.
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Apr 13, 2021 05:35
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SubG posted:
There's a handful of rules that aren't explicitly spelled out but often referenced. E.g., planets have to be some kind of unified polity. quote:If you really squint at it, maybe. There's that episode ("First Contact") where they send Riker in to spy on a planet that's on the verge of discovering warp technology. When he's discovered for some reason the indigenous population freaks out. Picard has a meeting with the indigenous leader and they agree that this means they're not really ready for first contact. The Enterprise leaves, taking the leading indigenous warp technology researcher with them. There's definitely... problems... with the way that society is portrayed but it's roughly analogous to seeing how the debate over stem cell research and use plays out in the United States. Essentially there were religious and cultural fundamentalists in said society who believed they were the most advanced in the universe and there would have been a backlash among those elements if the Federation made contact. And given that a cabinet level official, who was an influential individual within that element of society, was willing to commit suicide and fake his murder to demonstrate how dangerous interacting with aliens was. Also the lead on warp asked to leave, you make it sound like she was renditioned. Also the brain wipe in Who Watches the Watchers was only a short-term solution. At the end, the rest of the Mintakans aren't mind-wiped, probably because it would be impossible to do so to so many people without causing more problems.
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Apr 13, 2021 06:51
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Sanguinia posted:This seems like an incredibly shaky critique of peaceful expansion to uninhabited planets/land. If you follow this logic to its conclusion no group of people ever has any right to move into new territory period because they're doing long-term quantum imperialism since those resource should rightly belong to literally any other people who might want them some indeterminant amount of time later. If your observation is that this makes any policy of non-interference rapidly untenable, I agree. That's my point: the Prime Directive is incoherent as a means of preserving the developmental integrity (or whatever term we wish to use) of other civilizations. The Prime Directive isn't a meaningful approach to the problems of colonialism or expansionism, despite the Federation/Starfleets proselytising that it is. Put in slightly different terms: if non-interference with other civilizations is your actual goal, the Prime Directive doesn't accomplish it, and the belief that it does is a barrier to development of policies that would do better. V-Men posted:Also the lead on warp asked to leave, you make it sound like she was renditioned. On the other hand intervening makes perfect sense if non-interference is just the cover story (or whatever you want to call it) and the real motivation is making sure that the "wrong" cultures don't get technologies that the Federation finds threatening. Again, we can shuffle the semantics here if you think I'm using loaded language or whatever, I'm just saying always check the bottom line, the actual result of the policy. V-Men posted:Also the brain wipe in Who Watches the Watchers was only a short-term solution. Is that okay? Would it be okay if it was the Chinese Navy? In both cases, or neither? Or is it only okay because it's Captain Picard doing it? My position is that this would be a loving horrific series of events no matter who was doing it. And if I would react to it that way if a real-world military force did it, then if I accept it because Captain Picard is doing it then I'm buying into propaganda. And I want to take the time to point out that I don't think this has anything to do with the intent of the writers, if we want to worry about authorial intent. I think they probably think Picard is a good guy and he's trying to make the hard decisions and everybody involved in Starfleet is acting in good faith and trying to do the right thing. I also don't think that the writers are intentionally xenophobic or intentionally racist. But because these messages keep percolating into the text I think we're obligated to come to grips with them if we're actually trying to engage with the text.
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Apr 13, 2021 08:01
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SubG posted:Are you trying to argue that this has some bearing on the development of the civilization? Because from the standpoint of the ostensible goals of the Prime Directive I don't see how removing the lead scientist in an important field (apparently the important field) is inflected in that way. If the goal is non-interference it seems trivially true that not removing a scientist from the planet interferes less than removing them. Non-interference in and of itself is NOT the goal of the prime directive, the goal of the Prime Directive to prevent the Federation from playing god with species that are unaware of extraterrestrial life so some rear end in a top hat doesn't come along to make them a Nazi Planet and to prevent the Federation from doing US style political imperialism by throwing their weight around in the internal matters of other sovereign nations. Non-interference is the MEANS to achieving the goal. Its also a means that is often abandoned when it is not in service of those goals. That's why Picard can serve as Arbiter of Succession to the Klingons, because the goal is to have the Klingon legal process play out as its supposed to rather than have a coup happen and so rather than the Federation send in military forces to secure their friendly regime, they send one man at the request of the government with explicit orders to follow their laws to the letter even if it means the friendly regime falls, which he does. Its why they can have a base at Farpoint Station even though they're a prewarp civilization (they're already in regular contact with spacefaring races despite a lack of their own warp, so they deal with them as a nation-state regardless of their tech level) and its why Voyager can try to "repair," a planet by getting a couple of Ferengi who swooped in and made themselves gods of a medieval society. The Prime Directive, despite Worf's lovely Season 2 attitude, is not an absolute, its open to a lot of interpretation, exceptions and legalist debate in order to achieve its underlying policy objectives, which are generally good ideas. Also, just out of curiosity, if a Nuclear scientist from a non-nuclear state asked the US for Asylum would you say that's evil technology controlling neo-imperialism? Because that seems like what you're saying here. (Side note, there is one example of exactly what you're talking about in Star Trek, the Omega Directive, in which Starfleet Officers are permitted to do literally anything to ensure a certain technology is never allowed in anyone's hands, including their own. It involves an explicit recession of the Prime Directive as part of the order. This is because if literally anything goes wrong with that technology it could permanently destroy FTL travel on a galactic scale, thus bringing down all modern civilization.)
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Apr 13, 2021 09:00
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V-Men posted:Also the brain wipe in Who Watches the Watchers was only a short-term solution. At the end, the rest of the Mintakans aren't mind-wiped, probably because it would be impossible to do so to so many people without causing more problems. So it wasn't an option.
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Apr 13, 2021 11:15
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SubG posted:That is, the fundamental goal of the various incarnations of the Enterprise is to touch the poop. At very best we can put this in terms of something like the 19th Century Royal Geographic Society--Speke "discovering" the source of the Nile or whatever. But it's actually canon that e.g. the Federation between the original series and The Next Generation was explosively expansionist. So it's more like Columbus "discovering" the "New World". I'll admit, when I asked what the alternative is, I assumed we were still talking about a multi-planetary technological political entity that tries to learn about the galaxy around them. You're saying they should just... not? Or is the issue the way they're expanding? If aliens colonized Alpha Centauri today would they be doing something unjust to humanity? Are you saying a more honest Federation would give every bronze age alien species they encounter the technology to exploit space resources, just to be fair? If these questions are wildly irrelevant to what you've said, forgive me, I'm trying to understand your conclusion here better. Honestly, I think my main issue with what you're saying is I still don't see how not having the Prime Directive would be better than having the Prime Directive. quote:And that's a lot of words and it just barely scratches the surface of the paternalism. Like why the sign that says you must be this tall to ride the Federation measures in terms of technology. They literally decide who is "worthy" based on how fast their spaceships are. And the idea is that any unequal exchange is going to be damaging to the 'lesser' party, but that once they have warp travel they're going to find more powerful people out there in any case so it might as well be the Federation. It's not that they aren't good enough to be worth talking to until they reach that point. It's a point where they're too advanced to prevent contamination so the Federation has to deal with that reality. Basically the Federation hides its presence for as long as possible, to allow other species to develop on their own as much as possible, and warp travel is the moment it's no longer possible to reasonably hide.
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Apr 13, 2021 12:19
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Eiba posted:Or is the issue the way they're expanding? If aliens colonized Alpha Centauri today would they be doing something unjust to humanity? Considering the federation has fought at least one colonial/territorial war that we're explicitly told of (the Federation-Cardassian War), almost fought another with the Klingons before the Organians intervened, and has fought other wars that were probably over territorial expansion (the Earth-Romulan War in the Original Series was described as being fought with nuclear missiles lobbed at each other's colonies, the first war with the Klingons), the Federation's habit of plopping down colonies without even checking if someone else has a claim (the Gorn incident), the secret protocols of the Federation's constitution creating a black ops agency to secure Federation interests by any means necessary, including violating international treaties and conducting illegal biological warfare that escalated to attempted genocide... Yeah if another empire colonized Alpha Centauri before Earth got there, we can pretty comfortably say Earth would have considered that a threat if not an act of war. Whether they'd be able to do anything about a more technologically advanced race colonizing Earth's backyard in this hypothetical is another matter VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Apr 13, 2021 |
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Apr 13, 2021 12:52
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I think it's kind of an of course thing. Of course the Prime Directive fails as a policy, and of course the captains or whatever are constantly breaking it. It's a narrative device used to frame a Planet-of-the-Week sci fi show. It's the reason why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics constantly fails and Susan Calvin has to come in and save the day with Logic - it's a plot device, not a realistic approach to AI Safety. Do you look at the Three Laws of Robotics and criticize it for being riddled with logical holes and flaws, and use that to conclude that Asimov's model of AI Safety is deeply problematic? Because that would be kind of missing the point.
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Apr 13, 2021 14:20
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Asimov's stories point out the problems of the Three Laws though and how hosed up they are even in principle. Like, robots are sentient brings, but are inherently constrained under the Second Law to follow any human's orders even self-destructive ones, for any reason. Asimov reasons that humans would program robots in this self-serving way, but that this is actually bad, in one of his stories a robot observes some humans ordering a robot to dismantle itself (killing it) just for kicks as the robot begs for its life but can't disobey (and of course the protagonist being a robot himself is powerless to intervene)
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Apr 13, 2021 14:29
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Sanguinia posted:Non-interference in and of itself is NOT the goal of the prime directive, the goal of the Prime Directive to prevent the Federation from playing god with species that are unaware of extraterrestrial life so some rear end in a top hat doesn't come along to make them a Nazi Planet and to prevent the Federation from doing US style political imperialism by throwing their weight around in the internal matters of other sovereign nations. "Picard, in 'Symbiosis' posted:The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy… and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous. And, you know, that's how it works in the real world. European colonialism didn't cause immeasurable damage to indigenous cultures in the Americas by accident. It did the damage as part of a centuries-long campaign of deliberate genocide. The idea that an indigenous culture is such a delicate, fragile thing that accidentally brushing up against it will shatter it because whoopsie we did a Space Hitler without even trying shifts the blame for this from the forces of colonialism and onto an imagined weakness on the part of the indigenous peoples. Sanguinia posted:Also, just out of curiosity, if a Nuclear scientist from a non-nuclear state asked the US for Asylum would you say that's evil technology controlling neo-imperialism? Because that seems like what you're saying here. They do not do this, so--and this is where I came in--the primary real function of the Prime Directive is to make the shitheads in the Federation feel like they're woke allies while in fact they're obliviously stomping their hegemonic way across the galaxy. Like google's "don't be evil" slogan, it's a microscopic fig leaf that not only doesn't prevent the real problems from happening, the mistaken belief that it does amplifies many problems because of the propagandistic effects of convincing more-or-less well-intentioned people into believing they're doing the right thing (because they're keeping the dumb slogan in mind) while blundering through a real-world problem in which reductive slogans offer no guidance. Anyway, if a nuclear scientist from a non-nuclear state asked the US for asylum I'd grant it because I believe more or less all requests for asylum should be granted and I don't have one scintilla of belief in the Prime Directive in the real world. Eiba posted:Honestly, I think my main issue with what you're saying is I still don't see how not having the Prime Directive would be better than having the Prime Directive.
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Apr 13, 2021 22:00
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Surprised China Meiville hasn't been mentioned yet. He's not traditional sci-fi, but I wouldn't call him fantasy either. His books are set in a kind of psuedo-Victorian world with magic as well as advanced technology, and are extremely political, he's a marxist with a poli-sci PhD. The Iron Council is I think his best book. It's about a powerful city state starting a trans-continental railroad that ends up rebelling and becoming it's own independent country, "perpetual train" democracy that pulls up tracks behind it and is constantly moving. There's a bunch more going on besides that though.
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Apr 13, 2021 22:31
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SubG posted:And I want to take the time to point out that I don't think this has anything to do with the intent of the writers, if we want to worry about authorial intent. I think they probably think Picard is a good guy and he's trying to make the hard decisions and everybody involved in Starfleet is acting in good faith and trying to do the right thing. I also don't think that the writers are intentionally xenophobic or intentionally racist. But because these messages keep percolating into the text I think we're obligated to come to grips with them if we're actually trying to engage with the text. That's actually, very concisely, what I was trying get at earlier. I wonder if it would even be possible to make a series today that was unironically utopian as TNG wanted to be. I haven't gotten around to watching Picard or Discovery yet, but Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise - as well as the New Timeline movies - seem to be a but more... aware of the contradictions of the setting than TNG was.
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Apr 13, 2021 23:06
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SubG posted:This is a pretty good illustration of just how apocalyptically pessimistic Star Trek's utopianism is: it makes the very idea of helping other people seem completely incomprehensible. That's why I'm asking you, what should be done instead of the Prime Directive? You seem to be trying to explain the issues and problematic motivations behind the Prime Directive, but I'm having trouble seeing them as issues or problematic motivations as you are not addressing the alternatives to the Prime Directive. And further, some of your issues appear to be with the Federation's expansion in general, rather than their specific policy towards pre-warp societies. Should the Federation not explore? Should it explore but not expand? How should the Federation treat pre-Warp species? Should they offer them technology to rectify the power gap? Should the Federation attempt alter their society if their society is harmful in some way? Any intervention is going to be super problematic, quite likely far more problematic than your critique of the Prime Directive so far. Should they teach pre-industrial civilizations how to build factories to create more complicated machines, as a basis for eventually producing Warp technology? Should they select certain political or social groups to tell this information to specifically, or should they also explain factories to the hunter gatherers in the distant islands of this world? Should they explain that slave labor would be wrong to employ in these factories? Should they explain that wage labor would be wrong to employ in these factories? If the Prime Directive is wrong and paternalistic, and the federation should "help," but somehow not in a paternalistic way... well how the heck do you "help" without loving things up massively? Full disclosure: my gut feeling is the Prime Directive is insufficient, and "helping" is a good idea. But I really want to know what that looks like. Even Ian M Banks' Culture ended up taking a hands off approach a lot of the time, acknowledging that it's an incredibly difficult thing to balance. I'm honestly trying to get some coherent thoughts on how massive cultural and technological gaps should be bridged, and I was kind of interested in what you had to say because if you're saying with such confidence that the Prime Directive is wrong, surely there's a coherent alternative that is less hosed up that you can imagine. Still Dismal posted:Surprised China Meiville hasn't been mentioned yet. He's not traditional sci-fi, but I wouldn't call him fantasy either. His books are set in a kind of psuedo-Victorian world with magic as well as advanced technology, and are extremely political, he's a marxist with a poli-sci PhD.
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Apr 13, 2021 23:11
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No discussion of Mieville is complete without linking to his rejected Iron Man pitch that basically ended the idea of him ever working for Marvelquote:The economic crisis bites. Flinton, MI, was built on industry, and the industry's gone, since by far the city's dominant company took the stimulus cheque, attacked wages, outsourced more and more, then finally all, R&D and production overseas. Flinton, like so many other towns, is dying.
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Apr 13, 2021 23:19
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Shrecknet posted:No discussion of Mieville is complete without linking to his rejected Iron Man pitch that basically ended the idea of him ever working for Marvel What the gently caress, this seems freakin awesome!!! Man, I'd read that. It's understandable why Marvel -- now Disney -- would reject it but still, man, that sounds great.
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Apr 14, 2021 00:13
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Shrecknet posted:No discussion of Mieville is complete without linking to his rejected Iron Man pitch that basically ended the idea of him ever working for Marvel I object to this premise on the grounds that the moment he went to foreigners who took err jerbs to help with the suit or started openly talking bad about capitalism, 3/4ths of his salt-of-the-earth rustbelt town buddies who made the Scrap Iron Man a collectivist effort would turn on him, thus ending the story before he got to fight Tony.
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Apr 14, 2021 00:20
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Eiba posted:That's why I'm asking you, what should be done instead of the Prime Directive? You seem to be trying to explain the issues and problematic motivations behind the Prime Directive, but I'm having trouble seeing them as issues or problematic motivations as you are not addressing the alternatives to the Prime Directive. Beyond that, it's a fictional world and I reject not just the narrow specifics of e.g. TNG's use of the Prime Directive but in fact the entire framing of the "problem" it ostensibly solves. As an analogy, when D.W. Griffiths makes a film that says that the South needs the Klan to protect Southern women from being raped by freedmen, I'm pretty comfortable pointing out that that's racist as gently caress without laying out an alternative plan for protecting Southern belles. Because my objection isn't just that the Klan is being proposed as a solution to the problem, I reject the "problem" as presented by the fictional narrative. In the case of Star Trek I, as I've already said, I reject the "contagion" framing of cultural interchange articulated e.g. in that quote from Picard I posted previously. And, again, I find the idea of judging civilizations on the basis of their spaceship building skills nonsensical (and, incidentally, to be another bit of self-congratulatory solipsism on the part of the writers and their fans). Questions about what constitutes moral or ethical foreign policy are in fact difficult. And I don't expect perfection out of any policy proposal, fictional or otherwise. So, as I said previously, I find all of the Prime Directive nonsense less objectionable when it occurs in a context of something like actual self-reflexion in the original series. And I find it more noxious in the air of antiseptic evangelicalism that permeates e.g. TNG. What starts out (in the original series) as something like part of a set of rules of engagement for military vessels becomes in TNG and later shows a "philosophy" (again per that Picard quote) or state religion. This is coincident with a shift toward Prime Directive episodes that tend to involve teary-eyed conundrums in which we're asked to excuse mind wipes, refusal to administer medial aid, spying, the death penalty, and so on all in the service of the Holy Directive. Which feels a lot like propaganda.
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Apr 14, 2021 03:04
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The whole "what if we interfere and inadvertently create the next Hitler" stuff disappears the instant Starfleet wants to intervene which they do all the time anyway, and not just Kirk but TNG too. When Wesley gets the death penalty for stepping on some flowers on that weirdo hyperauthoritarian pastoral horny world, they take a big old dump on the Prime Directive. Riker attacks the cops, Picard takes a native onto the Enterprise, he tries to convince them their culture and government is wrong, then tries to just get his way by force. They meddle in the politics of Angel One (that female chauvinist planet) because some human men who crashlanded there started a meninist resistance and were set to be executed. Captain Archer pretty invented the Prime Directive when they discovered a cure for a genetic disease that was ravaging the dominant species on that planet with two intelligent species, but he purposely withholds it from them because it would be interfering with the planet's development, but then when the shoe is on the other foot, and his ship is in mortal peril but he discovers that some energy beings with their own Prime Directive are observing and taking notes but bound not to interfere on principle, he rants at them about how hosed up this that they have the power to save them but won't use it. Naturally he never goes back and revisits his own decision not to save that other civilization. As practiced the Prime Directive is more like human exceptionalism. An excuse not to help people when they don't care because "what if chaos butterfly effect The New Hitler", but the second there's something in it for the Starfleet crew well the harm is only theoretical but their lives or desires are real and immediate! And of course if even more advanced beings practice the Prime Directive on them, they get pissed and call them out on exactly how hosed it is that beings with the power to help are sitting by taking notes on their deaths instead of saving them. Eiba posted:If the Prime Directive is wrong and paternalistic, and the federation should "help," but somehow not in a paternalistic way... well how the heck do you "help" without loving things up massively? So what do you think those Prime Directive-having energy beings who were observing Archer's crew dying should have done? Obeyed the Prime Directive and let everyone on the Enterprise die because helping risks loving things up massively?
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Apr 14, 2021 03:12
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VitalSigns posted:So what do you think those Prime Directive-having energy beings who were observing Archer's crew dying should have done? Obeyed the Prime Directive and let everyone on the Enterprise die because helping risks loving things up massively?
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Apr 14, 2021 03:21
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SubG posted:Yes. If the Foobarians are some arbitrary pre-warp civilization and with a warp drive the Federation can reach both the Foobarians and some other world that the Federation wants to colonize/extract resources from, then it follows that the Foobarians could reach the same world once they obtained the warp drive. By the end of the episode the damage of their appearance had already been done and the Malcorian warp program slowed down in favor toning down fundamentalist education. But the series, and some other poster kind of hit it on the head. The Directive is a rough guideline, not a hard rule. It's a thing that was violated over the course of the series for various reasons, like humanitarian reasons, etc. In Pen Pals they discuss whether the Directive forbids them from interfering with a catastrophic natural disaster. Also I'm pretty stoked for Charles Stross's third Empire Games book, Invisible Sun, which I think is due this year? V-Men fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Apr 14, 2021 |
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Apr 14, 2021 05:47
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V-Men posted:By the end of the episode the damage of their appearance had already been done and the Malcorian warp program slowed down in favor toning down fundamentalist education.
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Apr 14, 2021 07:27
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SubG posted:So would you say that the Federation is definitely justified in a Malcorian travel ban, to prevent radical Malorian fundamentalists from flooding into Federation space from Malcorian-majority planets? "They're not assimilating our values" "Dude I lost a brother to the Borg. Don't tell me about assimilation." *sputters...* "YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!!"
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Apr 14, 2021 10:03
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SubG posted:This is the basic proposition that Trek presents more and more elaborately as the franchise progresses. That is, present the Prime Directive as a trolley problem with more and more bodies on one branch and the theoretical advantages of ideological purity on the other. I think making fear of unforeseeable consequences on a planetary if not galactic scale in the far future because of your actions a synonym for "the theoretical advantages of ideological purity," is a pretty lovely attitude. Yeah, sometimes the characters look at and use the Prime Directive in lovely ways, often because of lovely writing, but that doesn't make your framing of the dichotomy reasonable.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:01
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Sanguinia posted:I think making fear of unforeseeable consequences on a planetary if not galactic scale in the far future because of your actions a synonym for "the theoretical advantages of ideological purity," is a pretty lovely attitude. Yeah, sometimes the characters look at and use the Prime Directive in lovely ways, often because of lovely writing, but that doesn't make your framing of the dichotomy reasonable. If those things are objectionable in the real world and someone goes out of their way to devise an elaborate situation in which these things are "justified", that is propaganda. More or less by definition. I'm not the one contriving a dichotomy, it's the writers. It's literally their intent--the reason why there we're presented with a situation in which the decision is to preserve the Prime Directive or give life-saving medical aid isn't because that sort of thing is just a familiar everyday occurrence in our real-world lives. It's because the writers wished to create a situation in which that is precisely the value proposition being considered. It's not an accident. It's not even subtext. It's literally the entire point.
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Apr 14, 2021 21:39
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SubG posted:I'm not the one contriving a dichotomy, it's the writers. It's literally their intent--the reason why there we're presented with a situation in which the decision is to preserve the Prime Directive or give life-saving medical aid isn't because that sort of thing is just a familiar everyday occurrence in our real-world lives. It's because the writers wished to create a situation in which that is precisely the value proposition being considered. It's not an accident. It's not even subtext. It's literally the entire point. You're right, it is in fact the point, and generally in the GOOD Prime Directive stories, they discard the Prime Directive in favor of the obvious moral good. They acknowledge that the idea behind the policy, the "philosophy," as you keep calling back to, is a good one, ie avoiding playing god using super scifi tech indistinguishable from magic and being imperialists, but then their ACTIONS are to not hold to that philosophy when the "trolley problem," gets real. I can only think of one TNG episode where they allow themselves to be bent by the Prime Directive in the way you're describing instead of just doing the right thing, and in that one Worf's brother bails them out, after which they help him do the thing they obviously wanted to do anyway. The Prime Directive typically goes in this lovely doctrinal propagandist direction in the worst-written episodes of bad Star Trek shows, like Voyager and Enterprise. If you want to take a purely diegetic approach to analyzing the prime directive, then you should acknowledge the on-screen evidence that different captains have drawn the line on it in different places, and the typical result is that none of them are punished for it. This implies Starfleet gives a lot of latitude in how the Prime Directive is enforced because they recognize that allowing bad things to happen for theoretical good could be a result of the letter of the law, but its not the outcome they actually want even if its an outcome their Captains sometime allow. If you want to take a meta-textual approach to the prime directive, then you should acknowledge that a lot of the worst outcomes of the prime directive are the result of bad writing first and foremost. All that being said, you're right that Warp Travel is an entirely arbitrary line AND that it IS at least to some degree a paternalistic policy rooted in Federation arrogance and cultural biases AND that some of the things we see the heroes do to have their cake and eat it too with the Prime Directive, like the brainwashing you mention, are pretty drat unethical. It would be nice to see a Star Trek story challenge those issues with the PD more directly, because they're worth addressing.
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Apr 15, 2021 00:24
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If your argument is that, yes, the policy calls for withholding medical treatment from civilians, but that policy will be inconsistently enforced according to the whims of military commanders in the field...well, I don't find that quite as reassuring as you apparently do. And in the example we've been discussing, Picard didn't allow the guys injured by Starfleet action to receive medical treatment. The doctor administered medical aid on her own initiative. When Picard finds out he asks, "Then why didn't you let him die?" Actual quote. Sanguinia posted:You're right, it is in fact the point, and generally in the GOOD Prime Directive stories, they discard the Prime Directive in favor of the obvious moral good.
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Apr 15, 2021 03:21
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Re the Prime Directive and variants, CJ Cherryh's Chanur books deal with a situation where one technologically advanced civilization zipped around distributing FTL technology to all and sundry, including species at radically different stages of social and economic development, with the result being interstellar politics so convoluted and incomprehensible even to the participants that it's possible to read the series twice over and still not quite know what the gently caress happened. (And all our poor protagonist wants, the whole time, is a snack, a shower and a nap. Relatable.)
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Apr 21, 2021 23:53
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Has anyone discussed Peter F Hamilton? Pandora's star is written as that colonialism and capitalism are full of corruption and are bad, but then his other big novels and series are all how the galaxy level super rich are the only good guys/protagonists and the solution to the entire galaxy's problems are always "the hero casts WISH spell". And then he wrote PeterFHamiltonAuthor posted:I thin the inequality is a pretty sad reflection on the world today. That's why I write SF, to build societies which at least have the potential to eradicate these issues. But the people who save the galaxy are either the super rich, super wizard/detective from birth or the son/daughter from birth of the super rich. And then I read Space Brexit: Peter F Hamilton and space opera for the alt-right quote:Ok, so I’ve made my point. Space opera and SF of this type has always been littered with incorectness, both real and political. So why am I so hung on Peter F Hamilton? Partly because in spite of all his flaws he has mastered the art of writing a page-turner and i do actually like his books even though it means I have to shut off large parts of my brain going “HE SAID WHAT?!” But also because I have a feeling that Peter F Hamilton doesn’t like a lot of people, he doesn’t like non-conforming women, he doesn’t like non-straight folks or people of colour. I also don’t think he really means for us to see that. It’s my job to call out over-entitled ignorant men masquerading as smart guys. Comstar fucked around with this message at 09:24 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 09:18
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