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thotsky posted:Is the argument "you can't talk about conversion therapy' or "you can't talk about trans people"? As far as I know they weren't trying to do the latter, and as for the former, why not? I don't think it's a great episode, but the performances are pretty good and stuff about alien gender and sexuality stuff is always pretty interesting. The tragic ending is upsetting, but it's not the first or last time Star Trek does some dark stuff, and the episode is cearly trying to put forwards a positive message. I'm an ancient cishet male, so I may be missing some of the points here, but I believe the issue is that the episode posits a form of conversion therapy that works -- a process that clearly doesn't work in the real world, a process that queer folk have often been threatened with or forced to undergo, a process that simplifies queerness to "homo vs. hetero." Mention of the process itself is hurtful to a segment of folx here and that's the issue. Does that mean we can't talk about that episode? If it's causing a few people this much distress, maybe we can lay off of it -- I plan to.
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Apr 27, 2024 03:39
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As a gay dude I like The Outcast except for how they were too chicken to have Riker make out with a dude. They should have had it be another man. And there should have been nudity and full penetration.
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Apr 27, 2024 04:18
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Worf was a dick in that episode and I still can't decide if I like that he had Riker's back when he beamed down or if it's like, too little too late my man
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Apr 27, 2024 05:37
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Penne is actually pretty tame and primitive in a sci-fi galaxy where there could be energy beings that intertwine directly with every atom and quark in your body resonating some at weird string frequency outside the universe or time.
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Apr 27, 2024 05:38
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Funny enough Star Trek did do an episode with a Holocaust denial allegory where the people being genocided were heavily Roma- and Jewish-coded. It ended with the Federation crew shrugging their shoulders and saying "both sides say they're right, but the accuser is interrupting our party with these nice friendly people and being rude. Who can say what the truth is?" and just flying off. ...no they don't. They kick the aliens off their ship and stop dealing with them, and B'elanna confronts them about their crimes, and while she can't convince their leaders to listen, she does pass on what she's learned to one of them and hopes they'll eventually confront their past. (And the people being genocided felt more indigenous-coded to me - the alien government depicted them as 'primitives' who wouldn't assimilated into their 'modern' society, and the whole thing felt like more of a Trail of Tears forced displacement.)
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Apr 27, 2024 05:43
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Tighclops posted:Worf was a dick in that episode and I still can't decide if I like that he had Riker's back when he beamed down or if it's like, too little too late my man Worf's secondary role after Losing To This Week's Big Bad was Being A Douche About This Week's Alien Strangeness, he jobbed so hard back then.
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Apr 27, 2024 05:56
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Tighclops posted:Worf was a dick in that episode and I still can't decide if I like that he had Riker's back when he beamed down or if it's like, too little too late my man He really shows off that newfound tolerance for non-binary people when he jumps at the opportunity to beat up a dozen of them.
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Apr 27, 2024 06:15
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Jimbone Tallshanks posted:-A planet with an overpopulation crisis and heterosexual sex is forbidden Star Trek would never do this because planets are stargate style single cities on gigantic planets
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Apr 27, 2024 09:37
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Taear posted:Star Trek would never do this because planets are stargate style single cities on gigantic planets But they're beautiful cities.
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Apr 27, 2024 09:44
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Taear posted:Star Trek would never do this because planets are stargate style single cities on gigantic planets I like the episode where some alien planet has a fertility crisis so they kidnap, like, a dozen kids from the Enterprise and figure that's enough to keep them going for another generation.
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Apr 27, 2024 10:51
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Angry Salami posted:I like the episode where some alien planet has a fertility crisis so they kidnap, like, a dozen kids from the Enterprise and figure that's enough to keep them going for another generation. Look, it’s a really small planet
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Apr 27, 2024 13:34
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Angry Salami posted:I like the episode where some alien planet has a fertility crisis so they kidnap, like, a dozen kids from the Enterprise and figure that's enough to keep them going for another generation. Or the clone one where they basically take 3 people. Legit it's funny how 90s sci fi always has tiny, tiny, tiny world populations
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Apr 27, 2024 13:48
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free real estate
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Apr 27, 2024 14:18
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Khanstant posted:Penne is actually pretty tame and primitive in a sci-fi galaxy where there could be energy beings that intertwine directly with every atom and quark in your body resonating some at weird string frequency outside the universe or time. But it has been established that doing this just makes you a colossal rear end in a top hat. Because you've described the Great Link
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Apr 27, 2024 14:47
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Taear posted:Or the clone one where they basically take 3 people. The clone world had a base set of five individuals, that was the whole point. Even taking two would be a huge diversification and refreshment of their genetic base.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:25
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I suspect the 'take a handful of people to revitalize our dying population' thing came out of UFOlogy, since one of the emergent narratives about our little gray space brothers was that they were having population-wide genetic problems and were near enough to humans to want to take our pure bodily fluids, which could, in relatively small amounts, provide them with what they needed to revitalize their people. While perhaps superficially plausible, and similarly the kind of thing where they don't just show up on Clinton's doorstep and ask "WHERE IS THE CUM?", the implicit scale and frequency of this activity made the aliens seem more like perverts than desperate survivors doing something strange and nasty.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:37
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Riker: my cum, my choice *vaporizes giant vat of his cum*
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Apr 27, 2024 19:34
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Going back to good episodes of Enterprise, I'd even say there are nice parts of Season 3, although everything tying into the whole unbearable overarching 9/11 plot kinda makes it hard to pick and choose "untainted" episodes, which is the downside to continuity. The treacherous Delphic expanse with strange anomolies that make navigation difficult and drive vulcans mad and even for one or two episodes required that the crew be put in stasis or hide away in the warp coils is a real solid Star Trek premise, but there's no getting around having to explain why the crew is wandering through there and why there are two Malcolms. Khanstant posted:Is this from the new x man cartoon or the comics? Here's a pretty nice article going over the times she's done it in three separate stories in the 1980s. https://www.cbr.com/you-go-your-way-and-i-go-mine-kitty-prydes-use-of-the-n-word/ I don't think they're the worst things X-Men has done with their whole racial allegory angle, but it's definitely dangerous territory to play around with.
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Apr 27, 2024 20:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:Here's a pretty nice article going over the times she's done it in three separate stories in the 1980s. Thanks, more interesting in context than seeing a random page first time I looked it up. For the 80s might've expected worse, their missteps were clumsy and kind of weird to put on a mask over the hat of your allegory that matches the thing you're making an allegory for. At the same time, even when I was a kid you'd hear people discuss what something meant on media as if it were like a huge surprise that one thing could stand for another while not being literally part of that thing. So maybe they felt they needed to be more explicit for the knuckleheads who weren't getting it?
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Apr 27, 2024 22:04
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Nessus posted:I suspect the 'take a handful of people to revitalize our dying population' thing came out of UFOlogy, since one of the emergent narratives about our little gray space brothers was that they were having population-wide genetic problems and were near enough to humans to want to take our pure bodily fluids, which could, in relatively small amounts, provide them with what they needed to revitalize their people. This was a minor plot point in Stargate; I didn't know it had real-world believers.
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Apr 27, 2024 22:11
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Halloween Jack posted:Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but Saurian brandy, jamaharon, and the agony booth. lol
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Apr 28, 2024 16:18
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Speaking of bad message episodes, this discussion reminded me of the really bad episode about overpopulation from TOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Gideon
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Apr 28, 2024 19:30
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FlamingLiberal posted:Speaking of bad message episodes, this discussion reminded me of the really bad episode about overpopulation from TOS The inevitable Malthusian crisis was A Thing for a while there, yeah. They didn't imagine the impacts that technosocial isolation and the spiritual void of consumerism would have on the population curve.
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Apr 29, 2024 03:31
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Jimbone Tallshanks posted:This was a minor plot point in Stargate; I didn't know it had real-world believers. McSpanky posted:The inevitable Malthusian crisis was A Thing for a while there, yeah. They didn't imagine the impacts that technosocial isolation and the spiritual void of consumerism would have on the population curve. 'If present trends continue' should always come with a picture of DIsco Stu's bar graph.
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Apr 29, 2024 04:33
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Medical birth control helped a whole hell of a lot too.
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Apr 29, 2024 05:00
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McSpanky posted:The inevitable Malthusian crisis was A Thing for a while there, yeah. They didn't imagine the impacts that technosocial isolation and the spiritual void of consumerism would have on the population curve. People have been predicting the inevitable population crisis just around the corner that will end all humanity for well over 200 years, and they haven't really stopped. I guess on average it's a bit lucky that there aren't Trek messages that have aged even worse, considering the state of things in the 60s. I guess it speaks a little to the series setting out to be progressive.
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Apr 29, 2024 07:08
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I liked the Kurt Vonnegut short story I read in 7th grade postulating a future in which aging has essentially been cured and the olds have hoarded all the wealth and space forcing everyone under like 120 years old to sleep three to a bed. The solution for the two main characters is to murder their grandfather/grandfather in law and go to prison for life, where they have an entire cell for the two of them.
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Apr 29, 2024 12:01
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Robocop happens because Detroit is carrying like $20 million in debt, so basically don't rely on fiction for any useful scenario
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Apr 29, 2024 15:38
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Overpopulation panic in science fiction seems to have reached a peak during and after TOS was airing, when The Population Bomb came out. Like just off the top of my head you've got Make Room! Make Room!, Stand On Zanzibar, and The World Inside. The trend seemed to peter out after 1971, I don't know why.
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Apr 29, 2024 15:43
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Mostly because it's ecofascist nonsense.
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Apr 29, 2024 15:45
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Halloween Jack posted:The trend seemed to peter out after 1971, I don't know why. The Green Revolution kicking into high gear and making the pressures seem like less of a worry? FlamingLiberal posted:Speaking of bad message episodes, this discussion reminded me of the really bad episode about overpopulation from TOS I do like the part where Kirk is just like 'for gently caress's sake just use condoms' and the idiot guys are like 'NO we don't BELIEVE in that we'd rather do mass murder instead'
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Apr 29, 2024 16:01
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Yeah but did it take exactly 4 years for people to figure out that Paul Ehrlich was just a racist crank, or what? I read someone that the global population growth rate started to decline in 1969, but it's not like public perceptions adjust because of new statistics about what's happening on other continents.
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Apr 29, 2024 16:01
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I liked in Forever War they handled overpopulation by making almost everyone gay until they eventually evolved into a new deal.
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Apr 29, 2024 17:26
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah but did it take exactly 4 years for people to figure out that Paul Ehrlich was just a racist crank, or what? I read someone that the global population growth rate started to decline in 1969, but it's not like public perceptions adjust because of new statistics about what's happening on other continents. Ehrlich specifically overstated his case and prophesied incipient doomsdays which failed to arrive. Nothing like saying “millions will die!” followed by millions not dying to discredit a position. The U.S. did try to introduce moderate population control measures around this time (by making contraception and abortion more widely available—this is the decade of Roe vs Wade and the original backlash and “ur tax dollars are buying welfare queens abortions!!” stuff). But there realistically wasn’t much they could have done about world population, even if the government had fully accepted the doomer reasoning and adopted aggressive population controls domestically, Ehrlich doesn’t have any practicable solutions for the global problem beyond “starve the third world”, he’s just waiting for people to start dying en masse which they didn’t do. There was a UN World Population Conference in 1974 (warning, extremely boring read) where a bunch of Ehrlich style population control ideas amounting to “poors in foreign countries should have fewer children or else” were presented by western powers and went over the way we are used to seeing analogous international climate change plans go over. Also a decade of recession, inflation and energy crisis in the US, in the face of which successive governments enacted a bunch of environmentalist policies, probably ended up linking eco concerns like “what do we do if there’s too many people” to economic failure in a bunch of peoples minds. I assume this because (as with the abortion thing) the backlash is still with us. The 70s must have been bleak af for anyone who cared about that poo poo lol, you start the decade with Earth Day and end with Reagan declaring government the problem. Otoh you have the CCP’s ham fisted population control attempts starting in the late 70s, which would have made the topic poisonous to all red-blooded American politicians anyway. skasion fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Apr 29, 2024 |
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Apr 29, 2024 17:26
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And now the pendulum's swung the other way and you've got people freaking out over declining birth rates.
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Apr 29, 2024 17:30
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DaveWoo posted:And now the pendulum's swung the other way and you've got people freaking out over declining birth rates.
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Apr 29, 2024 17:32
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DaveWoo posted:And now the pendulum's swung the other way and you've got people freaking out over declining birth rates. Largely different people. The people concerned about world population are still concerned about high birthrates in many nations.
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Apr 29, 2024 17:33
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Yeah, there are plenty of degrowthers around.
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Apr 29, 2024 18:25
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DaveWoo posted:And now the pendulum's swung the other way and you've got people freaking out over declining birth rates. Oh so that's why they namedropped Elon Musk in Star Trek 
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Apr 29, 2024 18:28
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Don't forget the god emperor of the federation, stacey abrams
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