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VitalSigns posted:Replicators can't make gold-pressed latinum, phasers, or unique quest items It should be noted, replicators can absolutely make phasers, but the replicator pattern plans are extremely guarded/controlled by starfleet because "press button, get gun" is a terrible thing to have in the open.
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Jun 3, 2021 18:08
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Shrecknet posted:It should be noted, replicators can absolutely make phasers, but the replicator pattern plans are extremely guarded/controlled by starfleet because "press button, get gun" is a terrible thing to have in the open. At least I can make a Tommy gun in the holodeck.
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Jun 3, 2021 18:35
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Randalor posted:Im just wondering why the boys didn't ask O'Brian if he could replicate a copy of the bear ones the boys had it so that both of them could have it. Plus O'Brian would have something he could poke fun at Bashir with.
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Jun 3, 2021 21:16
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SubG posted:Or the 1951 Willie Mays rookie card that's the end goal of all the trades. A thing that's basically the apotheosis of capitalist/consumerist consumption--a bit of cardboard originally conceived for advertising/promotional purposes and eventually prized entirely because of its artificial scarcity--and which could be reproduced flawlessly today, much less with replicator technology. And which is nevertheless apparently something worth committing crimes to obtain in the post-scarcity utopia of the Federation. i assume rarity in star trek is old stuff that survived ww3 and is from pre replicator days. like sure you can have the replicator version easy but why not get the original.
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Jun 4, 2021 02:47
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i assume rarity in star trek is old stuff that survived ww3 and is from pre replicator days. like sure you can have the replicator version easy but why not get the original.
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Jun 4, 2021 02:56
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i assume rarity in star trek is old stuff that survived ww3 and is from pre replicator days. like sure you can have the replicator version easy but why not get the original. 
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Jun 4, 2021 03:06
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Shrecknet posted:The entire point of a replicator is that the copy is indistinguishable. They made up a whole type of thing that was invulnerable to replicating so they could still have space capitalism But we don't even have to go there because independent of whatever questions get raised by Star Trek technology about identity, synonymy, and the persistence of objects, the behaviour we see indicates that whatever is true about that poo poo, people still behave, in most cases, in exactly the same ways about property that people in the real world do. For example, they're willing to commit crimes to obtain specific items perceived to be valuable, entirely independent of any material or utilitarian need.
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Jun 4, 2021 03:26
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Shrecknet posted:The entire point of a replicator is that the copy is indistinguishable. They made up a whole type of thing that was invulnerable to replicating so they could still have space capitalism Well, I mean - I have a Lego minifigure from the Ninjago series. Probably at least a thousand of them were extruded, if not several thousand. I'm not sure which of two very similar ones I have, but replacing it would cost either $3.13 or $2.72 on Brick Owl, and they're so similar that if I needed to replace it I'd just buy the cheaper one - except, I can't really replace it, because the one I have is the one I took pictures of at Yellowstone National Park as if 'she' were visiting it, and it wouldn't feel the same to just buy a replacement. That kind of intangibility is what a replicator couldn't replicate, even though a replicator could obviously produce a minifigure with the exact same scratches and wear marks as mine. In any kind of SF environment where you can trivially obtain anything, people are just going to start valuing things for those intangibilities. Like, making replicators refuse to replicate gold-pressed latinum produces artificial scarcity, but "this is the first strip of latinum I ever won in a dabo game" is something a replicator can't do.
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Jun 4, 2021 15:00
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has anyone ever written a short story where someone invents a replicator that CAN replicate that sort of intangible? Some future world with duplicators that duplicate things, and everyone sees they are copies and the lego man isn't the same even if it's identical, then some scientist doing a diff file on the two objects and being like "yup, the difference is here" and just building a duplicator that can duplicate that instead. (with the gimmick of the story being how hard it is to even think about what that would even mean. it's so obvious you could make a machine that removes the intangible meaning of an object, but what about a technology that could add or replicate that meaning as simply)
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Jun 4, 2021 15:13
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:has anyone ever written a short story where someone invents a replicator that CAN replicate that sort of intangible? Some future world with duplicators that duplicate things, and everyone sees they are copies and the lego man isn't the same even if it's identical, then some scientist doing a diff file on the two objects and being like "yup, the difference is here" and just building a duplicator that can duplicate that instead. It'd be pretty cool to have all my minifigures have that intangible. "This one wasn't even printed until 2021! How did it go to Yellowstone Park with you in 2018???"
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Jun 4, 2021 15:17
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The locus of the intangible "stuff" in this case is in your head rather than in the figure. So I guess you could twiddle some bits in your head using one of those Starfleet medical flashlights or whatever, and then boom problem solved. If you find that unsatisfying (as I imagine most people would) then you end up having to impute some sort of metaphysical trail left by an object--basically shifting our idea of what constitutes the identity of an object like a Lego minifig from being the physical widget--the thing that you can pick up, fiddle with, weigh, measure, whatever--and instead insist that each object is its world line (or some similar formulation)--not just its physical properties, but it's entire present and future path through spacetime. That ends up pushing you into an irretrievably analogue universe--suddenly every individual particle is not an example of an abstract class of things, but something whose properties are inextricably linked to it itself. Was it St Augustine that said that categories were a human invention, because God could just keep track of everything individually, so he has no need to generalise? In any case, that's where you end up. A better science fiction show that posited the existence of technologies like replicators and transporters would at least hint at the fact that people would actually need to be coming to terms with these questions.
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Jun 5, 2021 00:15
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SubG posted:. In John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, people go from elderly bodies to supersoldier bodies by having their 'brain pattern' recorded, and then transferred to their new body, and then their old body dies (or is killed) but it is briefly aware that the change has been made. I mention this because after the transfer, the supersoldiers are told that there's members of the clergy available to meet with them and explain why everything is morally okay. No one is ever shown to have qualms, and it's never brought up again, but I thought it was a nice touch.
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Jun 5, 2021 00:43
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zonohedron posted:In John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, people go from elderly bodies to supersoldier bodies by having their 'brain pattern' recorded, and then transferred to their new body, and then their old body dies (or is killed) but it is briefly aware that the change has been made. I mention this because after the transfer, the supersoldiers are told that there's members of the clergy available to meet with them and explain why everything is morally okay. No one is ever shown to have qualms, and it's never brought up again, but I thought it was a nice touch. This is all more or less a throwaway gag and demonstrates more engagement with the subject than the entire 500+ hours of the Star Trek corpus.
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Jun 5, 2021 01:01
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Fill Baptismal posted:One of my pet peeves actually is that a lot of sci-fi that tries to Say Something About Prejudice or whatever usually totally bungle the metaphor by having groups that are in fact categorically different from, or more dangerous than, normal humans as stand ins for minorities/gay people/immigrants, whatever. X-men was always the biggest eye roll when it went in hard on this and I was always kind of amazed more people didn't realize how insulting the metaphor was. No, having radioactive skin is not the same as being a black man, thanks. But I will take a young black male urban crime-fighter who calls himself "Superpredator" just to troll Clinton, though. I do think there was perhaps some value at least in examining how those fears, however legitimate, could easily manifest in increasingly horrifying ways. After all there's obviously a great deal of space between being nervous around "Mind-reader guy" and going "So...death camps then?" In any case this is really all just whatever when you talk to the content creators of these various fictional representations of present and possible future reality and realize that the fans are thinking about this stuff way harder than the creators ever did because 99% of their focus was hastily throwing together something semi-entertaining to meet a deadline for their job. -Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jun 6, 2021 |
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Jun 6, 2021 18:32
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the other thing about x men is that mutants were legitimately an existential threat and it made sense to fight them or even wipe them out from the perspective of non-mutants - like, having a random person with the capacity for destruction greater than a nuclear weapon and hoping that they don’t use their power capriciously is uhh not a good gamble and no sane person would be ok with that x men actually justifies discrimination in a very Not Good way and promotes the opposite message from what was intended
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Jun 6, 2021 23:20
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X-Men promotes the message that there are dangerous crazy people who are mutants AND not mutants, and whether that dangerous crazy person can blow up cities with their brain or build giant robots that exist only to hunt minorities or convince the US government to open death camps, they all need to be dealt with the same way: by good people working together regardless of who they are. The X-Men's mission is to prove to the world that mutants and humans can coexist in harmony, and their villains, mutant and otherwise, are those who exploit the fact that they currently do not. That's the actual Marginalized People metaphor, not the concept of mutants itself.
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Jun 6, 2021 23:53
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i'm also not a marvel person so i am not sure if this is ever addressed, but from what i half-remember one of the key 'conflicts' of iron man 2 was that the evil US government wants to take away tony stark's property, and that's Bad. but like, the idea of a random person acting as an extra-judicial police force is objectively terrifying and no, he should not control and use extremely dangerous technology just because he invented it and is a "good person". also, is shield some sort of supra-national police force which has the power to literally invade sovereign countries, and thats ok for Reasons? Sanguinia posted:X-Men promotes the message that there are dangerous crazy people who are mutants AND not mutants, and whether that dangerous crazy person can blow up cities with their brain or build giant robots that exist only to hunt minorities or convince the US government to open death camps, they all need to be dealt with the same way: by good people working together regardless of who they are. i am not super up on my xmen lore, but aren't the only non-mutant bad guys bad ... because of how they want to respond to mutants? and that the other threats the x-men deal with are either mutants, or some weird celestial forces or aliens or whatever?
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Jun 7, 2021 00:01
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Owlspiracy posted:i'm also not a marvel person so i am not sure if this is ever addressed, but from what i half-remember one of the key 'conflicts' of iron man 2 was that the evil US government wants to take away tony stark's property, and that's Bad. but like, the idea of a random person acting as an extra-judicial police force is objectively terrifying and no, he should not control and use extremely dangerous technology just because he invented it and is a "good person". In Iron Man 2 Tony frames the idea of the US Government taking his property as bad because 1) his attitude is being informed by the previous movie's plot wherein all the weapon systems he'd invented had been appropriated for terrorism and mass murder and it had been enabled by a person he trusted, making him believe that the only person he can trust with those weapons is himself and 2) he's been consumed by his own Randian god-complex as part of his general mental breakdown as he faces his own mortality since the machine that keeps the shrapnel out of his heart and powers the Iron Man suit is killing him. Tony is WRONG when he says this, and the movie illustrates this in two ways. First, by (theoretically) taking the shine off Tony as an individual and as an extension of the father he has idolized despite their estranged relationship and the values he espoused ("The best weapon is the one you only have to fire ONCE," etc). Tony fucks up time after time in that movie, making everything worse by his continued insistence on doing everything alone and his own way, to show that his attitude was incorrect, and the climax of the film requires that he work together with others to defeat Whiplash and his drones. Second, the movie shows that Tony HIMSELF doesn't even really believe the things he says to the Senate on some level because, as Nick Fury points out to him, he explicitly allows Rhoddie to make off with the Mark 2 Iron Man suit and deliver it to the US Military so it can become War Machine. Tony could have stopped it or recalled it or shut it down at any time, but despite his protestations he wants the world to be protected once he's dead. His self-destruction in that movie is on some level also about trying to help the world move on without him, both by alienating those who love him so they won't mourne him, and practically by giving Stark Industries to Pepper and Iron Man to Rhodes (and by extension the government) so they can carry on once he's dead. As for Shield, Cap and The Winter Soldier (and Avengers) makes it pretty clear that they're not a US Government entity entirely and are under some kind of international oversight, some kind of "Global Security Committee," or whatever. Like, one of the top administrators is explicitly from India, just for the most obvious example. quote:i am not super up on my xmen lore, but aren't the only non-mutant bad guys bad ... because of how they want to respond to mutants? and that the other threats the x-men deal with are either mutants, or some weird celestial forces or aliens or whatever? The two most famous X-Men non-mutant villains are a US Politician who only hates mutants because he's racist and wants to genocide them regardless of how dangerous or not they might be, and crouches it in "reasonable," terms for the sake of politically enabling his fascism, and a mad scientist who uses mutants as an excuse to make giant robots which eventually take over the planet in some timelines. I don't think I would classify either of those as "bad guys because of how they respond to mutants."
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Jun 7, 2021 00:42
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Owlspiracy posted:the other thing about x men is that mutants were legitimately an existential threat and it made sense to fight them or even wipe them out from the perspective of non-mutants - like, having a random person with the capacity for destruction greater than a nuclear weapon and hoping that they don’t use their power capriciously is uhh not a good gamble and no sane person would be ok with that Babylon 5 had one of the more interesting takes on this kind of regulation versus liberty for a superpowered minority plot with its telepaths and Psi Corps. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the thought that there was no good answer. You can't argue that telepaths who can peer through the minds of everyone around them, can sift through memories with ease, and maybe even kill people with a thought shouldn't be monitored. But then you ended up with the most powerful telepaths inevitably ending up in positions within the Psi Corps structure where they could basically flaunt the rules (see Bester) and the worst atrocities were visited upon the most powerless telepaths. The replacement for Psi Corps similarly seemed stupidly idealistic (we'll rebrand it and fix it, telepaths will monitor each other) but also remarkably cynical (it's basically the old Psi Corps in all but name, a feel-good rebranding, the unjust structure persists.)
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Jun 7, 2021 03:07
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Babylon 5 had one of the more interesting takes on this kind of regulation versus liberty for a superpowered minority plot with its telepaths and Psi Corps. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the thought that there was no good answer. You can't argue that telepaths who can peer through the minds of everyone around them, can sift through memories with ease, and maybe even kill people with a thought shouldn't be monitored. But then you ended up with the most powerful telepaths inevitably ending up in positions within the Psi Corps structure where they could basically flaunt the rules (see Bester) and the worst atrocities were visited upon the most powerless telepaths. The replacement for Psi Corps similarly seemed stupidly idealistic (we'll rebrand it and fix it, telepaths will monitor each other) but also remarkably cynical (it's basically the old Psi Corps in all but name, a feel-good rebranding, the unjust structure persists.) The Psi Corps is more or less deliberately designed to be fascist, right down to eugenic breeding programs and laws which make it illegal for telepaths to work without membership in good standing, it existence justified under the false flag of security for "normals," and protecting from persecution for telepaths. Its actual purpose is the weaponization of a minority with unique skills on behalf of the state. Which is why fascists like Bester gain power through its structures, and not good people, and why later on in the show that people who give big speeches about "The Telepath Problem," are also the people saying that President Clark who would later go on to almost obliterate all life on earth and slaughtered millions before that, is a minor problem that can be left to sort itself out. B5 displays time and again that when Telepaths are treated like human beings by "normals," and they can believe that those "normals," won't turn on them there is no need for programs like the Psi Corps. The Minbari and Centauri have no official telepath regulatory agencies that we're ever made aware of and the presence of telepaths in their societies is never a problem, with a single exception involving a telepath who happens to be a criminal hiring himself out to do a crime that his gift is uniquely suited to, not really any different than a criminal hiring himself out because he happens to be a particularly good getaway driver because of better than average reflexes or something.
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Jun 7, 2021 03:48
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SubG posted:When I first started posting about this--being surprised about the weird smug evangelicalism, hosed up barely-concealed racism masquerading as progressivism, weird sex hangups, and that kind of thing, I got a lot of responses that that was just the first part of the series that was like that, it gets better later, TNG is bad but DS9 is really good, and so on...but that continued to really not be my experience. Picard takes all of the racism, xenophobia, smug lectures of TNG and appears to briefly acknowledge the fault in TNG before doubling down hard. Replicators are proof that TNG was more like the Jetsons than science fiction.
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Jun 7, 2021 05:01
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Sanguinia posted:The Psi Corps is more or less deliberately designed to be fascist, right down to eugenic breeding programs and laws which make it illegal for telepaths to work without membership in good standing, it existence justified under the false flag of security for "normals," and protecting from persecution for telepaths. Its actual purpose is the weaponization of a minority with unique skills on behalf of the state. Which is why fascists like Bester gain power through its structures, and not good people, and why later on in the show that people who give big speeches about "The Telepath Problem," are also the people saying that President Clark who would later go on to almost obliterate all life on earth and slaughtered millions before that, is a minor problem that can be left to sort itself out. This is all true, of course, and it's basically part and parcel of Babylon 5's 'end of history' (it's right there in the opening titles!) narrative. The Psi Corps is a fascist aberration - if we remove that, and get rid of the bad telepaths like Bester, it'll all be fine. What makes this interesting, of course, is that the replacement for the Psi Corps - the Psionic Monitoring Commission - is never actually described or detailed. What we do know is that it was formed after the Telepath War and is made up of mostly people from the Psi Corps - a real Operation Paperclip scenario, I guess - and the most significant changes include that they now wear Earthforce uniforms and submit to deep mental scans to ensure lawful behaviour. Which isn't exactly a system of transparent checks and balances, and could be argued as a different kind of oppression from the Corps - Psi Corps members didn't have to submit to regular scans to ensure they were being good girls and boys. If we go into the Psi Corps novels, which were based on an outline from Straczynski, it makes it more clear that the Psi Corps was formed in response to mundane intolerance, and the intolerance persisted in the form of pogroms, pre-natal eugenics, killings, hate crimes, and so on even up until Bester's death in the 2280s. What's interesting about the series itself is that this intolerance persists regardless of the Psi Corps. In the novels, the Earth Alliance was happily invading nations around the world who refused to sign on. But even in the series, John Sheridan happily uses telepaths as weapons during the Earth Civil War, the same thing the Psi Corps was doing, and basically gets away with it. Sheridan also calls the Byron-led telepath colony on Babylon 5 the worst mistake of his career. One of the more interesting points of the third Psi Corps novel is when Bester points out that he - and by extension, the former Corps - was a bogeyman for everyone else to point to when, really, the so-called Telepath Problem was still looming. Even Bester knew that the Psi Corps existed as a telepathic ghetto until the world figured out what to do with them. From his perspective, the destruction of the Corps was the mundanes realizing that the inmates had taken control of the prison and the formation of the PMC (lol) was to prevent telepaths from having a central base of power, scattering them throughout Earthforce while still requiring them to be registered, tested, and made to wear badges. That's not to say that Bester wasn't a monster or the Psi Corps wasn't a monstrous organization, but that the failings of the Corps lied with the Earth Alliance and the century of so of injustice it was built upon. The fact Bester is memorialized, if unknowingly, as a statue to the heroes of the Telepath resistance is one of the funnier jabs at this kind of concept in the novels. With the Minbari, we know that telepaths are basically wards of the state - I believe that Delenn says they occupy a honored position in their society and all their needs are met by the state in exchange for their service. I'm not sure if the Centauri approach is ever detailed, but a brief perusal online says that there's a Telepath Guild that ensures that telepaths are hired out to do specific things for the Republic. Sure, we never are made away of the problems these socities faced with telepaths in their societies, but they're never really detailed either, and it could be argued that they're still a form of strict regulatory control, especially in the case of the Minbari whose society is steeped in tradition and a strict caste system. It's also interesting that we never really see any telepaths, but that's more of an extension of Babylon 5 being very focused on the central larger-than-life cast. I'm pretty sure Bester says at some point that all societies have developed some way to control their telepaths in order to keep normals safe. edit: There are some other interesting points from the Psi Corps novels - Psi Corps must be led by a mundane, but the first Director was a telepath with a Lyta-esque situation. He was the guy who came up with the breeding programs as a way to create better soldiers to fight against the Shadows. The Psi Corps notions of obedience and order align pretty well with the Vorlons, don't they? But that Director was replaced by a mundane, and a bigot at that, which led to the higher echelons of Psi Corps waging something of a secret war against him and consolidating their own power and interests which led to the Psi Corps as we saw it throughout the series. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Jun 7, 2021 |
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Jun 7, 2021 05:22
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Sanguinia posted:The two most famous X-Men non-mutant villains are a US Politician who only hates mutants because he's racist and wants to genocide them regardless of how dangerous or not they might be, and crouches it in "reasonable," terms for the sake of politically enabling his fascism, and a mad scientist who uses mutants as an excuse to make giant robots which eventually take over the planet in some timelines. I don't think I would classify either of those as "bad guys because of how they respond to mutants."
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Jun 7, 2021 07:12
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:This is all true, of course, and it's basically part and parcel of Babylon 5's 'end of history' (it's right there in the opening titles!) narrative. I really can't speak to the rest of your post, since I've not had anything to do with the B5 expanded universe ( such as it is ), but I kind of have to take exception to the above. The whole point of the season 4 finale, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" - as well as the show in general - is that history never ends; there's no point where you can kick back and proclaim things finished and done. There'll always be some new opponent, some new, fresh crisis looming on the horizon and it'll need to be dealt with. Delenn's voice-over at the end is pretty drat explicit about it, too; She mentions the looming Telepath War, the Drakh War, that the Alliance will crack and fall, before coming together again. The show is pretty overt about its message in this particular episode; If there is an 'end to history' for Sheridan, Delenn, G'Kar, Londo, et al., it's only in the sense that the 'First Ones' are gone and won't meddle with the 'Younger races' anymore, so the Alliance is on its own from here on out... Which, yes, kind of the 'end of history', if you tilt your head and squint, but at the same time absolutely not. And if Straczynski hadn't gotten funding to produce the fifth season on TNT, then "Deconstruction..." would have been the overall end to the entire series.
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Jun 7, 2021 07:47
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Zachack posted:I'm pretty sure Kelly is/was propped up by evil mutants (Hellfire Club, iirc) and I doubt Trask gets anywhere without mutant threats. Evil humans are obvious risks in X-books but they are frequently either aided by mutants, secret mutants themselves, or frankly comical threats that get wiped by mid-tier mutants. Mutants that can fly or grow bones or even maybe Cyclops aren't threats to humanity but Iceman, Magneto, and definitely Jean Grey represent existential threats to the entire planet and the latter in particular is basically where the minority comparison really fails - if a member of a small human subgroup could and will suddenly, randomly, and uncontrollably destroy the Earth then you've just made a really good case for rounding that subgroup up. Jean Grey isn't an existential threat to the planet because she's a mutant, she has an alien space god possessing her body, which could have happened to literally anybody as we see in one of the big dumb comic crossovers when Everyone Is Phoenix for a few issues. Magneto needs Thor's Hammer to be an existential threat to the planet in the one timeline where that is the case, and MOST people with Asgardian technology can and have been existential threats to the planet, as we saw in the Everyone Is Thor event, where the premise was "We need to stop Norman Osborne, average smart human with modest super strength from science gas, from getting Asgard's technology or we're hosed." If there's some comic where Iceman is an existential threat to the world, I haven't seen it. Hell, at least back in the 90s Apocalypse wasn't even a threat to the world because of being a mutant, it was because of alien supertech, and he's like the X-men's biggest villain! The idea of Mutant Bigotry In Superhero World being kind of weird and dumb is a whole other conversation, but the point is that even if in theory some mutants can have powers that make them existential threats to the world, they live in a world where LITERALLY ANYONE can be an existential threat to the world if the wrong piece of Space Trash latches onto their brain or the wrong chemicals get mixed together in some lab somewhere. If anything, that reality makes the minority comparison STRONGER. Mutants are persecuted out of fear using worst-case scenarios as a rationalization, when any basic logic would demand that similar controls to what are proposed for mutants be placed on the entire population at large. And wouldn't you know it, they did that one time, it was called Marvel Civil War. It may not have been a good comic but it certainly did a good job of showing that literally any superhero could screw up and cause mass devastation, but that trying to strip them of all their civil rights because of that danger was not an acceptable recourse to that threat. What makes mutants a good minority allegory is that they are a group of people that society has decided its acceptable to persecute based on completely warped logic rooted entirely in privilege when you expose it to any kind of analysis.
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Jun 7, 2021 08:00
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TLM3101 posted:I really can't speak to the rest of your post, since I've not had anything to do with the B5 expanded universe ( such as it is ), but I kind of have to take exception to the above. The whole point of the season 4 finale, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" - as well as the show in general - is that history never ends; there's no point where you can kick back and proclaim things finished and done. There'll always be some new opponent, some new, fresh crisis looming on the horizon and it'll need to be dealt with. And yet, what form does this history take? What is the Interstellar Alliance, the Earth Alliance, and so on, but the extension of Western liberal democracy carried out two hundred years into the future? Indeed, that was a big reason that Babylon 5 was such a hit in the 90s, that it argued that the problems we're always faced would follow us into space, in contrast to Star Trek which was seen as overly optimistic or 'not realistic.' It's not dissimilar to some of the comments made about the Expanse novels a bunch of pages ago -- our society has peaked, this is as good as it's ever going to get (and it can certainly get worse), until we all become energy beings and totally not repeat the mistakes the First Ones made because the truth is in the middle between order and chaos. But you're also incorrect. Deconstruction was produced after the fifth season was renewed. Sleeping of Light was filmed at the end of Season 4 and would've been the finale had the show not been renewed, hence that it features Claudia Christian as Susan Ivanova. Deconstruction is a fun episode but it falls into the pattern a lot of Babylon 5 has when discussing significant issues -- such as, say, the aftermath of the Earth Civil War -- where it doesn't really say anything. From what we know of the Telepath War and the Drakh War, the Interstellar Alliance weathers it pretty well. In fact, according to the Babylon 5 wiki, the Interstellar Alliance still exists by the time humanity has become beings of pure energy some one million years in the future. That's crazy! Even five hundred years on, whatever group that is acting against the ISA tries to do so by deconstructing Sheridan, Delenn, Garibaldi and Franklin with faked propaganda -- what, in five hundred years, is the pull of these personalities still so strong? The end of history just means that humanity has hit a point where human life continues for much the same way without any major changes in society and so on -- the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. I mean, just look at the major species of Babylon 5 - they're all some form of democracy, oligarchic or otherwise, and they all seem to have a fairly free society with market economies and so on. Even though these powers have control over fusion, gravity, and so on, life in 2261 resembles much as it does in 2021. Delenn says that history will judge them, yes -- but, as we see, even a thousand years on, history still judges them pretty kindly and these Great Men and Women still cast phenomenal shadows over history. She also never says the Alliance will fall, just that it will crack and waver and ultimately hold. I think it's partially why Season 5 is a bit weaker than the rest and why Babylon 5 didn't really go past 2262 -- because the ISA is not the holy grail that the show thinks it is and while Bruce Boxleitner has a lot of charisma, the show leans a bit too much into seeing Sheridan as a Great Man and absolving him of a lot of bad things he does.
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Jun 7, 2021 09:37
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:And yet, what form does this history take? What is the Interstellar Alliance, the Earth Alliance, and so on, but the extension of Western liberal democracy carried out two hundred years into the future? Indeed, that was a big reason that Babylon 5 was such a hit in the 90s, that it argued that the problems we're always faced would follow us into space, in contrast to Star Trek which was seen as overly optimistic or 'not realistic.' It's not dissimilar to some of the comments made about the Expanse novels a bunch of pages ago -- our society has peaked, this is as good as it's ever going to get (and it can certainly get worse), until we all become energy beings and totally not repeat the mistakes the First Ones made because the truth is in the middle between order and chaos. I'll agree that, insofar as liberal democracy is held up as the one, true standard, then the End of History reading does make a lot of sense. At the same time, though, it also overlooks the fact that while the Alliance is run like a liberal democracy, the individual members seem... less enthused. As far as we know the Minbari are still under the Council of Nine, even with Delenn reconstituting it with a majority from the Worker caste, the Centauri hold on to their elective, aristocratic Empire, no-one knows what form the Narn Regime returns as after the second Centauri occupation, and Earth seems to be some flavor of liberal democracy. Of the League, we have too few examples, but it's not inconcievable that there are absolute kingdoms or dictators there. Overall, my reading has the Alliance presented less as "Space US" and more like "Space UN". Milkfred E. Moore posted:But you're also incorrect. Deconstruction was produced after the fifth season was renewed. Sleeping of Light was filmed at the end of Season 4 and would've been the finale had the show not been renewed, hence that it features Claudia Christian as Susan Ivanova. Deconstruction is a fun episode but it falls into the pattern a lot of Babylon 5 has when discussing significant issues -- such as, say, the aftermath of the Earth Civil War -- where it doesn't really say anything. From what we know of the Telepath War and the Drakh War, the Interstellar Alliance weathers it pretty well. In fact, according to the Babylon 5 wiki, the Interstellar Alliance still exists by the time humanity has become beings of pure energy some one million years in the future. That's crazy! Even five hundred years on, whatever group that is acting against the ISA tries to do so by deconstructing Sheridan, Delenn, Garibaldi and Franklin with faked propaganda -- what, in five hundred years, is the pull of these personalities still so strong? Yeah, true. That's my mistake with the continuity. Wires crossed on the sequence of events. Derp.  That said, I'm not entirely sure the Allience exists in the far, far future. Given the presence of the Ranger-symbol on the energy-Human ( Vorman? Hulon? )'s ship, we can probably say for certain that some fusion of Human/Minbari exists, but since it's also strongly hinted that Sol is going nova due to outside meddling of some sort, the Alliance may well have split into at least two factions. There's certainly precedent for it, given the Alliance civil-war that Earth touches off with their failed attempt at propaganda. That said, we do not know one way or the other, but the implication is certainly that the Human/Minbari merge happens. As for the aforementioned propaganda and the pull of strong personalities, humans have been doing it for a good, long while. It's not as present now as it was, but you will still have people, particularly in a religious context, draw on various saints and church-fathers and philosophers from 1500+ years ago to make a point, some authorities quite obscure. Further, we're still quoting leaders and politicians and philosophers from the 1600s to argue for positions today, and we have people twisting quotes and taking things out of context to have perceived authorities say exactly the opposite of what they stood for ( see: King Jr, Martin Luther ; Lincoln, Abraham ; Smith, Adam ; Fathers, Founding ; Luther, Martin ; etc., etc. ). I mean, if you could be guaranteed to "discover" documentation that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that some sacred authority was actually a villain, can you honestly say you don't know plenty of people in our current political climate that wouldn't have lept at the chance? Milkfred E. Moore posted:The end of history just means that humanity has hit a point where human life continues for much the same way without any major changes in society and so on -- the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. I mean, just look at the major species of Babylon 5 - they're all some form of democracy, oligarchic or otherwise, and they all seem to have a fairly free society with market economies and so on. Even though these powers have control over fusion, gravity, and so on, life in 2261 resembles much as it does in 2021. Except it... doesn't? Like, the show is pretty explicit in "Deconstruction" that Earth, at the very least, is so utterly ruined by an inter-Alliance civil war that it regresses to a medieval technology-level under an implied theocracy. Along with the "Space UN" portrayal of the Alliance, to me this calls into question just how triumphalist it is on behalf of liberal democracy and capitalism. Especially because we simply do not have any clues outside the context of this episode how Human society, let alone the Alliance as a whole, developed. I could argue that the energy-humans are living in perfect post-scarcity anarcho-communist utopia, and the show would support that reading just as much as a reading of the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism... Because you are absolutely correct about the show being really frustratingly vague and letting Sheridan, Delenn, et. al., get away with some really bad poo poo, no question.
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Jun 7, 2021 10:56
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Any good scifi novels or other works where everything is run direct democracy style via online voting?
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Jun 7, 2021 11:04
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Charlz Guybon posted:Any good scifi novels or other works where everything is run direct democracy style via online voting? Orville season 1 episode 7.
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Jun 7, 2021 11:36
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Charlz Guybon posted:Any good scifi novels or other works where everything is run direct democracy style via online voting? Hyperion book 1 and 2
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Jun 7, 2021 12:02
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TLM3101 posted:I'll agree that, insofar as liberal democracy is held up as the one, true standard, then the End of History reading does make a lot of sense. At the same time, though, it also overlooks the fact that while the Alliance is run like a liberal democracy, the individual members seem... less enthused. As far as we know the Minbari are still under the Council of Nine, even with Delenn reconstituting it with a majority from the Worker caste, the Centauri hold on to their elective, aristocratic Empire, no-one knows what form the Narn Regime returns as after the second Centauri occupation, and Earth seems to be some flavor of liberal democracy. I'd argue that Babylon 5's refrain that humanity is unique (because they build communities...) is another point towards it. Pretty much all of those other nations have a serious flaw in some way -- the Minbari are hidebound and isolationist, the Centauri are in serious decline, the Narn suffered grievously, and the League spend most of their time squabbling with each other. The EA struck me as Space US. The ISA struck me as that sort of neoliberal futurist dream of a powerful, benevolent UN. quote:That said, I'm not entirely sure the Allience exists in the far, far future. Given the presence of the Ranger-symbol on the energy-Human ( Vorman? Hulon? )'s ship, we can probably say for certain that some fusion of Human/Minbari exists, but since it's also strongly hinted that Sol is going nova due to outside meddling of some sort, the Alliance may well have split into at least two factions. There's certainly precedent for it, given the Alliance civil-war that Earth touches off with their failed attempt at propaganda. I think as far as we know from JMS' statements, humanity and Minbari became First Ones, whereas the Narn and Centauri did not. The destruction of Sol was at the hands of an unknown species, which begs the question of just what could threaten the Hulon state. Along the lines of this topic, it always bugged me that whatever form humanity took was heading off to go inherit the Vorlon homeworld. I don't think we'd want to inherit their legacy of failure and atrocity (what else could you call the genetic manipulation of entire specie to produce mind-warriors as battle thralls for your doctrinal conflict?) and the idea that things will be different magically is... just not fulfilling. It operates in a lot of the mythical, operatic spaces that Babylon 5 likes to occupy. quote:As for the aforementioned propaganda and the pull of strong personalities, humans have been doing it for a good, long while. It's not as present now as it was, but you will still have people, particularly in a religious context, draw on various saints and church-fathers and philosophers from 1500+ years ago to make a point, some authorities quite obscure. Further, we're still quoting leaders and politicians and philosophers from the 1600s to argue for positions today, and we have people twisting quotes and taking things out of context to have perceived authorities say exactly the opposite of what they stood for ( see: King Jr, Martin Luther ; Lincoln, Abraham ; Smith, Adam ; Fathers, Founding ; Luther, Martin ; etc., etc. ). It may be an American thing. My country -- Australia -- isn't really old enough to have a long history so the idea of someone appealing to something so old doesn't make sense, much less as part of serious political putsch. It's also strange to me because I don't think you'd need to put forward some perverted version of the ISA's 'founding fathers' to attack them -- all of them did questionable things. I feel like people more inclined to take a kinder view of historical figures -- poo poo, look at Hamilton -- than it is to excise them based on indiscretions being exposed. Even George Bush has been enjoying a period of rehabilitation. The other thing is that the bad guys are just deep faking the cast--like, it's almost like far-future shitposting. RARE FOOTAGE: CAPTAIN SHERIDAN EXECUTING LOYAL EARTHERS (COLORIZED, 2261!) I feel like if someone came out with some video of a beloved figure eating puppies or something it wouldn't do much to change the people who already thought that person was good or bad. It's possible I'm entirely too optimistic, and maybe we'll see deepfake stuff become a serious problem in the future. quote:Except it... doesn't? Like, the show is pretty explicit in "Deconstruction" that Earth, at the very least, is so utterly ruined by an inter-Alliance civil war that it regresses to a medieval technology-level under an implied theocracy. Along with the "Space UN" portrayal of the Alliance, to me this calls into question just how triumphalist it is on behalf of liberal democracy and capitalism. Especially because we simply do not have any clues outside the context of this episode how Human society, let alone the Alliance as a whole, developed. I think we need to be careful about the term Alliance, given the existence of the Earth Alliance and the Interstellar Alliance, hah. The Great Burn was the anti-ISA faction of the EA launching an attack on Earth which burnt the planet down to a pre-Industrial age level, leading to a civilization that revered the case of Babylon 5 as legendary religious figures. Meanwhile, the ISA -- specifically, the Rangers -- began a process of infiltrating to uplift Earth back to the stars. Honestly, it's pretty nonsensical, and I can't really resolve why the ISA left the people of Earth to linger in an apocalyptic wasteland beyond, maybe, teaching them a lesson? Or was the Great Burn a much larger event than indicated? There's a lot of things that're kinda funny in Babylon 5. For example, the stuff with the Mars colony and how the ISA basically tells the Earth Alliance that they must let Mars become a free state if the population so wishes. To me, that's taken on a particularly ironic sense of humor in a post-Brexit world. There's no way Mars is a self-sustaining colony or, if it is, that it'll magically be sunshine and rainbows. Like a lot of Babylon 5, it doesn't want to explore what this actually means. The thing about Babylon 5 is that JMS was, at least on some level, aware of the Great Man myth and how it is a bit of an issue. G'Kar's whole plotline is basically about the conflict between the teachings of a great man and the people who wish to use his teachings for their own purposes. But even so, the general throughline of a lot of these things is that the structures are fine, we just need to put the right person in the job. Clarke was a bad President, Sheridan will be a good one. The Grey Council is bad, but it'll be okay if we put more Worker oligarchs on it. Cartagia was a bad Emperor, Vir will be a good one, and so on. And, of course, it's not up to any story to be a didactic depiction of the future -- but it's a little bit frustrating, albeit I suppose the 90s were a very different time. The Earth Alliance Civil War is another of those interesting things that, like the demise of the Psi Corps, isn't sure whether it's really cynical or way too naïve. We'll touch on the character of Lochley, too, because she suffers because of this ambiguity. So, Vice President Clark assassinates President Santiago and assumes control of the Earth Alliance. Virtually immediately, he begins turning the Earth Alliance into a police state, establishing a secret police, getting in good with the Psi Corps and letting them run rampant, and inflaming anti-alien rhetoric. This culminates in a military coup by pro-Clark elements, a media blackout, the establishment of a totalitarian regime, and atrocities by the bucketload including attacks by the EA military on civilians. This leads to Captain Sheridan leading an insurrection -- eventually, with alien backing and support -- against his own government. In the end, Sheridan wins, Clark kills himself, and the day is saved. Score one for the good guys who fought the good fight of their conscience against fascism. But disregarding the rather naked and obvious way the Clark EA conducted itself, things get very interesting when the war ends. As an aside, I wish more people drew the link between the Great Burn and Clark's attempt to burn down Earth. Anyway. At the end of the war, the new President of the EA -- Luchenko -- basically says they'll put on trial anyone who directly performed war crimes for the Clark regime, but there needs to be time to determine who was a "willing participant" and who was only doing it because Clark's people threatened their families and so on. Anyone who joined Sheridan's insurrection is granted 'amnesty' but there's the implication that this is possibly a trick which Sheridan sidesteps by becoming, basically, President of the Whole Galaxy. This seems to make it pretty clear that, at the end of the day, and much like the earlier discussion of Psi Corps, very little probably changed in the Earth Alliance following the Civil War. This brings us to Lochley who is the next commanding officer of Babylon 5. For a while, the series dodges the question of whether she fought for Clark and, when it reveals that she did actually remain with Earthforce because she didn't believe it was the job of the military to dictate policy, it doesn't go any further than that. Did Lochley commit war crimes? Did she know they were happening? Did Clark threaten her family? Why did the EA appoint someone on the Clark side of things to their diplomatic station? These questions are never answered. It's like the Earth Alliance went 'So, that happened, let's all just move on.' I feel like the implication is that all the bad people will be rooted out given time if we let the wheels of justice turn -- much like Bester and his loyalists within the Psi Corps -- but there's nothing else that actually needs to happen. It's very realistic, in a sense, but I wager if you asked JMS about it he'd not see it that way. There's so many more things that are worth noting about Babylon 5, as fun a show as it is. The protagonist are all no-nonsense military sorts with good-ol-boy common sense, which is a pretty common sci-fi trope. Their ends always justify their means but, boy, they'll feel bad about doing something questionable. Whenever the first type of Space UN -- the League shows up -- Sheridan isn't above tricking them into siding with him, sometimes through pretty underhanded methods. And the ISA will be better than the League was because Sheridan can wrangle them into doing what he wants. The fact that within its first year, the ISA ends up with several major crises including the orbital bombardment of Centauri Prime is never really addressed or event commented on. There's a lot of little things that the series never draws attention to. Clark is bad because he uses propaganda and doesn't give people The Truth. Sheridan wryly claims that his resistance never lets the world know when they lose a battle. Kind of like the episode where the Vorlons send someone to judge Sheridan and Delenn and -- ignoring that the Vorlons turn out to be dicks -- the general theme is basically, yes, these two are the right kind of Great People. Which leads to that section in Deconstruction where some academics are wondering if Sheridan really was all that great, and Delenn shows up and shames them because he was a better man than they were.
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Jun 7, 2021 12:16
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:
I mean, I agree with pretty much everything you say here, but I shall single this out particularly, because of the absolute irony of who they send to perform their examination of Delenn and Sheridan - which doubles as the first main clue that, Kosh possibly aside, the Vorlons are absolute bastards in their own finely honed and specific way. I should also probably add that I pretty much base my 'read' of the show off the collected seasons, and try to avoid adding in too much stuff that's not off the commentary tracks, mainly because, well... the text is *there*, and while I think authorial intent matters, I don't think that should override the text as presented. Hence why I'm also a bit... confused about the choice of the Hulons going off to the Vorlon homeworld - since that is, iirc, one of the things JMS explicitly goes into at one point in the commentary. I mostly read it as one of the ironies that ends up being presented in the show, right alongside the whole plot of the aftermath of the EA civil war for individual officers being handled quite in a quite realistic ( don't ask, don't tell, don't rock the boat and we'll all just pretend it didn't happen ), if unsatisfactory manner. Honestly, every time I get into those plotlines, they seem both like a missed opportunity, but also as an "Of course the EA is going to try and pretend it's all fine now". Much like the aftermath of the US civil war, presumably, ended up playing out, except in the B5 universe the secessionists won... Which has some really unfortunate, potential implications, if you think about it a bit. Now, post-Brexit and post Jan. 6th, of course, it has picked up even more, layered resonances. Oh! Let's not forget Luchenko literally presents Sheridan with terms, and tells him if he doesn't resign in the interest of 'unity', she'll have him, and his people, court-martialled, and personally ensured his court is stacked against him. Her direct threat of "Do not make the mistake of assuming this is a conversation. It isn't." is really well done, I think. Sheridan's sidestep is less a sidestep as such, but an acceptance of terms, and he very specifically makes sure to get the amnesties in writing and off to safety before he resigns. The show, to me, always read as people trying to do the best they can within flawed systems, and while the IA is certainly shown as the least flawed, the show's still got plenty of things to say about the weaknesses inherent in our current, liberal democratic paradigm; the EA and Clarke is the perfect case in point; It's not quite as simple as 'Clarke was a bad president, Sheridan will be a good one' it's that Clarke was a power-hungry fascist, and he exploited the weaknesses he found in the system to seize power. Honestly, watching the rise of Clarke now, post-Trump, is kind of loving chilling, because the only major differences is that Clarke is actually competent ( or is smart enough to listen to competent people, anyway ), and he pulls the assassination/coup first, rather than later. There's the building of a cult of personality, propaganda drowning out news, the surveillance-state, the armbands, Night Watch... EA's liberal democracy can't handle that poo poo, and it leaves Clarke able to do pretty much whatever he wants. Something which - to JMS and the show's credit - Luchenko also acknowledges to Sheridan. There were people that wanted to act, but they were constrained, adopting a wait-and-see approach. So Sheridan probably did the right thing, but it's incredibly inconvenient for the system the EA is working under to acknowledge it, because that would mean there are situations that liberal democracy can't handle perfectly, and whoopsie, that would call the whole project into question. Luchenko posted:"The bitch of it is that you probably did the right thing, but you did it in the wrong way. The inconvenient way." e: Actually, gently caress it. Time to watch it again. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jun 7, 2021 |
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Jun 7, 2021 14:33
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Owlspiracy posted:the other thing about x men is that mutants were legitimately an existential threat and it made sense to fight them or even wipe them out from the perspective of non-mutants - like, having a random person with the capacity for destruction greater than a nuclear weapon and hoping that they don’t use their power capriciously is uhh not a good gamble and no sane person would be ok with that I'm honestly a not big fan of this argument because every human is capable of causing harm, intentionally or not, and we doesn't lock them up.
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Jun 7, 2021 15:34
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TLM3101 posted:Oh! Let's not forget Luchenko literally presents Sheridan with terms, and tells him if he doesn't resign in the interest of 'unity', she'll have him, and his people, court-martialled, and personally ensured his court is stacked against him. Her direct threat of "Do not make the mistake of assuming this is a conversation. It isn't." is really well done, I think. Sheridan's sidestep is less a sidestep as such, but an acceptance of terms, and he very specifically makes sure to get the amnesties in writing and off to safety before he resigns. Oh, absolutely. Hopefully I'll get the time to make a bigger reply soon. But, yes, I think Luchenko is one of the most interesting parts of the Civil War conclusion and it's a shame we don't see more of her. She basically reflects the third party that gets basically ignored by much of the civil war storyline -- the members of the EA who don't fight for Clark but don't sign on with Sheridan's insurrection either, people who choose to sit out of the war. And, of course, the existence of a third party between two warring ideological sides is interesting given the resolution of the Vorlon/Shadow plot. It's a really good moment that the EA doesn't welcome Sheridan back as a hero. But I've always felt like we're supposed to see Luchenko as an ungrateful bureaucrat, someone who Sheridan cannily gets the last laugh over. From memory, I believe Delenn and Londo tell Luchenko at some point that Sheridan was already picked to be ISA President before he got that amnesty deal from her. The formation of the ISA has bugged me since I went back and watched B5 a few years ago. But there's something unsettling about how, hours or days after shattering the EA fleet and dismantling Earth's orbital defences, Delenn has the White Star fleet come roaring through the skies about the EA capital. Having just overthrown your government, lawful or otherwise, this alliance is now 'offering' you to 'join' their assembly -- don't mind the fleet of advanced warships, they're peacekeepers who only go where they're invited. Doesn't that put a different spin on the issue Deconstruction illustrates, with this seemingly recurring, intractable problem of the Earth Alliance trying to undermine or separate from the ISA? A problem that leads to Earth being burnt down and the Rangers operating covertly, seemingly to manipulate the people of Earth into a state where they won't make the same 'mistake' again?
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Jun 7, 2021 16:30
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Owlspiracy posted:the other thing about x men is that mutants were legitimately an existential threat and it made sense to fight them or even wipe them out from the perspective of non-mutants - like, having a random person with the capacity for destruction greater than a nuclear weapon and hoping that they don’t use their power capriciously is uhh not a good gamble and no sane person would be ok with that The problem with discrimination is not that it's rooted in irrational beliefs about other people. The problem is the harm it causes to those people. Making those beliefs rational does not excuse the harm they cause.
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Jun 7, 2021 19:23
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PeterWeller posted:The problem with discrimination is not that it's rooted in irrational beliefs about other people. The problem is the harm it causes to those people. Making those beliefs rational does not excuse the harm they cause. I mean, like I said above, in the context of the larger Marvel Universe and how it treats superpeople in general its not even a rational belief, it just can be made to look rational in a total vacuum.
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Jun 7, 2021 22:01
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Sanguinia posted:I mean, like I said above, in the context of the larger Marvel Universe and how it treats superpeople in general its not even a rational belief, it just can be made to look rational in a total vacuum. Oh yeah. I'm speaking about this argument in general. Even in something like The Broken Earth trilogy, the idea that a group's special powers justify their marginalization and create a logical flaw in the allegory is gross and completely misses the forest for the trees.
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Jun 8, 2021 00:08
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Oh, absolutely. Hopefully I'll get the time to make a bigger reply soon. But, yes, I think Luchenko is one of the most interesting parts of the Civil War conclusion and it's a shame we don't see more of her. She basically reflects the third party that gets basically ignored by much of the civil war storyline -- the members of the EA who don't fight for Clark but don't sign on with Sheridan's insurrection either, people who choose to sit out of the war. And, of course, the existence of a third party between two warring ideological sides is interesting given the resolution of the Vorlon/Shadow plot. One thing that kind of puts a spin on the "threat" to the EA is the fascist EA also kind of was working pretty drat closely with the Shadows i.e. the species that was KILLING the comrades of those flying the White Stars in question. So yeah, I expect there was some deliberate stick hidden in the carrot that was being offered, because EA's little fascist turn didn't just hurt humanity. Add in the immediate turn towards trying to pushback by the EA, and I'm not shocked at all there's a constant pressure by the ISA to make sure Earth doesn't just keep going xenophobic isolationist again. It's one thing for the EA to be unhappy about being dictated to, but when what they're being told to do is "don't be evil bastards"? Kinda sounds like the complaints people have had about how if the South had its preconceptions kicked a little more post-Civil War we might not have some of our current issues, doesn't it? As is I think you can see Luchenko as the first whitewash by those who were on the wrong side of history, with Lockley's little proud spiel about how she was "standing her post" in Season 5 as another. They weren't WITH the fascists, but they sure didn't seem willing to sacrifice anything to stop them, did they? These days I kinda wish those scenes had somebody who'd been stuck in one of Clarke's torture camps (with less patience than Sheridan) to punch them in the face and remind them who got to pay for their "forbearance" and "proper procedure". Really Deconstruction is probably most honest in how it shows just how much being unable to deal with the remnants of the bad guys and those who would rather rewrite history than admit they failed leads to the same problem much later. You can almost see the through-line from the EA trying to soft-pedal and get back to "the way things were" to badmouthing the people who actually did something to eventually someone trying to fake things to support fascism YET AGAIN. Probably the real reason the Rangers snuck in as monk history keepers, try to prevent the facts once again being changed by being the ones writing things down. One can argue how well they succeeded (I rather think having only ONE fall was pretty optimistic really) or whether there were likely to be screwups and bad actors on the ISA side not shown (most likely of course). But I can't help but think the real issue is the "third party" between Clarke and Sheridan here was in the end just people who WOULDN'T oppose the bad guys, "good" reasons or not. I suppose to be fair I don't know how well I'd do either in their shoes, but it's amazing how much people will do to avoid having to admit they were on the wrong side afterwards, up to bringing the wrong side back.
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Jun 8, 2021 00:13
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MadDogMike posted:One thing that kind of puts a spin on the "threat" to the EA is the fascist EA also kind of was working pretty drat closely with the Shadows i.e. the species that was KILLING the comrades of those flying the White Stars in question. So yeah, I expect there was some deliberate stick hidden in the carrot that was being offered, because EA's little fascist turn didn't just hurt humanity. Add in the immediate turn towards trying to pushback by the EA, and I'm not shocked at all there's a constant pressure by the ISA to make sure Earth doesn't just keep going xenophobic isolationist again. It's one thing for the EA to be unhappy about being dictated to, but when what they're being told to do is "don't be evil bastards"? Kinda sounds like the complaints people have had about how if the South had its preconceptions kicked a little more post-Civil War we might not have some of our current issues, doesn't it? As is I think you can see Luchenko as the first whitewash by those who were on the wrong side of history, with Lockley's little proud spiel about how she was "standing her post" in Season 5 as another. They weren't WITH the fascists, but they sure didn't seem willing to sacrifice anything to stop them, did they? These days I kinda wish those scenes had somebody who'd been stuck in one of Clarke's torture camps (with less patience than Sheridan) to punch them in the face and remind them who got to pay for their "forbearance" and "proper procedure". The objection I have to this -- or perhaps not an objection, just a point -- is that the EA as a whole was not involved in the 'deal with the devil' with the Shadows. From what we know from the series, the Shadow influence appeared to be with Clark alone (although, presumably, they had other members of his government on-side.) While the Director of the Psi Corps was working with for the Shadows, in a sense, but shuttling telepaths off to them for use in their ships, I don't think we know if the Director knew that was happening as much as the orders coming down from Clark. Bester believes so, and Bester knows much more than most -- but he is also ideologically opposed to the Corps as a Clarkist tool. If we take the Psi Corps novels into consideration, then the Shadow influence is Clark, the Director of Psi Corps, some IPX executives, and other rich and influential people in the government or close to it. Either way, the majority of the Earth Alliance presumably had no idea what was going on and suffered under Clark's regime, too, which can be noted by the attacks on Mars and Proxima 3 and the civilian massacres, etc. The other thing to consider about the wider year is the trauma of the Earth-Minbari War. The Minbari blast Earth's military to bits in a genocidal crusade based on a tragic, stupid misunderstanding. Of the 20,000 defenders at the Battle of the Line, only 200 returned -- that's to say one-percent. As far as the population of the Earth Alliance is concerned, the Minbari showed up and staged a mock execution of humanity. It's another of those little things that bugged me about Babylon 5's worldbuilding -- after such a horrific war, I don't think anti-alien sentiment is such a surprise. I certainly don't think it's a surprise that it becomes this source of generational trauma for people like Clark to exploit. Because that's a key thing, too. Clark didn't create the anti-alien sentiment, it already existed before he took power with groups like Homeguard, etc. and Clark himself would've been old enough to live through the Earth-Minbari War.
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Jun 8, 2021 03:52
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So I've been watching some B5 since this thread got me thinking on it, and god drat is that blonde nazi from Earthdome in Voices of Authority supremely uncomfortable to watch. Its like someone in 1996 had a prophetic dream about Majorie Taylor Greene and/or Any Given Fox News Nazi Barbie.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:11
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