Meant to post this in main star trek community, not ten forward, d’oh.
If this is the wrong place for this, I apologize in advance and it’s okay if it gets removed.
First, it was bad enough for Elon Musk references, but now…
The real life Paul Stamets, for which the character is named, hired union busters at his business, Fungi Perfecti.
https://www.thestand.org/2024/05/fungi-perfecti-workers-joining-together-with-liuna-252/
But rather than recognizing and respecting these workers’ right to join together free from management interference, the union reports that Fungi Perfecti has responded by hiring the union-busting firms of Littler Mendelson P.C. and the American Labor Group. These firms represent clients such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks, all of which have faced multiple Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board for illegally interfering in their employees’ freedom to unionize.
These firms have attempted to slow the momentum of Fungi Perfecti workers’ organizing drive with typical union-busting tactics like “unrequired” meetings that are heavily encouraged.
“ALG has been distributing anti-union propaganda that, in some cases, are outright lies,” said Derek Sewell, a warehouse worker for Fungi Perfecti. “But we will not be discouraged. It’s just unfortunate that they are spending thousands of dollars on union-busting to try to discourage us rather than investing in making Fungi Perfecti and better and more sustainable place to work.”
Anyway, my opinion is firmly that if they’re going to make references, it needs to be about people who are already dead, whose negatives are known, and who can’t come back and fuck your reference up by becoming a horrible person as your life goes on.
Because these living people keep revealing how Un-Star-Trek they are, imho.
Despite taking place in the future, Star Trek can’t predict the future. And they have definitely used problematic people who were already dead (Sigmund Freud) or portrayed them in a pretty racist way anyway (Genghis Khan).
Edit: On top of that, you have actors in Star Trek who are thoroughly loathsome people like Whoopi Goldberg and Joe Piscopo.
Guiñan is an awesome character and I throughly wish they’d fired Whoopi from that role in Picard. I thought Ito Aghayere did a great job in the role.
All the Musk references in Discovery are so cringe. I just try to pretend that in that universe, Musk was a decent human.
in the kelvin universe someone time traveled back and replaced him with a talking pie for some reason and that’s why everyone thought he was a saint
Disco doesn’t take place in the Kelvin universe, and even if it did, Musk lived before the timelines diverged.
Well, you see, um, the reason it still works this way is because shut up.
Fair enough.
Let’s all just pretend it’s a movie. You can get away with a lot more if you do that.
Can his best friend be a killer robot driving instructor?
Kirk and crew traveled back in time to our own past on multiple occasions, ipso facto the Kelvin timeline split causes ripples both directions in time.
Kirk and crew traveled back to our past from the prime timeline, though. We have no evidence that the Kelvin timeline Kirk did the same thing.
Subtle reminder that our own culture still repeats the lie that Edison “invented the lightbulb” and teaches children about how Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin revolutionized the American textile industry without mentioning how it also created a massive boom in demand for enslaved labor. And we all tend to ignore the fact that Einstein was a serial adulterer and a monster to his first wife, or that James Watson was a racist ass. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a terrible person and died because of his belief in quackery, but his contribution to tech history will outlast those footnotes. Henry Ford was one of the worst humans on the planet, but he changed the course of the manufacturing industry forever, and he gets credit for that in spite of him being a huge piece of shit.
The overall effects of Elon Musk’s contributions to the culture have yet to be fully litigated, but his influence on the direction of private space travel is undeniable, and is probably the one thing about him that will outlive him, especially with regard to a space-oriented future society like the Federation. To them, his idiotic and toxic antics on Twitter/X/whatever-dumb-shit-he-renames-it-to-next are probably a long-forgotten historical footnote.
Sure, we expect the enlightened future of Star Trek to be better with its historical revisionism, but the personalities of famous innovators or self-proclaimed luminaries often fade into obscurity while the lasting consequences of their influence remains. People on Star Trek are meant to be an idealized version of what we strive for, but they are far from perfect, and the veil of history often obscures the ugly truth of how society-shifting change often comes about.
First Contact touches on this very topic by portraying the legendary Zephram Cochrane as a philandering drunk who lets his colleague Lily Sloane do much of the hard work while he gets all the credit.
History is messy and posterity doesn’t always get it right.
The point is about making better decisions in the future, not an expectation that existing problematic choices will be magially undone.
And I’m saying that is not something done even when picking dead people. Read what Freud did to Emma Eckstein sometime. I doubt whoever wrote Phantasms was aware of it.
Having to research the entire biography of a historical figure before putting them in a TV show is a bit much. And if you’re only going to accept angelic historical figures with no known wrongdoing, the pickings will be slim. Mister Rogers can only be depicted in so many shows before we run out of ideas…
That was kind of my point, but also I would say that A) Emma Eckstein isn’t some secret, it’s just not talked about much and B) that’s a hell of a lot worse than what the real Paul Stamets is involved with. The only real difference is that Paul Stamets hasn’t been dead long enough for a writer in the 1990s to not realize what a colossal piece of shit he actually was.
That’s the whole point, isn’t it? We shouldn’t cherry-pick living figures as something that future people should universally loathe, because there are many, many examples of historical figures whose loathsomeness they (and we) also gloss over.
Freud was at the time under the influence of his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Fliess, whom Freud had called “the Kepler of biology”, had developed theories today considered pseudoscientific, including the belief that sexual problems were linked to the nose by a supposed nasogenital connection. Fliess had been treating “nasal reflex neurosis” by cauterizing the inside of the nose under local anesthesia. Fliess conjectured that if temporary cauterization was useful, surgery would yield more permanent results. He began operating on the noses of patients he diagnosed with the disorder, including Eckstein and Freud. His surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; Fliess had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein’s nasal cavity, the subsequent removal of which left her permanently disfigured. Though aware of Fliess’s culpability, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror, he could only bring himself to delicately intimate in his correspondence to Fliess the nature of his disastrous role and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein’s hysteria. Freud ultimately reasserted his full confidence in Fliess’s competence, making Eckstein responsible for the catastrophe by concluding that her post-operative haemorrhages were “wish-bleedings”, caused by her hysterical longing for the affection of others.
face-saving
Talk about poor choice of words.
I’m out of the loop. What’s the problem with Whoopy?
TL;Dr she’s old and rich so problems that don’t happen to her don’t matter
Those issues are all fairly mild IMO
Defending Bill Cosby is mild to you?
She didn’t defend him, and actually did a 180 once proof came out.
Precisely. Thats character growth ffs
No, see, you’re not allowed to do takesies backsies. Once you screw up (or people think you did) you’re canceled forever.
/s needed because some people actually think this way
When a black person does it? Yes. It’s understandable. Just like with OJ.
Lemmy gets mad about the “two tiered” justice system but black folks are more than familiar with the reality that even wealth and celebrity won’t protect them, much less innocence, and white America is more than happy to assume guilt on the part of black celebrities while there’s no shortage of eager defenders of your Weinstein types.
That doesn’t make it good, or right, but centuries of mistreatment by the justice system doesn’t tend to produce a lot of trust in that system. It just produces cynicism, deserved or otherwise.
I’ve never heard anyone defend Weinstein…
I’ve seen people do it on Lemmy lol
“Convicted in the press blah blah blah”
Uh, my dude, literally the entire industry knew about him for decades before anybody managed to take him down, and they all did nothing. In their inaction they further hurt his victims, and allowed him to victimize others while they looked the other way. That’s just as bad if not worse.
I’m aware that Whoopie once said that the holocaust “wasn’t about race, but man inhumanity towards man.” For which she apologized. Is there something else that makes you say she’s thoroughly loathsome?
She said it, apologized, then said it again and apologized again.
It’s fine, not like there’s an alternative non-meme Star Trek discussion community anyways.
It’s completely dead.
I agree it would be nice if people would post there more, which is why I’m suggesting it
Nah, it isn’t
I can’t even see a single post there.
No one on your instance has subscribed to it, so it’s not federating content in. If you subscribe, it will populate.
Maybe the better approach is that we as audiences should understand that no real person is a saint and that whether or not it leaves a bad taste in our mouths, otherwise morally reprehensible people can still be responsible for profound achievements and progress.
Somebody else brought up Freud already, who many would call a deeply unethical man and whose conclusions are often debunked or thought better of in the modern era… Yet the impact of Freud, despite these shortcomings, remains basically inarguable.
I think the problem is that in the past 20 or so years we’ve started to read acknowledgement in media as endorsement by media, but those are two very separate things.
The thing is, when you look at Musk, he personally does not have any real accomplishments. He’s a wealthy man (inherited wealth that was made by exploiting black workers in South Africa’s emerald mines) who happened to fund existing projects that happened to have some semblance of success; in other words: any rich guy could have done the same thing. Worse yet, he is also a well-known man-child who supports wild conspiracy theories that are only popular with an unpopular segment of the population. Not to mention him being a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who has a penchant for suppression g free speech that does not align with his beliefs.
I fully agree with all of this and will add that he’s also obviously a nazi or at least nazi-sympathizer as well.
I definitely wasn’t speaking about Elon fucking Musk here because he has never been directly responsible for anything of value in the world, far as I can tell.
But still abstractly my point stands, assuming we’re identifying people with actual contributions to society rather than just the money to buy the contributions of others.
I suspect if social media has been what it is now when Edison or Jobs were alive, they might have self-immolated just as badly as Musk has. Both of them were by all accounts terrible people who history paints as visionaries because the force of their personalities gave them the weight of the innovations which occurred under their watch. Taking credit for the achievements of your underlings and business partners is a long tradition across many industries.
People in the future got it wrong, that’s all. It happens more often than most of us want to admit.
I don’t think he inherited any emerald money. His father owned the mine is still alive and disowned him in like 1997
I think the problem is that in the past 20 or so years we’ve started to read acknowledgement in media as endorsement by media, but those are two very separate things.
Bingo. It’s infuriating listening to people think they’re smart, that can’t seem to grasp that characters aren’t always there to be lionized. People saying something like “Homelander is an awesome character” gets interpreted by morons as endorsement, and often these same people complain the creators let villains have a sort of charm or charisma (not that Homelander has either, that’s a weird one, the actor is fascinating to watch and I don’t even know what you call that)
I actually really like this topic here in 10 Forward. It becomes more of what 10F really is anyway: a place to talk about stuff. Sometimes it’s comedy night (memes), sometimes it’s murder-mystery night, sometimes it’s slam-poetry night. It’s all good, let’s talk about all things Star Trek.
I will add my voice to the chorus, real life isn’t a cartoon where good people are morally, ethically and physically in the right. Real people and real situations have layers, and are rooted in fundamentally human wants, needs and limitations.
I get that if you’re a brand, and living only in a symbolic sense, you might want to distance yourself from symbols that don’t align. But us humans, actually having experienced reality, should know that some or even most actions aren’t perfectly informed, selflessly good from every perspective, for all of time.
And frankly, I think wanting and needing that unambiguity is dangerous as you’re dehumanising people and disempowering yourself from reflecting upon behavior and setting proper boundaries. That, and/or a sign of considerable stress (compare with black & white thinking or catastrophic thinking).
People can be flawed and make awesome contributions. The theory of gravity is good, useful, and a significant discovery forming the basis of much of industrial and modern society, even though it was made possible only by colonialism and systematic oppression.
Socrates/Plato made astounding work contributing to the development of every field of knowledge, despite being weirdo homeless hermits before forming a cult.
Be inspired by the greatness in people, not the flaws.
Elon Musk is literally only successful because he started out with tons of money. His vision is putting the letter X in every company he’s involved in. He’s not only personally a piece of shit, he also actively tries to stop transit projects from happening to potentially bolster his sales a tiny bit. I’m thinking of hyperloop which was vaporware from day 1 explicitly designed to halt California HSR.
Not only that but he is the SOLE reason twitter is a Nazi shithole now. He is an actual Nazi sympathizer and frequently boosts their messages on his massive platform.
The real visionaries of this world are the political activists that are pushing for change.
Agreed
Who cares.
At the time of this comment, about 72 people care.
Considering the majority of Lemmy always seems to have a bug up their ass about something, I wouldn’t put too much thought into it.
Yeah Lemmy is pretty biased at best and absolutely crazy on average.
Because there is little to no diversity. The vast majority, probably 90%+, is alt left and/or tankies.
Tankies keep being mentioned on Lemmy, but I have yet to see an actual tanky…
I like how this place is more on the left side of things, but very often it’s very far left, where other opinions suddenly stop mattering. And that bugs me at times. It’s still a better place than any other social media out there.
I wouldn’t say 90% are political extreme. I just think they are the loudest. Normal people don’t constantly comment and post about there political views.
Oh boo fucking hoo. This sounds like an off-shoot of that media literacy crap.
Sorry, what’s wrong with having media literacy? Understanding how to dissect articles is bad now?
That’s not how people are using the term. They prefer to claim if people enjoy art that is based on/conveys a different viewpoint than the viewer, the viewer didn’t understand it, rather than the viewer not being a mental midget that can’t understand/enjoy something without agreeing.
