Recently had an argument with my conservative father, he’s always been big into Trek and Wars, and I had just started really watching Trek again, never watched a lot of the shows all the way through. So this father of mine started going on about how woke Trek was now, and I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the “anti-woke” nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation. So I was like “oh no, not woke Star Trek, the series about a socialist utopia, the series that holds the title of “the American show with the first interracial kiss”, the show where Kirk throws his dick at every species with a quim, the show that had a Ruskie character in the middle of the f’n Red Scare.” Star Trek was always woke, and my father was always too dumb, racially biased, and narcissistic to pick up on the lessons that they were trying to teach us when he watched it as a child in the 60’s.
I have not even tried to bring up Star Wars since the Disney acquisition, I’m sure my father has an insufferable take on that series now as well.
Yeah but his reaction? Don’t leave us hanging.
It was mostly indignation over me not kissing his ass and telling him he’s right, I’m generally one of the few in my family that will stand up to him at all never the less consistently, he’s pretty charming and the family that have never lived with him all think he’s just great usually, but he always has this condescending way of telling me “you weren’t alive then so you don’t know” as if there aren’t interviews with Roddenberry that confirms these things, or if it’s broader politics, as if encyclopedias and news article didn’t exist back then. Then when I knocked down that argument he just defaulted back to “well it’s too woke and preachy now” while citing examples of preachyness that are just examples of inclusivity in the show.
I’ll say this, my pop apparently helped do clean up at ground zero after 9/11, he was a guard at Rikers at the time and I could see him volunteering for it, but he’s also kind of a bullshit artists so we’re never sure what’s fully the truth. However fact or fiction he’s never been the same since that day, we all lost a bunch of people we knew, and we all have a lot of friends who lost close relatives and it impacted not only us but our community, because it’s a fire firefighter town we live in, we live next to the former chief and down the block from the station house and my pop hangs out at the bar near the station house. After 9/11 he fell down the Fox News hole and never was the same again, and now i gotta hear some “woke” bullshit every time he talks about something he seems to not understand.
So overall the reaction was a lot of indignation, a little bit of arguing followed by a hasty hang up.
The non-woke Trekkies (or do they call themselves Trekkers? ) didn’t think about interracial kisses or the post-scarcity society in which capitalists were small-time traders. They see Captain Kirk running roughshod over other societies and turning them into America (see The Apple and A Taste of Armageddon ) which was more about 60s Hollywood imagining cold war United States as the height of civilization.
The Next Generation dared to imagine a more internationalist sense of culture and got into the notion that even extremely weird aliens might be deserving of civil rights. But by DS9 the Federation was reimagined as a failing coalition with multiple rising renegade factions and worlds teeming with disregarded peoples. The story became less about rising to ideals and more about dealing with grimdark realities and compromising principles to preserve status quo.
Then the Kelvin Timeline Reboot got J. J. Abrams’d and Paramount got litigeous about fan films it previously endorsed and I became so disgusted with the state of Trek, I divested myself from it. Star Wars would suffer a similar fate, and I don’t watch many movies these days.
Corporations have a tendency to ruin all art for the sake of profit. It’s infuriating.
I have met conservative Trek fans. I think some people really do watch stuff without ever thinking about it beyond its superficial spectacle.
“You know those Ferengi really have some good ideas…”
Same with conservative Fallout fans that somehow unironically think it’s pro-Capitalism, despite nearly every instance of actual Capitalism and not just bartering being absurdly evil.
Because muh rugged individual
It’s worse than that, it’s the unironic Legion, House, and Enclave support that’s absurd.
Sheesh. Satire really ain’t shit to a fascist
There are a surprisingly high number of educated conservatives in the high tech fields, engineers/programmers/etc.
It’s sad :/
Fear and prejudice transcends all education.
My dad navigated satellites and exploration probes for NASA his entire career, even doing work in getting better climate data. He’s a total MAGA and FOX loyalist now. Misses Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson.
One of the smartest people i knew was a former systems designer for NASA, I live close enough to the Cape to watch every launch from my backyard, anyway, this guy definitely worked for NASA, had his office decorated with the Patents that he held, really smart guy, complete conspiracy nut who was immediately on the Trump train.
I’ve always loved conspiracies too and we got along through that stuff, but then he went down the rabbit hole of Right wing and Russian propaganda/disinformation and no matter how much i tried to prove everything wrong, with good evidence, he went deeper down that hole, he died during COVID and one of the last things he sent me was about the “stolen election”, it was after January 6, to which my reply was “do you mean the 2016 election or the 2000 election?” and never got a response back and I’d heard he passed away a few months later from a mutual friend.
The educated laborers that perform highly skilled labor convince themselves that they have it better than everyone else because Capitalism worked and selected for them, it’s a comfy and delusional position to hold that requires having absolutely zero self-awareness. Unfortunately common.
It’s like conservative Always Sunny fans.
IASP is a pretty funny show. Even the most recent season was gold, covering inflation during covid.
I appreciate your avatar
I appreciate you!
It’s like conservatives with [insert 99% of media they consume, excluding Fox “news”]
Lol yeah fair enough
They thought Colbert wasn’t playing an absurd caricature of a right wing pundit when he was doing the Report
It’s like he’s writing trumps speeches for him there!
It is worth noting that the rapist Bill O’Reilly knew, because it was so blindly obviously a parody of him, and whatever else you might say of him he isn’t outright stupid.
The interesting bit is Ol Rapey Bill has quotes about Jan 6th saying his Fox would never have downplayed or enabled it, and yet, he’s now supporting Trump in 2024.
It’s almost like the actual truth doesn’t matter to them. Like they just want a comfortable lie that benefits them personally, some kind of “Truthiness” perhaps.
Any echo chamber can produce illusory truth effect. Repeated exposure to misinformation can result in a person failing to identify it as a lie, and begin to register it as fact and the lie gets amplified.
They view the show as a documentary, not a comedy.
I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the “anti-woke” nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation.
This is what I mean when I think “everything is political” is BS. That statement doesn’t mean one has to talk about politics 24/7.
Not understanding how anything works, and being angry about it, is a core tenet of conservatism.
They don’t have money but they do have the classic authoritarian hierarchy of SciFi.
Want to travel the galaxy? You need a starship. How do you get a starship? Join the federation.
Picard retired to a grape farm in France. How did he get that perk? Can anyone have a grape farm in France?
SciFi has an inherent power imbalance between the fleet and grounders. This comes from the ability to move around and drop bombs on people. As much as they try to stay in a socialist paradise, they still have tons of incidents that end up being solved the starfleet way.
It’s a quote from starship troopers, but the idea of “Service guarantees citizenship” is what draws fascists to SciFi. It’s a tough problem to fix in fiction and most of the time it’s overlooked because spaceships are cool on paper. They make great entertainment.
The reality is that serving in the federation usually would mean you’ve never been on a starship bridge. You’re 20 levels down in a maintenance hold with no outside view. Nobody tells you shit and all you know is the ship is being fired at and you’re fucking terrified.
Even if you can pull up an external view on your tablet (which is a massive security problem), you still don’t have any control over the fight. Now you can watch torpedoes coming straight at you and realize the captain can’t stop it, and you can’t either…
Morale would be constantly in the toilet, and without a bigger reward than to explore strange new worlds you can’t see from the hold, people would be constantly quitting.
In conclusion, I’m not saying that star trek is fascist. I’m just saying it hand waves away 90% of the problems with their alleged utopia and people like watching action packed SciFi adventures.
I have a whole separate rant about weapons like lasers that travel at the speed of light. In the real world most fights would happen across distances, with ships being undetectable against the blackness of space, until a beam comes out of nowhere and instantly destroys your ship. But because it’s fiction you can ignore this.
FRIENDLY NOTE: I don’t mean this to sound combative, I just want to offer a different (more optimistic) perspective.
What’s missing here is the central conceit of Trek: that humanity grew up. We could have a utopia now if people would just stop being greedy little shits, and decided to embrace empathy and forgiveness. There’s nothing stopping every single person in a modern conflict from dropping their weapons, but we still want vengeance and punishment. and I’m not saying I’m above that: someone kills someone I love, and I’m going to want blood. On paper I’m against capital punishment, but I know if I was faced with a war on my doorstep, bombs being dropped, my morals may not hold.
In Star Trek, they had WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and after that…humanity finally had enough. Never again, but for all the ills of humanity, in a way.
So very few people in the Trek world would actually complain about working a shit detail, because they’re in it for the greater good. We saw in TNG episodes that randos from the 20th century could just waltz around the ship at their leisure, and how lax security is…because people just generally behaved well. Humanity really did bind themselves to a stronger social contract, if that’s the right term.
As for needing ships: there seem to be plenty of civilian ships out there, from trading and light exploration to proper science vessels. Not all Starfleet, though the shows have focused on them. So I can only imagine there’s plenty of opportunity for non-Starfleet folks to get out there.
Granted, DS9 pushed back on all this a little, as the Maquis are comprised of a lot of Federation members that went feral/colonial and don’t hold themselves to the Federation ideals that seem to keep the rest of humanity and others acting in good faith at almost all times. Likewise still plenty of BadMirals out there, and they do show the Tom Paris-es of the world in some kind of prison, so it’s not all roses, and could definitely be spun as drops of dystopia in a utopia, but we’re also told (and have no reason to doubt) that it’s all well-above board, humane, and focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment.
Also, all that said, I do wish it wasn’t so hierarchical, but that’s my anarchist streak flaring up.
To reply to myself, because it merits its own giant text box: for anarchist-minded folks like myself, I’d highly recommend reading Homage to Catalonia, because it gives some glimpse of how things might work in a less-hierarchical military (in the cases like in Trek’s Starfleet that weapons are sometimes unfortunately needed).
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201111.txt
The main sections I want to quote are:
The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war.
But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type? It was what everyone was saying at the time, and though it was true it was also unreasonable. For in the circumstances the militias could not have been much better than they were. A modern mechanized army does not spring up out of the ground, and if the Government had waited until it had trained troops at its disposal, Franco would never have been resisted. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the private ‘Comrade’ but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never ‘work’, but as a matter of fact it does ‘work’ in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. ‘Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness–on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of ‘revolutionary’ discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot–were shot, occasionally–but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same circumstances–with its battle-police removed–would have melted away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victories, and even individual desertions were not common. In four or five months in the P.O.U.M. militia I only heard of four men deserting, and two of those were fairly certainly spies who had enlisted to obtain information. At the beginning the apparent chaos, the general lack of training, the fact that you often had to argue for five minutes before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and infuriated me. I had British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were very unlike the British Army. But considering the circumstances they were better troops than one had any right to expect.
the concept of science fiction is way to librul, since it suggests that science is real
But it says right in the name science fiction!
update even got dragged by george takei
At this point media illiteracy is a requirement to be a Republican.
StAr tReK is TOO DIVERSE, tHatS wHy I lIkE Babylon 5!
[insert heavy breathing and unchecked drooling]
she probably cheered for the bajor occupation or the government during the bell riots
Talk to me about Babylon 5. What all is woke in it. Never watched it so I don’t know.
Well let’s see, there’s an episode with a dockworker’s strike, in which a “negotiator” is sent in who’s position is basically “I’ll pretend to ask nicely but the only tactic I have is this in-universe law that says I can use the military to force you back to work.” The letter of that in-universe law (the “Rush Act”) is “The local military commander can break strikes by any means he deems necessary.” And Commander Sinclair decides to pay the dockworkers what they demand out of the military budget of the station. So the union ultimately wins.
There’s several times when some character, often a human but sometimes an alien, walks up to some other kind of alien and says “We don’t want you FREAKS coming in and stealing our JOBS!” and they’re always depicted as obviously in the wrong. Basically in the script it says “A Republican happens, and gets dealt with.”
There’s a whole episode with a religious exchange, all the various aliens are invited to demonstrate their planet’s “dominant religion.” When it’s the human’s turn, Sinclair takes the alien crew down a hallway with a long line of various different kinds of priests, ministers, monks, etc. The first guy in line is an atheist. The point being “Earth is diverse as fuck, yo.”
The show just barely glances off a lesbian relationship, and the show’s attitude says “What? You didn’t have a problem with the five other romantic couples we’ve seen so far, what’s your problem with this one?”
Oh, then there’s the whole major plot of a socially conservative president sliding Earth’s entire government into totalitarianism with the backing of a hostile alien race thing.
It has an alien species where the religious group has quotes that are directly from Carl Sagan (and they’re have more of a philosophy than a religion, at least in most ways). It generally treats religion with more respect than Roddenberry did, in a “all religion has some good parts to it, but extremism is a problem” kind of way.
One of its major plot arcs is all about how democracies fall into fascism. I thought it was a bit heavy handed at the time, but now it feels too real.
Skirts around a pair of characters in a lesbian relationship, but like most shows at the time, it doesn’t come right out and say it. They 100% banged one night, though.
It’s also military science fiction. That always seems to invite right wingers who love the asthetic but ignore the themes. Same problem with Star Trek and Star Wars.
Haven’t watched it in years myself, but unless you can define “woke” I’m not going to make any assumptions.
“Woke” has come to mean “Not completely adhering to Republican culture war dogma.”
Even that doesn’t really define it.
Babylon 5 is too liberal, that’s why I like Farscape
Farscape isn’t horny enough. That’s why I like LEXX
Lexx isn’t british enough, that’s why i watch red dwarf.
Red Dwarf isn’t wet enough, that’s why I watch SeaQuest DSV
Farscape is cool. Star Trek is cool. Star Wars is okay too I guess; not hating, I just don’t like them as much as the rest of the world seems to.
Obviously. Because Firefly is the superior show, right?
I mean Firefly is ok, but the original Battlestar Galactica is still supreme.
I loved the original BG!! But man it didn’t age well :(
I believe you are all wrong. Commando Cody is the most excellent science fiction program ever made.
Commando Cody? Bah. The 1935 film The Transatlantic Tunnel is the height of science fiction on film.
severe lack of stargate in this thread
ronon dex > aquaman
Disney did accidentally turn the two part story arc of space liberals restoring the status quo after it fell to space fascism into a three part warning that liberalism will always fall to fascism by allowing it to thrive in the first place by refusing to address wealth inequality and outright complacency in spite of all the warnings in the galaxy so that’s fun.
I guess if you just watched Enterprise you might assume trek isn’t woke
hey! ENT was awesome
They went heavy on Bush doctrine apologism during the xindi storyline though
I think it was more of a ‘this is a great opportunity for metaphoric storytelling’ than ‘let’s celebrate the Bush Doctrine’ though.
I think it failed, but that’s another issue.
She’s a cylon sympathizer
I maintain everyone on Battlestar Galactica was a Cylon.
That or Cylonism can spread as an STD.
This solves all plotholes, no further questions.
She’s so much of a Trekkie she did the LL&P sign backwards
WESSSST SIIIIIIDE
(Of the beta quadrant)
Live long and peace out, bitches.
I was gonna say, “what kind of fucked up Shekhinah is that???” That hands gesture symbolizes the Hebrew letter “shin,” which is the first letter of the feminine name of God in Judaism. The female form of God is believed by Orthodox Jews to be so powerful that seeing her can blind a human, therefore they cover their eyes when the rabbi does this symbol while they invoke the dwelling of God, or something like that. I’m quite fuzzy on this part.
So, this moron is calling Star Wars, the bra strangulation movie, too woke and is trying to troll Star Wars fans with a Star Trek symbol that she got wrong? The incredible irony of her being a bigot unfit for Leonard Nimoy’s Shekhina project while she’s blasting her own face with some Jewish mysticism girl power is beyond hilarious.
Just say you don’t watch sci fi movies. Sheesh so desperate to fit in. Why does everyone want to be a nerd now? Didn’t boomers invent beating up nerds???
Nerds became cool once they realized they could exploit their autism at tech companies
Many tech companies are led by neurodiverse people, too. Zuckerberg is definitely not just the typical billionaire sociopath.
Username checks out
Username checks out. Not sure if you were waiting for that…
I’m waiting to enjoy your appropriate meme for this topic.
I’ve seen the anti-woke Star Trek.
I had to stop when they invaded space Iraq due to WMD’s.
Yeah but the xindi actually did have planet killing weapons so
I’m not talking about Enterprise.
Then what are you talking about?
Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda
Neat, I’ve never heard of that show before
The first season is okay sci-fi. The rest is awful.
As far as I can tell, you’re not missing much. A ragtag bunch of sci-fi misfits led by Kevin Sorbo as Kevin Sorbo go on a series of cliche space adventures.
It has some interesting ideas and chapters. But when the creator of the show and the actor playing the Nietschean first officer leave due to Sorbo’s ego, the show really turns into a dumpster fire.
And each adventure is more Sorbo than the last.
Does Starfleet not? Besides literally all of their ships. Because every ship that can go to Warp Speed is a planet killer based on the information in the show.
Have you seen human history?
Untrustworthy savages, the lot of them. A rogue species just temporarily acting reasonable for some nefarious plan no doubt.
Now, before you explain that “No, the Xindi really did have it coming,” I have not watched Enterprise, and I never will.
Enterprise Season 3 opens with a Xindi ship coming out of warp over Earth and cutting a 20 mile wide trench across Florida. Earth didn’t know the Xindi existed at the time, had no idea it was coming or why.
Spoiler alert: the Xindi had been given faulty/false information that Earth was planning to attack them, by some other mutual enemy. IIRC it had to do with that “temporal cold war” thing they tried to push, which I’m convinced was someone in a writing room saying words without thinking about what they meant. What ensues is basically the Hell episode of Voyager stretched across a season.
But I wanted the Hell Episode stretched across a season…
The xindi were lied to by a faction of the temporal cold war that was trying to keep them from joining the federation in the future. From there perspective they thought humans were trying to genocide them so they were defending themselves. I actually enjoyed Enterprise even if it’s not close to my favorite trek series
deleted by creator
I’ve overall enjoyed enterprise, even if it’s not my favorite. I don’t like how many multiparty storylines there are, but they weren’t so terrible that I stopped watching.
I would have thought they’d be more of a Starship Troopers fan, since the satire would fly over the fash’s head.
Nice one! I’m ultra-progressive but love that movie.
I mean, so long as you see the satire of the film, that’s not incompatible.
Star Wars is literally space conservatives rebelling against the galactic communist (1970s US propagandized version of invented communism-fascist aesthetic*) empire…
Firefly is to an even greater degree, like libertarian Browncoats rebelling. I love the fan fic take that the Alliance were the “good guys.”
ok but the empire were literally fascists trying to rule the imperial senate with absolute authority…
Yeah it’s not actual communism but more like a reflection of the fears of communism in pop culture from the time when it was written in the late 70s. Comment was a bit inprecise.
Even the empire’s uniforms were pretty obviously based on nazi uniforms, what makes you think the empire is supposed to represent communism?
is it a coincidence that vader is derived from the german word for father?
Is that the case? It’s both written and pronounced differently
well i did say “derived from” and not “the exact same word” but as it turns out the connection to vater was a rumor george lucas himself started, likely to make originating vision for the series appear stronger and more planned. there is evidence that the name existed in the scripts before he was changed to be lukes father, so that does contradict the later assertion.
George Lucas said Vietnam inspired the writing, and communism in American pop culture was synonymous with basically every “bad” thing.
He said the Ewoks were inspired by the Viet Cong. Were the guerilla fighters fighting against the guerilla Empire?
The empire was the US
that makes sense! fair point!
Why are you spreading this around like it’s true? Also, this is you:
Very interesting! I knew the Vietnam thing but I’m not into Star Wars.
-
George Lucas mentions Vietnam as an influence
-
Fascism is clearly represented as well
-
Star Wars is not a politically consistent universe or critique
-
It’s a typical story arc where the antagonist is an amalgamation of things that were considered bad at the time
-
It’s Star Wars so I ultimately don’t care that much
-
George Lucas has said that it was the Vietnam War that inspired the conflict in Star Wars, with the Empire representing the US, but also the rebels could represent the US against the British Empire from the Revolutionary War.
I don’t recall reading that anywhere. I do remember seeing WW2 referenced, especially with respect to the dogfights.
The Empire was in no way representative of Communism, it’s a fascist Empire with literal “Stormtroopers.” Lucas has shown more antifascist sentiment, and no anti-socialist sentiment. Lucas said the Empire represents the US, and the rebels the Viet Cong, in inspiration.
One time, he even said despite the censorship in the USSR, he felt that move directors and writers were more free to make what they wanted without the profit motive getting in the way, specifically citing artistic freedom being higher (in his words).
The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one