star wars is too woke i like the show about the socialist utopia rule

katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zonebanned from community to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 916 points –
155

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.

I have met conservative Trek fans. I think some people really do watch stuff without ever thinking about it beyond its superficial spectacle.

It’s like conservative Always Sunny fans.

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 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.

Except the only real echo chamber is the one between their ears.

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They view the show as a documentary, not a comedy.

IASP is a pretty funny show. Even the most recent season was gold, covering inflation during covid.

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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.

There are a surprisingly high number of educated conservatives in the high tech fields, engineers/programmers/etc.

It's sad :/

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Not understanding how anything works, and being angry about it, is a core tenet of conservatism.

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.

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She's so much of a Trekkie she did the LL&P sign backwards

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.

“ Star Wars is bad now”

I mean yah, the vertical integration, means tested everything, nostalgia bating and assembly line techniques that Disney does sure do ruin otherwise fine properties.

“No, I don’t mind that, that’s just good business. I just hate the gay people who kissed in the background”

Oh, OH ok, you’re just an idiot…

I would have thought they’d be more of a Starship Troopers fan, since the satire would fly over the fash’s head.

TBF Heinlein didn't mean for it to be a satire, Verhoeven just turned it into one.

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

Babylon 5 is too liberal, that's why I like Farscape

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 :(

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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.

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Farscape is too queer, that's why i like Lexx

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Hey, Babylon 5 gave us Bester Mirror Chekov.

Talk to me about Babylon 5. What all is woke in it. Never watched it so I don’t know.

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.

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.

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.

Just making sure here, you want me to rigorously define the political position and identity of platformless reactionaries?

Not at all, in fact I'd rather "woke" be defined by what they really mean - feminism, inclusivity, equality, etc. Let's make them say what they actually mean without hiding behind a nebulous term like "woke".

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Money doesn't exist in Star Trek but credits do in Star Wars.

Money exists in Star Trek, the Federation just doesn't use it. the Ferengi love the stuff though

They occasionally reference "Federation Credits", but I think it's mainly for use outside the Federation.

Federation credits? Federation credits are no good out here. I need something more real.

That's the greatest accomplishment of the Federation, tricking the Ferengi! Internally money isn't used anymore, but to trade with the Ferengi they use these Non Federation Tokens, which have no real value.

Star Wars never got replicators, but they did get sweet laser swords

Fuck laser swords, i want food without cooking.

Best I can do is different colored milk, but I will throw in some space wizards and what the hell personal starships for everyone.

Star wars kind of has that, if 'just add water' counts as 'without cooking'

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Post scarcity societies can't be approached in any meaningful way with modern economic theories.

Star Trek is neither socialist nor capitalist, as both are systems designed to manage and portion out scarcity, and are based on economic theories that lack any predictive abilities in systems that don't work in a context of scarce resources that need administration.

Neither the labour theory of value nor marginal utility theory make any sense when all resources are trivial to obtain for individuals and whatever resources your community uses can be reused virtually endlessly within the limits of entropy.

Are we really dealing with "scarcity" at this point?

Supermarkets throw away literal millions of tonnes of food annually. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" has become a hollow mantra that cannot be truly adopted by the profit driven design philosophies of consumer products. Sustainability is being treated like some chic perk rather than a critical topic that must be taken seriously if we want any hope for our futures.

All these things are profoundly capitalist problems. Of course, it's not like marxist-leninist 'experiments' fared any better, devolving into their own variants of capitalism, but there are many other socialist ideologies to consider (such as anarchism...)

We are, because people want luxury goods too. Post-scarcity is about being able to produce most goods with barely any human labor (would absolutely be true for food if every person on earth only worked in food production or to produce machinery needed for it), which we aren't even close to. AI and automation might get us there (though it's questionable when the cycle of just investing the newfound labor capacity into more luxuries will stop, if ever), but people are actively resisting that (reasonably so) because the current economic system basically everywhere is horribly rigged towards funnelling the excess wealth to rich individuals rather than improving the living standards of society as a whole.

Idk, I'd say we want quality goods, and are lead to believe that these desires can be fulfilled by the lofty luxury goods market which is founded more on artificial scarcity than material scarcity. Even when rare materials and expensive labour are involved the fact that this simply makes them "more valuable" seems more important than any actual need, or lack of alternatives. Meanwhile, affordable products get enshittified, shorter lifespans, etc.

though it's questionable when the cycle of just investing the newfound labor capacity into more luxuries will stop, if ever

Which is precisely why "post-scarcity" can only be reached with actual societal change, not just technological advancement.

While that may be true about Star Trek after the fact, the truth is that in order to get the federation off the ground, and the world economy in line to create the first Enterprise and crew and all the scientific advancements they made, required the entire world moving to a purely socialistic platform/agenda to achieve.

I don’t think you can discount first contact’s affect on that shift. Finding out you’re not alone in the universe would surely have a massive societal impact.

I know she's smarter, better, and stronger than I and would find a way to help explain and educate this woman on how she's pissing into the wind wrong....

But I can't help but imagine Janeway just kicking the shit out of that foxbot on principle and for the security of the federations reputation.

Janeway would straight up murder them. She's done worse for less reason.

Everyone thinks she killed Tuvix to save her ship or crew or some utilitarian bullshit, but the reality?

She knew. She knew this was her chance to kill a man and call it duty.

Nah, it was pragmatic. She was losing crew that couldn't really be replaced. And she was on the verge of losing a very important crew member, Tuvok.

She wasn't about to let that happen.

If Tuvix retained Tuvoks skills, keeping Tuvix would mean not having to deal with Neelix, however. Im sure she considered that as a reason to keep Tuvix, before her bloodlust won out.

Nah, there was the clear risk that Tuvix exhibited the worst traits of Tuvok and Neelix. That would be a total nightmare. Restoring the original was the proper choice. At some point an opportunity to get rid of Neelix could appear, and you could retain the original Tuvok without loss.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The star of the show is definitely anti woke

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You serious, Clark?

🤣 My dad and I say this to each other whenever one of us is gullible. I never see anyone quote it out in the wild.

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.

Steve's videos helped me get into star trek, he makes really good essay content.

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.

I think Fox corporation is butt hurt they sold Disney TV & movie rights they didn't know how manage to make money on. 🍵 so they vent it through Foxnews. haha.

The oligarchs and billionaires who own the corporate mainstream media and both political parties are the ones stirring up WOKE issues. Why? So you all hate each other and take your eye off the billionaire thieves stealing everything. This is why we can't have nice things.

She can't even vulcan salute correctly, that's gang sign