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The recent flurry of posts on family formation, @PyotrVerkhovensky's post on Chesterton and MAGA, along with the proliferation of Penguin and Starfleet Academy memes in my feed has gotten me thinking about Star Trek again, and the role that aspiration plays in fiction, politics, and life in general.
What can a 24 year-old spin-off of a 60 year-old TV series teach us today's Culture War?
Star Trek is often presented as utopian, but it would be more accurate to describe it as post-post-apocalyptic. While the date and circumstances of "Post-Atomic Horror" have shifted over the decades, the idea that Trek's world is separated from ours by a massive catastrophic event that wiped out a significant portion of humanity has been present since Trek's inception. I find this interesting not, only from a lore perspective but in context of how the real-world has changed around it over the last six decades.
From the original series' premiere in 1966 through the end of the 20th century Star Trek had always been "linear" always moving forward into its own future. That is until "Star Trek: Enterprise". (STE) Enterprise jumped backwards in Trek's timeline to the early days of Starfleet.
In Trek's lore this is a frontier period full of unbounded optimism, but Enterprise premiered in September of 2001, and as those Americans here old enough to have first seen Fight Club in the theater or experience 9/11 as adults will recall, the early 2000s were not exactly an optimistic time. The dot com bubble had just burst, and the US was on a bit of a downs-slope both culturally and economically, the first cracks in the presumptions of progressivism had already appeared, and the quiet suggestion in Star Trek's backstory that "you can't get there from here" was starting to feel much louder. Enterprise sought to be a bridge, not just between the atomic wasteland and utopian vision of the original series, but between the progressive optimism of the late 20th century and the cultural "funk" of the year 2000. This is why, for me at least, Enterprise is simultaneously the most under-developed and under-rated iteration of Star Trek.
The series opens approximately 30 years after a drunken mad scientist living in the black hills converted a surplus nuclear missile into mankind's first FTL-capable spacecraft (*1). This triggers an intervention on the part of a paternalist Vulcan civilization to prevent this band of psychotic gun-monkeys from disrupting the delicate balance of power in our local galactic region. Earth now exists as sort of an indulged vassal of the Vulcans. A vassalage that while largely benign has begun to chafe. There is an increasing vocal faction of humans, most of whom who came of age post-Horror, who wish to see Earth set its own path and develop its own technology base. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of Japan in the 50s and 60s, economically vibrant but also still somewhat traumatized, the mass death and devastation of the Horror still very much within living memory. It is with this as background that the NX Program, a project to build and launch mankind's first proper Starships, is undertaken.
Our heroes are the captain and crew of the NX-1. All through the first season, there of this of their mission being this watershed moment that will determine whether Humanity sets its own path in galactic affairs or simply settles for having ended hunger, war, and disease. At best stagnating under the benevolent colonialism of the Vulcans, at worst losing some vital part of our collective soul.
Unlike the smugly enlightened Starfleet of the TNG era, the humans we meet in STE are clearly rooted in our modern world both aesthetically; The NX series ships follow NASA naming conventions (Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger), while their crews wear uniforms based on contemporary NASA astronaut uniforms. And more fundamentally; They have bitter political disputes and a bit of xenophobic streak. They can also be recklessly forthright when something gets their ire up. They have one ally, the Vulcans, and Archer burns them by revealing one of their covert listening posts operation to the wider galaxy. These humans are arrogant, violent, impulsive, illogical, and they're effectively betting the future of their entire species on a single ship. If the Enterprise gets destroyed or accidentally starts a war with the Klingon Empire that might just be the end of humanity's story right there.
Speaking of the Klingons, let's take a moment to talk about them...
The modern pop-culture image of Klingons as these weird Samurai space-orcs with bumpy foreheads talking endlessly about "honor" while they stab each other in the back mostly comes from Christopher Lloyd's Captain Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kruge seems to be more of a pirate or privateer than a naval officer, operating on his own initiative rather than as part of a wider organization. While subsequent portrayals would try to walk this back, they were never quite able to shake that image. Even in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, a series that was usually pretty good about giving its aliens depth and nuance, the Klingons come across as a remarkably simplistic and socially primitive society. This is in substantial contrast to how they were presented in the original series.
While originally envisioned by Star Trek producer Gene L. Coon as a mash up of the Soviet, Ottoman, and Mongol Empires, ie a stand-in for every "Eastern Horde" that has threatened Western civilization throughout its history, the original series gives them a lot of background for what could have easily been a just another throw-away villain of the week. The Klingons of TOS are presented as a fully functional society with scientists, lawyers, and diplomats, as well as warriors. They engage in diplomacy and undertake organized campaigns as seen in their introductory episode Errand of Mercy, they make use of proxies as shown in the episodes like Day of the Dove and A Private Little War. They have deep cover operatives as shown in *The Trouble With Tribbles". We even get passing references to famous Klingon actors, popular songs, and mytho-historical figures. While aggressive and expansionistic the Klingons of TOS are a civilization that venerates its warriors rather than a civilization of warriors. A distinction that STE explicitly calls out in the Season 2 episode Judgment.
Though much of it is now considered non-canon, the Original Series expanded universe novels, fan-guides (presented as in-universe guidebooks), and TTRPG took this even further, fleshing out the Klingons' history, and religion. Even giving them an entire constructed language that would be spoken on-screen in subsequent Star Trek movies and spin-off series. These Klingons are not just mindless brutes slobbering Gahg, while their children may train for war as part of their basic schooling, they also enjoy theme-parks and schlocky teleplays. Klingon adults listen to opera and have nuanced conversations about history and philosophy over glasses of Blood Wine. These Klingons are warlike, but they aren't obsessed with war for war's sake. Rather their militarism is an expression of a broader multi-domain aggressiveness.
And it is through this aggressiveness that they perceive something crucial about the other races they come in contact with. There are "Eev" that is beings like themselves, possessed of individual agency and ambition (The Humans,, Vulcans, Romulans, and Andorrans, all falling into this category), and then there are "Kuve", zombies, servitors, livestock, contemptible creatures worthy only of being conquered or consumed. There are shades of the Bene Gesserit's Gom Jabbar test in this distinction complete with Klingon youth having to be "tested with pain sticks" before becoming a legal adult (Coon, Fontana, Ford, Et Al. had clearly read Dune).
It is with this as context that I would like to highlight a scene from the novel The Final Reflection by John Ford, published the same year that Star Trek III would cement the pop culture image of the Klingons. In this scene a Klingon envoy is meeting with a wealthy Earth tycoon, Maxwell Grandisson the Third (this was written before Star Trek IV dropped that line about people in the 24th century not using money into the lore without any thought about how it would work). This man, Grandisson, is the leader of a "Back to Earth" movement that wants to do away with all this expensive and dangerous colonization of other planets bullshit in favor of building a paradise on Earth and he is trying to convince the Klingons to back his political campaign on the basis that if he wins there will be no need for conflict between their two peoples. The Klingon response to his overtures is worth thinking on...
To me, this speaks to the core story/premise of Enterprise. At the start of the series Earth is well on it's way to becoming a post-scarcity society but humanity is also starting to lean toward the Khesterex side of things. A vassal to the Vulcans, a junior ally at best. The NX Program is the physical manifestation of a conscious decision not to sink into comfortable dependency. This isn't the end of the humanity's story where we live boringly ever after, it is the beginning of "To Boldly Go..."
...and it is by "boldly going where no man has gone before", by inserting themselves into the middle of galactic affairs as though they belong, that by the end of Season 3 Humanity has gone from an indulged vassal to regional player and full partner in a powerful 3-way alliance that would have never come about had this band of psychotic gun-monkeys not disrupted the status quo. It is a quintessentially "American" story in that it's both the story of a child culture supplanting its parent as Hegemon and deeply rooted in the frontier mythos. But it's also a more universally human story about how cultures rise, fall, and occasionally merge. At the start of the series the Vulcans are powerful but also stagnant. Too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances and too conservative to tolerate uncertainty or risk even when doing so is arguably necessary. Meanwhile Humanity is both staggeringly ignorant and boundlessly confident. A confidence buoyed in part by the fact that there is nothing anyone can threaten them with short of extinction that they haven't already done to themselves. By the end of the series the two have moderated each other and become the closest of allies. It's a story about finding that balance between realistically assessing your limitations but also having the sense of confidence, self-worth, and "fuck it we ball" attitude necessary to pursue greatness. A worthwhile message for not just for individuals but for entire cultures.
Which brings us to the Culture War angle.
A common critique I see leveled against conservative populists on this forum be is that they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital". MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was, but I've seen similar complaints leveled against Abe and the LDP in Japan, and as as characters like Javier Milei in Argentina. But something the critics don't seem to grasp is that positive vision or no, their messages resonate, they win elections, and their rallies draw passionate crowds because it's a better story than anything the other side has to offer. A question our resident anti-Populists are going to have to grapple with is what does "elite human capital" have to offer the base-model human other than growing social dysfunction and death via "managed decline"?
I still think we can get to a better future without a catastrophic hard reset but we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces. Grievance-mongering might stir up a crowd but gripes alone are not a solid foundation to build upon, nor are the likely to inspire anyone to greatness. If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left. We need a unifying myth, and I feel like we might be in the early stages of figuring that out.
Ratzel and Kjellen wrote important books about this.
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Great assessment of the Enterprise setting. “And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’”
But you completely lose me at the CW bits.
Elites don’t demand either of those things. The traditional substitutes are money and power. Conservatives are quite willing and able to reward elites with such; populists are not. Intellectual and technocrat discomfort with MAGA was directly proportional to the amount of time it spent reminding them that they were class enemies.
In fact, this class consciousness was an essential part of MAGA’s positive vision. America is supposed to be great. We beat all our rivals, so what gives? It must be the liberal, coastal elites. Get them out of power so we normal Americans can resume our upward trajectory.
Wild material prosperity is a good start. Really, the question is absurd unless you draw a very unintuitive box around “elite human capital.” Purging your best and brightest is not conducive to scientific or cultural wealth.
It doesn’t appear to prevent social dysfunction, either. There is a direct line from the Chinese intellectual purges to the starvation of millions of peasants. Then China had to redevelop its own oligarchic class before it could play in the big leagues. Hollowing out institutions comes with consequences.
Wait, wait.
You gestured at all those examples of conservative populism, but now it’s “blue spaces” at fault? I don’t think you’ve properly made the case. Presumably, you’re thinking of critical theory, reparations, the intellectual backlash against America. But what you’re describing is just populism. Swap the word “blue” and you’d have the standard criticism of MAGA. It gripes, it does damage, but it has yet to build anything that lasts.
...I think you left off a third element, which is "immunity to consequences." There's lots of ways to get money and power. There are few ways to get or wield money and power that are protected from consequences deriving from the getting and the wielding, and almost all those ways involve "be an elite" among them. Include this element, and the hostility toward elites you correctly identify with gains a heaping helping of necessary context. Our elites have almost completely insulated themselves from negative consequences arising from their wielding of money and power, and the resentment this lack of accountability breeds is probably not something the present system can or should survive.
Do you believe elites have delivered wild material prosperity? Does the current generation understand that it is living amid wild material prosperity? If not, why not? Was Mangione mistaken? Are his fans in the public and the press and the justice system aware of that fact?
Like, the basic problem with the anti-populist defense of elites is that elites by definition are the people running things, and we can look at the world around us to assess how they're actually performing. So we repeatedly get, as you offer here, vague appeals to how wonderful things are in this best of all possible worlds, which die a death the moment you compare them to the PANIC PANIC PANIC elites themselves observably resort to in order to goad the populace down their preferred policy chute, into their preferred policy captive-bolt-gun.
The public at large believed that "police shooting unarmed black men" was a crisis, because Elites spent a decade intentionally generating the illusion of such a crisis. But the largest spike ever recorded in violent crime was actually real, and was very clearly a direct consequence of the public reaction to that elite-generated illusion.
And so for Education, and the Afghan war, and the GWOT generally, and the criminal justice system generally, and for offshoring manufacturing annd arguably for the economy generally, for the whole of the Trans Rights issue, for the LGBT movement in at least a large part, the COVID response, immigration and on and on and on.
I can't find the X.com link at the moment to the academic lady with a prestigious fellowship, arguing in an interview that reporting child abuse is racist. So instead, I'll note that I disagree that our present elites are in fact "our best", and that intelligence is very clearly orthogonal to goodness.
We straight-up cannot afford these people. They have to go, and if they do not go peacefully they will absolutely go violently, and much that we value will go with them, and that will still be preferable to the ruin of letting them continue to run things.
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You're mixing up terminology here. The elites are people with actual power. "Elite human capital" are a bunch of influencers with status anxiety, a Joffrey Baratheon complex, and a hate boner for populism.
If that were the definition, why would conservative populists want to attract them?
I’m pretty sure that I’m using it as the OP did, which is much closer to the first sense.
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Maybe people in this forum can help me:
I've got an 8 year old boy I'd like to introduce to Star Trek. I specifically want:
So my questions are:
I mean, shit, I was watching Star Trek as early as 8 years old on my lonesome. If they're into science fiction and have any sort of attention span, it's going to be hard to keep them away from that stuff.
Cut them loose with some of the more fun stuff in seasons 2 through 7 and see what happens. It'll build some foundations for them to appreciate the deeper stuff when they get older.
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13ish is fine, but a sharp younger kid might like it earlier.
I have three suggestions for starting points.
As you suggested, Wrath of Khan is a good one to start with. the TOS movies, from two onwards (the first one might confuse as to why these characters coming out of retirement is a big deal), are detached enough from the series that they won't feel like you're missing half the plot if you just watch them on their own. They have enough action to keep a child's attention. The action is modern enough that it doesn't look goofy the way the action from the 60's does.
For my second suggestion, I'll go very much against the grain and suggest maybe the most divisive series as a starting point: Voyager. It is "my Trek" in the sense it's the one that introduced me properly to the series, and I posit it's a good starting point, because its concept inherently reduces the requirement of knowing the lore that was built up on, without discarding it wholesale either. Yes, it's "lesser" in that it's not as good an example of the virtues you would hope the show would demonstrate to the kids, but those virtues are still there. Janeway is not the greatest role model, but in most episodes she's a decent one. Sometimes she does a cheeky little war crime, but what Starfleet captain hasn't?
The Animated Series might also be a good starting point, especially if you want to start him earlier than 13. It's simpler, introduces to the universe, and while it hasn't aged all that well, I think it probably aged better than TOS has visually. Or maybe I just forgave it because I had different expectations of cartoons back then.
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Appropriate age is going to depend a lot on maturity and attention span, but certainly I'd think no later than 13. I'd probably skip TOS entirely to begin with and start with the TNG pilot. Then skip to Measure of a Man, then some more plums from seasons 3-7, and the finale. If it takes, he'll fill in the rest of the episodes on his own volition and want more.
I'm pretty sure this is the worst episode possible as an intro. It's got lots of great philosophical nuggets to chew on, but there's no reason to identify with why Picard/Riker are so troubled by disassembling a "mere machine" if you haven't actually built a relationship with Data yet by watching him struggle to learn to be human. Without understanding that background, the JAG and cybernetics professor are "obviously right" and the whole episode is boring.
My problem is that all of the recommendations on trek sites I've seen are like this: they are geared towards the "best episodes for experienced fans" rather than "the best episodes for introducing the series".
I think both the pilot and the episode itself does enough to bring that background. You could, I guess, watch Skin of Evil after the pilot to cement data's personality and account for the disappearance of Yar, or Elementary, Dear Data to show his more whimsical side (which also sets up the clever Moriarty episode later). The good thing about TNG generally though is that it was conceived and written as an almost 100% episodic show, so while episodes can benefit from familiarity with the characters and the world lore, it is generally not necessary. That's one reason it was very popular in syndication.
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Modern Trek is not my Trek, and that's okay. But the latest show is so clearly not for the older/original fans, and so clearly "Dawson's Creek In Space", that it's over-done. (Also, how Holly Hunter plays her character makes me want to slap the face off her.)
As well, if anyone thinks it's too gay and queer and multi-culti? Excuse you, it's packed to the gills with racism! I would have thought this was a parody, but "he/hymn/it/xe (and more neos)" seems (on the face of it) to be serious.
Oh noes they separated a mother and child? Yeah, because Mommy is a convicted criminal accomplice to murder and even AmeriKKKa doesn't send six year olds to jail with their criminal parent. Of course, the right thing to do is let all criminals off if they have kids, because you can't send the kid to jail, you can't separate a parent and child, so that only leaves letting the parent off scot-free (else you get headlines about ICE arresting and detaining a five year old as though they're acting like the child is the criminal, and not abandoned by family who refuse to take him):
Guy goes to military academy and they insist on a haircut? Brutal non-consensual attack!
Gosh, with a modern audience like this, how can it be anything but a smash hit?
EDIT: More seriously, for a show supposed to be set centuries in the future, it's weirdly "all the 21st century West Coast liberal talking points". Apparently we now have canonical drag queens, because of course SF of the 32nd century is still Progress Pride Flag Central. (Although, seems like the performer may indeed be a Trek fan, so good on that). It's just the anvil to the face nature of it all that is tiresome. I don't object to having a sensitive Klingon who just wants to study medicine! Of course not all Klingons, just like all historical societies with ruling warrior/kingly castes, were not all warriors, you had different castes as it were, so a doctor is perfectly fine career path. But on top that make him a refugee gay polycule kid? Sigh, when is he coming out as nonbinary otherkin?
This wouldn't be out of place in the earlier Trek canon either: a good chunk of the Worf-centered episodes of TNG and DS9 focus on how to straddle "warrior culture" and "modern neoliberalism" to attempt to satisfy both, not always succeeding. Worf ends up teaching martial arts (Mok'bara) to crewmates, takes up prune juice as "a warrior's drink", and manages to be a questionable father to Alexander.
Honestly, some of the best Trek episodes are reflections on the human conditon like those.
If you think about it for five seconds, of course Klingon society has to have farmers and doctors and construction workers and all the rest of it. Even if it is a warrior-ruler society, they need people who work for them doing non-warrior stuff. Mr. "I'm a lover not a fighter" kid need not be spectacularly different, but the show can't resist piling on the agony to make the point about No, Seriously, We're Talking About Anti-Immigrant Racism In America.
Grew up in a refugee camp (because home planet was destroyed during The Burn), abandoned by both his dads in the polycule (er, what?) and now he just wants to watch birds and become a healer.
Knock yourself out, kid, would be classic Trek attitude here.
I didn't watch the show. What motivates such a character to attend Starfleet Academy of all things?
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You're preaching to the choir.
I am constantly amazed how each new version scrapes that barrel bottom even thinner. New one is "we're a queer show for queer people, wait why is nobody watching? it must be racism and transphobia is why!"
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I don't think this is the right frame.
OK, I guess if the Western political class was made up solely of EU or UK officials, there would be no productivity growth, just anemic faux-technocratic tweaks, Nudging even though Nudging has been debunked... Technocracy without technology. From that point of view it's declinism.
But there would be large and ever growing numbers of migrants. Is that not a radical policy, an ambitious vision to reshape the world? Spain legalized 500K illegals this week. Australia imported about 300K legal immigrants last year in a country of 27 million. The left have big ambitions for growth in the size of the state, fiscally as well as demographically. The left are big fans of renewable energy too, they want more solar panels and wind farms. Some favour war to impose their values overseas, war against homophobic or racist autocracies who deny their people Human Rights. From a certain point of view, some are imperialists.
Is Trump opposed to new technology, new ideas? No, he's a big fan of AI and crypto, he's eager to have new investments, new battleships, the biggest and the best. Not a big fan of electric cars or windmills, he prefers oil and gas. Trump's desire for overseas expansion is manifest. Right-wing populism has close ties to jingoism and imperial expansion historically and today.
One man's nostalgia is another man's 'this is obviously correct and good, the more good the better!' another man's failure is 'we clearly didn't try hard enough (this is correct and good), all these ____ists and Russian bots were in the way'
Each side has their own unifying myths. The left have a vision of evil white supremacy, white colonialism, racist capitalism... a world divided between whites and People Of Colour (with some subdivisions for educated/ignorant whites, model minorities, LGBT, intersectionalism). There's some variation between pursuing social democracy or socialism/communism and liquidating landlords. There are some on the left trying to push for more embrace of technology: how can you have fully automated luxury gay space communism without data centres? But by and large, the left's unifying myths unite the left.
The right's unifying myths are somewhat more diverse: good white supremacy, Judeo-Christian values, 'we abolished slavery', rallying behind the flag, market capitalism as an end in itself, leftists being gay (pejorative) and cringe... But they are also myths of the right.
I don't think you can unify left and right, only align everyone to be on the left or the right.
Trump gave us Space Force, that's not Khesterex.
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Well... that's an interesting post! As a fellow Star Trek nerd I'm conflicted on how to respond. You've made so many different, interesting points that I'm disoriented.
On the Enterprise series, personally I still hate it. I hate the opening theme song (trading the classy dramatic music of previous series for a cheesy pop song), I hate the way it retconned an earlier ship named Enterprise, I hate Scott Bakula as an actor, I hate how the showrunners were obviously running out of ideas, and I especially hate how they were trying to shoehorn in then-current year politicals about 9/11 into Star Trek. But I suppose it does have its place as the last of its era, and as something of a time capsule for early 2000s network TV.
I agree with you that Original Series Klingons deserve more respect. They get a lot of shit because of their appearance (which admittedly does look like a weird racial caricature of Turkish or Mongolian people, plus hilariously low-budget). But they're written as intelligent and respect-worthy adversaries. In many ways, not that different from Kirk. When they're first introduced Kirk is trying to blend in among a planet of pacifists, but the Klingons instantly sus him out as being different and more like themselves. They both share contempt for the pacifists, even when it's revealed that they're secretly a more advanced race. And the Klingons are very much a match for the Federation and a huge threat. Later series make them look cool, but act kinda goofy, just blundering around with swords and being stupid. "Samurai/vikings in space" turn out to be no match at all for hyper advanced humans.
Culture War angle: basically, I agree. But this is admittedly a spicy hot take. Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger. The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life. Trump's recent rhetoric on Venezuela seems to be a step in that direction- he says that he did it partially for security, but also partially just to take the oil and make us all richer. We'll see if that's actually the case, but I can appreciate the vision.
That doesn't sound particularly Roman. More Roman would be offering citizenship to any migrants who joined the army to conquer Cuba or Greenland, on the condition that they remain there afterwards and helped develop the new territories.
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I agree that "the Franchise" is too important to to entrust to accidents of birth which is why, if we are going to openly embrace empire, I would say that we ought borrow a page from the late-Republic / early-Empire and go full Heinlein. Tie citizenship and voting rights to military service or at least being a revenue-producing taxpayer. We want voters who feel invested, and granting citizenship at birth, be it by blood or by soil, has the opposite effect.
As for the rest, I have the same questions for you as @sun_the_second.
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Starship Troopers explored this concept seriously as well (disregard the movie, which may be fun but has little to do with the book). In the book, the franchise is only extended to people who undertake hazardous and/or unpleasant duty on behalf of the human federation. A right to be able to do this is guaranteed, and they will even invent difficult tasks for someone with disabilities, but the point is to ensure real skin in the game for the franchise-holders. The book also discusses the concept of human expansion as a sort of evolutionary force.
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Oh, Enterprise burned me so badly. I was delighted to hear Scott Bakula was cast as Archer. Then they gave me "a well-balanced captain, he has a chip on both shoulders", turned the Vulcans into racist xenophobe ableists and I don't know what-all else, that goddamn dog, and Trip Tucker.
No thank you!
Then they seemed to go on a spiral of "you thought the last re-imagining was bad? Hold my Romulan ale" and we got Disco Trek with mushroom-powered space ships and the biggest Mary Sue of Mary Sues, Michael (I'm a gal but I got a guy's name, ain't I daring?) Burnham.
Making "Spock's Brain" not the worst ever Trek episode produced for twenty years now.
I recently rewatched a bunch of Berman-era Trek including a good chunk of Season 1 Enterprise in part because I needed a pallet cleanser from the latest Kurtzman nonsense, and pop-song aside I feel that it is unfairly maligned. See the various re-dubbs of the Enterprise opening using other series' scores
TNG was "my Trek" but even I have to admit that the first season was pretty rough, if we compare season 1 of Enterprise to season 1 of TNG I'd argue that the former acquits itself well.
Season one of TNG was trying a little too hard to copy original TOS, to the point of remaking some episodes from the parent show. Once they got their own cast and setting established, and ventured out to do original stories, it was way better.
I really, really wanted Enterprise to work because I thought going back to the early days of the Federation and how it was built up was a great idea. The struggles, the coming together of the different founding members we knew from later series, the history behind it all. Instead we got decontamination gel rubdowns where any alien microbes presumably died of second-hand embarrassment.
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I wanted to give Enterprise a chance. The soft rock-jazz AOR fusion warbling of the theme song took me aback a bit, but I soldiered on.
Then we got "the fucking idiot* showrunners made it canon that this is not a bad shitty joke, it is now established in the Trekverse that Humans literally smell, so far as Vulcans are concerned, and they have to wear nasal filters to be around us".
I could not believe, over several episodes, that no this was not a shitty joke some dumb Human (Tucker) was trying to make a running joke, it was to be taken as real true fact of the setting.
Then we had Archer going to go to war (or a diplomatic incident) over his dumb dog where a bunch of aliens who had never seen a dog before and had no idea what kind of animal it was neglected to warn him that some plant on their world would give poor doggy-dums the equivalent of an allergic reaction.
The stupid, stupid, stupid attempts at fanservice sexiness (but not too sexy, and let's pretend that you treat radiation by rubbing gel on your half-naked partner. Yeah, hard science for the win!)
I liked Reed. I liked Hoshi. I was willing to give T'Pol a go, even though they plainly had her in the Seven of Nine catsuit and heels role, until they infected her with the mind-controlling Ceti eel and diverted what little character she had apart from being the sexpot to "Imma rebel against everything Vulcan and be 200% pro-Archer, pro-Humans and pro-romance with stinky Human Tucker".
It's a toss-up whom I loathe more, Tucker or Phlox, but given that Phlox is such an insufferable pain in the backside I'd be happy with an episode where they blew up Denobula (they blew up Vulcan, damn them, in the franchise but they couldn't destroy this lair of prats?)
My viewing dropped from "it's new Trek, that's every week sorted!" to "occasional if I remember" and ended with the first whispers of the Time war or whatever that plot was, when they decided they'd re-do Voyager's Year of Hell (the most popular season for that show) and re-cast Archer in the Janeway Action Hero mould. At this period, the Federation doesn't even have working transporters for people, but they're going up against a civilisation that can manipulate time? That's bows and arrows against nuclear missiles. I noped out because Braga and Berman and their bloody love of convoluted time travel episodes, plus some things are just beyond suspension of disbelief, and I didn't like any of the characters or setting enough to stick with the show.
*Yes, I am salty about this. It's reducing Trek to the level of "jokes twelve year old boys would think funny".
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From the Wiki link:
Yeah, if we're doing 60s Cold War analogies, the Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were the Chinese.
This really depends on which era and episode you're talking about. They did say that the Romulans were distantly related to the Vulcans but less friendly, so some people made a vague analogy to that with Vulcans=Japanese and Romulans=Chinese... but then the crew meets the Romulans and they're just space Romans, with all sorts of references to the ancient Romans. After that they only showed up a few times in later TOS episodes, mostly sidelined behind the Klingons. Meanwhile there's Sulu and Chekov on the bridge, as an actual, literal Japanese/Russian man, showing how the humans in the future had overcome these sort of petty national conflicts.
Later the movie Star Trek 6 made the Klingons a heavy handed metaphor for the USSR and the end of the cold war, with a complicated spy plot. But after that, TNG made them more like space Vikings who looked down on any sort of treachery, while the Romulans became the sneaky spy enemy. So I think the analogy is pretty garbled and there's room for the writers to do whatever they want.
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And Roddenberry was definitely doing '60s Cold War analogies.
Oh, yeah. But he also wanted that balance between "human nature has done terrible things" and "but we can change, here's a vision for the future of optimism and hope". The Federation works for its happy ending, which is why the puerile easy nihilism of over-using the Mirror Universe and Section 31 annoys me. "Guess what, suckers, your shiny future is built on grubby spy manipulation!" and then we get Picard etc. which are then "guess what, suckers, your shiny future is obsessed with late 20th century/mid 21st century SJW tropes as expressed in terms college student Marxists can understand!"
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What happens when you run out of inferior people to pillage and loot?
Also, who exactly provides the "services" won in war if not the underclass that you defeated?
Capitalism's greatest virtue was enabling continuous growth through continuous competition. Making competition physical either creates a real risk of winning and stagnating, lacking enemies, or you have to make the entire war a 1984-esque sham.
Also also, war isn't even fucking fun in a rah rah primal kind of way anymore. You don't get to see the whites of the enemy's eyes. Unless you're stomping primitives through vastly superior firepower in a way that can hardly be called war and certainly isn't edifying, all you get is cowering in a foxhole, waiting for a drone to pinpoint your location and either get you shelled or drop a grenade on you.
Well you don't kill them all. Don't commit mass genocide, that's barbaric and wasteful.
(@JeSuisCharlie this is also my reply to you)
Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.
(I feel compelled to mention at this point that I'm just offering this as a thought experiment, using all three of those plus the Klingons from Star Trek as a very loose example. All three of those have some obvious horrifying parts, and I particularly despise slavery)
The thing that all three had in common was that, although they were a heavily militarized society with many of their upper class men serving in the military, they weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory. They already had all the territory they could possibly use—arguably too much. Of course, to some extent they did go to war with other nations, but most of their normal military action was either:
(a) preparing ever greater amounts of force to make sure they never had to go to war (the best weapon is one that never has to be used) or (b) internal force against the tribute states of their empire (Czech or Afghanistan for the Soviets, India for the British, Blacks and American Indians for the Antebellum South)
Of course, the most obvious benefit of such an empire is the resourcees it provides. Natural resources like oil and minerals, but also humans to do all the work that no one else wants to do: work the farmland in harsh rural areas for example, or low-wage service work in the cities. In our capitalistic meritocracy, this leads to an endless dog-eat-dog struggle as everyone is in competition for the "good jobs," leading everyone in fear that they'll be stuck with one of those lesser jobs, and no one will offer them any sympathy—it's their fault for not doing better in school, or hustling harder, or something like that. With the empire model, things are much more clear—you're born into the lower caste, and you stay there, so there's a little more stability to build a culture there and offer some stability.
In our society, military service is usually offered as a path out of poverty for the lower class, while those in the upper class either making a token gesture of it (like the royal family in England) or skip it entirely (like Trump). In the "empire" model, it instead acts as a test of merit and one of the most respected careers, with many of the upper class choosing to make their career there. After leaving the military, they then get a huge advantage for later careers in things like law and politics, which seems a lot more fair and just than offering them to kids who got a high LSAT score and went to top law schools with no prior career experience. Or they can simply retire and live the rest of their life as a gentleman of leisure, with their military pension and discipline keeping them on a respectable path, which is much better than the aimless NEETS of today who have ample leisure time but nothing to show for it.
I would certainly not expect it to be "fun," and I'm aware there would be a heavy price paid in blood for all of this. But it might lead us back to an actually "great" society, where people have a sense that they are part of something truly grand and have an important role to play. The current vision of "you are all residents of an economic zone, go forth and maximize GDP" is somewhat... lacking in its appeal to our nobler spirits.
The South actually was pretty interested in expanding its territory. I think in a scenario where they successfully separate from the United States they probably end up with Cuba and possibly large parts of Mexico and South America.
As I understand it, that was mostly for political reasons. They felt outnumbered and wanted more congressional votes to survive.
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…this is TND with extra steps. I mean, you’re totally allowed to argue for the total dispossession of and presumed eventual extinction of the non-white/east asian peoples of the earth, but that is indeed the proximate outcome of such a Darwinian process.
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