JasSmith
@JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
Yes, in response to this comment.
Agreed. People should dislike modern Star Trek for it’s bad writing, not because it’s progressive.
I didn’t raise the topic. I replied to it. I presume you can see that comment? Are you using an application which truncates the discussion?
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
I clearly explained the distinction despite not using the term “forced inclusion,” which I didn’t raise. You did. I can’t reply qualitatively unless you explain which part confuses you.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
“Nuh uh” isn’t an argument. If you won’t read the comment then I won’t be able to give you a meaningful reply.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
If these themes are ancillary and not the one dimensional focus, no problem. In Ko’Zeine, the entire episode arc hinges on Darem being gay. It is the plot. To make it worse, there was never any ambiguity. The writers telegraphed the “correct” outcome from the beginning and never let the viewer stew in any kind of reflection or moral dilemma. We knew exactly what the outcome would be and the only reason we watched was to see how we would reach the only “right” conclusion. That’s not good storytelling. It’s a poor choice of plot. So would be a “murder is bad” plot. The issue isn’t a gay character existing. We have plenty of examples of gay characters existing in media in which “the right” takes no issue. See Six Feet Under, Will & Grace, Willow in Buffy, Remy in House, and a thousand other examples.
The issue is the poor writing. I levy similar criticisms of any writing like this. If these episodes revolved around “I’m short,” or “I’m ugly,” or “I’m fat,” they would also be uninteresting. There needs to be more complexity and moral ambiguity to provoke thought. I don’t watch Star Trek for the flashy lights. I watch it for the interesting dilemmas. Academy is the very lowest brow Netflix slop I could imagine.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
I think it did. If you disagree please tell me how. I provided two examples.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
But this is exactly my point. “Gay people are ok and normal” shouldn’t be a plot. It’s like a “murder is bad” plot. Yes, murder is bad. We know. That’s just not an interesting theme to explore. Maybe if it were presented as a trolly problem, where a crew member were forced to kill someone in order to defend their own life, or the life of a friend, that could be an interesting plot. Forcing the viewer to explore the tension of morality between killing or being killed, or taking an innocent life to save another innocent life. That could be interesting television.
We could apply this to a “gay” plot as well. What if the crew met a civilization that were on the brink of extinction for some reason, and they had outlawed homosexuality for reasons of survival. The crew could explore the tension between individual liberty and existentialism. Someone might argue, “our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive if we strip people of such basic human rights.” Another might argue, “if our civilization is to survive we must make hard decisions as we have always done during war and other crises.” They might argue it’s only “temporary,” and someone else might argue, “it’s been 30 years!”
The issue is driven by one-dimensional plot.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
Which part of my explanation did you not understand or disagree with?
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
I thought I did a reasonable job of explaining the narrative distinction in my comment. Maybe you could be specific about which part you don’t understand, or which part with which you might disagree?
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
In Ko’Zeine the conflict is not between self and tradition, but more about the internal conflict of Darem. The enemy here is his own crippling self-expectation, not society. I think this conflict resonate a lot with modern morality topics such as LGBTQ+ acceptance.
Either way, I feel the narrative is pre-approved, telegraphed at every opportunity, and leaves no room for ambiguity. I’m sure this theme does resonate with some people, but it’s not good storytelling. It doesn’t resonate beyond that small group.
Re Vox: I agree with your description of the storyline, and I am not disputing that is how the story was told. My point of contention is that the correct outcome was pre-approved. We all knew the “right” choice from the moment the choice was presented. There was never any doubt that the Klingons were wrong. Never any sympathetic exploration of the reasons for their cultural beliefs. Never a moment of critical self-reflection for the viewer. We were told up front “the Klingons are wrong, and we are going to take you on a journey to show you WHY the Klingons are wrong, and how we solve this problem of them being wrong.” It is more akin to an action movie than a Star Trek episode. We all know who the good and bad guys are, and we’re just excited to see shooty lasers on our journey to the foregone conclusion.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
That’s fair, and to be clear, I do not think the point is that old Trek was always perfectly nuanced and new Trek never is. Of course old Trek had plenty of episodes where the writers clearly had a preferred moral conclusion. The difference, for me, is in how often it still let the opposing view feel internally coherent, emotionally serious, and worth wrestling with before the resolution arrived.
Take The Outcast. Yes, the episode clearly wants you to sympathise with Soren, but the J’naii are not just framed as sneering idiots for 45 minutes. Their position is tied to a broader social order, Riker cannot simply speechify it away, and the ending is bleak rather than triumphant. Same with Ethics. Crusher is obviously the more humane voice, but Worf’s position is not treated as random barbarism. It comes from honour, fear, identity, and a real cultural framework, which is why the conflict works at all. You can disagree with how those episodes land while still admitting they spend more time inside the conflict.
That is really my criticism of newer Trek. It is not that it has politics, or even that it has a preferred answer, because Trek always has. It is that newer Trek too often signals the answer immediately, flattens the dissenting side into an obstacle, and then resolves the issue in a way that feels morally pre-approved. Old Trek could be didactic too, but it was more willing to leave the audience sitting in the mess for a while. That is the distinction I am getting at.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
A specific example would be “Vox in Excelso.” Jay-Den learns the Klingons have become an endangered people after the Burn, General Obel Wochak rejects the Federation’s offer of asylum on Faan Alpha because accepting it as charity would dishonour them, and the episode resolves that by staging a fake battle so the Klingons can claim the planet “by conquest”. To me, that lands too neatly. The episode tells you very quickly that the Federation position is the sensible one and the Klingon objection is mostly pride that needs to be worked around, rather than really sitting with the possibility that their view of dignity, sovereignty, and survival might have more weight than the script gives it.
Another example is “Ko’Zeine.” Darem is pulled back to Khionia for an arranged royal marriage to Kaira, and the episode is clearly building toward the conclusion that suppressing your real self for duty and tradition is tragic and wrong. That is a fair theme, but the show signals the moral endpoint so early that there is not much room left for genuine ambiguity. Kaira ends up being understanding, Jay-Den is framed as the voice urging honesty, and the traditional path mainly exists to be rejected. Compare that with something like older Trek, where you were more often left to wrestle with whether duty, culture, and individual freedom could all make a legitimate claim on the character at the same time.
So when I say the show lacks nuance, I do not mean it should avoid these themes. I mean it too often starts from the answer and then builds the episode backwards, instead of letting the conflict stay uncomfortable long enough for the audience to think. And when the story concludes, they make it VERY clear which way the audience is expected to land. They do not allow for any ambiguity or moral disagreement. They present the “right and true” path, and make it clear that any deviation is wrong and immoral.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 2 weeks ago:
I mostly agree, but with shows like Starfleet Academy, the writing is bad in part because of the forced inclusive themes. You’re broadly correct: these could be handled with tact for a better show. I still think these themes are handled best when they give the audience room to consider nuanced and complex ideas. Don’t shoot me, but instead of a classic New Generation episode I’m going cite an episode of The Orville - “About a Girl”. Bortus and Klyden have a baby, who is born female. They try to argue that she should be allowed to remain female, but ultimately the court rules that she undergo the Moclan gender reassignment procedure.
This touches on contemporary issues but also doesn’t present the situation as “this side is 100% right, and this side is literally Hitler.” The audience is actually left wondering, where does this sit in the contemporary debate? If a child is born one sex, should they be given the right to remain as that sex? Or should a court be allowed to step in and reassign sex? The episode also brilliantly explores the difficult dynamic between Bortus and Klyden, and doesn’t portray one as a cartoon villain and the other as a male Mary Sue.
This is where New Trek fails horrible. Zero nuance. Everything is presented in the first 10 seconds as “this is good, this is bad. Accept the message we are feeding you are you are a bad person.” That’s not Star Trek. Most importantly, that’s not interesting. It’s not good storytelling. It might appeal to people who really like circlejerking about that particular issue, but that’s a minority of people.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
Whataboutism re baby rape is next level evil.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know. How does it feel to be a genocide apologist?
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
You really like raping and murdering people, apparently.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
When Palestine began the most recent war, it committed the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Some of their first victims were innocent young people who supported the Palestinian cause. The Palestinians raped and murdered them en masse.
It’s a war, and both sides are committing atrocities. Innocent bystanders are caught in the crossfire on both sides. If I understand your argument correctly, do I understand that you support raping and murdering innocent Jews?
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
And the phrase “bless you” was created with the intent to banish demons out of your nose, but we still say it when you sneeze.
Bad example. The intent was good and it remains good.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is what they chant. Calling that genocidal is Orwellian, mate. Get a grip.
Many do not. Many drop the second part entirely. For example, the t-shirt on the girl in this very video that we are discussing. Either way, adding a nice phrase to the end of a genocidal phrase doesn’t make the genocide part less bad.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
Thank you for proving my point. Many activists do indeed want to destroy Israel. Clearly Israel is never going to say, “sure thing!” So the region will remain at war.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I’ve never been into his content but I really enjoyed his journey to build a better local LLM. Way more technical than I thought he was capable of.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
The phrase was created with the explicit intent to destroy Israel. We can equivocate about the intent to destroy Israel as being genocidal, but as I explain, Palestinian activists consider it genocidal intent when Israeli politicians talk of destroying Palestine, so I use their own standard. It may be that people who use this phrase do not intend destruction of Israel, but they are using a phrase which was created explicitly to call for the destruction of Israel. I don’t accept that there is any good faith way to claim the term has been “reclaimed.” If I say “heil Hitler,” and follow it up with “but no genocide or any of the bad stuff Hitler did,” it doesn’t erase the first part of my sentence. In fact, the second part is antithetical to the first.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
I’m referring to Hamas’ “one state” solutions they have proposed.
- Comment on Password manager woes. How have you solved syncing on Android? 3 weeks ago:
It’s true re adding passwords while the server is offline, but my server runs 24x7 and it’s never down for more than a few minutes. If it goes down, I fix it. I also backup the encrypted DB regularly to cloud, so there is little risk of data loss. I am a very satisfied Vaultwarden user. Especially because it allows password sharing with my family. Everyone has an account.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 4 weeks ago:
And yours.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 4 weeks ago:
It’s hard to engage with someone who genuinely thinks Apartheid was a nation state. We could call for the end of Apartheid without calling for the destruction of South Africa.
- Comment on Karim Diané on playing Star Trek’s first gay Klingon 4 weeks ago:
Well then John Cena is overweight. In fact, he’s obese, with a BMI of 33.9. So BMI isn’t objective reality. And I think it’s useful only as a very rough guideline.
BMI is a population level tool. There are individuals who are extremely muscular who can be in the obese range. I’m not seeking a perfect description - nor will ever such a description exist. If that is your standard then you are taking a postmodernist approach which is “everything is made up and the words don’t matter.” If up means down and the person in the discussion genuinely doesn’t care, there’s no real way to have a discussion after that.
We started with the question “Is Tilly fat?” And now suddenly you’re talking about medicine and health.
Because you raised the concept of soulism and utility. If we were to consider soulism and utility, I think using objective metrics make sense. I agree that there are many other frameworks we could use.
Humans view the world through their lenses of experience. Tolkien wisely remarked on creating fictional worlds that we should endeavour to change as little as possible compared to our world in order to suspend disbelief. When we do make changes, they should be meaningful, important for the story and world, and consistent. Unless Tilly’s weight is explicitly described as healthy and normal, and it is part of some new universe law and storyline, I don’t think we should be making any such assumptions. I think most people would balk at such a storyline and in-universe change. It would feel performative.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 4 weeks ago:
The same Wikipedia article hints at both Zionist and Palestinian use of a similar phrase even before PLO adopted it, so I am not sure if we can just plainly state that the cited sentiment is the original one behind this phrase.
When Menachem Begin’s Likud party won the 1977 elections, its official platform explicitly laid out a vision for the land that excluded any possibility of a Palestinian state. The relevant section states: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” It sounds kind of similar, and has been used by right wing parties since at various times. I condemn its use by them too.
I have a honest question though - if one calls for a one state solution, would you say that it always entails destroying one or the other?
This would require a 300 page document to answer. To shorten it, it would depend on things like the structure of the plan, the intent, the citizens involved, the negotiations, the history, and many other factors. As I have heard a one-state solution described by both Israel and Palestine leaders, they don’t want that. They want the other state to dissolve and be replaced by their respective states. Their positions are so unbelievably intractable it is impossible to ever envision a one-state solution.
When I was younger I believed that a one-state solution were possible, but things have only deteriorated in my lifetime and having had long conversations with citizens of both nations, I cannot ever conceive of such a plan working. They hold a level of hatred for each other that is generational, built by collective trauma and pain, oppositional religious views which are extremely dogmatic, and a history which is literally Biblical.
- Comment on Karim Diané on playing Star Trek’s first gay Klingon 4 weeks ago:
I like how that focuses on the desired outcomes. Research shows that health risks increase (on average) after a BMI of 25 (slightly more for women). So I would propose a soulism approach in which anyone over a BMI of 25 be considered overweight. That’s generally how medical guidelines categorise weight now.
- Comment on Karim Diané on playing Star Trek’s first gay Klingon 4 weeks ago:
Yes, you bashed out the tired old trope that if gay people are to exist in fiction then there must be a narrative reason.
No, that’s not what I wrote. If you’re going to try to strawman my position the least you could do is put some effort it.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 4 weeks ago:
“Palestine will be free”
This is not part of the original call to action. That is a modern addition used very selectively. It is frequently omitted, as we see on the t-shirt on the activist in the article. Selectively adding a nice phrase on the end of a very bad phrase doesn’t erase the original meaning, intent, and history of the phrase.
Please also note that I did not suggest that the slogan is a call to kill all Jews. The slogan is a call to destroy Israel. Those are not mutually inclusive. Palestinian activists argue that when right wing Israelis call for the destruction of Palestine, that does constitute intent to commit genocide, and I agree. So I don’t have much tolerance for hypocrisy on this. I find the call to destroy any nation - be it Israel or Palestine - to be incredibly immoral.