This one does not. I had the same reaction awhile ago when I noticed that a large group of Occupy protestors had gathered inside my store (not to protest, just sort of chilling)...and they all had Starbucks cups in their hands.
You just prove our point. Conservatives merely care about personal acts, not about systemic matters. So a guy who buys Starbuck coffee yet joins a leftist protest has to be hypocritical just like somebody who is personally rich (a poor guy is of course envious) yet advocates redistribution is hypocritical. "You could just give it all to charity you hypocrite!" I'll take this stuff seriously once charity pays the medical bills. At the moment it is just an act of narcissism. You feel so good about yourself when you give twenty bucks to a charity organization that helps this poor African kid. If you took the glasses from "They Live" and took a look at a random charity ad with a little African kid that has some injured lip it would say "spent the money such that you can forget about thinking about why the kid is so poor in the first place". Don't get my wrong, kindness is a virtue and helping your friends, your family and this poor African kid is better than being a selfish asshole. But it is does not substitute political aka collective acts.
Another bad idea of Roddenberry's was the no pockets in the future idea. I mean where exactlyare they supposed to put stuff?
This is why I liked the uniforms from ENT. The show was in general trying to be the most realistic one which is IMO not per se an asset in fiction. Perhaps a slight lack of realism like in TOS and TNG is actually useful to make a Trek show good?
I like the idea one of the board members here came up with a few years back, that their pants were "smart pants." If you needed a pocked, the pants would manifest however many you needed and in any size and location. like when Geordi LaForge need a small pocket to conceal a small phaser (to assassinate a Klingon), his clothes made a pocket, after he pulled out the phaser the pocket would in time disappeared. Personally, I find the FJ symbol more aesthetically pleasing, showing the locations of the Federation Membership, like the field of stars in the American flag I would imagine that it would change with each new member. The later "official" flag/seal is (as I understand it) simply a random spread of stars that represents nothing in particular. While the two Humanoid profiles looking outward might upset some of the Federations species, the two olive branches would do the same, being so Human-centric a symbol. I would say, look at the number of occurrences. Consider the letter R. Somewhat like Picard's single overt statement that money doesn't exist in the twenty-fourth century, during TOS there is a single overt reference to James Kirk's middle name beginning with the letter R. This comes to us via the tomb stone created by Gary Mitchell. That's the only time we see the middle initiial R. Kirk himself never refers to his middle initial being anything other than a T, his official records consistently use a T, and when Kirk is referred to in other series, his middle initial is a T. Eventual we are provided with the middle name Tiberius. In-universe, it unclear why Mitchell would use an R. . So, is this an example of a self-contradiction? No, it's one character making a single overt reference that doesn't fit with a large number of other references. And it's the same with the money references, while we do get money; don't use, don't need, don't carry - only once is there a overt statement that "money doesn't exist in the twenty-fourth century." Is Picard's statement a self-contradiction? No. If the yes and no money references were basically a balanced mixed, then that would be a self-contradiction, one line of dialog isn't.
^ I'm sticking with my theory that Picard was deliberately fudging the truth/being a jackass/acting high-and-mighty when he told Lily Sloane (in ST:FC) and those 20th-century people ("The Neutral Zone") that there was no money. Believing himself to be from a more enlightened future society, Picard would naturally tend to talk down to what he might consider 'stupid' primitives from earlier eras. Especially when talking to, say, Ralph Offenhouse, Picard probably thought he deserved to be taken down a peg.
Picard acts in the very opposite way. In "Who Watches the Watchers?" he encounters a civilization which is not even industrial and yet he is quite humble. This is not about Picard, it is about politics. Left-winger embrace the economic vision of Trek while right-wingers detest it.
Okay, then let me rephrase: from earlier human eras. As for that episode, though, Picard was definitely not "humble" regarding the Mintakans' religious beliefs...
All he did was undo their false, meaning that it wasn't natural but caused by the Feds, belief in him being a god. Of course the underlying idea was that the Mintakans would regress if the incident sparkles a rebirth of a dying religious belief. This is hardly anti-religious though as our own religious history implies a progress from paganism to monotheism to atheism. Take Christianity (which is basically the step from monotheism to atheism, God dies in the Jesus story) and the partial re-paganization of it once it came under Roman influence. I am not anti-religious when I call this a regression.
But the opposite would be true too, one side would support the observed economic system that obviously employs a form of money, while the other side would "detest" (or something milder) the very idea that centuries from now a financial system that is similar to our current one is still in existence. And it isn't simply about politics, it's also about sociology. The structure of the future. The economic system that our see heroes live in, is the one that we want to see them living in. Many Star Trek fans project themselves to a degree into the Trek universe, we envision (fantasize) ourselves in that universe. So in discussions when we advocate a economic system, or a type of interstellar culture, or a Federation legal structure, or tremendous diversity, or high degree of uniformity, it's because that's basically either what we personally would like to live in, or at least what we would like to see our heroes live in. .
People don't constantly carry junk around in the utopia. The obsession with constant communication had passed. No money means no wallets. ID by biometrics. Keys by voice. Frankly I wish I could get by without a cell phone again.
Exactly. In a future where crime, poverty, hunger, etc is apparently eliminated, and people can basically pursue whatever career they want to, without financial reward, you'd expect there to be some people who want to do...nothing much at all. Just sit around and enjoy life. I'm sure Joe Blow who works as a filing administration clerk on Starbase 49 doesn't love his job. The no money thing is a pretty stupid idea.
Fling administration clerk sounds like somebody you let a computer do and a society can work despite of some people who do not work. Capitalism has functioned for two centuries and if you take a look at long run employment stats full employment has been the exception (during the social democratic era). All the people we see in Trek work because they love their jobs. Some of them like the chief engineers even regularly work over hours. And there is nothing glamorous about fixing a broken piece of machinery or crawling through some Jeffries tubes, it is hard work. Happiness studies have suggested that being unemployed causes more loss of well-being to people than the mere loss of income could explain so we have firm empirical evidence which suggests that the economic ideas of Trek are not at all unrealistic.
It's not at all implausible, sure. But why would you expect to see those people on the show? It wouldn't exactly make for compelling drama, would it? Although now that I think about it, I don't think Trek's ever tackled the stoner comedy subgenre...
Horatio83's response to this was already pretty good, but yeah, I'll just echo it. There are a lot of people NOW who have dropped out of the workforce for difficulty finding a job, or just lack of appropriate skills. Somehow, the economies where this happens haven't collapsed. As technology and production have gotten more efficient, there should be MORE people who can "opt out of work," not less. The only reason that we're not working less is because the richest segments of society are gobbling up more and more of the increased gains in efficiency and production, and well, just the overall wealth. I don't think Star Trek's economics, given the post-scarcity assumption, and the important but frequently overlooked assumption of people being raised in an environment where "contribution to society" is valued, is all that unrealistic. After all, our economic system NOW is pretty absurd, with teachers who work 70 hour weeks, making 1/100th of a pro athlete who contributes far lass to society. But you don't question those assumptions, because you were raised in a certain way with the values of your society instilled in you. Star Trek is no different. The characters grew up in a post-scarcity environment where one didn't have to work to get the basic necessities, but where "bettering yourself" was the primary goal.
Indeed, it is strange that nobody questions why work hours have been reduced to 40 hours and below, a fairly natural trend in a society with real GDP per capita growth rates of around 2%, but then started to rise again. It is perceives as totally natural while it actually isn't. Capital is happy about it in the immediate economic sense (labour's share of income decreases) and in the indirect political sense: overworked citizens have no time or energy to do political work. Keynes, a guy who made money on the stock market and wrote that Marx misread Ricardo, i.e. not a crazy leftist prophet but a centrist liberal, wrote about the future reduction of workhours (this is a good modern follow-up). The economic world of Trek, not working at all anymore out of necessity, the step from work as a means for consumption to a means for social contribution / self-fulfillment, is just the next step. And unlike working like crazy and then being too exhausted to do anything but passively consume and perhaps enjoy one hobby it sounds like a better life. About work incentives, they are overrated. Socialism didn't fail because of work incentive issues (they existed but were of minor relevance and compensated for by Western inefficiencies like lack of competition on output markets) but because of the absence of a capital market: companies couldn't fail. Interestingly the problems we face today also have more to do with a badly functioning capital market than with lazy, shirking workers. So yeah, I have no idea where these obsessions with work incentivzes come from. Somehow people are masochistic, they prefer a world without democracy in the worldplace and the constant fear of job loss to either a full employment world where they could actually tell their boss to fuck himself and easily change the job or a post-scarcity world in which they could merge work and hobby.
they're not "masochists," they get bombarded with 24/7 propaganda that's very cleverly designed to deliberately mislead them give them misinformation, and make them not question. It's like the line about the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled." the greatest trick the right-wing neoliberals ever pulled was convincing the poor and the exploited to DEFEND the very system that exploits them.
I am not so sure. Of course ideas and ideology matter and they are the single most important reason people act against their own interests. But I also think we should take the lessons from psychoanalysis seriously, people wanna sometimes punish themselves and others. Take austerity, one minor factor that might contribute to it is politicians repenting for their former deficit bias, punishing their over-indulgence and so on. When I studies and worked during the summers in a factory a colleague there said that he will vote right-wing because they will reduce work regulations and this will make one particular lazy co-worker work harder or make him get fired. I didn't get the impression that the was the victim of propaganda, he just seemed to care more about punishing this one guy than caring about his narrow self-interest. Of course this can be intertwined with ideology and perhaps this desire to punish others (which can also be beneficial, think about a state attorney who fights against organized crime and risks his life) explains why the "welfare mom" rhetoric ("Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?") has worked so well.