Roddenberry's Worst Ideas

Discussion in 'General Trek Discussion' started by ZapBrannigan, Mar 16, 2013.

  1. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The character of Minuet in "11001001" and "Future Imperfect" was supposedly Riker's perfect woman, actress Carolyn McCormick (Minuet) and actress Melinda Culea (Soren) have almost identical figures.

    Minuet was more fashionably decked out (dress, make-up and hair), but the two women are surprisingly similar in appearance.

    :)
     
  2. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    In TOS, Is There In Truth No Beauty? and Metamorphosis touched on the idea of humans paired with alien aliens.
     
  3. TheSubCommander

    TheSubCommander Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    They may have shared a similar body type\figure, but I don't think they look very much alike, otherwise. But it is interesting that both Culea and Dwight Shultz were on the A-Team. What is even more interesting, neither look anything like Troi. :)

    Carolyn McCormick


    Melinda Culea
     
  4. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    But the Captain of a ship still gets to have four pips on their collar, while their subordinates only get three or less.

    Rank, position, hierarchy, stratification ... power.


    :)
     
  5. Valin

    Valin Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I just imagined Picard trying to swivel all three chairs at the same time, with Riker and Troi going along for the ride.
     
  6. Valin

    Valin Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    If you look at history it was religion, nationalism, and capitalism (and competition) that helped make us the explorers that reached out to new vistas in the past and probably will continue to do so in the future.
     
  7. mos6507

    mos6507 Commodore Commodore

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    In Measure of a Man, Data comes very close to expressing grief over the death of Tasha. So there's always a glimmer of emotion, chip or no chip, but the vocal inflection and body language isn't quite there.

    What Data has, and a lot of real people don't, though, is a good conscience. He is selfless and always does the right thing. In that respect he's a lot like Spock, despite their overall goal being cross-purposes.
     
  8. TheGoodNews

    TheGoodNews Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Maybe some of the posters here can't envision a world beyond their own dispossession?

    "If they had asked," Lededje told her,"I might even have told them; I was running away to the Culture because I heard they'd escaped the tyranny of money and individual power, and that all people were equal here, men and women alike, with no riches or poverty to put one person above or beneath another." Surface Detail by Iain Banks page 159.
     
  9. Lt. Uhura-Brown

    Lt. Uhura-Brown Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Time travel.
     
  10. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Or maybe that they *can* envision it, it just sounds mega-boring. Either way works. :shrug:
     
  11. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    :)

    T'Pring:

    But if you did not free me, it would be the same.
    For you would be gone, and I would have your name and your property, and Stonn would still be there.


    :)
     
  12. sonak

    sonak Vice Admiral Admiral

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    being dispossessed= excitement?:confused:
     
  13. Lee Enfield

    Lee Enfield Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    Wasn't there WWIII in the Trek universe? With all that genocide and crawling asf? So, it seems to be part of the Trek idea that currently we live live in that age of self-destruction and we would have to elevate.... because, well, it's still pretty self-destructible out there and we might need that place of piece, from where we can grow...
     
  14. horatio83

    horatio83 Commodore Commodore

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    I think the crucial point here is that dispossession actually implies empowerment of a different kind. I don't need to wield more power or own more than my brother or sister to be happy. I am actually more happy when I do not have to fear that somebody wants to take more power or possessions for him- or herself at my expense.
    And no, none of this implies that nobody strives for excellence.
     
  15. sonak

    sonak Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I think the problem is that some people have a hard time imagining how excellence will be MEASURED if there's no money.;)
     
  16. Lt. Uhura-Brown

    Lt. Uhura-Brown Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Non-profit is anti-American. Why do you hate America, post-scarcity economy?
     
  17. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Maybe some of the posters here can't comprehend why people need to submit to any form of dispossession? In a legal sense, dispossession is characterized with language such as wrongful, illegal and non-consensual. An example of the act of dispossession would be ouster or removal of a person from their property by trick, compulsion, or misuse of the law.

    What kind of hellhole future would see an entire populace exposed to this kind of horrifying treatment? To have people capriciously strip of their possessions and properties?

    Empowering to whom? The people or organization preforming the dispossession? A dispossession is something that happens to you.

    Of course if you freely choose to divest yourself (but not others) of all possessions and property, this would be your choice. But there should never be assumption that others will do the same. Nor should here be any level of societal pressure, nor misuse of law, to compel others to follow your freely chosen path.

    There'll always a hot meal waiting for you down at the mission.

    But there is a heavy implication that no one will receive the fruits of their labors, compensations for their intellectual and physical efforts. Not if another person receives the exact same compensations for doing essentially nothing.

    Every year the Nobel committee awards Nobel prizes to select individuals, for their accomplishments in their chosen fields, comes with a nice 1.2 million dollar check. People who do nothing noteworthy don't get even a chance at the award, nor at the check from the committee.

    There's nothing remotely wrong with exspecting to compensated for what you do, it's a form of recognition. In the future as in the past, people with intelligence, or born talents, or unusual levels of drive will be compensated more generously, than those who come up lacking in the attributes department.

    ***

    KIRK: No matter how long it took, he came out with multitronics. The M-5.

    MCCOY: Right. The government bought it, then Daystrom had to make it work.



    [​IMG]
     
  18. gturner

    gturner Admiral

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    But there are opportunities in the Federation. Tens of thousands of its citizens choose to die in miserable dilithiium mines just to better themselves, just as millions of Soviet citizens thought clearing trees in Siberia would be personally fabulous and advance the state to a more perfect future where humanity moves beyond the need for money. They didn't ask for any pay, just the chance to freeze to death in a camp like any enlightened member of their advanced society.
     
  19. stj

    stj Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The italicized and bolded phrase highlights the false facts upon which politically conservative ideologues rely. No, the past was not meritocratic. In fact, it was notably not so. The sly insinuation of such a blatant falsehood is not an acceptable argument. (Whether or not this was sincerely believed, blindly accepted second-hand is irrelevant. It's still every bit as untrue.)

    Further, quite aside from the relevant facts that driven people have not been rewarded while undriven people have, the implication that being forceful deserves a reward assumes that not only is society a zero-sum game, but that "winning" such a competition is inherently moral. This is assuming the conclusion in effect. This makes it doubly unacceptable as an argument.


    Egyptian religion and nationalism didn't make the advanced civilizations of Egypt or China or Japan explorers. Mediaeval Europe wasn't notably nationalistic (though the notion of "Christendom" is thoroughly romanticized) either. And the European voyages of exploration at the end of the Middle Ages were far more a cause of capitalist development than a result.

    Lastly, the real context here is exploration of space. History tells us that the capitalist and competitive US has only a limited interest in space exploration, not counting space based weaponry. It was the Soviet Union that started space exploration and after its disappearance, space exploration is marginal, in constant threat of extinction. Space race for competitive prestige? The real question is why the USSR government could see space exploration as prestigious, while the capitalist, competitive US could not?

    PS It seems Scotpens was right.
     
    Last edited: May 19, 2013
  20. gturner

    gturner Admiral

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    Yes T'Girl, you are a quasi-capitalist revanchist whose weak morality and ignorance of the Communist dialectic undermines the strength of the state and the power of the worker! Your rations are cut for a week. Now get back to shoveling!

    ***

    The driven people usually produce more, often directly from nothing, which means society is not a zero-sum game. Take a look at inflation-adjusted GDP charts and you'll notice the graphs trend strongly upwards. This is a result of the simple cause and effect of "the more stuff you make, the more stuff you have. If you want to have more stuff, make more stuff," which leads directly to purposely making stuff that's in demand (higher value stuff), trading for other stuff, wholesaling, retailing, franchising, etc.

    Money is way to assign simple numeric values to what would otherwise be an impenetrable diversity of different, incomparable items, and to delink a product being sold from another product being bought. (If you have an '11 Mustang and want to buy a '12 Prius, you sell the Mustang for money and use the money to buy a Prius, adjusting the amount of money by the price difference, instead of spending two years hunting the one guy who wants to trade a Prius for a Mustang.) Meanwhile in socialist utopias, there's a massive toilet paper shortage in Venezuela being blamed on "excessive demand." :guffaw:

    Communist appeals to morality don't carry much weight, since they happily starve farmers en masse and shoot workers in the back of the head for failing to meet the production quota. Their main industry was building walls to keep workers from fleeing. And of course the universal currency in all communist countries was the US dollar, because it was the only thing there that had actual value. Yet even they knew to maintain internal domestic currencies because without a currency system, even government projects have to operate via forced appropriation or bartering.

    Star Trek's lack of any monetary system is an obvious leap backwards. How can the Federation figure out what a Galaxy class starship costs? How can it assign and procure resources or make any rational decisions regarding economic inputs? Without the ability to assign financial numbers to different courses of action, all their decisions would be nearly random guesses.

    "Should we source hull plating from Procyon 7 or Dadelon 5?" In our universe, we'd compare price, quality, and schedule. In their universe, they have to calculate production costs, which to them would mean calculating hundreds of thousands of hypothetical barter or trade exchanges required to shift resources, equipment, and personnel to their project instead of some other project. Unless they are given the power to commandeer equipment and order citizens about on a whim, they have to figure out, have to negotiate, what it will take to draw each worker onto the project.

    Weeks of negotiation later:
    "Okay, worker XB71539, the Federation will give you three original Al Yankovic CD's, a year's supply of cat food, an apartment with a north facing view, a season pass to the Red Sox games, a set of Zephram Cochran commemorative stamps, and tell your girlfriend that you're on a vital mission in Romulan space."

    By the time they finish figuring out what it will take they'll have to start over with renegotiations because people and equipment don't stand idle for two years waiting for someone to make up their minds.