Yes, we're waaaay off base, but I'm confused enough to respond. Wouldn't a progressive leftist also be a humanist?
Public perception of Star Trek?
- Thread starter dahj
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Yes, we're waaaay off base, but I'm confused enough to respond. Wouldn't a progressive leftist also be a humanist?
Not necessarily.
Not in the sense that Star Trek has recognized humanism.
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"NuTrek characters are cartoonish"
"Nope - and here's why (long, detailed, sensible analysis of character)"
"All that is true but they still cartoonish because they don't act like the Star Trek characters from the Prime Universe"
"Nope - here's a list of how other characters from the Prime Universe acted in the exact same way for the exact same reasons"
"Their still cartoonish because... Gene Roddenberry! Real Star Trek! JAR JAR ABRAMS!"
"Nope - and here's why (long, detailed, sensible analysis of character)"
"All that is true but they still cartoonish because they don't act like the Star Trek characters from the Prime Universe"
"Nope - here's a list of how other characters from the Prime Universe acted in the exact same way for the exact same reasons"
"Their still cartoonish because... Gene Roddenberry! Real Star Trek! JAR JAR ABRAMS!"
@AdmiralShran You've got your quote attributions mixed up. I didn't say that.
Would you like to start a new thread to discuss these issues? This one has been hijacked by arguments against my assertions that New Trek was less humanist.
To rephrase something I said above, in his thinking, if it's sacrificing those 250 to start a war we are 99.5 percent likely to win and "only" a few million die, versus fighting a future war that could very well be lost and cost tens of millions of lives, then to him, that could be within the bounds of his morality. That's the idea of the "needs of the many..." to him in this case. A few good people die now so many more live in security later.
I'd argue all Trek characters are a little cartoonish. But that's what I love about them.
But that means he's insane because he thinks he knows the future... And insane villains seldom make good villains...
Health Ledger being a notable exception.
Nope. There have literally been hundreds of threads on nuTrek.... and about 100 unique posts in all of them combined.
Hannibal Lector? Norman Bates? Jack Torrance? Anne Wilkes? Alex Delarge? Nurse Ratched? etc. etc.
I acknowledged your pointing out about bad admirals and certainly mentioned bad admirals before. I had forgot about the defiant coup admiral but this was done in a time of actual war with the dominion and, true to Trek form, Captain Sisko is sitting right there trying to get the admiral to stop his insanity to give the impression that Starfleet is in good hands. By contrast, Kirk doesn't skip a beat in obeying whatever insane thing Marcus tells him to do.
Do you know who was a really cartoonish character?
Lieutenant Arex.
Lieutenant Arex.
Are you seriously going to try to compare Admiral Marcus to Hannibal Lector? Also it's disputable whether he's insane or not or just a very Machiavellian cannibal. I haven't seen most of the rest of those movies so I can't be sure whether insane villains are good villains in those movies. I'm not very impressed with Stephen King horror so I wouldn't use it as a standard for good villains - especially not good Star Trek villains where insane villains are actually very very rare.
By contrast, Nero is insane and Marcus might be insane.
Sisko poisoned an entire planet of Federation colonists with a deadly toxin and Worf and Kira just sat there and went along with it.
And Kirk almost immediately takes a more cautious approach once he reached Kronos, standing down from firing the torpedoes.
As they should have. They knew exactly what they were doing and Sisko kept nothing from them.
By contrast, Kirk almost commits mass depraved-heart murder of Khan's crewmen. The writer notes this unusual enough to have two senior officers warn him about checking the torpedoes but has Kirk make the wrong decision anyway which ultimately kills 100,000s (?) in San Francisco. The entire plot doesn't happen if he checks the torpedoes as he is told - never captures Khan, never fights Vengence, never dies in the warp core, Vengence never crashes into SF.
This is the same Kirk (genetically) who felt regret for years after failing to fire a phaser at a cloud monster which killed 200 people. The whole thing makes you feel like Starfleet is utterly incompetent in this envisioning and they have no standards for officers or lessons on crew communication. JJ Kirk is nothing but an airheaded hothead - not a Starfleet officer. So why am I watching a movie about Starfleet if it isn't Starfleet?
It makes about as much sense as watching an X-men reincarnation where Xavier is a chronic drunk.
Wesley Crusher from Season 1 of TNG could more competently command a starship than JJ Kirk.
If that's how you feel, then honestly, you should probably stop reading/watching fiction.
I'm at a loss for words. After all this talk of morality and humanism, that's not the answer I was expecting. Especially when you go from showing approval for the deliberate poisoning of a planet to trying to trump up what would be at worst a negligence charge into willful mass murder below.
Kirk's failure to follow Scotty's inspection protocols does not make the leap to depraved mass murder, since he would have no reason to reasonably conclude that the torpedoes were filled with humans in cryostasis.
Also, he didn't make the wrong decision ultimately, because he didn't fire the torpedoes at Kronos. Everything that happened afterward happened as a result of his refusal to do the wrong thing and act out of revenge, so your criticism of his actions is inconsistent in that you're saying he's wrong both for taking the torpedoes onboard and for refusing to fire them, which drew Marcus' attack in the Vengeance.
On the contrary, the Federation is involved in a war with the dominion. They don't need a rogue terrorist colony with WMDs causing trouble. General Order 24 still exists and Sisko is no more wrong to show the Maquis they're behavior won't be tolerated than Section 31 is to try to exterminate the changlings.
Both of these cases are people/species engaged in open hostilities against the Federation during wartime. I love Odo and I'm just as much of a fan of Bashir fighting Sloan to get the cure for Odo, but I don't believe either Sisko or Section 31 are wrong in this case.
But Starfleet officers are trained to listen to their senior officers and the fact that they're engaged in an unprovoked attack on Qo'noS should be raising extra red flags in Kirk's mind. But it's not because this Kirk is mindless. The problem is probably that we have no clue what Marcus means by "the Klingons have been aggressive." This could mean they've been slaughtering Federation colonies or it could mean they colonized an empty system near the Federation Border. This probably is the ultimate problem with Marcus is that we have absolutely no context by which to judge whether Marcus is responding to legitimate threats from Klingons or not.
