The lack of national diversity in the Discovery cast...
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As was said upthread, Trek has used American actors to play non-Americans before. Uhura was apparently from East Africa given her name and speaking fluent Swahili. Geordi was apparently born in Somalia. Keiko and Hoshi were supposed to be Japanese, not Japanese-American. And of course there were characters like Tasha Yar, Beverly Crusher, Chakotay, Seven of Nine, and Mayweather who were born offworld. Sure, they all had American accents, and arguably presented as Americans. But the same point could be made about Trek aliens - every single one of note was performed by an American.
It could be argued to be somewhat offensive to portray the future Federation as not being a multicultural place, but a bland, Americanized setting. But it's much less offensive to portray the future as being Americanized than it is to just portray it as being dominated by Americans. It's also incredibly lazy, because since it's been established that seemingly everyone in the Trekverse speaks with an American (or occasionally British) accent, so you can establish a backstory of a character being played by an American actor being from anywhere. Only, as I noted, they even went so far as to make the two British cast members American (explicitly for Tyler, implicitly for Lorca) for no good reason.
It could be argued to be somewhat offensive to portray the future Federation as not being a multicultural place, but a bland, Americanized setting. But it's much less offensive to portray the future as being Americanized than it is to just portray it as being dominated by Americans. It's also incredibly lazy, because since it's been established that seemingly everyone in the Trekverse speaks with an American (or occasionally British) accent, so you can establish a backstory of a character being played by an American actor being from anywhere. Only, as I noted, they even went so far as to make the two British cast members American (explicitly for Tyler, implicitly for Lorca) for no good reason.
According to John the amount of American/Canadian named ship that were appearing was the writers/producers doing.
He gave them 50-60 designs to use and there are non-american/Canadian class names in there, they just didn't use them.
I kind of doubt that. As I understand it, they used their own internal nomenclature to refer to the designs they liked and let him come up with class names for the ships that DID get selected. Like alot of things with John Eaves, this one feels like one of those "Oops... wait a minute, it's not really my fault!" type things.
The writers and producers still could have changed the names. They are the ones writing the scripts.
Yes, I'm sure they COULD have. But after all the years I spent crawling around the "Eavesdropping" blog before they made him take it down and knowing some of his patterns, I would be VERY surprised if that is what actually happened. It's a lot more likely that he was just going off the top of his head and momentarily forgot that Soviet space exploration was a thing. That's hardly unprecedented.
The fanon is (for some) most of the Third World population died during WW3 to explain the in universe human whiteness of 23rd century Starfleet and the Federation. (must be a Stormfront wet dream).
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My headcanon is that Starfleet is an Earth organization in the service of Starfleet, and that one branch of Starfleet (say, the 4th Exploration Flotilla) is a North American based agency. The 5th fleet is based out of Japan, 2nd fleet out of Russia, 7th fleet out of China, 8th fleet out of Luna, 1st fleet based at Jupiter Station. These fleets all have more or less the same standards, but all slightly different procedures and protocols, and it just so happens the only fleet we ever see is the North American exploration flotilla with its headquarters in San Francisco. The Russian branch of the Starfleet probably does things completely differently and maybe has a different rank and command structure (army/marine ranks?) while the European branch is essentially MACO.
Does Doctor Who claim to be a show about future humanity (not Americans ) working together and getting over their ancestors, barbaric petty prejudices?
If Star Trek was produced now for the first time with the premise based on a future NASA/USA getting over its past and working together and exploring the stars I would not expect most of the people on the show to look only like William Shatner or DeForest Kelly with a token Nichelle Nichols thrown in.
Then why use just one aspect of humanity as the main default?
The writers created Star Trek with an element of subconscious, 'humanity = white Anglo Saxon North American male/female'. I'll give the 1960's creators a pass, but not the 21st century ones. With DISCO the producers took two steps backward.
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Really doesn't make a lot of sense, especially considering we should be much more intertwined as a race.
Well, there is the "Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire" which is, for all intents and purposes, the British Empire in Space. And then there's the two or three times the Doctor went to New New York and discovered the city was being run by various alien species that were pretty much just English people in various configurations (including humanoid cats, geriatric lesbians, and John Barrowman's gigantic swollen head). And then there was the time he spent Christmas on the Starship Titanic which, despite not actually being built by humans or or crewed by anyone who had ever actually BEEN to Earth at all, still included an ensemble of british, American and Australian charicatures as its passengers and senior officers (plus a helmsman named "Alonzo" for some reason).
Science fiction plays to its target audience, which -- fortunately -- is not overwhelmingly dominated by continuity snobs or Issues Crusaders.
Indeed. I would expect it to look something like this.
Better than other fanon theories.
So in other words Doctor Who stories never claim to be about a future better humanity working together.
Why would we be more intertwined? Even in the future, people probably still live where they do, fall and love, get married and raise families in the general vicinity of where they were born. Massive migrations across borders are actually LESS likely to happen in the Star Trek utopia, since there's no more war or oppression to drive people out of their home countries and no more "promise of better opportunity abroad" to trigger voluntary migration, so most people will actually just stay right where they are.
Hell, even countries where those pressures DO exist have vastly different cultural boundaries. The United States, Mexico and Canada have decades of large scale migration between them, but politically and socially they couldn't be more different. The phrase "the other side of the train tracks" isn't just a figure of speech, even major cities can be divided that sharply by arbitrary boundaries between one neighborhood and another, and that's for people who actually live and work together on a daily basis.
It's a Trekian conceit that diversity and inclusion is a natural consequence of social and economic progress, but that is not likely to be the case. It's just as likely or more so that the end of poverty, disease and hunger will lead to the rise of a new kind of furious elitism among Earth's many populations and an almost clannish dedication to local affairs to the exclusion of all other considerations; apart from this being the only thing that keeps Earth from degenerating into a communist hellhole (they don't really believe in collectivism and every community is looking after its own interests) it also has the effect of forcing malcontents into exile, preserving your crime-free utopia and sending people like Harry Mudd searching the stars for a place that isn't quite so anal.
Starfleet is made up of malcontents who also happened to have really high test scores. They're not really happy staying in the utopian gated community, but they're smart enough that they can get the government to pay their room and board on a big fancy starship.
Many of its episodes ARE. It just doesn't pretend to be able to accurately predict what that would look like. Star Trek DOES pretend, and is just as wrong.
If you are going to have a human dominated crew I would have made
Stamets - Australian
Tilly - South African or German
Burnham - British
Georgiou - North American
Lorca - Cuban
And like Patrick Stewart, Zoe Saldana, Levar Burton etc let them keep their own accents
You're assuming you have ANY IDEA what an Australian or British accent would sound like in the 23rd century. That's interesting...
I've said it before: if Star Trek took seriously its attempt to portray the future and actually projected current linguistic trends to two centuries out, we wouldn't have ANY IDEA what the hell anyone was saying because their language, accents and vocabulary would be totally unrecognizable. They might as well be reciting Shakespear in Gaelic.
Sure they would sound like an English born Yorkshire man. Or as East African as Nichelle Nichols version of Uhura.
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