That makes no sense. An indicator for X is not X itself. An ingredient for soup is not soup itself.
Sorry, I don't understand how this counters or relates to what I said.
Alex Kurtzman Gets New Deal With CBS, Will Expand 'Star Trek' TV
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That makes no sense. An indicator for X is not X itself. An ingredient for soup is not soup itself.
Sorry, I don't understand how this counters or relates to what I said.
Where? Do you understand the difference between the two things I listed in that post? A -> B doesn't imply B -> A.
Moderates, left-leaning people, right-wingers. Again, I couldn't say in which proportions, so I don't know if your claim that it's a strong indicator is true. In any case I've conceded your point. (EDIT: although I will note that deliberately using the phrase to show that you can use it in a different way than it's generally used is not much of a counter.)
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No, you really don't. You are utterly unable to understand the point I was making, even after I've explained it to you.
Yet an indicator of a vegetable soup, is literally the presence of vegetables.
Also ‘radical behaviours’ do not mean the same thing as ‘a radical’ or ‘radicalism.’ So I was never claiming that it ‘looked like itself’ in the first place. What’s wrong, ‘reading not your strong point?’
That post-WW1 Germany ended up some of histories greatest monsters, because they thought the apparent ‘flow’ of history was putting them on the losing side?
(And apologies to any historians. I’m aware that’s the ‘written in crayon’ version.)
Yeah, I don’t see how that’s the exact opposite of ‘Seeing the opposition as being on the wrong side of history, leads to another Reich.’ Must be my reading skills.
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Analogies always fail when taken beyond their intended point.
So no, an indicator of radicalism is not radical, necessarily. Completely at random, one purported indicator of serial murder is wetting your bed past a certain age. I don't think anyone would argue that wetting your bed is serial murder.
Oh, I see what you mean. I meant that they thought they would be on the right side of history. That's generally what the phrase means.
Serial murder is a pretty sure-fire indicator of a serial murderer. Maybe the flaw is less pushing the analogy, and more just...the analogy.
Also, taking your ‘bedwetting’ example further...why should we accept your designation of a fellow poster as radical, because you could offer one example of a supposed correlation?
I covered that. It doesn’t.
For eg. People bleating about black people or women getting ‘uppity’ by being too present in media, are on the wrong side of history. As in ‘right now, coz the 1950’s are thataway...’
You know, when I first saw and responded to the post quoted just below, I snipped out the specific examples, because I honeslty didn't think it was necessary to address them. But it's become increasingly clear that there are posters around here who really do profess to think that it's somehow possible for art and entertainment to isolate themselves from politics; who believe that politics is some narrow and marginal subset of human activity, rather than a pervasive element running through all of it.
(One might as well imagine that you could engage in human behavior, or talk about it, or dramatize it, without implicating economics... or psychology... or ethical philosophy... or any of several other disciplines. You simply can't. All of these intellectual domains are just as pervasive and just as important as politics. It's like saying "show me people doing stuff, but don't make reference to any of those highfalutin' theories about how and why people do stuff.")
(And all this really is on topic, BTW, because how DSC handles this sort of thing under the new regime will have a huge impact on the tone of the show and how it's perceived.)
So!...
In service to the larger discourse, in this thread and about Trek more broadly, I'm going to take a sentence or two to point out meaningful political themes in every one of the examples below. Because finding those themes is the foundation of critical analysis; saying "there's nothing there to analyze" is a cheap and easy dodge. If anyone finds any of them particularly interesting, by all means feel free to dive deeper into the discussion!...
To wit:
WNM is about how power corrupts, and also about dealing with conflicts between personal loyalty and duty to a higher cause. Both are deeply political themes.
As previously noted, DITD is about blowback from colonialism and exploitation of native resources... obviously very politically relevant topics in the Vietnam era, and hardly less so today.
Despite its lighthearted tone, TWT touches on political topics as diverse as the importance of complying with treaty obligations even with distrusted adversaries (detente with the Klingons), the harm that can result from items traded in markets with information inequities (the tribbles, of course), and the ways that gut-level emotional impulses can put larger political principles at risk (Scotty's spirited defense of the Enterprise).
TCM is all about the importance of maintaining diplomatic protocols rather than succumbing to a fight-of-flight impulse.
MM, like many alternate history stories, interrogates notions of political agency, via the conflict between the idea of individuals as shapers of their own destinies (and social constructs), and the idea that individuals are helpless and ultimately interchangeable pawns of larger societal forces.
JTB is about the importance of setting aside personal resentments and the fallacy of guilt-by-association in order to find common ground and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
SOTG is about seeking nonviolent means of conflict resolution even without recourse to recognized legal authority.
TTW is about how legitimately motivated differences in priorities (e.g., between Spock and McCoy, exacerbated by the interphase dementia) can interfere with taking effective collective action even toward shared goals.
I could hardly do better than @Ometiklan above, who noted that TIL "deals with realizing impending environmental disaster, the validity and value of the scientific method, and the willingness of government/authority to ignore or dispute facts that are inconvenient for them."
YE demonstrates (as do many real-life examples) how both the origins and the outcomes of military conflicts are incredibly sensitive to small changes in initial conditions.
BOBW embodies (literally) the tension between the drive for technological improvement and expansion, which has driven Western society for 500 years, and the ideals of personal autonomy on which that society professes to be built.
C'mon, this one is literally all about communication problems in diplomacy. That's nothing but politics, right there on the surface.
ST:TMP is about the danger that results when the drive to discover and understand new things (as exemplified by V'ger) gets distorted and corrupted into an irrational (quasi)religious quest for Truth.
STII:TWOK is about the unanticipated consequences of attempted nation-building without sufficient oversight. And about how basic scientific research inspires destructive military imaginations. And about how skilled leadership can be undermined by personal passions such as the desire for revenge. Among other things.
STIII:TSFS is about how bureaucratic inertia can blind institutions to important human needs.
ST:FC is about time-traveling robot zombies conquering Earth, for heaven's sake! Isn't that obvious?
(But seriously, it's also about historical turning points, the importance of science even in times of political crisis, and how crucial it is for humanity to move beyond Earth's gravity well if we want our civilization to survive. Every one of those themes is steeped in politics.)
So! How's that? I'm not saying all of those political themes are equally interesting, equally important, or equally well-served... and certainly many of them are arguable (but then what about politics isn't?)... but they're undeniably there. And that's just off the top of my head.
Meanwhile!...
Nope, it's not. First, positing oneself as the rational middle ground between two opposing extremes is the classic "fallacy of the excluded middle." Second, history is replete with examples of times when siding with a supposedly "radical" point of view was vindicated as right and just from a subsequent perspective.
And third, there's nothing particularly "radical" anyway about wanting to see demographic representation in art that at least roughly mirrors the actual real-world population. The inability to see figures one can identify with situated in a positive context is stigmatizing, with real, damaging effects on both individuals and society. If you doubt this, you need look to nothing more "radical" than the classic Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954)... the context there was classrooms rather than television screens, but the logic is the same.
So, really, to say you're against discrimination but "don't care" about the composition of the casts of the shows you watch just indicates that you belong to a demographic that has never experienced a lack of representation. IOW, it's a signifier of privilege.
Yes, you wish. But that doesn't make it so.
The political content of any given story (in or out of Trek) absolutely is a factor in assessing the quality of the work as a whole, no different than (e.g.) plot coherence, acting, or cinematography. How could it be otherwise? For heaven's sake, seen through that lens Gone with the Wind is just a story about ill-fated romance and making it through tough times.
When it's no longer a problem, I'm sure people will stop talking about it. You hardly ever hear people discussing (say) child labor or women's suffrage any more, because (at least in the U.S.) we've solved those problems. Those we haven't, though, are still worth people's time and attention.
As an aside, I've always been aggravated by the phrase "get your panties in a bunch," and I can't help noticing it's used almost exclusively by relatively conservative males. It's a pretty obvious way of trying to gain rhetorical advantage not through any substantive argument, but instead through feminizing and "sissifying" your opponent. It's a demeaning turn of phrase, unworthy of an honest interlocutor.
Bro, seek help. With that much energy and imagination, you could make up something in your mind (as you've done here) about how any story ever written is political. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It's not an indicator. It is the thing that it is.
I was asked for an example, so I named one. It doesn't mean that the one example is sufficient in and of itself.
I'd say they're simply wrong. In 20 years, we have no idea what society will be like.
...
No? No it’s a not?
A warmonger is not the same thing as a war. A tennis player is not ‘tennis.’
All those comprehension barbs aimed to various people are looking pretty bad right about now. Not that they didn’t look bad before, mind.
Please stop playing games. We've already got King for that.
The point is simple: an indicator of something is not that thing, and is not necessarily of the same quality as that thing, like the bedwetting example, which you failed to address.
I'd guess the reason we have so many in the pipe is to help support the channel. It's a subscription service with one new show and a bunch of reruns. Compare that to Amazon or god forbid Netflix and I'm gonna agree that I wouldn't be surprised if they were soon tagging out one show after another at least until they have something else to put on the line up.
Yeah, I did.
Bedwetting is not the indicator that you’re a serial killer.
Serial killing is.
(Note: no one has ever claimed it’s an indicator of serial killing anyway. It was merely linked to homicidal violence, required being present in conjunction with other behaviors, and even at the time had an iffy hit rate.
It’s also been largely disproven, because it’s been found that very ‘indicating’ behavior was itself more than likely caused by other factors. Like mental illness, being victim of abuse, psychopathy, neglect etc.)
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The professionals seem to largely disagree with you. But that's besides the point. Smoke is an indicator that there's a fire but it is neither a fire (or fiery) itself nor is it exclusively an indicator of a fire.
No, serial killing definitely makes you a serial killer, it doesn't indicate it. Seems my barbs are well deserved after all.
The professionals ‘actually’ don’t. Literally just added it to my post
And I doubt it. You seem to be under the notion that an ‘indicator’ can’t, well...’indicate’ with any accuracy.
Which is...odd.
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It's not unanimous but it was definitely claimed to be an indicator, contrary to what you said. Whether or not it turns out to be true is irrelevant to my point, which keeps getting dodged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_triad
I know what it is. It’s original form was considered outdated at best, dangerous at worst. (Because as it turns out, it applied to nearly all antisocial behaviour.)
The sort of thing that’s a barristers wet-dream if the prosecutions witness is stupid enough to raise it.
And I didn’t dodge ‘the point’. Restate it, and I’ll answer it again if you’re so determined.
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