What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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Most of the time, when people say, "The U.S. is not a democracy, it's a republic," it's their way of trying to rationalize policies that disempower normal people and give power unjustly to the ruling class.
In this context, when @Shawnster said it, it was a meaningless statement, because he then immediately defined "republic" as "a form of government in which the people hold power, but elect representatives to exercise that power." But that's not what "republic" means; again, a republic is just a sovereign state that isn't formally a monarchy. China is a republic, but no reasonable person would say the people hold power.
The term for "a form of government in which the people hold power, but elect representatives to exercise that power" is "representative democracy" (as opposed to "direct democracy," where the people rule directly, usually via referenda and popular meetings; direct democracy is rarely functional above the town level.)
So when Shawnster claimed the U.S. is "a republic, not a democracy," he might as well have said, "The U.S. is a democracy, not a democracy." It's just nonsense.
When I say, "I don't think the United States is a real democracy," what that means is that I think the U.S. is not meaningfully accountable to its people, that power isn't really held by the people. It is a negative evaluation of the situation.
Good answer. I think @Shawnster had a good answer with plenty of specifics as well. And I'm pretty sure those footsteps behind us are a mod.
Yeah, if we want to head off a mod we all might want to just pre-emptively agree to set aside the "is the U.S. a democracy?" tangent.
They might stay “behind” as long as nothing goes beyond the relatively academic poli-sci type back and forth currently going on (as a guess, not a stance of mine) but…it is the internet, so…
Actually, all I did was share how the US government defines itself. The paragraph I shared is from the source I linked.
Not my words. Not my opinion. It's how the US government self identifies.
The replicated snozzberries taste....mostly like snozzberries!
Gross.
As is often the case such things are not totally clear.
https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https://www....ve/2020/11/yes-constitution-democracy/616949/
This is still all fundamentally assuming that systems can only exist in the configurations we know them. Star Trek is a fictional world full of literal alien civilizations that could very easily have the technology and/or genuinely alien cultural tendencies to make theoretical systems that we can't accomplish possible.
For instance, they could have the capability to allow all citizens to respond directly to Govt. decisions in a way that can't be stifled, and so might find it eminently democratic to say that their ruler can rule for as long as the majority accepts that rule and will be removed as soon as the majority wants it to happen, without ever holding anything we would recognize as an election.
It does not consider that these various planets approach democracy like the Klingons do; that they experimented with them once, consider them “the dark times” and won’t look back. So, they’ll created a political system that works for themselves, like suggested above with an election every twenty years, or have rotating monarchs have unlimited non-consecutive seven-year terms. And for whatever reason, democratic mandates of 4/5/6/7 years are unreasonable and off the table.
Some planets might be completely fine with a democratic dictatorship, and do not view the Federation ideals as absolute.
And how much democracy does the Federation need in order for a planet to be a member then?
The post I responded to was specifically talking about leaders being elected for life.
Another thing to remember is that different races have much longer lifespans than humans. Vulcans, for example, can live to be over 200 years old, easily. So while holding an election every 4-6 years might make sense for humans, that might be too chaotic for others with much longer lifespans.
Agreed and co-signed.
I hated the ending of PIC S1. If Picard is now just an synthetic golem version of the original Jean-Luc Picard, why should I care about anything that happens to him from that point on?
PIC S3 just devolved into constant fan service without doing much of anything new with the characters.
"Hey, remember this character? Well, how about this character? Can you believe we got THIS actor back to reprise their role? What about the Borg? Are ya sick of the Borg yet? How about the Changelings on DS9? You liked them, right? You liked Christopher Plummer in Star Trek VI, didn't ya? Well, we've got his daughter Amanda to be the big bad for Picard's crew from TNG! Isn't that neat? Hey, wasn't it cool when Sisko hated Picard in the first episode of DS9? How about we give another character the exact same backstory as the reason why HE hates Picard? That'll work just as well the second time around, right? And hey, what if we resurrected Data for the sixth time?"
I had the misfortune of eating pasta when I first saw that teaser.
I think you could make a good argument that the box office returns of each film are in part a reaction to the last film. Lots of people came out to see Into Darkness in the theater because they really liked the 2009 film. And then they didn't come out for Star Trek Beyond because STID turned out to be such a stinker.
Yeah, all those "We don't have money in the future" lines ever meant was they don't have cash money in the 23rd Century, which they don't.
Peter Parker tells Tony Stark when he meets him in Civil War that he's had his powers for six months and he tells Ned Needs in Spider-Man: Homecoming that he got his powers when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. There are also some subtle allusions to Peter's dead uncle Ben Parker, but they never outright say that he was killed by a criminal that Peter failed to stop.
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