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Why was Kes written off the show?

What the Hell does any of this have to do with Kes?

If the Admins and Mods see no issue in stj's avatar, then there's no reason for him to take it down.

You're absolutely right, Exodus! This has nothing to do with Kes because Kes and Star Trek is the opposite to what Communism stands for.

As for the avatar, in that case I hope that no one objects if I put a swastika or some Al Qaeda symbol in my avatar. But since I don't support mass murderers, I will settle for my current one.

Just a final comment regarding this matter before I go back to the original topic which, despite my misgivings with "Fury" and the way Kes was treated, is a rather harmless thing to debate compared to the diabolical thing called Communism.

Most of you people seem to have a very rosy-eyed view of Communism. You are talking about communism in theory when I talk about Communism in practice which is far from the fairy tales about the equal society which Communists fool people with. Or are you mixing up Communism with Social Democracy which is an entirely different thing?

I also get the impression that some of you have your only experience of Communism from Hollywood WWII movies where the "heroic" Red Army (pronounced Rape Army) helped the Western Allies to wipe out Adolf's army. The reality is very different from that.

Don't you know anything about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, how the Commies and the Nazis attacked and divided Poland? How Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupiedand the Communist terror in those countries? The Soviet attack on Finland when Adolf and Josef were the best buddies?

And I have to mention the ethnical cleansing which the Rape Army conducted in the east German provinces (which are now part of Poland) in the end of the war. That was worse than what happened in Bosnia (and yes, the Serb leader Milosevic was Communist too).

You do know of Auschwitz, Treblinka and other Nazi death factories. Do you know about Kolyma, Vorkuta, Virandozero, Butyrki or Ljubljanka prison? I suppose not.

Don't you know anything about Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968? Mao's terror in China? Pol Pot in Cambodia? The KGB, The GULAG? The continuing genocide in Tibet? North Korea?

And there are people who think I live in a dream world with Kes and Voyager! :lol:

I have a book written by the Ukrainian refugee Viktor Kravchenko who was an important politruk in the Communist organization before fleeing to the US. He once visited a factory outside the town of Podolsk, a real terrible place located underground where political prisoners were held as slave workers, where the working conditions were terrible and where lots of prisoners died every day.

He could never forget that terrible place. And many years later when he heard people he met in the US talking about the wonders of Soviet Communism he always thought: "If I could send you idiots to that factory for two days, only for two days, then you would sing an entirely different song."

Now back to Kes and the Star Trek dreamworld!
 
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The hippies in my area are currently holding free showings of some movie about the wonders of Castro's Cuba, how incredibly fabulously egalitarian it is. Of course most of them would be thrown in prison for their lifestyle choices and otherwise if they were in Cuba but the need to believe that there is a magical ideology that will make life fair is too great.

Part of the appeal of Star Trek.
 
Now we've reached Godwin.

Goodbye, cruel thread...
kes.gif
 
Now we've reached Godwin.

Goodbye, cruel thread...
kes.gif

Godwin is like the galactic barrier, everyone is sure something you can never undo is at the other side of it. However I feel confident in the power of this thread to absorb Godwin like that absorba-zorb in Dr. Who and suffer little more than a page of indigestion.

Why was Kes written off the show? I didn't give a fig about her so I did not speak up when she was written off. And then TPTB came for Janeway :(
 
Why was Kes written off the show? I didn't give a fig about her so I did not speak up when she was written off. And then TPTB came for Janeway :(

For me, the "annihilation" of Janeway in the recent books is like the Kes tragedy all over again, this time with another favorite character. :weep:
 
Kes turned into a god a went home.

If that's a shitty way to treat someone what do you think of Neelix's final fate or Hogans?

Dinosaurs picked through giant snake skat to see if his bones were museum worthy.

That's an Opposite Day level sort of a clusterfuck.
 
I think I've clearly articulated why I think Kes was written off. The only thing I can think of to add is that everything I've read about Berman Trek backstage is that it is extremely hierarchical (reflected in their revival of military hierarchy, in ways the WWII veterans of Star Trek didn't choose to incorporate.) In terms of career experience, Lien was very much a junior. The guy with the least experience gets laid off.

As for the detour on the avatar: I forgot that the quote function automatically italicizes. So my effort to highlight the particularly offensive claim that the "system" murdered more people than the Nazis.

Proportionately, Stalin killed more members of the Communist Party than any other group. It is a notorious fact that the Old Guard, the members who joined before it would be personally profitable to do so were particularly targeted. This is especially true of Party leaders, central committee members in particular.

He created security organs (and their labor camps) that were outside Party control.

Indeed, they were essentially recreations in modern times of Ivan Grozny's oprichniki and their forced labor camps, which were then innocuously called estates. Concentration camps of course were used in Cuba by the Spanish and in South Africa by the British, so they are perfectly respectable. Obviously this type of thing has no connection with the Communist "system" as such.

Stalin of course found it necessary to kill even members of the security service and at least one camp administrator (sorry, forgot his name, but he was a Communist with peculiar ideas about rehabilitation, which are not very commonly accepted today.) Hitler's concentration camps first held Communists and Socialists, so the right-thinking people of the democracies loved and admired Hitler.

Stalin's pursuit of personal power also led him to attack the Communist Red Army leadership, decimating the "officer" corps.

Additionally, Stalin also reversed many of the socially progressive policies associated with Communism, reinstituting laws against homosexuality and so forth. And reinstituting the usual military hierarchy typical of democracies and dictatorships alike.

The Nazi/Soviet Non-Aggression pact is in fact the stellar example of Stalin's break with the Communist "system." Oh, it has its justifications in hard necessity. After all, after the democratic powers had assisted the Fascist victory in Spain, and helped Germany and Poland dismember Czechoslovakia, there is a powerful case to make that Communist ideals had to give way to reality. After Munich, war was inevitable and there was no reason to think England and France would turn on their Nazi friends. It is still true that the Pact was not the Communist ideal.

And the upshot of this brief lesson in history is that it is a Big Lie to assert that the "system" is responsible for the Yezhovshchina. Hitler didn't have to kill the Nazi Party leadership, Hitler didn't have to decimate the general officers, Hitler didn't have to reverse the Nazi Party policies of years to keep his personal power, Hitler didn't have to execute the rich in his system. If there is anyone who merely executed the "system's" directives, it's Hitler.

The other part, about the relative number of casualties, is not so short and clearcut. Also, it's perfectly obvious that the people who insist on screaming this stuff are never going to accept reason. But, briefly, Jews were not the only victims of Hitler. They are the commonly estimated six million. They were by far the largest single group of course, so well worth considering.

They way the Nazis murdered Jews, going into peaceful cities and villages, then dragging them into camps in wholesale lots, then simply murdering women and children, more or less at random. This kind of murder was not what happened under Stalin. This kind of murder was and remains unparalleled. Not even the Mongols did that kind of thing, they massacred population during military campaigns against enemies, not in lands under their control.

The official estimates of victims of Stalin's kangaroo courts numbers well over 600 000. Plus there must be some murders that were carried out like the kind democrats carry out in Colombia, where the victims more or less disappear, just killed out of hand by offduty cops or soldiers on night ops. These numbers are quite sufficient to condemn Stalin. I have no idea how people can deceive themselve into thinking that this is some sort of apologia for Stalin's crimes. That is a horrifying figure. Yet, as criminal as the frameups were, they were still not the same as going into a Jewish neighborhood, just grabbing everyone and then sending them off to be exterminated. Inflating the number of victims to millions is intended to get Hitler off the hook.

Many of the millions attributed to the "system" and dragged in to make Hitler not look so bad are victims of civil war and fighting in rebellions and victims of famine. There is another kind of responsibility for misgovernment that leads to this kind of death. But it's not the same thing as murder. These numbers are mostly made up and rely upon a double standard. There was a famine in India during WWII. Aren't those victims of the Raj? Of course we know that ranting about Churchill and the capitalist system murdering all those people is tendentious and ideological. The same for Stalin. The kind of "logic" and evidence that is used in these figures for Stalin's victims, applied to someone like Abraham Lincoln, would also give horrifying numbers. You would end up saying things like, the 600 000 dead in the Civil War were victims of Lincoln and the abolitionist system!
 
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^^
I'm really sorry that I have to break my promise about going back on topic but I just have to contradict some of the BS written above.

Stj wrote:
They way the Nazis murdered Jews, going into peaceful cities and villages, then dragging them into camps in wholesale lots, then simply murdering women and children, more or less at random. This kind of murder was not what happened under Stalin. This kind of murder was and remains unparalleled. Not even the Mongols did that kind of thing, they massacred population during military campaigns against enemies, not in lands under their control.

Haven't you read of the "destruction brigades" which were essential in the Soviet terror in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and eastern Poland? They did exactly what you describe above, going into peaceful villages, murdering and raping at random just to scare the population. I'm sure that you can find information about that on the Internet if you bother to look.

I have no intention at all to "make Hitler look good", I'm only pointing out the Communist crimes whic actually are worse than even what Hitler could come up with. Or aren't Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians or other people under Soviet opression worth as much as the Jews who Hitler murdered?
 
I wrote "[Look at] (T)he way the Nazis murdered Jews, going into peaceful cities and villages, then dragging them into camps in wholesale lots, then simply murdering women and children, more or less at random. This kind of murder was not what happened under Stalin. This kind of murder was and remains unparalleled. Not even the Mongols did that kind of thing, they massacred population during military campaigns against enemies, not in lands under their control."

Googling "destruction brigades" I really only came up with one Wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_battalions
This strongly suggests that this article was a contribution by an amateur wanting to grind an ideological axe. This is exactly the type of article which has won Wikipedia a reputation for unreliability.

Even so, this article tells us the term properly applies to paramilitary units organized to carry out scorched earth policies during the Soviet retreat in 1941. In other words, it was not just wartime but during an actively contested campaign. It cites some really nasty stories about what happened in 1941, but curiously none of them seem to have been done by Nazis. But these were no peaceful cities and villages, no lands under Soviet control. Just as I said, this is not a parallel to what the Nazi did, which is truly unparalleled.

This is what it says about the post-war situation:
The destruction battalions were restored after the retreat of German forces in the newly annexed areas to the Soviet Union. In 1945–46 they were renamed to narodnaya zaschita (people's defence), because of the notority their old name had gained in 1941. They were formed from local volunteers, from the most variable layers of the rural communities. They were tasked to guard, secure and support with arms all activities, directives and orders of the Soviet power, which the population could have sabotaged, intentionally avoided or directly resisted.[23]
The primary task of the destruction battalions was the fight against the armed resistance movement. This included terrorising the actual or potential supporters of forest brothers among the civilian population, participation in active combat, organisation of ambush and secret guard posts, reconnaissance and search patrols. The passive operations included guard and watch-keeping duties, convoy of detainees and arrested individuals as well as guarding cargo.[23]
The destroyers guarded systematically institutions of power and economic objects in the rural areas. In a post-war situation where the factual state power in a rural municipality lay with the Soviet police, the Militsiya, the destroyers constituted a force, which guaranteed the implementation of the Soviet policies. A typical task was to force the farmers to fulfil public forestry, peat extraction and road construction obligations. No measures of coercion policy were implemented in the rural communities, which were not carried out or supervised by armed destroyers. They also fought against crime, both independently and as an additional force to the Militsiya.[23]
The destruction battalions were great in size while they never became the efficient and active armed force which it was expected to come and which was meant to rapidly eradicate the forest brothers. Despite the primarily passive role of the destroyers in the fight against the resistance movement, they provided invaluable assistance to the active participants in this fight, state security institutions and internal troops. As local people the destroyers spoke the language, knew the people, landscape and circumstances, which was inadequate among the NKVD and internal troops. The destruction battalions were also very useful as an auxiliary force. The organisation was eventually dismissed in 1954.[23]

I'm quite sure that there was a great deal that was perfectly awful but there's nothing like the Nazis going on here. There are not even inflammatory atrocity stories.

As for not being for Hitler, well if you say so. I must wonder however, because the Wikipedia article had a useful link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_long-range_reconnaissance_group
This one is about another paramilitary organization, this one Nazi organized, that engaged unspecified Soviets after the Kautla massacre (one of the best attested atrocity stories, Wikipedia even lists most of the twenty victims.) The postwar Forest Brothers movements was also a continuation of Nazi organized forces, including Baltic Waffen-SS units, etc. continued with the assistance of Swedish, English and US intelligence support. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Brothers This too, after the Nazis had slaughtered millions of Soviets of all nationalities (except, I gather, Balts and Poles, where apparently the relatives and friends extended a warm welcome that was happily reciprocated,)
was certain to be a bitter struggle.

But, again, what happened then was not the same as Nazis seeking out Jews as such, before suffering enormous losses and hardships that would embitter most people, and murdering them. As for indifference to human suffering, it is quite clear that the anti-Communists are quite happy to commit enormities. For example, the CIA assisted Suharto in his massacre of perhaps 500 000 people in 1965, contributing hit lists. Unlike the Baltics, there was no war, just killing. But those really were people whose lives were worth less than the Balts or Poles.
In anti-Communist eyes.

But then, the lives even of Balts don't count for much in the eyes of anti-Communists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps_in_the_Baltic We find there a lovely example of the lovely mind of the anti-Communist:
They drove the Latvians 'like rabbits across the fields'. They burned houses, destroyed bridges and telephone poles. They threw bodies into wells, followed by hand grenades:
"We killed what fell into our hands, . . . We saw red, we had nothing in the heart of human emotions. . . what were earlier houses, were rubble, ash and smoldering beams, like festering sores in the bare field . . . We had lit a bonfire, there was burning more than dead material, there also was burning our hopes, our desires, . . . the laws and values ​​of the civilized world. . . We retreated, bragging, intoxicated, loaded with booty" -- Ernst von Salomon, Die Geächteten[7]

Incidentally, the expulsion/evacuation/flight of the German population of the Baltic states is conveniently overlooked in the jingo histories. Really, gullibly swallowing the self-serving recollections of criminal friends and relatives is not the same as studying history.
 
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I wrote "[Look at] (T)he way the Nazis murdered Jews, going into peaceful cities and villages, then dragging them into camps in wholesale lots, then simply murdering women and children, more or less at random. This kind of murder was not what happened under Stalin. This kind of murder was and remains unparalleled. Not even the Mongols did that kind of thing, they massacred population during military campaigns against enemies, not in lands under their control."

Frakking hell DEAD is DEAD.
 
I had no idea about any of that, but then I've usually been rather too busy to 'dig' into the extra details, and just watch the show for it's incredible value. But knowing those things as outlined, might explain a few things for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed her chartacter, feel that if she had stayed , as you stated, that they could have explored her character traits amazingly well.

I'm normally never someone to critisize acting, but I felt some of Jen's acting in places was a tad either rushed, or simply again as stated, possibly not felt enough?

I didn't have all that many moments like that, but they were enough that I can see them wanting to replace her, but having said that, what she did while there I thought was enough to make Voyager better for it indeed.

I also think with the utmost certainty and emotion, that 7's addition to the show was a very smart move, for obvious reasons. Her acting was stunning and her entire character was so spot on, and the scripts absolutely genius.

I enjoyed all the series, but I think Voyager has managed to grab me even now, as I watch reruns fairly often, and lets face it everyone, the 'chemistry' between all the characters was amazing, no matter their salaries ;)

New technologies afforded for the shows special effects etc., given its the last currently of the series notwithstanding, allowed everything to come together perfectly.

I hope the next one, if there is one will be just as good.

They were actors portraying characters, but still, given my love for space and wanting to ' go where no person has gone before' , when I watch this show its like hanging out with friends. I can't think of a better compliment ;)

Thanks to all of them, and prior series as well for giving us all something to look forward to ,as our technology evolves, and we as a species grow into maturity.

Watching it as part of my dvd collection had me slightly missing the 'tv' show again and wishing I was on that ship with those amazing people exploring worlds together; so short of that, finding this list was as fulfilling as well.

Cheers
smarine


Right on both accounts, I believe. However, Sandoval still has a point. Jennifer wasn't in a top 50 of good looking folks, Garrett was. One might even argue if keeping an actor based on looks is in itself the opposite of being PC, despite Garrett being Asian, but I digress.
Sex appeal has always been a major factor in selling Trek to the public. Every show be they male or female has always had a sex symbol type character. Look on all the TV shows, how many ugly people are on TV? Even the old people are pretty.

As far as Kes, isn't there a recent interview with Jen Lien posted on this site that explains that her contact ran out and that she had talked to Berman about wanting leaving acting anyway? So it sounds like even if they killed off Harry Kim, Jen Lien didn't want to stay anyway. So they kept the guy that did.
Doesn't matter how much potential Kes the character had. If the actor isn't serious about the job anymore, then they aren't going to put their best into the role.
 
I finally get to quote the illustrious Wadsworth:
"Communism was just a red herring."


And I believe the wrong clip is used the previous page. Given the epic derail this thread has had, the clip of mutant Paris taking Janeway to warp 10 so they can have cold, clammy amphibian sex should be used.

162891.jpg

This thread did devolve after all.


and this thread is about as healthy as this:
Kim_deformed.jpg


and this for good measure when looking at the thread:
044obr19.jpg
 
1. The Kes character was in fact extremely hard to write for because in her personal interactions with other characters, the other characters all loved her and were instantly swayed by her marvelous wisdom and angelic goodness. In Resolutions, for instance, she instantly persuades Tuvok to turn back for the Captain and Chakotay. Jennifer Lien is so cute and that voice is so gorgeous

I guess I am alone in not being able to stand her voice. I spent the first 3 seasons of VOY during my maiden watch of the series wanting to slap her.

Her voice was the main reason I couldn't stand her. It irritated me so much, it was 1000 times worse than Keiko's whine. I din't want to slap her, I wanted to throttle her. The other reason i didn't like the character was because she was so sickly sweet.
 
I finally get to quote the illustrious Wadsworth:
"Communism was just a red herring."


And I believe the wrong clip is used the previous page. Given the epic derail this thread has had, the clip of mutant Paris taking Janeway to warp 10 so they can have cold, clammy amphibian sex should be used.

162891.jpg

This thread did devolve after all.


and this thread is about as healthy as this:
Kim_deformed.jpg


and this for good measure when looking at the thread:
044obr19.jpg

:guffaw:
 
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