And?
I like STID. Is that wrong?
- Thread starter AmbassadorPointyEars
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And?
So... you don't want a fish sandwich?
And yet "more optimistic than existed in the 60s" is both highly subjective and, also, a pretty low bar, one I think STID more than rises to.
Grasped and rejected, yes.Indeed. I see you have grasped the principle involved.And surely the fact that Pepsi Cola helped shape the lives (and bellies, and medical bills) of many consumers suggests it is not just a beverage.
But what it says to you and what it is are two completely different things. Obviously you believe that there's a certain "ethos" in TOS that is very important to you personally, but that is again a subjective judgement being presented analytically.
Of course, there are certain TOS episodes you don't personally care for for whatever reason, and if you really looked I bet you would discover a few episodes that deviate from TOS' overall "ethos" too. Therefore, the most you can say is that STID didn't have enough of what YOU wanted to see, but to claim that it lacks essential qualities of Star Trek is, IMO, disingenuous.
Which goes back to my earlier point about America's high divorce rate: you're assigning highly weighted importance to something that was not necessarily even a major selling point for TOS in the first place. Which, actually, is what a lot of husbands/wives wind up doing for their partners in midlife (e.g. she's gained weight; he doesn't take me places anymore; she's not as pretty as she used to be; he doesn't buy me nice things anymore; the excitement has gone out of our relationship; etc).
OTOH, I'm a child of the 90s, so I may be re-interpreting TOS 1960s "ethos" through the inherent cynicism of the Epic Fail generation and it's entirely possible that you and I have very different opinions on what constitutes "optimism."
Actually, I thought it had better characterization and interaction than any Star Trek movie since "Voyage Home." And STID captured the "spirit of adventure" pretty solidly in the opening scene on Nibiru.
I still maintain that a lot of the backlash against the Star Trek movies is the reaction of kids who have grown into adults and have forgotten that they were still kids when they originally discovered Star Trek.
Luckily it is ST09 not STID that I am complaining about.
Yet that interpretation still seems quite reasonable. I mean, if Pepsi Cola also cured cancer, would you regard it as more than just a beverage then? If so, I think we are only talking about a matter of degree.
Its not that subjective actually. Many people recognize TOS has those qualities but just don't seem to find them that important. As I pointed out, some even complain that such qualities are over done!
That is all I'm saying (except about ST09
).No, that's what you seem to think I'm saying for some reason unconnected to what I actually wrote. On a personal level, I'm saying that ST material shouldn't conflict with those qualities without a damned good explanation, which was missing in ST09. The writers etc seemed to think about such things a little more in STID, though I wouldn't say it was perfect. Anyway it didn't feel like negative Trek.
I didn't say it was a selling point. I only ever said it was important to me. Which is way "I" can't just ignore it as you wanted me too. In defense of that point I have also said that the issues I have highlighted are normally regarded as being important (in the scheme of things), but only in response you view that they are nitpicks.
Rest assured that the problems I have with ST09 are less superficial than those sort of clichés, as per my original example.
Perhaps so.
I dig how, again, Abrams is - seemingly - referencing STAR WARS, by way of having Carol Marcus in the same sort of position as Princess Leia was, between Luke and Han "competing" for her, only Carol had Kirk and Bones doing it. I wonder if the STAR WARS inspirations will cease with a new director in the next STAR TREK movie ...
I don't think Bones and Kirk were competing for Carol. Some folks have noticed some chemistry between Urban and Eve but I don't think it was intentional. ( on the part of the writers or director)
A
Amaris
Guest
As far as I could tell, Bones was just pouring on the southern charm, which was something he did even with the ladies who were already "spoken for" by Kirk. Happened in TOS quite a bit.
It isn't. It's just a smaller number of vocal super-fans.
Believe it or not, you don't have to be part of that "vocal super-fans" group to regard it as mediocre.
Yes. It would be a beverage with a useful medicinal quality.
That's a far cry from saying that Pepsi is some sort of important social phenomenon whose significance transcends its nature as a commercial product, to the degree that releasing a version of Pepsi that DOESN'T cure cancer would totally ruin the product.
To put that another way: is Pepsi still Pepsi if it's caffeine free?
Yeah, I think that makes sense.Its not that subjective actually. Many people recognize TOS has those qualities but just don't seem to find them that important. As I pointed out, some even complain that such qualities are over done!
That is all I'm saying (except about ST09
Pasi Nurminen
Lieutenant Commander
Partially true, except that when you say that someone is "a black person" all you're really doing is narrowing down the range of possible skin tones that he probably possesses. As we've spent the last sixty years learning (and legislating) it's not generally meaningful beyond its utility as a description, despite the lingering belief among many people that you can make certain immediate assumptions about what kind of person he is without knowing anything else about him.That's almost the ONLY thing it has to do with.
Especially since most of the time you cannot specifically tell someone's ETHNICITY just by looking at them, which is why the racial groupings are as arbitrary as they are.
So if I wanted to describe Jean Luc Picard, I would call him "the tallish bald white guy in the red uniform." If I wanted to describe Geordi, I'd call him "the short black guy with a visor across his eyes and the yellow uniform." If I wanted to describe Chief O'Brien, I'd call him "The heavy-set red headed guy in the yellow shirt, looks Irish maybe." And somebody who'd never seen any of these people would be able to turn on Star Trek and immediately know who I was talking about.
On the other hand, if you set down to watch Star Trek Into Darkness and I told you "Wow that Puerto Rican girl is cute!" would you immediately realize I was talking about Uhura?
No, no, you're completely wrong.
Race is a social construct. The human races have no basis in biology. A black person is not made black by "phenotypical descriptors," nor is a white person made white, etc.
To be sure "Black" or "white" are racial groups; they may be social constructs, but they're still distinct and meaningful in and of themselves. "Zulu" and "Irish," on the other hand, are ethnic groupings that are meaningful for entirely different reasons and in entirely different ways. For example: my five year old son is one quarter Zulu, one quarter Ashanti, one quarter Irish, one eighth Choctaw, one sixteenth Dutch, and one sixteenth Greek. He could, to various degrees, claim any of those ethnicity as his "origins" but in the United States of America, he would be described as "black." In in the 1940s he'd probably be called "Mulatto" while in Mexico, he would probably be described as "Mestizo" or some other sub-category.
The categories THEMSELVES are social constructs, but they're really nothing more than descriptions of a person's visible phenotype.
I don't know that that's actually true, considering most people in my generation (and my daughter's generation) grow up with people of various races all around them all the time and are accustomed to defining "race" as just a convenient subset of attributes used to tell each other apart. The simple fact is there aren't ENOUGH racial categories to describe what's really going on, precisely because the older categories were defined by racists and we haven't done the hard social work of creating new ones as demograpgics have shifted.
If racists are going to reach their children to also be racist, your personal discomfort with racial semantics probably isn't going to change that. On the other hand, an effort to use more fitting categories to describe different racial groups and sub-groups would make life easier for just about everyone else.
Which is exactly the problem: that would imply that a black man from Nigeria is basically the same race as a black man from the Dominican Republic. They have absolutely nothing in common OTHER than skin color: they don't speak the same language, they don't come from the same culture, and they DO NOT have the same ethnic background. It gets worse when you consider that there are recognizable racial subgroups even among Africans, with differences strong enough to have triggered at least two civil wars in recent history.
I think you're not really appreciating the extent to which "the black ethnicity" or a similar umbrella term would be the preference or racists, who would rather pretend that no meaningful differences exist between any two groups of black people and therefore they should all be treated exactly the same.
It kinda does, actually, since that's not what "interracial" meant in the context of 1960s white supremacist culture. Otherwise, you'd have civil rights workers walking through Connecticut, pointing out a group of Italians, Greeks, Norwegians, Anglos and Russians and saying "Wow, look at all this racial harmony!" You'd have black panthers holding meetings in storefronts saying "Italian power to Italian people, Russian Power to Russian People, Greek Power to Greek People..."
Racial identity in the 1960s was overly simplistic BECAUSE the dialog was primarily dominated by racists, most of whom drew the racial lines as "negro", "caucasian", "mongoloid", "don't even know."
Failure of comparison: with the highly notable exception of Japanese Americans, institutionalized racial oppression of Asians wasn't that intense during World War II either. Significantly, France Nguyen was not Japanese.
The historical track record says otherwise. Again, most western states had, of their own accord, lifted the standing bans on marriage between whites and Asians by the mid 1950s, which suggests that their hatred or bigotry had subsided to the point that they were willing to tolerate Asians as members of their communities even then.
Consider that right around the time Asians were being accepted into white communities, Emmett Till was getting dumped in the Tallahatche River for whistling at a white woman.
Unless, of course, that racist is himself Japanese or Chinese.
No, no they're not. A black person is not made black by the colour of their skin, nor is a white person, etc. You are only demonstrating that you haven't a clue what race actually is. The idea that it has any basis in human anatomy or biology is obsolete, and of the time when scientists went around measuring skulls and noses. Please stop talking about race since you clearly haven't a clue what you're talking about.
How can I become a super-fan? Are there prizes? Are there discounts on special merchandise chosen especially for me?
Either way, I wouldn't need my arm twisted to believe that men would fight over the Carol Marcus in this movie. When it came time to find Kirk a love interest, J.J. Abrams couldn't have chosen better ...
You have to be able to make a mean sandwich, and to have mastered the technique of throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
Its not about ruining a product at this point (though I believe ST09 doesn't just leave out TOS's ethos but negatively impacts it.). The only question is whether TOS (that has shaped some people's lives) or a soft drink (that also did something useful or alternatively deleterious) are more than just a "TV show" or a "beverage" respectively. The answer, as you agree, is obviously yes. And its the principle not the magnitude that's important, so long as the magnitude is sufficient to be noticeable of course.
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Its not that subjective actually. Many people recognize TOS has those qualities but just don't seem to find them that important. As I pointed out, some even complain that such qualities are over done!
That is all I'm saying (except about ST09
It appears the quoting bug in these forums may have corrupted your efforts in accurately represent my last post. Anyway, its great we could reach agreement.
It involves being bitten by a radioactive fanboy or being caught in the blast of a fanrage.
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