Was he ever invited to that program like he was to Vics ?
Thoughts on "Code of Honor"...
- Thread starter dswynne1
- Start date
So much for "love is love".
I miss the days when the solution to racism was for people to not make mention of every itty bitty detail and simply treat others the same the way they wanted to be treated. Like what Morgan Freeman was saying in the 1990s:
https://www.azquotes.com/author/5151-Morgan_Freeman
But that's probably never going to end. So what other solutions are there?
If Shran called Archer "Pink-Skin" all the time, then what would ha have called Sisko, all the time?
That's fair, reasonable, and makes sense.
But is it wrong for
That's a nice ideal, but before we can reach that point, we have to talk about the societal factors that keep it from happening. It's incredibly disingenuous to think that centuries-long institutionalized oppression will magically go away if people pretend it doesn't exist. Talking about it -- loudly and persistently until people could no longer hide from it -- is the only thing that's ever changed it for the better.
There was a time when people didn't talk about rape. A time when they didn't talk about child abuse. A time when they didn't talk about people being murdered for being gay or trans. That didn't make those things cease to exist -- on the contrary, it just let them proliferate with impunity. It was only when we talked about these injustices, when we acknowledged and confronted and worked against them, that justice started to be done. As Elie Weisel said, "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
Not talking about racism makes white people feel more comfortable, because they can pretend it doesn't exist. Ditto for rich black men like Freeman who are relatively insulated from the abuses the rest of their people suffer. But for people who are victimized by racism on a daily basis, other people's refusal to talk about it is a prison.
What's that got to do with anything? We're talking about the reverse of that, whether black male leads want to be paired with non-black love interests. As I said, it's about making sure that black actresses are not denied opportunity. It's about pushing back against the conscious and unconscious casting biases in the industry. And in that respect, it's a positive if any character's love interest -- or any woman who's defined on her own terms rather than just as someone's love interest -- is a role that goes to a black actress.
Oh, white American society has always, always been more comfortable with portraying Asian women as sexually desirable than black women. Look at how NBC's censors had no problem with William Shatner making out with France Nuyen in "Elaan of Troyius" but freaked out over him kissing Nichelle Nichols in "Plato's Stepchildren." So it's apples and oranges. Not every racial stereotype is the same.
It's not about exact tallies, it's about changing the attitudes and the culture, pushing against ingrained prejudices in hopes that they eventually die out. And these days, we've come much closer to that goal than we were at the time of DS9, so it's a strategy that's been at least somewhat successful, as we have much more diverse casting on many shows today than we had back then. So raising a fuss over it now is running a couple of decades late.
But the insane dangerousness of it is kind of the point. It's hardly unusual for people to try to prove their toughness and courage by knowingly taking ludicrous risks, or to prove their prowess by their ability to avoid accident when handling something so dangerous.
It doesn't matter who wins.
But the winner has to be functional and pretty afterwards.
Why trick two beautiful women into a duel, if at the end even the victor looks like she's been dragged face first across 20 miles of gravel road?
The brutal equivalence of a coin flip.
Although you have to remember, that there were dozens of possible weapons that they duel might have been fought with, and the finial selection was random and chosen at the last second second before the fight started.
If what they fought with could have been possibly a less forgiving weapon not covered in deadly poison it would would have made the fight more about skill and less about luck, since both women were evenly matched... Which is silly. A royal diplomat vs a security chief who spent her youth wrestling rape gangs off her backside.
Yar should have won that fight even if one hand was tied behind her back.
Pennant Roberts, while not one of Who's greatest directors, had a positive habit of running through scripts and saying to himself "No reason why that character shouldn't be a woman", and hence turning all male scripts into something more balanced.
To me Sisko having a problem with Vic's program being from a previous time when racism was bad is something that is worth bringing up but it's also a hard thing to do because Sisko has unlikely ever faced racism for being black while growing up do to humans evolving at least past that kind of bigotry. I feel like it was written well though and it kind of makes sense from a in-universe way when you consider that he did face some racism in "Past Tense" then he experienced the Benny Russell vision from the prophets which actually gives him some insight on the issue most humans in the 24th century just won't have because of their more evolved culture they live in.
Jason
Jason
YouBYou are spot on as by the time of that episode he has already had the Benny Russel experiences which are more than just.dreams as he seems to have actually lived them in his mind a bit like Picard and that probe.
Sure I do - Sisko is where the Prophets got that stuff from. They never visited Earth, except through Sisko. (How Sisko ever managed to visit 1950s Earth is still a mystery. Did he watch old movies a lot as a kid? Read the diaries of an ancestor buried so long ago that finding not just the grave but the graveyard is a chore?)
For today, he's probably too insensitive - he should be phasering people on the streets left and right to make the world a better place. For who he "really" is, a late 24th century guy, he's a total redneck, said neck being the first thing that peeks out from his ass. It's utterly unrealistic for him to bury his head like that, in the context of the fiction. Which is what makes it pretty bad fiction, even though yes, yes, the context calls for his character to "really really" be from the 1990s, complete with hairstyles, figures of speech and so forth.
For Sisko, plantation whipping scenes should be harmless humor the way a life-and-death struggle in the castle of Sheriff of Nottingham is to us: "That's SO absurd / I can't believe that ever happened / even if did, it is utterly irrelevant to me / if I for some reason start to see relevance, shame on me for being such a disgusting re-enactor of old wrongs".
Sisko is doing nobody any good in his desperate quest to reintroduce 1960s racism in the 2370s. But hey, if he finds it entertaining and satisfying, at least the harm he is doing is limited to the holodeck for the most part. Bashir and O'Brien didn't appear to start taking their holotainment more seriously as the result, say.
What does "suck it up" mean? He can choose a different program. He probably isn't volunteering to partake in Klingon blood orgies, either. Or the depravations of Quarks's more exclusive sexual programs.
Nobody else enjoying Vic's is actively trying to ruin the program for the others. I can easily see some female users decide they'd rather use something different, and then doing so. Or teetotalers. Or nonhuman users. For all we know, they run a parallel Vic's, depending a bit on the nature of Felix' IP rights...
Timo Saloniemi
How was Sisko trying to ruin the program for others? He didn't get mad at others including his beloved wife for using it. He just never used it himself and never even voiced his reasons until being sort of asked why by his wife. Plus he comes around enough to even liking it to actually join in and help Vic and sings and has fun and joins the others in the final episode were VIc sort of sings a farewell song to them.
Jason
Jason
It was the Paugh Wraiths who were behind the Benny Russel Timeline.
Very true: Sisko's attitude towards the program changes, both thanks to the program itself, and thanks to the attitudes of the fellow users. It's where Sisko is coming from that ruins the impression that he would be a man of the 2370s: he is no alien to the general use of holofiction (even though we lack references to him using plot-based holotainment, he uses setting-based simulations often enough), and isn't in the habit of nitpicking setting errors. That he nevertheless nitpicks Vic's tells us that he is almost as passionate about the subject as we are about Star Trek - a pathological state, basically, and a surprising one considering the fact that he's in the 24th century while we're to be found on a Trek forum.
Not that I'd dislike the idea of characters having unique traits as such. I liked nuBSG quite a bit despite wishing that all the hero characters would die gruesomely and soon; I have no objection to Sisko being a racially obsessed oddball in the 24th century, any more than I have to McCoy being a Southern gentleman far removed from the appropriate time and place. It's just that I don't quite like the idea that Sisko's character should be treated as actually fitting in the fictional setting.
Timo Saloniemi
Not that I'd dislike the idea of characters having unique traits as such. I liked nuBSG quite a bit despite wishing that all the hero characters would die gruesomely and soon; I have no objection to Sisko being a racially obsessed oddball in the 24th century, any more than I have to McCoy being a Southern gentleman far removed from the appropriate time and place. It's just that I don't quite like the idea that Sisko's character should be treated as actually fitting in the fictional setting.
Timo Saloniemi
In fairness you are trying to argue race with someone who used the word "negroid" a few pages back
How are we going to get rid of racism? Stop practicing it!
Maybe the civil rights movement was wrong to keep going on and on about segregation, civil right, Jim Crow...damn them! As for the abolitionists of the 19th century why did they not just shut the f....up!
Just like the Trump version of Covid19 those nasty things back then would just 'go away'.
'Harmless humour' like a potential 'The march to the gas chamber' holoprogram? You want to also equate that to storming of the castle of the Sheriff of Nottingham? Riiight, since the peoples of Nottingham have been suffering cultural prejudice and discrimination ever since that took place.
I never really thought of holodecks in relation to education and tourism. I assume schools would use them all the time and I wonder if sites like Dachau would have interactive exhibits
Exactly. Morgan was sorta implying the stopping of doing it in his speech. But it's been how many years since he's said it?
That's basically just a question of counting the centuries. Massacres have been the norm no matter what century; the world has never been a particularly happy place.
That it would be getting better is a somewhat exotic assumption: we may have a lot fewer wars and massacres with every passing century, but thanks to mankind evolving (which basically means multiplying uncontrollably), each of those results in more suffering than before. Sisko would be in a position to laugh off millions of dead when he has witnessed the deaths of billions, just like we can laugh off the Norman conquest and say "that's how folks were back then, and hey, folks always suffer and die, and boy if that Robin isn't a cool character to invent!"
Hmh? Sure they have. That is, if they happen to be Jews or black or gay or whatever is the height of hating fashion at a given date. But talking about it isn't really going to help in making the past the past.
Sisko here is spreading a disease, plain and simple. There's no point for the 24th century people to remember the Alamo (Julian and Miles certainly don't) or the Maine or even Tomed, although they probably can't help remembering Setlik. Or for the most current rage in human failings to be spread across continents because "everybody should care". Containment of problems is the one thing that has sorta worked on this human nature thing; awareness campaigns just make things worse. Often far worse.
Timo Saloniemi
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