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'White genocide in space': Racist "fans" seething at racial diversity in Discovery...

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I also call into question the use of handful of tweets (or even hundreds of tweets) as a suitable metric for judging the state of a fandom.
Twitter (and YouTube comment sections) are often the refuge for the worst qualities of humanity, and/or the people who get giggles from pretending to stupid/hateful.
That's a problem, for sure, but I don't see basing moral commentary on the actions of a minuscule minority.
 
First off, racism is idiocy because there aren't human races, so to speak. There is no biological subdivision of homo sapiens. Human "races" are the effect of geographical and political divisions, and are not taxonomic. To be properly racist you'd have to hate Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, not other humans.

Not that that apparently matters to a lot of folks.
 
Spider said:
First off, racism is idiocy because there aren't human races, so to speak. There is no biological subdivision of homo sapiens. Human "races" are the effect of geographical and political divisions, and are not taxonomic. To be properly racist you'd have to hate Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, not other humans.

Not that that apparently matters to a lot of folks.
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There are two things I can't stand. Racists and Neanderthals. ;)

I think that's proper.
 
Jedi_Master said:
I also call into question the use of handful of tweets (or even hundreds of tweets) as a suitable metric for judging the state of a fandom.
Twitter (and YouTube comment sections) are often the refuge for the worst qualities of humanity, and/or the people who get giggles from pretending to stupid/hateful.
That's a problem, for sure, but I don't see basing moral commentary on the actions of a minuscule minority.
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I definitely agree that this is a small contingency of people, many of whom likely don't even watch Star Trek the way people on this board do. They're the same people who lost their minds over the diversity in TFA or "female Thor" or any pop culture product that isn't dominated by white straight men.

Normally, I'd be on the side of "ignore them, they're not worth time or energy." But in our political climate today, where people like Richard Spencer are doing college tours, it's best to fight shit like this so it doesn't fester.
 
uniderth said:
Which is exactly my point. Even though they lost the war they just stayed racist and bitter. So while changing the legal structure it didn't actually change any hearts and minds.

But I have to disagree with you on the whole losing thing. I don't think there is such a things as winning or losing or even progress. There is only change. Today's "progressives" are tomorrows conservatives and the cause of today will become antiquated in 100 years time. It's been the same through out all of human history. What you perceive as the "bigots always losing" is really just a manifestation of the fact that things will always change. They always will. The way things are right now will always die out in favor of the way things will be tomorrow. I don't find this indicative of the rightness of anybody's view points. In fact I would even go so far as to bet that every single conservative ideal throughout time was at some point a "liberal/progressive" ideal at one point. And all the "liberal/progressive" ideals of today will be the archaic conservative ideals in 100 years.
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I disagree. You can never change their minds, but you can remove them from power so they can never hurt anyone again.

I also disagree with your other point. Conservatives are always conservative and liberals are always liberal. Only the positions change. Liberals grow and accept more and conservatives eventually accept the new normal. But conservatives have always been against progress.
 
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CutieMcWhiskers said:
Some people are denied rights by their own "peers" (for lack of more appropriate term), since the "peers" are in the same group of people being marginalized yet never understood the irony of their own situation, among other possible and/or hypothetical conditions.

As civilized people, we all could find a middle ground/compromise regardless of the groups we're inside of or looking at. Most of us don't exist to hamper others' freedoms. But there's more going on than "rights" when history is replete with issues where people in the same peer group/community/etc consciously do nasty things to others inside their own group while whining about being badly treated by other groups. So the group in question must be part of the question too.
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Actually laws have been passed to limit my freedoms and to unjustly control my life and all by people who wish I'd disappear from public view.
 
uniderth said:
If nobody gets to question what human rights are, then we could never have reached a point when people with darker skin color have the same rights as people with lighter skin color in the United States.
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You are still doing a false equivalence. In the near future, will any "good thing" come out of Racist people being permitted to have a platform today ? No. Quite the contrary. There's a real possibility these people will harm marginalized groups.

When folks demanded more rights for African-Americans in the past they did knowing they were fighting for a better future... And they actually made the future better. So there's no sense in comparing the two.

uniderth said:
Unless physical harm comes then it is not violence. An opinion cannot be violent unless it comes with an associated physically harmful act, at which point it ceases to be just an opinion.
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Institutional Racism still exists and it's quite violent against marginalized groups. If your words are backed by it, then they are not words anymore, they are a form of coercion.

Another form of coercion is denying the historical impacts on the material conditions of marginalized people living today. In doing so, you deny any possibility of reparation. Denying a group of people the same privileges as all the other groups is very violent.
 
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Balok's Decoy said:
I definitely agree that this is a small contingency of people, many of whom likely don't even watch Star Trek the way people on this board do. They're the same people who lost their minds over the diversity in TFA or "female Thor" or any pop culture product that isn't dominated by white straight men.

Normally, I'd be on the side of "ignore them, they're not worth time or energy." But in our political climate today, where people like Richard Spencer are doing college tours, it's best to fight shit like this so it doesn't fester.
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I see your point. I think that if these type of "fans" were capable of sabotaging the future commercial viability of Star Trek then I think there would be a need to actively engage in fighting them. Until then, it seems like more damage is done by amplifying their hateful message, even if it is to mock them.
The total amount of these racist tweets has to be small, as two separate articles used two of the same tweets as a reference point.
 
Awesome Possum said:
I disagree. You can never change minds, but you can remove them from power so they can never hurt anyone again.

I also disagree with your other point. Conservatives are always conservative and liberals are always liberal. Only the positions change. Liberals grow and accept more and conservatives eventually accept the new normal. But conservatives have always been against progress.
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Over the arc of US history, I definitely agree with you. But I can think of two exceptions:

1. Teddy Roosevelt, who established 5 National Parks, 51 bird reserves, 150 national forests, etc. He set aside 230,000,000 acres as publicly protected land.
2. Richard Nixon (yes, that one!) established the Environmental Protection Agency, which Republicans today are hellbent on destroying.

I mention these only to highlight the needless stupidity of contemporary Conservatives' goals in relation to the environment. I recognize the narrowness of this exception.

EDIT: Looking into Teddy Roosevelt again, he actually bears very little in common with conservatives, even though they like to claim him as their own. He's actually a little more Bernie Sanders than he is Ronald Reagan. :shrug:
 
BillJ said:
I know it sounds dickish, but I simply don't have time for those kind of folks. They are lost down those side roads because they want to.
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While I don't think it sounds dickish, and emotionally I get where you're coming from, I don't know if it's really that simple. I think we learn values from those around us, the people and culture we are exposed to and the environment we are in. I can really see how an environment which perpetuated the idea that, for example, the white race is being wiped out by immigration and the femidiversinazis of libtard!Hollywood, would imprint that on your mind and affect the way you reason, especially if you don't move out of that circle as an adult and get similar instruction from authority figures such as ministers and politicians. While this is obviously an extreme example, I think many of us have problematic ideas or habits born of the environment in which we were raised and subsequently where we live.
You can certainly choose to work to overcome them, absolutely, but even coming to the point where you see them as something to overcome is a journey many won't take without a guiding hand. What I find sad is that we have a shared influence here, Star Trek, which took most of us on a very different path.
 
I noticed a lot of these type of comments on the Star Trek Facebook page when the trailer first came out. Holy cow, I was legit bummed out for like four days.
 
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