Just streamed today-a dose of reality.
You may be able to enjoy watching people be repeatedly killed for no reason, but I suspect most can’t.
Fortunately, it doesn’t happen. The entire “transporter means death” argument is from our own real world, using our own real-world logic. Star Trek has a lot of things that cannot exist in our universe. Thus the rules of their universe are different from ours.
We have examples in-universe of people not trusting transporters. But, unless it has showed up in the Paramount+ shows I haven’t watched, none of them were concerned about dying wile a duplicate of them survived. And we know that you maintain consciousness throughout the transporter process, as shown in various episodes and movies. For example, in Star Trek IV, they talk during transport. There’s the TNG episode where Barclay saves some people who got turned into transporter microbes. Or that one super soldier who breaks out of the transporter beam.
There’s no reason in-universe to assume transporters are killing machines. Not while continuity of consciousness is shown to exist, and their universe has such completely different rules than ours.
I’ve been trying to avoid this hijack (is it still a highjack this long into it?), but just wanted to make 2 points.
First, I think the OP about Phlox being a Luddite is thoroughly debunked. He is more than willing to use any tech available to him, high or low, and his usage of various animal and vegetable sources is more a pro than con, in that in a pre-replicator universe, having self-sustaining methods of treatment when you’re at the end of a very long supply chain is helpful. Especially since the Denobulans are, if anything, more liberal in utilizing advanced medical treatements, such as biological engineering, which human Luddites refuse to examine due to their historical trama though the era of DS9.
Okay, Pro Phlox rant off.
Back to the transporter hijack. Leaving aside the fictional science vs real science debate, I think it’s clear that in context, the transporter is not a murder machine. If it were just humans using it, yeah, I could see (barely) that the utter ease of use would convince our fundamentally lazy race to use it and ignore/conceal the side effects. But transporters are used by the vast majority of Trek races, not just humans. And while Starfleet could potentially be a dumping ground for humanity’s more aggressive individuals, would Vulcans and others be willing to die frequently for such reasons? Sure, militant societies such as Romulans and Klingons might, or it might be concealed by their higher ups, but many open societies use them as well.
For that matter, we have amply in-universe reasons to accept that there is a ‘soul’ for lack of better word, such as the Vulcan’s Katra, which, at least in the case of Spock, we see surviving multiple transporter visits. Now, we could make the argument that the soul is spawned from the flesh, and that each time you re-create the flesh, you create a new soul, but well, that would be an interesting religious thesis. Is this soul heir to the virtue or sin of the previous body/soul system prior to the transport? Someone get me a Jesuit!
Was there technobabble while Roddenberry was running the show? He was in pretty bad shape during the Next Generation.
Vulcans, definitely. They’re highly utilitarian. There’s no practical argument against transporter use; it’s a net positive for any society that uses them.
If Star Trek has souls, then the transporter can certainly create them, or the conditions for one forming. Unless you want to argue that one of the Rikers doesn’t have one.
The transporter trip that duplicated Riker wasn’t Riker’s first transportation. If the transporter creates duplicates without souls, then neither version has one.
There is always the Whipping Star version, where you aren’t duplicated and your soul comes through all right, except with increasingly complicated quantum entanglements, but that’s OK, except when it isn’t in which case you die or go insane. [ETA I think TNG mentioned “transporter psychosis” !]
Just thought of something…given the insane levels of genetic manipulation (and whatever the hell Dax and Worf had to do) to have viable offspring that didnt die in the womb…you’d think Sarek would be a hell of a lot more happy to see Spock just…LIVE…rather then such an ass, “So human”.
I mean if you’re going to go to so much trouble, you should be more invested rather then so aloof.
Maybe he wanted a girl. he always had a soft spot for human women,
The idea that human/Vulcan hybrids were hard to make seems pretty new. I don’t think the topic was ever discussed prior to Enterprise.
Human/Klingon and human/Betazoid crosses seem to be easy (eg no plot-relevant genetic tinkering needed).
The mother of Worf’s son, K’Ehleyr, was a Klingon/Human hybrid. IIRC, when her character was first introduced, she explicitly said that her birth required medical intervention.
Well, if the human parent was the mother, K’ehleyr probably tried to punch her way out of the womb. 
Despair thy charm, and let the angel thou hast served tell thee, K’ihleyr from her mother’s womb untimely ripped herself.
Or, as it is known to the Children of Tama: “K’Ehleyr, at her birth”. And everyone present cringes, or vomits.
The ideas been around, IIRC, since before TNG, but only in the novelizations.
In fanzines, human-Vulcan hybrids are sometimes quite easy, as in the shortest fan-fict I’m aware of, called (something like) “At the time, it seemed like the Logical Thing to Do”: the entire text is “You’re WHAT!”
isn’t that true for all militaries even modern/real-life ones? I mean until the 90s the military was considered the last resort for anyone who couldn’t find a job or life? Or up to WW2 when the army was considered so low class and troublesome that no one wanted a base build near their town?
Now as for the transporters … There’s a small game series that makes fun of the concept saying in an in-game historical text “when humans and an alien race (i forget the name) developed teleportation they realized after a few accidents that despite what silly ancient earth shows and cinema presented transporters can not be used for sentient beings and the galactic force mandated it to be used for only cargo and material transportation”
This is drifting way off topic, but, no, that’s frankly rather silly and insulting. There certainly have been (and given the sheer numbers almost certainly are) incompetent admirals (and generals) in the U.S. military, and in other militaries as well. But not 80%! How could any organization, much less one as large as the U.S. Navy, manage even day to day peacetime operation if 80% of the highest ranking officers were evil or incompetent?
As to this:
I don’t doubt that was a common belief in many circles. I’m sure it still is. That doesn’t mean that it’s true. Since the U.S. military became an all-volunteer force in the '70s, it’s been able to be quite selective in recruitment. There have been dips in quality, as with the Army’s personnel crunch at the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars in the '00s and a dramatic increase in issuance of enlistment waivers. But in general, military personnel have to have a high school diploma or GED, pass a proficiency test, and have a clean criminal record. The result is, despite lingering and widespread misapprehensions, most U.S. military recruits are actually better educated and more employable than the U.S. populace as a whole, within their age group.
And that’s not even getting into the officer corps, which is where admirals would come from. The U.S. service academies have always been highly selective. They might not compare to top tier elite universities as far as average academic achievement of their students, but their have always been more bright, ambitious applicants than slots.
In both cases, contrary to lingering misapprehensions, the recruiting pool isn’t primarily the “underclass” or people with no options. It’s primarily working class and lower middle class kids.
The fact that the Army might have been viewed that way doesn’t make it so. But to an extent, that was probably an accurate perception at that time. Prior to World War II, the U.S. Army was tiny, and enlisted soldiers were poorly paid. The officer corps was, again, a different story. But a big part of what might have made having a military post nearby seem unattractive to a town wasn’t necessarily that soldiers and sailors were the incompetent dregs of society. It’s that they were young men. If you get a bunch of 18 and 19 year old guys together, they pretty much are going to get into trouble. College kids tend to have a terrible reputation among “townies” as well.