You can do anything you want in the whole universe except cross James T. Kirk. He will fuck you up!
He’ll fuck you up, He’ll fuck you up.
Yes, Jim will fuck you up.
Just like he did to Klingons in those days.
“We come in peace; shoot to kill.”
Star Trekkin’ is a cumulative song. Each time the refrain is sung, one more character’s tag line is added:
**Uhura**: *"There's Klingons on the starboard bow."*
**Spock**: *"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it." *
**McCoy**: *"It's worse than that — he's dead, Jim!"*
**Kirk**: *"We come in peace; shoot to kill."*
**Scotty**: *"Ye canna change the laws of physics!"*
Apparently, even Starfleet personnel have trouble following orders. In “Time Squared,” which I’m watching right now, Normal Picard specifically tells Troi to stay close to Timewarp Picard, and the first thing she does after he walks away is to leave Sick Bay. Ten minutes later, she’s on the bridge and Jean-Luc doesn’t even ask what the hell she’s doing there!
WTF?!? :eek:
We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a **stainless steel rat **can be at home in this environment
Or possibly a Transparent Aluminum Rat
The Federation was Roddenberry’s “utopia” and as past attempts at utopia have shown, people can strive for it but if they achieve it they have nothing else to reach. To paraphrase Browning “Your reach must exceed your grasp,else what’s a Heaven for?”
The Federation only seems to be a great place if don’t consider what it took to get there and what it lacks for it to remain as it is.
Actually, the Federation is the epitome of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The members of Starfleet, far from being venerated heroes, are malcontents and regressives who do not fit into Federation culture and are doomed to a fate of wandering the stars in search of adventure and excitement and really wild things, which are totally unpalletable to the typical Federation citizen. They are dicks who manufactue artificial crises to make themselves seem critical while sucking off the public teat to fund their ever-growing ‘Starfleet’ buildup.
Stranger
I’m sure they have other means of shipping cargo by then.
Matt Yglassias’s take is here: Typically, Picard and the Enterprise-D face problems—Wesley’s been sentenced to death, Riker is held prisoner on a pre-warp planet, Troi’s mom is coming to visit, Tasha Yar is being pressed into a forced marriage—that could be easily solved by photon torpedoes or a commando squad, and the real dilemma is how to get out of the jam without resorting to violence.* We also see the practical operation of a post-scarcity socialist economy. Picard explains in Star Trek: First Contact that “money doesn’t exist in the 24th century,” when “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.” Instead, “we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
And it could hardly be otherwise. Consider the miraculous technology of the replicator—a machine that can seemingly create anything out of thin air, based on rudimentary raw materials plus energy. When computers and energy can substitute for productive human labor, either the energy supply will be controlled democratically for Federation-style liberal socialism, or else it will fall into the hands of some narrow clique and give us the fascistic authoritarianism of the Klingons, the Romulans, or the Cardassians. Under the circumstances, nothing resembling capitalism as we know it could survive. As Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program, the material prosperity made possible by ever-better technology is the necessary precursor to an economic system ruled by the principle, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And that’s the principle the Federation lives by.
Well practically speaking there are precious few real life problems that can’t be solved with a barrage of photon torpedoes. Basically Yglassias is framing the franchise as some sort of commie-pinko pseudo-paradise. If they had any sense the Federation would have fired Picard and put Steve McGarrett in charge.
Except that as far as we can tell no one knows that any of this is happening. Look at Family. Picard, captain of a ship which just saved Earth, goes home. Does anyone say thanks for keeping them from being assimilated? Nope. I bet Star Fleet told the families of all those who got killed by the Borg that there was a really, really big warp freeway accident. Fog or something. Do civilians even know the Borg exist?
Has anyone ever seen a reporter in the TNG universe? In the Star Wars universe the Emperor probably killed them all off, but there is supposed to be free expression in ST.
Space then is like Afghanistan today only less in the news.
Again, such a society cannot possibly be healthy, since it would require third parties to arbitrarily dictate what constitutes one’s abilities and what constitutes one’s needs.
When you can use transporter technology to fabricate what the hell you want including tea and scones, people can just state what their needs are and you hand it to them. If they want heroin, well there are forms for that, just like today.
But no, a society like that wouldn’t be healthy, which is why Star Trek actually depicts a military dictatorship with the great majority of off-screen civilians zoned out on soma.
As a matter of fact, to be fair…yes. Even photojournalists.
'Course, while they may have free speech, we have no good look on who’s listening. Whether they be hive-mind transhumans chasing comets in their dreams, cowed Outer Party sheeple, or throngs of new-agers wrapped up in their standards of self-congratulatory propriety. Or perhaps a queasy melange of all three.
Also, it occurs t’me that the Earth-derived Fed civilizations are also the result of a massive culling—the Eugenics Wars, and World War III and it’s aftermath of horrors. Who knows what kind of eu- or dysgenic effect that had? How many cultures and bloodlines were wiped out—and who were the kind of people who survived, to set the stange for Earth’s future “Utopia”?
That fails on two counts. Consider, if I may be allowed to cross irreality boundaries, the case of Louis Wu. He was a “wirehead” who spent his days in the thrall of his droud,not terribly different from a heroin addict. But Louis Wu was kind of an outlier, most people in society were not like that (perhaps because there were restrictions on getting a droud implant in the first place). Why would one assume that the Federation would be a significantly different type of society from the future with Louis Wu?
And in that vein, setting aside the relevant goofy plots from TOS, Soma? Really? Why bother with a drug when direct pleasure-center stimulation would probably be as easy as modifying a tricorder? No side effects, no supply issues, just endless electronic happiness, if’n you want it.
You guys can’t guess the future because the Enterprise future is post-Singularity. Humanity has gone so far, so fast in 500 years that it’s unknowable. That would be my honest answer to what the Federation is, though to be sure the crew of the Enterprise sure looks like unmodified, normal human beings from our present day. I suspect that’s simply because presenting them as cybernetically jacked-up humans who are half supercomputer and physically far beyond us in a lot of ways would not make for a watchable show.
I haven’t gotten far enough into DS9 for that reference. I do remember the ones in Generations - but they are more like the people sent to supermarket openings than actual reporters. Or the people in our PR department who wrote stuff for the employee newsletter.
This “Singularity” idea is just fantasy nonsense. Star Trek is … umm …
Unless people just aren’t paying attention (not impossible, actually), it would be hard to hide the Dominion attack (and the senseless destruction of the Golden gate bridge), the whale probe near-extinction event, or the large scar cut into Florida.
V’ger could be unknown-the events happened in space. The events of First Contact (complete assimilation of earth) was undone when the time change was corrected. Q’s meddling in the primordial soup-likewise.
Large planetary destruction or population annihilation-the events of Doomsday Machine, The Immunity Syndrome, for example, are similar to Afghanistan - out of planet, out of mind.
I think a rat with a miniature subspace shield generator and a tachyon-flux modulator. This is Star Trek after all.
(Off topic-could you see a SSR movie with say, Brad Pitt as DeGriz and Angelina Jolie as Angelina? Just the first book, please. No SSR for President (Leverage did it better))
Expanding upon this thought: Even if people are assimilated or killed couldn’t they be cloned? Don’t the various sickbays and medical labs have detailed genetic makeups of them. Can’t all of their thoughts and memories be recorded?
Just clone a replica, give it all of the “primary person’s” knowledge and keep on keepin’ on. Nobody dies and the adventures just continue.