I watched the entire video, but I timestamped the link to where I believe it matters most for any comrade that ever liked Star Trek, liberal idealistic and quasi-militaristic flaws and all, and would like to see a succinct and thorough summary of what they might have already felt, may have already inductively collected for themselves, but got it drowned out by “well the TNG gang got together by the end of Picard Season 3 so just enjoy it like a popcorn movie, 4/5” or even worse brainworms like “section 31 is based and it’s just cold hard reality that such an agency would have to exist for the Federation to exist, just like in based Deep Space 9 which was totally about wars and genocidal biowarfare plots and how cool and necessary they are.”

The Trek fandom site in the Lemmyverse is loaded with insufferable liberal/libertarian brainworms and a fair amount of Thermian Arguments that justify anything that was presented on screen as not only good, but necessary if they were done by protagonist characters, and not just the flaws, weaknesses, and (for lack of a better term) sins of characters that weren’t intended to be infallible, let alone blindly emulated, no matter how cool it was when Sisko punched Q or whatever.

TL;DR: I hope comrades find value in this concluding section of a much larger video, or maybe even watch the whole thing, which I also think is worthwhile. Also, I fucking despise Section 31 apologists because they make the Lemmyverse’s Trek site unbearable for me. If Kurtzman gets his way (especially with that Section 31 series he keeps jerking off about), Trek will become increasingly murderfucky gory edgy black ops obsessed bootlicking schlock with a vague and redundant nostalgia flavor.

  • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    3 months ago

    section 31 is based and it’s just cold hard reality that such an agency would have to exist for the Federation to exist

    i mean this is literally my defense of China/the USSR/DPRK etc etc, you literally do need some clandestine bullshit intelligence agency when you’re beset by those of others

    this isn’t a section 31 defense because I’m not enough of a nerd to know all the holocausts they’ve done for liberalism

      • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        3 months ago

        Hehe, reluctant agreement, my favorite kind of agreement gendo-tent

        But yeah no i agree, it’s just lib shit if it’s used to handwave away “we did a genocide” or whatever. Nutrek sucks, it’s just action schlock and it’s not even good it’s all shaky cam action schlock

      • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        3 months ago

        Some of the morally questionable things in DS9 are more justifiable. Like In The Pale Moonlight, where Sisko and Garak assassinate a Romulan Senator to trick Romulus into joining the Dominion War on the Federation’s side. Hell, I expect that when the Romulans eventually find out about that they’ll respect it as a very Romulan sort of plot. Notably, Section 31 wasn’t involved in that one.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          3 months ago

          My favorite part of Discovery was the episode where the anthropologist yells “holy shit Klingons! You have to punch them in the face as hard as you can right now or we’ll all die!” And then they don’t listen to the anthropologist and they don’t ship-punch the klingons and then they do all die. Idk if the other episodes were good.

              • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                3 months ago

                Somewhere in another universe there’s a version of DS9 where the focus was on rebuilding Bajor and all the complex post-revolution politics that inevitably happens, and not on technobabble and CGI space battles. We got glimpses of what it could have been like with episodes like “Duet”, “Shakaar”, “Progress” and “Past Prologue”. What could have been.

                  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    3
                    ·
                    3 months ago

                    Oh fully agreed on that. My personal litmus test is what they think of “Duet”. If they don’t remember it, that’s a bad sign, because it’s easily the best episode of the series.

                    I do think that DS9 was consistently better written than TNG on average. But on rewatches I just find myself disappointed with how many missed opportunities there were. In canon, Bajor is an old world, rich in a variety of cultures. There’s so much that could have been done with that setting in a post-occupation political-infighting context. The first few seasons started to go down this road. But in the end we got almost nothing. Honestly during rewatches I tend to skip most of the latter half of the series. I just don’t find the war to be interesting.

                    In contrast TNG was never really trying to be anything other than modernized-for-the-1980s TOS. Just high-concept episodic sci-fi. It succeeded brilliantly at that once Roddenberry’s counterproductive micromanagement was over by the end of season 2.

            • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              3 months ago

              To be fair he made the planet toxic only to Humans after Eddington tried to make it toxic only to Cardassians

              I mean its a bit outta pocket, but there’s a million planets and he was trying to make a really funny point

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      3 months ago

      Yeah but there’s a difference here - Communist intelligence units are full of commies, and can be a net good and continue to be a net good as long as they continue to be full of commies. Their goal is to defend the star trek future. Their enemies are the guys who think that Section 31 make cool protagonists.

      If you look at the cold war, one thing I’m amazed by is how cheap you can by an American patriot. It’s fucking chump change, beer money. And it’s always because America’s spies don’t have financial stability and a good quality of life.

      Meanwhile the Russians had guys inside Hoovers toilet counting the boils on his ass.

      You’ll find endless discussion on why, but i’m pretty sure at the end of the day the commies were fighting for an idea, and the americans, regardless of what they believed, were fighting for a roof, braces for their kid, cancer treatment for their mom.

      The section 31 these show runners have created aren’t hard nose old revolutionaires who have seen and done terrible things in the name of a good and honest ideology. The show runners are all end of history kids. They grew up after the world of ideology and belief had ended. For them there’s only the status quo, forever.

      Starfleet can’t boldly go because they’ve already arrived at the end of history. Starfleet is america, section 31 is the cia and fbi and army, the only conceivable goal is to maintain the status quo forever. And int he world of the show runners that means that as the status quo decays for reasons they are ideologically not allowed to understand the intelligence services, the section 31s, use increasingly mask off violence to keep the wheels on.

      Sci fi is always about society in the present day. Picard is about america, no. With no soviet union who can the romulans or klingons be? There’s no one left except competing “bad” capitalists. There’s no revolutionary future, just a static liberal now. They can’t tell star trek stories because they don’t live in a world where kids can be allowed to dream star trek dreams, because that would be better than what we have. And better isn’t allowed. The status quo must be defended, and that demands that the star trek future, the better future, the we came in peace for all man kind future, has to be killed. And it’s most important that it be killed in the dreams of children.