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Cake day: June 28th, 2022

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  • The Ukraine’s (and the west’s) demands are utterly insane, but others have addressed that better. Just gonna nitpick that the USSR only put missiles in Cuba as a response to the US having stationed missiles in Turkey, right on the Soviet’s doorstep. It should be called the ‘Turkish Missile Crisis’ or the ‘NATO Missile Crisis’ - it’s always the US starting this shit and then, like an abusive partner, gaslighting the world into accepting their narrative, painting themselves as the victim when they’re the aggressor.






  • I’ve seen all 10 films many times (no Abrams, your trash doesn’t count) and I really don’t remember an alien supercomputer saying any such thing. Or even being in any of those films. The closest thing would be V’Ger in TMP, which ‘scans’ (and thus kills) the Deltan navigator, Lt. Ilia and recreates her in the form of a computer probe with her memories to interact with the crew. While the crew do hit on the idea of using the probe’s memories of the dead Ilia’s romantic feelings for Captain Decker against her (it?) and that is really horrible in hindsight knowing what we now know about Decker’s actor…

    As for the cold war thing, yeah the Klingons were explicitly meant to be a standin for the USSR, and of course, an American tv show of that era is gonna present a biased perspective, tbh I feel they did a better job than many others would have at presenting even the possibility of peace between the two. Worth mentioning one can extend the cold war metaphor to include others - the Romulans being the PRC (sneaky, authoritarian, collective-minded aliens with yellow skin even! Plus baseless accusations from one character in Balance of Terror that they ‘stole’ Federation technology to make their ships even though they clearly have advanced technology the Federation doesn’t have like the cloaking device and the plasma torpedo). If we accept the Romulans as being the Chinese to the Klingon USSR and Federation as NATO, one could posit the Vulcans as kinda like Taiwan/ROC/KMT? I’m not so sure on that one but the argument could be made.

    I think one has to consider the material circumstances in which the shows were made. TOS was made in the 60s at the height of the cold war, TNG was made in the 80s/90s and reflects prejudices of that era (the showrunner once Gene died, Rick Berman, infamously vetoing ANY LGBT representation at all - going so far as to interfere with DS9’s plans for Garak/Bashir, a show he wasn’t running). I think it’s about as good as one can expect given the environment in which it was made. Especially compared to modern Trek having people living in poverty and drug addiction on Earth of all places, and even having an “Elon Musk high school” or something mentioned in one episode.