OnToMars
Now on to the making of films!
Member # 621
posted
quote:As an aside, how do you reconcille the untopian morals of Star Trek with these ultra-conservative, rights-limiting, torture approving, anything goes against an enemy viewpoints?
This continues to be a fascinating and perplexing question for me.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
posted
My skills typing at work (often with one hand) continue to decline- it should be "utopian morals".
It's a valid question though- a LOT of guys over at starshipmodeler.com are both huge Trek fans while be extremely conservative republican hawks.
I just dont see Picard's morals lining up with "preemptive warfare" or Kirk ordering torture of a prisoner, much less Sisko racial (species?) profiling debarking people from DS9.
Janeway's shameful behavior notwithstanding.
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
I don't have time to be swarmed, so I'm going to just hit the highlights. Pardon any shorthand I might use, and please ask if something doesn't make sense rather than make an ass of yourself by jumping to stupid conclusions like "he said every NATO country is an enemy!"
quote:The recession is a result of the free market and a lack of oversight and accountability vis à vis irresponsible banking practices.
These irresponsible banking practices were largely necessitated by the government. The expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act (pushing banks toward riskier lending practices) plus the presence and expansion of the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation . . . government companies, in essence (which were providing a largely false guarantee for risky loans). . . warped the natural market landscape.
Once the government started trying to effectively subsidize housing in an effort to help with "affordable housing", the increased demand naturally sent home prices higher. Hence the housing bubble, which made homes less affordable. So much for government intervention. And now that the bubble is bursting thanks to government intervention in the mortgage market, the whole planet's in the shit.
It's been said that we're all Keynesians now, which is true to an extent. Government's role in the economy should be as limited as possible, enforcing the laws of justice, supporting research that is too long-term to be readily profitable to companies, and keeping on an even keel the natural ebb and flow of unbridled capitalism.
However, beyond that, government becomes the problem.
It is the height of perversion to declare the present crisis to be the fault of the free market or Wall Street greed, because the free market in this case scarcely existed. Further, Wall Street is supposed to make money, and they have to do it in whatever ways they can when government is involved.
quote:In short, what America has been in the past is not what it can continue to be in the future if we want it to survive
You list the sins of America, and they are grave ones, yes. There are many more you don't mention, and some you probably don't even know.
The times were different then, and the understanding of many people was far less than it is now. Even the last 100 years has seen massive changes as classical-liberal ideals have finally begun to flourish.
In response to your list, though, I'm interested to know . . . what of America's noblest successes and moral triumphs? Why can you not bring yourself to acknowledge those?
See, when you look at America's past, you judge it by your own modern idealism and find it wanting. But, frankly, you're doing it wrong. Compare America to what came before.
In a time when national democracy was a lost ideal, a collection of brave men gathered together to see a new democracy born.
In a time when man held his fellow man in bondage, not even recognizing him as such, and in a country where plentiful slave labor was most needed, we fought a self-destructive war to destroy it, to free those who few then believed capable of equality.
In a time when a whole race was being exterminated on one side of the globe while to the east the world was being conquered, we supported the good and, when attacked, became their destroyers.
When an iron curtain was set to descend upon the world and millions lost lives and liberty, we held the evil empire in check and, almost without firing a shot, managed to make it crumble to dust.
Through our capitalist ways came much good. The common man had incentive to innovate in a way the Romans never mastered. Men of energy found their reward. Our greatest heroes were entrepreneurs . . . those who created work and jobs and value, not out of thin air, but from the work of their minds.
But that time is passing, and that candle flickers more and more. In so many ways, our system seems now more based on sapping the energy of men, not allowing it to flourish.
Before burdensome taxes and excessive litigation and the departure from the gold standard, it was comparatively easy for a man to make a profit. But now? Hell, I wouldn't start a business here.
And yes, that all ties in to the leftward drift.
quote:there should never have been a war there in the first place
Saddam spent years trying to convince everyone he had WMDs.
He succeeded. Dumbass.
This, while also thumbing his nose at the UN and trying to assassinate our former president. And, even before Bush's initial bipartisan administration, folks from the left and the right were saying there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda via Sudan.
With all that to go on, over a decade of information Clinton had generally failed to act on, and after having seen 9/11, our president chose to remove that threat.
As it happens, Saddam didn't have threatening levels of WMDs. But still, America is safer with modern Iraq than it was before 2003.
And you know, it's really scary that Obama's opinion never changed no matter what the facts on the ground were.
I also want to note here that I heard some guy on the radio the other day talking about how silly it was for us to be there, because why would a terrorist trouble himself to come here when he could go try to kill Americans closer to home in Iraq.
I laughed out loud, because he had stated the best reason to be there without even understanding it. We kill them there so they can't kill us here.
quote:So, let me make sure I've got this right. You are arguing that, because no war has been declared, the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay cannot, by definition, be prisoners of war.
Wrong. It has nothing to do with declarations of war. It has everything to do with who we're fighting.
Imagine, if you will, that we were terror-attacked by forces of the multinational corporation of Coca-Cola, and we wished to respond.
Those arrested within the United States would probably be subject to relatively normal legal proceedings, just as we've done with AQ assholes on our soil. But suppose that, out on the battlefields of the world, as we tried to ferret out these terrorists, we captured some Coke employees on foreign soil who were shooting at our men.
What do we do with them? Are they prisoners of war? How can they be for Geneva purposes? They have no country, no formal military, nothing. And hell, Coke employees would at least be wearing uniforms or Coca-Cola paraphernalia. Al Qaeda bitches don't even do that.
Yet still, even without particular prompting, we gave them shelter, food, the Quran, and so on. Yes, those we believed to have actionable intelligence found themselves on the ass end of enhanced interrogations. We even waterboarded three guys for a grand combined total of like 90 seconds.
Despite being the sort of nuts who are ready to strap bombs on themselves and die, thirty seconds of waterboarding was enough to make them sing like canaries.
Bleeding hearts proclaim this to be torture and use an argument of self interest to try to stand against it, namely that our troops might be waterboarded by enemies. Oh, to be so lucky! Given what Al Qaeda does to our captured troops, waterboarding sounds like paradise.
quote:You cite Vietnam and Iraq as other examples of undeclared—thus, not—wars.
An unfortunate choice of example, since you then twisted it into something ridiculous:
quote:By your logic, then, no American captured by an enemy force since 1945 has been a prisoner of war.
Wrong. Think, man.
quote:As an aside, how do you reconcille the untopian morals of Star Trek with these ultra-conservative, rights-limiting, torture approving, anything goes against an enemy viewpoints?
I'm amused that by "untopian" you presumably mean to suggest that Trek shows a leftist utopia.
I disagree with that completely.
In the Federation, the people are free, possessing their liberty, and do not take it for granted. It is not a nanny state with whiny bleeding hearts who cry when the wind blows . . . the people we've seen are rational and resourceful.
Such as economics are shown, Trek is compatible with a post-scarcity economic structure . . . in other words, the Federation has moved past the question of capitalism versus communism.
As people become more and more separated from production from nature . . . e.g. when food doesn't come from labor and soil and dirt and blood but from the McDonald's Magic Mystery Truck . . . they lose that understanding of and conformity to nature and nature's laws that make me a conservative of the Objectivist mold.
The fact that Trek shows Earth as a paradise of personal responsibility and common sense is hopeful, because it means that somehow we won't become whining Eloi, or a Malthusian ultra-environmentalist micro-society, or lost to evil as the strong, powerful nations standing closer to what is just than most fall to the truly evil ones because they pussed out due to false and weakening philosophies from within.
And, of course, as was the Cold War fear, we didn't end up destroying ourselves, either.
The way I think such a society would evolve is by colonialism, but I don't know how precisely that would hold. When colonization stops and the colonial spirit no longer moves the people and government, the Federation will crumble soon after. A non-leftist education system, teaching logic and no-BS philosophy early on (unlike the US system), would seem key also.
I am a conservative agnostic. This puts me in a unique position, since whereas some conservatives get there via Goddidit and most agnostics just cling to their counterculturalism and go lefty, I was lucky enough to hit it all at just the right time and way to be able to think it all out, and to recognize early on that good and evil and right and wrong really do exist.
There are a lot of "Star Trek Republicans", incidentally . . . National Review Online still has its Star Trek week.
quote:I just dont see Picard's morals lining up with "preemptive warfare" or Kirk ordering torture of a prisoner, much less Sisko racial (species?) profiling debarking people from DS9.
Funny, I seem to recall Kirk threatening (with rope around the neck) to strangle a Klingon on Organia for information . . . surely evil torture and war crimes in your book. Kirk was also prepared to destroy Eminiar VII. Et cetera.
Picard had his pajama-clad hippy times, but he evolved. By the time of First Contact he was digging in the guts of his men for tactically useful equipment. As to your thought I do remember him going into the Neutral Zone to search-and-destroy the base from which the Romulans supposedly were going to strike. But that's not "preemptive warfare" in your book, I guess.
Your Sisko example is poor because such things were more Odo's role. But indeed, "the only people who can really handle Klingons are Klingons." And indeed, Odo used profiling frequently . . . "Visionary", for instance, featured Odo going on alert because Klingons were around, it figured in his investigation in "Improbable Cause", et cetera.
It's not like Odo was putting out APBs for a tall humanoid (ooh, can we even say humanoid without offending someone?) wearing full-body metal and fur and leather protective garments.
In a leftist utopia, that would be how to describe a Klingon, because just saying "get the damn Klingon" would be racist . . . hence the silly APBs of some modern police.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
"But still, America is safer with modern Iraq than it was before 2003."
Even if there had been WMDs there, there were no missiles with a range to reach us. Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the United States. Seems to me, we're a lot less safe, now that we've opened up Iraq as a breeding ground for al-Qaeda.
"It is the height of perversion to declare the present crisis to be the fault of the free market or Wall Street greed..."
The crisis came about because the Wall Street banks started buying up mortgages from smaller banks, tying a bow around them, and selling them off as investments. These investments became incredibly popular, because the vast majority of mortgages get paid back, with interest, so there's pretty much a guaranteed return. But, to keep up with the demand, the banks had to start giving out more and more mortgages, even to people who were obviously never going to pay them back. Pretty soon, all those shitty mortgages were defaulted, no-one wanted to buy an investment package made up of mortgages given to people with no money, and the banks were left with piles of negative money that wasn't going to be paid back to them.
If there had been regulations in place saying that they couldn't do that, everything would have been fine. But they got greedy and massively stupid and brought the whole economy down with them.
"In a time when man held his fellow man in bondage, not even recognizing him as such, and in a country where plentiful slave labor was most needed, we fought a self-destructive war to destroy it, to free those who few then believed capable of equality."
This is highly dubious example. You can't say it's an example of this country fighting for what's right, because half the country was fighting for what's wrong. Plus the fact that the North wasn't so much fighting to destroy slavery, as to stop the South from leaving the country.
"...we held the evil empire in check..."
When you've got two opposing sides who are basically doing the same stuff to each other, how exactly do you decide which one is "evil"?
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
The Civil War was *not* fought primarily to free the slaves. It was firstly and foremostly fought to prevent the loss of a resource-rich, economically productive region from the Union.
As for the convoluted "explanation" of how the current economic state is a result of Democratic socialist policies, it strikes me as being just a tad too convenient.
The "natural market landscape," if by that you mean the natural result of a free market, is a small percentage of people holding most of the wealth. That's what you get in a system where money = power. Is that really the ideal situation for our species?
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
posted
You know, it occurs to me that the earlier question of whether the detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere are prisoners of war or not is moot. The government should not be torturing anyone under any circumstances.
If anyone wants to argue that torturing someone is okay, as long as their legal status is outside the scope of certain treaties, then the person making that argument is a sadistic bastard.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
"I laughed out loud, because he had stated the best reason to be there without even understanding it. We kill them there so they can't kill us here."
It's true, if you think about it. I'd rather fucking kill all those cunt-fucks over there in the sand box, than in, oh... say, public square in Cleveland?
and you'll never change those arabs who profit from hate. they make too much money on all the idiots 'who go to a better place' blowing thier asses up in suicide bombings, or any kind of terrorism. for those people, killings a profit motive.
posted
Wow. Where to even begin to unravel the convoluted excuses you're proposing here....
quote:there should never have been a war there in the first place --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saddam spent years trying to convince everyone he had WMDs.
He succeeded. Dumbass. .
Firstly, the last recourse of people losing an argument is to resort to personal attacks: no one has said anything about you- only your positions on the topics. This mentality of "attack the person you're debating" has led to the downfall of the Republican party- it's base and uncalled for. As to the topic, no one believed Saddam had WMD- certainly not the German inteligence officers that turned over one Iraqi defector to the CIA claiming that there were WMD. Certainly not CIA satelite photography experts that had constantly monitored Iraq's former weapons facilities since the Gulf War.
The Bush administration managed to convince the majority of Americans that Iraq was in league with Al Queida: knowing that was not the case. Saddam did not want any fundamentalists undermining his absolute control of the country.
quote:
With all that to go on, over a decade of information Clinton had generally failed to act on, and after having seen 9/11, our president chose to remove that threat.
The only "threat" post 9/11 was from Bin Laden and, rather than pick a fight with Pakistan, Bush chose to invade Iraq- an "easy win" as his war hawks suggested. Now there is a greater threat as thousands of iraqi people have become radicalized- having their way of life destroyed by an invading army and years of being caught in the crossfire will "accomplish" a lot.
quote:
As it happens, Saddam didn't have threatening levels of WMDs. But still, America is safer with modern Iraq than it was before 2003.
NO, be clear on this, because it's a known fact accepted by both sides: SADDAM HAD NO WMD OF ANY KIND. Period. No chemical, biological and certainly not nuclear weapons.
As to assertion that America is "safer", that's a matter of narrow perspective- certainly the invasion of Iraq has been the recruitment tool used by evey hostile organization and country to "defend aginst American imperialism" (as Bin Laden, Chavez, Morales, Ahmadinejad, Correa to name a few puts it).
If you want to compare americans themselves being safer, consider that the 9/11 attack killed 2,973 americans while the Iraq invasion has cost the lives of 4,157 americans and wounded 30,182 more- and we are not out yet.
Bush's unnecessary war has caused far more death and pain for Americans than anything Bin Laden's goons ever managed.
But hey, no costly US real estate has been harmed in the war, so that's something, right?
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
That's how I read it, too. Saddam wanted people to think he was armed, and, when Bush et al. believed him, he ended up dead. So, bad planning on his part.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Ah, in that case, please disregard: the point I was making was for all of us to keep it as civil as possible: after all, wer'e not running for office here.
With regards to the Gitmo prisoners:
quote:What do we do with them? Are they prisoners of war? How can they be for Geneva purposes? They have no country, no formal military, nothing.
As I pointed out and gave examples to, foreign fighters and terrorists have been tried and convicted within the Federal Courts without resorting to some unlawful tribunal system. I say "unlawful" because the Supreme Court has said so- when they ordered restoration of habes corpus to the prisoners at Gitmo.
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
OnToMars
Now on to the making of films!
Member # 621
posted
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: please ask if something doesn't make sense rather than make an ass of yourself by jumping to stupid conclusions like "he said every NATO country is an enemy!"
Is it too much to ask to be respectful towards people even when you disagree with them?
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: These irresponsible banking practices were largely necessitated by the government.
No, they weren't. And even if they were, your talking point is out of date. How exactly do a few (supposedly) bad loans plunge the entire planet into a terrible recession?
The government encouraging a fraction of the total home loans made does not do something like that. Financial institutions making up imaginary money that manages to exceed the gross domestic product of their countries (by ten times!) does.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: Government's role in the economy should be as limited as possible...keeping on an even keel the natural ebb and flow of unbridled capitalism.
Which is precisely what they haven't been doing for the past few years, which is why we're in such a hole now.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: However, beyond that, government becomes the problem.
Not government. Bad government, which is not a redundant phrase.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: Further, Wall Street is supposed to make money
But what is good for Wall Street is not axiomatically good for America. Greed is not good.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: In response to your list, though, I'm interested to know . . . what of America's noblest successes and moral triumphs? Why can you not bring yourself to acknowledge those?
Because that's not the point he was making in that particular moment. If the conversation were flipped and you said something like, "America can do no right!" He would probably (and rightly) still disagree with you and list points that supported his position.
Please, please, I beg you, if you only take one point to heart from all of this, let it be this one: just because there are some of us that acknowledge our country hasn't been perfect and isn't today perfect, does not mean we do not love it or that we aren't proud of the incredible accomplishments of this country and our ancestors.
We love this country dearly, we simply acknowledge that it hasn't been perfect and isn't today, and want it to reach its full potential as a beacon for freedom, justice, and equality for the rest of the world.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: Through our capitalist ways came much good.
Good came from outside the capitalist system as well. Good things have been done when not in the name of profit.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: And, even before Bush's initial bipartisan administration, folks from the left and the right were saying there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda via Sudan.
No, they weren't. And if somebody did, they were wrong. And it doesn't change the fact that they were wrong, and that we have fought and killed over a mistake.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: We kill them there so they can't kill us here.
That's right, the Iraqi people have shouldered the immense burden of our fight. Thousands have died, been wounded, lost everything and lost everyone so that I might be (supposedly) "safer" even though I'm not. I'm not okay with that.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: It has everything to do with who we're fighting.
It doesn't matter who we're fighting. If we give up the ideals that make us better than them in the first place, then we've lost.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: I'm amused that by "untopian" you presumably mean to suggest that Trek shows a leftist utopia.
I disagree with that completely.
In the Federation, the people are free, possessing their liberty, and do not take it for granted. It is not a nanny state with whiny bleeding hearts who cry when the wind blows . . . the people we've seen are rational and resourceful.
Such as economics are shown, Trek is compatible with a post-scarcity economic structure . . . in other words, the Federation has moved past the question of capitalism versus communism.
As people become more and more separated from production from nature . . . e.g. when food doesn't come from labor and soil and dirt and blood but from the McDonald's Magic Mystery Truck . . . they lose that understanding of and conformity to nature and nature's laws that make me a conservative of the Objectivist mold.
The fact that Trek shows Earth as a paradise of personal responsibility and common sense is hopeful, because it means that somehow we won't become whining Eloi, or a Malthusian ultra-environmentalist micro-society, or lost to evil as the strong, powerful nations standing closer to what is just than most fall to the truly evil ones because they pussed out due to false and weakening philosophies from within.
And, of course, as was the Cold War fear, we didn't end up destroying ourselves, either.
The way I think such a society would evolve is by colonialism, but I don't know how precisely that would hold. When colonization stops and the colonial spirit no longer moves the people and government, the Federation will crumble soon after. A non-leftist education system, teaching logic and no-BS philosophy early on (unlike the US system), would seem key also.
I am a conservative agnostic. This puts me in a unique position, since whereas some conservatives get there via Goddidit and most agnostics just cling to their counterculturalism and go lefty, I was lucky enough to hit it all at just the right time and way to be able to think it all out, and to recognize early on that good and evil and right and wrong really do exist.
There are a lot of "Star Trek Republicans", incidentally . . . National Review Online still has its Star Trek week.
quote:I just dont see Picard's morals lining up with "preemptive warfare" or Kirk ordering torture of a prisoner, much less Sisko racial (species?) profiling debarking people from DS9.
Funny, I seem to recall Kirk threatening (with rope around the neck) to strangle a Klingon on Organia for information . . . surely evil torture and war crimes in your book. Kirk was also prepared to destroy Eminiar VII. Et cetera.
Picard had his pajama-clad hippy times, but he evolved. By the time of First Contact he was digging in the guts of his men for tactically useful equipment. As to your thought I do remember him going into the Neutral Zone to search-and-destroy the base from which the Romulans supposedly were going to strike. But that's not "preemptive warfare" in your book, I guess.
Your Sisko example is poor because such things were more Odo's role. But indeed, "the only people who can really handle Klingons are Klingons." And indeed, Odo used profiling frequently . . . "Visionary", for instance, featured Odo going on alert because Klingons were around, it figured in his investigation in "Improbable Cause", et cetera.
It's not like Odo was putting out APBs for a tall humanoid (ooh, can we even say humanoid without offending someone?) wearing full-body metal and fur and leather protective garments.
In a leftist utopia, that would be how to describe a Klingon, because just saying "get the damn Klingon" would be racist . . . hence the silly APBs of some modern police.
Thanks for this. I completely disagree with your politics, philosophy, and interpretation of Star Trek, but this is something that I have long wondered about, and I appreciate the insight.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
OnToMars
Now on to the making of films!
Member # 621
posted
I guess we're done here?
Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
