MLF
Church of Jeff
Sarathai@jeffowski As long as you spill the blood of your enemies in the name of the empire, no one cares who you love and as what gender you identify.
I like it!
@sarathai --
Just shows you that you just need to find your crowd... 😮
@jeffowski Who knew... The LGTBQ+ is finding their closest ally on the bottom of keg of blood wine and a bowl of G'aGh!
@sarathai -- It doesn't matter where you find your allies, as long as you have them.
Pseudonymous 
They care not who spills blood, only that it flows. 
@sarathai @jeffowski
@BackFromTheDud @ami
Just a reminder that there was a fight wih the network to get these background characters to be allowed to wear whatever future clothes the costume department wanted. The arguing included the idea that the Federation's Star Fleet allowed crew members to choose which official uniform they wore. 
@VictimOfSimony @sarathai @BackFromTheDud @ami --
The funny thing about it all is that it looks very comfy and perfectly suited to sitting around doing shipboard stuff.
Maybe not practical on the away mission.
@jeffowski
@sarathai
@BackFromTheDud
@ami
What do you mean by, "wear my dress uniform?" 
Dudula the Dud@VictimOfSimony @sarathai @jeffowski @ami a kilt would be better, especially if it was a utility kilt. Not everyone has the legs for a mini skirt. 😕
@BackFromTheDud @VictimOfSimony @sarathai @ami --
Remember, it is an option, not a requirement.
That's the joy of it all.
belfinwe 🇳🇴@VictimOfSimony @sarathai @jeffowski @BackFromTheDud @ami Reminds me of Zapp Brannigan from Futurama 😁
Brian MacDonald@jeffowski The assertion that Star Trek was never political is one of the most annoying things in sci-fi fandom.
Star Trek has *usually* been the quiet, understated, matter-of-fact kind of political. And often that's enough.
And then there's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," because sometimes you just want to beat the message into people's heads with a club.
ocdtrekkie@bmac @jeffowski I will say that I feel the usual subtlety in the classic shows was more effectively persuasive.
I don't think Discovery was more political or progressive than Deep Space Nine, but obviously conservatives recoiled at how direct the writing was, so instead of slowly teaching people how to be better, they didn't watch it at all. (And whined about it online.)
Jon A. Cruz@ocdtrekkie @bmac @jeffowski subtlety? Given the times, it was definitely not so subtle. Sure, subtle things permeated most of the episodes, but it would regularly smack you in the face with it like in "A Private Little War", or "The Omega Glory".
The rythem felt like monster of the week episode, silly little episode, SMACK YOU IN THE FACE WOKENESS episode.
@joncruz @bmac @jeffowski I mean thinking of DS9 and even TNG, Star Trek allowed characters that were actively racist and sexist *to be heroic characters*. They certainly did not celebrate those aspects of those characters and highlighted them as teaching moments, but on their face, Star Trek episodes had a cast of characters that held very flawed views and were still accepted.
@ocdtrekkie @bmac @jeffowski yes, exactly. The *good* kind of inclusive types (as opposed to the Nazi bar kind)
David Brin wrote a great piece that touches on that
https://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/
Jesse Spielman@bmac @jeffowski my unified theory of ST and Dr Who is when the Dr Who writers watched the ep where Kirk and pals beam down to Morgulon 9 and meet the mud men, they missed the part where the mud men society was a (clear! political!) metaphor for fascism / racism / classism and instead thought the point was the sweet mud men costumes.
Don’t be like straw men Dr. Who writers! Trek has always been political!
Today is a good day to shout ‘trans rights are human rights’!
@bmac @jeffowski My mom once described the entire genre as just people reading dials and babbling about aliens. For her it’s all aesthetics. However, Scifi (esp soft sci fi) has always been at its best when it’s been about ideas that mirror and reflect our own society.
I will never understand people who enjoy the genre purely for the aesthetics and miss the message / deep ideas / social critical.
I promise the best parts go way beyond dial checking.
zbrown@zbrown @bmac @jeffowski my impression from the small (10?) number of episodes I've seen is that the show is mostly about having adventures in space and time and that it's sort of a love letter to the camp that I think was the unintentional byproduct of very low sci-fi budgets. But I make the comparison to be silly and hyperbolic ("straw men") -- I'm sure there are great episodes that have things to say! No disrespect meant!
@heavyimage @zbrown @jeffowski
I would suggest that "The Happiness Patrol" is just about as subtle in its political commentary as "Last Battlefield," but you'd need to be familiar with 80s British politics for it to land.
Who has always been political, back to its origins, just like Trek.
(And the straw men were in the "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" two-parter in 2007.)
@bmac @heavyimage @jeffowski subtle that one was not 🙈
I wonder as well if things like the jab at Boris/Tories in Joy to the World at Christmas are noticed outside of the UK (or even entirely noticed inside).
The ‘campness’ itself is arguably something of an anti-Thatcherism for that matter — it was a later addition to the show.
@heavyimage @bmac @jeffowski having run for 60 years (admittedly with a 15 year gap in the middle) Who has had a whole bunch of episodes in different veins — the second ever story, that introduced the Daleks in 1963, was somewhat anti-Nazi.
In 1975 we have ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ where we have the predecessors of the Daleks in blatantly Nazi uniforms, leading up to the Doctor trying to tackle ‘do we kill baby Hitler’.
@heavyimage @bmac @jeffowski More recently we have 2017's Oxygen where the punchline is ‘The end point of capitalism. A bottom line where human life has no value at all. We're fighting an algorithm, a spreadsheet. Like every worker, everywhere, we're fighting the suits.’ (just two episodes prior we also punched racists, no allegory involved, just literal racist punching).
@heavyimage @bmac @jeffowski Arachnids in the UK, 2018, involved some kinda painful Trump mocking, 2023 brought ‘The Star Beast’ with it's pro-trans subplot broadcast on prime-time BBC that may well have saved lives on this cursed island, and finally just last week Who was making jabs at how pervasive ableism is in society.
@heavyimage @bmac @jeffowski These are just some examples that come to mind, obviously not every episode is ‘political’ and it doesn't ‘land’ every time either, but Who has often had ‘a message’ right since the start.
Not to mention behind the scenes things like Verity Lambert, the first producer, being the only woman with that title at the BBC at the time.
(I need a longer character count, sorry 🙈)
@heavyimage @bmac @jeffowski we can argue it should be obvious and non-controversial, I'd be right there with you, but this here isn't exactly ‘not political’ — it's borderline a manifesto:
The Value of A Life
@bmac @jeffowski or "A Private Little War", or "Patterns of Force", or "The Conscience of the King", or "The Omega Glory"...
I had got in an argument with some idiot on Twitter who argued that and also that it was just based on the US military which he claimed had solved racism by the '60s! (I served as a Sargeant in the '90s, while this idiot was still a kid, and it definitely was not solved)
Turns out he was one of the Sad Puppy leaders, so that explained that. Failed writer white dude…
@bmac @jeffowski (FYI TOS ended before he was even born, whereas I technically watched its original run on broadcast TV)
Janis@joncruz @bmac @jeffowski You better hope he failed. I hear the audience for his kind of claptrap isn't shrinking.
@janisf @bmac @jeffowski at the time I checked he still had failed to progress past publishing a novella. Probably a big factor in that campaign was privileged white boys being unable to comprehend that they were failing due to their own lack of talent.
Even the conservative Baen writers I'd read still got a fair bit of wokenes in, if nothing else then from having a brain.
On the other hand you can contrast that with someone like Martha Wells, who's pronoun centric woke fiction is now on TV
@janisf @bmac @jeffowski oh, and the * puppy movement itself appears to have failed, especially since their attempt to troll by nominating Chuck Tingle backfired so spectacularly on them.
Rora Borealis@joncruz @janisf @bmac @jeffowski That whole debacle resulted in the world being introduced to Chuck Tingle. It almost makes up for the whole thing. Almost.
Church of Jeff (@[email protected])
https://youtu.be/n_71QzBeaRg Why Are Conservatives So Media Illiterate? #StarTrek #MAGA #MediaIlliteracy #PunchNazis #ToBoldlyGo
BeeCycling has moved@bmac @jeffowski I wonder if it's to do with the way that the political issues dealt with in TOS and even TNG now barely even seem political, as they've just become mainstream ideas that nearly everyone holds, like equality and tolerance etc. But people watching in the 60s would have found them more controversial. Modern Trek covers modern issues, where there is still disagreement between people, so it seems like it's "suddenly" political.
Howard Cohen@jeffowski Klingons honor relationships. One of the most admirable parts of their mythical culture.