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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

    The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.



  • When I call a fern (or wolf, crab, crow, whale, shark), at that level of syntactical broadly used common word I’m mostly talking about the phenotype, not the genotype. If someone was saying something about a specific fern, then we can argue against those romantic idea of deep time, a little. I mean, we’re probably all descendants of some ancient panspermia event anyway if you want to feel some connection to the ancient forgotten past.






  • Autocorrect seems to have gotten noticably worse for me in recent years. I regularly find that the entirely correct words which I type out get changed to something completely different because the autocorrect decided that I couldn’t possibly mean that word. It regularly helpfully replaces entire words after I hit space and have moved on to the next. By that time, I’m usually focused on the next word, so slip-ups that I almost never make at a dumb keyboard (like its vs. it’s, there vs. their, your vs. you’re, or were vs. where vs. wear) happen with shocking regularity unless I proofread the entire comment. As a perfect example, I had to proofread and fix multiple instances of such while typing those examples.