Hmm. I don't like the temporal setting, pre-TOS. As forward-thinking as TOS was for the 60s, bridge officers and brass clearly tended to be male. Now, pre-TOS, we've got a female Captain and 1st Officer on the same ship. Plus, Enterprise already tried the whole prequel thing and was generally not as warmly received as the other series.

Don't like the look of the Klingons. The whole Levodian flu thing was clearly a retcon to distinguish them from humans beyond bushy eyebrows and bronze makeup, but it was a definite improvement and set the standard going forward. Why mess with that?

The bit about "never being able to learn Vulcan" (language) made me jump to the conclusion that Sonequa Martin-Green's character was going to be a young Uhura. Guess that is wrong. She's looking foxy as hell though -- probably the best thing about the trailer in my opinion!

I guess I agree with a lot here that seem to have some doubts about this. Willing and hopeful to be proven wrong though!

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@transmorpher
so when i point out the historical implications,i am somehow automatically disregarding the inherent problems within islam itself?

and your counter is to not only NOT counter,but refuse to acknowledge the historical ramifications,because that is some political,agenda driven-drivel.

that the ONLY acceptable argument is to focus on the religion itself,and ignore all other considerations,because,again..just tools to be used and abused by the left to fuel the far right.

am i getting this right so far?

that to include history is actually the path that stops that path to move forward?

and here i was still hanging on to that tired old adage "those who refuse to recognize history,are doomed to repeat it".

i am glad that you found those authors so respectful and admired their analysis and dedication to research,but you didn't even bother to use one of THEIR arguments.you simply made claims and then told us you read some books.

dude..now i am just kinda...sad for you.

i am sorry that you are oblivious to your own myopia,and that you are coming across as condescending.yet really haven't posted anything of value that you have to contribute.

you are just pointing the finger and accusing people of their arguments being dishonest,when it appears to me that everyone here has taken the time to try to talk to you,and your replies have been fairly static.

hitchens tried to make the case,and failed in my opinion(i am not the only one),but a case i suspect you are referencing.that even if we took the history of neoliberalism,colonialism and empire building OFF the table.islam would STILL be a gaggle of extremist radicals seeking a one world caliphate.

which is why i referenced dearborn michigan.
it is why i mentioned kabul afghanistan.

we are talking about the radicalization of muslims.
why are they growing?
where do they come from?
why do they seem to be getting more and more extreme?

which many here have attempted to answer,including myself.

but YOU are addressing and entirely different question:
'what is wrong with islam as a religion"

well,a LOT in fact and i already mentioned islams dire need for a reformation,but it goes further than that.you see the epistemology of both judiaism and christianity have been thoroughly argued over and over....and over..that what you find today is a pretty succinct refinement of their respective theologies.

agree/disagree..maybe you are atheist or agnostic,that is not the point.the point is that the so-called "finished' product has pretty clear philosophies,that adherents can easily follow.

for judaism this is in large part to the talmud,which is a living document,where even to this day rabbis debate and argue the finer details.not to be confused with holy scripture the torah.

christianity was forced to acknowledge its failings and flaws,because the theology was weak,and was becoming more and more an amalgamation of other religious beliefs,but most of all,and i think most importantly,the in-fighting with the vatican and the church of england had exposed this weakness,and christianity was on the brink of collapse due to its own hubris and arrogance.

they had no central authority.no leadership that the people could come to in order to clarify scripture.

so thanks to the bravery of martin luther,who risked being labeled a heretic,challenged the political power,which in those days was religious,and so began the process of reformation.

and also ended the dark ages,and western civilization stepped into the "age of enlightenment".

islam has had no such reformation,though is in desperate need of one.they had no council of nicea to decide what was holy canon and what was not,which is why you have more gospels of jesus in the quran than you do in the actual bible.

the king james bible has over 38,000 mis-translations in the old testament alone,whereas the quran has....well...we don't know,because nobody challenges the veracity of the quran.

am i winning you over to my side yet?
still think i am leftist "stooge' and "useful idiot"?

look man,
words are inert.
they are simply symbols.
they are meaningless until we lay eyes on them and GIVE them meaning.

so if you are a violent,war-loving person-------your religion will be violent,and warmongering.

if you are a peaceful and loving person----then your religion will be peaceful and loving.

the problem is NOT religion itself,and i know my atheists really don't want to hear that,but it's true.religion is going nowhere.

the problem is fundamentalist thinking.
the problem is viewing holy scripture as the unerring word of god.
which is why you see creationists attempt,in vain,to convince the rest of us that the earth is only 6,000 yrs old,and their only proof or evidence is a book.

so we all point and laugh.....how silly..6,000yrs old.crazy talk.

but WHY is the creationist so adamant in his attempts to defend his holy text?
because to accept the reality that the earth is not 6,000 yrs old but 14 billion yrs old,is to go against the word of god,and god is unerring,and if the bible is the word of god....and god is unerring.........

now lets go back to dearborn michigan.
if hitchens and harris are RIGHT,then that relatively stable community of muslims are really just extremists waiting for the angels to blow their horn and announce the time for JIHAD!!!

and,to be fair,that is a possibility,but a small one.

why?
because of something the majority of christians experience here in the states,canada,europe,australia...they experience pushback.

does this mean that america does not have radical christians in our midst?

oh lawdy do we ever.

ok ok..i am doing it again.
me and my pedantic self.

suffice to say:
islam IS a problem,even taken as a singular dynamic,that religion has serious issues.
but they are not the ONLY problem,which is what many of here have been trying to talk about.

ALL religions have a problem,and that problem is fundamentalism.which for christianity is a fairly new phenom (less than 100 yrs old) whereas islam has suffered from this mental malady pretty much since its inception.

ok..thats it..im done.pooped,whipped and in need of sleep.

hope i clarified some things with ya mate,but i swear to god if you respond with a reiteration of all your comments.i am going to hunt you down,and BEAT you with a bible,and not that wimpy king james either!
the hefty scofield study bible!

What kind of balance are you speaking of? For the sake of argument, I'll assume that you mean spending somewhat equal time and effort on different sides of an argument.

That kind of balance can be expected from a news outlet. Many of them, especially American ones, overcook is massively by refusing to make judgements on the validity of opposing arguments. If argument A is backed by empirical evidence and argument B is smoke and mirrors, argument B should receive ridicule, not the same kind of respect that A receives.

Now, applying this kind of balance to individuals strikes me as wierd. They are not obliged to give a balanced view: they are obliged, as journalists, to present facts, and offer interpretations. The issues we're talking about here are not disputes between neighbours. We are talking about the war on terror, macroeconomics, propaganda, things of the utmost importance. And the media is doing a woeful job at presenting any dissenting view.

Thing is, you can get the major consensus narrative from countless news outlets out there. Want to here about the supposed benefits of multinational trade agreements? The NYT and the WaPo have dozens upon dozens of articles with praise of TTIP and TPP. If, however, you would like to hear about the consequences of previous trade agreements, or just some hard math on the numbers they like to throw in there, you won't find any. You'll have to go to Dean Baker at the CEPR, to Yves Smith at NakedCapitalism, you'll read Rick Wolff's take on it.

These people do everything in their power to restore the balance that the media drowned in buckets of party-line puff pieces. People recognise RT for propaganda, but somehow think propaganda stops when ownership is private.

Try to find proper articles about the global assassination program (drone warfare) and its effect on sovereign people abroad -- won't find anything in the media, you'll have to go to Jeremy Scahill.

Try to find proper articles about the desolation brought to communities in the developed world by (the current form of) capitalism, the epidemic of loniliness, the breaking apart of the social fabric, the monetarisation of every aspect of life -- silence. What about the slavery-like conditions it creates through indebtedness? The absurd inequality? Nothing.

What about the massive atrocities in Jemen? There was plenty about the atrocities committed by Russia in Syria, but when Saudis use US weapons to destroy an entire country, mum's word.

There is no balance in the media. They are the gatekeepers of knowledge, and anything outside the establishment's agreed upon consensus is ignored, marginalised, ridiculed, or straight up demonized.

CJ Hopkins had a great piece at Counterpunch the other day, titled Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works. He puts it more succinctly than I ever could. Reality doesn't matter, not for the mainstream media. The narrative matters.

And that's why I listen to dissenting voices like Chris Hedges, Abby Martin or Thom Hartmann, even when they are employed by a state propaganda outlet.

@bcglorf

think we are talking about two separate issues,with a only a subtle overlap.

i totally agree that when it comes to russian politics,and/or state sanctioned military operations,RT tends to lean in favor of the russian state.

but in my opinion this does not detract from the works of hedges,or hartman or even abbey martin.who used to have a show "breaking the set" and "empire files".

we can view american corporate media through the same lens.

FOX=republican message of the day
MSNBC=democrat message of the day
CNN=the american state message of the day.

taken in aggregate,these corporate media outlets are all propaganda/misinformation machines.

but..taken singularly...

shep smith on FOX does some good work.
while personalities such as o'reilly,cavuto and carlson are simply demagogues.

or rachel maddow on MSNBC.
who does an excellent job of disseminating the politics behind a lot of republican shenanigans.sadly her show is incredibly biased and partisan.so while i LOVE her analysis..i realize that it is a tad bit biased and slanted.

i do not watch CNN.except when i want to know what bullshit excuse the american government may be focused on.

so i get where you are coming from,and i agree for the most part.
i simply refuse to outright ignore someone like hedges,with his credentials,because of the venue he has been relegated to in order to express his criticism.

is/does RT sometimes promote russian propaganda?
yes..of course.
does this equate to chris hedges being a russian propagandist?
no..it does not.

and i am also not necessarily disregarding your discernment and discrimination towards hedges.
we all have a metric we use when discriminating.
yours is simply different than mine.
this does not equate a moral right nor wrong,just different.

but you and i may disagree on some things,but i would like to think we have both earned each others respect.

so when you post a comment.i read it with that respect dictating the lens with which i view your words.i know that you consider your words carefully,and i think it polite to give those words the same consideration that you gave them when writing.

we can disagree,and have,but i always walk away with at least understanding WHY you may feel a certain way.

"I have a dream."

God bless Martin Luther King.

I don't expect it in my time. But someday......

You know, things would have been so much easier if Rosa Parks, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and many others throughout history had simply complied.

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Blame presumes guilt. There's no guilt in voting for your interests, even if others don't understand them.

Reasons for those voting decisions are interesting, but also very hard to get since the media ignores everything between the coasts, and even the diverse internet is so full of filter bubbles that you're basically funneled straight into echo chambers. At least on my end, the Silicon Valley/Hollywood culture is drowning out everything else -- and I'm a commie outsider who doesn't give a shit about celebrities or "save zones".

That said, the election is just the most recent culmination of an ongoing, decades-long development. But that's beyond the point, so...

Populism trumps business as usual if business as usual leads to Detroit, Cleveland and Camden. Or the rural areas on the coast of Louisiana, which were hit much harder than New Orleans and still look worse than Chernobyl, 11 years after the fact.

So the question is: did you a) fail to provide an alternative, b) fail to make a convincing case for that alternative, c) decide against trying to convince those that think differently, or d) not even realize that not everybody shares your perception of reality.

Given the tone of the reactions, the collective damnation of Trump voters as (insert any insult in the book), I'm thinking that d) is a much bigger issue than anyone is willing to admit.

In short, I blame George R. R. Martin. If he had published The Winds of Winter by now, all would be well.

*doublepromote

Superb quality, this one.

The Blame Cannons are already in firing position. It's the fault of Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota, of Abby Martin and Kevin Gosztola, of Bernie and his BernieBros, of WikiLeaks and Assange, and Putin most of all.

Anything but 40 years of fuck-the-plebs politics.

Having never read anything by Martin Amis, I'll just assume this is a direct Trump quote.

The punk who stole the car and hit the police cars "was" revolting.

The shooting was justified.
Just like Trayvon Martin
Just like Michael Brown.

Sorry that you don't see wrong for wrong sake.