Not insulting, but this is communism that works!

Communism is not a dirty word, and in small towns and states it works well, promotes a sence of community, you are there for your fellow man and everyone shares freely of their labors.

Where it falls apart is disabled, sick, those that dont want to work partake in the free benefits causing anger, jealousy and split in other community members.

Thats why the old saying about communism works great on paper but will eventually fall apart in ptactice. Without a tyrant to keep it in check.

By the way Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek the entire Earth was communism and had eliminated capitalism in the future :-)

I imagine it will just be like just about every vice in existence, there will be people who can handle it and there will be people who can't

Remember the first Barclay episode of TNG dealing with Holo-addiction? They made the pretty clear implication that they do use the holodeck to act out sexual fantasies, they did seem to have a taboo on making holo-recreations of people they knew RL however. which, of course, Barclay did indulge in.

Of course it got somewhat more explicit after Roddenberry died and the producers decided to make humans in the 24th century a little bit more..human instead of the ultra superbeings who were paragons of virtue of Roddenberry's vision and the idea of "Vulcan Love Slave" was introduced among other things.

And disagreement is cool with me, I often disagree with people who like musicals but I can do so without being a jerk about it, I'm just not into them. An active imagination is often considered a sign of intelligence and higher thinking. I'm pretty sure creative minds like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, just to name a few, are not lacking in the intelligence or comprehension departments. Gene Roddenberry could be responsible for god knows how many people going into the sciences, inspired to make the future, he imagined a reality.
Lincoln was great movie and I'd be all for seeing a movie based on the 47 Ronin that was more historically accurate, but that doesn't mean I can't also enjoy movies like Pacific Rim. As for 300, the movie was actually based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, which I doubt was ever intended to be a factual account of the event anyhow. Movies like this one are, for better or worse a product of market forces and the society we live in.

Gene Roddenberry LIED to me!

1. Overuse of CGI - check
2. Pandering to the teenage demographic - check
3. Heavy-handed presentation dripping with dread, seriousness and desperation - check

And now it's leeched out into everyone else's films. Iron Man 3, the new Superman movie, the latest Dark Knight movie.

Roddenberry must be spinning in his space canister. Can't wait for the next reboot - maybe someone will be smart and return Star Trek to its roots - the exploration of space.

I didn't mind the new one, but I kinda miss TNG themes of a more peaceful exploration of universes unknown. I think Roddenberry would gag on his own vomit if he saw this. It's not unique SciFi anymore, it's just the usual really well-done hollywood tripe.

Gene Roddenberry and L.Ron Hubbard were secret lovers.

>> ^blankfist:

I don't get what people see in Star Trek.


I don't get what people see in watching professional sports. I get playing sports. I get watching your friend/partner/child playing sports. I just don't understand the allure of watching professional athletes.

As for what people see in Star Trek? It's escapist wish fulfillment, like any fantasy. The idea that our (or our descendants) lives in the future, while still recognizable, will be better than they are now. That we can overcome the petty, backwards, theist-stained bullshit our lives are currently mired in. That was Roddenberry's dream. Everything before most of DS9, and ALL of Voyager, is his vision. A vision shared by thousands (maybe millions?) of people...

@NetRunner

True. But how many shows have the same following as star trek? It really does deserve better writers along with a re-airing. Especially now more than ever. Roddenberry's ideas need to be heard again.

@csnel3
@kulpims
@GeeSussFreeK
@NetRunner
@draak13
@gwiz665
@budzos
@Bidouleroux
@everyone else here
And while it is true the vulcans have emotions which if left unchecked can perpetuate acts of chaos, even logic could condone the acts of intervention under certain circumstances. Like what was mentioned earlier with transporting the inhabitants of an entire colony to another planet. Logic would dictate that saving a lives rather than having them face extinction, especially when taking such action takes minimal effort on the part of those who intervene is a far better outcome than ignoring them and moving on. some of those ants Q steps on could have made great stides, some Q are even cautious enough to look out for ant hills so they would not step on them. Remember that Q himself does not represent the continuum and the entire Q as a whole.

Now just so I am entirely clear here, I am not against the principles of the prime directive, it does have its importance. But it seems whenever this debate is drawn both parties in which are for or against the directive are under the impression the directive has to be the one sided stance. That is what I am against. It should indeed be a directive, a consideration to keep in regard, but upholding to a non debatable stature leaves no room for leniency, any more than abandoning it and following a reckless moral compass as those pro directive would imagine it to be. What the directive needs is a middle ground. A set of further principles which leaves room for making a rational and logical decision to intervene under appropriate circumstances.

I was going to save this for a future sift, but this seems like the best time to place this:



I fear that point the most. Is it really free thinking if everyone shares the same idea? Unity may bring about a positive force, but it will always need quarrelsome debate to establish its principles, When people need to resort to an order, to establish the prime directive as a one way street, is it unified logic, or a dictated mindset? And if it is either one, what happens when everything else becomes a one way street? even in the optimistic future Roddenberry Imagined, his future did not have a perfect race. Every race had its own strengths and weaknesses. And some of their strengths to others seemed like their weaknesses, but when they worked with and learned with one another, it provided a harmony of thought, principle and the idea that even Their "enlightened" principles needed adjustment from others.

So my point to all this is the prime directive should be seen as a recommended precaution which leaves room for debate, not a dogma, and certainly not something that should be taken lightly. With that said, I think I am past the point of sharing the video, and this should really be moved to sift talks so we can further *discuss this in greater detail.

Quite well done. I've usually excused the capricious way in which the "prime directive" ended up being a placeholder for "I need the heroes to be conflicted about resolving a major issue by doing something trivial so there's dramatic tension", but he really nails them to the wall.

The real problem is that after Gene Roddenberry died, you had that awful, awful travesty known as Star Trek: Voyager, where following the Prime Directive always meant doing something hideously awful.

The other series got sketchy about it at times, but ST:Voy is really the issue here.

I was really impressed with this. This really puts the ethics embedded in star trek that I really enjoyed under the microscope.

One of the difficulties of lifting the underlying ethics out of the series is that the series itself spans its creation over an incredible period of time; I'm not sure Gene Roddenberry was thinking 30 years ahead when he first came up with it =P. Also, Gene died shortly into the 4th season of start trek TNG...he wasn't around to be really involved with deep space 9, voyager, or enterprise. This is reflected in TOS vs. TNG; in TOS, the goal was to, "explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." TOS was about adventure; they had the people fly out to find a new world, fly down 'n meet 'em, and then get in all kinds of trouble. They seemed to focus on meeting civilizations that were approximately as technologically advanced as starfleet's. In TNG, the stated mission is the same, but the show has a much stronger anthropological sentiment to it. They actually fly down to places where they would be considered gods (and occasionally are, when they screw up).

From the anthropological perspective, the prime directive really does make a lot of sense...to a point. Suppose that you do come across some relatively underdeveloped civilization, and you have the chance to immediately save a lot of citizens of that civilization. Your direct interference with that civilization will indeed mess up your experiments concerning the study of how civilizations develop, so it's something that you generally want to avoid. Trying to save a civilization from one problem necessarily induces another problem. By solving a civilization's problem, their behavior may change to become reliant, and therefor dependent, upon you. Then, what are the ethics of *not* stopping your mission to explore out new civilizations? What are the ethics of *not* creating a supply line to suit the needs of your newly dependent civilization? Should you try to make that civilization self-sufficient to solve their own problems, what are the ethics of giving them technology without the social infrastructure for them to be able to deal with that technology? Finally, after all that, suppose that you give a new civilization new technology and a new social infrastructure to be able to deal with that technology responsibly; you've just committed a much more interesting and philosophical upset, and you've essentially wiped out an entire culture, and replaced it with another. From an anthropological standpoint, that's complete disaster.

That said, there are still times when it's a much bigger disaster to let things fall their course. Suppose a natural disaster is about to occur in which an entire planet will be destroyed. In this case, by not intervening, the entire culture and population will be eradicated, which is completely unacceptable from both anthropological and humanitarian standpoints. What do you do? In one episode of TNG (I can't remember which one), the solution was to transport the entire civilization to their holodecks, and transfer them to a new planet, all the while they believe that they are migrating to some new location on their homeworld. They preserved both the life and the culture, and satisfied both standpoints, which is a great and rare solution.

This video illustrates this caveat and many others by showing that the prime directive should *not* be considered a dogma that should be followed by every anthropologist blindly, but rather should be a rule of thumb. In a tough spot, it'll get you the best outcome most of the time. At other times, advanced levels of thought are necessary in order to fish out the actual best solution. For someone to break this rule of thumb very frequently might raise some eyebrows about what they are doing, as is the case seen in the clip where the senior officer was putting Picard in the hotseat about breaking the directive on 9 separate occasions in a short span of time.

The fact of the matter, though, is that it is *not* treated as a dogma in the series; it *is* treated as a rule of thumb. The fact that Picard broke it on 9 occasions in a short span of time truly shows this. In several other clips that was shown in this video, they actually *did* end up breaking the prime directive.

I believe that the person who created this video was just upset that he was never issued a starfleet academy textbook on the prime directive which spells out every detail and nuance of the directive =P. Of course they don't go into high levels of detail on it; the mass wouldn't be interested, or would just take a course on ethics & philosophy instead. Instead of going into high detail, they did as entertainers do, and just presented the rule in its most frustrating (and therefore interesting) fashion, by showing all of the situations when it makes us violate our own compulsion to follow our own set of moral standards. I believe that the prime directive in the series does come close to that which the author of the clip wants, but is merely stifled in its presentation by drama and intrigue.

Roddenberry was a capitalist selling a commie fantasy. Shatner had unkind things to say about ole Gene.

The Ferengi purportedly represent "unfettered" capitalism.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Poor writing, directing and style choices- it could have been good if hadn't been run into the ground by Hollywood schlock-masters.

Any SF show or movie has to respect the art-form of Science Fiction- or it will fail. This show did not. I imagine some cigar chomping fatty leaning back in his office chair saying "let's give those nerds an alien with big tits - you know, one of those Vogons or whatever those idiots call them". That's why SF shows fail. No science fiction people running the show. That's why Gene Roddenberry was awesome (he hired writers like Harlan Ellison) and that's why the JJ Abrams movie was good too.

SGU is still on probation in the NetRunner household. I'm still waiting for them to come up with a theme other than survival. For example, give us some antagonists, or at least some compelling potential benefit from discovering the ship.

I also liked the initial offering of V. I'm curious how many episodes it will take before the teabaggers start carrying reptilian Obama signs.

I've also been watching FlashForward. I loved the novel, and the series is definitely taking a very different direction than the novel (the Flashforward in the novel was a freak accident, not part of a shadowy plot).

I'm looking forward to the Prisoner remake that's coming in a couple weeks.

As much as I like all this new/remake Scifi, I do find myself craving a nice, predictable, upbeat Star Trek series. Everyone wants to be the new Battlestar Galactica, but no one seems to be going for that simple morality play format that Roddenberry pioneered.

I'm getting sick of antiheroes in my sci-fi.