It's boggles the mind to think that such massive firepower and horse mounted infantry (dragoons) coexisted. It seems like a plot out of a time travel movie.

And Douglas Adams pointed out that our inability to create time travel is, in part, due to the tenses it would create.

I am so one of the few who thought the William Hurt movie version really got a lot of things right. I loved the style, the effects, the acting, the actors (leblanc takes some time to get used to. I did not like friends and he has a punchable mug). The only thing that fell apart was the last 3rd of the movie, the whole time travel going back to a mutant gary oldman spider creature was just so...unwanted. But the lighting, the way the ship looked, the way the suits were designed, awesome. There is very little I see that I like in this trailer.

Ok, then I'm (accidentally) correct, time lady is fine. What's the issue, then? Fan boys that gotta hate change?

She could be the best one ever...wouldn't make me a fan. Early episodes blew it all for me with the tin foil costumes and plunger armed garbage can monsters. Oddly, my wife is getting into the newer ones.
I can't get beyond an immortal Time traveling hero bothered by anything, there's more than all the time in the world to fix any problem, or go back enough to never allow a problem to exist. Any time the hero controls time, the story is blown for me, even when they invent some convoluted reason time travel won't solve this episode's problems. Kinda like the all seeing, all knowing, all powerful, all loving God that allows evil to flourish and innocence to suffer....just doesn't make sense.

But, can you play Saga's Time Traveler on it?

Einstein was a time-traveler.

This video time travels back to the 80's without hitting 88 Mph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)
I admit I was wrong about the 8% figure, I got the columns crossed, recalculating, it was about 11% in 22, 17% in 31, and 32% in 47. That still sounds like a pretty huge influx by my standards, almost tripling the per capita population in 25 years (and more than tripling the actual population) compared to others in the region, mostly by imigration.

You said they stood along side the Nazis " upon the UN mandating a two state solution to the whole mess" (I think you've edited what you originally stated, that they then stood along side the Nazis, and clarified what you meant, that the leaders that turned down the 47 proposal had stood with the Nazis in the past, which I don't disagree with...too bad I erased the quotation for space). The U.N. mandated a two state solution in 74...in 47, they 'mandated' a 3 state solution that took massive territories from the Palestinians and handed it to Jewish immigrants, it turns out the Palestinians should have accepted because they've lost far more since then, but it sounded terrible at the time.

What points? Are these universal points? Can I redeem them for trips to the store by the universe...it owes me some milk.

In 48, when the illegal immigrants became land thieving invaders, the U.N.partition plan was to split the territory 3 ways, and for the U.N. to control Jerusalem. It would be like the U.N. agreeing today with illegal Mexicans in Texas and California that the southern 1/2 of all border states was now a new country because they are now a majority in many areas, with the U.N. taking control of the LA basin....we might say "no thanks" like the Palestinians did...at least I hope so.

The 37 British plan for Partition came before 47.
WIKI-The first proposal for the creation of Jewish and Arab states in the British Mandate of Palestine was made in the Peel Commission report of 1937, with the Mandate continuing to cover only a small area containing Jerusalem. The recommended partition proposal was rejected by the Arab community of Palestine,[8][9] and was accepted by most of the Jewish leadership.

You said they stood with the Nazis when the two state solution was proposed...which was actually 74, but I'll give you leeway and say you meant 47, which is still ridiculous, the Nazis were long gone in 47.

They didn't seize it as payback for the holocaust, but many allies went along, seemingly out of guilt for not stopping it sooner (a valid complaint about the US, but no reason to help take Palestinian territory and hand it away).

Yes, there was Jewish hatred in Europe before the Nazis, that's one reason why they were able to grab so much power, they had a ready made scape goat. Your point?

No, not every Jew in Palestine was a Zionist, but enough of the 11% were that they tripled their presence in 25 years....and far more importantly, today it's near 100%, and they are violent, expansionist, ruthlessly inhuman, and zealous.

I refuse to call it a civil war when one side was made nearly completely of immigrants....that's called an invasion.

I do agree, the inability to assimilate is not 100% the immigrants fault, but it is 100% their responsibility. Refugees, that are not expected to stay, so not expected to assimilate, are kept in camps. These people did not go to camps, so they were, at best, illegal immigrants, and many were coming with the goal of stealing inhabited territory for their own, which makes them invaders. The VAST majority of them came after the war ended, so could not be war refugees. During the war, Jews had an incredibly hard time traveling in Europe.

The few actual refugees there that the axis created were absorbable by the Palestinians. It's their multitudinous militant expansionist friends that continue to immigrate there to this day that are the problem, IMO. I'll continue to call them violent invaders, you've said nothing to convince me otherwise.

I always thought this 'problem' was bullshit - not because I dreamed of being some special snowflake 'outside the box' little shit who just wants to bypass the difficulty in question, but because the answer is so obvious. If you have perfect certainty that you can either save 1 life or 5 lives, then that's the same as choosing to kill 1 person or 5 persons. Perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action. It's only in reality, where there's uncertainty, that you can balk at taking action.

In the same way I find the moral dilemma of killing Hitler as a baby to be ridiculous. If you, as a time traveler from 2016, balk at the idea of going back to 1889 to kill baby Hitler, but you're fine with going back to 1939 to kill adult Hitler and maybe prevent WW2, then you essentially want hundreds of thousands of people to die in concentration camps just to make you feel good about your murderous action. Ridiculous.

For starters, I have to oppose the implied thought that Saddam's reign of terror was preventing this sectarian violence. His rule through the Suni minority to wage genocides against the Kurdish and Shia majority and decades of brutal repression of same all served to make the sectarian hatred and violence worse. Tally up the hundreds of thousands he killed through genocide, the million plus he killed in the Iran-Iraq war and everyone that died by direct execution or deliberate starvation level poverty and compare it doesn't stand out as starkly and objectively a desirable alternative to today.

Now if you ask what would I do differently it depends on what level of power I've got to act with. Ideally, we can go back to first Iraq war and have Bush senior march on Baghdad. This would've aborted one of Saddam's genocides. Equally importantly, this would have kept the Shia Iraqi population's view of America as a liberating force. The standing in the desert and watching Saddam slaughter them thing still carried their mistrust of American forces after Saddam's actual removal later. That singularly stupid move of leaving Saddam in power, at the urging of most of the planet, drove the Shia population of Iraq back to Iran as their sole sympathetic ally.

Next step, after the removal of Saddam, whether we can do it back then, or only a few years ago as it really happened is to truly setup an occupation government. You don't bring stability to a region by immediately trying to transition to a democracy before the shooting has even stopped. The occupation government would be run by somebody with actual knowledge and experience with Iraq, rather than as Bush senior did by sending in a guy with zero experience and a two week lead to brief himself. The task you should place on this leader, is to setup a federated Iraq, with distinct and autonomous Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states. The occupation government would dictate things after taking input from Iraqi's rather than holding them to the tyranny of the majority as Bush and co allowed. The occupation would setup an initial constitution defining what laws and agreements spanned all three Iraqi provinces/states and what extent of autonomy they had to define their own systems of government. The American military's job would be to enforce this very basic constitutional framework. Each Iraqi state/province would be aided in setting up their own governments with a transition plan again dictated not voted upon. The transition plan would define the point in time when each state transitioned from occupation rule to a self determined future and rule of law.

The above plan on the whole would work, but Bush and co couldn't have managed post Saddam Iraq more poorly if they had actively tried to.

If zero time travel is allowed and we are to 'fix' things today, you need a lot MORE power. You need an army the size of America or Russia's and the political will to spend several years doing things the public will hate you for. The end game is still the same as above, a federated Iraq kicked off under a dictatorial occupation. To get there from today though you need to create stability. You need to take an army and march it across the entire country. As each city is cleared of militants you take a census of everybody and keep it because you need it to track down future militants. In entirely hostile locations like were ISIS has full rule, you bomb them into the stone ages before marching the army in. The surviving population is given full medical treatment. Now, as for sorting militants from civilians though, you do NOT use American style innocent until proven guilty justice. Instead, any fighting age males are considered guilty until proven innocent. This level of rule of law needs to remain in place until stability can be restored. You of course guarantee lots of innocent arrests, but your trying to prevent massive numbers of innocent deaths so it's required. As you stabilize the nation you can relax back to innocent until proven guilty and work on re-integrating the convicted.

You'll note that although the methods I'd declare necessary above are by any count 'brutal', they do not extend into Saddam's usage of genocide, torture and rape as the weapons of choice.

First Contact has three unforgivable flaws.

1. The time travel plot makes zero sense. Why do the Borg need to go back to that particular time to assimilate humanity? Why don't they go back to pre-WW3, where there were a) more humans to assimilate and b) lower tech weapons? Why do they need to interrupt the moment of humanity's first contact with the Vulcans? Why do they give themselves such a tiny margin of error by only giving themselves a few days to assimilate Earth before the deadline? Why don't they send Borg down to begin assimilating humanity straight away? And the Enterprise conceals itself from the Vulcans by hiding behind the fucking moon.

2. The writers fundamentally ruin the idea of the Borg by giving it a figurehead it doesn't need. They are not a collective if they have a Queen; they are subjects.

3. Worst of all, Picard's characterisation is a complete volte face. Seven seasons of the TV show proved that Picard just isn't a man who stoops to revenge. Only a year or so after recovering from his own assimilation, Picard has the chance to cripple or destroy the Borg forever and he doesn't take it, because he's a man of balance and pragmatism, not of blind rage. His sudden change into Captain Ahab is lazy and it's unearned. Picard, like everything else in the film, is dumbed-down for the sake of the action, and the character as written undermines the work done over the course of the TV series, amputates him from Roddenberry, and is frankly unworthy of being performed by Patrick Stewart.

Star Trek: First Contact is fucking dumb.

Of course I have to concede to subjectivity and some of the action is very exciting (if still stupid; the "no firing at the deflector dish oh except when you do" incident is a prime example). But it's only possible to enjoy it as an action movie if you like your action movies to appeal to the very lowest common denominator.

Gonna have to disagree here. Not that you are incorrect, but the assumptions might be incorrect. First, technological advances occur rapidly when one is found and they tend to ripple in every advancement. Consider that human "advancement" is really just centuries old. Second, and I am not entirely sure of the Star Wars universe on this matter, but Star Trek technology has the ability to warp time and time travel. This means in theory that if their universe saw people doing this over and over, the technology could have spread and spread in the same eons. In essence, the technology of their pantheon could be trillions of years old (Ie., Scotty gives shield upgrades to save whales, shields have now been upgraded to Scotty's timeline even further than before. But Scotty has to go back in time for some other event, gives newest shield information which increases his own time's shield power further, cycle continues indefinitely when Scotty is killed by a younger version of himself...)

This is like Hieronymus Bosch took a bunch of acid then time-traveled to 2015. Then took a lot more acid.

It sorta follows the circular time travel idea (wibbly wobbly timey wimey) used in Doctor Who. You know something in the future because you went to the past and told someone to do something because you knew it from the past because... yeah.