(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The first, most important thing you have to understand about Starfleet is the Prime Directive.
The prime directive states:
Nothing within these articles of Federation shall authorize the United Federation of Planets to intervene in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system, or shall require the members to submit such matters to settlement under these Articles of Federation; But this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.[1]
Think of what such a principle, refined to the humans on our own globe could mean.
The Prime Directive would have forbidden Afghanistan and Iraq. Wars of paranoid prevention would have been OUTLAWED.
Second, the IDIC:
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
Think. Think of how many problems we have in the United States and elsewhere boil down to our fundamental unwillingness to accept different kinds of people.
To think that another human is strange and alien, and beyond your ken, is the basis of BIGOTRY.
I stand by a principle that we are stronger, together. But that “togetherness” must never deprecate PEOPLE, or the basic attributes and characteristics of PEOPLE. The principle must also never be used to destroy diversity.
On the basis we accept and work together as different kinds of people, we must never forget, THERE ARE DIFFERENT KINDS OF PEOPLE.
And that, the mere fact that there are different kinds of people, who may not be like us, or who do not think like us, must never be used as a basis for oppression.
What the broader world is debating right now are things like the Tea Party and its pollyanish counterpart, the Coffee Party.
We strive, as apposite to these to extremes, to IMPROVE OURSELVES.
In between these two poles, the country needs to discuss, in essence, what are, in effect, Starfleet Values.
There is no war. There is no money. There is no bigotry. There is only self improvement, expansion into the universe, fundamental change, and acceptance and integration of other cultures and values.
You may think it silly to base an entire philosophy on the doings of a fictional TV series. Is it any more silly to base an entire political philosophy based on a set of DRINKS?
I WANT A STARFLEET PARTY, DAMMIT
First, I am going to scare the fuck out of you Tea Partier types. Next, I am going to scare the fuck out of you Borg Drone Coffee Party Types.
I want Starfleet Values.
First, for you Tea Partiers, yes, I want a one world government. About taxes and your peculiarities about how you can use religion and bigotry to divide HUMAN BEINGS from one another, SHUT THE FUCK UP.
If to you that makes me a communist, all I can say is this:
WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.
Second, the thing that is going to scare you lily livered, scared, dyed in the wool, “I want mine, fuckers” Coffee Partiers:
Yes, I want nuclear power, if it solves problems. I want renewable power also, but the world needs energy.
I want us to explore space. Your ideas that “the money would be better spent here” is a prescription for lack of vision, leading to extinction.
PRO SPACE
PRO TECHNOLOGY
ANTI BIGOTRY
ANTI RELIGIONISM
PRO SOCIALISM
PRO ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT.
Discuss my ass. Fuckers. 😉
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with things like Democratic Party Values, and Republican Party Values and their illiterately supposed extremes (but not really) of things like the Tea Party and the Coffee Party.
Why do we not discuss a more sane set of values? Ones not rooted in who gets more for how many cookies and has little resemblance to the things that really matter.
While we’re discussing things like taxes and oppression, the fish are being fished to death. Biological diversity is being destroyed.
Our planet, on the basis of unlimited material consumption without brakes or even analysis, is being rendered uninhabitable.
What to do. WHAT WILL YOU DO?
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has to save the world.
You say, yes we can, but are you saying, you CAN’T save the world?
Then, saying “Yes we can” is meaningless claptrap.
But, you have to. We have to, together.
you da bomb.
One set of rules by which we all abide. Do No Harm.
won’t let us into the realm of space as we have traded Star Trek for Avatar. The technology will be Prozium and the one world government will issue the death at age 30 initiative of Logans Run.
I’m a Star Trek fan; I watch TNG just about every night, and I am a lifelong science fiction fan as well. But Star Trek does not represent to me the pinnacle of social/political/technological development, though it does provide some useful signposts and hopeful directions.
Clearly, Star Trek’s consistent appeal to pluralistic values is extraordinarily helpful, in real-world terms. Star Trek was far ahead of the curve regarding issues pertaining to race, in particular, and this goes all the way back to the original series. Strangely, perhaps, Star Trek has not featured any prominent characters who could be described as GLBT, though there are many episodes that “play” on conventions related to sexuality and gender, and many Star Trek characters are polyamorous.
Also, the Star Trek universe, especially in the Federation itself, is clearly very prosperous: everyone has access to food, shelter, clothing, and health care, as far as I can see. This is certainly a positive (socialistic) political value. Technology, and perhaps most importantly, replicators make this possible. Will nanotechnology make the world more prosperous, so that we live without scarcity? It’s hard to imagine that the curve of socio-technics will “go down like that,” but we’ll see.
So, prosperity and pluralism are two values that are clearly positives. However, the militarism and hierarchy (not to mention galactic-level colonialism) of the Star Trek universe bothers me quite a bit.
It should be said that the Prime Directive is regularly violated in this series, so much so that it is almost a joke. It’s subject to Niebuhrian/utilitarian calculations, the same kind of calculations that drive countries like the US to promote the idea of “humanitarian interventionism” and American exceptionalism. I don’t think that it is a surprise that TNG, in particular, came about in the aftermath of the Cold War, the show reflects, to some extent, a kind of galactic Pax Americana.
Anyway, can we have prosperity and pluralism without militarism, and “space navies”? I hope so. Cory Doctorow has a nice satirical short story about Star Trek in the New Space Opera collection, entitled “To Go Boldly” and it explores some of these issues.
My personal favorite sci-fi writer at this point is Alastair Reynolds. The best and most complex sci-fi, in my mind, is Kim Stanley Robinson’s series on Mars. Really very interesting.
My two cents.
… is “Star Fleet Values”?
The world needs first and foremost to stop destroying our life support systems. We need that far more than we need our current consumption of energy. And as far as destroying our life support systems go, there is no evidence that the problems caused by mining nuclear fuels and managing the concrete and rebar from decommissioned plants will be solved if we continue to use nuclear power – nor that they can be solved.
For the medium term, it would be silly for the United States in particular to use our energy gluttony as an excuse for building new nuclear power plants, when we have roughly twice the biocapacity as the world average, so that whatever lifestyle we could achieve on renewable resources alone would still be unsustainable for the world as a whole.
Hab SoSlI’ Quch!
ourselves. We have sunlight, color and sound everyday, but choose to live under the spell of high priests. It is time to turn on other channels of awareness. We must look to the light in the stars and the light in our souls. We will connect some day.