Ramin Honary

How can you pirate Photoshop and Elements? They are WebAssembly binaries that phone home before you are allowed to use them.

Came here to say this. I once cut open a 9-volt battery and discovered it was really just 6 AAAA batteries wired in series.

I am upvoting this thread for being relevant to the discussion, but man, this article makes me sick. They are completely ruining Star Trek.

they’re not really illegal at all, are they?

If a police officer commits murder but the D.A. covers it up and the officer is never charged with a crime, does this make murder by the police legal?

Yes, it is illegal, and the government does not enforce laws consistently. The point is, this is a moral failing of Starfleet/the US government. This is an injustice.

“Illegal?” DS9’s S31 was protected by Starfleet Command. They were completely untouchable.

They can be both protected and illegal. Sisko noted that the organization was completely antithetical to the laws of Starfleet, e.g. committing genocide against the Changlings of the Dominion (they used the actual word “genocide” to describe what Section 31 did in the show). But their existence was neither denied nor acknowledged by Starfleet. This is part of the reason why he asked Bashir to act as a double-agent.

It was clearly analogous to the CIA, which for decades has been collecting money from the illegal drug trade and supporting terrorist organizations around the world, all in the name of “national security.” It was a critique of the US government, like most of the Star Trek episodes that deal with the moral shades of gray within the laws of Starfleet. It is clear from their political commentary that the shows morality was staunchly anti-fascist.

And this new film on Section 31 completely reversing their former politics and joining with and celebrating the fascists is more than I can stomach.

Deep Space Nine made it absolutely clear that Section 31 is an illegal black-ops org with garb somewhat reminiscient of Nazi storm troopers, they were the bad guys.

Yeoh has described it as “Mission: Impossible in space,” and likened the tone to the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

Mission: Impossible, the longest-running, pro-CIA anti-socialist propaganda series in US history. OK… so now Star Trek is about making illegal black-ops Nazis look cool?

Fuck these fucking producers. I want my gay space communism back.

The Voyager theme song is by far my most favorite, probably of any TV series. I haven’t seen the whole series yet, but I like it a lot so far. Still, I think DS9 is my favorite.

They don’t teach about Configuration Management in web-dev bootcamp

Ha! Bullshit like configuration management, memory management, optimizing compilers, all obsolete technology! We don’t need that anymore with modern web browsers now that every single computer ever is connected to the Internet, and now that we have AI to write code for us!!! JavaScript is the one true language!

(sarcasm)

Thanks for posting your transcript and putting in chapter markers, it is much easier for me to read than to listen to a 90-minute video.

And in this episode, I’m going to argue that replacing the word “equality” with the much more vague concept of “equity” is largely a way of taking ideas that promote economic inequality and disguising them in the language and style of social justice – and that it’s also a way of keeping people of all races, genders and ethnicities divided in conflict and competition with one another, so that we can’t pose an effective challenge to the people in power.

It is great that you have shone a light on this recent phenomenon in neoliberal politics, especially from the US Democratic party, of singing the praises of equity over equality, and showing how equity is just a bait-and-switch for right wing policies that focus on a narrow range of economic outcomes rather than the material conditions of peoples lives.

Wow, I am impressed. I am just finishing up the entire Deep Space 9 series, this really adds to the ambiance for me.

I am so curious where they got all the 3D assets for the Defiant, Deep Space 9, even one of the Orb of the Prophets… did they actually do all that by hand? These aren’t just available on Thingverse or the Unreal Engine Marketplace, right?

I might vote for Biden if he maintains any semblance of whatever little remains of “the rule of law” so that hopefully someone (perhaps in the UN) will press charges against him for aiding and abetting the genocide of the people of Gaza, along with the actual criminals committing crimes against humanity in the IDF. Without that, there is no rule of law and there is no justice in this world.

I saw the “502 Gateway” HTTP error message, but I never even closed my browser tab. I refreshed again today and Lemmy.ml was back online! Thanks for your hard work!

you’re talking about centrists and liberals.

I suppose I am, though I think it is accurate to call centrists and liberals “right wing.”

Those are both good articles, I have actually read them both before.

People who are right wing support fascism. Full stop.

I very much agree with everything else you said, but I can’t grasp why you would make the extra effort to pander to them like that, it’s bizarre.

You are right, and I also agree with you, so let me just clarify… there is a difference between people who unconsciously support fascism merely because they are apolitical, and people who are very deliberately fascist, as in enthusiastic supporters of the Republican party.

Most fans of US movies are indifferent, and do not think of themselves as political beings. They think of themselves as just “ordinary.” Like a fish not knowing what water is, “ordinary” for an average US citizen is about as close to fascism as a person can possibly be without enthusiastically actively waving around swastikas – but there is still a difference between “ordinary” apolitical people like Tarantino and all of his fans who think of him as edgy, and someone actively wishing to purge the world of all non-white people. That is what I mean by “right wing” and not fascist.

I think it is important to draw that distinction because I don’t like blaming apolitical people for being the victims of US mainstream cinema brainwashing.

I also love the Green Day cover.

Government bad, corruption everywhere, war for the sake of war, etc.

I’m certain Tarantino would double down on that and I just don’t want it.

Tarantino is kind of a bellwether for the mostly apolitical right-wing (but non-fascist) middle-class majority of the US population, the movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” convinced me of that. It also convinced me that Tarantino himself has lost the plot, or actually never really had it. He reminds me a bit of Beavis and Butthead, kind of just watching movies and TV all the time, sorting everything into the binary categories “cool” or “sucks”, except he actually goes out and makes films that glorify all he thinks is “cool” which happens to be a cross-section of all media that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity.

So he likes Star Trek. Congratulations Tarantino, your “geek” bona-fides are authentic, but like the rest of the right-wing (non-fascist) middle-class majority, you really have no fucking clue and don’t care about the political origins of Star Trek and are just itching to erase them so you can make it into another “cool” movie that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity. You can fuck right off, Tarantino.

I don’t hate Star Trek: Lower Decks, but I did find it to be pretty boring. I watched the first 3 episodes on a flight last year and I almost fell asleep while watching it. The jokes just don’t land for me. I don’t know, it seems to be trying to be like Family Guy or The Orville (which I both love) but it ends up being more like “Our Cartoon President”, it is just dull, without edge. Maybe I will watch more episodes, it might get better, I don’t know. But I still haven’t seen all of DS9 and Voyager yet, so it will have to wait.

deuterium is liquid at room temperature

I think you are confusing Deuterium with heavy-water. Deuterium is a heavy isotope of Hydrogen, and so is gas at room temperature. Heavy water is water where the Hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are of the Deuterium isotope, and is liquid at room temperature.

In an episode of DS9 I heard some of the characters mention that they not only have deflector shields, but also “structural reinforcement shields.” So whatever science-fictiony force field is used to protect them from phasers and micrometeorites is also coursing through the skeletal structure of the ship.

When I heard this it immediately clicked in my mind: whenever the ship is hit with phaser fire the explosions happening inside are recoil from these internal shields. Perhaps the catastrophic damage prevented by structural reinforcement shields outweighs the localized damage of potentially fatal recoil.

That is my favorite explanation, anyway.

(This assumes all ships have structural reinforcement shields, and not just the Defiant.)

I would recommend The Next Generation or Deep Space 9 first.

The Original Series is pretty campy and low-budget. I don't think Star Trek really became Star Trek (as we know it) until Roddenberry had a second crack at it, which was The Next Generation. Be warned, both of these series start out pretty rough.

The first 2 seasons of TNG is a little corny, although they have some very good episodes, like one planet they visit which is a matriarchal society, and they show the male-female gender roles reversed. In my opinion, their 1940s nostalgia episodes (played out in the holodeck) really did not age well, fortunately they stopped doing that in season 2. Dr. Polanski gets a lot of hate, but I thought she was a fine character. I think season 3 of TNG was by far the best, with some of their boldest political statements. One episode, Picard is accidentally seen as a God by a pre-industrial society, in another, Commander Data is judged by Starfleet to be a person of a race of a single individual, and is granted personhood. In yet another episode, Mr. Data creates a child for himself which Starfleet deems to be their property, and results in one of my favorite Picard quotes of all time: "Hold your ground Mr. Data. (To the admiral) Order a man to turn his child over to the state? Not while I'm captain." By season 6 and 7 they clearly start running out of ideas though.

In my opinion, Deep Space 9 was the hardest to start, but probably the best series of all I have seen. The first 17 episodes were so boring I could barely get through it. But starting with Season 1 episode 18 (titled "Duet") and every single episode after it was consistently very good. They also, I think, make many more, and much bolder, political statements than The Next Generation ever did.