At first I thought it was a giant snickerdoodle! Now I kinda want a snickerdoodle…

Conservatives like Star Trek because it promotes the values of meritocracy, hierarchy, authority, and military discipline. None of these are commonly held by people in the American left (especially not the academic left, which tend to be pretty anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian).

The people usually referred to as Republicans these days are right-wing populists. They have very little in common with the types of conservatives who loved the franchise in the 20th century. Those older conservatives are almost extinct in the Republican Party today.

I don’t think we actually disagree all that much. Our main point of disagreement is on the degrees of stuff. It seems I think the 90s was way less extreme (on the bad side) than you do, and that Star Trek was also way less extreme than you do (on the progressive side).

To be honest, you’ve made it sound like the 90s America was pretty much like Saudi Arabia and that Star Trek as depicted was the full realization of Gene Roddenberry’s post-race free love communist utopia. The reality of both was far more moderate. I’d even argue that there’s a lot more anti-gay sentiment and hostility around now than there was in the 90s.

The deeper thing they have in common is that they’re all products which follow power law distributions based on popularity. Popular items get more exposure by word of mouth than unpopular or unknown items. That exposure leads to even more popularity which results in exponential takeoff.

Thus you can have a music industry where Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars on one tour while millions of other musicians languish in total obscurity.

Yeah. The same thing has happened in the music world, the book world, and even the movie world.

YouTube lowered the barrier to entry to basically nothing if you want to publish your own movie. Getting millions of people to watch it, even completely for free, is very difficult. Almost all of the videos out there with millions of views were published by people who were already well known (even if they grew their fanbase directly on YouTube).

Music is probably fairly similar to movies in that you can publish easy on YouTube and then direct everyone to your Bandcamp site to buy music from you.

The book world is probably hardest to crack. There are so many authors out there and it’s very easy (from a technical standpoint) to publish your own book. Writing a book a lot of people want to read and getting people to read it is a totally different matter!

Dax is literally a worm living inside Jadzia’s body. Basically an alien parasite that evolved into a mutualism relationship instead.

Jadzia is more than a sex appeal of course. I’m talking about one scene, not her whole character.

If you look at her entire character it’s pretty clear that at no point is she living as a lesbian, closeted or otherwise. All of her interactions with male characters have romantic or at least flirtatious overtones (some unrequited), except with Sisko who she treats as an old friend (and he refers to her as old man). Her only major romantic relationship that takes place during the running of the show is her romance and marriage to Worf.

Furthermore, I take exception to quotes from the show’s writing staff. The writers’ goals and intentions literally do not matter. Only what appears in the show as it aired (“the text”).

Just as we shouldn’t pay any attention to what JK Rowling says now (about Dumbledore’s sexuality or other issues), so too should we ignore what the DS9 writers have said since.

Oh and by the way, I’ve known about RuPaul since the 90s and I am not in the community. He reached #2 on the billboard hot dance music chart with Supermodel, recorded in 1992.

No, Uhura is clearly more than a sex appeal character. That role would fall to Janice Rand.

I grew up in the 90s. I understand it perfectly well. We had everything from Elton John to RuPaul. We were a long, long way from the days of Paul Lynde and the wink wink nudge nudge approach.

You can both be happy for lesbian representation

That scene is not lesbian representation, it’s two straight women kissing for the benefit of the audience. It’s 100% shot from a straight male gaze perspective.

You’re not wrong that they cleared it with the network (they had to clear everything with the network). What you’re missing is that the execution of the scene, what we actually saw on screen, was pure titillation. It was sex and sex sold to a heterosexual (predominantly white) male audience.

You’d have a much better case if it were 2 men kissing. Jonathan Frakes wanted to do that for TNG! He was shut down completely.

Girls gone wild came out in 1997. Girls were kissing and having sex in college long before that.

This scene in DS9 was pure fan service. Sexy women kissing for the pleasure of men. Trying to couch it as a gay rights thing is pretty silly. They didn’t get married to each other on the show and they both had male love interests.

That actually doesn’t say very much. Vegan ricotta can be made with many different things.

So the ocean is basically the earth’s sweat!

A bunch of those fruits were likely pollinated by domestic honeybees!

They’re kind of similar to scones, but lighter and looser. They’re often quite crumbly but with this recipe having a cup of butter they’ll be nice and moist.

It’s like a big soft noodle, but rather than chewy/bouncy it’s more gummy. It’s very nice though because unlike gummy noodles, it’s a completely smooth consistency (gummy noodles tend to be gritty and inconsistent).

Git is not very efficient for handling a lot of binary files. Your best bet would be for hosting fanfic and erotic lit.

Phoenix Quill? Down feathers are the small, soft feathers close to a bird’s body. The long flight feathers are called quills.

Or just ZZ for me since I’m rarely in insert mode (I just press esc quickly after making an edit out of habit).

What have we learned though? Seems like the lessons we learned with liberalism are forgotten. We’re sliding back into authoritarian brutality.

Believe me, no one gives a damn about a critic.