STD: Lethe

[CrypticMirror]

http://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/c106.php

Lots of controversial stuff from Chuck today. I dunno, all I can think though is that the more I see of STD the less and less I can see myself ever liking it. The whole feel of the show is just off putting. Even The Walking Dead has occasional (and I can only assume accidental) fits of interest and likeability. This is more like The 100, boredom overlaid with apathy and a faint sensation of centipedes dancing on your feet before you fall asleep.

That is just me though.

Oh, and for controversy's sake. The Govt should neither be interested in the contents of my womb nor in ending my life.

[Zoinksberg]

Wow, a LOT in this review to talk about. Well frankly I think there is only one thing that absolutely needs to be said...

Disco Stu doesn't advertise.

[SFDebris]

Please keep in mind that the topics were brought up solely to facilitate discussing fictional character motivations, not to advocate positions on social issues. As such, please limit the actual merits of each position to the politics board and stick to the larger issues here. Thank you.

[Darth Wedgius]

What I got from the "DISCO" shirts is "Please stop calling it STD..."

I think logic is limited in what it can do. It can tell you how to get from A to B, but it can't tell you where you ultimately want to end up going. It's like that game four-year-olds excel at, where they always ask "Why?" until the only question left in your mind is, "why kids?" You want to make a sandwich. Why? To eat. Why? To survive. Why? There is nothing inherently logical about wanting to survive. Computers run on logic and they'll destroy themselves with no objections. We want to survive because our genes motivate us.

I've long figured that's one reason Vulcans might be so keen on traditions, no matter how illogical they might seem to us. To some extent, they can't be logical. Vulcans will be motivated by their genes too, of course.

So I'm fine with Vulcans seeing humans as inferior, because they might have values where that would indeed be logical. They may take it to extremes not warranted by facts -- Kirk's beaten Romulans in both hand-to-hand and starship combat, Spock acknowledged Scotty as having more expertise in some areas of engineering, Sisko was able to upstage a Vulcan captain in emotional control in DS9, and we didn't have to resort to such extremes in social change in order not to kill ourselves off as a species. So there are some times and some places that some humans will do better. But for some Vulcans to see humans as generally inferior, hey, no problem. There are humans who do better than me in any area of anything, anyway. And I 'm already used to being looked down upon because of my species -- I have a cat.

My problem with the Vulcans being irritating in DS9 and Enterprise is they seemed to be antagonists more than allies. Star Trek fans have liked Vulcans for as long as Star Trek fans have liked Star Trek. Vulcans should generally be people fans are happy to see around, not dread. I haven't seen enough STD to get an overall handle on Vulcans there, but I think Enterprise did annoying Vulcans to its own detriment.

[CrypticMirror]

If they didn't want it called STD they should have chosen their title, and lead vessel, more wisely. Star Trek: Concorde; Star Trek: Waverley; Star Trek: Vital Spark, I'd have watched any of those without blinking an eye. STD is a pre-existing TLA, so it is no wonder that it just fits. Honestly, it is the job of the production team to anticipate things like that ahead of time.

The portrayal of Vulcans post TNG, well post TOS really, has been described as the showrunners trying to seize control of the depiction back from the fans. In the gap between TOS and TNG the fan communities basically turned Vulcans into Tolkien's elves. Wise, calm, stately, and serene, and that was done even in the Star Trek books too; especially in the 1970s. That portrayal really became a target, whenever a showrunner wanted to do something that would make their mark and outrage the audience (because showrunners hate their fans, really, for some reason) they always used the Vulcans and the excuse that went "we wanted to do something different and really subvert expectations of..." not realising that most of the fanbase didn't want to be subverted.

STD and Enterprise take it to new depths, their entire production philosophy (at least for for first three seasons of ENT) seems to be "spite".

[TK99]

Okay since no one is bringing this up I will. What the hell is up with the beeping in the background of Chuck's audio? It sounds like a smoke detector battery is low.

As for the epo. on other forums I had people complain about the stuff that Vulcan extremist injected himself with than anything else, that something that dangerous should have been detected and never allowed on board the ship. I argued first, that it was probably acetylene gas (like that used in welders) since acetylene when mixed with oxygenated copper heats up and eventually explodes. Second it might have been a drug for blood condition of Vulcans, that in small doses makes it an effective medicine. But if someone was illogical enough to inject all of it (like our drugs today, taking a month's worth of medicine at once is many times fatal) then it could cause that effect.

[SFDebris]

Ugh, that's exactly what it was. My son smoked up the downstairs cooking, and it reached a point where, audio be damned, I had to just finish the review because I'd lost way too much time on it already. I'd hoped you wouldn't be able to pick it up.

[rickgriffin]

I have absolutely no issue conceptualizing the Vulcans as having different, and sometimes malevolent, viewpoints. And I also completely expect, as happened in DS9, that they'd still explain their behavior as being logical; it's almost memetic of them. Of COURSE Vulcans see their values as logical; that's exactly what they prize in their culture, like it's the vulcan version of machismo. Their really big elaborate rituals are ALSO, by that metric, logical.

I mean, the seeds of this were still present very early on in TOS. Sarek was framed as doing the weird thing and marrying a human, and he's still presented as more or less a paragon of vulcan thought. If even he can deviate from the expected norm and still be considered a logical being, why can't others?

[G-Man]

At 9:06, are they Logical extremists, or logical Extremis?

It just seems to me that the discussion of something that sounds so much like "Extremis" when we have a scene of a person glowing and then exploding must somehow indicate someone was thinking about Iron Man 3.

[G-Man]

Darth Wedgius: "I think logic is limited in what it can do. It can tell you how to get from A to B, but it can't tell you where you ultimately want to end up going. It's like that game four-year-olds excel at, where they always ask "Why?" until the only question left in your mind is, "why kids?" You want to make a sandwich. Why? To eat. Why? To survive. Why? There is nothing inherently logical about wanting to survive. Computers run on logic and they'll destroy themselves with no objections. We want to survive because our genes motivate us."

I think the word that everyone is looking for here is "premise."

Logic only works from premises. In the abortion example given, for example, arguments against abortion that rely on the wrongness of taking life are based on a premise that a fetus should be considered to be a person. Most of the arguments that it should be allowed are based on the premise that a fetus should not be considered a person. Unless one considers the status of a fetus to be axiomatic (i.e. a postulate, something that is a base premise underlying the logic that cannot be determined from baser premises), this issue is going to be built on other premises (e.g. what constitutes personhood, etc.). The point being, logic can tell you whether your position on abortion is consistent or inconsistent with your overall values, but not whether it is the correct one.

Much political acrimony comes from making, in essence, that assumption that our opponents really agree with our premises, but are arguing in bad faith to justify a position that they feel will benefit them or make the world more the way they want it to be. That is why so much argumentation relies on impugning an opponents' motives.

I think this sort of feeling underlies the distaste some feel about the Vulcans having different viewpoints on moral questions, and having what we might consider repugnant viewpoints. Our society has certain values regarding the value of an individual's life, self-determination, equality of value and rights, that we accept so thoroughly that we just sort of assume they are things that any advanced culture would believe in, and therefore we see ideas such as racial prejudice against humans by Vulcans as illogical, rather than simply being logically inconsistent with our beliefs as a culture. Put another way, much of the objection to the idea of Vulcan extremists is based on the idea that our cultural values are absolutely correct, and therefore, "logic," if properly applied, will always come to a conclusion consistent with them.

That makes it impossible to see the "bad" Vulcans as taking their positions in good faith.

This has always been a bit of a problem with the use of the term "logic" as applied to Vulcans; when Spock said logic dictates that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" he was actually describing not logic, but quasi-utilitarianism (technically utilitarianism would argue that the greater aggregate need outweighs the lesser, not merely an issue of the greater number vs the lesser, but of the severity of the need of each, and possibly the value of each individual in each group). Most people accept that as logical because it seems to mesh with at least one aspects of their moral instincts, but it is actually a debatable cultural position.