/strek/ - Star Trek

>>26866

I wish there were more than just six episodes of Dukat in power. Should have given it at least a season, with constant station log entries of Dukat like in the 6x1.

>>27178

If they followed the original plan of making 8 seasons instead of 7 we might have seen that.

>>27176

Data (or Spock) wasn't a Gary stu. You're being a faggot.

>>27185

I've read that the main reason to make Dukat from am Machiavellian statesman to an autistic genocidal maniac was because fans showed up at conventions starting to defend Dukat's actions during the occupation. Can you imagine the collective OY VEY in the writers room when they saw a bunch of left-liberal nerds starting to defend what they basically set up to be Nazi Germany? So guess what, we need to make Charles Manson out of him and have him possessed by the literal devil, maybe that will help.

>>27201

The real story is that the production kept receiving more fan mail about Dukat than Sisko so Ira Steven Behr got pissed and turned Dukat into a cliché of a villain. Marc Alaimo hated the drastic change and had several heated discussions with ISB.

>>27202

Sisko was by far the most colorful captain (no pun intended) but the problem was he got a sort of "moral plot armor" as the main character, which is boring. It was just impossible to make him into a villian type, because back in these days, the regulars need to come out as the good guy winner. If DS9 was produced 2017 by Netflix or HBO it might have been very different, with Sisko turning somewhat evil and Dukat nailing Kira. It was just another time.

So scroll back to the late 90s, and Dukat comes across as a character who could do anything in the next episode. This excitement and unpredictability made him so popular, because DS9 was a pioneer in long overarching stories and character development. It's basically GoT in space by 90s standards.

Regarding Marc Alaimo, he always striked me as a cool dude and talented actor, only matched by Jeffrey Combs and Casey Briggs, but he never got another role like Dukat. Kinda sad.

>>27178

Any chance Marc Alaimo might be up for a new series?

<Star Trek: The Terok Nor files

>A team of newly graduated SF intelligence officers are poring over the records and reports of the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor.

>Both official Cardassian records and Bajoran resistance files

>Episodes split, alternating episodes told from both perspectives

>Over time it becomes obvious that the Bajoran records are increasingly overblown and exaggerated

>Become flat undeniable fabrications when it starts talking about "muh 5 trillion gorllion!"

>Throughout the series Dukat is shown as an intelligent, shrewd, master of realpolitik who simply tried to make things better for the occupied people while keeping to the unrealistic demands from the Central Command and doing everything he could to limit the suffering of the Bajorans (who he honestly cares for)

>Occasionally an aging Sisko wanders in and goes full 'Angry Black Captain Ranting' mode about how much he hates DOO-KAT!

>By the end of the show young, idealistic, humans, vulcans, and betazoids are forced to admit the truth.

DUKAT DID NOTHING WRONG

>Last episode sees them being expelled from the federation and welcomed in by the newly reformed Obsidian Order

>>27209

I have never given a cent to Kikestarter but a project like this would make me reconsider that policy.

Marc Alaimo would have been a great Thrawn

>>27207

>If DS9 was produced 2017 by Netflix or HBO it might have been very different, with Sisko turning somewhat evil and Dukat nailing Kira. It was just another time.

>2017

>Netflix

>with Sisko turning somewhat evil

Anon,I.jpg

But really, no it won't and definitely not if Netflix is handling it. If anything it would likely go full Kangz, or an even more beaten over your head literal BLACK JESUS PERSECUTED BY HUWHITE KARDASHIANS NOW IN SPEHS FUGG NOT DRUMPF WE ARE THE RESISTANCE!

>>27213

>Using the term alt-right

>« ƸЖƷ » in name

Fuck off back to /leftypol/, faggot.

>>27215

/sw/ agrees.

>some namefag

>filter

>>27252

>actually defending Bajorans

Filtered.

>>27252

"Dukat did nothing wrong" isn't a meme, he literally did not break a single moral or ethical rule during his entire behavior in the series. Even the backstory, which is shittily written, has him never doing anything really bad.

>>27258

>2378

>There are STILL no statues of Dukat on Bajor

>they never thank him for his good deed

>>27258

The only flaw Dukat has was his pathological narcissism.

>>27258

Now come on, this is untrue. He stole a guy's wife and fucked her and cheated on his own wife. But all heroes have flaws.

>>27266

>He stole a guy's wife and fucked her and cheated on his own wife

Firstly he was a long way from home on military service, and there is a long history of military officers needing to take a … personal assistant to see them through such stressful and lonely assignments. Secondly, if they hadn't included that sort of weakness in his profile he'd have been a pretty unbelievable character - and I rather like the Tora/Garak storyline.

>>27268

This tbh, military men on long campaigns can play a little looser with the rules. Odysseus' marriage was seen as one of the most perfect in existence because of his wife's constant rejection of her suitors, despite Odysseus himself getting sum fuc on his way back.

>>27269

It is NEVER okay to fuck a guy's wife without killing him first. The whole Iliad is based on that. Adulterers were serious shit. Remember this was in the time when 'alphas' got their shit pushed in by the numerically larger number of angry 'betas' and had to respect marriage

>>26824

underrated post

>>27265

He was actually awarded "The Most Humble Man In The Sector" award. Twice.

>>27266

I'm…. I'm not seeing where he did wrong.

>>26746

It must be, since the Federation is founded 8 (I think) years after the start of Broken Bow.

We see some evidence of post-scarcity in a few episodes (T'Pol references how 1950s earth had currency, when Archer is in the bar on earth at the end of series 2 he doesn't pay, all the trading stuff has to be in-kind since Enterprise doesn't have any currency). Iirc canonically post-scarcity is established like 2 decades after WWIII, after the genocide that Colonel Milosevic Thingy does. Also tbh this why that Sisko episode with the riot on 2030-whatever Earth annoys me: mostly because why would a riot sparked by economic confinement of lumpenproletarians cause radical economic reconstitution after a nuclear war? I thought it was meant to be the war that made humanity decide to end its petty fights and shit? Also why does human civilisation die-out because that Riot doesn't go a specific way? As a meditation on the issues of inner cities in the 1990s it is pretty good, but it makes no sense cannonically.

I mean Roddenberry never properly established the economic rules of Star Trek (perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of a desire not to get McCarthy'ed), and what we see in TNG & DS9 is that latinum is a kind of Bretton-Woods style universal trade regime, and a post-currency system like earth acquires it through producing goods (in the federation's case, it appears to be advanced technology), although interestingly a lot of trade in-kind does occur (like when Jake and Nog go around exchanging shit in that episode).

It also isn't established how property relations work in Strek, like the UEG doesn't own everything (or at-least we don't see anything to indicate that), but we also see small businesses (Pappa Sisko's restaurant, Kim visits a cafe regularly in a weird episode of Voyager, Archer visits a bar he liked when he was at uni). In a marxian sense, this is private property (as opposed to personal, which is like your house and that), but at the same time if there is no currency there can't be any wage labour, so is the land owned directly by a proprietor? by the workers? by the state? is it held in common and people agree that "yeah this bar can be here"? The issue is that Roddenberry was a communist (or at-least sympathetic to communism, apparently his wife said he was a fan of Mao so that's something) so I imagine he conceptualised what things would be like in broad-brushes, but not really much deeper than that. TNG tries to establish more pratical stuff out in-space but we see little of stuff on earth, then DS9 shows us how a trading hub works between Fed and Non-Fed economies, but yeah: we have no conceptualisation of property on Earth. So to answer if he is a porky, I would say it is possible but if earth is post-scarcity (which it should be) then he shouldn't exist: there is no profit to be made in a post-scarcity world…

>>27530

perhaps the federation runs on Mussolini style socialism where businesses and corporations are still allowed to be privately owned as long as you're a good goy and follow the party line so that the state doesn't have to show up and put a boot on you neck.

As far as I can tell, even though it's never actually spelled out, federation seems to give everyone universal basic income where you basic needs are provided for, though it's not an income, so much as they're just given the stuff outright. Meanwhile they also have some sort of additional stipend system for" luxury" goods like off world produced items or non-replicated food. And some people chose work jobs to obtain more of this discretionary "currency". Now in the real world, this system would fall apart, but since there's no scarcity issues like the bakery having to decide whether to use his limited stock of flour to make basic bread that people need to live off of or to make the expensive cakes that they can earn a profit from, and people are just plain "better" here and don't fail into negative personality traps like like greed, envy, sloth, or addiction somehow, this system manages to work instead of utterly imploding or even worse spilling out and fucking over the primary universal basic income system.

Meanwhile the feds, being holier than thou assholes, just choose to not consider this system of trade and resources an actual form of capitalism or even really talk about it because it's an technically entirely optional sub system people choose to partake in rather than the basis of their society.

>>27533

>Now in the real world, this system would fall apart, but since there's no scarcity issues

At the risk of autistically repeating myself, I must point out that this isn't really the case, economically speaking. Even in a "post-scarcity" utopia, you still have scarcity of time, labor, and to a certain extent of prestige/perks. Even in such a utopia you'd still need a market economy, and thus a currency, in order to properly allocate resources.

>>27533

I would content that Mussolini ran any type of socialism (but that's just economics autism so nevermind).

UBI in-kind seems like a reasonable idea, but one thing we have never established about Star Trek is what is the state of employment? It is obviously not a situation of fluctuating unemployment like a liberal capitalist economy, with UBI in-kind it could be compared to say corporatism or keynesianism but those both require full employment: which we don't see either. It is also not a centrally planned ML economy, since full employment is again absent. So what does that leave us? steady rate of unemployment with a generous welfare state á la Self-management socialism (see Yugoslavia and Kadarist Hungary)? That doesn't seem right either.

What it appears to me is a situation where so few of the population are needed to run civilisation that the vast majority of people are not formally employed (you still need government workers, starfleet officers, there are mentions of an existent Earth Navy in ENT ect.). As such if you need such few people to run society, the vast majority live on this in-kind UBI. I mean Star Trek is never actually portrayed as a theoretically classes society, just one without poverty. Kinda indicates that the Fed does have three classes: required workers (Gov officals, Starfleet officers, teachers, doctors, ect.), voluntary workers (Papa Sisko, Boothby, basically every bartender), and non-employed persons (effectively everyone else). Since to maintain the system, only the first class is required: they get privileges purely by working (as a Starfleet officer, I imagine it is far easier to get Klingon Blood Wine than a rando on Earth par examplé). Voluntary workers are also likely to get more privileges from their work, a trader will get to acquire goods most humans will never see, a bartender will have customers who will pay them in various currencies, ect.

Now what does a rando do on earth? He's a painter in the morning and a carpenter in the evening, like Marx describes? There is an explosion of art like most UBI advocates say? (considering Bashir's comments in DS9, doubtful), civilisation is full of dullards that can't do shit? (Again doubtful, mostly since there is a steady stream of colonists and recruits for various roles in society, which indicates there isn't an issue with people wanting to enter needed roles in society). It also doesn't help that we don't know how many people live on Earth, like if the population of earth was 500m or 1bn this would make a lot more sense than say, 20bn.

But yeah: there exists private (or at-least personal) property, the economy isn't centrally planned (or if it is, it resembles Samoupravni Socializem and not the other economies of the eastern bloc), there is no currency, and there is no scarcity of goods required for living a comfortable life on core worlds (we hear about famines and shortages in the colonies, that makes sense ngl).

>>27534

Well in the TNG era: there is no scarcity of labour due to replicators. Time is only really shown for big things (like starships), and as for rarer goods well we do see currency in the form of Latium (which in most cases, we see the Federation acquire through production of advance technology).

As for requiring a market economy, imma gonna press x to doubt purely because such a market would not be able to uphold itself since so much of the economy would not be effective on market exchange: there is no scarcity of food for example, so how could an agricultural sector work under market exchange? You would see a globalised hyper form of the overproduction crisis of the US in the 1920s.

Ironically, the economics of the Earth colonies make far more sense: since they are de facto run Kibbutzim style with initial agricultural self sufficiency, then industrial, and service self sufficiency.

Also it is mentioned the Vulcans have no currency at-least as far back as the 1950s (again in ENT), so post-currency economics is not limited to earth or the fed, and has existed canonically for at-least 200 years pre-Fed.

It is a weird situation where market exchange could not support it, we don't have central planning, and we have no idea how it could function otherwise. I mean could someone in slavery conceive of capitalism? Maybe we just can't conceive of how it could work.

>>27535

>there is no scarcity of labour due to replicators

That implies there are no jobs, and that's clearly not the case–starships require hundreds of crew to operate, DS9's promenade was covered in single proprietorships, and the Picard family operates a vineyard. The Doctor pitched a play of his to an Earthside publishing firm, so there must be some sort of publication industry. Clearly there are jobs to be done, ergo there's a demand for labor. The supply of skilled individuals capable of performing the work demanded is non-infinite, therefore it is scarce.

>Time is only really shown for big things

I think you misunderstand what I mean by "scarcity of time." It necessarily applies to every action taken by every person, not just for big things. What is meant by scarcity of time is that no one can do everything at once or be everywhere at once, and that means they have to prioritize what they will do now over what they will do an hour from now, or a day from now, or a year from now. Automation and transporters might make the opportunity cost of time much lower than it is now, but "cheap" isn't at all the same thing as "free." So, because people's schedules are not limitless and because people are not omnipresent, there must be scarcity of time.

>there is no scarcity of food for example, so how could an agricultural sector work under market exchange?

That's a very strange example, it's like asking how the horse-and-buggy sector could sustain itself in a market dominated by automobiles, or how an artisan cobbler could hope to compete with industrial road rollers. The answer is they don't–those markets have been replaced by superior ones and they don't exist. In your example, the agricultural industry has been replaced by the replicator industry. And there has to be a replicator industry; even if replicators could produce new replicators (and it's implied in several instances that they need non-replicable components to be constructed), you still need skilled engineering labor to install and maintain them. Also, this is ignoring the fact that replicators are far from the only providers of foodstuff in the Federation. Joe Sisko and O'Brien's mother both cooked using natural ingredients, and it's often implied, especially in DS9, that replicated food "just isn't the same", and that people are willing to pay for meals using natural ingredients. Ergo, despite replicators there very much is a market for agriculture in the Federation, as natural food is an in-demand substitute good for replicated food.

>You would see a globalised hyper form of the overproduction crisis of the US in the 1920s.

I'm afraid you're misinformed on the nature of the Great Depression and the antecedent Roaring Twenties–there was no "overproduction crisis", in fact no such thing exists–it's a Keynesian fiction used to justify the presence of central banks when there is no need for one. The "overproduction" of which you speak is the result of the Federal Reserve's inflationary policy–this kept interest rates artificially low, decreasing the cost of borrowing and causing the increase in investment to outpace the true growth of the market. Were this manipulation not in place, and the price of future money reflective of reality, growth would have been more mild and inline with the market. There would have been no credit expansion and no subsequent crash. Put another way, if the free market price system wer allowed to do what it does best there wouldn't have been a problem.

>Also it is mentioned the Vulcans have no currency at-least as far back as the 1950s (again in ENT), so post-currency economics is not limited to earth or the fed, and has existed canonically for at-least 200 years pre-Fed.

Yes, which is quite simply impossible, but because Trek writers aren't economists and not economically literate they put it in anyways. As long as scarcity of any sort exists (and unless we gain the ability to become immortal, be in multiple places at once, magick things out of thin air, and reverse entropy, there will always be scarcity), you will need some way to allocate those scarce resources, and a market price system is the only feasible way to do so.

>>27535

>>27536

>It is a weird situation where market exchange could not support it

That's the second time you've said this, but you haven't really followed it up with some kind of justification. The Misesian Calculation Problem shows that the only way to properly determine the proper supply and allocation of scarce resources is through a price system, as individual demand and the valuation of factors of production are inherently subjective measures that cannot be calculated through any other means besides a market economy. It doesn't matter how big your computer is, or how much data you've collected, these are problems that only may be solved with a price system.

>I mean could someone in slavery conceive of capitalism? Maybe we just can't conceive of how it could work.

I can see where your metaphor is coming from, but slaves often did conceive of capitalism, or at least of the market. It wasn't uncommon for the head slave of a Roman estate, for instance, to start earning a wage for his work and eventually purchase his freedom from his master.

>>27537

>The Misesian Calculation Problem shows that the only way to properly determine the proper supply and allocation of scarce resources is through a price system

>the only way

>proper

>one way to accomplish a subjective goal

There's a reason Economics is the dismal science.

>>27541

>There's a reason Economics is the dismal science

In that it's too dry for most people to bother mastering it, preferring instead to subscribe to fantasies about free stuff and grand plans? Sure.

>one way to accomplish a subjective goal

May I suggest you re-read what I posted, or better yet read up on the Calculation Problem firsthand (https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem)? The goal is not subjective, it is an objective goal, reached by objectively defined processes and arguments only the information is subjective.

>>27542

Supposed to be a comma after arguments, apologies.

>>27535

oh god, please don't even try to bring the Vulcans into this. Because as much bullshit and hand waving the federation/earth seems to require to function as shown, The Vulcans just flat out make so little sense that it's often hard to believe they even exist in the same setting that the rest of ST does.

>>27559

I can't give a source but I seem to recall it being said that the Vulcans used a barter system for their economy as well, to make matters worse.

>>26811

>What's the worst that would happen if the Feds broke the treaty?

That's the point of Picard's character though: he's a man of principle before anything else. Breaking the treaty isn't the honest thing to do, so he wouldn't do it. Hell, that's what Chain of Command (part 2) was all about. He's willing to suffer and sacrifice to maintain his principles even when giving them up is of no practical consequence. Doing anything but what he did would have undermined everything we know about his character. You might think it's foolish, but there's more to a military victory than tactical advantages. Men like Picard are the only reason why anyone's willing to agree to a treaty in the first place. Without a reputation for honest dealings, the Federation would have to rely on military might to survive, and especially on a galactic scale, that strategy just can't work because you're always hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.

>>30037

>the Federation would have to rely on military might to survive, and especially on a galactic scale, that strategy just can't work because you're always hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.

Keep in mind also that Starfleet is relatively tiny for the territory it has.

>>30132

probably the reason why they got hammered by the dominion so hard

>>30134

The Dominion mistake was not inventing a breed of troops to give Federation women the Big Jem'hadar Cock and plant them as refugees which the Federation would accept in open arms and they would eventually overrun their borders.

>>26742

I'd say the way he conduced himself was almost right, only they always make him overdo it because they needed a villain.

>radically changing crew rotation

Great. I just have to question the wisdom of doing that right before likely engagement, as people will still be used to the old system, which can hamper overall crew performance.

>trying to act tough

Good. Just don't be such a tryhard about it. And make sure that you don't come out looking like a faggot when they call your bluff.

You can claim that writers made him into a strawman, but it's how he was written whether you like it or not.

You know I get the impression Jellico was an attempt by Picard to stop Riker being an overgrown manchild.

>>26758

>>26759

6 posts too late.

>>30166

well that backfired didn't it

>>30253

Did it?

>>26827

Jellico, being a competent captain and not desperate for hollywood action fights like Patrick Steward, would never have been dumb enough to try and lead a team of commando's on a raid behind enemy lines in the first place and would thus never have been captured like Picard was.

Picard is a plenty good captain if you need someone to hold a formal diplomatic event, ferry about Federation dignitaries, rush out medical supplies like an overpriced fedex courier or command a ship sitting around gawping at spatial anomalies and shit. If your ship is leading hostile negotiations with people looking for an excuse to go to war with you and your ship might be the only warship within a hundred lightyears of the frontline if negotiations fail however, Jellico is your man.

>>30291

I would imagine if he was in danger of getting captured in the first place he would strip naked, oil himself up and start swinging his dong at the Cardassians saying "Your move, Mr Gul"