immutable
This old video by thoughtslime perfectly explains this and when I saw it years ago it really opened my eyes to what bothered me about your average liberal.
It is interesting to consider that in the vastness of space that something like a single restaurant might be viewed similarly to a glass of water in the US.
Sure the government could come in and declare eminent domain on my glass of water, but it’s value is so low as to be effectively a nonissue.
In a future where there are tons of planets and tons of replicators, perhaps the idea of personal property has just been extended to include things like a restaurant or a vineyard.
If you use the definition that private property is the private ownership over the means of production, it could be reasoned that something like Sisko’s is not necessarily a means of production but more akin to personal property. If someone on earth wants some creole food they can use any number of replicators to produce and enjoy that. Sisko’s and Picard’s vineyard might be similar to how we would look upon historical preservation. Some people could choose to spend their lives making things the old fashioned way because they enjoy it and people enjoy experiencing it.
The economy of Star Trek is interesting, but I think there are plenty of times when the utility of storytelling ends up mucking with the clarity of the message. One example I was just thinking about the other day was the introduction of the borg queen.
I get why it’s nice for there to be a borg queen, she can embody a more nuanced thinking part of the borg collective and the audience can much more readily understand the idea of a queen ruling over her subjects (whether that be like the rulers of humanity or like the queen bee as they sometimes say). But it also kind of sucks. The borg are such a fascinating species, a collective hive mind acting to attain perfection, more a force of nature than any of the other species we encounter.
While the borg queen is a compelling character and is acted wonderfully, I can’t feel a bit sad that it’s so normal and pedestrian. It turns the borg from this almost incomprehensible force into something so regular, a bunch of drones carrying out the will of the queen. While expedient to the storytelling, I like the idea of what the borg are pre-borg-queen more than what they become post-borg-queen.
I think with the economy a similar thing happens in storylines. There are many scenes that make it clear that humanity doesn’t have money anymore, but when you are telling a story and you want to have some stakes and obstacles, money is soooooo useful. Money makes it trivial to have an obstacle, or shit we need some latinum. Money makes it trivial to introduce stakes.
Star Trek had to try to thread this needle of presenting a post scarcity society while also making a dramatic engaging show for people living in a capitalist society. Scarcity is at the heart of a lot of drama, if you can just replicate your way out of every problem it’s not a very interesting show. It also leads to a thing that once you spot it’s hard not to spot, so much of the tension is aided by the “oh no we can’t replicate that” McGuffin. It plays out in a lot of episodes because otherwise every episode would be 5 minutes of “there’s an outbreak of tallarian flu on Corso V, we emailed them the recipe for the medicine and told them to replicate it.” Then the credits roll.
Privatizing our space program was a great idea, everything neoliberalism touches turns to gold!
Fucking morons
I spent about 2 decades trying. The idea that if you offer this up then you’ll get some groundswell of support just isn’t realistic in America.
We are a nation of people sold hyperindividualism and the goodness of capitalism and greed from birth. People routinely vote against their own interests in every forum imaginable. I tried to organize the people I work with to demand a pittance of compensation for what amounts to mandatory uncompensated work and the overwhelming reply was people going “I don’t know, it’s not so bad, I don’t want to rock the boat”
America is a nation where if you stay in the good graces of the capitalists you can have a somewhat nice life and if you don’t then enjoy the fucking gutter. In the late stage capitalism the exploitation and propaganda is so all consuming that most people spend the vast majority of their hours slaving away and then with what little time they have left they numb themselves with social media, booze, and drugs. The capitalists designed a system to break people’s spirits, to convince them they could do nothing to change them, and instill in their hearts the idea that maintaining it is law & order and these maniacs fucking crave that like none other.
In the absence of being able to make any meaningful change to the conditions they find themselves in they dedicate themselves to othering and hating the others, blaming them for their lousy lot in life because the capital class tells them to. They grab for whatever semblance of control they can find, becoming petty dictators at work and home and their HOA boards. They turn their rage at a system that crushes their dreams on the service workers around them.
This is not a land of solidarity.
If you think that a movement would be some clarion call that would awake these people from their slumber and suddenly the ranks would swell with people ready to right the injustices they suffer. I’ve got some bad fucking news for you. You can ask these fucking morons if it’s fair that they spend all day making the products, delivering the products, generating all the value, and the ceo gets paid more in that day then they will make in a year and they stare back at you and earnestly say “yes, his skill set is in greater demand”
The capital class played the long game, they crushed every speck of solidarity, they filled every bit of media and education with their propaganda, they have waged a half century long project to break the people and they have succeeded.
This is not to say that the ship can’t be turned, but it won’t happen overnight. It is naive to think that some well articulated alternative can undo multiple generations of intensive indoctrination. This is what defeat in a class war looks like, we might be able to make it out of this, but it won’t be easy.
It will shock Alex Cole to find out “BUT HER EMAILS” led to electoral defeat. Fucking Dems love losing it seems
She is truly awful, her take in her own field is extremely dumb but it’s her takes in other fields that are even worse. Like a lot of science YouTubers she doesn’t stay in her lane, she thinks the fact someone gave her a phd for her ridiculous idea of superdeterminism gives her license to opine about other field she knows fuck all about.
If you can find any video of hers from a field you have first hand knowledge about her takes are wrong, and not just wrong, but that special kind of wrong where you completely misunderstand the basics of something and then extrapolate out from there the stupidest fucking conclusions imaginable.
What benefits? Even if they put her to the top of the ticket she’ll just lose, she’s somehow even more unpopular.