I have never understood how we can pretend Starfleet isn't the military of the Federation by function if not in name. They make a lot of noise about everything being diplomatic, and/or science. Then, curiously, when they are at war these exact same ships are on the front lines fighting wars. It isn't even a matter of changing crew either. We know for a fact that if the war with the Klingons hadn't ended that Picard and the Enterprise would be a front line ship.
I don't see how you can square this circle with what we have seen on screen. The part of your government responsible for fighting wars is a military more or less by definition. I don't know what else you could call it.
The thing with Star Fleet is that since starships in this setting are so expensive, exploration, transportation, science, and military goals for a society have to use the same ships. Most of the groups surrounding the Federation formed their star fleet using the military as a base, but the Federation used their exploration/science division. Thus, in that sense, Star Fleet is not a military. There would be massive differences in priorities and tone between a star fleet that grew from the American military, and one that grew out of NASA. However, Star Fleet is also a military in the sense that it is the group that gets sent out whenever something needs to get exploded.
EDIT: Also, the Federation is not the overwhelming military power in the sector. There's a sense that it maintains approximate equality with the other main powers, but does not have an overwhelming advantage. This is rather different from 1990s America.
This is what people mean when they say Starfleet isn't a military. The main goal of Starfleet is, in fact, exploration and science. They also function as a military, but that's not why they're out there.
It's a fleet equivalent of the National Guard. Everybody in Starfleet trains and studies for military eventualities because they're realists and know they live in a dangerous universe, but Starfleet is primarily scientific and diplomatic. They might turn the storefront sign over from "SCIENCE!" to "military, bleh" when they need to, but it's equivalent to a member of the National Guard spending the vast majority of their time living civilian life and spending a couple weeks a year in uniform. Yes, they've got military training, but the bulk of their time is anything but military life. You would not say a member of the National Guard is living a military life because they get military training and serve in the military for brief periods.
Starfleet can serve as a military force as needed. It is not a military force by design or intent, and the changeover is always extremely reluctant. That's completely different from a professional standing military force which operates in military capacity 24/7, peacetime or wartime.
I dunno why people insist Starfleet has to be a permanent standing military force just because it can be an effective military at need. This is not a situation of mutually exclusive roles, just Starfleet adjusting to whatever a given situation requires as a solution.
+10
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Cambiata, you're taking the ball and running to some other, distant place with this, and it semes to come from a place of feeling like, idk, soldiers are being disrespected? I dunno.
I feel like what I'm saying is pretty simple: I think that the best support for the show saying "we don't consider ourselves a military" is how frequently viewers and internet people take issue with things that happen because characters make decisions that a real such-and-such on a real sailing vessel in a time of war wouldn't do.
Do you see what I'm saying? Like, imagine a cop show about a cop who doesn't play by the rules. If someone's watching that show and goes "hey! That cop isn't playing by the rules!" it's like...yeah??? The opening credits have him driving a car on fire into a shopping mall! Out of universe, when Star Trek characters say "we're not a military" it's being upfront about the fact that characters will say and do things that your dad who was a sonar operator on a submarine would not have said and done. It's trying to set expectations.
In-universe, they're using a definition of the word that is more specific than "any armed force." And I'm fine with that, since to me, it seems clear that there are other words for other kinds of armed forces that aren't military (like police, or militias). But if someone's personal definition for military is that it's the generic word for an armed force, and police are a subset of that category, then that's fine and we're not really disagreeing? it's just semantics.
But it's not just that they can serve as military, it's that they repeatedly function as such on a consistent basis. The Enterprise may not be on combat duty 24/7, but it’s one ship out of countless many all of which are varied in responsibility.
At a certain point it’s kind of a prescriptivism/descriptism breakdown. As prescribed, maybe the intent of Starfleet isn’t to be a military, but the Federation and Starfleet Command’s usage of it repeatedly sees it function as a military
Some of us: “Okay, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”
[one conversation about the Federation’s geopolitical nature later]
Some more of us: “You’re right. I do not like it.”
Only we’re not being nearly as harsh in critique as Ezri was
Lanz on
+4
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
But it's not just that they can serve as military, it's that they repeatedly function as such on a consistent basis. The Enterprise may not be on combat duty 24/7, but it’s one ship out of countless many all of which are varied in responsibility.
At a certain point it’s kind of a prescriptivism/descriptism breakdown. As prescribed, maybe the intent of Starfleet isn’t to be a military, but the Federation and Starfleet Command’s usage of it repeatedly sees it function as a military
To get more into the weeds on this, here's my actual take on what a military is:
I think that different words should mean different things. Like, I think that "big" and "enormous", or "pretty" and "beautiful", mean similar, but not identical, things.
We have a lot of words and concepts associated with organized, armed groups of people. Military is one; police is another; guard is a third.
Japan has a "self-defense force." To some people, that's just a euphemism and it's obviously a military. But if it is, it's kind of a sucky military? It can't project force over vast distances, it doesn't have big deep reserves, it can't fight long protracted wars in multiple theaters. But if we rate it as a self-defense force, it's ok! It preserves the integrity of Japan's territorial waters pretty okay, it supports its allies in the region pretty okay, it is a credible deterrent to keep people from just invading Japan on a whim for funsies, it tries to help when Godzilla attacks, etc.
To me, Starfleet is a "military" on about that level. It fights the Federation's wars and is responsible for home defense but we never actually see it doing one of the biggest functions of most militaries, which is the taking and holding of territory. Almost everything we ever see our characters doing is in defense of existing Federation territory or its allies; the Enterprise goes into Romulan territory in pursuit of attackers or criminals or...or space hippies (sigh)...but it doesn't rock up to a Romulan planet and conquer it. We never see our characters in any of the shows fighting a counterinsurgency or pacifying a local population.
In fact, it's entirely possible they're not even trained or equipped to do such a thing! Those things take specialized doctrine and logistics, they don't just happen. And if the Federation doesn't train or equip its defenders to do that kind of thing, if it doesn't build giant troopships capable of moving planetary armies, if it doesn't build the infrastructure required to support those conquering armies, then it has, IMO, pretty good reason to tell people "Starfleet isn't a military."
Nobody's saying that the characters aren't members of an official armed force. We're just saying that they seem to use those arms in certain ways and not in others.
+6
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
man why do you even bother watching this show
like every so often dude you bust out these turbo cynical readings and I have both no idea where it's coming from or to whom it's directed!
I don't think it's cynical at all to acknowledge colonialist themes in Star Trek's basic framework. It doesn't make Trek bad or invalid! Understanding the drives and desires underlying the stories we tell makes us better story-recievers and better storytellers. Ultimately what we're doing is practicing analyzing our own subconscious frameworks for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
I'm not talking about the tweeter. I'm talking about this:
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
Like, what exactly is this? What is it even trying to say?
0
Options
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Cambiata, you're taking the ball and running to some other, distant place with this, and it semes to come from a place of feeling like, idk, soldiers are being disrespected? I dunno.
While I think I probably have a more positive view of military in general than PA as a whole, I don't tend to concern myself with "the military being disrespected." People overly concerned with "the military being disrespected" rather than what the military is actually doing that is morally and ethically wrong tend to irk me. That said you can't deny that there is a... flavor... About denying that Starfleet is a military that is more about "I have negative feelings about the military, so Starfleet being a military is something I find to be horrifying." Than it is about any facts on the table.
I feel like what I'm saying is pretty simple: I think that the best support for the show saying "we don't consider ourselves a military" is how frequently viewers and internet people take issue with things that happen because characters make decisions that a real such-and-such on a real sailing vessel in a time of war wouldn't do.
Do you see what I'm saying? Like, imagine a cop show about a cop who doesn't play by the rules. If someone's watching that show and goes "hey! That cop isn't playing by the rules!" it's like...yeah??? The opening credits have him driving a car on fire into a shopping mall!
I can't tell if you've made this deliberately contradictory or if you don't realize that you've done that.
People saying "that cop is doing things no real cop would do!" Are yet not saying, "that film is not creating a depiction of a police officer, fictional or otherwise." In other words, people still CALL the character a cop, no matter how many "rules" he breaks. And you can understand, can't you, that if someone tried to do film criticism of Dirty Harry based on the premise that Dirty Harry is not attempting to make you feel any sort of way about law enforcement, since no cop would ever act like Dirty Harry in real life, that that criticism would appear to be naive *at best*?
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
How does the idea that the Federation holds no territory, and seemingly does not know how to, mesh with them having fought and successfully not been overrun in various wars, let alone the various fallouts of those wars like the Cardassian/Federation DMZ, which featured a trading back and forth of colonial territories between the two powers?
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
man why do you even bother watching this show
like every so often dude you bust out these turbo cynical readings and I have both no idea where it's coming from or to whom it's directed!
I don't think it's cynical at all to acknowledge colonialist themes in Star Trek's basic framework. It doesn't make Trek bad or invalid! Understanding the drives and desires underlying the stories we tell makes us better story-recievers and better storytellers. Ultimately what we're doing is practicing analyzing our own subconscious frameworks for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
I'm not talking about the tweeter. I'm talking about this:
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
Like, what exactly is this? What is it even trying to say?
That Mainstream American fiction is deeply compromised in wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism without the part where you are the bad guy who, you know, destroys the aboriginal society.
+4
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I can't tell if you've made this deliberately contradictory or if you don't realize that you've done that.
People saying "that cop is doing things no real cop would do!" Are yet not saying, "that film is not creating a depiction of a police officer, fictional or otherwise." In other words, people still CALL the character a cop, no matter how many "rules" he breaks. And you can understand, can't you, that if someone tried to do film criticism of Dirty Harry based on the premise that Dirty Harry is not attempting to make you feel any sort of way about law enforcement, since no cop would ever act like Dirty Harry in real life, that that criticism would appear to be naive *at best*?
I'm honestly not picking up what you're driving at here.
0
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
How does the idea that the Federation holds no territory, and seemingly does not know how to, mesh with them having fought and successfully not been overrun in various wars, let alone the various fallouts of those wars like the Cardassian/Federation DMZ, which featured a trading back and forth of colonial territories between the two powers?
I think that "not being conquered" is a different skillset from "conquering and occupying hostile territory" with different material requirements (for example, long range strike capability is very important to one and not the other).
+1
Options
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
edited January 2020
I'll try to reword it.
You seem to be saying, Starfleet CAN'T be a military, look at all these rules the break for modern United States armed forces!"
Then to help me comprehend your viewpoint, you gave me the example of the renegade cop in fiction , and how people might say, "this cop breaks all the rules, no modern law enforcement officer would do that! What a crazy depiction of a cop!"
But the words used in the second example seem to make the entire argument fall apart. Because in the first example, you're saying " the hero can't be X, because rules have been broken" while in the second example you're saying, "the hero is X, an X who breaks all the rules!".
You're using an example in fiction where the character is explicitly the thing (cop) who breaks all the rules. That's the trope. And you're comparing it to the character can't possibly be the thing (military) because they break all the rules. Does that make sense?
(The Meta point also is that a renegade cop isn't really breaking *all* the rules or you wouldn't recognize him as a cop. He's performing enough "cop" that you know without having to ask that this is a depiction of a police officer. Likewise, Starfleet isn't breaking "all of the rules" of being a military, it's actually a quite solid depiction of a military. Only a few elements have been changed, but none of the ones that make it a military)
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
man why do you even bother watching this show
like every so often dude you bust out these turbo cynical readings and I have both no idea where it's coming from or to whom it's directed!
I don't think it's cynical at all to acknowledge colonialist themes in Star Trek's basic framework. It doesn't make Trek bad or invalid! Understanding the drives and desires underlying the stories we tell makes us better story-recievers and better storytellers. Ultimately what we're doing is practicing analyzing our own subconscious frameworks for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
I'm not talking about the tweeter. I'm talking about this:
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
Like, what exactly is this? What is it even trying to say?
I think@Undead Scottsman is saying Trek is, in that specific respect, ignoring/rewriting the horrific parts of colonialism so we don't have to think about it.
Personally, I read that part of the fantasy as optimistic: that someday we will live in a society humane enough - and, frankly, wealthy and content enough - that when we encounter indigenous cultures, we actually do treat them as sovereign equals.
edit: reddit markup doesn't work here, derp
Calica on
0
Options
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
How does the idea that the Federation holds no territory, and seemingly does not know how to, mesh with them having fought and successfully not been overrun in various wars, let alone the various fallouts of those wars like the Cardassian/Federation DMZ, which featured a trading back and forth of colonial territories between the two powers?
I think that "not being conquered" is a different skillset from "conquering and occupying hostile territory" with different material requirements (for example, long range strike capability is very important to one and not the other).
But that is literally one of the major mechanisms of a ground war. The taking and holding of territory as you drive back the opposing force. It’s a fundamental nature of war.
Your argument is because The Federation is not an occupying force presently that therefore Starfleet cannot be a military, but that presumes that Starfleet has never been used as such during war time, and I’m not sure that’s feasible or even supported by the text. They may not as of present series hold Cardassian territories but the mere existence of the trading of worlds between the two as part of the peace treaty implies such holdings following the war
This debate is simplifying it between three functions: an organized combat force, an organized peacekeeping/diplomatic mission, and a scientific and exploratory expedition. It's clear all three functions exist in Starfleet.
But if you're wondering which function is essential to Starfleet's nature, just imagine what would happen in the Star Trek universe if you were to remove the other functions. What would happen if you removed the necessity for a diplomatic and scientific space faring organization, would there still be a need for an organization embodying the combat function to exist and would it look like what Starfleet looks like? My view is that fuck yes it would.
Still, you could also make the case for the diplomatic function. But the thing is, that function is also mirrored by the US military. They go on missions to engage with friendly governments, train their forces and persuade them that we are strong allies so they become our allies or trading partners. It's just that the US military uses diplomacy to advance a much harsher political perspective, because the US represents a much harsher perspective.
So, that's the thing here, Starfleet is a military organization but what it services, the Federation, is much different than the United States as a political body. Is the Federation a propaganda version of the United States, though? That's a little more confusing, I think. Star Trek embodies an extreme idealism that all propaganda tries to mimic. If a space faring show like Star Trek was derived from the principles of the Soviet Union, I think it would look very much like Star Trek. The tall tales tend to look alike, no matter who is doing the telling. I think what redeems Star Trek is that it's depicting a type of ideal human society that's possible and it doesn't lecture us on how to get there, it just urges us to try. And if it's not possible, well then fuck it, might as well live in our dreams.
Oh, and to answer the question directed at me on the previous page - it's complicated.
First, I'm willing to consider these arguments, and/or try to rephrase and summarize them for others, even when I don't necessarily buy into them myself; playing interpreter and/or "devil's advocate", if you like. (To anticipate a possible objection - that the devil doesn't need one, today or any other - I'd note that without someone serving in that role, we wouldn't have TNG "Measure of a Man" or several other excellent episodes.) Note that I didn't write that series of tweets; I was just trying to explain part of it for someone who asked.
Second, I'm very mindful of what all of the shows (including TNG "The Drumhead") tell us: that a better society isn't something that just happens, and sustains itself, without care and attention and effort to keep it from sliding back into old bad habits. When we take progress for granted, we not only minimize the struggles and sacrifices of those who made it so, we also run the risk of becoming complacent and letting it slip away. I find more truth in the acknowledgement that "it's easy to be a saint in Paradise", or that within every decent, "evolved", "civilized" person are the instincts of a savage, but those instincts can (and should!) be fought, every day, than the notion that someday we'll reach The End of History and all those problems will be solved, never to trouble us again. I understand where the latter comes from; it's (IMO) a lovely fantasy, the fervent wish of every addict and dieter and sufferer from chronic illness, to take one pill and be cured forever... but I can't quite bring myself to believe it.
And finally, I acknowledge that I myself am "flawed and imperfect" - or, if you prefer, human. Some days I want to dig deep into this stuff; others, I'm fine with (or even seek out) uncritical optimism and the belief that we can do better than we are right now, that we don't have to settle for the lesser evil or a zero-sum solution but can Take a Third Option and have it work out for everyone. It depends on a lot of things.
... there was a comic I was thinking I might link to, but I can't find it, so I'll just end this here.
0
Options
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
So I think the point I want to get at with this, especially in light of the Picard stuff, is that Star Trek has always been a reflection of the real world instead of simply just a form of idealistic utopia to strive for. There is this repeated fear that Star Trek is going to go dark and gritty, that hope and the light will be abandoned and we're just going to wallow in despair or something.
But Star Trek has always had these elements of reflecting the culture it was created in, and in some cases the negative aspects of the culture we tend to overlook. In many ways, the Federation is this kind of quintessentially 20th Century American ideal, where everyone wants to join the democratic world order and be One of Us. But it does so by glossing over a lot of the negatives of how that worldview established itself in colonial manners. Trek skirts around this by removing the things that make those manners bad; as the professor notes, rare is the colony in Trek that has to displace an indigenous populace or impact a non-sapient species by disrupting its ecosystem, etc. It gets to play out the fantasy of the expanding frontier without ever having to account for how the expanding frontier impacts things already living there. And yeah, sure, Trek is using it as background for the most part to have a pseudo-anthology style tackling of themes and events and issues of the current day. But those problems still exist and float around on the periphery of Trek without ever really getting tackled as hard as they could in favor of keeping it as flavor text for philosophy adventures that aren't colonialism-critical.
But with the progress of time, and an evolving society and groups of writers, that is inevitably going to shift. Because you're going to get writers who see that stuff and are going to want to begin interrogating it, and through that using Star Trek as a deeper cultural critique. And that's how things like DS9 happen, and how Picard seems to be setting itself up. Newer generations of Trek writers want to be able to tackle these themes and use the parallel between Trek and the society that created it to interrogate the issues that society is dealing with.
Okay, so one of the things I don't like about this argument is that it says that we should throw out the context of the fiction in order to better understand it. Which... we can fucking do that all day. Starfleet ships run on dilithium crystals, so why aren't we talking about the obvious parallels to the use of whale oil and the barbaric and ecological disaster that arose from fleets of whale hunters?
Like yes, I can see an exploration of that. It could definitely be a great topic to explore on the show. But I am not certain that redefining Star Trek as a "fantasy of guilt free maritime whaling" is particularly on point.
Like, what exactly is this? What is it even trying to say?
That Mainstream American fiction is deeply compromised in wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism without the part where you are the bad guy who, you know, destroys the aboriginal society.[/quote]
Yeah, so, let's unpack this.
Is it, in your view, actually literally the case that it's physically impossible to travel to new places without committing a whoopsie genocide? Like if we land on Mars are we doomed to start enslaving Martians? Before you scoff and go "that's not what I'm saying," consider that the line I'm referring to actually uses the word "fantasy."
Do you feel that Star Trek, the tv show, does not do enough to acknowledge the perils of colonialism? I think that's a valid view! I would personally disagree inasmuch as a consistent feature of the show from the beginning has been characters constantly being nearly paralyzed with questions about the ethics of their actions and even, allegorically, challenging the basis for our various contemporary wars and interventions, but it's undeniably the case that some stories reflect very parochial attitudes or present viewpoints as moral that you or I might find pretty monstrous or at the very least incredibly misguided.
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
+2
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
You seem to be saying, Starfleet CAN'T be a military, look at all these rules the break for modern United States armed forces!"
Then to help me comprehend your viewpoint, you gave me the example of the renegade cop in fiction , and how people might say, "this cop breaks all the rules, no modern law enforcement officer would do that! What a crazy depiction of a cop!"
But the words used in the second example seem to make the entire argument fall apart. Because in the first example, you're saying " the hero can't be X, because rules have been broken" while in the second example you're saying, "the hero is X, an X who breaks all the rules!".
I'm saying that the show is being internally consistent. Characters say they're not a military force and then they do things that a modern military force wouldn't do, to the point that it elicits viewer complaints - "that's not how a real ship/captain/etc works!" I'm saying that what's on the box matches what's inside the box, just as a show called TANGO HARDMUFFIN: ROGUE COP showing the guy not Mirandizing his suspects and not filling out all the paperwork is being consistent with its own premise.
Yeah like the Federation has colonies but they're explicitly not European-style colonialism. That's literally the point of the Prime Directive. (NB: I initially put First Amendment here, which I find amusing.)
If Star Fleet acted like real-world historical colonial powers they'd be selling pre-warp civilizations hand phasers in return for the right to settle Space Manhattan Island, and while I'm sure someone can dig up an episode where a jackass admiral did exactly that I'm also 100% certain that the episode ends with Kirk/Picard/Sisko reading that admiral the riot act and imprisoning them
and the point, I believe, that the tweeter is making is that it's the fantasy/propaganda version - where the Final Frontier, pristine and unclaimed, is just waiting for us to come along and Manifest Destiny all over it, and this time, there are no inconvenient natives already sitting on our land that we have to displace or eradicate and then pretend to later generations that they didn't exist, or voluntarily moved off it to live on reservations. We get the American legend of the Westward Expansion without all that icky genocide spoiling it.
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
man why do you even bother watching this show
like every so often dude you bust out these turbo cynical readings and I have both no idea where it's coming from or to whom it's directed!
I don't think it's cynical at all to acknowledge colonialist themes in Star Trek's basic framework. It doesn't make Trek bad or invalid! Understanding the drives and desires underlying the stories we tell makes us better story-recievers and better storytellers. Ultimately what we're doing is practicing analyzing our own subconscious frameworks for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
I'm not talking about the tweeter. I'm talking about this:
EDIT: and as the Scottsman notes, in the fantasy, when we do discover someone or something living there, of course we apologize and treat them respectfully and would never try to steal their planet. That's something only Bad People do. >_>
Like, what exactly is this? What is it even trying to say?
I think@Undead Scottsman is saying Trek is, in that specific respect, ignoring/rewriting the horrific parts of colonialism so we don't have to think about it.
Personally, I read that part of the fantasy as optimistic: that someday we will live in a society humane enough - and, frankly, wealthy and content enough - that when we encounter indigenous cultures, we actually do treat them as sovereign equals.
edit: reddit markup doesn't work here, derp
Not quite, but very close!
Undead Scottsman was one of a few who pointed out that most of the planets are empty and, when the Federation does discover life on them, they treat them respectfully etc.
I chose his post as representative of such reponses, and made essentially the point that you (innocently, but mistakenly) attributed to them rather than to me. EDIT: Or, as Lanz put it:
That Mainstream American fiction is deeply compromised in wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism without the part where you are the bad guy who, you know, destroys the aboriginal society.
Though I do think your "Personally" is a lovely thought.
Commander Zoom on
0
Options
MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
But it's not just that they can serve as military, it's that they repeatedly function as such on a consistent basis. The Enterprise may not be on combat duty 24/7, but it’s one ship out of countless many all of which are varied in responsibility.
At a certain point it’s kind of a prescriptivism/descriptism breakdown. As prescribed, maybe the intent of Starfleet isn’t to be a military, but the Federation and Starfleet Command’s usage of it repeatedly sees it function as a military
To get more into the weeds on this, here's my actual take on what a military is:
I think that different words should mean different things. Like, I think that "big" and "enormous", or "pretty" and "beautiful", mean similar, but not identical, things.
We have a lot of words and concepts associated with organized, armed groups of people. Military is one; police is another; guard is a third.
Japan has a "self-defense force." To some people, that's just a euphemism and it's obviously a military. But if it is, it's kind of a sucky military? It can't project force over vast distances, it doesn't have big deep reserves, it can't fight long protracted wars in multiple theaters. But if we rate it as a self-defense force, it's ok! It preserves the integrity of Japan's territorial waters pretty okay, it supports its allies in the region pretty okay, it is a credible deterrent to keep people from just invading Japan on a whim for funsies, it tries to help when Godzilla attacks, etc.
To me, Starfleet is a "military" on about that level. It fights the Federation's wars and is responsible for home defense but we never actually see it doing one of the biggest functions of most militaries, which is the taking and holding of territory. Almost everything we ever see our characters doing is in defense of existing Federation territory or its allies; the Enterprise goes into Romulan territory in pursuit of attackers or criminals or...or space hippies (sigh)...but it doesn't rock up to a Romulan planet and conquer it. We never see our characters in any of the shows fighting a counterinsurgency or pacifying a local population.
In fact, it's entirely possible they're not even trained or equipped to do such a thing! Those things take specialized doctrine and logistics, they don't just happen. And if the Federation doesn't train or equip its defenders to do that kind of thing, if it doesn't build giant troopships capable of moving planetary armies, if it doesn't build the infrastructure required to support those conquering armies, then it has, IMO, pretty good reason to tell people "Starfleet isn't a military."
Nobody's saying that the characters aren't members of an official armed force. We're just saying that they seem to use those arms in certain ways and not in others.
I strongly agree with your overall point but would note that we see the Voyager pilot plus several episodes of Sisko fighting a counterinsurgency operation against the Maquis. Sisko even makes a whole planet uninhabitable to humans for 50 years, displacing apparently tens of thousands* of people from their homes! It's also noted that the Defiant is explicitly just fighting ship, one that wouldn't have been commissioned but for the Dominion threat, implying that pretty much every other ship in the fleet is considered to be at least more than that, and we see a ton of ships that are basically defenseless exploratory, scientific, or merchant marine vessels.
Starfleet has forthrightly done and also passively tolerated a ton of heinous shit to advance their galactipolitical interests, but they also definitely do have a mission which is larger than just that of a military.
I think "The Federation is a Human-Supremacist Empire" is a separate question that I only kiiiind of agree with.
* It's unclear the number on the one planet he does poison, but they number the total DMZ population in the "hundreds of thousands" divided by probably dozens of planets means the ev(human_misery_coeff) = like 10-50k?
So I think the point I want to get at with this, especially in light of the Picard stuff, is that Star Trek has always been a reflection of the real world instead of simply just a form of idealistic utopia to strive for. There is this repeated fear that Star Trek is going to go dark and gritty, that hope and the light will be abandoned and we're just going to wallow in despair or something.
But Star Trek has always had these elements of reflecting the culture it was created in, and in some cases the negative aspects of the culture we tend to overlook. In many ways, the Federation is this kind of quintessentially 20th Century American ideal, where everyone wants to join the democratic world order and be One of Us. But it does so by glossing over a lot of the negatives of how that worldview established itself in colonial manners. Trek skirts around this by removing the things that make those manners bad; as the professor notes, rare is the colony in Trek that has to displace an indigenous populace or impact a non-sapient species by disrupting its ecosystem, etc. It gets to play out the fantasy of the expanding frontier without ever having to account for how the expanding frontier impacts things already living there. And yeah, sure, Trek is using it as background for the most part to have a pseudo-anthology style tackling of themes and events and issues of the current day. But those problems still exist and float around on the periphery of Trek without ever really getting tackled as hard as they could in favor of keeping it as flavor text for philosophy adventures that aren't colonialism-critical.
But with the progress of time, and an evolving society and groups of writers, that is inevitably going to shift. Because you're going to get writers who see that stuff and are going to want to begin interrogating it, and through that using Star Trek as a deeper cultural critique. And that's how things like DS9 happen, and how Picard seems to be setting itself up. Newer generations of Trek writers want to be able to tackle these themes and use the parallel between Trek and the society that created it to interrogate the issues that society is dealing with.
Okay, so one of the things I don't like about this argument is that it says that we should throw out the context of the fiction in order to better understand it. Which... we can fucking do that all day. Starfleet ships run on dilithium crystals, so why aren't we talking about the obvious parallels to the use of whale oil and the barbaric and ecological disaster that arose from fleets of whale hunters?
Like yes, I can see an exploration of that. It could definitely be a great topic to explore on the show. But I am not certain that redefining Star Trek as a "fantasy of guilt free maritime whaling" is particularly on point.
This is where I point out that when TNG did try to address "hey, did you know that fossil fuels warp drives are actually tremendously harmful to the environment?", this fine and timely moral message cut so deeply into the heart of the premise of the franchise (Space Travel is Awesome and Good!) that it was mentioned only a couple of times afterward, with handwaves that amounted to "yes but we fixed that so It Just Isn't A Problem Anymore", and then dropped down the memory hole never to be spoken of again. :rotate:
Commander Zoom on
+1
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
How does the idea that the Federation holds no territory, and seemingly does not know how to, mesh with them having fought and successfully not been overrun in various wars, let alone the various fallouts of those wars like the Cardassian/Federation DMZ, which featured a trading back and forth of colonial territories between the two powers?
I think that "not being conquered" is a different skillset from "conquering and occupying hostile territory" with different material requirements (for example, long range strike capability is very important to one and not the other).
But that is literally one of the major mechanisms of a ground war. The taking and holding of territory as you drive back the opposing force. It’s a fundamental nature of war.
Your argument is because The Federation is not an occupying force presently that therefore Starfleet cannot be a military, but that presumes that Starfleet has never been used as such during war time, and I’m not sure that’s feasible or even supported by the text. They may not as of present series hold Cardassian territories but the mere existence of the trading of worlds between the two as part of the peace treaty implies such holdings following the war
I feel like an armed force built for something other than conquest is not a big ask. That's what police are, that's what national guards are, that's what militias generally are.
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
Commander Zoom on
+4
Options
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Also, I absolutely agree with Inquisitor - a lot of this back and forth stems from a vocabulary that fails to describe the purely imagined setting of Star Trek. The real world has plenty of examples of armed ships that did not serve as military vessels, and most of them had a command structure similar to what we adopted for the US navy. So "Captain" and "Admiral" make for convenient shorthand.
And that (to me) is the only real link here. Starfleet is a Navy. It has what we consider a military command structure. It enacts missions dictated by the 'government' that is the Federation. You can say it models absolutely every human government throughout history that had the same setup. We view it through the lens of the United States because it's an American tv show starring English speaking actors (also the dumb USS designation), but I don't see why it can't be called a naval based "fantasy" of perhaps any nation state.
But hell, let's "demilitarize" Star Trek. No more central command directed by the Federation. The Enterprise is essentially a roving mercenary company and do science research, play diplomatic taxi, rescue colonists, and protect territory only by negotiated contract. That certainly doesn't look like the US navy!
And it doesn't make any substantial difference to the series. Funny that
But it's not just that they can serve as military, it's that they repeatedly function as such on a consistent basis. The Enterprise may not be on combat duty 24/7, but it’s one ship out of countless many all of which are varied in responsibility.
At a certain point it’s kind of a prescriptivism/descriptism breakdown. As prescribed, maybe the intent of Starfleet isn’t to be a military, but the Federation and Starfleet Command’s usage of it repeatedly sees it function as a military
To get more into the weeds on this, here's my actual take on what a military is:
I think that different words should mean different things. Like, I think that "big" and "enormous", or "pretty" and "beautiful", mean similar, but not identical, things.
We have a lot of words and concepts associated with organized, armed groups of people. Military is one; police is another; guard is a third.
Japan has a "self-defense force." To some people, that's just a euphemism and it's obviously a military. But if it is, it's kind of a sucky military? It can't project force over vast distances, it doesn't have big deep reserves, it can't fight long protracted wars in multiple theaters. But if we rate it as a self-defense force, it's ok! It preserves the integrity of Japan's territorial waters pretty okay, it supports its allies in the region pretty okay, it is a credible deterrent to keep people from just invading Japan on a whim for funsies, it tries to help when Godzilla attacks, etc.
To me, Starfleet is a "military" on about that level. It fights the Federation's wars and is responsible for home defense but we never actually see it doing one of the biggest functions of most militaries, which is the taking and holding of territory. Almost everything we ever see our characters doing is in defense of existing Federation territory or its allies; the Enterprise goes into Romulan territory in pursuit of attackers or criminals or...or space hippies (sigh)...but it doesn't rock up to a Romulan planet and conquer it. We never see our characters in any of the shows fighting a counterinsurgency or pacifying a local population.
In fact, it's entirely possible they're not even trained or equipped to do such a thing! Those things take specialized doctrine and logistics, they don't just happen. And if the Federation doesn't train or equip its defenders to do that kind of thing, if it doesn't build giant troopships capable of moving planetary armies, if it doesn't build the infrastructure required to support those conquering armies, then it has, IMO, pretty good reason to tell people "Starfleet isn't a military."
Nobody's saying that the characters aren't members of an official armed force. We're just saying that they seem to use those arms in certain ways and not in others.
I strongly agree with your overall point but would note that we see the Voyager pilot plus several episodes of Sisko fighting a counterinsurgency operation against the Maquis. Sisko even makes a whole planet uninhabitable to humans for 50 years, displacing apparently tens of thousands* of people from their homes! It's also noted that the Defiant is explicitly just fighting ship, one that wouldn't have been commissioned but for the Dominion threat, implying that pretty much every other ship in the fleet is considered to be at least more than that, and we see a ton of ships that are basically defenseless exploratory, scientific, or merchant marine vessels.
Starfleet has forthrightly done and also passively tolerated a ton of heinous shit to advance their galactipolitical interests, but they also definitely do have a mission which is larger than just that of a military.
I think "The Federation is a Human-Supremacist Empire" is a separate question that I only kiiiind of agree with.
* It's unclear the number on the one planet he does poison, but they number the total DMZ population in the "hundreds of thousands" divided by probably dozens of planets means the ev(human_misery_coeff) = like 10-50k?
The situation with the Maquis is kind of a reverse conquest. They're fighting those people because they (Starfleet) don't want them (the Maquis) grabbing land that (at least legally, if not, in the Maquis' view, ethically, belongs to the Cardassians). Sisko is basically being a very heavy-handed cop, rather than an invader.
+3
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
The thing is that I don't think the shows are by and large blithe and uncritical; self-questioning is built into the program's very DNA, to the point where characters sometimes take up kind of facile or absurd devil's-advocate positions just to have scenes where everyone can sit around debating the merits of a given action.
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
The thing is that I don't think the shows are by and large blithe and uncritical; self-questioning is built into the program's very DNA, to the point where characters sometimes take up kind of facile or absurd devil's-advocate positions just to have scenes where everyone can sit around debating the merits of a given action.
Okay, that's fair. I acknowledge and agree with your point, actually.
(I was about to add to the quoted bit, "Today, we're on the edge of the #%$^ing Bell Riots.")
Also, I absolutely agree with Inquisitor - a lot of this back and forth stems from a vocabulary that fails to describe the purely imagined setting of Star Trek. The real world has plenty of examples of armed ships that did not serve as military vessels, and most of them had a command structure similar to what we adopted for the US navy. So "Captain" and "Admiral" make for convenient shorthand.
And that (to me) is the only real link here. Starfleet is a Navy. It has what we consider a military command structure. It enacts missions dictated by the 'government' that is the Federation. You can say it models absolutely every human government throughout history that had the same setup. We view it through the lens of the United States because it's an American tv show starring English speaking actors (also the dumb USS designation), but I don't see why it can't be called a naval based "fantasy" of perhaps any nation state.
But hell, let's "demilitarize" Star Trek. No more central command directed by the Federation. The Enterprise is essentially a roving mercenary company and do science research, play diplomatic taxi, rescue colonists, and protect territory only by negotiated contract. That certainly doesn't look like the US navy!
And it doesn't make any substantial difference to the series. Funny that
Your solution to the “Starfleet cannot be a military!” problem is to... make it a PMC instead?
Like... how does making them a privately operated mercenary group that still does all those things avoid the issue?
This is what I meant by the prescriptive vs descriptive problem; you’re not changing the things it does. The things it does are what make Starfleet a military organization. Yes, it has merged it with a diplomatic and a science corps, but it is still a military organization in function and structure
+4
Options
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
So I think the point I want to get at with this, especially in light of the Picard stuff, is that Star Trek has always been a reflection of the real world instead of simply just a form of idealistic utopia to strive for. There is this repeated fear that Star Trek is going to go dark and gritty, that hope and the light will be abandoned and we're just going to wallow in despair or something.
But Star Trek has always had these elements of reflecting the culture it was created in, and in some cases the negative aspects of the culture we tend to overlook. In many ways, the Federation is this kind of quintessentially 20th Century American ideal, where everyone wants to join the democratic world order and be One of Us. But it does so by glossing over a lot of the negatives of how that worldview established itself in colonial manners. Trek skirts around this by removing the things that make those manners bad; as the professor notes, rare is the colony in Trek that has to displace an indigenous populace or impact a non-sapient species by disrupting its ecosystem, etc. It gets to play out the fantasy of the expanding frontier without ever having to account for how the expanding frontier impacts things already living there. And yeah, sure, Trek is using it as background for the most part to have a pseudo-anthology style tackling of themes and events and issues of the current day. But those problems still exist and float around on the periphery of Trek without ever really getting tackled as hard as they could in favor of keeping it as flavor text for philosophy adventures that aren't colonialism-critical.
But with the progress of time, and an evolving society and groups of writers, that is inevitably going to shift. Because you're going to get writers who see that stuff and are going to want to begin interrogating it, and through that using Star Trek as a deeper cultural critique. And that's how things like DS9 happen, and how Picard seems to be setting itself up. Newer generations of Trek writers want to be able to tackle these themes and use the parallel between Trek and the society that created it to interrogate the issues that society is dealing with.
Okay, so one of the things I don't like about this argument is that it says that we should throw out the context of the fiction in order to better understand it. Which... we can fucking do that all day. Starfleet ships run on dilithium crystals, so why aren't we talking about the obvious parallels to the use of whale oil and the barbaric and ecological disaster that arose from fleets of whale hunters?
Like yes, I can see an exploration of that. It could definitely be a great topic to explore on the show. But I am not certain that redefining Star Trek as a "fantasy of guilt free maritime whaling" is particularly on point.
This is where I point out that when TNG did try to address "hey, did you know that fossil fuels warp drives are actually tremendously harmful to the environment?", this fine and timely moral message cut so deeply into the heart of the premise of the franchise (Space Travel is Awesome and Good!) that it was mentioned only a couple of times afterward, with handwaves that amounted to "yes but we fixed that so It Just Isn't A Problem Anymore", and then dropped down the memory hole never to be spoken of again. :rotate:
Yes but I do not believe you would characterize TNG as a show that indulges in the 90's fantasy that ecological disasters were something we'd just 'get over' and that it attempts to downplay the fears of climate change.
Even though that is exactly what that episode and its subsequent burial does
I believe Star Trek is neither an indulgence in 'yay pollution' nor 'yay colonialism'. In fact, I believe the intent of the show is the opposite! Can and does the show have missteps that work against the overall setting and narrative? Absolutely. There are plenty of just plain disasters in writing throughout the series. But it feels disingenuous to say that Star Trek misrepresents itself with regards to its ideals.
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
edited January 2020
Uh, yeah, I actually think the show would be changed significantly (for the bad) if Picard were a mercenary and there was no central government guiding his, and the rest of the fleet's, actions.
Though I guess there's a way to depict that and it still seem hopeful - basically by having human mercs come to help other ships by default, even if doing so could cost them their lives. Mercs who are not mercenary. But it would be a very different show.
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
0
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
The thing is that I don't think the shows are by and large blithe and uncritical; self-questioning is built into the program's very DNA, to the point where characters sometimes take up kind of facile or absurd devil's-advocate positions just to have scenes where everyone can sit around debating the merits of a given action.
Okay, that's fair. I acknowledge and agree with your point, actually.
(I was about to add to the quoted bit, "Today, we're on the edge of the #%$^ing Bell Riots.")
To me a much more biting critique of the show is that it's at times an incredibly pensive, milquetoast, moderate-liberal handwringfest where even the smallest interventions are treated as if they might be worse than the original problem ("but if we break this minor rule to free this one slave, isn't that almost as bad as the entire institution of slavery ever?")
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
The thing is that I don't think the shows are by and large blithe and uncritical; self-questioning is built into the program's very DNA, to the point where characters sometimes take up kind of facile or absurd devil's-advocate positions just to have scenes where everyone can sit around debating the merits of a given action.
Okay, that's fair. I acknowledge and agree with your point, actually.
(I was about to add to the quoted bit, "Today, we're on the edge of the #%$^ing Bell Riots.")
To me a much more biting critique of the show is that it's at times an incredibly pensive, milquetoast, moderate-liberal handwringfest where even the smallest interventions are treated as if they might be worse than the original problem ("but if we break this minor rule to free this one slave, isn't that almost as bad as the entire institution of slavery ever?")
I read this and my mind immediately goes to them just leaving the narcotic addict planet and the planet of narcotics pushers to their own devices to solve the problem, despite the fact that the former were repeatedly lied to and deluded by the other into thinking their narcotics were a necessary drug for a plague that ended centuries ago
+6
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
The thing is that I don't think the shows are by and large blithe and uncritical; self-questioning is built into the program's very DNA, to the point where characters sometimes take up kind of facile or absurd devil's-advocate positions just to have scenes where everyone can sit around debating the merits of a given action.
Okay, that's fair. I acknowledge and agree with your point, actually.
(I was about to add to the quoted bit, "Today, we're on the edge of the #%$^ing Bell Riots.")
To me a much more biting critique of the show is that it's at times an incredibly pensive, milquetoast, moderate-liberal handwringfest where even the smallest interventions are treated as if they might be worse than the original problem ("but if we break this minor rule to free this one slave, isn't that almost as bad as the entire institution of slavery ever?")
I read this and my mind immediately goes to them just leaving the narcotic addict planet and the planet of narcotics pushers to their own devices to solve the problem, despite the fact that the former were repeatedly lied to and deluded by the other into thinking their narcotics were a necessary drug for a plague that ended centuries ago
Yeah this is like the shining example of that. It's just awful.
To me, I see an episode like that and it feels very much like a well-meaning writer oversteering the other direction away from colonialism. Like they believe so strongly in the law of unintended consequences that they ended up writing a show about how you shouldn't ever dare lift a finger to help anyone because you might actually harm them instead.
and we're back to talking about how the PD went from "don't do it without a damn good reason and don't get caught" to "THOU SHALT NOT INTERFERE in matters of Fate, lest you offend the gods with your hubris!"
:P
Commander Zoom on
+2
Options
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Also, I absolutely agree with Inquisitor - a lot of this back and forth stems from a vocabulary that fails to describe the purely imagined setting of Star Trek. The real world has plenty of examples of armed ships that did not serve as military vessels, and most of them had a command structure similar to what we adopted for the US navy. So "Captain" and "Admiral" make for convenient shorthand.
And that (to me) is the only real link here. Starfleet is a Navy. It has what we consider a military command structure. It enacts missions dictated by the 'government' that is the Federation. You can say it models absolutely every human government throughout history that had the same setup. We view it through the lens of the United States because it's an American tv show starring English speaking actors (also the dumb USS designation), but I don't see why it can't be called a naval based "fantasy" of perhaps any nation state.
But hell, let's "demilitarize" Star Trek. No more central command directed by the Federation. The Enterprise is essentially a roving mercenary company and do science research, play diplomatic taxi, rescue colonists, and protect territory only by negotiated contract. That certainly doesn't look like the US navy!
And it doesn't make any substantial difference to the series. Funny that
Your solution to the “Starfleet cannot be a military!” problem is to... make it a PMC instead?
Like... how does making them a privately operated mercenary group that still does all those things avoid the issue?
This is what I meant by the prescriptive vs descriptive problem; you’re not changing the things it does. The things it does are what make Starfleet a military organization. Yes, it has merged it with a diplomatic and a science corps, but it is still a military organization in function and structure
Okay, hard to edit quotes on mobile so I am going to respond to Cambiata's merc post too
I feel like you're very much layering current definitions, even historical definitions, of "mercenary" onto a science fiction universe. It may even be telling that you've done that! I absolutely see no reason Picard or any of the crew would need to behave differently in almost any episode if they were exploring space on their own recognizance without direction from the Federation itself. In fact I think it could make some episodes even better as it becomes less about "we'll be yelled at for doing this" and more about "what are the personal stakes of me doing this"
The only point of the Federation in the show is to be able to firmly state "These are the ideals humanity stands for" and watch the Enterprise crew live up to them. Which is completely undermined when you believe the Federation doesn't actually stand for those ideals.
That aside, we're again into the territory of military = has guns
What exactly does a PMC have in common with a "military" besides "has guns"?
So I think the point I want to get at with this, especially in light of the Picard stuff, is that Star Trek has always been a reflection of the real world instead of simply just a form of idealistic utopia to strive for. There is this repeated fear that Star Trek is going to go dark and gritty, that hope and the light will be abandoned and we're just going to wallow in despair or something.
But Star Trek has always had these elements of reflecting the culture it was created in, and in some cases the negative aspects of the culture we tend to overlook. In many ways, the Federation is this kind of quintessentially 20th Century American ideal, where everyone wants to join the democratic world order and be One of Us. But it does so by glossing over a lot of the negatives of how that worldview established itself in colonial manners. Trek skirts around this by removing the things that make those manners bad; as the professor notes, rare is the colony in Trek that has to displace an indigenous populace or impact a non-sapient species by disrupting its ecosystem, etc. It gets to play out the fantasy of the expanding frontier without ever having to account for how the expanding frontier impacts things already living there. And yeah, sure, Trek is using it as background for the most part to have a pseudo-anthology style tackling of themes and events and issues of the current day. But those problems still exist and float around on the periphery of Trek without ever really getting tackled as hard as they could in favor of keeping it as flavor text for philosophy adventures that aren't colonialism-critical.
But with the progress of time, and an evolving society and groups of writers, that is inevitably going to shift. Because you're going to get writers who see that stuff and are going to want to begin interrogating it, and through that using Star Trek as a deeper cultural critique. And that's how things like DS9 happen, and how Picard seems to be setting itself up. Newer generations of Trek writers want to be able to tackle these themes and use the parallel between Trek and the society that created it to interrogate the issues that society is dealing with.
In 1969, nobody (as far as I know) blinked at the implication that an advanced 23rd century society wouldn't allow women to command starships.
Times change, and with them contexts and assumptions.
Well, Gene, for all his many flaws, at least wanted the second in command to be a woman. At least it's canonically still there, in he flashbacks of the pike incident
As someone who believes establishing offworld colonies is rather imperative for the long term survivability of humanity (seriously, one really good plague or a big enough rock and we're fucked, and that's not even getting into the things we do to ourselves), the framing of any form of settling of other planets, no matter how benign, as rooted in the same mindset that lead to the theft of land and various genocides in human history is disingenuous to me.
If we put a colony on Mars, we're not displacing anybody, we're not taking anything from anybody, and it's a real planet that exists in our solar system right now. Space is huge; there are going to be many, many planets devoid of life, and we may one day be able to inhabit them. I don't think going "but remember the specter of COLONIALISM that haunts over your actions" is either useful or accurate.
If we start thinking about messing up inhabited worlds, then by all means, it's time to beat the anti-colonial drum. Doing it for when 200 Irish erudites establish a colony on a planet with absolutely nobody on it though? I don't see the point.
Posts
It's a fleet equivalent of the National Guard. Everybody in Starfleet trains and studies for military eventualities because they're realists and know they live in a dangerous universe, but Starfleet is primarily scientific and diplomatic. They might turn the storefront sign over from "SCIENCE!" to "military, bleh" when they need to, but it's equivalent to a member of the National Guard spending the vast majority of their time living civilian life and spending a couple weeks a year in uniform. Yes, they've got military training, but the bulk of their time is anything but military life. You would not say a member of the National Guard is living a military life because they get military training and serve in the military for brief periods.
Starfleet can serve as a military force as needed. It is not a military force by design or intent, and the changeover is always extremely reluctant. That's completely different from a professional standing military force which operates in military capacity 24/7, peacetime or wartime.
I dunno why people insist Starfleet has to be a permanent standing military force just because it can be an effective military at need. This is not a situation of mutually exclusive roles, just Starfleet adjusting to whatever a given situation requires as a solution.
I feel like what I'm saying is pretty simple: I think that the best support for the show saying "we don't consider ourselves a military" is how frequently viewers and internet people take issue with things that happen because characters make decisions that a real such-and-such on a real sailing vessel in a time of war wouldn't do.
Do you see what I'm saying? Like, imagine a cop show about a cop who doesn't play by the rules. If someone's watching that show and goes "hey! That cop isn't playing by the rules!" it's like...yeah??? The opening credits have him driving a car on fire into a shopping mall! Out of universe, when Star Trek characters say "we're not a military" it's being upfront about the fact that characters will say and do things that your dad who was a sonar operator on a submarine would not have said and done. It's trying to set expectations.
In-universe, they're using a definition of the word that is more specific than "any armed force." And I'm fine with that, since to me, it seems clear that there are other words for other kinds of armed forces that aren't military (like police, or militias). But if someone's personal definition for military is that it's the generic word for an armed force, and police are a subset of that category, then that's fine and we're not really disagreeing? it's just semantics.
At a certain point it’s kind of a prescriptivism/descriptism breakdown. As prescribed, maybe the intent of Starfleet isn’t to be a military, but the Federation and Starfleet Command’s usage of it repeatedly sees it function as a military
Some of us: “Okay, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”
[one conversation about the Federation’s geopolitical nature later]
Some more of us: “You’re right. I do not like it.”
Only we’re not being nearly as harsh in critique as Ezri was
To get more into the weeds on this, here's my actual take on what a military is:
I think that different words should mean different things. Like, I think that "big" and "enormous", or "pretty" and "beautiful", mean similar, but not identical, things.
We have a lot of words and concepts associated with organized, armed groups of people. Military is one; police is another; guard is a third.
Japan has a "self-defense force." To some people, that's just a euphemism and it's obviously a military. But if it is, it's kind of a sucky military? It can't project force over vast distances, it doesn't have big deep reserves, it can't fight long protracted wars in multiple theaters. But if we rate it as a self-defense force, it's ok! It preserves the integrity of Japan's territorial waters pretty okay, it supports its allies in the region pretty okay, it is a credible deterrent to keep people from just invading Japan on a whim for funsies, it tries to help when Godzilla attacks, etc.
To me, Starfleet is a "military" on about that level. It fights the Federation's wars and is responsible for home defense but we never actually see it doing one of the biggest functions of most militaries, which is the taking and holding of territory. Almost everything we ever see our characters doing is in defense of existing Federation territory or its allies; the Enterprise goes into Romulan territory in pursuit of attackers or criminals or...or space hippies (sigh)...but it doesn't rock up to a Romulan planet and conquer it. We never see our characters in any of the shows fighting a counterinsurgency or pacifying a local population.
In fact, it's entirely possible they're not even trained or equipped to do such a thing! Those things take specialized doctrine and logistics, they don't just happen. And if the Federation doesn't train or equip its defenders to do that kind of thing, if it doesn't build giant troopships capable of moving planetary armies, if it doesn't build the infrastructure required to support those conquering armies, then it has, IMO, pretty good reason to tell people "Starfleet isn't a military."
Nobody's saying that the characters aren't members of an official armed force. We're just saying that they seem to use those arms in certain ways and not in others.
I'm not talking about the tweeter. I'm talking about this:
Like, what exactly is this? What is it even trying to say?
While I think I probably have a more positive view of military in general than PA as a whole, I don't tend to concern myself with "the military being disrespected." People overly concerned with "the military being disrespected" rather than what the military is actually doing that is morally and ethically wrong tend to irk me. That said you can't deny that there is a... flavor... About denying that Starfleet is a military that is more about "I have negative feelings about the military, so Starfleet being a military is something I find to be horrifying." Than it is about any facts on the table.
I can't tell if you've made this deliberately contradictory or if you don't realize that you've done that.
People saying "that cop is doing things no real cop would do!" Are yet not saying, "that film is not creating a depiction of a police officer, fictional or otherwise." In other words, people still CALL the character a cop, no matter how many "rules" he breaks. And you can understand, can't you, that if someone tried to do film criticism of Dirty Harry based on the premise that Dirty Harry is not attempting to make you feel any sort of way about law enforcement, since no cop would ever act like Dirty Harry in real life, that that criticism would appear to be naive *at best*?
That Mainstream American fiction is deeply compromised in wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism without the part where you are the bad guy who, you know, destroys the aboriginal society.
I'm honestly not picking up what you're driving at here.
I think that "not being conquered" is a different skillset from "conquering and occupying hostile territory" with different material requirements (for example, long range strike capability is very important to one and not the other).
You seem to be saying, Starfleet CAN'T be a military, look at all these rules the break for modern United States armed forces!"
Then to help me comprehend your viewpoint, you gave me the example of the renegade cop in fiction , and how people might say, "this cop breaks all the rules, no modern law enforcement officer would do that! What a crazy depiction of a cop!"
But the words used in the second example seem to make the entire argument fall apart. Because in the first example, you're saying " the hero can't be X, because rules have been broken" while in the second example you're saying, "the hero is X, an X who breaks all the rules!".
You're using an example in fiction where the character is explicitly the thing (cop) who breaks all the rules. That's the trope. And you're comparing it to the character can't possibly be the thing (military) because they break all the rules. Does that make sense?
(The Meta point also is that a renegade cop isn't really breaking *all* the rules or you wouldn't recognize him as a cop. He's performing enough "cop" that you know without having to ask that this is a depiction of a police officer. Likewise, Starfleet isn't breaking "all of the rules" of being a military, it's actually a quite solid depiction of a military. Only a few elements have been changed, but none of the ones that make it a military)
I think @Undead Scottsman is saying Trek is, in that specific respect, ignoring/rewriting the horrific parts of colonialism so we don't have to think about it.
Personally, I read that part of the fantasy as optimistic: that someday we will live in a society humane enough - and, frankly, wealthy and content enough - that when we encounter indigenous cultures, we actually do treat them as sovereign equals.
edit: reddit markup doesn't work here, derp
But that is literally one of the major mechanisms of a ground war. The taking and holding of territory as you drive back the opposing force. It’s a fundamental nature of war.
Your argument is because The Federation is not an occupying force presently that therefore Starfleet cannot be a military, but that presumes that Starfleet has never been used as such during war time, and I’m not sure that’s feasible or even supported by the text. They may not as of present series hold Cardassian territories but the mere existence of the trading of worlds between the two as part of the peace treaty implies such holdings following the war
This debate is simplifying it between three functions: an organized combat force, an organized peacekeeping/diplomatic mission, and a scientific and exploratory expedition. It's clear all three functions exist in Starfleet.
But if you're wondering which function is essential to Starfleet's nature, just imagine what would happen in the Star Trek universe if you were to remove the other functions. What would happen if you removed the necessity for a diplomatic and scientific space faring organization, would there still be a need for an organization embodying the combat function to exist and would it look like what Starfleet looks like? My view is that fuck yes it would.
Still, you could also make the case for the diplomatic function. But the thing is, that function is also mirrored by the US military. They go on missions to engage with friendly governments, train their forces and persuade them that we are strong allies so they become our allies or trading partners. It's just that the US military uses diplomacy to advance a much harsher political perspective, because the US represents a much harsher perspective.
So, that's the thing here, Starfleet is a military organization but what it services, the Federation, is much different than the United States as a political body. Is the Federation a propaganda version of the United States, though? That's a little more confusing, I think. Star Trek embodies an extreme idealism that all propaganda tries to mimic. If a space faring show like Star Trek was derived from the principles of the Soviet Union, I think it would look very much like Star Trek. The tall tales tend to look alike, no matter who is doing the telling. I think what redeems Star Trek is that it's depicting a type of ideal human society that's possible and it doesn't lecture us on how to get there, it just urges us to try. And if it's not possible, well then fuck it, might as well live in our dreams.
First, I'm willing to consider these arguments, and/or try to rephrase and summarize them for others, even when I don't necessarily buy into them myself; playing interpreter and/or "devil's advocate", if you like. (To anticipate a possible objection - that the devil doesn't need one, today or any other - I'd note that without someone serving in that role, we wouldn't have TNG "Measure of a Man" or several other excellent episodes.) Note that I didn't write that series of tweets; I was just trying to explain part of it for someone who asked.
Second, I'm very mindful of what all of the shows (including TNG "The Drumhead") tell us: that a better society isn't something that just happens, and sustains itself, without care and attention and effort to keep it from sliding back into old bad habits. When we take progress for granted, we not only minimize the struggles and sacrifices of those who made it so, we also run the risk of becoming complacent and letting it slip away. I find more truth in the acknowledgement that "it's easy to be a saint in Paradise", or that within every decent, "evolved", "civilized" person are the instincts of a savage, but those instincts can (and should!) be fought, every day, than the notion that someday we'll reach The End of History and all those problems will be solved, never to trouble us again. I understand where the latter comes from; it's (IMO) a lovely fantasy, the fervent wish of every addict and dieter and sufferer from chronic illness, to take one pill and be cured forever... but I can't quite bring myself to believe it.
And finally, I acknowledge that I myself am "flawed and imperfect" - or, if you prefer, human. Some days I want to dig deep into this stuff; others, I'm fine with (or even seek out) uncritical optimism and the belief that we can do better than we are right now, that we don't have to settle for the lesser evil or a zero-sum solution but can Take a Third Option and have it work out for everyone. It depends on a lot of things.
... there was a comic I was thinking I might link to, but I can't find it, so I'll just end this here.
Okay, so one of the things I don't like about this argument is that it says that we should throw out the context of the fiction in order to better understand it. Which... we can fucking do that all day. Starfleet ships run on dilithium crystals, so why aren't we talking about the obvious parallels to the use of whale oil and the barbaric and ecological disaster that arose from fleets of whale hunters?
Like yes, I can see an exploration of that. It could definitely be a great topic to explore on the show. But I am not certain that redefining Star Trek as a "fantasy of guilt free maritime whaling" is particularly on point.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
That Mainstream American fiction is deeply compromised in wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism without the part where you are the bad guy who, you know, destroys the aboriginal society.[/quote]
Yeah, so, let's unpack this.
Is it, in your view, actually literally the case that it's physically impossible to travel to new places without committing a whoopsie genocide? Like if we land on Mars are we doomed to start enslaving Martians? Before you scoff and go "that's not what I'm saying," consider that the line I'm referring to actually uses the word "fantasy."
Do you feel that Star Trek, the tv show, does not do enough to acknowledge the perils of colonialism? I think that's a valid view! I would personally disagree inasmuch as a consistent feature of the show from the beginning has been characters constantly being nearly paralyzed with questions about the ethics of their actions and even, allegorically, challenging the basis for our various contemporary wars and interventions, but it's undeniably the case that some stories reflect very parochial attitudes or present viewpoints as moral that you or I might find pretty monstrous or at the very least incredibly misguided.
Do you feel like people "wanting to have the fun parts of colonial adventurism" is a major baleful force in our current situation? I would, again, disagree. I feel like our present-day moment (and for the past 20 years) has been much more about paranoia and mob frenzy, or just cheerful outright celebrations of violence and brutality ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" etc) than any sort of misguided enlightenment. Right now I don't think Americans feel very paternal about the rest of the world at all; I think we just loathe the rest of the world and are increasingly making less of a secret about it.
My sense of the original tweets is that that person thinks the third thing; that Star Trek is like, lulling people into a sense of warm fuzzies about colonialism. And I'm like, meh, because right now people have warm fuzzies about putting kids in camps. The moral corrosion of going "maybe someday we could visit other planets" feels like a nonproblem to me.
I'm saying that the show is being internally consistent. Characters say they're not a military force and then they do things that a modern military force wouldn't do, to the point that it elicits viewer complaints - "that's not how a real ship/captain/etc works!" I'm saying that what's on the box matches what's inside the box, just as a show called TANGO HARDMUFFIN: ROGUE COP showing the guy not Mirandizing his suspects and not filling out all the paperwork is being consistent with its own premise.
Not quite, but very close!
Undead Scottsman was one of a few who pointed out that most of the planets are empty and, when the Federation does discover life on them, they treat them respectfully etc.
I chose his post as representative of such reponses, and made essentially the point that you (innocently, but mistakenly) attributed to them rather than to me. EDIT: Or, as Lanz put it:
Though I do think your "Personally" is a lovely thought.
I strongly agree with your overall point but would note that we see the Voyager pilot plus several episodes of Sisko fighting a counterinsurgency operation against the Maquis. Sisko even makes a whole planet uninhabitable to humans for 50 years, displacing apparently tens of thousands* of people from their homes! It's also noted that the Defiant is explicitly just fighting ship, one that wouldn't have been commissioned but for the Dominion threat, implying that pretty much every other ship in the fleet is considered to be at least more than that, and we see a ton of ships that are basically defenseless exploratory, scientific, or merchant marine vessels.
Starfleet has forthrightly done and also passively tolerated a ton of heinous shit to advance their galactipolitical interests, but they also definitely do have a mission which is larger than just that of a military.
I think "The Federation is a Human-Supremacist Empire" is a separate question that I only kiiiind of agree with.
* It's unclear the number on the one planet he does poison, but they number the total DMZ population in the "hundreds of thousands" divided by probably dozens of planets means the ev(human_misery_coeff) = like 10-50k?
This is where I point out that when TNG did try to address "hey, did you know that fossil fuels warp drives are actually tremendously harmful to the environment?", this fine and timely moral message cut so deeply into the heart of the premise of the franchise (Space Travel is Awesome and Good!) that it was mentioned only a couple of times afterward, with handwaves that amounted to "yes but we fixed that so It Just Isn't A Problem Anymore", and then dropped down the memory hole never to be spoken of again. :rotate:
I feel like an armed force built for something other than conquest is not a big ask. That's what police are, that's what national guards are, that's what militias generally are.
Well, yes; part of the tweeter's thesis, IMO, is that the 90s were a very different time, when we (as a society at the unchallenged height of our power and prosperity) could blithely engage in such unexamined fantasies of rewriting the history of how we got there. It's not like that today, for all the reasons you mention and more.
And that (to me) is the only real link here. Starfleet is a Navy. It has what we consider a military command structure. It enacts missions dictated by the 'government' that is the Federation. You can say it models absolutely every human government throughout history that had the same setup. We view it through the lens of the United States because it's an American tv show starring English speaking actors (also the dumb USS designation), but I don't see why it can't be called a naval based "fantasy" of perhaps any nation state.
But hell, let's "demilitarize" Star Trek. No more central command directed by the Federation. The Enterprise is essentially a roving mercenary company and do science research, play diplomatic taxi, rescue colonists, and protect territory only by negotiated contract. That certainly doesn't look like the US navy!
And it doesn't make any substantial difference to the series. Funny that
The situation with the Maquis is kind of a reverse conquest. They're fighting those people because they (Starfleet) don't want them (the Maquis) grabbing land that (at least legally, if not, in the Maquis' view, ethically, belongs to the Cardassians). Sisko is basically being a very heavy-handed cop, rather than an invader.
The thing is that I don't think the shows are by and large blithe and uncritical; self-questioning is built into the program's very DNA, to the point where characters sometimes take up kind of facile or absurd devil's-advocate positions just to have scenes where everyone can sit around debating the merits of a given action.
Okay, that's fair. I acknowledge and agree with your point, actually.
(I was about to add to the quoted bit, "Today, we're on the edge of the #%$^ing Bell Riots.")
Your solution to the “Starfleet cannot be a military!” problem is to... make it a PMC instead?
Like... how does making them a privately operated mercenary group that still does all those things avoid the issue?
This is what I meant by the prescriptive vs descriptive problem; you’re not changing the things it does. The things it does are what make Starfleet a military organization. Yes, it has merged it with a diplomatic and a science corps, but it is still a military organization in function and structure
Yes but I do not believe you would characterize TNG as a show that indulges in the 90's fantasy that ecological disasters were something we'd just 'get over' and that it attempts to downplay the fears of climate change.
Even though that is exactly what that episode and its subsequent burial does
I believe Star Trek is neither an indulgence in 'yay pollution' nor 'yay colonialism'. In fact, I believe the intent of the show is the opposite! Can and does the show have missteps that work against the overall setting and narrative? Absolutely. There are plenty of just plain disasters in writing throughout the series. But it feels disingenuous to say that Star Trek misrepresents itself with regards to its ideals.
Though I guess there's a way to depict that and it still seem hopeful - basically by having human mercs come to help other ships by default, even if doing so could cost them their lives. Mercs who are not mercenary. But it would be a very different show.
To me a much more biting critique of the show is that it's at times an incredibly pensive, milquetoast, moderate-liberal handwringfest where even the smallest interventions are treated as if they might be worse than the original problem ("but if we break this minor rule to free this one slave, isn't that almost as bad as the entire institution of slavery ever?")
I read this and my mind immediately goes to them just leaving the narcotic addict planet and the planet of narcotics pushers to their own devices to solve the problem, despite the fact that the former were repeatedly lied to and deluded by the other into thinking their narcotics were a necessary drug for a plague that ended centuries ago
Yeah this is like the shining example of that. It's just awful.
To me, I see an episode like that and it feels very much like a well-meaning writer oversteering the other direction away from colonialism. Like they believe so strongly in the law of unintended consequences that they ended up writing a show about how you shouldn't ever dare lift a finger to help anyone because you might actually harm them instead.
:P
Okay, hard to edit quotes on mobile so I am going to respond to Cambiata's merc post too
I feel like you're very much layering current definitions, even historical definitions, of "mercenary" onto a science fiction universe. It may even be telling that you've done that! I absolutely see no reason Picard or any of the crew would need to behave differently in almost any episode if they were exploring space on their own recognizance without direction from the Federation itself. In fact I think it could make some episodes even better as it becomes less about "we'll be yelled at for doing this" and more about "what are the personal stakes of me doing this"
The only point of the Federation in the show is to be able to firmly state "These are the ideals humanity stands for" and watch the Enterprise crew live up to them. Which is completely undermined when you believe the Federation doesn't actually stand for those ideals.
That aside, we're again into the territory of military = has guns
What exactly does a PMC have in common with a "military" besides "has guns"?
Well, Gene, for all his many flaws, at least wanted the second in command to be a woman. At least it's canonically still there, in he flashbacks of the pike incident
If we put a colony on Mars, we're not displacing anybody, we're not taking anything from anybody, and it's a real planet that exists in our solar system right now. Space is huge; there are going to be many, many planets devoid of life, and we may one day be able to inhabit them. I don't think going "but remember the specter of COLONIALISM that haunts over your actions" is either useful or accurate.
If we start thinking about messing up inhabited worlds, then by all means, it's time to beat the anti-colonial drum. Doing it for when 200 Irish erudites establish a colony on a planet with absolutely nobody on it though? I don't see the point.