stupid box
Aug. 25th, 2009 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethmy recorder box forgot Enterprise. It had the little clock on the guide but it was grey like for when it's a repeat or something. Boo.
... usually I only watch once and delete it anyway but so far I have kept two whole episodes. One was Malcolm Reed and Trip stuck in a shuttlepod, one was Reed pinned to Enterprise talking the Captain through defusing a mine. Today I realised the absence of recording and got the box sorted out by the opening credits. It looks like Reed and the Captain stuck on an alien planet. Possibly will fit my pattern.
... I am predictable.
Hmmm... by the end of the episode it was mostly the Captain being defiant and beat up. Like one conversation with Reed. Also it was that annoying 'cultural contamination' thing. They keep talking about warp drive as if that makes a species 'ready' to meet others. It just makes it inevitable they will! Waiting on first contact until they independently reinvent the wheel, or the warp drive, just means waiting around a few hundred years while those people suffer and die of things other worlds have already fixed. And why? When they get out into the universe they'll discover their tech level is rubbish anyway. How is it less contaminating then? It isn't, is how.
It's stupid. There have been repeated incidents where tech from one part of this world gets to another part and jumps them hundreds of years or whole tech levels. How is that bad? Well usually it goes with military invasions, but I think that adds up to 'military invasions is bad'. You know how long it takes to advance humans to futuristic tech levels? 25 years. That's how long it takes to learn all the science we've got and start making your own discoveries, PhD level. Give us alien technology and will it take significant longer? There'll just be a generation that grows up with the stuff. Simple.
To get into the idea that this is A Bad Thing goes into a whole bunch of racial ideas, like the bit where one theory of black children underachieving is they're taught that only white people think stuff worth the teaching so they give up. I don't exactly buy that, but then again I think it's important to tell all the stories, tell the truths of lots of different people. The whole 'cultural contamination' idea, you apply that to Empire and colonialism and you get a statement that Europe has contaminated most of the world. I do not like that statement. Is that how the writers see it? Are they being any kind of subtle about it? Because their pre-warp civilisation was once again compared to Europe, specifically Churchill pre World War II. Is that the only comparison they can imagine? I get so frustrated sometimes. It's like saying other cultures will inevitable be nazis or paranoids! Weirdness.
The kind of cultural inequalities I see are the ones where some bunch of people with more technology look at another bunch of people and declare they ain't ready and can't look after themselves. It's racism. It's taking tech as an index of culture. It's ridiculous. So how many times does Enterprise complicate things, compared to how many times it risks all to avoid 'contamination'? Well the persistent annoyance at the Vulcans and the way the humans are constantly on the looked down on end complicates things nicely... to a point.
I don't know. I think the only answer is 'ignorance is poison'. Teaching is the good thing to do.
But then I look at wars and all the other ghastly things humans do to each other and if I don't know how to teach close to home well enough then who am I to judge about the great unknown?
*sigh*
... usually I only watch once and delete it anyway but so far I have kept two whole episodes. One was Malcolm Reed and Trip stuck in a shuttlepod, one was Reed pinned to Enterprise talking the Captain through defusing a mine. Today I realised the absence of recording and got the box sorted out by the opening credits. It looks like Reed and the Captain stuck on an alien planet. Possibly will fit my pattern.
... I am predictable.
Hmmm... by the end of the episode it was mostly the Captain being defiant and beat up. Like one conversation with Reed. Also it was that annoying 'cultural contamination' thing. They keep talking about warp drive as if that makes a species 'ready' to meet others. It just makes it inevitable they will! Waiting on first contact until they independently reinvent the wheel, or the warp drive, just means waiting around a few hundred years while those people suffer and die of things other worlds have already fixed. And why? When they get out into the universe they'll discover their tech level is rubbish anyway. How is it less contaminating then? It isn't, is how.
It's stupid. There have been repeated incidents where tech from one part of this world gets to another part and jumps them hundreds of years or whole tech levels. How is that bad? Well usually it goes with military invasions, but I think that adds up to 'military invasions is bad'. You know how long it takes to advance humans to futuristic tech levels? 25 years. That's how long it takes to learn all the science we've got and start making your own discoveries, PhD level. Give us alien technology and will it take significant longer? There'll just be a generation that grows up with the stuff. Simple.
To get into the idea that this is A Bad Thing goes into a whole bunch of racial ideas, like the bit where one theory of black children underachieving is they're taught that only white people think stuff worth the teaching so they give up. I don't exactly buy that, but then again I think it's important to tell all the stories, tell the truths of lots of different people. The whole 'cultural contamination' idea, you apply that to Empire and colonialism and you get a statement that Europe has contaminated most of the world. I do not like that statement. Is that how the writers see it? Are they being any kind of subtle about it? Because their pre-warp civilisation was once again compared to Europe, specifically Churchill pre World War II. Is that the only comparison they can imagine? I get so frustrated sometimes. It's like saying other cultures will inevitable be nazis or paranoids! Weirdness.
The kind of cultural inequalities I see are the ones where some bunch of people with more technology look at another bunch of people and declare they ain't ready and can't look after themselves. It's racism. It's taking tech as an index of culture. It's ridiculous. So how many times does Enterprise complicate things, compared to how many times it risks all to avoid 'contamination'? Well the persistent annoyance at the Vulcans and the way the humans are constantly on the looked down on end complicates things nicely... to a point.
I don't know. I think the only answer is 'ignorance is poison'. Teaching is the good thing to do.
But then I look at wars and all the other ghastly things humans do to each other and if I don't know how to teach close to home well enough then who am I to judge about the great unknown?
*sigh*
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 05:20 pm (UTC)It's just a stupid plot device so they can meet aliens with very advanced tech without the humans getting ever more fancy tech that would theoretically act as a solution to every subsequent storyline. But it is really annoying.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:16 pm (UTC)And it's why very little television science fiction is, well, science fiction - it doesn't chart the impact of new technology on the world, it just has flash bang shiny and then it goes away. It would be so much more interesting to see what just one of those gadgets does to society. But on TV? *sigh*