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Cake day: July 12th, 2022

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  • but Star Trek is not a Marxist piece of media

    If anything, i’ve seen much more direct claims (not mine) that it’s anticommunist: https://communistkenobi.tumblr.com/post/737508042870079488/the-missing-context-from-this-post-is-that-any

    I think the degree to which people call tos a socialist utopia or socialist media (and therefore unimpeachably progressive) is wildly out of proportion to what is actually in the show, which is an anti-communist, american imperial prosperity fantasy of exploring an infinitely vast, infinitely ‘exotic’ frontier. tos depicts a post-scarcity, post-money society, and so the colonial logic of exploration* in the show shifts from pursuing material resources to epistemic ones, and space is an unlimited resource from which to extract, refine, and ultimately reassert Western intellectual supremacy, all of which is set against the context of the Cold War. The racism and misogyny are not antiquated bigotries mistakenly grafted onto an otherwise progressive utopia, they are a fundamental part of the narrative engine that drives tos forward. *exploration itself is not colonial, but tos’ conception and depiction of it is indistinguishable from orientalist stories about western explorers finding barbaric, exotic, uncivilisable peoples who can be studied, observed, and used as examples to reassert the fundamental rationality of Western society. the fact that the enterprise does not (usually) steal or pillage material resources from the aliens they encounter does not make this relationship less colonial in its framing

    https://communistkenobi.tumblr.com/post/737463878390366208/ok-so-the-omega-glory-episode-in-tos-written-by

    ok so the omega glory episode in tos (written by gene rodenberry, the creator of star trek) is an alternate history style episode where the Enterprise discovers a planet like Earth where the communist “asiatics” (in the words of the show) took over the world instead of the americans, but instead of acting as a global civilising force over “non-civilised” people (as america is presented to have done in the show via a global democratic Earth government that the enterprise explores on behalf of), it turned americans into barbarians, converting them into pre-civil “native americans,” because a communist force, specifically a racialised eastern one, only has the capacity to degrade the lands and peoples it conquers, to destroy “enlightened” settlers so thoroughly they convert “back” to a savage indigenous race. tell me again how this show is socialist

    I do, however, have no first-hand experience of watching any ST installments.


  • That’s the curious thing - reviews stating that the game gets a lot of it right despite the widespread (and, quite possibly, still present in the game itself) liberalism. One player mentioned feeling defenseless as the workers when the capitalists sell everything abroad and gain so many influence dice as to make engaging in elections and policy-making against them pointless, then, following the workers’ attemps at striking, decide to buy abroad as well; his coplayer referred to a two-months-old argument among them about protectionist policies, then asked whether player 1 sees now, taking a simplified model that is the game as an example, that reliance on consumer imports is pretty harmful for the majority of the population in the long run.