this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Recently had an argument with my conservative father, he's always been big into Trek and Wars, and I had just started really watching Trek again, never watched a lot of the shows all the way through. So this father of mine started going on about how woke Trek was now, and I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the "anti-woke" nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation. So I was like "oh no, not woke Star Trek, the series about a socialist utopia, the series that holds the title of "the American show with the first interracial kiss", the show where Kirk throws his dick at every species with a quim, the show that had a Ruskie character in the middle of the f'n Red Scare." Star Trek was always woke, and my father was always too dumb, racially biased, and narcissistic to pick up on the lessons that they were trying to teach us when he watched it as a child in the 60's.
I have not even tried to bring up Star Wars since the Disney acquisition, I'm sure my father has an insufferable take on that series now as well.
I have met conservative Trek fans. I think some people really do watch stuff without ever thinking about it beyond its superficial spectacle.
It’s like conservative Always Sunny fans.
It’s like conservatives with [insert 99% of media they consume, excluding Fox “news”]
Lol yeah fair enough
They thought Colbert wasn’t playing an absurd caricature of a right wing pundit when he was doing the Report
It is worth noting that the rapist Bill O'Reilly knew, because it was so blindly obviously a parody of him, and whatever else you might say of him he isn't outright stupid.
The interesting bit is Ol Rapey Bill has quotes about Jan 6th saying his Fox would never have downplayed or enabled it, and yet, he's now supporting Trump in 2024.
It's almost like the actual truth doesn't matter to them. Like they just want a comfortable lie that benefits them personally, some kind of "Truthiness" perhaps.
Any echo chamber can produce illusory truth effect. Repeated exposure to misinformation can result in a person failing to identify it as a lie, and begin to register it as fact and the lie gets amplified.
Except the only real echo chamber is the one between their ears.
Best White House Correspondents Dinner ever.
It's like he's writing trumps speeches for him there!
I appreciate your avatar
I appreciate you!
They view the show as a documentary, not a comedy.
IASP is a pretty funny show. Even the most recent season was gold, covering inflation during covid.
There are a surprisingly high number of educated conservatives in the high tech fields, engineers/programmers/etc.
It's sad :/
One of the smartest people i knew was a former systems designer for NASA, I live close enough to the Cape to watch every launch from my backyard, anyway, this guy definitely worked for NASA, had his office decorated with the Patents that he held, really smart guy, complete conspiracy nut who was immediately on the Trump train.
I've always loved conspiracies too and we got along through that stuff, but then he went down the rabbit hole of Right wing and Russian propaganda/disinformation and no matter how much i tried to prove everything wrong, with good evidence, he went deeper down that hole, he died during COVID and one of the last things he sent me was about the "stolen election", it was after January 6, to which my reply was "do you mean the 2016 election or the 2000 election?" and never got a response back and I'd heard he passed away a few months later from a mutual friend.
My dad navigated satellites and exploration probes for NASA his entire career, even doing work in getting better climate data. He's a total MAGA and FOX loyalist now. Misses Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson.
The educated laborers that perform highly skilled labor convince themselves that they have it better than everyone else because Capitalism worked and selected for them, it's a comfy and delusional position to hold that requires having absolutely zero self-awareness. Unfortunately common.
Fear and prejudice transcends all education.
Same with conservative Fallout fans that somehow unironically think it's pro-Capitalism, despite nearly every instance of actual Capitalism and not just bartering being absurdly evil.
Because muh rugged individual
It's worse than that, it's the unironic Legion, House, and Enclave support that's absurd.
Sheesh. Satire really ain't shit to a fascist
"You know those Ferengi really have some good ideas..."
The non-woke Trekkies (or do they call themselves Trekkers? ) didn't think about interracial kisses or the post-scarcity society in which capitalists were small-time traders. They see Captain Kirk running roughshod over other societies and turning them into America (see The Apple and A Taste of Armageddon ) which was more about 60s Hollywood imagining cold war United States as the height of civilization.
The Next Generation dared to imagine a more internationalist sense of culture and got into the notion that even extremely weird aliens might be deserving of civil rights. But by DS9 the Federation was reimagined as a failing coalition with multiple rising renegade factions and worlds teeming with disregarded peoples. The story became less about rising to ideals and more about dealing with grimdark realities and compromising principles to preserve status quo.
Then the Kelvin Timeline Reboot got J. J. Abrams'd and Paramount got litigeous about fan films it previously endorsed and I became so disgusted with the state of Trek, I divested myself from it. Star Wars would suffer a similar fate, and I don't watch many movies these days.
Corporations have a tendency to ruin all art for the sake of profit. It's infuriating.
Not understanding how anything works, and being angry about it, is a core tenet of conservatism.
"when did star trek get all woke?!" "1966"
I think the best response to that kind of crap is what you said, with the addition of "and when did you start caring? When Fox news told you to care."
If you're feeling extra spicy you can add a comment about being a sheep lol
This is what I mean when I think "everything is political" is BS. That statement doesn't mean one has to talk about politics 24/7.
Yeah but his reaction? Don't leave us hanging.
It was mostly indignation over me not kissing his ass and telling him he's right, I'm generally one of the few in my family that will stand up to him at all never the less consistently, he's pretty charming and the family that have never lived with him all think he's just great usually, but he always has this condescending way of telling me "you weren't alive then so you don't know" as if there aren't interviews with Roddenberry that confirms these things, or if it's broader politics, as if encyclopedias and news article didn't exist back then. Then when I knocked down that argument he just defaulted back to "well it's too woke and preachy now" while citing examples of preachyness that are just examples of inclusivity in the show.
I'll say this, my pop apparently helped do clean up at ground zero after 9/11, he was a guard at Rikers at the time and I could see him volunteering for it, but he's also kind of a bullshit artists so we're never sure what's fully the truth. However fact or fiction he's never been the same since that day, we all lost a bunch of people we knew, and we all have a lot of friends who lost close relatives and it impacted not only us but our community, because it's a fire firefighter town we live in, we live next to the former chief and down the block from the station house and my pop hangs out at the bar near the station house. After 9/11 he fell down the Fox News hole and never was the same again, and now i gotta hear some "woke" bullshit every time he talks about something he seems to not understand.
So overall the reaction was a lot of indignation, a little bit of arguing followed by a hasty hang up.