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[Reelya]

I've been watching through the Star Trek series in order and just got to the episode in Voyager where a couple of main characters devolve into giant salamanders, have sex and have salamander babies that escape on a wilderness planet.

Luckily the doctor is able to turn them back into humans instantly in some sort of "removing the mutant DNA" hand-wave. And the weird thing is that the whole salamander sex is right at the end, and uses up the actual story mechanism that could have reversed the main problem that arose in that episode, hence the need to give the doctor the magically ability to just turn salamanders back into people with no explanation.

Why would the do that? The salamander animation clearly cost plenty of money (it's the only CGI in the episode) yet it's only used for < 1 minute. My guess is that the salamander animation had been created for some other episode, but wasn't used, so they felt the need to shoehorn it in somewhere, so it got tacked onto the end of a new episode (it's really jarring and makes no sense that it even happened).

[Rowanas]

Less WTF than why anyone would think Janeway was the best Star Trek captain.

[Hanslanda]

Right, everyone knows it's Picard.

[Reelya]

Less WTF than why anyone would think Janeway was the best Star Trek captain.

Right, everyone knows it's Picard.

No it's Sisko.

Picard's cool but the problem is that it's Patrick Stewart's acting that's good. The character himself is paper-thin. Sisko is the most complex and well-realized captain, and got to fight in a proper war. Also, the moral dilemmas faced by Picard are peanuts compared to the stuff Sisko had to deal with. The acting in DS9 was pretty bad in the first season however.

[Hanslanda]

I'll be honest, I just wanted to start a nerd fight but you made a good point.

[Descan]

It takes balls to fly next to a nuclear explosion.

Temporarily, at least.

They fall off later.

Also: DS9 is best trek, TOS is good for starting it and for hamminess, Picard is lovely and TNG has some great episodes but overall it's a little samey, Voyager was The Great Lost Potential series (THERE WAS SO MUCH THEY COULD DO WITH IT ARAGQFABLE THEY JUST TURNED IT INTO MORE OF TNG BUT PICARD HAS TITS AND IS KINDA GENOCIDAL NOW) and Enterprise doesn't exist, we spit on that heinous name of Archer.

[Rowanas]

It takes balls to fly next to a nuclear explosion.

Temporarily, at least.

They fall off later.

Also: DS9 is best trek, TOS is good for starting it and for hamminess, Picard is lovely and TNG has some great episodes but overall it's a little samey, Voyager was The Great Lost Potential series (THERE WAS SO MUCH THEY COULD DO WITH IT ARAGQFABLE THEY JUST TURNED IT INTO MORE OF TNG BUT PICARD HAS TITS AND IS KINDA GENOCIDAL NOW) and Enterprise doesn't exist, we spit on that heinous name of Archer.

It's so nice to see someone acknowledging straight up that Janeway is a perpetrator of genocide.

[Descan]

Yeaaaah. Doesn't exactly take a great dissertation or anything... Just vaguely pointing at a fair few episodes where "Killing an entire species for profit, to achieve my goals, because of twisting a principle of the federation whose entire point was to SAVE species from meddling, not consign them to the dustbin, or really just for giggles" was the name of the game.

I mean, Picard only did that a few times, to the best of my knowledge! And even then, he relented in the end and saved them. Usually.

Star Fleet captains are a bit genocidal as a rule, I think...

[scourge728]

I mean, I know of a few leaders of countries on Earth who are pretty genocidal, this is just counting ones still ruling today, because I'm pretty sure genocide was the rule for most of history, at least using the U.N's definitions

[hector13]

Things just got a bit too real.

[birdy51]

Why are we so bad at not killing people en masse. ;.;

[Kagus]

Why are we so bad at not killing people en masse. ;.;

Sometimes it's because we don't want to wait around to see if someone else is worse at it.

Sometimes it's because we just go for broke and try to get a high score.


EDIT: Somewhat relevant, the Norwegian government had contracted an artist to develop plans for an official memorial dedicated to those affected by the July 22nd attacks in 2011. His idea was a massive stone engraving, containing the names of every living person registered as living in Norway at the time of the attacks. The names of the 77 who were killed would be "surrounded with empty space, like a breath of air". The concept would be that people were to look through the monument and find their own names in the manifest, and as a result "Come face-to-fact with a greater realization; that being alive includes a responsibility to others. That it includes, even, a responsibility for the events of July 22nd, 2011."

I say "would be", because the contract was cancelled by the government after approximately three years of work, scrapping the project.

[Loud Whispers]

I mean, I know of a few leaders of countries on Earth who are pretty genocidal, this is just counting ones still ruling today, because I'm pretty sure genocide was the rule for most of history, at least using the U.N's definitions

Conquest perhaps, but genocide has only been the rule during those rare phases of history where a rising imperial power could outmatch its rivals and liquidate populations without interference. So the Roman conquests, the Mongol conquests, the European colonial conquests, that one Maori one, the Ottoman ones, Belgian Congo, the two phases of European imperial conquests, the Axis conquests, the Communist liquidations, various post-colonial race wars and genocides in Africa & Asia, the Jihadist ones - if you don't count cultural imperialism or centralization (so for example, the eradication of language dialects through uniform educational standards in favour of the state dialect), genocide in the rather direct sense of eliminating or replacing a peoples has largely been an occasional experience in history whose incidence increases with the advent of modern industrial, administrative and logistical capabilities which render genocide possible. So on the bright side; we've mostly been fucking up in the last 600 years, picking up in the last 300, and so it seems apparent that the mass discriminate killing of humans is not an unavoidable trait present in human group behaviour

[Teneb]

I mean, I know of a few leaders of countries on Earth who are pretty genocidal, this is just counting ones still ruling today, because I'm pretty sure genocide was the rule for most of history, at least using the U.N's definitions

Conquest perhaps, but genocide has only been the rule during those rare phases of history where a rising imperial power could outmatch its rivals and liquidate populations without interference. So the Roman conquests, the Mongol conquests, the European colonial conquests, that one Maori one, the Ottoman ones, Belgian Congo, the two phases of European imperial conquests, the Axis conquests, the Communist liquidations, various post-colonial race wars and genocides in Africa & Asia, the Jihadist ones - if you don't count cultural imperialism or centralization (so for example, the eradication of language dialects through uniform educational standards in favour of the state dialect), genocide in the rather direct sense of eliminating or replacing a peoples has largely been an occasional experience in history whose incidence increases with the advent of modern industrial, administrative and logistical capabilities which render genocide possible. So on the bright side; we've mostly been fucking up in the last 600 years, picking up in the last 300, and so it seems apparent that the mass discriminate killing of humans is not an unavoidable trait present in human group behaviour

By the UN's definition, and given they are the ones who came up with the term might as well use it, genocide can also involve displacing a whole population from their homelands and supressing their culture. So you can, at the very least throw in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the count given the sheer numbers involved.

[Rowanas]

One last thing before I go to sleep - Did someone say Palestine?