The Old Hack

Entropy: Darn kids! GET OFF MY LAWN!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGHHHHH! (kill me now, please.)

Oh yes. Some consider it breaking with Gene Roddenberry's ideal. I personally believe that a flawed ideal is better than either no ideal at all or a completely perfect one. The flawed ideal forces you to think about it and to fight for it; in the case of no ideal at all there is nothing worth fighting for and in the case of the perfect ideal there is no need for either thinking or fighting. And that would promote a passivity and absence of creativity and ambition that I find frightening to contemplate. As to the second season thing, rules of thumb are often flawed. Most of season two was bland at best and a huge loss of potential at worst. There may have been a good episode in season one but I cannot remember any offhand.

I already know of one. Me. I firmly believe that if one cannot laugh at oneself, one is missing out on some of the best humor life has to offer.

That was perhaps the first time TNG achieved truly groundbreaking science fiction. 'Measure of a Man' was brilliant and chilling, culminating in Whoopi Goldberg's awesome revelation of exactly how high the stakes were.

Sorry. Bad old memories from struggling to get enough of those DAMNED SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY KILOBYTES THAT OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE clear of TSR bullcrap so I could actually make my programs run.

I agree with both of you. To me DS9 reached its heights with the episode "In the Pale Moonlight" in which Sisko out of desperation takes just one little step into the unethical. And very soon the consequences are snowballing out of control... Jake Sisko was sometimes good but my Lord he was annoying as the war reporter. I wanted so badly to smack him.

Not to worry. I am sure that the people who write those ships find you laughable, too. Eh. I may be a liberal but I am not blind to the fact that there's a bunch of idiots out there who WANT to be offended and look for any excuse to be just so they can look down their nose at people. You do not have anything whatsoever to prove, certainly not to me. As to the misogyny, I am specifically talking about the attacks made because they were women. They might not have come from a very large group of people but they more than made up for it in volume and obnoxiousness. Personally I find my blood pressure rising whenever I come across threats of violence and rape, and both kinds were all too frequent. *sigh*

...I feel quite ill.

On phones and tablets?

Of course you don't have to be a misogynist to be repelled by the film or its trailers, but when a group of detractors attack it specifically for its female representation and argues that women can't handle roles like that, it is hard not to consider the attackers misogynistic. *sigh* John Boyega got hit by some pretty vicious hate mail and attacks. I think it is because he clearly had protagonist/main character status. I did not delve into the precise reasoning behind the attacks as I found them thoroughly repellent and disgusting. I have to confess, I'd find that reasoning equally puerile and laughable no matter what.

That pretty much matches what SF Debris says except that hints of the improvements to come could be sensed in late season 3. He usually refers to season 1 as the "let's see how fast we can get this turkey cancelled" season and to season 7 as the "oh crap, we ran out of ideas, now what?" season.

For some reason this gave me a nightmare vision of a phone or tablet running DOS. I am very glad that MS-DOS has been consigned to the technical nightmares of the dwindling past and that it is not likely to ever trouble my sight again.

My apologies. I am tired and paid insufficient attention to what you intended to say. I should have addressed that point as an individual issue and simply explained that I take exception to it; I am sorry for my lapse in courtesy. Genuine bigotry does exist but I do not count "I prefer to watch movies with people like me in it" as such. Before it qualifies, it needs to be vocal and active in pursuing the detriment or destruction of the object of its hate. I would count the vast wave of outrage from MRAs and similar people at the new Ghostbusters movie as misogyny, which is closely related, and the hate and insults aimed at John Boyega as bigotry and racism.

Nonetheless I thank you for it. It was interesting, I hardly knew half of all that

That is not a factor. It is an assumption. There is an important difference. If it were a correct assumption, no women would ever go to movies only featuring men. Blacks, First Nationers, Latinos would scarcely watch movies at all. For that matter, I would not currently sit glued to Netflix's Luke Cage. Moreover, the actual assumption is "if we use women or coloured people or Latinos/whatever then our movies will bomb." I suppose that explains why The Force Awakens so utterly bombed that Disney lost a fortune on it. No, wait, actually it was a huge box office success. My bad.

*sigh* You may well be right, but for me it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. The racism and bigotry are deeply embedded in the system and will require a great deal of pruning to root them out. A good step is to show that there is indeed money in diversified movies.

Which once again boils down to cishet racist assumptions. They altogether disregard the fact that it is not about 'offending minorities' but rather making movies for an entire untapped market. They use excuses like "There is no money in movies about women/Blacks/insert minority of choice" and happily bumble on because an unrealised profit doesn't show up in the budget.

"It's my fanfic and I'll ship if I want to, ship if I want to, ship if I want to..."

All that is not a reason for using white actors. It's a justification. Or, if you like, switching the burden of responsibility for racism and bigotry to the SAG. I am not buying it.

Oh dear. Do you really think a single kiss is any proof of orientation?

In your opinion, yes -- but not in the opinion of girls and women looking for role models and heroes of their own. The point of diversity in movies is that as long as we do not have full representation, those who don't get represented feel left out. (At one point, a teenage gay boy wrote Mark Hamill a fan letter in which he wondered if Luke Skywalker might be gay. Mark Hamill wrote back that he saw absolutely no reason that Luke couldn't be. Such a seemingly small gesture but it allowed a boy to feel included instead of left out...)

Mph. This is the usual problem when someone invents a rough rule of thumb and others then try to apply it as if it were a precision tool. It originated simply as a filter for whether the inventor could be bothered to see a movie or not. If it passed the test, she might give it a chance; if not, she considered it a lost cause. It's the same thing with the Kinsey scale. The true value of both the Kinsey scale and the Bechdel test is that they show there is something to pay attention to. Having now served that purpose, we really need to progress to more advanced tools.

They do. Thing is, the Bechdel Test does not actually serve as to whether something is good or not but solely as a rule of thumb as to whether women are allowed an active and independent presence in the movie.

Bingo.