Makeitstop
Been wearing a kilt for years. I will never go back. Pants are tight, restrictive, and lack much needed ventilation. And let’s be honest, they weren’t designed to accommodate the male anatomy. Much better to have a kilt and enjoy the breeze between your knees.
Eliminate 3rd party tools, try to force people on to a terrible app with a shitty interface, and then incentivize the content farms. A recipe for success if ever I’ve heard one.
You know what might have been a better idea? If they’d offered a profit sharing agreement to third party apps through some sort of affiliate program that allowed them to sell gold and split the revenue. They could even have kept the obscene api rates for AI scrapers by giving a massive discount to affiliated apps. This way reddit would get the revenue it was missing out on, users could support their preferred app while also giving money to reddit, and really, everybody wins.
But then spez wouldn’t get to be Elon jr, so that obviously wasn’t going to work.
I’m pretty sure they already have and just don’t know it. Quinn from Voyager has done “everything” and you can’t seriously expect me to believe that being part of the collective isn’t on that list.
Of course, you could argue that even if he ever had been assimilated, it wasn’t real, since he’s still Q and the Borg aren’t omnipotent. But then again, that’s kind of moving the goal post when you consider how many others managed to maintain some kind of independence after being assimilated. Hugh, Janeway, Seven and her internet friends, they all managed to resist the collective in one way or another.
But ok, for the sake of discussion, what happens if the collective does get the full knowledge and power of a Q? Well, it probably depends on how Q powers and the abilities of other such godlike entities in Star Trek work. Is the continuum more powerful than the ascended collective? Does a comparative power level even enter into it or do they have the admin rights to the universe’s operating system? Does it matter how many Qs there are, and if so, does the collective count as just one entity or many, and does that help or hurt their chances? Without a clear understanding of what the rules are, we can’t really say how things would likely play out, only how we would want to see them played out.
That said, you could argue that we get the beginnings of a unified godlike powers theory early on in TNG. The Traveler explains that the basic building block of all reality is thought. Essentially, Star Trek’s entire universe exists in a mindscape, and thought can directly alter reality. With this as our starting point, we can theorize that Q and any other godlike being is directly manipulating a layer of thought that is the foundation of all reality.
That we can’t all do this under normal circumstances, but that we can be given access or suddenly do it by accident when we’re beyond the edges of our normal cosmic environment implies that something is actively preventing us from just casually hacking the universe. The Q continuum being able to bestow and revoke such powers, even among their own, implies to me that they are the ones policing this stuff.
Now, how a conflict between an unknowable continuum and an ascendant collective plays out is still vague, but I think we have enough point of reference to translate this conflict into a more familiar form. In this scenario, the universe is a holodeck, the Q are running IT, and the Borg are professor Moriarty. When viewed through this lens, the question is, how effective can the Q be at containing a system breach, vs how well can the Borg evade the Continuum’s countermeasures? Since we know the Borg are not always the best at thinking outside the box, while the Q do seem to be able to police their own, my money would be on the Borg getting beaten almost immediately (or perhaps even retroactively).
Well, my money would be on the Q, if it weren’t for the Voyager crew being able to beat them with muskets. (I don’t care if they aren’t really muskets, it’s still Qs getting killed or wounded by mere mortals, and on their home turf, which those mere mortals can’t even properly comprehend.)
I can go with either extreme or anything in the middle, depending on what fits the story, tone and aesthetic.
At the same time, either one can look stupid when there’s no thought put into it. We don’t necessarily need to know how any futuristic stuff works, but it helps if the people designing it have some vague idea of why things are there and what they are supposed to do. It doesn’t have to be realistic, but it can help it stay internally consistent. And it helps avoid the pitfalls of lazy or obviously impractical designs that can plague sci-fi. It can be very distracting when the set is a bunch of random plastic tubes, half the contents of a Spencer’s Gifts, and recycled props that have been bouncing around for decades despite having no apparent function.
Force powers are vague psychic/mystic stuff. We see Vader sense Kenobi, and he can tell that Luke is strong with the force when he is focusing on him. And there’s other stuff like sensing Alderaan blowing up or things happening in other places and times (aka literally anything the plot wants the character to see). But the rules just really aren’t clear, especially in the original trilogy. There’s no indication given that Vader should be able to sense that someone is related to him, nor would he be able to pull it from Leia’s mind since she doesn’t know either. If anything, he should have sensed the millennium falcon coming in to cover Luke during the trench run, that seems like the more obvious thing to be able to detect.
Troi has empathy, which is a much more clearly defined concept. And while they stray from that sometimes by letting her sense danger or other nebulous generalities, we do know that she should be able to sense emotions, intentions and honesty vs deception. That makes it stand out when the script seemingly forgets that she should be able to sense lies, deception, and malicious intent. Conman pretending to be a researcher from the future lies in order to steal from them and she can’t tell that he’s a fraud. The staff at a party are getting ready to grab weapons and take them all hostage, and she doesn’t notice. These are situations that call for things that are well within her established skillset.
They really could have done themselves a favor by adding some clear limitations to her abilities.
- Proximity required: No sensing through the view screen.
- Surface impressions only: Disciplined minds can fool her
- Background noise: The more people are around, the harder it is to get a clear read on someone.
- The more alien a mind is, the more difficult or painful it is to interact with.
There you go, she can still use her abilities to help the crew, and sometimes to solve problems, but you can also get stuff past her without making her seem oblivious. Then all they have to do is consistently write her as an intelligent and competent member of the crew, and we’re good.
Who says he didn’t? We only know he sensed that Luke was strong in the force during the death star trench run because he said it out loud. Presumably he has encountered many people with relatively strong force potential, but that’s probably something he’s going to keep to himself unless he has a reason to act on it. She’s a prisoner that he’s unlikely to recruit, and it’s not like she’s had any training. Hell, he probably dismisses people like her as being too old to start training anyway. (And if we bring in stuff from outside the movies where they explain that force sensitive people often become leaders, or larger than life figures that shape the course of events, then one would expect a lot of those people to run into Vader eventually.)
It may also be that force ability is more apparent once someone actually starts using the force. That would be logical and consistent with the fact that Luke is only really noticed by Vader once Obi Wan started telling him to use the force, and the fact that Vader and Luke could sense each other in space over Endor, but apparently that didn’t apply to Leia.
And again, he wasn’t trying to reach Luke on the radio to make him an offer once he noticed the force was strong with him, he was trying to kill him. The empire wasn’t determined to capture Luke until the emperor was able to sense him making waves in the force, when he was at the point where he was already using a lightsaber and capable of telekinesis, and when he had been identified as Vader’s son. At that point he had demonstrated actual ability, not just wasted potential, and the familial connection offered a plausible way to work around his opposition to the empire.
She is a poorly written character whose powers are frequently ignored or forgotten by scripts. It’s established that she can sense emotions, intent, honesty, deception, danger, and so on. Yet, even after establishing this, a conman can lie to her face and she won’t notice. She can be surrounded by people who are preparing pull weapons and take the crew hostage, and she doesn’t sense a thing.
Yeah, for some reason she can sense emotions through the viewscreen despite the person on the other end being lightyears away. But even then, her role is mostly to state the obvious, letting us know that the scowling guy who was been yelling at them is upset.
On a more fundamental level, her entire concept is at odds with the rules governing the show. It’s the enlightened future where people are more evolved and we aren’t allowed to have interpersonal conflict or psychological issues. To the point that they were forced to rewrite a script about a kid trying to cope with the death of his mother, because Gene insisted that in the future, people don’t grieve. And of course none of this was enforced consistently, but it did mean that they couldn’t focus too closely on the crew dealing with the kinds of issues that would actually require some kind of psychological help.
At the same time, they also gave a lot of the advice giving duties to Guinan, some of which goes way beyond the stuff a bartender should handle. They even gave Guinan mental powers to further the needed advice in one episode, which makes Troi that much more superfluous.
Part of the problem here has as a lot to do with pacing and expectations. Guinan, being a guest character, gets to pop into existence when someone needs to have their perspective altered with an anecdote or keen observation, possibly while they look miserable at a bar. And then, having prepared our heroes for the climax of the story, she exits the script with another tally in the win column.
Troi, whose official job is providing guidance and therapy, is going to be the first person you talk to when her skills are needed. So sessions with Troi tend to be early enough in the script that we can’t have them solving the problem. Therefore, her advice can’t actually work, so she either misreads the situation (looks bad for an empath), or she just gives very bad advice. For fuck sake, her response to being told “I think the only emotion I feel is anger, and killing gives me pleasure” was to suggest that the patient go explore these emotions on his own, without guidance or supervision.
What we’re left with is a character who mostly states the obvious, who forgets she’s psychic when it would actually matter, who is terrible at her job, and for bonus points, who spends most of the series in her pajamas when everyone else wears the damn uniform.
Because the constitution is the document that lays out the foundation for all of our legal rights and the limitations placed on the government that are intended to keep it accountable to the people. It’s not perfect, but it does cover a hell of a lot, even more gets expanded on through legislation and the courts, and when necessary it can be (and has been) amended.
But it’s also just ink and parchment. It can’t do anything if the government decides to ignore it. It’s the people who give power to the constitution. The more it is valued by the people across the country, throughout the political spectrum, both inside and outside the halls of power, the more likely it will be that those protections are respected. And when those protections are violated, people are far more likely to push back. And many within the government are also more likely to push back. That’s literally the only reason we didn’t have an overturned election, because numerous people at all levels of government said no, many despite being aligned with the assholes that were trying to stay in power.
So yes, I would very much prefer it if everyone would treat the constitution with some reverence if that’s what it takes. The alternative is not pretty.
