• 15 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Irreparable brain damage is something the Federation remains uncomfortable trying to “fix” with advanced tech well into the TNG era, as shown by Bareil’s situation in DS9 Life Support.

    Knowing nothing of brain science, I’d extend your theory to posit that Pike also lacks the brain function to do any fine motor controls of his body: he can conceptualize simple things like “go to a place,” but cannot handle anything more precise. As such, the chair and beeper allows him essentially the same freedom of movement and expression that his damaged brain could have got out of a more “conventional” set of cybernetic replacements.

    Pikes chair still sticks out as a classic example of old Star Trek having moments of not-so-prescience, but viewing it as a solution to a damaged brain more than a damaged body definitely helps make it less absurd.


  • From the Washington Post piece:

    But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

    • It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
    • Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
    • Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

    And

    “Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.




















  • My personal bet is that until the bechdel pass rate goes up into ~90%, your point won’t really fly and the reverse will be passed all of the time … still interesting to find out.

    In the era of “just asking questions”, I certainly understand any implicit assumptions that I’m oh-so-cleverly concealing some ill-conceived “point” about feminism. Certainly a case can be raised that by presenting a possible chink in the supporting evidence of your post is an inherently disruptive and destructive act; clearly your broader point about closet bigotry affecting fan biases is both correct and worth emphasizing. I’d far rather strengthen your argument than tear it down. I hope that’s ultimately what I’m doing here.

    Given the numbers and the low bar of the Bechdel, some quick sampling could probably be done to get a picture. Select 10 episodes that pass the Bechdel test and 10 that fail, maybe some from TNG ans some from voyager, and we here collectively try to see if they pass/fail the reverse bechdel test in a group effort?

    I don’t think I would trust the results of this, unfortunately, as there’s probably a reverse correlation between the Bechdel and reverse Bechdel tests; in a sample this small that would pollute the results. For example, take any episode where two characters of the same sex are stuck together in some sort of trouble. That episode will surely pass one of the tests (Bechdel for two women, reverse for two men) but has an increased chance of failing the other because much of the dialogue for the rest of the characters is likely to revolve around the plight of the imperiled pair.

    …which isn’t to say that what you suggest isn’t worth the attempt. Certainly raising an issue and then shooting down a proposed solution to it isn’t very helpful. Episode transcripts are out there; maybe there’s a software solution here? Automatic identification of conversations between two characters would be imperfect but manageable, running that dialogue up against a list of names of male/female characters and then manually checking up on the episodes that missed to avoid false negatives would probably be the most technically efficient way about this?

    Circling back on your actual point, though… You are absolutely and unambiguously correct that TOS did a horrible job with gender representation, much worse than TNG did (or could have been expected to by fans when it was about to air). It’s also clear that Voyager did much better than it’s contemporaries, and ENT was a pretty harsh step backwards. You don’t need to know the base rate to establish if one number is bigger than the other, only to draw more nebulous, general conclusions about how well shows are doing with gender representation.


  • For level setting, I would like to see the results of the “reverse Bechdel” test: a scene where two named male characters talk about something other than a woman.

    The numbers will surely be higher than for the standard Bechdel, but I doubt they are 100%: for example, any episode primarily about heterosexual romance will risk failing both tests. TOS seems like it should hit that mark pretty reliably, but the prevalence of episodes where Kirk gets stuck on an alien world and spends most of his time chatting up a lady cut into the odds. (Likewise if we were to take literally Kirk’s absurd characterization of the Enterprise as a woman, but… no). DS9 and TNG will run into problems with their volume of mixed-gender conversations, and for TNG especially the prevalence of significant female guest stars who male characters are likely to be discussing will cause some failures. Etc, etc.

    To be clear, we know damn well that Star Trek has had problems with sexism, with instances both subtle and gross (Qpid and clay pots, anyone?). The Bechdel test also seems to be accepted as both a ludicrously low bar and an unreliable measure, but I have yet to see it put in appropriate context against the reverse test. What does it tell us if 98% of Trek episodes pass the reverse Bechdel? or if “only” 75% do? Does Voyager’s 86.9% standard score exceed or fall flat relative to their reverse Bechdel? Etc, etc. I would posit that the relationship between the Bechdel and reverse Bechdel should tell a pretty strong story about the level of subtle sexism in how the show is written, while an aggregation of the two scores is mostly just a measure of how (in)frequently the characters are chatting about their coworkers.