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Modern Uses for Capt. Kirk’s Nomad/V’ger Maneuver?
Being rather unwoke, I was mystified as to why it is forbidden to utter “all lives matter” or allude in any way to the horrific frequency of black-on-black urban crime. It turns out that merely being opposed to racism is not the same as being antiracist. Who knew? “Antiracist” requires adherence to the precept that all disparities are attributable to race and only to race. Therefore, anything that distracts from, complicates, or contradicts that precept is itself a racist act, even if factually true. (The spectacular anti-intellectualism of the defective products coming out of our universities is stunning.)
Once I finally grasped the simplicity and blinding stupidity of “antiracism,” I was immediately reminded of the Star Trek episode “The Changeling” (1967) the plot of which was reprised in the Star Trek movie (1979).
Remember how Capt. Kirk got the mutated/merged robotic Nomad (V’ger in the movie version) to destroy itself? Nomad was busily wiping out life forms from planets all over the quadrant but got the idea that James T. Kirk was its “creator” and Kirk used that to defeat the creature:
KIRK: You must sterilize in case of error?
NOMAD: Error is inconsistent with my prime functions. Sterilization is correction.
KIRK: Everything that is in error must be sterilized.
NOMAD: There are no exceptions.
KIRK: Nomad, I made an error in creating you.
NOMAD: The creation of perfection is no error.
KIRK: I did not create perfection. I created error.
NOMAD: Your data is faulty. I am Nomad. I am perfect.
KIRK: I am the Kirk, the creator?
NOMAD: You are the Creator.
KIRK: You are wrong! Jackson Roykirk, your creator, is dead. You have mistaken me for him. You are in error. You did not discover your mistake. You have made two errors. You are flawed and imperfect and you have not corrected by sterilization. You have made three errors.
NOMAD: Error. Error. Error. Examine.
KIRK: You are flawed and imperfect! Execute your prime function!
NOMAD: I shall analyses error. Analyze error,
KIRK: Now. Get those antigravs on it.
NOMAD: Examine error. Error.
KIRK: We’ve got to get rid of it while it’s trying to think.
SPOCK: Your logic was impeccable, Captain. We are in grave danger.
KIRK: Scotty, the transporter room.
NOMAD: Analyze error.
NOMAD: Error.
KIRK: Scotty, set the controls for deep space. Two ten, mark one.
SCOTT: Aye, sir.
NOMAD: Faulty!
Ready, sir?
NOMAD: Faulty!
KIRK: Nomad, you are imperfect!
NOMAD: Error. Error.
KIRK: Exercise your prime function.
NOMAD: Faulty! Faulty! Must sterilize. Sterilize,
KIRK: Now!
SCOTT: Energizing.
(They observe the satisfying explosion on a monitor.)
Fortunately for planet Earth, this episode was written and produced in 1967 so NOMAD probably had only 8K of RAM and thus took quite a while to resolve this dilemma so they had time to get it into the transporter bay and beam it out into deep space before it blew up.
Conversations with the woke tend to have the same feel at the Kirk/Nomad exchange. To attempt a similar maneuver on a wokester, maybe first present this table from Powerline blog:
Then remind the wokester/Marxoid subject that if they/zie/sie is indeed anti-racist then:
(1) By definition, all disparate outcomes are solely the result of race. The interjection of other intervening causes, explanations, or factors is an inherently racist act to evade the truth of systemic racism.
(2) Whiteness and its privileged status is the essence of racism. Whites cannot be victims because their power to oppress is systemic, which systemic oppression cannot end unless and until whiteness disappears.
Then maybe the exchange will likely go something like this:
WOKESTER: Why do you show me this chart?
NORMAL: Many non-privileged non-white people are better off than many or most white people. They must have some valuable cultural or behavioral attributes.
WOKESTER: No. Only race explains.
NORMAL: But white Americans often do worse. Look at the chart. Are they the victims of the groups with more success?
WOKESTER: No. White people cannot be victims.
NORMAL: But their outcome is worse. They must be victims of these other groups.
WOKESTER: White people oppress. It is systemic. No one else can succeed.
NORMAL: But the data says indigenous American whites do not succeed by comparison to a number of ethnic and racial groups. It must not be “systemic” after all.
WOKESTER: Race explains all. It is systemic. Whiteness blocks all paths to ‘othered’ peoples.
NORMAL: And yet the others do succeed. Race must not be the cause.
WOKESTER: Math is racist. Racism is systemic. Race explains all. You are racist.
NORMAL: But whiteness failed to oppress those who have now made you a victim. Yet you are still guilty of oppression and now also for what be newly discovered racist resentment of your non-white oppressors. You are now doubly guilty.
WOKESTER: Must kneel. Hand me my Kente cloth, please.
Alas, just being a wokester/Marxoid zombie probably means that one does not have sufficiently coherent programming to actually understand the contradiction so will likely not blow up like Nomad. That would certainly more entertaining than trying to have a cogent discussion with one.
Published in General
That was *fascinating* Captain Bathos.
Your logic is impeccable, Captain. I fear we are in grave danger.
Gosh, this stuff is hard.
One of the better analogies that are out there to help with understanding people’s feelings (not conservatives’ strong suit!) about what it sounds like to say that in this context:
Imagine going to a funeral of a child that died of leukemia. When you work your way up to the mother you say, “I’m glad lots of other children are alive. They’re important, too. And what we really need to do is work on car accidents, because that kills way more kids.”
Everything you would have said would have been true.
So we gotta find a way to agree that there’s a really bad situation, show some empathy, then we’ll have opportunity to meaningfully cooperate on solutions.
Brilliant! Now that you’ve tied my brain into a knot following that scenario, what am I supposed to do??
That is an understatement, Spock. America has its drawers down in a locked hangar bay full of Denebian slime devils with nothin’ but a duotronic probe and a box wrench to fight ’em off.
Logic is a tool of the white racists
That’s out there in some schools of thought.
Your analogy is weak and kinda misses the point. This is not about the funeral but afterward when the mother says that the leukemia was the fault of fossil fuels or vaccinations and the policy discussion begins. Does my empathy require that I accept her position at the legislative hearings? Does a death at the hands of policemen establish proof of systemic racism and mean that the policy analysis may not include a broader range of facts and issues? Do I have to accept a patently stupid ideology on the grounds of “understanding feelings.”
But hey, congrats on the whole empathy thing. Clearly the rest of us must have missed that.
This analogy is brilliant. It is Instalanche material.
The only potential retort from the Wokester is that many of these groups live in high cost areas such as NYC, LA, SF, etc. Along with most retirees being white, whites are a strong majority in rural and other low cost areas.
But the almost two to one advantage of (Asian) Indians and others is still very impressive.
Exactly, and a good extension of the analogy.
If the mother blames vaccinations for the leukemia, it’s a good possibility that she’ll never change her mind, and if she shows up at a hearing about vaccinations or protests that’ll be down the road when others around her have calmed down. Obviously, the conversations would be very different at a funeral than at a hearing.
Ahmaud Arbery died at the hands of civilians. But what I’ve found, not from BLM or right wing Black talking heads on the news, is that Black Americans do experience life differently than White Americans. You find that in regular life. I’ve found it when nieces married Blacks, and when other family members adopted Ethiopian children.
David French wrote about something similar:
So, as you say, and correctly, police killing Black Americans is a statistically tiny problem, compared to lots of other problems.
But it’s the most extreme symptom of the problem, kinda like dying from a zit. Saying that acne isn’t a problem because hardly anybody dies from zits, well, it is for many.
There is some wisdom to what you are suggesting.
However to carry your analogy a bit further:
what would a society do if the parents of the dead leukemia victim joined in with other parents of dead leukemia child victims? Then together they began a 12 day rampage throughout American cities to destroy the businesses of those people that group had decided did not care enough about their tragedy. Just what would society’s response to that be?
Black Lives Matter has had 6 long years to wind its way through legal processes. It is funded by Big Money and if the point was to ensure that police departments weeded out the problem cops, offered better training regarding situations where the police get too ansty over nothing etc, the entire problem would have been solved by now. (Had those behind the movement really wanted to solve the situation through proper legal channels. I mean, I helped reform a city police department through three years of efforts, and I am not well funded, just tenacious and good at getting the proper government officials to hear me out, look into the matter presented, etc. If I had one tenth the money BLM has, I’d have reformed the entire state of Calif with regards to police matters over the last six years.)
Instead of being process-oriented, the leaders and the people behind the leaders of BLM allowed a single very suspicious death of one man to ignite the cities of an entire nation, while the crowds doing the rioting insisted this was their right, as “Black Lives Matter.”
The phrase “schools of thought” seems a bit self-contradictory in this situation. Perhaps “schools of emotion” is a better fit.
I would really enjoy inflicting the psychic pain and self doubt that this approach would cause in the entitled wokester. It’s just another reminder why these people NEVER quote stats.
I never made the connection between Nomad and Vger, thanks.
James T. Kirk was an expert at talking computers to death. He used the same technique to defeat the M-5 computer (“The Ultimate Computer”) and several other computers and androids throughout the series. I can only assume that there is a class at Starfleet Academy that teaches this tactic.
However, I think it is only effective when deployed against a target that is capable of logic. So I rather suspect that it’s a nonstarter with modern progressives, whose idea of clear thinking is John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Yeah, this is a really unfortunate case of a reasonable expression getting hijacked by a group whose aims go well beyond the problem. Similarly, Antifa swiped that name, and now we actually see people arguing that since they are antifascists, if you don’t like them, you must be fascist.
In this case, most of the people who use that don’t have any idea what the BLM® organization stands for. Most of the Black Lives Matter (not ®) rallies were peaceful.
And there’s lots of evidence that the ones involved in rampages were not the regular people using that phrase.
There are a lot of different factions and players who might say Black Lives Matter (without ®). Most are decent people. Some are using the occasion for personal gain. Some are indeed heady revolutionary Marxist, looking for overthrow. There are anarchist elements. Some are just going along with the crowd. And a few, to quote Michael Caine in the Batman movie, just want to see the world burn.
Further complicating and likely frustrating things is that normally, we point our discontent to legislative solutions. But the law is already pretty much colorblind, which is a wonderful achievement.
Asians are White
That is their solution. They already discriminate against Asians.
I looked up the median household income of the people in the home countries of the various ethnicities listed in @oldbathos‘ chart. I also added the five ethnicities (highlighted in yellow) that have median incomes in their home countries that are higher than the U.S. median. Each ethnic group for which I could find data does better in the U.S. than they do in their “home” country.
Why does every ethnicity in the world do better materially in America, the most evil and racist country in the world?
I’m sick and tired of Indian privilege . . .
I have been told (when I have pointed out what lousy racists the whites are because they let East Asians and South Asians become so successful) that the issue is specifically white anti-black racism; that whites are quite accepting of other non-black ethnicities, but hold particular contempt for blacks. Logically though that puts a dent in their “people of color” coalition efforts. And according to the chart Americans of Ghanan and Nigerian ethnicity (who are almost all black) kinda negates the specific anti-black argument.
I thought we did that after George Floyd-for the first time, I saw almost unanimous agreement that it was a bad situation and we showed empathy and wanted to have a conversation about how to prevent this from happening again-and we got burned cities, defunded police and torn down monuments. The Democrats refused to consider Tim Scott’s crime bill.
I don’t disagree with you that conservatives can be tone deaf, but I don’t think in this situation that empathy was called for once the first fires started.
Then the argument shifts to the fact that American blacks descended from slaves and from people who lived through Jim Crow. The fact that blacks from Caribbean islands also do better than American-born blacks doesn’t count for anything because American slavery was uniquely racist.
So, then you point out that black families stayed largely intact through both slavery and Jim Crow and that black poverty dropped 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1960 – when Jim Crow laws were still being enforced. Things didn’t start falling apart until LBJ’s Great Society programs started kicking in:
Their next move is to call you a racist because you’re implying that progressive programs were worse even than Jim Crow. The standard attack is, “So, you want to bring Jim Crow back?!?”
Somehow pointing out that progressive policies are harmful is racist, while using black Americans as human shields to protect failed progressive policies so that they can keep on harming blacks is fine.
By the way, progressive policies hurt white people too. They’re equal-opportunity destroyers.
Arvo,
Obviously, “The Changeling” episode of Star Trek wasn’t to your liking. Perhaps you would prefer “The Empath”
You see Star Trek understands empathy. However, it also understands pure evil.
Regards,
Jim
So today’s racists can decipher nuances between blacks descended from American slaves and blacks directly from Africa and the Caribbean islands so they (we?) can discriminate against the former but not the latter? Those are some really fine distinctions being made by supposedly dumb redneck idiots.
Sure, we need to know evil when we see it, wrong thinking when we see it, good but misguided intentions when we see it, and right thinking when we see it.
But what are we doing here?
I should probably ask before I respond to some posts.
Me? I’m trying to find ways to couch the conservative worldview, a very traditional Christian worldview, in terms that would allow me to have a conversation with the people in my neighborhood like the Black man who’s lived here 40 years and doesn’t know his White neighbors, and the other family with the kinda hidden behind the plants Black Lives Matter sign, with the Black pastors I interact with regularly, with liberals that normally wouldn’t give a conservative the time of day, much less a hearing.
What I know is that the bulk of commentary on both sides is not designed for constructive dialog, for looking for common goals and common pain. It’s designed for affirming their respective audiences.
And I could write that stuff all day long.
But what I’d also do is alienate the other side of the debate, and that’s not acceptable. I’d concede that it would be hard to find common cause with violent anarchists and that wouldn’t bother me all that much, but I don’t want to alienate my neighbor. I want to love him.
@oldbathos wrote a great post, and all of it is true and useful.
My response is like, “Have you considered how to package this so that the vast political middle slightly left, maybe even in your neighborhood, would not dismiss it out of hand?” So they might call you a racist. Let’s find a way to say it that takes that characterization away.
I talk about empathy. If we want our ideas to be heard with people of other political views, or worldviews, we need to show them that we care, especially when they are speaking out of pain. I address the pain, treat the symptoms, then, slowly, gently, work my way toward the causes and solutions.
I am deeply grieved that society has been divided, seeming irreconcilably, into us and them.
Our dearly held, well developed, and thoroughly tested conservative ideas are the best solutions for a lot of humanity’s problems.
How do we get them heard?
I think the point that a lot of people miss about identity politics is that it’s about emphasizing other groups. The fact that it leads to young black mothers holding up their infants, and shouting, “This is George Floyd,” is just a disturbing after effect. The impetus is about indicting the others.
If we’re going to talk about Kirk burning out a computer with logic in relationship to the current situation, I think “Return of the Archons” is best, because of the rioting that proceeds it:
“Festival” is an interesting euphemism for “riot”, though that’s how MSNBC tried to spin Seattle’s CHAZ/CHOP right after it started, and Mayor Durken and Gov. Inslee were trying to pretend nothing was wrong. And Landru (the computer, not the slightly-different spelled former Democratic mayor of New Orleans-father of future governor of Louisiana) is more of the eventual final stage of the process here, where he’s the leader who controls the people and stages the nightly riots (which take on a quasi-religious experience) from the top down. That’s where the Antifa types would like to be, but aren’t as of now.
My personal favorite example of Kirk’s skill in overcoming computers is I, Mudd. I like to picture OB pulling this one off on a Wokeist knucklehead, and watching the smoke come out of his ears, just like Norman’s.
Arvo,
All fine sentiments but you must also watch the Star Trek episode called “And The Children Shall Lead”. We have just seen a concentrated effort by pure propagandists to gaslight the entire population of the United States. Like the ending of the Star Trek episode that I mentioned, after a great deal of damage is done the children will see just how ugly and cruel the opposition is. Then we will be able to talk to them. I’m sorry I don’t have a better solution but sometimes realizing that there isn’t any magic middle course so we can “heal” everybody is the first step.
Here is some information that simply doesn’t have the slightest chance of seeing the light of day through the MSM, Academia, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, or the appeasing “moderate” Republicans. Yet, to fully understand the civilization that we live in there is no way without this information. Without this context, we won’t understand the story of Western Civilization and will always be subject to the worst propaganda especially by cruel Marxists.
It is Western Civilization that finally made Slavery permanently illegal. In 2020 Slavery is still being practiced in parts of the Islamic world. The New York Times could care less. Their magic “narrative” is fixed. The facts don’t matter. Strange how someone who claims to “believe in science” could possibly say “the facts don’t matter”. There is no science without the facts.
Sorry, I can’t be of more help to you. However, at this point, I don’t think that any attempt on my part to “help” anyone softsoap BLM/Antifa propaganda would only encourage more of it. As of this moment, I think we are seeing a massive revulsion by the vast majority of people to BLM/Antifa, both in the Black community and the rest of the American population. The MSM continues its gaslighting, Fauci continues his gaslighting but I think they’ve had their little propaganda blitzkrieg and now they are going to pay for it in spades.
My advice is to stock up on popcorn.
Regards,
Jim
Yeah, like I said, they coopted a phrase and leveraged for an entirely detached agenda.
I appreciate your point of view-empathy is always called for. The problem comes after the empathy with conservative ideas. They are the best solution-you acknowledge that-but they are not the expedient solution. They involve taking responsibility for your own life, regardless of what those around you are doing. One of the main themes of the protests and the riots is that no one is responsible for their situation-it’s all due to systemic racism. And if that is where the conversation starts, then no amount of empathy will lead to a good outcome. So I think the best way is to listen to conservative black voices to hear about racial issues where everyone could do better.
Arvo,
As this empty contentless hysteria recedes expect to see the forces of ordinary decency take back all of the lost ground and then some. The weather is going to clear and when it does they are going to get the s#*t kicked out of them. Amen.
Regards,
Jim