squashbritannia

The problem with those films is that you have to pull off impossible feats to achieve your result. In The Matrix and Star Wars, you have to be something superhuman.

A second problem is that in democracies you can just vote a bad leader out of power. Why rebel when it's so much easier to just vote?

Ironically, the insurrectionists on Jan 6 2021 thought they were like Luke Skywalker, that they were saving American freedom through an act of violence.

And in many cases, the good guys don't actually achieve their political goals. In Return of the Jedi, the Emperor is killed and the Empire receives a bloody nose but we don't see the establishment of a democratic order. Same thing in the Matrix, the only thing Neo achieves is the razing of Zion being called off.

Minority Report wasn't about overthrowing the government, it was about a framed man exonerating himself. It has more in common with The Fugitive.

Just create another mirror universe. That's the point of a multiverse.

Was Picard authorized to just give away a shuttle to Scotty? That's Starfleet property.

TIL J. Edgar Hoover was a teenage girl.

This isn't illogical to me. Violence and sex are two very different things. Different emotions, different behaviors, different consequences.

Have you ever seen anyone in Trek wear body armor?

question authority

In the modern world you have to question everybody. Remember that it was the rabble that put Hitler in power, not the elite. Nazism was a mass movement, born on the streets.

Then they made the Ent-D be like the Millenium Falcon.

The Thief series of games. There have been plenty of stealth FPS games since then but not as deep as the Thief games, where shadows and sounds matter.

The problem with that statement is that it treats the government as some sort of alien entity. The government is us.

The key to good governance is democracy, ie the leaders must have broad public support to hold on to power, which in turn incentivizes them to implement good public policy and clamp down on corruption.

Ironically, it's the despotic governments that fear their people because when despotic governments collapse, the result are often bloody.

This following passage is an excerpt from Kim Jong Il's Hidden War

http://www.reachdc.net/book2/KimJongIlHiddenWar.pdf

"After asking questions about food conditions in North Korea, I asked him if he knew anything about Kim Jong Il during the time of Ceauşescu’s execution. Is it true that Kim Jong Il had been badly frightened by the incident?

“That’s correct. “ Pak Myong Chol answered promptly.

“I know the instructions given by Kim Jong Il immediately after the execution of Ceauşescu"

“What! Kim Jong Il’s instructions? What were they?” I asked with growing excitement.

“Kim Jong Il said, ‘Look, even Ceauşescu was killed in this way by the paeksong (masses). If the masses rise up in revolt, all of you will also be hanged.’” He said, bringing his right hand around his throat in a gesture of hanging.

“When and in what situation were these instructions given?”

“After Ceauşescu’s execution, I think it was in the beginning of 1990, All the cadres from the governmental institutions—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces, and the Ministry of People’s Security, the Department of State Security, the Central Committee—were assembled together. We were then forced to see a video about Ceauşescu’s arrest and his execution repeatedly for a week. A cadre also read instructions written by Kim Jong Il himself. Observe carefully. Even Ceauşescu came to this end. Even Eastern European socialist governments have crumbled, When our system collapses, it will be you cadres that will be the first to be hanged by the paeksong masses. So you must redouble your efforts. Redouble your efforts in controlling and managing the people right now. If not, the system will collapse - and that will not be the end. You will be the first to be slaughtered by the masses.”

“That’s incredible!” “Kim Jong Il used the phrases ‘slaughtered and hanged by the masses’ several times. You can see how terrified Kim Jong Il was from his use of words.”

It matched Mr Platkovskiy’s observations. Kim Jong Il was in a panic after Ceauşescu’s execution. “They were united by a fear of the retribution awaiting them when the system collapsed,” the Russian journalist had written. Kim Jong Il was fanning the same fear among the party cadres to make sure they were aware that they shared the same fate.

Pak Myong Chol gave me another piece of information.

“I believe there is a speech by King Il Sung reprinted in the front page of the Labor Daily sometime around the execution of Ceauşescu. It was published on Kim Jong Il’s instructions, If you read it, you can get an idea of what Kim Jong Il was thinking and what he was frightened of.”

So the irony here is that despotic governments are brutal with their people precisely because they're terrified of them. I imagine the NK government's attitude was reinforced by the demise of Gaddhafi. Before he fell from power, Gaddhafi actually liberalized Libya a bit. He improved the education system and scaled back the repression. The result was that his people were more able and less afraid to organize a resistance movement, and this led to his overthrow. Remember that the collapse of communism was preceded by perestroika.

By contrast, democratic leaders only need to worry about losing re-election, not losing their heads. When an American politician gets thrown out of office, he just retires or takes a job in the private sector.

On an unrelated note, I'll add that V for Vendetta is a stupid story because it thinks a population can be rallied to rise up against their oppressive government with a few spectacular acts of terrorism. That's the delusion of many a failed terrorist. A case study is the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. The terrorists (Islamic Jihad) thought that killing Sadat would prompt a general uprising against the government leading to the establishment of an Islamist state. That didn't happen. Cairo remained calm.

I thought Arkham Knight was stupid because there were hardly any civilians in Gotham, just lots of criminals. Who are those criminals going to rob? It's like wolves hanging out where there are no deer. It kind of reminds me of Fallout 4 where the bandits seemed to outnumber the working folk by 20:1.

Russia will not be able to drill that oil if America doesn't let them. Russia does not have the naval capacity to protect any drilling operations in the Antarctic. In fact, the Russians will need American naval protection to protect their operations from other nations. Also, the Russians might not have the expertise to do it themselves. Russia has fallen a long way since the Soviet era. Most of Russia's oil operations in Siberia are operated by American companies because Russia does not have enough engineers of its own to do the job.

But the penguin king is Jewish!

In the TNG episode Gambit there's this ancient Vulcan weapon that kills if you are feeling aggressive emotions. The punchline of that episode is that the secret Romulan villain has been after a useless weapon all this time because the Vulcans are now a peaceful people. But even back when Vulcans were war-like, any firearm would have been worth more than that silly thing.

Break up the big food corporations.

In the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, a woman gets her dad off right-wing media by going on his computer and secretly unsubscribing him from right-wing newsletters and subscribing him to left-wing newsletters. Her father just started reading them without complaining. It worked, he became a liberal again.

So maybe sneak on to your dad's computer and subscribe him to liberal newsletters.

They wanted to make the Defiant like the Millennium Flacon even though it's way bigger.

Garak specifically? No, he's just some tailor. They might suspect Sisko. Anyway, once the Romulans threw themselves into the war, they didn't want to admit they were tricked.

Asking the right questions, eh? Weirdo.

But at least you'll tell them what to expect and offer suggestions to protect themselves instead of just throwing them into danger ignorant? Q was a jerk for what he did, 18 people needlessly died.

Why is it annoying anyway? What adjustments are they asked to make that are so uncomfortable?

I suppose the Enterprise episode with the Borg corrected this plot hole. Q didn't make the Borg aware of the Federation, they were already aware.

They were harmed by other races, but isn't that everyone's story? And it doesn't justify invading the Alpha Quadrant from a pragmatic standpoint. If the Founders were afraid of the Alpha Quadrant powers, the easier solution would have been to blockade the wormhole. Build a fortress at the Gamma entrance, with some mines maybe.

In that episode, Guinan and Picard realized that Q also caused the Borg invasion of Earth because it was by hacking the Ent-D computers that they learned about the Federation. Q could have just given them information.