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Media literacy is low among conservatives. Unless its literally spelled out they probably miss it even when directly quoted.
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Submitted 3 months ago by MarxistStarTrekfan@startrek.website to startrek@startrek.website
Comments
Sanctus@lemmy.world 3 months ago
MarxistStarTrekfan@startrek.website 3 months ago
I notice they tend to find metaphors and allegories confusing.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Conservatism is fundamentally tied to a lack of empathy for people beyond one’s immediate circle, and creativity in large part is fueled by the ability to imagine other people’s experiences, i.e., empathy. It’s likely why there are so few conservative artists, and when they do exist, they tend to focus on literal/realistic or derivative art.
cabron_offsets@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Bruh. Paul Ryan’s favorite band is Rage Against The Machine. These people are fucking dense.
UlyssesT@hexbear.net 3 months ago
It’s baffling to me too, but considering how much the post-DS9 “NuTrek” showrunners like to trot out Section 31 and give them more power and reach and even respectability among the protagonists each time they seem to show up (such as in Picard where for some reason Worf and Jurati were associated with them and they apparently “had all the best toys” in a way that sounded quirky and cool rather than an unaccountably self interested bunch of murderous criminals as seen in DS9), there’s a fair amount of overlap it seems between the “black ops special forces shadowy adults in the room that make the hard decisions and get shit done” power fantasies of typical right wing entertainment and whatever Kurtzman keeps trying to push on the Trek franchise.
wirehead@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.
There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.
The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.
So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.
If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.
So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.
cybervseas@lemmy.world 3 months ago
A bunch of random thoughts I’ve had about this over the years.
If you want to use a hard right lens you can interpret some Star Trek stuff in a way that aligns with your worldview.
- Starfleet is a pseudo-military organization. Rank is very very important. They’re the best of the best, and they come to save the day often with phasers blazing.
- Sure the humans are egalitarian, but each race has its own behaviors and personality types and traits: Klingons are aggressive, Ferengi are greedy, Romulans are duplicitous, Bajorans are spiritual, etc.
- (idk about this one) Men are more “important?” in older trek. Women were sexualized more. In TNG after Tasha died, the leading women were a doctor and a counselor. And they put poor Troi through so many tropes, including random pregnancy and those tight outfits.
wirehead@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.
MarxistStarTrekfan@startrek.website 3 months ago
Good points here
buckykat@hexbear.net 3 months ago
Star Trek should absolutely be gatekept from conservatives.
xantoxis@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Two words: media illiteracy. They don’t understand the themes in what they are watching; moreover, they can’t connect any themes they do recognize to their own beliefs because they are disconnected from reality in the first place.
Modern conservatism has noticed that reality rarely agrees with its values, so its response has been to reject reality. That has a lot of side effects, and the inability to hear the message in the media is one of those side effects.