Star Trek was originally a show to address racism and not just science fiction! It might take a reminder from a baby-boomer to realize what it meant for a black woman, Russian, Japanese, Scottish characters to all share the same bridge in close quarters in 1968! Then we can't forget all of the aliens, strange encounters with other cultures, etc...
Interesting that "Spock" uses a lot of emotional language -- "prejudice", "lonely", "happiness", "frightening", "feel best about himself" -- contrary to the popular conception of Vulcans as an emotionless, logic-above-all race.
Certainly, modern conceptions of Vulcans are a lot more nuanced e.g. they are privately strongly emotional or otherwise have to strongly suppress their emotions. See for example Star Trek (2009) which deals with Spock as a young boy in Vulcan culture, which is eerily reminiscent of this article. Wonder whether Orci, Kurtzman or Abrams read this article before conceiving the 2009 incarnation of Spock?
Actually, the fact that young Spock was an outcast was already established by the early '70's thanks to the animated series’ episode “Yesteryear”, written by D. C. Fontana. For the most part, this was only episode of that series that was considered canon until ST: Enterprise incorporated more of that series into official lore.
It was actually established in 1967 in "Journey to Babel", when his mother said "When you were five years old and came home stiff-lipped, anguished, because the other boys tormented you saying that you weren't really Vulcan. I watched you, knowing that inside that the human part of you was crying and I cried, too."
The fact that he wrote this in 1968 is really amazing. How many people in 1968 would not have felt compelled to respond to the girl in a compassionate way?
If you want something to really blow your mind, in my state, just 1 year prior to this article, it was illegal for white and black people to get married and have sex. She would have literally been the product of an illegal act.
That's a pretty fucked up burden to grow up with and only hints at the kind of twisted cultural thinking that would vote such a law into existence.
I'm less impressed by Mr. Nimoy here, considering that his colleagues would perform the first interracial kiss on-screen later that year, and more bothered that substituting "1968" with "today" in your question doesn't make the answer obvious either.
Do you seriously think people in 1968 were different to people today?
People have always been people, they are and always have been intrinsically nice to others at a personal level. Most people then and now would have responded in a compassionate way.
It's in groups and at higher levels they can be more uncaring.
Nope, and you'll see this everywhere that you see the intersection of pop culture and the advice to "be yourself."
This isn't a dig at Nimoy's advice - it's damn good advice. But it doesn't sell compared to You're worthless unless you buy our stuff. The only reason why they can print Nimoy's advice is that the "Be a FAD" ad is right next to it. And not only that, the earnest advice itself is often packaged and cynically sold, right alongside the "OBEY CONFORM CONSUME" message!
One of the most recent examples of this is a song I keep hearing on the radio - "Try," by Colbie Caillat.[1] The message of the song is pretty simple - it's that people work their asses off to be liked, but they're still not happy because they're straying from being true to themselves.
But it's a manufactured product explicitly created to appeal to people who are feeling lost, confused, and frustrated with being popular. And they have a beautiful woman, who is already an enormous success, singing this song that's specifically saying, "Stop worrying about what other people think about you" when her entire career is based on what other people think of her.
I'm a much bigger fan of Tool's Hooker With a Penis.[2] At least Keenan is frank about it.
All you read and wear or see and hear on TV is a product
"Revolution has already been televised. Revolution has been merchandised. Revolution is a commodity, a packaged lifestyle, available at your local mall. $19.95 gets you the black mask, the spray can, the "Crush the Fascists" protest sign, and access to your blog where you can write about the police brutality you suffered when you chained yourself to a fire hydrant.
Capitalism has learned how to sell anti-capitalism."
Similarly in the atheism movement movement there's 'freethinkers'. It annoys me that being a freethinker is just subscribing to another labelled group with a doctrine, as opposed to being a free thinker. A small space makes a lot of semantic difference.
This kind of thing tends to happen to historical terms. Groups that trace their lineage from group X call themselves X, especially if the name has positive associations. This happened with, to use a somewhat controversial example, the term "liberal" in the US but, curiously, not in Europe. In computing you could say that this happened, and continues to happen, with the term "hacker" ("growth hackers" are a recent example).
Atheism is not a doctrine any more than not believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy is a doctrine. It is possible that there are doctrines within atheism but atheism itself is not one.
I'm not bothered about the term free thinker and wouldn't necessarily have linked it with atheism.
Although being off topic, I think this is still a good observation to make.
About five years ago, I was looking up something related to bulimia. Low and behold, I ended up on a site that had advice for young people with this disorder, and the keyword ads on the right of the page included a bunch of "Lose weight fast using this pill" type ads. I was quite horrified (and reported the ads to the ad network).
While the case you describe might have been an accident, the big problem with the marketing-surveillance state Internet is becoming is that someone somewhen may - or maybe already did - decide to run such ads on purpose. After all, what's a better market for diet pills than people suffering from bulimia or anorexia? What's a better market for anti-depressants than people with suicidal thoughts?
I don't get your last example - getting antidepressants to people with suicidal thoughts sounds great to me.
In any case, while I have no doubt that people have and will continue to make such decisions, I doubt they will become the norm - they're too prone to lawsuits, and too inefficient. Instead, Google et all will continue to develop algorithms that detect and exploit those correlations from raw data, so that no one will be able to tell why your profile was selected to be shown diet pills. Which is much more insidious, since it diffuses the moral responsibility.
You might be interested in the 15th episode (of the 4th series) of Person of Interest, "Q & A" (Aired at February 17, 2015), in which depressed and addicted people were targeted with special adds to drive profit up. I won't spoil the whole episode, but it certainly made me think about our implicit, almost tacit trust in search engines, social media sites, and other services we don't fully understand (as users, because we don't have access to the source or data), but which we use daily. I can only imagine our dependence on these services to grow in the future, while our understanding of these complex systems does not grow at the same rate (or at all).
That was exactly the episode I was subtly referencing in my comment. BTW. after watching it, I thought that the way the data was collected in that episode is a writer's fiction. Imagine my surprise when I learned few days later that it's actually true, and it's what Apple and Microsoft do.
> This genre of magazine flourished in North America in the 1950s and early 1960s. The title Confidential alone boasted a monthly circulation in excess of ten million, and it had many competitors, with names like Whisper, Dare, Suppressed, The Lowdown, Hush-Hush, and Uncensored. These magazines included more lurid and explicit content than did the popular newspaper gossip columnists of the time, including tales of celebrity homosexuality and illegal drug use.
Newspapers were full of celebrity stories, starting with the Hollywood gossip columnists of the 30s and 40s, like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Jackie Kennedy's hair style, pillbox hat, and oversize sunglasses influenced a generation of women.
Obsession is an aspect of the recipient. What you listed are aspects of the supplier.
Bobby Fischer was obsessed with chess. Modern chess players have access to a lot more information about chess; records of all of the chess tournament plays, high quality chess computers, on-line play. That doesn't mean that Booby Fischer was less obsessed than modern players.
Newton in his early years was obsessed with science. Modern scientists have access to an entire industry and government infrastructure for supporting science. That doesn't mean that modern scientists are fundamentally more obsessed about science than Newton was.
