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Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.

You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!

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Having read a ton of sci-fi from that era, they were entertaining even if one overlooked the social commentary. Young me did not give a hoot that Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was supposed to be social commentary but I can still recite the USS Enterprise's destruct sequence from memory because of the tension the cast and director put into that scene.

Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.

Being unable to recognize a theme in media is not the flex people think it is…

To paraphrase Peter Gibbons from Office Space, "The thing is, @moate, it's not that I'm unable, it's that I just don't care.", much like the rest of the public doesn't. I really do not think it is too much of us to ask that our entertainment actually be entertaining.

Your story was literally about your inability to recognize a message within media. That was the point you were making, that you were too young to realize what the adults in the room were talking about. Then you grew up and probably realized something incongruent between what you value in a society and what your favorite media was saying. People love the OG Star Wars trilogy and can enjoy it without recognizing that the Empire is the USA, but that doesn't mean that's not literally the point of the story. Right wing idiots can read 1984 and think "this guy is talking about how bad leftists politics are specifically and how only conservatism makes sense" despite points vaguely at the entire life of Orwell. I'm aware that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him literate.

As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.

I think the source of your confusion is that "overlook" has multiple possible meanings. One is to fail to observe something but another means to forgive or ignore a fault.

I remember reading about star trek, and in particular uhura.

"Uhura" comes from the Swahili word uhuru, meaning "freedom"

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyota_Uhura

On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.

She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichelle_Nichols

No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present social commentary in a way that trusted the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The writers may have had an opinion, but they avoided obviously taking a side and tried to present reasonable points of view all around even if they did gently nudge things to make one side seem better. By letting the viewer come to a conclusion naturally, they actually had persuasive power because they didn't antagonize the audience. New Star Trek, on the other hand, has the writers openly preaching to you. They have one side of an issue represented by paragons of virtue, the other side represented by the scum of the earth, and have characters say what a bad person one must be if they come down on the wrong side of this. There is no subtlety whatsoever, and it has no persuasive power because the writers are more interested in flipping the bird to those whom they consider evil than actually trying to educate or persuade the audience.

And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.

Which Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"?

Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?

Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?

How about the one with the Nazi planet?

Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?

Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?

No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.

"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget.

And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.

> an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.

It wasn't. Neither NBC nor the producers expressed any concerns over interspecies kisses.

It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.

Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.

Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.

Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.

Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.

Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.

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