That's probably because it's a repost of a reddit slop account. Link if you're feeling brave and indignant.

Their books are on these devices. They don’t have physical books anymore.

Frankly, probably the best part about them, potential eyestrain notwithstanding. Having a sack of bricks strapped to your back all day, or constant retreats to a locker, wasn't contributing to my quality of education, LOL. Having an electronic device as a reading and writing and proctoring tool, sensibly extended with the bare minimum of other capabilities, is not a bad thing at all, IMHO.

1. Important context: he's talking to Laura Loomer, so trying to communicate to a skeptical White House that supporting Ukraine is supporting the values of Trump's base. Ukrainian propaganda is real and I don't judge them for deploying it, but we also don't want to presume that statements like this are not calculated. That said...

2. I mean, he's not wrong. You can (and I'd argue should) stop well short of confiscation when trying to keep religion from being a toxic voice in a country's political discourse. However, raising it in this conversation, when Putin seems more interesting in co-opting religion rather than suppressing it, and that in a way that MAGAs would frankly find to be a useful model, makes me think of it more as a hail mary (LOL) than anything else.

3. The last line of the article gave me pause, so in investigating this source, it appears to be an arm of the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate, and while I am concerned by any curtailment of the free exercise of religion, the Russian Orthodox church has been largely co-opted by the Putin government, leading to the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul to cut the Ukraininan church free from Moscow, and now the UOC-MP seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it to with regard to respecting Moscow without fully toeing the line on the ROC's pro-war rhetoric. The argument would come down to whether the Russian Church is de facto an arm of the Russian state. At any rate, the site definitely has an agenda here.

It's not because I'm obsessed with continuity, or because I'm a hardcore fan.... It requires more explanation than a soft reboot. Normally when you reboot something, you can tell it's a reboot.... But with Doctor Who, the fact it's a new actor doesn't tell you that at all, so most people casually watching would just be assuming, 'Oh, it's the next version of Doctor Who, he's changed again'... You'd have to keep reminding the audience, ‘We started from the beginning again.'

Completely fair for Doctor Who specifically, and as others have pointed out, utterly trivial to handwave things into however much of a reboot the new writers decide they want to do. Audiences of legacy SF properties will roll with whatever nonsense they need to if the resulting stories are compelling.

Yeah, it seems almost like a perverse point of pride that the weirdos who join Starfleet don't really participate fully in planetside culture, and getting retired from it would almost like a kind of death or imprisonment. Now, why Picard and O'Brien don't get assigned to a cushy Starbase gig in Sol is beyond me. Those two are, mentally, hundreds of (very traumatic) years old each.

This is me. I use it just often enough that I'll occasionally embarrass myself smudging the screen of a non-TS laptop trying to zoom a map or tap a shutdown icon.

There is a line you see quoted from time to time the ST:TMP novelization, which I understand Gene Roddenberry had a real hand in crafting.:

We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us. We submit ourselves to starship discipline because we know it is made necessary by the realities of deep-space exploration.

He seems to have struggled with what his vision for a future society would be, versus the realities of making a sellable media property in the late 20th century. He posits that our Starfleet friends are actually socially conservative space cowboys by the standards of the UFP, which makes it easier for the audience to identify with them without compromising the rest of his post-scarcity utopian vision (e.g. that same passage indicates that James Kirk was partially named after his mother's first "love instructor"). However, it also means we're seeing a bizarre subculture of quasi-exiled psychological luddites who take on the eldritch horrors of service in Starfleet in return for not being slapped down into conformity.

It's clearly not a guiding principle for how Starfleet is generally portrayed in ST media, but it's interesting to think of them in terms of being distinctly apart from the rest of humanity while dedicating themselves to protecting it and expanding its understanding of the universe.

(goes back to No Child)

In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different "customers". The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

Then, to make sure we didn't fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same "University" paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn't do anything "real."

The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There's genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.

Hmmm...

Checkmate, @cynar@lemmy.world... Well played...

for now.

Who had side cutters laying around during the heyday of the gray-testicled computer mouse, though?

I guess the reviews say it doesn't suck? Still, anything that could have got in the way of Reggie Dinkins s2 is acceptable collateral damage.

Yup, in most prequel series you know where you’re going to land, so there’s a huge pillar of engagement (ie “what’s gonna happen?”) just kicked out from under you. That means the performances and character work need to be on-point or it just becomes “meh.” Like I said, I didn’t hate s1. Prettyboy Sauron was engaging enough, the dwarfs were fun, and the protohobbits had some heart, even if they were baffling in many ways.

However, nothing came together quite right. The Elves are aloof and unengaging, the plot is on rails, and the specific era of the setting was never really meant to support the weight of person-scale storytelling, so the whole thing just felt like an extended video game cut scene.

I guess I’ll watch more eventually, but I’m in no rush.