i hope people realize that southern states reopening even when they shouldn’t is not because southern people are dumb. it’s because their mayors and governors want them to die. they care about the economy more than the people there.
and because they don’t want to pay unemployment anymore. they’d rather people die than pay unemployment
I live in Florida and I need y'all to know, this is 100% true. It is entirely and completely about the FL unemployment system being broken, not about any deep patriotic sense of freedom.
One thing I treasure about this parallel in TOS is that it reminds us that being a “good person,” while it can ultimately become part of our being, is a series of constant, difficult choices. We are shaped by our experience and circumstances, and choosing to do good is more difficult in some situations and for some people than others.
It’s much more admirable knowing that Jim makes the choice over and over again to do the “good” thing, despite everything that has happened to him, so that he becomes the person the people who know him best think of as having an unassailable goodness, rather than just making a simple claim that some people are born to goodness and some are not. This extends to every character on the show, and into our own lives.
Goodness is not who we are, it’s what we do. Eventually, those actions become “what kind of people” we are. Knowing the other choice was possible makes the decision more meaningful.
This is why I’ve never been happy with the way DS9 and all subsequent series have handled the mirror verse. In my opinion, they miss the point entirely.
The whole point of the original mirrorverse was that these characters were reflections of our leads. Mirrorverse Kirk wasn’t just some sex-obsessed dictator, he was specifically a parallel to our Kirk, just one who didn’t fight his worst impulses.
Kirk could have been mirror Kirk. If he gave into his anger. If he’d decided that ethics didn’t apply. Even the relationship with Marlena underscored that point. Real Kirk was attracted to her (as he had been to Rand), but Real Kirk knew that pursuing a relationship with a subordinate was wrong and exploitative.
That was also the point of Mirror Spock. Mirror Spock had been a reflection of Spock’s capacity for callousness and apathy, and ends justified the means. But just as Spock might have become this man, like Kirk might have become his own reflection, the mirror universe versions COULD HAVE become them too. And Mirror Spock chose to do that.
DS9 and later decided that the idea of fixing Spock was too naive, and that, therefore, things went to absolute hell for the Terrans later. Which was an okay premise for a parallel universe, but it completely lost the “Mirror” aspect.
The Intendent is not Kira and never would have been. There’s nothing parallel about their lives, temperaments, or means to deal with problems. Kira is a traumatized revolutionary who has been driven to extremes. She’s not, and would never become, a sex-obsessed decadent dictator.
And unfortunately the DS9 version is the standing version: So we get Jonathan Archer the genocidal monster, Empress Giorgiou and Captain “Killy”, none of whom give us any sort of insight into our leads because they don’t reflect anything.
It’s a shame, because a PROPER Mirror Universe could have explored so much. A dark version of Kira as a righteous revolutionary that doesn’t care about collateral lives and considers everyone less extreme to be a collaborator could have been a great exploration of what someone can become under extreme trauma, if they don’t take efforts to hold onto their humanity.
A dark version of Tilly as a scientist that actually explored the callousness inherent in watching a friend and colleague reduced to a component of an engine they were never meant to use, just to give them an edge in war, would have made far more effective a point given the themes of the first part of the first season.
It’s really frustrating to see that missed potential.
I also can’t stand the implication that these versions are in ANY way better. It’s EASIER to give into destructive impulses, sticking to the hard road is the hard part. Hence, Jim could adjust to the mirrorverse but Mirror Jim could not.
The idea being pushed that the regular Starfleet was too weak and naive to deal with the Klingons until someone came in and showed them some mirror-tactics, that mirrorverse counterparts can easily slip into the roles and identities of the regular verse while the other ones are killed or “would never survive there” is deeply unsettling to me.
I do love it on STO, though, because Mirror-Leeta goes on and on about how much more powerful she is than the STO Captain when she gets outmatched, outsmarted and outclassed in each storyline. And Killy manages a short-term win but ends up getting her ass kicked in the next installment, because the Terran Empire, full of those who always make the easy choice, is not nearly as tough as the Federation, filled with those who struggle with their desires and work to make the best choice.
You may have heard about AOC catching a lot of flack from conservatives for claiming that computer algorithms can be biased – in the sense of being racist, sexist, et cetera. How, these people asked, can something made of math be biased? It’s math, so it must be objectively correct, right?
Well, any computer scientist or experienced programmer knows right away that being “made of math” does not demonstrate anything about the accuracy or utility of a program. Math is a lot more of a social construct than most people think. But we don’t need to spend years taking classes in algorithms to understand how and why the types of algorithms used in artificial intelligence systems today can be tremendously biased. Here, look at these four photos. What do they have in common?
You’re probably thinking “they’re all outdoors, I guess…?” But they have something much more profound in common than that. They’re all photos of giraffes!
At least, that’s what Microsoft’s world-class, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence claimed when shown each of these pictures. You don’t see any giraffes? Well, the computer said so. It used math to come to this conclusion. Lots of math. And data! This AI learns from photographs, which of course depict the hard truth of reality. Right?
It turns out that mistaking things for giraffes is a very common issue with computer vision systems. How? Why? It’s quite simple. Humans universally find giraffes very interesting. How many depictions of a giraffe have you seen in your life? And how many actual giraffes have you seen? Many people have seen one or two, if they’re lucky. But can you imagine seeing a real giraffe and not stopping to take a photo? Everyone takes a photo if they see a giraffe. It’s a giraffe!
The end result is that giraffes are vastly overrepresented in photo databases compared to the real world. Artificial intelligence systems are trained on massive amounts of “real world data” such as labeled photos. This means the learning algorithms see a lot of giraffes… and they come to the mathematically correct conclusion: giraffes are everywhere. One should reasonably expect there might be a giraffe in any random image.
Look at the four photos again. Each of them contains a strong vertical element. The computer vision system has incorrectly come to the belief that long, near-vertical lines in general are very likely to be a giraffe’s neck. This might be a “correct” adaptation if the vision system’s only task was sorting pictures of zoo animals. But since its goal is to recognize everything in the real world, it’s a very bad adaptation. Giraffes are actually very unlikely.
Now, here’s the clincher: there are thousands and thousands of things that are over-represented or under-represented in photo databases. The AI is thoroughly giraffed in more ways than we could possibly guess or anticipate. How do you even measure such a thing? You only have the data you have – the dataset you trained the AI with in the first place.
This is how computer algorithms “made of math” can be sexist, racist, or any other sort of prejudiced that a human can be. Face photo datasets are highly biased towards certain types of appearances. Datasets about what demographics are most likely to commit crimes were assembled by humans who may have made fundamentally racist decisions about who did and didn’t commit a crime. All datasets have their giraffes. Here’s a real world example where the giraffe was the name “Jared.”
Any time “a computer” or “math” is involved in making decisions, you need to ask yourself: what’s been giraffed up this time?
Thanks to Janelle Shane whose tweet showing her asking an AI how many giraffes are in the photograph of The Dress prompted this post.
Please note that Microsoft does try to take steps to correct their computer vision system’s errors, so the above photos may have improved their detections since they were first evaluated by @picdescbot. (They did all still register as giraffes on 31 Jan 2019.)
A Star Trek idea: A comedy sitcom where instead of a Vulcan on a mostly human ship it is a human on a mostly Vulcan ship
All the Vulcans are fiercely protective of the ‘fragile, illogical, prone-to-danger, smart, reckless little human’.
To make the human feel more accepted (as it is only logical) the Vulcans try to include aspects of terran culture in the ship’s day-to-day life, failing spectacularly at it.
The human loves them even more for it.
They’ll get better at celebrating the human’s birthday next year. It’s the thought that counts.
@jvlianbashir THAT’S A GOOD END TO THAT EPISODE THOUGH…
the vulcans put together awful, bland decorations. they make a cake because it’s of “significant importance”. they go through the process of putting together this party and Studying this Human Ritual and the entire episode is setting up to what you KNOW will be a horrible result. they do a bad job!!
then when the human’s birthday comes, and they reveal the off-the-mark, underwhelming looking birthday bash, the human just. starts crying. because they had no idea their crew would go through all this trouble to celebrate their birthday, and even put up DECORATIONS, or make a CAKE, and there’s a birthday card with extremely polite impersonal messages written and a hundred perfectly tidy signatures.
and the vulcans are just standing around like “you appear upset. the Birthday Party was unsatisfactory”.
Do this for any company that asks you to review their employees always.
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I swear I get 4/5 star ratings at my job just because the way people think is “well 5/5 means perfect and nobody’s perfect, 4/5 is good!” The company I work for doesn’t understand this common mentality at all, and will let people go over not having consistent enough 5/5 ratings. Obviously they don’t inform the customers of that.
gen z kids don’t give a single fuck and they’re all like 9
Actually, Generation Z began in 1998. So if you’re 19 or younger, you’re gen Z
Actually Actually I’ve read that it began in 95. So as far as 22, I’m sorry for you but you’re gen Z.
18-23 year olds who are in the weird gray area between generations
“Generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science. They should be viewed primarily as tools, allowing for the kinds of analyses detailed above. But their boundaries are not arbitrary. Generations are often considered by their span, but again there is no agreed upon formula for how long that span should be. At 16 years (1981 to 1996), our working definition of Millennials will be equivalent in age span to their preceding generation, Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980). By this definition, both are shorter than the span of the Baby Boomers (19 years) – the only generation officially designated by the U.S. Census Bureau, based on the famous surge in post-WWII births in 1946 and a significant decline in birthrates after 1964.”
so here’s our favorite adoptive space dad Bail Organa in Revenge of the Sith:
and here he is in Rogue One:
meanwhile, here’s Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith:
and here he is after the exact same amount of time:
I’d like some of whatever Bail is having on Alderaan and exactly zero of what Obi-Wan is having on Tatooine
well one of them is the viceroy of alderaan and the other one is living as a hermit in space nevada, sorry that obi wan isn’t keeping up his moisturizing regimen on Planet Sand Hell while bail organa drinks kale smoothies in the shade
And let’s not forget that Tatooine has two suns and is incredibly hostile to the aging process. Look at Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.
When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.
There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.
When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.
what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.
So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.
This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
Whatever I'm currently into. Right now its a lot of Star Wars, but I'm also up for Star Trek, Wonder Woman, and King Arthur. I tend to be very long-winded.
