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Post by Julian Sharps on Dec 4, 2014 3:01:14 GMT -5
DS9 is still one of the best written shows I've ever watched. I use it as a template for plot progression in some of my writing. For which Star Trek is forever indebted to JMS. DS9 got a lot of its plot material from the early drafts of Babylon 5's arc notes that JMS showed the execs at Paramount when he pitched the show to them in 1992 (and they subsequently rejected it). I'm not looking to stoke the flame wars between fandoms here; I like both shows just fine. There's just a large number of suspicious coincidences between the two.
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Post by Adkenpachi on Dec 4, 2014 3:45:31 GMT -5
I think its similar to simpsons/family guy, there's so much star trek and space Sci Fi only has X amount of stories which can occur that there is bound to be coincidences.
I don't know this however because I was never a fan of B5, or most trek actually (only liked voyager and ds9)
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Post by ElegaicRequiem on Dec 4, 2014 9:30:12 GMT -5
DS9 is still one of the best written shows I've ever watched. I use it as a template for plot progression in some of my writing. For which Star Trek is forever indebted to JMS. DS9 got a lot of its plot material from the early drafts of Babylon 5's arc notes that JMS showed the execs at Paramount when he pitched the show to them in 1992 (and they subsequently rejected it). I'm not looking to stoke the flame wars between fandoms here; I like both shows just fine. There's just a large number of suspicious coincidences between the two. It's certainly not unlikely. B5 just seemed strange to me. It's one of those shows I just couldn't get into when it was on, and then tried finding it to watch years later without success. Much like Farscape, but Netflix did put that back on streaming. I wish I had more time during the day to just watch old TV.
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Post by Rook on Dec 4, 2014 23:57:53 GMT -5
I know I'm a little late to the debate on the teen who got shot.
It's been my understanding that he was acting like a punk minutes before the lethal shot. His complexion is irrelevant, as is the complexion of the man who removed him form the Earth. I had heard that there was enough camera footage to substantiate the officer's shot. Why there is angst over it I can't understand.
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Post by Paimon on Dec 5, 2014 3:07:14 GMT -5
There was no camera footage, there were several eye witnesses. Some of the witnesses stories were different from one another, which is typical, human memory is notoriously bad, conflicting eye witness accounts don't mean that a shooting death doesn't go to trial. Darren Wilson's story was highly suspect. There was a lot of character assassination after the fact so that people would blame the murdered kid for getting murdered. Following the shooting, the boy's community held a peaceful candlelight vigil, to which the police responded with attack dogs and riot gear. Since then, peaceful protestors were shot at with tear gas and rubber bullets, blamed for starting fires when the local SWAT was caught on camera starting them, and generally harassed for daring to question the police on who they choose to gun down in the street. Since this is in no way an isolated incident, it's understandable that, even if all of the highly questionable accusations about Mike Brown's behavior were true, people would still be upset.
Are we also going to blame the 12 year old girl who got beaten by the cops, and then charged with assault because they 'thought she was a prostitute'? One of these cops got an award for being such a great cop after the fact. What about the cop who got promoted after he killed an off duty cop? What about the cops who shot a 12 year old within 2 seconds of exiting their car because he had an airsoft gun, in spite of the fact that in the same week, and adult (White) man who had a real gun and was waving it around and shooting randomly was taken in alive? What about the cosplayer who got shot in the back because he had a toy sword? None of these were about race either right? Just cops doing their job? Is the job of White American Police officers to assault and kill black people? Because that's what it's starting to look like. I mean the KKK was in Ferguson in support of Daren Wilson, but it's not about race.
Jaywalking isn't punishable by public execution, neither is petty theft, neither is mouthing off a police officer, neither is punching a police officer. Of course Darren Wilson didn't actually have any injuries, and was described by the hospital that he went to after his lawyer suggested it as 'healthy and well fed' or something equivalent. How does that match up to Mike supposedly punching him full force in the face? Mike was shot nine times, at least twice in the head. Does this not sound like excessive force to you?
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Post by emptyhat on Dec 5, 2014 4:16:20 GMT -5
DS9 is still one of the best written shows I've ever watched. I use it as a template for plot progression in some of my writing. For which Star Trek is forever indebted to JMS. DS9 got a lot of its plot material from the early drafts of Babylon 5's arc notes that JMS showed the execs at Paramount when he pitched the show to them in 1992 (and they subsequently rejected it). I'm not looking to stoke the flame wars between fandoms here; I like both shows just fine. There's just a large number of suspicious coincidences between the two. And of course Babylon 5 draws a lot of inspiration from Lord of the Rings. So we end up with a weird progression of LoTR==>B5==>DS9 and it's all good if you enjoy all of them. Are there any further mutations?
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Post by Julian Sharps on Dec 5, 2014 12:46:58 GMT -5
B5 also drew a lot from Foundation, which actually beat out Lord of the Rings for a Hugo award. However, the difference here is that Lord of the Rings was written about 40 years before B5, while DS9 was made concurrently by a company that JMS pitched his show idea to and was rejected by, only to make a suspiciously similar series the next year in an established franchise.
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Post by Rook on Dec 5, 2014 15:01:57 GMT -5
There was no camera footage, there were several eye witnesses. Some of the witnesses stories were different from one another, which is typical, human memory is notoriously bad, conflicting eye witness accounts don't mean that a shooting death doesn't go to trial. Darren Wilson's story was highly suspect. There was a lot of character assassination after the fact so that people would blame the murdered kid for getting murdered. Following the shooting, the boy's community held a peaceful candlelight vigil, to which the police responded with attack dogs and riot gear. Since then, peaceful protestors were shot at with tear gas and rubber bullets, blamed for starting fires when the local SWAT was caught on camera starting them, and generally harassed for daring to question the police on who they choose to gun down in the street. Since this is in no way an isolated incident, it's understandable that, even if all of the highly questionable accusations about Mike Brown's behavior were true, people would still be upset. Are we also going to blame the 12 year old girl who got beaten by the cops, and then charged with assault because they 'thought she was a prostitute'? One of these cops got an award for being such a great cop after the fact. What about the cop who got promoted after he killed an off duty cop? What about the cops who shot a 12 year old within 2 seconds of exiting their car because he had an airsoft gun, in spite of the fact that in the same week, and adult (White) man who had a real gun and was waving it around and shooting randomly was taken in alive? What about the cosplayer who got shot in the back because he had a toy sword? None of these were about race either right? Just cops doing their job? Is the job of White American Police officers to assault and kill black people? Because that's what it's starting to look like. I mean the KKK was in Ferguson in support of Daren Wilson, but it's not about race. Jaywalking isn't punishable by public execution, neither is petty theft, neither is mouthing off a police officer, neither is punching a police officer. Of course Darren Wilson didn't actually have any injuries, and was described by the hospital that he went to after his lawyer suggested it as 'healthy and well fed' or something equivalent. How does that match up to Mike supposedly punching him full force in the face? Mike was shot nine times, at least twice in the head. Does this not sound like excessive force to you? As I had mentioned 'it was my understanding that he acted like a punk'. I was basing that remark on what I believed reliable details form friends and family. They clearly didn't do the research! Upon looking into further on my own I see this video... www.cnn.com/2014/09/11/us/ferguson-michael-brown-shooting-witnesses/If the teen was shot in the back then the cop should clearly be indicted(as should,in my opinion, every single cop that uses lethal force on an unarmed person). As to the other things you cite I.E. the 12 y/o and such; I'm not going to research those. I will leave this as my best response: our media has become more about shock and less about truth. We all saw it with the Zimmerman/Trayvon thing. So in short I need to do my own investigating before coming off half-c.ocked. EDIT: Ah , here it is! fox2now.com/2014/08/15/raw-video-surveillance-video-believed-to-show-michael-brown-robbing-convenience-store/This is the video my friends/family had mentioned. Who knows what it was about? The store owner said he was 'robbed' but in the video you can't tell. Just found this quote from an officer and I think he sums it up nicely.... “What happened to Brown far outweighed what he did. But what he did set in motion a series of events that ended in his life being lost. If he doesn’t do that, the officer doesn’t have to respond, they don’t cross paths. If you’re a young black man in America, and you go down to the corner store and snatch things that don’t belong to you, and now somebody calls the police on you, you’ve just set in process a chain of events that, God only knows how will turn out. “So to see this thing magnified from a racial aspect, I feel like we’re doing an injustice to all the young black men in America who are watching this unfold. We need to reinforce the message that decision-making, the power of choices, is also important. In an instant that officer made a choice, just like Brown made a choice.”
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Post by Paimon on Dec 5, 2014 16:49:45 GMT -5
Darren Wilson, and the police themselves have admitted that Mike wasn't stopped for the robbery, as Darren didn't know anything about it at the time. Plus the store owner originally said that they weren't robbed, but changed their story some time later (which is super suspicious). Comparing petty theft to gunning down unarmed civilians creates a pretty terrible false equivalency. 'Don't rob a store or maybe we'll just fornicateing kill you' is a pretty terrifying thing to hear from a police officer. If it were an isolated incident, I'd definitely agree that it might not actually be about race, but it's not even close to an isolated incident. Just last Tuesday another unarmed black man was killed by police. Plus there was the incident in New York where the unarmed black man was strangled to death by police, and caught on camera doing it, but got off scot free. Darren Wilson, in his testimony described Mike as looking like a demon, and 'it'. If that doesn't sound dehumanizing to you, then what does?
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Post by Rolling Thunder on Dec 5, 2014 17:11:44 GMT -5
Burning a planet to glass to save it's inhabitants from something worse. Betraying your oldest comrade to his rivals to save his soul. Watching the last few hundred people from your culture die around you, one by one. Having someone you loved try to have you put in prison because the relationship ended.
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Post by Rook on Dec 5, 2014 20:19:50 GMT -5
If that doesn't sound dehumanizing to you, then what does? I may be the wrong person to ask. My wife on several occasions called me a demon or a devil when I got angry. I see it as a complement. Paimon I am lover of chaos and mayhem and all their ilk, yet you seem troubled by this. Why choose a name like 'Paimon' if this sort of thing bothers you? I am NOT trying to anger or belittle you. Just asking a question.
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Post by Paimon on Dec 5, 2014 23:09:46 GMT -5
I generally prefer my chaos and mayhem to be fictional. In the case of oppressive regimes that silence and murder their people, I'm in favor of the chaos and mayhem that comes from people rising against it.
I'm bothered more by people's reactions to the event than the event itself. I'm confused and disturbed to see people hearing that an unarmed black kid was killed by a cop, and rather than condemn the cop, the cop gets paid time off, and $500,000 donated to him, and then let off scot-free. I'm confused at the insistence that the shooting wasn't about race, when this particular cop has a history of racism prior to the event in question, and a bunch of the cops (I can't remember if Wilson was one of them) were previously from a precinct that was shut down because of racism and corruption, and the statistics clearly indicate that black people in the area are disproportionally stopped, even though white people were more likely to be charged with something when stopped. When 911 operators in the town are calling the people monkeys, and shutting down service right after the killing, it's pretty clearly about race. Racism didn't go away in the 60s, and even if you aren't racist yourself, pretending that racism is over seems like sticking your head in the sand.
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Post by ElegaicRequiem on Dec 6, 2014 0:17:47 GMT -5
I don't understand racism at all. I look around, and I see humans. And they're all stupid.
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Post by Adkenpachi on Dec 6, 2014 2:49:27 GMT -5
I don't understand racism at all. I look around, and I see humans. And they're all stupid. They should all die, and will with the rise of the robots. Even Stephen Hawkins says so
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Post by emptyhat on Dec 6, 2014 3:16:10 GMT -5
Out of curiosity are the number of shootings by law enforcement officers in the US higher this year? Same question for black victims of said shootings.
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Post by Julian Sharps on Dec 6, 2014 3:20:22 GMT -5
Out of curiosity are the number of shootings by law enforcement officers in the US higher this year? Same question for black victims of said shootings. Probably not, but they're getting more media exposure.
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Post by emptyhat on Dec 6, 2014 3:22:54 GMT -5
That's possible. The British government claimed lower rates of knife crime while the tabloids were making out that there was a knife crime epidemic back in 2008. But are there any numbers on this?
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Post by Paimon on Dec 6, 2014 3:34:31 GMT -5
Supposedly the current rate of cops killing black people is something like once every 28 hours. It's hard to find statistics on total deaths because of reasons.
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Post by Rook on Dec 6, 2014 12:28:38 GMT -5
I generally prefer my chaos and mayhem to be fictional. In the case of oppressive regimes that silence and murder their people, I'm in favor of the chaos and mayhem that comes from people rising against it. I'm bothered more by people's reactions to the event than the event itself. I'm confused and disturbed to see people hearing that an unarmed black kid was killed by a cop, and rather than condemn the cop, the cop gets paid time off, and $500,000 donated to him, and then let off scot-free. I'm confused at the insistence that the shooting wasn't about race, when this particular cop has a history of racism prior to the event in question, and a bunch of the cops (I can't remember if Wilson was one of them) were previously from a precinct that was shut down because of racism and corruption, and the statistics clearly indicate that black people in the area are disproportionally stopped, even though white people were more likely to be charged with something when stopped. When 911 operators in the town are calling the people monkeys, and shutting down service right after the killing, it's pretty clearly about race. Racism didn't go away in the 60s, and even if you aren't racist yourself, pretending that racism is over seems like sticking your head in the sand. Don't forget Paimon that the vast majority of news organizations don't really put out truth any more. It's all fluff, shock, and awe now. As for racism, I have my own take on it. You see most people actually ARE racist. Answer this truthfully: What culture would have a better chance at building an igloo? The Eskimos, or the Egyptians? If you said the Eskimos then you are a racist(as per Merriam-Webster). Now if you said, the Eskimos because the Egyptians can't do anything right, you would be a bigot. Most people confuse the word 'racism' with 'bigotry'. As for myself I am not a bigot but I can't answer the above question without being 'racist'. BTW the Eskimos actually are different than us. They have a different physiology than us. They can survive the Arctic more readily than us. They actually are different and better in that regard. Talk about racism!
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Post by ElegaicRequiem on Dec 6, 2014 12:34:45 GMT -5
And I've recently learned that the term Eskimo is offensive to some people.
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Post by Rolling Thunder on Dec 6, 2014 12:47:57 GMT -5
Indeed, and when they report Rook's comment I will amend it duly.
Assuming I am sober.
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Post by treadiculous on Dec 6, 2014 14:07:30 GMT -5
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Post by Rook on Dec 6, 2014 17:07:42 GMT -5
And I've recently learned that the term Eskimo is offensive to some people. To who? The word means 'lacing a snow shoe' or something close to that. How could anyone see that as offensive? Man people are weak! This reminds me of the debate I got in when 'political correctness' first reared it's ugly head. I had used the word 'Oriental' to refer to someone of Chinese decent. But that's where China is....in the Orient. I consulted my dictionaries when I got home and out of the 5 I possess only 1 had it considered offensive. So apparently language changes and terms that have been in use for centuries can suddenly become offensive. Who has time for searching every dictionary before using a centuries old term? The term I can't stand now is 'Asian'. Am I supposed to call Stalin, Lenin, and Boris Yeltsin 'Asian'? What's next calling the Chileans and Canadians 'Americans'? Look at 'Native American'. I can't stand that term either. I was born in The USA so that makes me native to America but I'm not 'Native American'. Seriously WTF?!?! Use the term 'Indigenous American' if that's what you truly mean! Than means that Canadians and Chileans are 'Native American' as well. And don't get me started on 'Caucasian'. Wikipedia that little gem and then ask yourself how everyone who wasn't Caucasian isn't offended by that. Seriously go read in on Wiki.
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Post by Rolling Thunder on Dec 6, 2014 17:48:07 GMT -5
The irony of the majority of people living in the Caucasus' being non-Caucasian is truly delicious.
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Post by ElegaicRequiem on Dec 6, 2014 20:57:39 GMT -5
After thinking more on it, I don't think Rook's example is exactly right for 'racism' as-used in everyday speech. I think racism would be more like:
Q: Who's better at dealing drugs, black people or Hispanic people
A: Trick question! White people are always better at everything. Seriously, they got a white guy to play a Cuban guy in Scarface.
At any rate, we're way, way more racially sensitive in the US than most other places. I speak to immigrants, get the hear the sort of casual slurs they spout, and tell them why they shouldn't do that here. They're always confused, laugh at me, and continue to be "racist."
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