Patrick Stewart has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I also want to mention his hilarious role as bullock in American dad, the way he takes a role both so seriously and ridiculously makes him so fantastically hilarious.
I love him and will miss him.
Really high quality writing for its time.
The original Star Trek was Roddenberry's vision of utopia. The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all. Any and all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. None do anything bad (unless it's a plot device with an explanation that absolves them).
Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed watching ST very much. Just keep in mind that that it's a fiction.
The best dialog ever:
Lawyer: Mr Spock, I understand you know something about computers?
Spock: I know all about them.
Always makes me laugh.
Whereas Voyager, which was written after Roddenberrys passing, leaned heavily into inter-crew disputes.
I have a feeling this might be no small part in why TOS and TNG are the two ST series that contain 90% of the "only comes up once" sci-fi plots / concepts / worldbuilding that people ever make reference to when talking about "things from Star Trek" rather than when talking about Star Trek. TOS and TNG, while definitely soft sci-fi, were to some degree trying to create 22-minute-long works of literary Speculative Fiction, modelled after the sort of things you'd read in serial SF magazines of the 1950s. Later ST series are emphatically not that, and nor do they try to be.
But as you said, I think it ends up with a higher quality show.
An annoying facet of ST episodes is the morality lessons they push, like on every episode of The Brady Bunch.
It’s nice to watch something that highlights the best of humanity in a future setting.
Almost everything else in SciFi is dystopian. But ST is a rarity. And it’s all the more beautiful for it.
While established SF writers wrote episodes for the original series (Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, etc.), David Gerrold was a recent college graduate and "The Trouble With Tribbles" was his first sale.
The difference was that rather than turn it into soap opera porn, the characters actually tried to behave professionally (most of the time).
• DS9 only had a little soap-opera drama, serving as almost a kind of fanservice sprinkled judiciously into otherwise-thematic B-plots.
• VOY had more, with entire B-plots of episodes now being character-focused, including a few arcs that would have worked just as well if transplanted into some modern-age military drama with no SF elements.
• Drama-as-the-A-plot episodes were appearing by ENT.
(After that I stopped watching, but I've heard the trend has just continued from there.)
But when you only have half a dozen-ish episodes per season, you can't afford filler.
It’s such lazy writing.
I actually didn’t mind Academy. Yeah it was flawed and had a lot of lazy tropes. But it had an identity to it and some substance to it. Not much substance, but still something. Whereas the latest season of Strange New Worlds? It wasn’t anything. It had no substance. It had no identity. It was as if someone made a silly clip show (like the Stargate 200th episode) but instead of lots of short parodies in one filler episode, they made an entire series with each episode being one very long joke. A singular punch line stretched out over nearly an hour.
I hated the first season of Discovery. But that was still better than the season 5 of SNW. I hates the first season of Enterprise. And that was also better than S5 for SNW. And I wasn’t much keen on the first season of Lower Decks either. And even that was less goofy than S5 of SNW. And what’s worse, all of those spin offs that I said had poor first seasons ended up with excellent 5th seasons. And yet SNW started of strong and fizzled out it shallow jokes.
It honestly feels like the writers had nothing.
I really enjoyed TNG as well, and DS9 probably wouldn't have even happened if not for TNG's excellence. I never really felt like the writers gave Picard's character a lot of room to change, though. A lot of the time, he was almost like the sitcom dad who was mainly there to teach the kids a lesson at the end of the episode. That's not a knock on Stewart's acting ability; I'd say he was almost certainly the best actor on the show.
Also agree about Bashir.
And some of O'Brien‘s best performances were counterpointing Bashir too.
I think as a solo character, he’s a little shallow. But he works exceptionally well at being an anchor for other characters to play off.
But yes, those instances were a bit rare.
It was actually quite pleasing to see the subplot of them them repeatedly failing until they got out of their predicament by other means.
It's a rarity to see something like that in fiction.
(That one, at least, has Geordi literally saying, "that's impossible", but comes up with a solution. Apologies if that's not the one you're thinking of.)
> LAFORGE: Captain, we can do it. We can modify the transporters.
> PICARD: Excellent.
> LAFORGE: It'll take fifteen years, and a research team of a hundred.
> PICARD: Mister La Forge, I believe we will postpone.
> LAFORGE: Yes, sir.The clips that the channel puts out... are... let's say interestingly timed.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheWestWing
For example, https://youtu.be/LwNtZgLPCpg was posted 13 days ago (October 16th).
Also from Andrew Sorkin...
• Joshua Malina: Jeremy Goodwin (Sports Night) / Will Bailey (The West Wing)
• Janel Moloney: Monica (Sports Night) / Donna Moss (The West Wing)
• Felicity Huffman: Dana Whitaker (Sports Night) / Ann Stark (The West Wing)
• Clark Gregg: Calvin Trager (Sports Night) / Mike Casper (The West Wing)
• Timothy Busfield: Director (Sports Night) / Danny Concannon (The West Wing)I'd put the Expanse there though.
Then again, maybe understandable, since he's a veteran ex cop in the midst of tweakers, junkies, madmen, and generally people not well geared for success in life. And it makes for bigger payoff when we DO get a situation where anantagonist actually does get the better of him - that tells us we're dealing with a sharp customer.
What great frickin' writing.
It should give every greasy shiny suit film executive a bowel-evacuating fit of shame that a support character like Mike gets more audience engagement than a half billion bucks spent in SWeIX: TRoS or Justice League or that godawful Marvel Immortals movie.
Hey, Finance Guys: you find creatives you know are good (y'know, using that newfangled notion of Domain Knowledge), you give 'em a kitchen and you let 'em cook.
Mr Inbetween gets more done with thirty minutes than I thought possible.
Scott Ryan deserves a big break more than most others I can think of - which he might be on the way towards, word is he's got a lot of agents sniffing at his door. He might have to give up his fixation on writing-directing-starring . . . that combo is a very hard combo to pull off at scale. There's only so much one person can do on set . . which is why all that the creator of Mr. Inbetween has managed basically boils down to just . . Mr. Inbetween.
Unless . . . Scott Ryan isn't a great Hidden Filmmaker or Outback Actor at all, and Scott Ryan actually is Ray Shoesmith. It's not Great TV, it's just Tuesday. Which would be super awesome and horrible at the same time.
On rewatching Mr Inbetween, it's good fun to pick out all the fore-shadowing of events, especially parts where Ray figures out a person before it's made obvious to the audience. Awesome writing.
Love the idea of their parents calling them Joel and Noel. :)
(He played the "kitschy" character that Ray pushed through the glass window and of course he's the real-life dad of Ray's "daughter")
It's a great show. We actually thought we bounced off it, but he inhabits the character and his little world so well that we kept thinking about it and were drawn back.
Don’t get me started on their engineering that causes a matter-antimatter runaway reaction if their fuel tanks ever lose power. And routing discharge-prone HV power lines behind the bridge consoles, or placing the bridge on the outer hull.
I love it, and I know this is all in the service of the story, but I will not give Starfleet a pass for that kind of irresponsible engineering.
https://cheezburger.com/13685509/tumblr-thread-the-staggerin...
There's no practical way depict incoming enemy fire blowing in a bulkhead and spraying shrapnel and debris across the bridge, particularly for a low-budget 1960s show that needed the bridge intact for filming the next episode. (The Expanse did that slightly more believably but not that much.) I've always viewed the exploding consoles as just PG-13 cinematic shorthand for something much more spectacular and horrific happening.
Some say it was the last sci-fi utopia in modern pop culture.
This one is pretty famous I think and I enjoyed it a lot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
(I just read that James Cameron held the screen production rights and was planning a series, but it never happened)
Or if Comic Books are in scope, obviously "Miracleman: The Golden Age" is a utopia. Explicitly so. It is about the ways people are still people in a utopia.
Less mainstream, Greg Egan's Amalgam is also clearly a utopia. The couple in "Riding the Crocodile" choose to die at the end of that story, more out of some sense that stories need endings than because of any outside force.
They mostly just said it was all great and fair and nobody needs money and is somehow trying to be their best selves… nevermind the numerous examples to the contrary.
They weren’t really post scarcity. They never explained how they’re not in a constant state of rioting when a weird government/military decides what everyone can have or do.
You just go with it, because that’s the backdrop. You have to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the story.
But also, Picard is the best Captain, by far.
What would the effects of growing up in a post-scarcity utopian society be on a human? To never fear poverty or hunger? To be sure that no matter what they do (or don’t) they will be housed and cared for as long as they live?
I assume the people in Starfleet would be the ones who are most inclined to work for their betterment, with no fear of competition, with the drive to do The Right Thing. Outside the organisation there would be people who would be totally happy in doing nothing.
It's not the same since they exist in a world where most other people aren't at that level, but we can see that the human psyche isn't always able to manage it.
That’s very different from saying everybody can now have a life style that is above the poverty line and never have to work to keep that.
The utopian society is both a backdrop, and a goal we can strive towards.
Well, post-scarcity really just means that ordinary citizens have free access to replicators (matter-energy converters).
So the closest example (and the only one I can think of where you see civilian Earth, outside of SF Academy / SF HQ or a time travel episode), is probably the double episode in DS9 where the changelings reach earth and there's a false flag event by a corrupt Admiral that causes a momentary power outage and a planetwide lockdown for a few days. I believe it's meant as a 9/11 allegory -- the homeland is attacked and suddenly everyone WANTS a police state, or at least is willing to go along with it, and only the courageous honorable military officers are there to stop the corrupt ones, all the civilians are frightened into compliance.
But post-scarcity? That just means when the security officers aren't around, people can wander into Joseph Sisko's restaurant and eat as much as they want for free, and Joseph Sisko can run his restaurant with as much food supply/ingredients and kitchen equipment as he wants for free, and every gets as much clothing as they want for free, etc. When Earth isn't on lockdown, that's the implication, everyone has as much material goods as they want for free, that's post-scarcity and the implication is they have it.
Post-scarcity doesn't mean infinite resources, or that you can have whatever you want, not everyone gets free land/space on which to build their home, for example. If that's your definition of post-scarcity then I guess at least the Q Continuum has it! :)
And yes, in Star Trek, it mostly just seems to mean that food, clothes, and small clonable objects have very little value if you live where those machines are common.
But, of course, that’s not what people think when we talk about a “post-scarcity utopia”. And they don’t think about how people have homes and property and fuel and ships, or how everything bigger than a wrench is allocated by a mega government that seems to have ultimate control over all resource allocation.
We just have to assume “everything is good somehow, and everyone is fine and docile in luxury space communism.” Because they say that.
It’s all very weird, and easy to see why it was all intentionally left unexplained. It would have been a disaster to even try.
It's worth remembering that social organization (currency, capitalism, democracy) is a technology as well, and we should not expect that a sci-fi author can explain the advances in that technology any better than they can explain a warp drive. (one nod to this I think is telling is one scene in the movie where they travel back in time and Kirk is telling the others 'they still use money' in much the same way that he would say 'they still use guns'. They have replaced guns with phasers and replaced money with something else and Roddenberry can give us the blueprint for neither).
I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.
It feels like the actual problem is that the status quo is so entrenched, people have a hard time imagining how to unseat it.
Consider the last few successful Presidential election campaigns. Hope and Change. Drain the Swamp. Biden's uninspired but ultimately successful strategy of running against the incumbent rather than for anything in particular. People keep voting for "we don't like what's currently happening" and the system keeps running them over.
Or maybe the problem is actually this:
> require deep thought, research, and experimentation
These are the things that the status quo robustly impedes.
Tweet firehose social media feeds and fragmented leadership.
Research funded by the entity under study or the politicians interested in manufacturing support for a predetermined policy rather than trying to find out something we don't already know.
Federal laws or even corporate-bought international treaties preventing local governments or private citizens from trying something new because the something new might solve a problem someone doesn't want anybody solving.
You're tasked with changing the system while operating under the system that evolved to perpetuate itself.
Which isn't to say that it can't be done, but it's easy to see why people are nonplussed.
That’s a bit of a spoiled attitude. You can’t expect a science fiction author to just casually solve a problem that humanity hasn’t managed to solve in millennia.
We also accept that they have warp drive without expecting an explanation how they got it.
But if we examine TOS and TNG, I could say it represented a "roving utopia" model where Utopia Meets Reality. The episodic nature and self-contained stories would typically examine the question: "what happens when the Roddenberry philosophy comes into contact with something unique?" and it would be a study in anthropology, comparative religions, or sociological questions.
I hadn't watched much Star Trek in the 1990s, but I was becoming excited about Babylon 5. One of the main points of departure was the planning of the 5-year story arc, and the character development that accompanied it. Every character in Babylon 5 was imbued with an origin, a narrative, and a destiny. Jumping into the story from the beginning, and riding along for all 5 imperfect years, it felt like we also had a destination, and threads came together, and there was resolution and revelation. The Babylon station was never a utopia in reality, only in its aspirations.
So I cultivated a disdain for Star Trek as it was in those days, but Trek was a product of its time, and had helped to cast the die for episodic and self-contained "Monster of the Week" type shows. However, I've rewatched all the films, and I commend them on great production values, acting, and interesting themes. The Star Trek franchise has grown to include something for everyone, including the Klingon-language performance of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which definitely captured my attention.
Also worth mentioning the recently deceased Walter Koenig who had said that playing Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was his favourite role, despite being much more famous as Chekov in the original Star Trek.
That the writers at this point in Trek canon started playing pretty fast and loose with Roddenberry's vision doesn't erase the deeply optimistic and even spiritual grounding of that show.
Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.
It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.
> even widen the gap between the haves and haves not
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... You can read https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an... which is by a working historian.
I also want to add that, none of this is relevant to the point of whether or not the current system is "just" or reasonable given and I think overall that argument is mostly a red herring.
i keep telling them they’re free to have their own personal monarchy in their own family as long as people are free to leave and also to leave the rest of us out of it. but for some reason they don’t seem to like the idea as much then.
But also, no they don't. Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment. An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will. No one making $18,000 is having hundreds or thousands of people bending over to serve them.
Utter nonsense.
No, it doesn't.
Lol nope? This is utter ignorance. Medieval kings were constantly balancing power with people directly underneath them.
Whole dynasties have been eradicated in the continuous power struggles, particularly from rich families.
Not only that: medieval kings had to bow to religious authorities as well (something ee don’t do anymore). In 1077 kind henry iv had to stand three days bare headed in the snow to convince pope gregory vii to reverse his excommunication (an excommunication would effectively invalidate him as a king, btw).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
You comment shows your utter general ignorance and complete misunderstanding of medieval times.
Being available is not equal to a person being able to afford it.
Maybe you were writing about middle class and not the poor?
On the other hand kings had free-range organic grown meat prepared by personal cook anytime they wanted which is a true luxury even today.
The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.
And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.
There is no refrigeration, so "fresh" meat has to be slaughtered the same day. Kings tended to live in populated areas, so wild game would be scarce. Majority of meat would have been pork kept in pens (not free-range in the modern sense), or mutton/goat (free range, but typically older and tougher). At the same time, even a king likely wasn't slaughtering 365 pigs/year just to have fresh meat every day - lots of dried, smoked, or even salted meat in the diet...
The government provides food to the poor with SNAP.
The only starving people in America are drug addicts or very ill people. Obesity is the usual problem for poor people.
I mean, it’s no wonder people move from uganda to mississipi (or other places in the us) and not rhe other way around.
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang...
My parents had access to cheaper housing, less red-tape and fixed working hours, more job security than my generation, when I was born.
So now insert BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE FLAT PANEL TV AND IPHONE in retarded Sponge Bob chicken meme here.
Clean water depends on how you define "clean" e.g. from https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-water-poll...
> Current EPA data reveals that nearly half of all tap water in the United States contains detectable levels of PFAS chemicals
There's also plenty of contamination violations (apart from maybe Hawaii with only 2) of the water supply.
As far as health care goes, I thought that most people in the USA will refuse to get an ambulance due to the expense. I've also heard of plenty of reports that poor people will not visit a doctor for minor health issues even though they may be early signs of much more serious issues.
> Clean water depends on how you define "clean"
Always, back to arguing about the definitions of words. Let's put it simply. People before 1800 had little idea about clean water. They didn't know what bacteria was. They didn't know about contaminants. They had very poor sanitation practices. They died of cholera regularly.
Probably the greatest advance in health care in history was the introduction of a clean water supply.
So if you want to quibble about what "clean" means, I'll take municipal water, water filters, and boiling any day over what anybody in medieval times drank. If you don't think your water is clean enough, get a water filter from Amazon. They're cheap, and they work.
In the US, emergency rooms cannot turn away anyone. The care delivered there is light years ahead of anything any king got in medieval times.
Amazon filters would not have remotely been a reasonable solution to that problem.
My memory might be faulty but I remember watching "The Lion in Winter" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqz3gkrmBbo) and feeling really happy I was not alive then, even as royalty. (hope that's the movie)
You're somehow succumbing to the fallacy of the edilic life of old.
The same life where you had to have a dozen of kids to overcome infant mortality, and each time a woman gave birth it was like a Russian roulette.
And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years? You didn't had a midlife crisis because you'd be dead by then.
The answer to this riddle lies in the previous paragraph
If you lived to 20 you had a pretty good chance of making it to 70
The facts don't quite line up with your belief. In the middle ages, those reaching 20 had an expected remaining life of around 20 years.
“ At age 21, life expectancy of an aristocrat was an additional 43 years.[40]”
Maybe not quite 70, but pretty close
Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.
False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?
This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.
I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).
(French isn't that bad a language)
* https://thisisversaillesmadame.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-lack...
> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.
But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.
Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.
Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)
s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.
probably more that Louis XIV was not a medieval king.
Some more thoughts for you: since 19xx workers are productive to the scale of 10x (feel free to downplay it to whatever factor over 3x as this is the minimal amount, everyone agrees on except of those that harvest the difference) against those times. But we are still working 8/8/8. Who takes the difference? Of 10x (or 3x)?
Counterpoint: any leaking abandoned oil well. Check out YouTube videos documenting the abandoned oil wells in West Texas, which are dumping industrial volumes of water into abandoned land.
Obviously that isn’t to say there is isn’t room for improvement or that we shouldn’t try, but the current system has worked incredibly well.
According to whose defintion for standard of living?
We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.
Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).
IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.
E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.
But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.
Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.
Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.
What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.
Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.
I don't know if it's selection bias, but the unabashedly positive sci fi of the mid 20th century seems to be more of a blip than a pattern.
True, and I think Iain M. Banks specifically commented on this in interviews and essays. The Culture novels are mostly set outside of The Culture. Star Trek is mostly set on the fringes of or outside of Federation space, but especially during Roddenberry's lifetime, no matter what the crew was dealing with, they were very self-consciously people from a utopia.
I like your analysis of Cyberpunk.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...
I think it may be unclear that net worth and high education are a 1:1 proxy for IQ as many of the highest educated and highest earning individuals may be in that situation not because of raw IQ, but due to the other socioeconomic factors which lead to those conditions. Namely being born into high net worth households and being afforded extensive tutoring and supplemental education relative to their poorer peers. I accept the premise that highly educated households do correlate with high net worth, and the study's TFR findings relative to those points are interesting.
However, there is still a nonlinear relationship between high IQ and those factors, as well as between high IQ parents' offspring IQ levels. Not a few high net worth individuals choose mates based on factors distinct from having a similar or even a high IQ, if a strong correlation between genetic heritability and IQ is to be believed.
The study actually tracked high income with regards to increased TFR in the US and UK, while the correlation to high education was primarily in Sweden. This serves to weaken the connection between IQ and fertility as there are numerous high income situations which are specifically not correlated with high IQ or high education.
So, yes, having children is increasingly expensive especially in America, and wealthier people are more prolific. This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes regarding the Idiocratic potential.
> This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes
No but the proposed mechanism in Idiocracy is clear, and that is not happening. We may still head towards an dumb future, but it's not Idiocracy.
TLDR; I have met quite a few very high net worth individuals, their spouses and offspring. Hundreds of them, actually. I have not been impressed overall with their intellectual capacity for learning important and lifesaving knowledge in preparation for life-changing natural survival conditions which are outside of their daily routine. The same has been true at the middle and lower income distributions under similar circumstances. I am neutral about the future IQ of the population of any of their descendants, poor or rich.. There are many other factors at play.
The long version:
That has not been my admittedly anecdotal experience among high, moderate, and average net work individuals and small to large congregations of those net worth groups in North, Central, South Americas, East Asia, the Pacific Islands, the UK and Northern Europe. I haven't found any specific factors resulting in concentration of above or below average IQ individuals within any of those groups. I have traveled much; been in direct leadership positions among high net worth individuals' on board of directors, and have been in direct contact with significant groups of low net worth populations in both labor and non-profit support roles. I do confess to not having conducted specific research in the IQ to net worth among those groups, so this is just an informed opinion.
So, I will yield on the sole point IFF net worth is assumed to be a strong proxy for high IQ; then we might be headed in a smarter direction in the portions of the general population resulting from those families. I do agree with the distinction that the proposed mechanism in the film Idiocracy is not what is occurring. It does however seem apparent that due to many different mechanisms we may be in for a significantly dumber future, and on that we also agree.
It may be that among the high net worth populations; there may be a factor within the high IQ subgroup that is aware of the complex difficulty for the planet due to excessive and wasteful overconsumption and the aggregate demand that additional population stresses the situation. That subgroup may be choosing to self deselect for reproduction, and that subgroup may be among the highest fraction of IQ. It doesn't appear that this aspect was in the study you referenced, nor in any of that study's sources' research. Did I miss that component?
Sounds like you are vastly overestimating the intelligence of the median.
My statement was that I have been not overall impressed with ANY of the groups. None of the groups was more or less likely on average to not need rescue, resuscitation, or to be refused participation due to non-compliance.
My proxy for IQ is; don't eat the sticky purple berries, don't stand on the edge of the precipice, don't try to drive across the flooded wash, don't camp in the dry streambed, don't try to pet the baby buffalo, check your shoes before you stick your feet in them in the morning, put the fire all the way out - cold, wet, and mixed is out, don't swim away from your dive buddy, don't walk up on the mule from behind, wear a hat, bring extra socks, don't drink the water from the stream, cook the bear meat thoroughly, don't put your hands in dark holes; in the forest or in the reef, clip your toenails well before the long downhill hike, spend a few extra dollars on a pair of slip on ice crampons for your tennis shoes - even though the instructions were to bring two pairs of hiking boots - wet and dry. Pack light, wear a small bell to warn off the bears, pick up your garbage - if you brought it into the wilderness you must take it back out with you,... again, DON'T STAND ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, I don't care how you are going to look in the selfie, and neither will anyone else if the phone and you fall 300 feet. And, no your emotional support min-pin-poo cannot go on the week long rafting trip with us.
Does this sound like I'm over-estimating anyone's baseline IQ? You wouldn't believe the raw stupid that happens all the time. It's just not demonstrably correlated with bank balance or jewelry selection.
1. never walk behind a car with its backup lights on
2. when climbing a ladder, only move one limb at a time
3. never walk in front of a car that has its engine running
4. wait for traffic to stop before setting a foot in the crosswalk
5. floss every day
6. keep your shoes on when taking off or landing in an airplane (can't run barefoot over burning, torn metal)
7. if you smell smoke in a building, exit immediately. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200
8. take the stairs once in a while in your workplace, as then you'll know where they are when the building fills with smoke
9. wear a life jacket on a small boat, even if you look like a dork. The water ski vests are less klunky
I have been in the position of holding pre- and post excursion knowledge and readiness assessment sessions, which contents and protocols were rigorously designed by Principle Investigators, with external audit and multi-year review. In one location there was over a hundred years of applied practice. (Back-county mule operations since 1904 with an enviable safety record and over twenty riders on every day where not cancelled due to adverse weather or public health risks)
My personal observations include covering very specific potential hazards for backcountry, open ocean, agriculture and industrial workplace risks. They also include direct and indirect observations in the domains of corporate, personal risk, and global threat assessment, up to and including prevention of and response to K&R by state and private actors.
So, yes, I cherry picked for the comical and obvious. That list is not comprehensive or statistically balanced whole set. I do admit to confirmation bias, I'm positive that was at the lead of this flow as " admittedly anecdotal observations." And you're right, that is not what Idiocracy was representing. That is still clear and we still do agree.
My only point is that my admittedly biased observations fail to find high net worth as a positive correlation with above average IQ. I also "posit" that although the high net worth shows recent increases in TFR is substantial in some places (the US and UK from your source), there is still a high rate observable in the bottom 25% of net worth populations as seen due to earlier time of first partition and a slightly higher number of offspring per mother, and that the difference in resultant IQ in the whole population due to these effects may be well within any statistical margin for error.
So, we still agree, this is not the mechanism either causing nor preventing an Idiocracy defined change in the outcomes for the US population. There appear to be other, less (epi)genetic, reasons for the demonstrable decline in outcomes for the median populations.
~ BTW, big fan of the work in alternative bit representations.
As far as Judge Dredd, my personal beef is that Megacity One's "dystopian" density with 800 million inhabitants from Boston to Washington DC barely ranks in terms of density in today's top 100 cities.
As far as Idiocracy, I believe that if the networks had played that and it was promoted on YouTube for free the night before the most recent presidential election, it might have gone differently.
What else would you add to the list?
As much as I love Star Trek, The Culture feels more mature and nuanced.
Star Trek has always had a sort of hammy or "of course we're jumping sharks, that's kind of our thing, but when we do it's not really jumping a shark" tone to it. Especially the action sequences.
I've oft criticized novels and movies that are too thin a shell on philosophical givings forth, but in the case of Star Trek (mainly Enterprise and Deep Space Nine for me, but I think the original has the same appeal for many) it's like I can't get enough.
It's the thinking that appeals to me, and the inspection of the human experience in a manner that feels familiar to me.
it's pretty shitty for anyone outside the singular theocratic military enclave that hordes all the water and decapitates scientists.
thats the first sample i ever read that got me to read a book. not particularly great writing, but clean and propulsive and i hope the mystery pays off.
I think you're overestimating the sci-fi cannon indoctrination of the general public, or even tech people, and underestimating their reaction to current events. As things lie at the moment, Big AI is served as a SaaS that can be manipulated at any time by obscenely rich and powerful individuals with questionable decision making skills, some of who reside in the White House and some of who have called empathy a "fundamental weakness". One would be hard pressed to dispute these characters rival the caricatures present in some dystopian sci-fi as it is, they themselves even seem to enjoy the irony. Yes, I also cringe at the alarmist nature of these sentences, but we are at a point where we are most likely to dismiss things right in front of our eyes just by how outlandish it all sounds.
The public's willful transfer of their most intimate personal information to these entities, and once given almost impossible to remove, would make any surveillance state salivate. You have only to look at who holds the keys to this estate.
And to Patrick Steward's opinions on it...
> According to Ronny Cox, Patrick Stewart hated Livingston's presence in the ready room, and constantly petitioned the producers to remove the fish. Stewart, a strong animal rights advocate who opposes many forms of pet ownership, felt that using a captive animal in an ornamental display was "immoral" and inconsistent with TNG's core theme of exploring the inherent dignity of different species across the galaxy. Cox, who called Stewart's point "well taken", stated that Livingston's temporary removal in "Chain of Command" was thus a "sort of a bone they threw to Patrick".
It's pretty much impossible to have that. You'll always have the author's worldview shaping the fictional world.
The common cold thing is a direct reference to what happened to European explorers when they first encountered syphilis in North America.
I don't expect, and don't think most people expect, for authors to not have their storytelling shaped by their views. That would be impossible. But it's not impossible for them to refrain from derailing the story just to lecture the audience on morality.
Most of the characters in Star Trek are members of the military. So of course, there's a chain of command and orders have to be followed.
The Federation of Planets wasn't a dictatorship.
And they aren't even really members of the military. Starfleet is canonically not a military force, its purpose is exploration, science and diplomacy. It just happens to have a military chain of command, and ships with military designations bristling with planet-cracking weapons. That get into battles and fight wars a lot.
No, he wasn’t. He was a B-17 pilot in the Army Air Force.
That bunch had the highest mortality rates of any unit (except maybe some of the Japanese units, who were basically suicidal), during the war.
The 8th Air Force suffered heavy losses over Europe but I don't believe Roddenberry served there. He was in the Pacific and after his B-17 crash stayed in the mainland US.
I think it's more accurate to say that the Federation of Planets wasn't militaristic, not that they didn't have a military or that Starfleet wasn't their naval equivalent.
And yeah, it's not conventional military fiction which usually revolves around actions during a war. But it's still military fiction in the sense that nearly all the characters are in the military and doing missions for the military. It just happens that the government running that military is at peace most of the time and uses its military for peaceful purposes when it's not actively at war.
I dunno, I just can't see it that way. Starfleet has been involved in way too much combat to not be a military. But then again, I don't really remember seeing a Federation equivalent of marines, which a real navy would have...
That's why Orville is my favorite of the newer ST series. It has the high moral standards of the original series, but with characters who are far from perfect, who make mistakes, and who are sometimes even a little weird.
I don't think TNG is as simple as you make it out to be. All of the characters have serious flaws. Picard does make mistakes (including some very serious, consequential ones). Characters do get angry, jealous, etc. and do bad things. Sometimes their friends help them overcome it, other times they figure it out on their own, etc. It's episodic so it usually goes back to the status quo, and that can feel kind of trite through today's lens. But it's exactly that ability to solve problems (technical, emotional, organizational, etc.) as a team that's so compelling for many of us.
In other words it only works because it ignores basic human nature. Which is one reason why Star Trek's utopia isn't really tractable. The others being the technology that completely ignores the laws of physics. Free energy, warp drives and magic boxes that grant wishes.
If people want a science fiction "utopia" I'd say look at Babylon 5. It certainly has its flaws but its Utopia isn't real (because they never are,) it's an ideal that people are always struggling towards.
Picard says at one point "A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions."
At another point he says "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
To be fair, capitalism is mainly a system of contracts and laws that allow for certain kinds of ownership structures and investments. It does not necessarily have to be done in a way that is obsessed with the accumulation of things or wealth. So those quotes are also not really anti-capitalist. But the quotes are, at least, not friendly to today's common notion of what 'capitalism' means.
I find it somewhat plausible that this could actually lead to something like the show depicts. There is precedent for sweeping moral changes in human history. For example, large parts of the world now find practices like torture, slavery, and collective punishment to be repugnant. Those practices still happen to some extent, but they're not viewed as being just normal like they generally were seen back in the day.
Another example is how Europe and Japan after WW2 genuinely became more pacifistic. Not just as a pretense to fool outsiders, but as a genuine change in how the inhabitants see things.
Ursula K. LeGuin
That is an oversimplification and simply not true at face value.
'The original Star Trek', even less so! Very morally questionable at times. In TNG, you are watching the flagship of Starfleet, it's the most coveted starship. The crew are the best they have to offer. It's obvious that they would be the most professional. Even then, they make mistakes, often serious. Sacrificing themselves - if needed - is part of their job too.
Riker does spend a long time on the Enterprise, even after being offered command a few times. He does eventually move on.
Maybe they are a little too perfect, but I'd argue that's for the best. The moments where there's friction within the crew are much more memorable because of it.
Thats in contrast with some newer Trek which have more conflicts than Stargate Universe characters and would be considered way too unprofessional even if they were Lower Decks characters.
Also he is not free of ambition, he wants Picard's job. He isn't willing to do anything negative to get it, but part of that is that Picard constantly proves himself the better captain. Picard isn't captain because he joined Starfleet first or because he has better connections, he is genuinely better at the job and non-toxic ambitious people can respect that. Riker still has more to learn from Picard that will make him a better captain later.
So I think a lot of the people staying in their positions make sense, the primary characters are as high as they can go (for their specialty) without transitioning into a role that stays on a planet.
DS9 did good in adding a bunch of non star fleet characters who had maybe more realistic motivations. Voyager tried but immediately just turned them all into a big happy family just like TNG.
Sir, I believe you have not watched it.
IIRC Riker has turned down multiple offers to become a captain of his own ship, to stay as Picard's #2. This would've never happened in real life, he would've been gone after Season 2 at the latest.
Every now and then, we see the limits of those foundations. In "Tapestry," we learn that if Picard hadn't been an aggressive, obnoxious, even womanizing young f cadet and junior officer, he'd never have taken the risks necessary to take command. In "Chain of Command," we learn that he in fact had been broken under torture such that he could actually see five lights when there were only four; his shouting "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS" at the Cardassian torturer was as much an act of stubborn defiance as it was cleaving to moral foundations. Occasionally, Picard uses blackmail and veiled threads to get what he wants, such as implying in "Unification" that he may give his "gratitude" to the Duras family and enemies of Chancellor Gowron if his request for a cloaked Bird of Prey isn't dealt with expeditiously (this was after waiting like three days).
Picard has strong moral foundations because of his experience, which is why he has been promoted to run the Federation flagship. He takes enough risks with enough bravado to accomplish the Federation's political and scientific goals and to serve Starfleet's military goals.
One episode that sticks out to me as a good management episode is "Hollow Pursuits." Barclay is annoying everyone on the crew, particularly Geordi and Will to the point where they want him transferred off the Enterprise. Wesley Crusher has even begun calling Reg "broccoli" behind his back. Picard wants none of that. The Enterprise is a team in which members must be held accountable, but that does not mean simply jettisoning underperformers when they fail to deliver. He challenges his direct reports to make every effort to improve Barclay's performance. He also puts the kibosh on the rude nickname, though accidentally uses it to Barclay's face later in the episode. It's fiction, but everyone behaves in very believable human ways, and the situation is absolutely relevant to our lives today.
Basically the reverse of mirror universe meme.
Roddenberry was after someone younger. There’s even a casting show reel of Stewart wearing a toupee and speaking with a very bad French accent.
Lord have mercy
Picard viewed the power of leadership as, foremost, a responsibility. Every action was careful, deliberate, and well advised. Some later Trek shows (e.g. Voyager) turned captains into geniuses who knew more about everything than all of their underlings. Picard was not an expert in most things and needed his staff to advise him. Once he knew the options and consequences, he shouldered the responsibility of the outcomes, but as a leader of a crew, not a genius with compatible lackeys and minions around him. It was a realistic take on leadership that simply doesn't appear often in television or movies.
Stewart, of course, was not Picard. It's too easy to conflate actors with their roles. However, actors do often help shape their characters, and Stewart's ability to give a thoughtful, diplomatic, and prudent character such incredible power and presence is likely what made Picard possible. The showrunners didn't need to strap a phaser to his thigh and drop him into every away mission to make him compelling because of what Stewart was able to accomplish as an actor sitting behind a desk.
Not everything. Picard was command track his whole career, I think the same was true for Sisko. But Janeway started as a science officer before switching to command, and Archer was a test pilot. Their experience in those fields would sometimes be useful. It's similar to how Picard's interest in archeology was sometimes useful.
I imagine they'd also conclude Picard is a loser.
The main issue was his PTSD.
I don't like the premise that Picard, alone, out of the entirety of the Federation, is the only thing standing between the Borg and the assimilation of Earth. It seems to go against the collectivist identity of the franchise. It's fiction, they could have written it another way, they just didn't because Picard is the star of the show.
And the PTSD isn't even the issue, he was compromised by alien mind control implants from a species far stronger than the Federation, with hostile intent. Implants the Federation couldn't even remove. Implants which have the property of aggressive assimilation. A single nanoprobe is a potential extinction level event.
Humans lose their security clearance by smoking a joint. Being puppeted and mind-controlled by eldritch alien gods into a system-wide genocide should at least lead to a demotion.
And everyone forgets Geordi was tortured and mind-controlled by the Romulans. In anything close to reality he'd never be allowed on a starship again, and Picard would spend the rest of his life quarantined inside a force field getting scanned like that guy in the X Files with the dark matter shadow.
You could say that about so many characters. Capitan Pike lived an entire lifetime in his head, and then just woke up as a 50 year old Capitan again, and went back to work.
Chief O'brian went to a brutal prison for 20 years, in his head of course, but it was real to him.
Both of them would be completely different people after these experiences.
Really high quality writing.
The episode is classic sitcom "wrong conclusion escalates out of hands" so I highly recommend watching it in full instead of the clips but if it's not on your streaming platform, Stewart's scenes are cut together in
I see him in this episode:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xA6QbwPGlgk
I've read both Suetonius and Tacitus on the subject of Augustus and the Julio-Claudian dynasty:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio-Claudian_dynasty
Those who lack this family knowledge would want to start with the first episode of I, Claudius.
I'd also recommend the recent Domina for Livia's perspective.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlwzDYw6zp2D6DxLR8zGz1i_7...
True as always.
Ever since I watched it, I half jokingly suggested that it should be a mandatory watch before you're allowed to join the workforce.
Don't forget he voiced the Poop emoji in that movie. If only we could tell his younger, Shakespeare-acting, self.
Extrapolate from that and it becomes a easier to make the right decisions.
Need more starfleet academy.
I have the same attitude with House MD lead actor Hugh Laurie: the actor played the role greatly, but the actor was not the fictional person of the role.
Not to say they're comparable - both characters and actors are much loved.
Patrick Stewart modeled how a good man should behave and you could tell that he acted from a place of wisdom he understood through experience.
Wonderful contribution to humanity and truly saddened by this loss.
Has it made you disappointed of how people are managed in real life?
https://youtu.be/tSukMQHQLIs?t=172
To be an actor of that level, yet still have so much fun in American Dad! is so cool. He will be greatly missed.
https://www.audible.com/pd/Patrick-Stewart-Performs-the-Comp...
Incidentally, this is one of those times when the comment section of YouTube becomes the most wholesome place on the net.
Nothing, and I do mean nothing, touches McKellan's 1995 Richard III in my eyes, for Shakespeare in cinema. Although calling it Richard III is a bit of a stretch. How about Richard III: The Greatest Hits?
Not in the same category of greatness, but apropos of this thread, I also saw Patrick Stewart playing Othello (in a reverse-race production), and that’s when I realized how good an actor he actually was.
Everyone has to watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
Ran?
Good startup advice. Good life advice.
You're the captain sir, you're entitled
Hmmm, I'm entitied to ramble on about something everyone knows
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise
Make make make make it so
o7
Good life advice as well
- Patrick Stewart breaking character
It's painfully hard to compare that to the real world.
But at least, sci fi viewers can graduate to more serious shows with increasingly complex narratives (B5, bsg, I hear good things about the expense, etc...) then discover the really dystopian shit when they realize they live in it - or decide to become tech entrepreneur to get rich building the dystopia themselves.
But you can't blame the storytellers from trying to tell a better story than the news...
May the kid inside you, who once believed in the "good folks", rear up his metaphorical heads once in a while.
It's like you never read the quote, and if you read it you did not understand it.
We live our lives to the best of our abilities and sometimes things go very bad for us. What is unreal about it?
Let me guess: you definitely don't consider the possibility of trying your best to be realistic.
So many great lessons I have heard from him, truly a life model.
Anyway, it's a sad day, but I do appreciate that both his work and the influence he's had on people like me live on.
My condolences.
I've got fond memories of visiting in the summers as a kid and watching TNG episodes he'd taped on VHS.
I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.
To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
I agree and although the prestige TV era has produced some wonderful TV it’s also been overflowing with antiheroes. I hope todays younger generation gets to see another character like Picard.
Some of the best television ever made if you ask me.
I think I’m at that point the characters and their actors feel like dear friends I have grown up with. Sir Patrick will be missed. I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye to Picard on his own series.
To me, I’ll repeat to myself he was just recruited into Section 31.
R.I.P. Captain.
Shakespeare effectively changed his life, and it's incredible to think that you could map everything he did and his success to his love of the bard.
If I had to take a lesson from his life, it's to have something you love, even if it isn't trendy (especially if it isn't) because most good things flow from that.
Godspeed, captain.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mfw63
(not sure if it is regionally restricted) also:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZsy4Rj7uAiT2NL8RIgH0...
I remember my father saying how strange it was to meet HIS father for the first time when he was 5 - suddenly there was this stranger in the house.
My grandfather fortunately wasn't violent, or a drinker, but I never saw the same closeness between him and dad that I did between my mother and her parents.
His performance (as well as how the character was written) still today illustrate what I view as an ideal male archetype. Fair, honest, in control of his emotions yet passionate. Thank you for the gift your performance has given me Mr Stewart. My life would likely have turned out a lot worse without a solid example of that a good man could be
I hope our current environment is one that can elevate someone of similar talents to an equivalent stature, but I worry our media is not up to the task.
When I think of our civilization, the Ressikan Flute often comes to mind.
Pour one out. https://picard.ytmnd.com/
What an episode, and what a beautiful, terrible, gift!
It comes down to one single message. It is like my instructor once told me, on how to do classes: You can put maybe one to two messages into the minds of people in an hour of a class. So you can dance around, do the fanciest of shit, jump around, pull down a rocket, and all that you can probably get across is just one message, for them to remember.
So it comes down to a small message, and that is all that there is to it. The resolution where the whole village comes together shows just that: This was just a message.
It's cutting everything down to the bare truth. And the truth is a beautiful thing, the most terrible thing there is.
I think it might be a coincidence, that the ressikan flute kinda sounds to me like the Pierian Spring[1] even 'though it's far from it, isn't it?
And what's odd to me, now, too, is that I want to watch that TNG episode[2] again, not just to remember, not to get the 'rememberries', but what can I learn from it still? -- it's like a beautiful solution, you keep on looking at it. A masterpiece.
Thank you for indulging in the piece.
[1] Pierian Spring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierian_Spring [2] TNG episode: The Inner Light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_%28Star_Trek:_...
He was host at an academy awards event for technical achievement a few years back. Usually they send some random actor who jokes about how nerdy everything is. Having Patrick Stewart there was very popular he was 'one of us' even though he said himself he knew very little about tech. Had a chance to talk to him a bit afterwards and got to tell him how well appreciated he was by that audience. Gracious and funny, exactly how you might imagine he would be.
A sad loss.
This was a person who from a relatively young age looked old, but more importantly behaved with a sort of dignity and thoughtfulness that projected way beyond his years. I'm not really sure how to assimilate the news because on the one hand obviously this was going to be happening sooner or later. He has always just felt old. But on the other, he's felt old for my whole life, so why shouldn't he just continue on that way without bound.
If you love what you do, you do it well because you’re doing it for yourself.
Lewy body dementia was what Robin Williams had but they didn't discover until after his death and I guess he was misdiagnosed during life.
https://lewybodyresourcecenter.org/robin-williams-lewy-body-...
That page talks about what to do if somebody with LBD is thinking about suicide. After seeing what that disease does, interfering with those plans seems inhumane to me.
I watched a parent die of LBD.
After that experience, I'd also be inclined to go with "let them" as the most-correct solution to that particular dilemma.
And to think he was filming Picard just a few years ago.
Rest in peace captain :(
It’s also very trying for family and caregivers, as the person regresses until they’re as helpless as an infant trapped in an adult body.
Shatner is doing remarkably well for 95 years of age, I saw him performing with a band at a rock show just this summer!
We may not live long enough to know who wins.
It's really enticing to think that there's some nice controllable reason why some people live longer (assuming you don't smoke, do drugs to excess, etc.) but really it's mostly genetics and chance.
These seem within one’s agency.
I visited a cardiologist today, who has seen thousands of patients. He remarked that two big factors in staving off heart disease are staying slim and long term aerobic exercise.
Those two factors are under one's control.
(Nobody said it was easy, though.)
For example, I seriously doubt that lung cancer causes smoking.
Many of the studies that associate lifestyles with health outcomes have this issue with the causative arrow: disease tends not to enable activity.
Oh, any links?
"Seeking Major Tom" might be of interest to you.
Google sez:
William Shatner’s heavy metal album, titled What the F Is Heavy Metal?, does not have an exact release date yet, though it is tentatively scheduled for winter 2026 or 2027 via Cleopatra Records.
Album Details
• Title: What the F Is Heavy Metal? • Band Name: The *uckers • Expected Release: Winter 2026 / 2027 • Label: Cleopatra Records • Format & Content: Features a mix of original tracks and heavy metal/hard rock covers (including Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne). • Notable Collaborators: Rob Halford, Tony Iommi, Zakk Wylde, Brian May, and Dave Lombardo, among dozens of other rock and metal musicians. • Live Debut: Shatner and his band debuted songs from the project live at Riot Fest in Chicago in September 2026. • William Shatner on Instagram Ladies, gentlemen, SWs fans… I have explored space. I have explored time. Now… I explore distortion. Yes. You read that correctl... • USA Today William Shatner debuts heavy metal band at age 95 At 95, William Shatner is starting a heavy metal band Greta Cross USA TODAY Sept. 17, 2026Updated Sept. 18, 2026, 9:14 a.m. ET Wil...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFwiLa3TYwg&list=PL1T3N4t2kU...
> Sunspots: LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Patrick Stewart.
uNF!
Star Trek TNG + Captain Picard acted as a male role model, a different moral philosophy, and a celebration of nerdy people as competent and important in the world
Edit: Oh man, I can't believe I'm crying at work over an actor.
Of course, he could probably make reading the tax code sound pretty interesting.
It might of been Im not sure, not the case? But perhaps against a white wall it was clear we were the only ones standing for the performance and in turn it felt he was performing for us. It just felt like that.
I ofcourse have no idea if he was just looking in our general direction but it weirdly felt like it and I thought it was kind.
Ive never had such a "he was doing it for us" self centered view of any other performance Ive ever been to, but I always remembered this, and like to believe it was true.
The play itself was about him being an old dying forgetful man. It was so convincing I somehow left thinking that surely he was but ofcourse it was just excellent acting.
The NY times editorial board seems to have become even more performatively egalitarian. Stewart (like Ian McKellen) was (IMNSHO quite rightly) recognized with a knighthood for his services to drama. They call him "Mr Stewart" - technically there is no such person.
The correct way to refer to him is Sir Patrick Stewart, or Sir Patrick thereafter. Ditto McKellen.
And yes, the US doesn't issue its own knighthoods, peerages &c - but the US constitution is fairly clear on what is disallowed - but that doesn't affect a non-US Citizen
The foreign emoluments clause [0] applies to "holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them" and the section also prevents the US from creating any title of Nobility, but editorial courtesy usually grants foreigners their titles [1]
It's perfectly correct to ignore honorary knighthoods - like that conferred on Bill Gates. It's discourteous to ignore them for those rightly conferred, and inconsistent. [2]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C8-1/...
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1929/10/27/archives/the-unshackling-...
Yes, Mr Stewart existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
I feel like a few years ago, there would have been no question about adding a black banner. Lately, Hacker News hasn't felt very "hacker-y". Corporate and legal concerns frequently outweigh freedom, talent, and curiosity in discussions.
Really enjoyed his stuff. Always enjoyed that he could do both the grand and the silly with equal aplomb.
You might also have missed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA
I met Patrick when we organized a Star Trek convention. He was even kinder and gentler in person than in his role as Picard.
(I looked up the original script, it’s “Kiazi’s children. Their faces wet.” But I’m gratified that you knew what I meant.)
Now cheer up me lads, t’is better to have loved and lost, than never have loved at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZn6c4CeJCc [The one on Pogo’s channel doesn’t include clips of Stewart, just his voice. This is a reupload of the original]
It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.
ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.
I thought it was a lovely version of an ancient idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)#%22The_Butterf...
But he start losing his hair at 17 and really struggled with it. A turning point came when a friend (a Hungarian judo black belt) and his wife wrestled him down and physically cut off his toupée with scissors.
His agent even had him do the Star Trek audition in a wig, but luckily the crew had better ideas.
https://www.facebook.com/teamcoco/videos/sir-patrick-stewart...
William Shatner was just on earlier this month, incredible he's still going strong at 95.
I was more of a Shatner movies Star Trek kid but I remember watching The Next Generation when it first came out and liked it. RIP to a legend.
So it's the passing of real talent without replacement. I think we live in a pretty dead culture now. Just my opinion of course.
But if you dont know any better I guess its fine
From 2000s, culture has been more diluted across the medias.
So - when TNG began airing, I would have been about 15 - right squarely in the perfect formative timeframe - it was "ours" more so than the original series ever was.
100% agree. I watched all the originals too, and enjoyed them, but they absolutely felt like an earlier generation, building on a culture that did not match how I felt. As you say, TNG was all ours. <fist bump>
I’ll be re-watching The Inner Light in his honor tonight.
1. The Drumhead
2. Tapestry
3. The Inner Light
4. Chain of Command
5. Darmok
I know a lot of people would put "Family" on that list, I just can't say I enjoy that one too much. I also like his dialogue in "Yesterday's Enterprise", but I wouldn't call it a Picard-focused one.
Darmok and Jalad, aura maxxing
Shaka, when the six seven
One of the things I particularly liked is that he admits to the mistakes he made, and the times when he wasn't the human being he strived to be.
Stewart was rather like Alan Rickman's Galaxy Quest character in real life: when he first joined the TNG cast he was rather arrogant and thought he was demeaning himself, a Shakespearean actor slumming it as a spaceman on terrestrial American television. As a consequence, the rest of the season one cast started pranking him pretty hard on set. In a textbook example of what the British mean when they say they're "taking the piss out of someone", Stewart was humbled and developed a good sense of humor about it all, and would go on to embrace Star Trek and the Picard role, and not take himself so seriously in general. Which to me, is worthy of the absolute highest respect for a performer. He brought the same professionalism and enthusiasm to Picard, Charles Xavier, and Yaotl from TMNT (2007) that he did to any of his Shakespearean roles.
This must have gone largely unnoticed... all but 35 comments here on HN spread out of 11 articles reporting on his passing. Sad.
I can still hear the voice: "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."
I saw him performing this show when it was revived for a run at the Old Vic in London in 2005 and it was even better seeing it in person. I'm so glad I was able to do that, it's still memorable more than 20 years later.
He was a wonderful actor and by all accounts a wonderful person.
He really was able to translate the literature to acting relevance for me (as a lit person)
~ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Generations
Thank you, Patrick. Rest in peace.
PS. Something that's really sad (at least here in my Scandinavian country) is that it's currently completely impossible to stream TNG anywhere at all. No idea of the situation is the same elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world. Thank goodness I found the complete DVD collection in a thrift store earlier this year. But the saddest thing of all is that the current generation of young people miss out on experiencing the feeling of hope that Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the TNG crew gave us through their story. And miss out an important vision showing the possibility of a positive and bright version of the future, where humankind has grown into a mature and competent version of itself. Especially now in these dark and uncertain times.
All because of Paramount's unfortunate corporate choices (at least here in Europe).
Absolutely.
> I would like to understand though since Stewart was filming up until this year? What was the time frame like, was it a more sudden onset or was he able to manage somewhat while continuing to film and work?
AFAIK, his last role as a film actor was in Doomsday, which comes out in December 2026 but filmed late last year. The timeline does seem incredibly quick for a natural death from Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia if he wasn't somehow secretly and very effectively hiding it for the past near-decade.
I suspect (but obviously don't know) that he may have checked out on his own terms rather than literally dying due to the disease progression. I understand why people don't like to talk about it, especially given legal issues faced by anyone who may have assisted in many jurisdictions.
In California it can be legal to assist but technically only if a doctor decides you will live less than 6 months, which IMO is an awfully narrow requirement. I wish people could be more open about it (and that the laws weren't so stupid).
In any case, shocking and sad news. I never would have guessed we'd lose Patrick Stewart before William Shatner. 86 isn't exactly young or anything, but he seemed to still be incredibly vibrant in very recent productions.
ETA: Steward also voiced Picard in robot chicken's "night crew": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8
Now it's just Sulu and Captain Kirk....
Though he was most known for playing Captain Picard and Professor Xavier, I will always remember him for his portrayal of King Leondegrance in Excalibur.
As a kid watching him kick major ass in the Siege of Cahir scene led to many battles between my brothers and I, dualing each other with mop and broom sticks. We watched Excalibur and handful of other films over and over again via VHS tapes, ha ha ha.
RIP Mr. Stewart. Thanks for the memories and creating an amazing body of work I will continue enjoying until I join you in death.
I didn't bother him, as much as we both wanted to (he looked busy), what struck me was how casual Sir Patrick Stewart was in his faded sweatshirt talking to some awestruck kid and his mom.
Never too late to do the other thing. Keep going.
My mom was a huge Trekkie and it's something I had some ambient exposure to in childhood but didn't really get into until adulthood when I started watching TNG as a comfort show after her cancer diagnosis, and we'd sometimes watch episodes together where it became apparent she had a pretty good memory of all the episodes and knew which ones she liked and didn't like. I wish I'd written down more of her specific favorites, but was pretty stricken with grief at the time. That said, the show meant a lot to me and helped me find comfort and go to sleep at times when I really needed it. His portrayal of Picard managed to strike a refreshing balance of sensitive and inspiring. I also really respect his commitment to Shakespeare and theater, and how it influenced his acting style even in non-theater roles (of course Star Trek was also famous for having its captains be Shakespearean, but he nailed the assignment).
I never knew that. I wonder if, in the "I, Borg" episode, they chose the name "Hugh" as a reference to this when coming up with a name for the newly individuated Borg. It's a stretch, but I'd like to think so.
RIP Mr. Stewart.
Hewes is a distinguished and very American name in its surname form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewes
I did notice that in the latest Wolverine he seemed to be doing not so well with his physical status, looking quite frail and his voice was also no longer strong as it used to be (that was in Logan 2017, so already 10 years ago). Dementia is kind of eating away at the neurons.
No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another, but yesterday we lost someone very important.
(Highly recommended.)
I didn't know anything about him other than his work, which is perhaps as fine an epitaph as any man could have.
Let me go and fix that.
Patrick Stewart's role in TNG was iconic and left a big mark on me as a kid. I felt like TNG really envisioned a society that would be utopic, and I was always inspired by his code, his faith in himself and his morals, and his deep curiosity and compassion for the people around him and the strangers out in the universe.
The world of TNG still lives in a tiny corner of my brain, as a place of both comfort and inspiration.
The cast also seem like a group of genuinely nice people. It's so nice to see the real world friendship there. A group of people I'd want to be friends with. Sir Patrick Stewart was the perfect Captain Picard. Someone many of us looked up to even though he's a fictional character.
Never have I seen such presence and charisma squeezed into so short a scene.
Sir Patrick, my captain, you will be sorely missed.
Closest i've seen is The Orville which I found best described as McFarlen using his money to pay for his Larping (in a good way), but was pretty much just copy pasting.
It was such a fascinating show and handled issues with a tact and nuance you're lucky to get today.
Great breakdown of every Q episode, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTze8n62M3M
Godspeed mon capitaine
I was fortunate enough to get to chat with him and some of the lead crew of ST:TNG while at a local convention. He was exactly how I imagined he would be in "real life", such a clever and well-spoken class act. RIP <3
A little off topic, but are there any modern utopian/positive sci-fi shows still being released? I feel like ST:TNG was the last of its kind?
Vivaldi's poetry ... left something to be desired (think Vogon), but Patrick Stewart made it noble.
One small quote of his character from TNG that got deeply burned into my brain : "time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and allows us to cherish every moment because they will never come again"
Sir Patrick Stewart inspired me since my childhood. Thank you captain!
A wonderful human being with charisma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWdUlFCESeY
I grew up with this guy. I will always remember him, his work. I will always smile when he comes on screen. And I will always keep using his facepalm meme with a smirk. Thanks Patrick Stewart.
RIP
Watching Star Trek TNG episodes when they first aired in the late 80s had a powerful effect on my imagination as a child. It would not, and could not, have been the same show without Patrick Stewart. RIP.
Google “Dear Satan”.
I also really liked him in a Christmas Carrol (1999). I thought he played the role really well.
— Picard in TNG episode Night Terrors
Extremely sad day for the geeks in us. Good bye professor X.
RIP Sir Patrick
The original incarnation of Android's voice assistant was codenamed after her.
Wow, what a loss. So many iconic characters, so much inspirational
It was inevitable, though you always hope for an exception. I don't think I've ever seen any work of his I didn't deeply appreciate.
Angela Collier did an extensive bit[0] on that. Although she left out several of the canon-breaking details in the series.
That said, Patrick Stewart nailed it. Every. Single. Time. Despite the awful plotting/writing of Star Trek: Picard.
Bringing Q back was dumb. Time travel is dumb. The Borg as a metaphor of trauma and addiction is brilliant, but like every other brilliant idea it had no follow through and didn't take chances.
I didn't hate Picard as much as many other people who just wanted a Captain and a Ship and a Planet of the Week. I like it when franchises try to break out of their molds and explore new things. It just wound up being so disappointing in the end.
echo $'\U1F596'
Quite a sad day.
RIP a legend
RIP
I often think of Picard looking down at us, through a force field in the Enterprise D, sees our wars, our inequalities and slowly shakes his head: "Savages". In his role as Picard he was a bit of a teacher to me.
more of us men should be like him and who he was and what he stood for
I've found no evidence of this ... can you confirm?
Thank you.
I think all of us growing up in the 80s and 90s just don't realize that we probably lived in the most awesome time period in human history. Everything was just peak. Vibes, music, film, art, travel.
Now the OGs all die... and I look around and see nothing and no one to step into their humongous foot steps...
Wait, was that a Picard quote, in fact? It has the right tone. (Nope, looks like it's from Age of Ultron.)
I bet Shatner, somehow, will get it.
I'll never forget this line, and what it means. I think of it often.
So many thoughts and memories...here are some:
First time watching Star Trek in Tunisia in the early 1990s. It was a very hot summer, and the air-conditioned basement of my friend’s folks contained every episode of The Original Series and The Next Generation, and a computer with games like Rogue, as well as American junk food like sour cream and onion chips and cherry-vanilla ice cream, so we spent quite a bit of time there :D
Star Trek TNG’s optimistic view of humanity overcoming its primitive base instincts.
Videogames and VR as nascent versions of the holodeck.
Facepalm, [PicardTips](https://mastodon.social/@PicardTips@mas.to), etc.
Quotes, conversations, monologues, including [Data’s about death](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik8i-Ev__s4), with the butterfly.
Background [hum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYTthcDCTtE&t=59s) of the Enterprise, Ressikan Flute in [The Inner Light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_Th...).
“[More familiarity with our own mythology may help us relate to theirs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZeB4gFMQA).”
Jokingly speaking in stentorian English, like a captain, while riding on a boat. A young person asks me where I learned to speak like that. Answer: Watching Jean-Luc Picard in TNG, and reading some VVilliam The Spear Shaker!
https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/download/
> “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
> “Seize the time... Live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”
Goodbye, Captain.
Thank you.
<3
Instead I’ll go find my old DVD box set of “I, Claudius” where he had a memorable role too.
instead: https://archive.is/sTC3D
We should remember Picard's defiance, especially now.
Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of people around me who could show me what a good person was supposed to be like. So I found those elsewhere. In games and in Star Trek. To me, Jean-Luc Picard was probably the closest thing I had to a proper father figure.
He embodied everything I felt a person should aspire to be. Intelligent, thoughtful, but also compassionate, principled.
He taught me that you could exercise authority without cruelty, resolve conflict without violence, understood that strength wasn’t about dominating others, but about having the wisdom and restraint not to.
He taught me that you could be rational without being cold, that you could lead without humiliating others, and that kindness and competence weren’t opposites.
These weren’t just qualities I simply admired in a fictional character in a silly science fiction show. They were things I tried to build into myself. They were what I had.
I’m having a really hard time with this. I never know how to articulate how this feels, because I grew up with these role models and most of the people I know haven’t and it feels awkward.
You were a positive force. RIP
He wasn't an engineer or scientist but I'd wager a majority of the readership of HN, at least those over 35 or so, grew up inspired by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard.
non-x Alt text:
We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all. We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.
A son of Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he travelled from the Royal Shakespeare Company to an equally acclaimed career spanning six decades on Broadway, the silver screen and television.
His sonorous voice and singular talent will forever be synonymous with indelible performances in every genre. He explored the human condition in all its poetic complexity and brought hope not only to the far reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but into science fiction's most iconic final frontier aboard the Starship Enterprise.
His professional accomplishments were humbly matched by his philanthropy and activism on behalf of human rights, survivors of domestic violence, global refugees, veterans' mental health services, and animal welfare, particularly his cherished foster pitties. He was a Knight, Chancellor, motor sport enthusiast, and lifelong Huddersfield Football fan. He will be remembered for the dignity, compassion and humanity he brought to every role - in his art and life.
"Like me, Jean-Luc has lived an unusual life that has taken him far beyond the bounds of normal human experience. But he is also someone who has remained true to his earthbound roots, for they are what gave him his identity. In the end, he feels the call of home, as do I." - Patrick Stewart, Making It So: A Memoir
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund https://alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources https://alzfdn.org/donate/
Rest in peace, Picard.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
your wording is rude. when you post a comment reply to someone online, ask yourself if you would choose the words F2F. if they would be rude F2F they are rude here
lastly, I am allowed to express my opinion, and no harm was done. I express it precisely to try influencing, to nudge the world around me in a better direction. nothing about that is wrong. indeed it is wise
may you behave better in the future
And Sir Patrick did provide one as captain Picard.
And on top of he was a good human being.
Nah, it's SciFi. They'll find a way of writing them back in. Won't they?