I love Voyager, but of all Treks it’s the hardest to make a move of. Their whole thing was to get home and… they did! You can’t have ‘We need to reunite the old gang to get home from the Delta Quadrant one last time’.

Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.

I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!

I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.

Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.

Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.

• Sport and art
• low cost and free places to do sport and art
• linked together by public transit and clean, safe places to walk, run or cycle (or scoot or skate or whatever)
• a shorter working week, so people have time to do the above
• a higher minimum wage, so people can afford the (ideally low, if necessary) costs involved

So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that’s your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there’s space for that.

Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that’s your art.

Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.

You don’t need an uncritical belief in the Labour Theory of Value to think that human labour has a special value and dignity to it. The people who want AI to replace many kinds of intellectual labour just don’t believe that there’s a value to human labour, and I do think this is fundamentally an antihuman, misanthropic way of looking at the world.

People are already painting his face on walls.

It’s job? The vacuum guitar schema. Rough!

Bonus fun: watching YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles try to deal with Klingon.

This is irrelevant to the discussion, which was not ‘Is it an alternate timeline/who likes it?’ but ‘does it possess certain qualities?’.

Yep. I just watched ‘Past Tense’ this week, where DS9 spends an entire two-parter advocating for the humane treatment of homeless and unemployed people through an economic policy of full employment. The characters succeed in bringing this about by staging an armed uprising largely led by a black man. It’s not only ‘woke’ but explicitly socialist!

For me, trek was about people overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other. Newer shows lack this ideas, in my opinion.

In Discovery, a Vulcan woman gets married to a seven-foot tall walking squid man. In seasons 4-5, Book nearly destroys the galaxy and they forgive him because they understand he was traumatised. These strike me as pretty clear examples (just two, I could add more!) of people ‘overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other’.

This is entirely separate from the question of whether those plots lines and character arcs were well-written - they largely weren’t, IMO. But they did happen!

Photons or protons?

Heh. Yeah, I can’t really hold up a country backsliding on trans rights as an example of an effective constitutional monarchy.

I think taking a broad view, there are quite a lot of constitutional monarchies that are really great places to live (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, the Bahamas, Japan, to name a few). There are also quite a lot of republics that can claim the same. So, from a sort of human development POV, I don’t think it really matters very much.

[EDIT: Should’ve added that there are also plenty of republics and monarchies that are disasters, too. My point is that there’s no consistent pattern of one works and the other doesn’t.]

Sure, monarchies are a bit daft but I think ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is quite a good rule. Especially since spending time on fixing things that ain’t broke is time you could be spending on fixing things that are broke. I live in the UK and we have a lot of major problems that need our attention. It’s better to focus on those than have a big argument about the King when, as we can see from international comparisons, the King isn’t really the issue.

People also makes this argument about guns, and yet gun controls work!

You are right, of course, that if someone really wants to hurt lots of people, they will likely find a way to do it. But that’s no reason not to put barriers in their way. As for ‘punishing the rest of us’, I’m not sure that making cars a bit lighter amounts to a punishment!

It’s what the people voted for.

The only people who can quit their “pointless” jobs in the name of “moral ambition” are those who are lucky enough to not need them in the first place.

The article does say exactly that.

Good question.

The Newer Forest.

Always makes me laugh that the ‘New’ Forest is getting on for a thousand years old.