Are you really going to keep on trying to defend the notion that the human society portrayed in Star Trek is not socialist? (In The Next Generation, no human investors, traders or financiers are ever depicted, and human society did away with money. Socialist countries have militaries, too.)

The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.

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vrganj 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wow, that comment went from quite reasonable to taking a very strange turn in the second paragraph.

	▲	hollerith 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I shouldn't've published the second para, at least not here, but I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first two to four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world. In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress. Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share the same commitment. [1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. The reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it made him warm to socialism.

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rayiner 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s not what I said. I said that the human society portrayed in Star Trek had warp drive before it had socialism. Viewed charitably, it reflects how society might plausibly be structured when technology renders questions of resource or capital allocation largely moot.