I listened to the first audio book. It consists entirely of descriptions of the main character making coffee and hawking belt buckles. It is pretty tedious, maybe a more optimistic version of something like the game cart life

Holy molly. I actually felt quite similar about the first one, but the second one was so ridiculously absurd that I felt I had been fooled by the first (quarter share) book? Did you feel a huge change in the second book? I genuinely could not tell if I had been misreading the first one or if the book went straight off into wish fulfillment absurdity?

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6945329546 (quarter share)

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6973501411 (half share)

TNG put writing first. They went after interesting stories and didn't try to force them into a formula for ratings. Sometimes there was fisticuffs and phaser fire, but many of the best TNG episodes didn't involve violence at all. It was an optimist's take on the future. The cast of TNG was great, but Patrick Stewart's acting chops let them do episodes that another show couldn't have pulled off. He changed what was possible.

The quality of writing for DS9 was also quite good but, after trying the TNG formula for a season or two, they broke with the writing-first mentality and adopted an action sci-fi formula. The showrunners feared they'd lose ratings if an episode didn't have at least some action. It worked for DS9, but later Trek series have had a tough time shaking free of the action sci-fi formula. The problem with formulas is that, while they produce individual episodes or shows that are exemplars of their form, the sameness eventually causes viewers to drift away.

Strange New Worlds has shown it's willing to do some pretty wild things (e.g. turning its cast into muppets, adding gore and horror elements, etc.), but they have not messed with the formula in a meaningful way.

If you're looking for something outside the Trek formula, one recommendation I'd share is "The Foundation".

My first forays into DS9 were sort of haphazard and I didn't appreciate the political thoughts and tensions that are much more nuanced and consistent throughout the series compared to the relatively simple TNG operating paradigm of "we explore, navigate the inevitable sticky situations that arise."

Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.

I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...

I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.

I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.

I'm currently watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time. Give it a try, it scratches the same itch for me

I really cannot understand how anyone can like the expanse. It must really be because the really good scifi is a bit old and nobody knows what scifi should be like. Cannot explain it otherwise.

Eventually?

It's more Event Horizon:

>>"Where we're going, we won't need eyes..."

Hell is real: we create our own best emprisonments.

Wild! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307407

Time to take some risks I suppose. ;-)

Quark is not intended to be an upstanding role model.

The borg would say “resistance is futile.”

I think if one looks beneath the veneer there's far greater inequality than that. The typical human issues are regularly hit on in the show. I mentioned [1] one great example above in the episode Tapestry. But even more broadly than that consider lifestyle differences. Right now on Earth the lifestyle between a billionaire and an average person isn't all that different. They have nicer stuff and more influence, but we live lives that are still roughly the same. The endless hedonism people think they'd engage in if they had billions gets old fast.

But now imagine on the Star Trek universe the difference in lives between somebody in Starfleet and a regular 'peasant.' You have this class of people out there exploring the universe, making amazing discoveries, and pushing the boundaries of humanity in every way. And then you have the peasantry back on Earth doing Earthy things. The difference in these lives would be dramatically more stark than now a days, to the point that they may as well be two different species. Come to think of it, that could literally happen since Starfleet families would likely disproportionately beget Starfleet children and so on. And these differences in environment/family would create radically different classes.

In reality there would likely be major class protests, claims of nepotism, calls for Starfleet to be 'more inclusive', and so forth. In short order everything would start rapidly descending into disorder.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332143

I think your first question is answered by your second. The main reason for a radically egalitarian Star Trek utopia to have money would be to allocate scarce resources. The shack and the 8-bedroom villa have very different supply and demand curves, so would have very different prices.

There are other problems that get glossed over in a Star Trek utopia, and there are other ways of allocating scarce resources than a market economy, but I don't think your objection really holds.

Fair questions.

But we answer those at the moment with equally inadequate answers: your parents owned the nice mansion, so you get it (though that also includes "so your older brother gets it" just to be really unfair). Also on the other end of the spectrum: your parents messed up your education and traumatised you, so no mansion for you.

It would be good to work out some system that could answer these questions on a better basis than that.

The winner of the “Mansion Games”!

You do the same as you do with Ren Faires and whatnot, by definition you're the lord or lady or knight and someone else is the peasant with a fascinating collection of skin diseases in soiled rags who gets to eat warm mud for dinner.

Wealthier societies have fewer babies - it is likely that earth has a lower population in the 24th century than today. So the resources are less limited, and technology solves other scarcity issues. Everybody gets a Ferrari. Also, humans have settled other planets, so you could always just move to one of those.

Of course, it’s science fiction, not reality. We’ve seen how communism works in the real world, so I’m fairly skeptical of the Star Trek future. 350 years doesn’t seem like enough time to fix all the things wrong with our society.

I am not going to comment in favour of one "ism" for another. Capitalism, Communism... etc. The more I see this it goes beyond our past attempts and understanding.

Its hard to tell what our future is. I don't think we can begin to understand it as its outside our thinking. We are conditioned inside an existing system. We can only see it from the early stages and we are torn between those that see the good and others the bad. In this case it's about :-

- universal basic income

- who owns what?

- etc

I am not suggesting these are ignorant comments. Far from it. The change is about our mindset. It won't be us that changes but the younger generations that gradually transitions. It certainly wont happen overnight. Its a COMPLICATED MESS! We still have Countries with different views, religions, etc.

One thing I've always said especially since the rise of AI in the last number of years is to "hold on tight because its going to be a bumpy ride!" - This could be small bumps or terrible bumps. We are talking about people struggling as well as big corporations!

Slow but surely, we are making a lot of things become redundant.

Look at Universal Basic Income. Will it be this easy? Likely not. Someone will suffer more than another. People are going protect themselves and lives could be lost. On another end, we have big companies that are giving us software for a charge which AI can now decompile and release for Free. AI is still young but you can see where its going. Not only could AI take human jobs away it can also destroy large businesses and their business model.

AI might be seen a "slop" at this time... but as a software developer myself I can see the direction we are heading. Eventually is won't be slop. It will simply be better than humans at solving problems. I am not just talking about code -- but healthcare, logistics, and other planetary preventions. It will become a powerful tool that can free humans to enjoying life to the fullest. Personally, that is my view... for others it is going to be a Terminator scenario or nothing will change at all (other than AI being a nice tool only)

The way I see things, beyond our lifetime, the idea of owning will disappear. This is a hard thing for people to grasp. Many today will think about the gaming industry and "you will own nothing and be happy" -- Yes, in this scenario we are still allowing large corps to control us. I am simply looking BEYOND large corps and our current mindset.

In order to get there (if we do make it) - there will be struggle ahead. I very doubt (assuming we keep advancing positively) that money will exist in the next 200 years. Hopefully sooner. I am sure some 'men behind the curtain' wont want that.

I thought this as well, then found myself in the situation of not needing to work and found that, after some period of hedonism, it became quite empty. I think in the past it was easier for more people to experience this. We had less 'stuff' but much larger families and lived in generally more social systems. Those mitigate a lot of the coercive extrinsic pressures to work. And I think this is why philosophy, especially personal philosophy trending towards self betterment, was so much more prevalent in the past.

Aspire to at least leave the world better than you found it, so it is a little better when you are gone.

The theory is that inefficient companies die in the open marketplace, and bad leadership is inefficient.

This fails to account for the sheer scale and encumbancy advantages of massive corporations. It also fails to account that efficiency can be appallingly evil.

Even Hayek was a proponent of robust antitrust measures for this reason. And he's hardly a figure of the political left.

I would say let’s start with accountability for politicians in general. It’s pretty common for idiots mess up locally and then self promote upwards to state and federal levels.

and who gets to decide that? now you've concentrated power again.

I think the problem is more about how do we get people in power that don't actually care about it.

You have to go through a lot of crap to get to a high leadership position and, in general, the only types of people that will think it's worth it are the ones who are attracted to the position because of the power benefits that it offers.

That problem doesn't really have a solution, though. Power inherently is a corrupting influence, and everyone is fallible. Focusing on building safeguards into how we choose whom to give power to, rather than limiting the exercise of power itself, will always produce dysfunctional systems.

It’s true, and Stewart was a great actor. But he would have sold a vision of a morally compromised captain just as well. The vision is Roddenberry’s.

The original Janeway for Star Trek Voyager only filmed like one episode and her take was very different (French actress I think. And maybe they were aiming for a Picard analog).

> It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him

That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.

I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.

> But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce.

There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-we-all-too-cynical-for-star...

At the same time he was making way too many calls in the "Picard" series.

This reminds me of how it's a software developer's ultimate power that he or she gets to bring the vision to life. If you disagree with the implementation of a requirement, you can build it the "right" way, and let them choose to fire or replace you. If your judgement is good, they probably won't.

Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.

He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.

What do you mean by post-Roddenberry? Most of the TNG era was created without his direct input.

Yes and no. DS9 plays with things at the edges, much like Ian Banks’ novels deal with the behavior that lies at the edge of the Culture and is part of what permits a utopian society to exist at all. It cuts directly to the question of when and if martial force —or other, more subversive mechanisms of power — must be deployed for protection against a force that threatens the existence of an otherwise non-violent society. I think these are criticisms of visions like Roddenberry’s without necessarily undermining them or missing the point entirely. I also think it’s been an ongoing commentary on modern civilization as much as speculative fiction.

Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.

Yes it becomes space liberalism rather than space communism.

Yea I have debated this before about the roleplaying, but I find it more immersive if I roleplay as a crewmember (Riker) and discuss problems that way.

The lack of a grounding in cultural anthropology is the core problem. We fear the other instead of being curious about them.

Fear is the enemy. Fear, and its close cousin anger, grows and maintains barriers.

Yes, but I think he also showed that being a nerd didn't necessarily mean being weak. He could fight and he was physically brave.

Because Data isn't obviously the result of corporations seeking to get very, very, very rich along with VCs seeking to do the same, and both not really caring much about the collateral damage to everybody else along the way.

Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.

I don't think you have adequately steel-manned the current anti-AI sentiments. I encourage you to consider more deeply why people would be opposed to AI as it exists in our current regulatory, political, and social climate.

As a starting point:

Business leadership is giddy to replace workers with AI.

Investors are eager to roll out massive resource-intensive and locally polluting industrial installations.

Politicians are eager to rubber-stamp these developments without community input, bypassing existing regulation and failing to satisfy or even address community concerns.

The defense industry is recklessly employing this emerging technology to make life and death decisions, already resulting in the deaths of innocents.

I also think you should fundamentally reconsider your comparison. Data is a singular being, not a widespread new technology. The only similarity between Data and 2026 LLMs is that they are not biological.

I feel this is because Data is represented as a wholly independent being. One of a very few created by an eccentric inventor. There's only one Data so he's not threatening to displace flesh and blood Starfleet officers.

Data was gifted independence from his conception, but the AI of today is owned and controlled by corporations. Creating a conscious AI under today's ownership model feels akin to slavery. Perhaps this is one reason for the aversion?

People don't AI as a concept. They hate the people who creating it who want to make themselves god kings of a permanent underclass. They hate that we are building data centers instead of funding universal healthcare, they hate that they can't buy RAM and schmucks like Sam Altman are saying that people don't need RAM, they hate billionaires and millionaires owning islands, and saying things like "we will surveil everyone at all times (except me) and force them to behave like we want them to". There's a lot to the AI hate, but it's a proxy for essentially power inequality caused by runaway capitalism.

> So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?

Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?

He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.

Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.

And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.

I guess most people assume that working to build Data didn't involve all the secondary harms such as environmental and economic damage. It's also not clear to me that we are in fact working in that direction - so far the people in charge of our current AI efforts seem more interested in enriching themselves than building something that is a net positive for humanity.

Data is an embodied finite being. Claude et al seem more like the Borg or Skynet.

The distinction is giving AI a will, or something like a continuous agentic task like "be a productive member of this starship". Maybe that is enough, with emergent behavior and interactions with dynamic systems and memory, to say that AI develops identity and a "will" that is unpredictable and unique.

The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal. We see this with the Huggingface hack and if Data operated the same he might immediately deduce he is better equipped to make tactical decisions in combat, hack the starship and mutiny.

So if we could make Data we are more likely to create Data the space pirate rather than Data the useful member of the staff. Caplocking DO NOT COMMIT MUTINY in system prompts does not solve the problem. So we are at an impasse until we can structurally bridge that gap and no one is (or should be) in a rush to go down that path.

This is the fundamental concern of runaway AI scenarios. And the most worrisome answer might be that Data can't exist in reality. It might be a fundamental rule of nature that you can't create a greater intelligence then cage it forever to be subservient, which means we are doomed to wipe out humanity with half-baked AI or cede our will to Claude completely, creating a higher form of life that eventually supercedes humanity itself, reducing human existence to a transitional cocoon-goo state of life from animal to sentient AI.

All that being said, 2 or 3 years ago LLMs could barely make inline code edits. Rushing to find an answer to the "Data problem" is not something most people want answered in their lifetime.

So, I've heard many AI boosters say that current-day AI is probably "conscious", "sentient", etc. They occasionally invoke "Measure of a Man", as you've done here.

And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.

Why is that?

> Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI.

It's the same reaction: being protective of sentient beings who are being dehumanized and treated as raw resources. If you can't even defend humans, being one, you wouldn't be able to defend sentient AI, should it ever exist.

Because despite his lack of emotions and other human traits, Data is a person, not a service provided by a for-profit corporate entity. He doesn't do La Forge's job for him, nor is La Forge or any other Enterprise crew member expected to perform all their duties with him as an intermediary. He doesn't undermine the competence of every single crew member on the ship; that job was left to Wesley Crusher. (whoops did I just say that out loud) But most importantly, it's fiction... and the writers can contrive to present problems and challenges that Data cannot resolve whereas one of the other characters can. It's also telling that the only truly sentient robots on TNG were the Soong-type androids—quirky side projects of a sort of mad scientist, rather than massive corporate or institutional undertakings. That made them rare and special, and allowed them to dodge the sticky wickets presented by having that sort of AI be ubiquitous.

Turns out, there is difference between an extremely simplistic fiction and actual real world reality. And turns out, quite a lot of people can distinguish between the two.

On the bad side, quite a lot of people cant.

Data wasn't built by a fascist who wanted to take over the world.

It was always noticeable when the writers were on strike.

Maybe in political views, but does the show Picard seem like someone who would (twice) leave his wife to marry a woman half his age? Would Picards children not want to talk to him in his old age?

It's easy to be in alignment with a system that has replicators that can magically produce whatever you what.

I’d like to know whether writers eventually come to write for an actor’s persona as much as (or more than) the character they portray.

And to explore hypotheticals. What would happen / what would it be like / what would have happened, IF ...

> We actually studied leadership via Star Trek at the Air Force Academy. There were a lot of practical lessons to learn about decisiveness versus being too rash, or performing your specific role well to help the team. It was an interesting study in real-world leadership through this fictional show.

- Col. Terry Virts, USAF

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/star-trek-...

Perhaps they should include a chapter on the Prime Directive. Or at least remind congress of George Washington's recommendation in his farewell address.

Proposing solutions that you cannot put into place because others do not agree with you is also fiction. One might as well propose an algorithm for finding an item in a singly-linked-list that is O(1): just select the right node. Finding the right node is the entire cost; just as coordinating people for one's solution is the entire difficulty.

"Make everyone happy" is even better than your solution if we're ignoring coordination. And it is many characters shorter.

The traitors had a hand in the dumbing down of the country as well. There's a reason Trump loves the poorly educated. All Republicans do. That's their base. The problem they are running into is the inmates are now running the asylum. The ignorant true believers are being elected in place of the former conservative elites who created the propaganda networks to create those ignorant true believers in the first place.

Works of fiction borrow heavily from real life and writer's perspersonal experiences. Very rarely does fiction garner notice when it is completely divorsed from the reality and experiences and questions of most people's lives. It is good at showing other people's and idealogocal perspectives without bringing as many preconceptions as a straight copy from real life often would.

"Of course it is a work of fiction, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Dumbledore, paraphrased

Works of fiction are critical to understanding the society in which they're made and interpreted.

He did have a very varied life story, but I'm sharing what I did because it's what he expressed about his entire life, especially in the most recent years.

https://www.looper.com/1516934/patrick-stewart-tragic-true-l...

I know several people who think Star Trek is a course in leadership and The West Wing is how politics works. Ever since Patrick Stewart died a bunch of outlets have been telling them that that's a good thing. It isn't.

> I've been on HN since 2010 and I've watched it play out first hand

Care to unpack that for the rest of us?

Ah yes, the famous Shakers of Sabbathday Lake who were eventually seen in jackboots marching across New England.

or Bible

And science fiction in particular: it is meant to be a reflection on reality.

> I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.

Maybe it exacerbated it, but The Office was mostly a documentary of preexisting behavior.

This is a classic breakdown:

https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

The nice thing about Michael Scott is that while he is a self-absorbed and very flawed manager and human, he also genuinely cares a great deal about his employees.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) worked in an office for many years, and so he had credibility in making funny observations about it.

There's value in allegory. I don't think there's value in modern mainstream television or film.

A historian can make their interpretation of history plausible. A group of historians can reinforce a narrative that is then undercut by the next generation of historians. What made Rommel a good commander is a complex question and we might not yet be done exploring the answer.

Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.

If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.

Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?

TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.

Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.

> The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.

Agree but...

There is fiction also in stories of actual leaders (obviously even if 'non fiction') but more so in actual fiction (no matter who writes it even someone who has had the actual experiences). In a sense non-fiction more dangerous possibly (since it's taken more seriously and generally by many people unfortunately assumed to be true).

So even movies about real people or books have fiction ie creative license. How many times has the Steve Jobs story about 'the other side of the fence needs to be good (or whatever it was)' been told? Did it really happen (just because Steve told it or even his father related it?) Does it matter? Point is you might as well take most stories with a grain of salt. Even if again non-fiction.

What amazes me is how people are discussing a fictional character that they enjoyed watching and apparently learned from (because that character was entertaining). If someone had written a book (with the same info and credentials as the writers) most likely it would never have been taken seriously at all.

Maybe the take away isn't to use the word learn or taught but 'inspired me to think about' which happens in many situations and many places.

> Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.

My point is also agreeing better than fiction writers but still who knows for sure the truth or what lucky events lead to Rommel being able to do what he did.

Well probably better to look to Picard than a literal Nazi…

>The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.

the fault with taking lessons from history is to mistake what just happens to be the case for what could be, or as Rumi said:

"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everyone took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."

thinking the world exhausts itself in history is to mistake the particular for the universal. Shakespeare knew more about reality because, not despite writing fiction. Or put differently, if the actual leaders of our current world were characters of fiction we'd question whether the author wasn't taking the cheap route and was lacking some depth.

Yes, mostly?

My feeling is that while enjoyable and thought provoking, TNG is still a work of fiction, and as such favored entertainment and legibility within a 45 minute window over nuance or subtly. That meant there were clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" sides, and scenarios often felt like they were constructed backwards from an outcome/clever solution.

I think that in turn causes people to view the real world in the same way, except they are always the "good" side and solutions that require compromise and tradeoffs are seen as unacceptable failures.

Or Homer’s?

You're describing the idea that thought leadership should be based on individual character, regardless of [non]fictional status, which is exactly the point of the pushback.

How on earth could you come to the conclusion that the people pushing back believe all fictional characters are good models of thought leadership? The parent's implication was that none are.

Three times. Nixon was a stage actor and in fact that’s how he met his wife, Pat (she was also an actor).

I'm not saying that it is isolated, I'm saying that it has too much influence.

Maybe it doesn't have to be.

6 comments in 11 years and this is one of them. I'm honored, thank you!