Hmm. Interesting perspective. I must admit I've never had someone try to convince me of the merits of socialism using any kind of argument, let alone by way of comparison to Star Trek.

But I'm not sure that enthusiasm for technological progress can be truly said to be an ideology? I know it would have seemed that way to any pre-Christian era man, as the concept of linear time with forward progress isn't an intuitive one and had to be developed. But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".

People are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about technological progress. It doesn't always seem that way because new tech tends to cause people to stress out about change and predicting doom is good for getting attention, but when we look at people who are genuinely committed to rejecting techno-progress we're limited to the Amish and nobody else. It's not a big or growing community of people. Given the choice, people always take the upgrades.

I think that's why rayiner thinks support for progress shouldn't be politically polarized. It's actually not, most of the time. In the context of modern politics we see this with the various attempts at starting an "abundance" movement amongst the Democrats. The more moderate subfactions realize that the left is becoming strongly associated with anti-tech, anti-progress politics, and that this lacks mainstream appeal so they need to fix it.

>But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".

But then why didn't he write what you wrote? His citing Star Trek in his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.