The US has a nasty history with regard to slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples, but that doesn't have much bearing on its current culture.

I'm not talking about Scandinavian culture 100 years ago, only right now.

thanks for that information. but other than the mail, none of that is anything they did. they bought out other companies. I mean thats great for them, flickr is a good platform, im sure tumblr as well. but buying a company and innovating are 2 different things.

Most big companies are like this.

Look at Microsoft, their history is full of purchases: Powerpoint, Hotmail, Visio, Dynamics, Skype, Nokia, Bungie,

I never said they were poor. However, they have a really small population compared to the US, Russia, and China, and a much smaller GNP as a result. So why aren't those countries doing useful things like this?

The 1st season of TNG was a mess; it got better afterwards when Gene became less involved and Rick Berman took over. He's really the guy we can thank for TNG being the classic it was. He took Gene's great vision, and made a great show out of it. It also helped when Gene's drinking buddy Maurice Hurley left the show, as he was a writer and had a lot of sway over the scripts. He's the reason Gates McFadden left during the 2nd season.

As for the Federation not being superior, how do you figure? They weren't militaristic, so of course they weren't easily able to easily overcome the Romulans and Klingons who devoted all their resources to empire-building and the military. It's just like Russia today. Their economy sucks but they're still holding onto lots of territory and have lots of power because that territory holds valuable natural resources, and they have a huge and powerful military to guard it and push their agenda, including seizing land from neighboring nations.

BS, TNG was a great series. However, it was really rough and kinda bad during the first season, and into the 2nd.

What worked was when Gene was the figurehead and kinda oversaw things, so that people were working according to his vision, but Gene was not involved in any nitty-gritty details. He was a lot like George Lucas: he came up with some cool ideas and visions for things, but when they were executed by other people is when the final product was really fantastic.

Gene became much less involved in the show after the 2nd season, and that's when it really shined, at least until it just got too old and stale. The 3rd-5th seasons were amazing, and some of the best TV ever made.

The same thing happened in TOS too. All the best episodes were when Gene wasn't so hands-on.

Now with Gene gone, it's gone to crap because they aren't using his vision at all, they're just recycling and trying to make money off of things from the prior series, but without the vision that really made it ST.

I actually like the guy they have playing Bones on the competing fan-made Star Trek Phase II series. The other actors, not so much, but the McCoy guy is great. They should swap him with the Bones guy from ST: Continues, because all their actors are great except for the McCoy guy. My office desk is less wooden.

Great post. I feel mostly the same way, except I never bothered with JJ's 2nd movie because I was too disappointed by the 1st one.

The real problem with Star Trek, however, was that it was unrealistic in its optimism and with everyone having such excellent values. They said many times in the series that genetic engineering was bad, was banned, etc. (except for that 2nd-series Pulaski episode in TNG, for some odd reason), but the only way humanity is going to be that moral is if it's engineered into them, or we do something to engineer sociopathy out of our species. Right now, sociopaths are in charge, and are exceedingly common, and their values permeate our society. Just look at the replies to your post: these days, the only thing that matters is money and profit, that's what makes a person "good". Even the Christians will tell you this these days: God favors people who make more money, and loves rich people more, and poor people are poor because God has abandoned them. Popular TV preachers like Joel Osteen will happily tell you this, and countless Christian churches preach this theology.

Of course, even Star Trek had its dark side, but it was in the past: we were supposed to have the Eugenics Wars back in the 1990s, and we're supposed to have WWIII sometime soon. Only after all that calamity is Zephram Cochrane supposed to invent the warp engine, meet the Vulcans, and quickly propel us into the galactic neighborhood as seen in STE, with humanity going from a war-torn society to eradicating poverty inside a century. So according to ST, we're supposed to be living in a pretty shitty time right now. That seems ridiculously optimistic however (that going through WWIII and meeting the Vulcans will suddenly turn us into a wonderful race of moralistic do-gooders without a bunch of sociopaths running our society like we have now).

What I like to tell people in discussions like this is that Star Trek does show our society, but not in the normal episodes; they're in the "mirror" episodes! That's us: the evil humans who run around murdering and conquering anyone and anything we can. If we ever invent warp drive and phasers, the galaxy is going to wish they only had the Klingons to deal with.