Star Trek's Sulu: Straight Arrow or Gay Blade?

Star Trek was a show ahead of its time. It portrayed a world in which human racism and sexism were long dead: the crew was made up of men, women, Americans, Russians, Britons, Africans, Japanese, who all got along without any racial friction. It featured the first interracial kiss on television (though it was coerced by a third party).

People were still people, however: racism persists in Star Trek. For example, in the episode "The Balance of Terror," a crewman suggests that Spock is not loyal to Star Fleet because his physical appearance is similar to the Romulans.

One thing that was never mentioned in the original series was homosexuality. Director Justin Lin and writer Simon Pegg have addressed this in Star Trek Beyond, the third installment of "new Trek," the alternate future version of the original series.

In the upcoming film, Hikaru Sulu is depicted raising a child with another man. Pegg and Lin made Sulu gay in part to honor George Takei, the actor who originally played Sulu.

But Takei is not pleased. He came out as gay more than a decade ago, but he thinks this artistic choice is unfortunate. He feels that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, wrote Sulu as a straight man and that this choice should be honored. I can buy that.

Simon Pegg respectfully disagrees. Homosexuality was never addressed on television in the Sixties. Even if Roddenberry had wanted a gay character, it would never have happened -- the network censors would have crushed it. But Pegg's Sulu is not Roddenberry's:

Our Trek is an alternate timeline with alternate details. Whatever magic ingredient determines our sexuality was different for Sulu in our timeline. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere.

I can also buy that.

But I don't think you need to go there: the Sulu who appeared on the screen in the original series could easily have been gay, from a continuity point of view. I've seen all the episodes, and they're sufficiently ambiguous to argue that the original Sulu could be gay.

Sexuality was addressed for most of the main characters: Kirk and Spock had several entanglements with women. McCoy and Scotty had similar dalliances. Nurse Chapel was hung up on Spock and had an old boyfriend in "What Are Little Girls Made of?". Chekov fell for a girl in "Spectre of the Gun." In the new continuity, Uhura is Spock's lover.

Sulu never really had his own episode, so we never knew his orientation; he mostly set courses, fired weapons, did countdowns, shot revolvers or froze off his ass. However, with 2016 hindsight looking back at the aired episodes, you can make a reasonable argument that Sulu was intentionally written as gay.

There are no episodes where the real Sulu is romantically involved with a woman. In "Man Trap" Sulu and Yeoman Janice Rand are shown as friends. Sulu is in the arboretum and she brings him some food. The interaction is not romantic in any way. This could easily be interpreted as Rand doing a favor for her gay botanist friend.

In "The Naked Time," the crew's inhibitions are stripped when they are infected by some weird pathogen. Spock gets all teary, Kirk loses his cool, O'Riley shuts down the engines and starts singing. But Sulu takes off his shirt, picks up a rapier and runs flamboyantly around the ship like a French swashbuckler, a gay blade.

In "Mirror, Mirror," a transporter accident sends Kirk and Uhura to a universe where the crew are Bizarro opposite versions of their normal Enterprise selves. There, the Mirror Sulu does show some interest in Uhura.

However, since it's the Mirror universe, Mirror Sulu's attraction to Uhura could be viewed as diametrically opposed to the real Sulu's true feelings about women. Alternately, even if Mirror Sulu is gay, given the Mirror Universe's misogynistic treatment of women (they are underlings and mistresses), Mirror Sulu is merely following societal norms of the male-female power dynamic. He had to go after Uhura on the bridge to "prove" he was regular tough guy to the other misogynistic tough guys the inhabited the Mirror Enterprise. Just like all the gay football and basketball players who have to prove to team mates they're not gay...

Roddenberry's dead, so we can't ask him. But if you were to pick a character from the original series who could be gay, it would have to be Sulu. And is it just a coincidence that Roddenberry cast a gay man in that role? And you can see why Takei wouldn't want to think that Roddenberry picked him because he was gay: actors hate being pigeonholed -- they want to believe they can play anyone.

And even if Roddenberry did originally conceive of Sulu as straight, it's very common for writers to reconsider and change the direction of characters and plots years later when they think of something better: their fervent fans are frequently more enamored of the status quo than they are!

We Need Him Today

Welcome to the NRA's World

3 Dallas Officers Killed at Protest Over Police Shootings

Three Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded Thursday night during a demonstration protesting the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana this week, according to Chief David O. Brown of the Dallas police.

Aren't guns wonderful? Isn't it great how cops use them to shoot dozens of unarmed civilians a year and terrorists and assassins can buy them anywhere without background checks and then use them to murder cops and innocent people at protests and in nightclubs, schools, churches, movie theaters and malls?

I feel so much safer knowing that any moron can go to a gun show or the Internet and load up on tons of weapons and ammo.

Hillary Email A Go Go

Here's a great list which summarizes FBI director James Comey's fact based, unbiased and emotion free testimony today regarding Hillary Clinton's email server (currently more important to conservatives than police shooting black people on a regular basis, Americans shooting people at an annual rate of 30K a year, ISIL, education, climate change, poverty, college debt, racism and inequality)

Here are my conclusions based on these facts:
1. Hillary Clinton made a mistake using a home email server
2. She went against State Department policy
3. She was careless with government information some of which was sensitive or classified
4. The emails were not properly classified by the State Department indicating a much larger problem beyond Hillary Clinton.
5. There wasn't enough evidence of criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt to pursue this case. Previous cases that have been mentioned had obvious criminal intent.
6. Hillary Clinton did not lie to the FBI.

Anything beyond this moves out of the realm of facts and evidence and into the realm of politics. I honestly don't fault her that much for making this mistake. Clearly, she would have done things differently if she could go back but it makes sense to me that you'd want to keep as much of your dealings private when you have an army of assholes out there ready to give you a colonoscopy over any little thing they can find.

Obviously, this will never be over because Republicans, as usual, have nothing else to run on. They can't actually tackle the real problems we face today because their solutions (the ones they have to keep beating over our heads because of their angry and hateful base) haven't worked and never will. I'm betting the a majority of the US voters don't care either and the GOP's continued mouth foaming about this will end up hurting them in the fall...along with their nominee:)

The Black Man With A Gun

The shooting of Alton Rouge, an open carry permit holder in Louisiana, was bad enough. Now my own home state has gone and done the same thing. And, once again, to a licensed gun holder. The Gun Cult wants as many people as possible carrying guns, concealed or open. But have they stopped to consider the cultural stereotype of a black man with a gun?

Whether people want to admit it or not, we are still feeling profound effects from the institution of slavery. Black people in this country are still at a disadvantage in this country on every level. Our criminal justice system is the starkest example of this disadvantage in that people are being shot on a regular basis as a result.

I am so thoroughly disgusted and heartbroken that this happens to black people on a regular basis. In the year 2016, it seems that we have not made any progress.

What Does It Mean To Be A Patriot?

Fuckin' A

Representing Whom, Exactly?

Livestream!

BREAKING NEWS: A group of gun violence survivors are in the Capitol Rotunda right now committing a new act of civil disobedience in an attempt to push House Speaker Paul Ryan to vote on meaningful gun legislation this week. Here is a livestream of their Sit-In. The survivors are Christian Heyne, Margaret Eaddy, Bob Weiss, Jeanette Richardson, Pat Maisch, Nardyne Jeffries, Eddie Weingart and Camiella Williams.

One of them just held up a photo of their dead daughter who had been shot with an AK-47. That's what I'm talking about...put it in their face!!!!

Which Door?

Good (Happy Birthday, United States) Words

For me, freedom means the ability to live free of fear, free of intimidation and free from gun violence. Freedom in America, as set out in the Declaration of Independence, is meant to be life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, there is a vocal minority who believe these fundamental rights are pre-empted by the right to unrestricted access to deadly weapons.

---Jane Doughetry, sister of Sandy Hook victim

The Republican Brain Part Seven: For God And Tribe

The last time we looked inside Chris Mooney's insightful and amazing book, The Republican Brain, we saw that conservatives are dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, fear death, less open to new experiences, less "integrative complexity" in thinking and have more need for closure...all backed up by peer reviewed science. The next section in Mooney's book, "For God and Tribe," examines the moral system created by this type of political personality.

Consider the trolley dilemma. You are on a trolley that is about to have an accident. Everyone on board will be killed unless you push off one person in which case everyone will be saved. Do you do it? The cognitive processes of most people reason that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one so the sacrifice is made. But what if that person is named Jerome Williams and the other people on the trolley are all Nazis? Or the one person is named Chip Anderson and the rest of the people on the trolley are all Muslims? Or what if the person you are pushing off is fat?

In the next section of Mooney's book, he takes a look at motivated reasoning and the emotional impulses that drive it. A UC Irvine study showed that when liberals were presented with the either/or of saving a white guy or black guy, invariably they chose to save the black guy...even though they were explicitly told that race was not to be factored in to their answer. Liberals were intellectually more inconsistent conservatives. Perhaps race doesn't really matter to conservatives after all. At least it didn't in this scenario.

Yet when conservatives were presented with an alternate scenario...one that involved a military leader in Iraq trying to decide to kill opposition leaders...conservatives gave the thumbs up if Iraqi civilians were going to be killed but the thumbs down if American civilians were going to be killed. So. the same inconsistency was present. Further, they accepted either civilian casualty as being a part of war.

So, why does this happen? Recall that Mooney discussed how liberals and conservatives tend to have classification types in terms of their ideological bend. Liberals are more egalitarian-communitarian whereas conservatives are hierarchical-individualists. Thus, we see why conservatives and liberals fall into this cognitive trap. Liberals have an bias towards making sure that everyone is equal so they feel bad for Jerome who is about to get pushed off the trolley. Conservatives trust that authority figure of the military leader and tend to want to protect their tribe more than the other tribe.

Closely related to this study of cognition is the work of George Lakoff and how all of us tend to think in metaphors. We understand what it means for stock markets to rise and fall because we are familiar with those descriptors in everyday life. Yet the word "family" means something entirely different to a conservative than it does to a liberal. When conservatives think of family, they think of a strong father figure. Liberals tend to think of a more caring and nurturing parent that is gender neutral. So, the way each political ideology views authority is different and this extends to science. Conservatives have no problem with nuclear energy, for example, because it fits in with the strong father figure that goes out and provides for his family in the free market of energy. Liberals, conversely, have no problem with climate science because it show the necessity of nurturing one's planet. It's not surprising that the science is denied is the one that goes against neurological type.

I was pretty amused when I read this because I simply accept the science of both. The cool thing about science is that it's true whether you believe in it or not. Why try to buck reality? Besides, I don't have any emotion invested in nuclear energy or climate science. My rational mind accepts the science of both. They are what they are.

The takeaway from all of this is that the leaders of the conservative base know exactly what kind of authority their people respond to and they use that to manipulate them. If an authority on climate science comes out and talks about how it is settled science, they will throw a competing authority that matches conservatives' God and tribe out there and all is well. The need for this becomes more stark as Mooney notes in the closing pages of this chapter how science, and, indeed, academia in general has people that are more liberal in ideology. Why? As previously noted by Mooney, liberals tend to psychological be more open to new experiences, novel ideas and want to use science to improve society. In short, they are progressive whereas conservatives are not.

Mooney uses the example of Galileo and Darwin. Even though they were separated by hundreds of years, each man was confronted with the same problem: instransigent, conservative ideology rooted in emotion, not logic and rationality. Each man had to buck the powers that were deeply entrenched in God and tribe. At this point, Mooney interestingly notes that even conservative intellectuals are aware of this. Yuval Levin, conservative science and policy writer, notes that conservatives have a problem with science when it directly threatens the imperatives of their cultural continuity. Again, God and tribe...

Mooney concludes this section by noting that the ol' conservative meme of academia creates liberals no longer applies when considering the research in this section. More liberals are in academia because of how the brains work to begin with and they are naturally drawn to places where openness to new experiences are the order of the day. All of the information in this chapter reinforces the overall thrust of this book so far. The conservative brain is, by nature, far different from the liberal brain.

Oblivious Truck Driver Kills Man Driving Tesla

My headline just doesn't have the zip of the New York Times headline: "Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says." The news outlets are reporting this as, "A man died when his Tesla broadsided a semi while he was watching a Harry Potter movie."

As a programmer, I have been skeptical of self-driving cars since Google started talking about them a few years ago. The question of liability if someone is killed is a legal rats nest, as we are now seeing.

From the New York Times article:

The death is a blow to Tesla at a time when the company is pushing to expand its product lineup from expensive electric vehicles to more mainstream models. The company on Thursday declined to say whether the technology or the driver or either were at fault in the accident.

The thing is, it's not complicated at all: the driver of the truck is at fault!

The crash occurred at the intersection of Highway US-27A and NE 140th Court in Williston, Fla. Here's a diagram:

 

The truck (V01) was turning left in front of the oncoming Tesla (V02). If you look at the Google Street view of that intersection from the point of view of the truck that was turning, you'll notice that the truck even had a YIELD sign.

The driver of the Tesla clearly had the right of way: the truck turned left directly in front of him, causing the crash.

I'm not sure why all the news stories failed to note this, or why Tesla declined to say whether the driver or the car was at fault: the truck driver killed the Tesla driver by obliviously turning left in front of oncoming traffic.

Insurance companies deal with this kind of thing all the time. They assign some percentage of blame to each driver: to the truck driver for ignoring the YIELD sign, and the Tesla driver for not seeing the truck in the way. But since the truck driver violated the law by failing to yield, he is at fault.

Now, I'm not defending the Tesla driver's stupidity. Clearly he was an idiot for watching a movie while driving down the highway. But this kind of crash happens every day to people who are distracted for the briefest moment by eating a sandwich, drinking coffee, talking on their cellphones, flashing LCD billboards on the roadside, or glints of blinding light from the setting sun; you can't blame the victim when some idiot fails to yield the right of way and turns right into their path.

This is why I'm still of the opinion that there's too much crap going on on regular streets for computers to drive cars autonomously in traffic. The infrastructure is completely inadequate: road markings aren't clearly defined. Maps can never keep up with detours and construction. Delivery trucks stop in the middle of the street and double park. Drivers make sudden turns without signaling. Morons fail to properly secure cargo, which falls off and causes accidents. Pedestrians dart out from between cars and bikes whiz through intersections.

Computers are good at doing things that their programmers have anticipated. I'm sure they'd do fine in a controlled system where the vehicles run on tracks closed to human traffic, are programmed with all the speed limits and rules, and can communicate with each other to avoid collisions (something like Personal Rapid Transit).

But when you introduce stupid, impatient, irrational, oblivious humans into the mix, and put them in control of 40-ton vehicles of mass destruction, the computer will never be able to make the "right choice."

Our Mice Are Alive, Your's Are Dead

California is now the 6th largest economy in the world? All while being run by those tax and spend Democrats? GDP at 4 percent? Surplus at $11 billion? Compare this to Kansas and Louisiana.

I know it's hard to let go of something so personal as an economic ideology but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Supply side economics doesn't work. It never did. Conversely, raising taxes on the wealthy and increasing government spending improves economies. It ALWAYS has.

The World is Ending Because Expensive New Cars Are Expensive!

The headline sounds so dire: "New Cars Are Too Expensive for the Typical Family, Study Finds:"

AS prices for new vehicles continue to rise, the cost of an average new car may be a stretch for typical households.

A new analysis from Bankrate.com found that a median-income household could not afford the average price of a new vehicle in any of the 50 largest cities in the country, though cars are more affordable in some cities than others.

“The new reality is that cars are becoming more expensive,” said Steve Pounds, a personal finance analyst for Bankrate. “People are having to make tough decisions about financing.”

You'd think our entire economy is on the verge of collapse.

But the basis for this alarmist article is completely false. The problem isn't that new cars are too expensive. It's that people are spending too damn much money on cars they can't afford. No one needs to spend the "average" $30,000 on a car.

Checking the current price of the class of cars that I have bought brand new over my entire 40-year new-car-buying lifetime, they range from about $13,000 (Chevrolet Spark) to about $26,000 (Subaru Forester).

And that's first-time new cars -- if you're buying a replacement, you can sell your old car for a decent chunk of change.

And since when are new cars a necessity? When I was a kid, in a family with six kids, my dad always bought used cars (he still does). You can get perfectly serviceable used cars for half the price of a new car.

That puts the cost of a car completely within the economic grasp of the average family, which has 2.54 people in it. The average family does not need a car that holds eight passengers or tows four tons. A five-passenger sedan or hatchback will fill the needs of the vast majority of American families.

And don't feel sorry for people with a ton of kids, who "need" a gigantic SUV: they made their bed, now they can sleep in it -- or maybe not, since that's what got them into trouble in the first place. They can just buy a used station wagon or van, like my dad did. If their kids won't be caught dead catching a ride to school in a junker, they can take the bus or walk.

The reason the average price of a car is "out of the reach of the average family" is that a relatively small number of really expensive cars dramatically raise the average price. No one needs to buy an expensive car. Too many people treat their cars as a measure of their manhood or social standing, so they have to buy the flashiest or fastest car.

Cars are just a way of getting to point A to point B reliably. Thankfully, many millennials have seen the light and are not stuck in the car rut: they don't even want drivers licenses.

The main reason for the financial meltdown of 2008 was that banks encouraged people to take out loans on houses that they simply could not afford, which drove up the price of housing even more, which exacerbated the problem.

This is the same mistake that's driving the "I have to buy an expensive car" mentality. Most expensive cars get you coming and going: pricey Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedes, and big honking SUVs get terrible mileage. For example, the $151,000 Porsche 911 Turbo gets 17 mpg city, while the $24,000 Toyota Prius gets 58 mpg. The Porsche costs 6 times as much and gets about a quarter the mileage.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. The Porsche can go 205 mph. As if someone stupid enough to drop that much money on a car is actually competent to drive that fast...

The End of Reverse Racism and Race Baiting

Conservatives love to foam at the mouth about race baiting and reverse racism. Somehow, all racism is very minimal in the US today and anyone who cries racism is a (gasp!) race baiter!!! All of this caterwauling amounts to (yet another) responsibility dodge.

Turing to a much larger audience than this blog, I posted the following question on Quora.

In the United States, what is more prevalent: racism or reverse racism?

This was a question based on the poll results that I posted yesterday. Here are my favorite answers.

I feel like the headline could be more accurately written “half of all Americans don't understand racism” To more accurately answer the question, racism is a bigger problem. A more prevalent problem is ignorance of racism. I think the biggest problem is bystanders not condemning racism when it's taking place because they don't see it, or are afraid to speak out or don't know what to say.

That was the top answer so that means it was the most accurate. I think that most of the people who cry race baiter are largely ignorant of what racism is and are too lazy to take the responsibility to find out.

Do people of color sell their houses when a second or third white family move onto their street? How often do you hear about black police officers shooting unarmed white males? Has the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ever had a year when no white actors were nomimated for a major award? Do people of color get a six month prison sentence for a rape conviction? Of course there are instances where a qualified non-white student or applicant is selected over a qualified white applicant. It does happen. Other times it goes the other way. There is always the question, “Did race enter into the equation?” Things are much better than they used to be, but in my humble opinion, reverse racism is not as prevelent or as harmful as its conterpart.

Great answer and very illustrative of what actual racism looks like as opposed to the fictional oppression of white people. And now my favorite...

Racism. The people who talk about reverse racism haven’t suffered anything more than the refusal of other people to feel sorry for their racist ideas. There really isn’t any reverse racism of any sort in this nation. White people, particularly white men, are still in the driver’s seat. The problem in America is that the there are a lot of working class whites who think that they should be treated better than people of color in similar position just because they are white. It’s something they have been buying into ever since the days of Jim Crow.

Exactly. And these are the folks who support Donald Trump. For some extra fun, check out Richard White's brilliant answer and the ensuing comments.

So, that's pretty much it, folks. We can finally put an end to all this nonsense about reverse racism and race baiting. It doesn't exist.

And it never did.

The Scourge of Reverse Racism

Half of US Citizens think that reverse racism is a real problem. That's according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll. The numbers are even higher among working class white Americans — 66% of them believe that discrimination against white people is as big a problem as discrimination against "blacks and other minorities."

As noted in the piece, reverse racism doesn't exist. Here's why.


And that's the end of that bullshit...

Are They Merely Lonely?

This showed up in my Newsfeed recently and it really struck me as being true. I've felt pity in the past for gun rights activists but not like this. A big reason why this resonates with me is my experience interacting with gun bloggers and their commenters. I got the real sense that they were pretty lonely people who were likely bullied in secondary school. The guns make them feel important.

If we can understand how this works on a sociological level, we can finally begin to take substantive steps towards progress.

Trump Supporters View Blacks Negatively

In what can be filed quickly under "No Shit," Donald Trump's supporters are more likely to view blacks negatively, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Supporters of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump are more likely to describe African Americans as "criminal," "unintelligent," "lazy" and "violent" than voters who backed some Republican rivals in the primaries or who support Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll. Some 31 percent of Trump supporters said they "strongly agree" that "social policies, such as affirmative action, discriminate unfairly against white people,"

Right...because reverse racism is so much worse than racism...wow...

There Is A You

Now that the 89th Benghazi report has been released and no new evidence has come to light regarding malfeasance on the part of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Ladies Auxiliary of Hibbing, MN, it's my hope that we can move past the conservative obsession (see also: jealousy, Obama better than Bush on terrorism) with this event. It might have been nice, however, to have such a report and investigation on the Bush Administration after the 9-11 attacks considering they represented the worst attack on our home soil in our history and cost many more lives. But you know conservatives...zero fucking logic. All anger, hate and fear...

As a post script, this pleased me greatly.

Amb. Stevens' sister: Don't blame Clinton for Benghazi

Nice.

In short, here is my message to conservatives now that Benghazi is all wrapped up.

Why Gun Nuts Lie

David Smalley has a great piece up over at Patheos called "Why Gun Nuts Lie – I Know From Experience."  It is filled with many wonderful things but I'd like to start with two of the images from the comments.

Right. He was a carpenter after all:)

And fool them they have. Remember, a lot of these guys live in their parents basement and play video games all night so it makes sense. Here are some choice cuts from the rest of the piece.

Secondly, what if you were? I could hand you 50 AR-15s, give you 1000 illegal bombs, steal you a couple of tanks, and smuggle in some bazookas, and even let you fully train 500 of your closest friends. If the government wants your shit, they’re going to take it. You still wouldn’t be a match for even a single battalion of the United States Marine Corps. Not to mention the Air Force, Army, Navy, National Guard, Secret Service, FBI, CIA, and Seals. So stop acting like your little AR-15 is going to stop tyranny..

And you will give it to them without any sort of fight. Internet comments bravado is largely BS. Gun bloggers and their commenters like to brag about how they will never hand over their guns and would welcome a shootout with the federal government but they are completely full of shit. These are people who have families and children in their house and they will avoid any sort of conflict. And honestly, they are cowards at heart. The louder the protestation online, the quicker they will be the ones giving up their guns willingly.

The only reason you want to protect your second amendment now, is to justify buying an AR-15 or weapons for your home. I understand. I have them. But is it worth it? Does it really make you feel safe? If it does, it’s a false sense of security that statistically puts us in more danger.

Yes, it does. And, unlike the Gun Cult, I actually care about what happens to other people in my society. More guns mean more chances for accidents...accidents, btw, which happen more often than defensive gun use as study after study has shown.

Treat guns like cars. Mandatory licenses License renewals Mandatory training Mandatory insurance Operating laws Operating age limits Restrict some models Require safety inspections Mandatory registration Background checks. 

Amen. It's not all that I want but I'd go along with it for now to see how it would work.

Perhaps Smalley is the start of a trend and the ultimate defeat of the gun lobby will come from within. Isn't that what happened with tobacco? Reading this, I can see a few folks breaking ranks at first and then some sort of event will trigger a larger group breaking away. And then we might actually get some real progress.