Corrupt Governance as a Consequence of Fear of Change

Apartheid was bad. If that's a controversial statement for you, then you may not be ready for what follows.

One way that apartheid is not often presented, though, is as a form of corruption. There are already enough bad things to say about it, so this seldom seems necessary to add, but I think it's useful to frame it that way, to compare with current national problems we face.

Apartheid can be seen as nepotism on an unusually massive scale: Ensuring the financial and political success of "your people" over anyone else. Unlike the usual individual-level acts we normally associate with nepotism (giving a less qualified person a position or perk, contrary to official requirements), apartheid went a few levels further, ensuring that only the desired people could even become qualified, and that the undesired majority wouldn't just be deprived of jobs, but of all sorts of resources, right down to their choice of homes. Apartheid enshrined pro-white nepotism as the official requirement to follow, not something contrary to it.

There was also, of course, plenty of conventional, "lesser" government corruption by the apartheid government, and it's ridiculous to say that things only became corrupt here after 1994. And yet, it's become widespread, almost cliche, for white South Africans today to bemoan current government corruption, with the implication that this is a new, black thing.

And of course, not all whites opposed to government corruption have consciously racist motives, and of course we'd all be better off, black and white, if corruption was ended. It's a good goal. And it's hard to argue that certain individuals are anything but obviously corrupt. The trouble is, most white South Africans don't seem to see, in the bigger picture, how they're indirectly complicit in corrupt systems, and are often making it easier for corrupt officials to justify their actions.

Consider this: Service delivery protests have become so routine in South Africa that the media no longer bothers to cover the smaller ones at all, and usually only covers larger ones if there's an element of violence (because that sells better, apparently). This is ordinary black South Africans, complaining to the government that they should be providing the essential services a modern state is supposed to. Water. Electricity. Housing. Sanitation. Education.

You don't see white people staging service delivery protests, though, because for the most part, we're still fine. The buckling of the electricity grid over the last few years was one major exception. Apart from that, white South Africans are as comfortable (if not as happy) as ever. Whites like to whine a lot, but we have little to drive us to take any greater action, because the status quo still measurably favours us. We remain more employed than other race groups, better paid, better educated, and still tend to live in the best-resourced areas. We know this isn't a coincidence; this is exactly what apartheid was designed to produce.

Note that white incomes started going down back in the '80s, and went up again from 1994. Black income can fairly be characterised as "pretty damn flat".
Source: The Economist

"But the government and/or the ANC is black!", white people often shout at me. And it's not a crazy question to ask (provided you re-word it into a question): Why is the black-majority post-1994 government not doing much more - as much as possible - to bring about racial equality at an economic level? Why not push with maximum urgency for the full extent of the goals set out in the Freedom Charter? Why hold back?

Explanation 1 makes no sense at all: That they hate the wider black population as much as the unapologetically racist apartheid government did. I reject this out of hand.


Explanation 2 is that too many key government officials have become corrupt, and are now more interested in their own pockets than in the bigger project of nationwide equality. There's certainly some evidence of this, but it's an incomplete explanation, if you look at it closely. How would so many people get so corrupt so quickly? The racist assumption (sometimes subtly hinted at, sometimes stated plainly) is that it's a "black" thing, that whites are inherently more law-abiding, or shit like that. As my opening paragraphs illustrate, the apartheid government was no stranger to corruption, same as anywhere around the world. This explanation also always glosses over one very important follow-up question: Who's paying the bribes? Corruption takes two. A corrupt government dealing only with lawful entities will never have any chance to act corruptly.

And this leads me to explanation 3: White people. And here it gets a little complicated, and it's easy to see why even well-meaning people don't naturally come to this conclusion, and how less well-meaning people can use that to conceal selfish intentions. I'd even say this explanation starts out with good intentions, probably.

In the late '80s and early '90s, when it became accepted that South Africa would become democratic, there wasn't just a simple hand-over of power. There were years of negotiations, some public and well-recorded, others private, informal and maybe not recorded at all. The bottom line of these negotiations was that white South Africans would be welcomed to stay and participate in the democracy, keeping their experience and savings around for as long as possible, with an emphasis on stability. Nobody would benefit, it was argued, from any sort of rushed scramble. Things were generally set up to keep whites happy. Nothing was to be taken directly, nothing had to be surrendered, and very little would actually change for whites, apart from symbolic things, like the national anthem (well, part of it), the flag, and details like that. Land restitution was done on the "willing seller, willing buyer" principle, as if it were a normal market transaction, and not the compulsory return of stolen property. There would even be a government of national unity, sharing the executive branch among many parties, instead of just letting the parliamentary majority take it for themselves. This meant there were still white apartheid officials in senior posts after 1994, not to mention all the lower levels of state bureaucrats.

The only noteworthy scheme that might have cost whites anything was affirmative action (and its sequels, BEE and BBBEE), but this is pretty heavily over-hyped. It only applies to state employers, and to private employers looking for state money, which immediately makes it irrelevant to a large number of employers. It's also had virtually no impact on white employment rates, which have remained comfortably above 90% for decades, while black employment rates have wobbled wildly in the 60%s and 70%s (and as the graph above shows, black incomes also didn't suddenly rocket with the adoption of affirmative action. White fears of afirmative action turning us all into paupers never materialised; meanwhile, black South Africans have not really gained that much from it. I think it's a reasonable, fair policy, but clearly not enough on its own.

(I'm focusing solely on race in this post, but note that there's definitely a similar pattern along gender lines too. The apartheid people were total misogynists, and only ever gave white women the vote to try to undermine growing cooperation between feminist and Africanist movements, and all the economic stats for women are now predictably always worse than average. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence until 1994. Non-christians didn't get much respect either. This system was shit for most people, and all of those consequences need to be dealt with too. For simplicity and brevity, though, I'm keeping this post on race; assume that many of the same principles apply to other factors too.)

So, in general, the average white South African man has seen little real change in his quality of life. (But try communicate this big-picture perspective to him when he's too emotional to want to look at graphs and statistics, too biased to care if he's wrong, and too hung up on individual-level anecdotes to pay any attention to the over-all national pattern!) So how does this cause government corruption? Well, so far, it doesn't, although it should be obvious that it becomes much harder to pay for improvements for 90% of the population if you're not allowed to significantly reduce the unbalanced, excessive spending on the other 10%.

Another part of the "keep whites happy" compromises of the '90s was not aimed at individuals like me, but at business. The private sector isn't elected, it isn't ANC, it isn't black (and again, the handful of anomalous exceptions you can point to don't override the broader patterns). Very often, it isn't even South African, and the mining sector especially has been channelling billions to mainly British and American shareholders for over a century.

And that's why explanation 2 doesn't make full sense on its own: Because it ignores that the people paying the bribes are still predominantly wealthy whites, and without that influence, there would be little a corrupt government official could achieve. It may have started with big-scale scandals, and it may be most obvious with truly evil abuses, but it continues a bit at a time whenever any one of us uses our greater wealth to elbow our way through life. This is just as true of the times we do so illegally (like when we bribe a traffic cop to escape a ticket) and the times we're technically, legally doing nothing wrong (like paying domestic workers as little as possible, or hiring top teachers away from government schools to more expensive private schools). We all know people who boast about it, and often we even benefit from it indirectly. During my undergrad years, for example, we had plenty of parties in big, expensive, Northern Suburbs houses that later turned out to have been funded by guys ripping off a rural employment scheme in the Free State - and the faces in the photos from those events all look pretty uniformly white. We may not have committed the crime, but we undeniably benefitted from it. And those black women in rural FS undeniably lost their livelihoods. It's one case that encapsulates everything I'm trying to say here.

In effect, white South Africa has spent the last 22 years paying to keep things from changing, to keep from having to sacrifice any level of comfort, rather than paying to bring about the changes that will make things more fair and just. It seems like a bad deal to me.

A lot of commercial and social media outrage has gone into condemning the corruption accusations associated with the India-based Gupta family, and I have to agree that these have been pretty egregious. But they're also something of an exception; most corrupt businesses that we know of are not Indian. I almost get the feeling that, in some circles, the outrage against the Guptas is less about the specific things they've done, and more about how they've gate-crashed someone else's corrupt turf, and spoiled the party by failing to conceal things the way their predecessors did. (Cultural differences... what you gonna do?)

I suppose this also partly reflects the big spike in Asian South African wealth on that graph; wealthy whites have hardly set a good example for the even smaller Indian minority.

This is not the easiest problem in the world to visualise. It's a puzzle with a lot of different pieces, some in different rooms, and some in different times. I've tried to lay it out as neatly as possible here. And I think the one feasible solution I can see in all of it, is for white South Africans to admit we're still fucking things up (whether intentionally or not), and stop trying to control the national narrative. We basically have to shut up, stand back, and let ordinary black South Africans lead the way. We should have done that decades ago already.

Star Trek Fan Series: New CBS/Paramount Restrictions follow up

The author of the new fan Trek guidelines, John van Citters, has discussed the intent behind the rules, and some of my concerns have been assuaged. Obviously we don't know what all his colleagues think, nor the limits imposed on him by studio management, nor how people other than van Citters will try to impose the guidelines in future, but I'm prepared to accept that his intentions are good, at least.

The main concern he mentions, which you can hear in more detail in the podcast above, is the indirect (presumably unintended) escalation in commercialisation of fan Trek productions over the years. Every impressive new step that anyone takes raises the stakes for other fan productions (at least, the ones with competitive personalities), and it's not hard for CBS/Paramount to point to examples of this getting out of hand, with fan donations going to things other than essential production costs. You could argue that the examples so far aren't that serious, but combined with the trend of escalation, it's not unreasonable to act to cap this trend before it gets too silly.

I think that's fair. I'd hold up Star Trek: The Romulan War as an example of a fan production that didn't let serious underfunding get in the way of making something shitty-but-good. Fan productions shouldn't be about having expensive, expert-quality resources bought right off the shelf, with no personal effort by the creators. The DIY aspect is clearly an important element of a fan production.

I'm even coming around to really approving of rule 7, the way van Citters intends it, though it may be the hardest to enforce. One of the most frequently recurring complaints you'll see in my list of fan Trek reviews is the problem of stories that go directly against the core ideals that Star Trek is built around. And I don't mean testing the limits of these ideals in interesting and creative ways, I mean just flatly rejecting or ignoring them. Violence is the most obviously common of these, and you can read in detail all of my objections to mindless shooty pew-pew without any attempt at diplomacy. Many fan productions also have problems with the inclusivity Trek has (almost) always pushed for, and this is trickier, because sexism, racism, and other such discrimination isn't usually as immediately obvious on screen as phasers blasting and things exploding. It takes more focus and concentration to identify problems like that.

But the point is that rule 7 is aimed at keeping fans on track a bit better in these ways. It's going to be very difficult to say what is and isn't "real" Trek morality, and edge cases may be very difficult to judge. What I think is good here, though, is that rule 7 puts the burden on fans to think it over for themselves, because that's what I think has been lacking from the worse fan scripts: They're not intentionally malevolent, probably, they're just written by people who've not been critical enough of their own ideas, not stopped think exactly what it is they're communicating. And if you don't like a lot of stopping and thinking, then maybe Star Trek isn't really for you after all.

The rule I still have the single biggest problem with is rule 1, the 15 minute time limit. Van Citters argues in the podcast that fans shouldn't limit themselves by thinking that Trek has to be a certain length, and I'd turn that back around at him: Why does it have to be the certain length of 15 minutes? I've seen some great shorts, it's true. But I've also seen plenty of great longs that would be really hard to cut down. If there were a really good reason given for why there needs to be a time limit at all, I might concede that it could even be good for fan writers to be challenged to fit things in that tightly. But since there doesn't seem to be any clear motive for the time limit, then why bother with it at all? A longer run time doesn't favour anyone unfairly, it doesn't escalate the funding problem. Long productions have been part of fan Trek for as far back as my records go.

What's also still unclear is what the line "no additional seasons, episodes, parts, sequels or remakes" is supposed to mean. The Potemkin Pictures people have interpreted it to mean only episodic series are allowed, with no sequels to specific episodes, no ongoing unlimited strings of episodes to get around the 15-minute limit. I hope that interpretation is right, for now, though even that I'm not certain is really a good restriction. If the 15-minute limit goes, then that part ought to go too.

Rule 5 is an interesting case. It can be argued both ways pretty well, and I'd suggest the solution is to have a separate third category between official productions and fan productions; call it 'alumni productions'. Ring-fence those professional-amateurs in their own separate play pen, so we can still see their ideas, but make it clear that they're not pure amateurs. I can see that getting more complicated, as they need to bring in non-alumni to help out, but since these professionals are the people the studios can speak to directly most easily, I'm sure they can work it out between them.

I'm now less concerned than last week, and I still don't trust the upper management of CBS and Paramount (who, after all, let Abrams fuck with the integrity of their IP way more than any fan production could). But I'm optimistic that at least there's someone there who'll be fairly fair and open to corrections.

no additional seasons, episodes, parts, sequels or remakes.   - See more at: http://www.startrek.com/fan-films#sthash.kdDmbMov.dpuf

Star Trek Fan Series: Comments on New CBS/Paramount Restrictions

In the short time since I've mutated from someone who knew nothing about Star Trek fan series into someone who knows an unreasonable amount, the official reaction to these productions by the copyright holders has gone into major flux. Until 2015, fans were left pretty well free to create what they liked, and my list in the link above shows they did so vigorously, often in lame and awkward ways, sometimes in wonderful, exciting ways. Then the Axanar lawsuit sprang up, and 2016 saw a grinding halt to many fan productions. The May dropping of that suit seemed to signal a return to the previous status quo, or something close to it. Even though they got Abrams to announce that, it did otherwise feel like a conciliatory gesture, and acceptance of symbiosis, rather than parasitism.

[Edit: It seems I'm a little behind, and the lawsuit has not actually been dropped at all, despite the public claim by Abrams.]

Now an official set of guidelines has been jointly released by CBS and Paramount, who control the Star Trek intellectual property, and it seems they've rather missed the fans' point, or were bluffing us all along. Their new restrictions seem to expect little more than volunteer brand advertising, not deep story-telling that creates entirely new material. In particular, their requirements that fan productions not exceed 15 minutes, and not form ongoing series, using only officially licensed merchandise, would seem to spell out almost exactly: "Make a standard short Youtube clip to sell our toys."

Maybe that's just my interpretation, but I think what they're undoubtedly not saying, in any sense, is, "Please continue to tell stories of your own that expand on all the many possibilities of this setting".

Applying these guidelines retroactively to the list I've been drawing up in my older blog post, and cutting out all productions that violate them, would leave hardly any behind. Of the 42 series and movies on my list (at the time that I write this), I believe only the following don't break the new guidelines and would be allowed:

• Redshirt Blues
• Steam Trek: The Moving Picture

And that's it. Two little parodies made decades ago - and I'm not even certain Redshirt Blues passes the 'officially licensed merchandise' rule perfectly. A couple others might sneak through if they take the words 'Star' and/or 'Trek' out of their titles, but these are still only tiny little shorts. The remaining 90% of productions are the big, narrative-driven ones, the ones with actual stories. And sure, I've already claimed that many of those stories are shit, but that's the nature of art; it can't all be good. But absolutely none of it can be good, if it's banned outright.

I have strong thoughts about the jurisprudence behind intellectual property laws, and that inevitably leads into a much wider socio-economics lecture. But let me keep this post short and focused. The bottom line is that these new guideline are a de facto ban on exactly the kinds of productions that fans have been making. CBS/Paramount may have found it awkward from a publicity point of view to shut down Axanar so late in its gestation, but these new guidelines effectively shut down everything of this nature that might be made in future. It's really the same demand from them, but with a grandparent clause added to keep the Axanar hubbub from spoiling their 2016 movie and 2017 series releases.

And that's the major point of this post: To point out that CBS and Paramount really didn't back off at all. They just stepped more quietly to the same point. (I knew we couldn't trust any apparent good news delivered by Abrams.)

[EDIT: This proposal seems like a reasonable, constructive response, if it can grow large enough.]

[EDIT: A week later, there's some useful follow up to consider.]

WFRP2E Speed Combat (House Rules WIP)

I really like the 2nd edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. For its intended function and within its intended setting, it's one of the friendliest, smoothest-running systems I've seen. Its links to WFB remain obvious and sufficiently useful for inter-game borrowing, but it also stands alone as a proper roleplaying system of its own. It's not perfect, but it's flexible enough that even a mediocre GM can improvise through most complications and uncertainties.

The biggest trouble I've had with it has been excessive combat. I realise we're talking about a setting designed to maintain perpetual war between every group that can pick up a stick and call it a war banner, but that's to serve the miniatures game. The roleplaying game just uses that huge conflict as background flavour, something the player characters seldom enter directly themselves. Most of the official early '80s and '90s WFRP adventures (especially the excellent Enemy Within campaign that we're currently playing through again) were explicitly written in a style based more on Call of Cthulhu than Dungeons & Dragons. And their character levelling system (the 'careers') fits with this too; it's very unlikely any PC will ever reach the point that they can stand toe-to-toe with a major demon, dragon, or similarly powerful monster.

Yet WFRP2 remains burdened with a more D&D-like set of combat rules, inherited and adapted from the Warhammer minis combat rules. And combat in WFB (any edition) can be tedious as fuck when you've got a huge block of basic troops flailing stupidly at another huge block of basic troops, each side gradually wearing the other down with millions of dice rolls over several rounds. WFRP seldom has such great numbers, but its combat rules allow for more detail and complexity, so a 5-vs.-5 skirmish can last for even more rounds, and see just as many dice rolled, dragging the game on for hours, all to reveal that... a group of scholars and merchants and peasants are not very good at hitting stuff!

From a story-telling perspective, that's lame: A huge time investment to do very little and not advance an investigation plot at all. And that's annoying enough when the plot-as-written calls for a big fight scene against a group of, say, Chaos cultists. Then everyone's neatly boxed in to a fairly featureless warehouse for 2 hours, all to reach the final point of saying, "One side or the other won, and the following people got injured doing it." Unless you specifically want a combat game over a more plot-driven game, that's pretty inefficient and even boring.

And it's worse again when the combat wasn't even planned. It makes sense that the thief character would try a bit of burglary while in town. It makes sense that she'll fail from time to time. And it makes sense that sometimes that failure will be so terrible, no matter how lenient the GM wants to be, that it only makes sense that the town guard will be fully alerted, drawing a huge fight to the players. Sometimes there are believable ways around this, but the towns of the Empire are usually small and compact and densely populated; raising the alarm is easy to do (in a setting where invasion is frequent), and sneaking around is not. So now we're running an impromtu cops & robbers scene, where the only interesting outcomes are death, capture or escape. Three outcomes. Shouldn't be hard, should be a minor blip in the story-telling process. And instead, the rules as written turn it into yet another half hour or more burned away rolling dice.

So this is the long, waffling background to my new house rules. The combat in WFRP2 definitely isn't the most painfully slow I've experienced by a long margin (Pathfinder has, at times, been far worse, and the various Star Trek RPGs always seem to get shitty combat rules, as I've noted before), and sometimes it's even fun and interesting to play a decent WFRP fight scene. If you want to run a weapon-centric game, then it's actually quite a good option. But if you want to rush through most combat, then I propose the following (and bear in mind, this in the first version of this, pre-playtest). The main idea is to reduce combat to a single skill check, over a single round, same as any other skill check.

When a fight scene occurs, at the GM's option, each character in the fight rolls one attack roll (WS or BS, as appropriate).

If a character rolls a failure, note the number of degrees of failure. Otherwise, that character scores no significant hits.

If a character rolls a success, note the number of degrees of success. For each degree of success, that character has scored one hit against an opponent. Assign hits to specific targets. Assume all characters are free to move around as normal; character position only matters if the GM rules that someone definitely can't be hit (out of range, no matter how the attacker moves around).

(If you're using hit locations, the first hit is on the usual location, with the attack roll's dice swapped around. Subsequent hits land in locations equal to the original location value, plus or minus (attacker's choice) 10 x the number of the hit beyond the first. The attacker may never choose hit locations greater than 100 or less than 01. For example, you score 3 hits with a roll of 23, so hit 1 (n=0) lands on location 32 (23 reversed). Hit 2 (n=1) could be either location 22 or 42 (32 +- 10n). Hit 3 (n=2) could be either on 12 or 52 (32 +- 10n).)

For each hit, roll the attacker's damage, per the standard weapon damage rules, and subtract from that per the standard armour and toughness bonus rules. Defending characters with parry and dodge may use these as normal too, once each per attacker. (I've assumed that once per attacker is a reasonable substitute for once per round). The guiding principle is advancing the plot, adding more chances for the player characters to do interesting things, not roll dice.

If any target is killed and there are still hits assigned to it, re-assign these to other targets.

If either side is completely killed, they lose by default.

Once all individual hits have been resolved, for each side add up all its characters' degrees of success, and subtract from that all their degrees of failure. The side with the higher total degrees "wins" the fight scene, however the GM chooses to intrepret that.

The default assumption should be that the losing side flees. This is what most people would do in real life.

It's up to the GM to decide what sort of fleeing would be appropriate and possible, though if the player characters are the ones fleeing, then they should have some say in where they hope to escape to. Consider movement speed, encumbrance, stealth, terrain, dumb luck, and any other relevant factors.

If there is a compelling reason that the losing side might want to hold on to the bitter end (special training, Orc culture, defending their homes, etc.), then the closest thing the group has to a leader character may make a Command roll to try to keep everyone in place. With a successful Command check, that side still loses, but not by fleeing (see capture/kill, below). If the winning side includes the Terrifying talent, then the losing side automatically loses all Command rolls to resist fleeing.

(It's weird that WFB has this mechanism more or less built in, as Leadership checks, and yet WFRP's rules just assume that everyone's default choice is to fight to the death.)

If a losing group is incapable of fleeing (trapped, rooted to the ground, zombie mindlessness, geas, etc.), then they still lose, but not by fleeing (see capture/kill, below).

If a group loses, but doesn't flee (for whatever reason), then the winning group has to decide whether to capture or kill the losing group. Capture keeps more story threads open (especially if the players are the losing side!), but certain characters may be immune to capture (ghosts and such, which must instead be busted; characters with suicide pills, etc.). For other characters, capture may mean pretty much the same as kill, unless the captors take special precautions (I'm thinking fish out of water?). Resolve this decision on a case by case basis, i.e. roleplay it out. Consider each side's motives, morals, resources, and context.

(I think far too few roleplaying combat systems have substantial capture rules, even though that's a very common result in real skirmishes. It basically means the Altdorf city watch, by the letter of the roleplaying rules, will almost always kill suspects, and almost never actually arrest anyone.)

The one thing I know I haven't accounted for yet is magic. Maybe some sort of channeling test, similar to an attack roll, to see by degrees of success how many castings may be attempted?

This is still a lot of detail, a lot more bookkeeping than most other skill rolls in the system, but I think cutting out the multiple rounds and piles of pointless rolls will speed things up a lot, without altering the end result to the detriment of a good game. You'll also notice that I intentionally haven't removed anything at all from the original character and gear stats, so that when the GM does want to run a more detailed combat (maybe a boss fight against the supreme villain NPC, or a player-vs.-player duel to decide the fate of the party), then it's easy enough to revert to the official combat rules. Nothing is lost, and the GM gains the ability to fast forward through the more tedious slogfests.

I'll revise this once we've given it a play test. In the mean time, feel free to add suggestions for getting this to run even smoother and easier.

How EC Henry Missed the Point

Random youtuber EC Henry wants you to know that JJ Abrams and his writers totally, seriously got Star Trek, you guys. And, lucky you, I've got a free morning to spell out exactly why he's talking crap. His video "Did JJ's Writers Know ANYthing about Star Trek!?", is built around the central straw argument that visual and dialogue references clipped from TOS are what trekkies hated about the Abrams movies and yet are what make the movies so close to TOS.

First, I've never heard anyone complain that 2009 and Into Darkness were bad because they contained callbacks, references and homages. These were expected, and mostly they were done adequately. However, they're nowhere near as subtle as EC Henry seems to think they were, and he's pretty patronising when his video suggests that I must have just missed all those "clever", "hidden" references. I'm a serious trekkie, I hold the pretend rank of captain and own the uniform(s) to match; of course I fucking spotted the "Yesteryear" links immediately. I just didn't give too much of a shit, because these stolen images (including the primary colours uniforms) are not what make a good story. What makes a good story is putting the images and dialogue together in an interesting, meaningful way. "Blowin' shit up" was not especially interesting or meaningful, especially by Star Trek's past standards.

What many fans (including me) have instead complained about is how obvious and clunky many of the references to TOS were, especially in Into Darkness. We got some pretty crappy storytelling from the crude stitching together of as many well-known and unmistakable (but generally unrelated) references from TOS and the TOS movies as the Abrams writers could manage. It's also the exact opposite of the subtle and clever referencing that EC Henry claims is so remarkable. I'm not impressed by either style of referencing, though the crudely obvious stuff was really annoying.

At the same time, I've never heard anyone suggest that the Abrams writers knew nothing at all about Trek, so the title of EC Henry's video is also made of straw. Sure, JJ Abrams himself is brick-ignorant and even antagonistic towards Trek by his own admission. But obviously his other writers knew just enough to show us that they knew exactly enough to fuck it up and no more than that; THAT's the real complaint.

via W. Wheaton

Second, as I've argued in excessive detail already, the thing that made Star Trek what it was, the truly distinctive aspect of the original series and the main link between it and the later series, was not the look of it, nor anything else that superficial, but Roddenberry's sense of human optimism. EC Henry is eager to dismiss this "philosophical stuff" as a post-TNG contaminant, but it was plainly there all along, and Roddenberry and the TOS writers are on record explaining, repeatedly, that they always wanted the show to be about making the world better, in a humanist, social justice sort of way. The silly action scenes were usually crammed in there at the studio's insistence, on the assumption that audiences are stupid. EC Henry apparently doesn't know the historical background of the series well enough to get this crucial detail right. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion about what he personally enjoys and doesn't enjoy, but he steps into Bullshitland when he tries to second-guess the original creators' intentions.

Third, a lesser complaint, EC Henry implies that trekkies hated 2009 because it was a reboot, and then tries to use TMP and TNG to say that we've already accepted these reboots in the past, so we're stupid for not accepting it again now. I don't think this is true. I was genuinely eager for the 2009 movie when it came out, and what left me disappointed was not that there were New Things, but that they'd done such a shitty job with those New Things. TNG changed things from TOS, true, but nearly all trekkies accept these changes as good, worthwhile and for the better, no matter how much they loved TOS before it. But 2009, as previously noted, just fucked things around, adding little new of any value, while also failing (contrary to EC Henry's assertions) to bring back lost wonders from TOS. It wasn't bad because it was a reboot, it was just a bad reboot.

I write all of this, not just because I have some time to kill and it amuses me, but also because I remain hopeful that the upcoming 2017 series will finally return us to my idea of "real" Star Trek, in the sense of being good science fiction (and not just "a thing that happens to be in space") with a strong sense of optimism and progressive ethics. I also hope that all of the many fan productions out there will choose to head more and more in that same direction, and show just how many great stories can come from a wide variety of creative minds all playing around with the same shared vision, but with fresh characters and contexts. I would find that far more satisfying than EC Henry's unimaginative notion that we just have to keep repeating the past, over and over, cutting and pasting from what has already been done, without really understanding what it's all for.