Meant to post this in main star trek community, not ten forward, d’oh.
If this is the wrong place for this, I apologize in advance and it’s okay if it gets removed.
First, it was bad enough for Elon Musk references, but now…
The real life Paul Stamets, for which the character is named, hired union busters at his business, Fungi Perfecti.
https://www.thestand.org/2024/05/fungi-perfecti-workers-joining-together-with-liuna-252/
But rather than recognizing and respecting these workers’ right to join together free from management interference, the union reports that Fungi Perfecti has responded by hiring the union-busting firms of Littler Mendelson P.C. and the American Labor Group. These firms represent clients such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks, all of which have faced multiple Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board for illegally interfering in their employees’ freedom to unionize.
These firms have attempted to slow the momentum of Fungi Perfecti workers’ organizing drive with typical union-busting tactics like “unrequired” meetings that are heavily encouraged.
“ALG has been distributing anti-union propaganda that, in some cases, are outright lies,” said Derek Sewell, a warehouse worker for Fungi Perfecti. “But we will not be discouraged. It’s just unfortunate that they are spending thousands of dollars on union-busting to try to discourage us rather than investing in making Fungi Perfecti and better and more sustainable place to work.”
Anyway, my opinion is firmly that if they’re going to make references, it needs to be about people who are already dead, whose negatives are known, and who can’t come back and fuck your reference up by becoming a horrible person as your life goes on.
Because these living people keep revealing how Un-Star-Trek they are, imho.
Maybe the better approach is that we as audiences should understand that no real person is a saint and that whether or not it leaves a bad taste in our mouths, otherwise morally reprehensible people can still be responsible for profound achievements and progress.
Somebody else brought up Freud already, who many would call a deeply unethical man and whose conclusions are often debunked or thought better of in the modern era… Yet the impact of Freud, despite these shortcomings, remains basically inarguable.
I think the problem is that in the past 20 or so years we’ve started to read acknowledgement in media as endorsement by media, but those are two very separate things.
The thing is, when you look at Musk, he personally does not have any real accomplishments. He’s a wealthy man (inherited wealth that was made by exploiting black workers in South Africa’s emerald mines) who happened to fund existing projects that happened to have some semblance of success; in other words: any rich guy could have done the same thing. Worse yet, he is also a well-known man-child who supports wild conspiracy theories that are only popular with an unpopular segment of the population. Not to mention him being a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who has a penchant for suppression g free speech that does not align with his beliefs.
I fully agree with all of this and will add that he’s also obviously a nazi or at least nazi-sympathizer as well.
I definitely wasn’t speaking about Elon fucking Musk here because he has never been directly responsible for anything of value in the world, far as I can tell.
But still abstractly my point stands, assuming we’re identifying people with actual contributions to society rather than just the money to buy the contributions of others.
I suspect if social media has been what it is now when Edison or Jobs were alive, they might have self-immolated just as badly as Musk has. Both of them were by all accounts terrible people who history paints as visionaries because the force of their personalities gave them the weight of the innovations which occurred under their watch. Taking credit for the achievements of your underlings and business partners is a long tradition across many industries.
People in the future got it wrong, that’s all. It happens more often than most of us want to admit.