Star Trek is (still) incredibly relevant, even in an age when it’s not cool to be “cerebral”.
There’s this moment in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country where Chekov, trying to find common ground, asks of the visiting Klingon ambassadors, “You do believe that all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights?”
The Chancellor’s daughter points out that “inalien” and “human rights” are racist phrases when you’re talking to people from another planet who aren’t human.
When most political discussion is talking past one another and civil discourse is out the window, it’s a nice reminder that context is subjective – even things that most could agree on are subverted by mostly harmless word choice evoking the wrong subjective context.
A decade of degrading political discourse all wrapped up in 30 seconds of dialog from a “silly” show set in space about the adventures of future humans.
