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Do you guys think Barbie exists in the Star Trek universe? Because it would be really funny if they started making like diversity barbies when we discovered aliens were real. Like whenever someone joins the federation, they make barbies of them.

This is Vulcan Barbie, this is Tellarite Barbie, and this is Andorian Barbie, together with Star Fleet Barbie, they make up the Federation Barbies® collection. And then people were like but we want more representation, so they started making a "Federation and friends" collection, and there's Ferengi Barbie, Orion Barbie, Bajorian Barbie etc etc

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They're trying so hard to make this a culture war thing instead of a class consciousness moment.

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I respect that so much!

jimmy carter stayed long enough to vote for who he hoped would be the first Black/South Asian female president and then noped out before he had to live through another presidency of the orange man who somehow beat her

fair enough, man

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i could go on for hours.

this article puts some of my thoughts into words

edit:

here's the deal- can Spock be played by Goyim? sure yeah, Quinto did a fine job, and I appreciate that he spent time with Nimoy to understand the character better.

but the point basically is that Spock wouldn't be Spock if Nimoy hadn't been Jewish. He would not be the character we know and hold dear. Literally the Vulcan salute alone is entirely due to Nimoy seeing something that struck a chord with him in temple when he was a child.

Nimoy created a character with traits we could identify with, a character that might make us feel seen. The article is largely satire, but the point is there is something in Nimoy so entwined with the character that someone else playing him will always feel... off.

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GO APOLLO GO

SIC 'EM

EVERYONE LEND HIM YOUR STRENGTH!

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THE BIG VULCAN BIOLOGY POST (aka Vulcan is a Hell Planet)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a biologist, astrophysicist, neurologist, animal psychologist or literally anything that would qualify me to talk about this with 100% confidence. This is the result of dozens of headcanons and obsessive deep dive research. I don’t want this post to be three miles long, so after I address the planetary stuff I will oblige y’all with a Read More.

Adsfasdkfjhaslkdfh I’ve been working on this post for almost a month SO HERE WE GO!

First of all, Vulcan (aka T’Khasi) is a HELL PLANET, which is part of the reason they’re so badass, I say this for the following reasons:

No moon(s) (natural satellites)

Sodium (Salt) is so rare on the planet that Vulcan’s oceans are freshwater

It’s a “Super-Earth” (as in big chonkin’ planet of similar composition to earth in the “goldilocks region”)

Let’s do this.

“Vulcan has no moon Ms. Uhura.”

-Spock, The Man Trap

Tons of things change about our planet if there was no moon:

Much darker nights (no moonlight)

Much lower sea levels since there is no gravity from the moon to pull it upward.

Lower and weaker tides because the water is pulled by the sun instead of the moon, and it depends on how large the Vulcan solar system’s sun is for how big the waves are.

Stronger winds from faster planet rotation.

Depending on whether the axis of the planet would straighten or tilt further without the moon’s pull, combined with the faster rotation would lead to more severe seasons (strong tilt) or no seasons at all (no tilt)

The first factor may lead to Vulcan eyes being very catlike even if they aren’t nocturnal (I think they’re crepesucular but we’ll get into that later). Which given the likely nature of their blood and their herbivorous eating habits they probably aren’t. The sky would still be so dark that our human eyes couldn’t even see our hands in front of us, being blind when the sun goes down could be a death sentence. Alternatively, if they didn’t develop strong night vision that may be one of the reasons why they have such strong senses of hearing.

The stronger winds, faster rotation, and stronger (or nonexistent) seasons come from the lack of resistance and friction that stronger tides and the moon’s pull create on our planet. I suspect that Vulcan is larger, or at least denser than Earth, but I’ve been informed that according to the TMP novelization that it does rotate faster. I also think that Vulcan’s tilt is on the more extreme end to get the hostile extremes like storms and heat that we see on Vulcan.

If you look at this image of Vulcan, water covers way less of the planet’s surface than Earth. I don’t think this is necessarily because Vulcan has less water, but that it isn’t spread as far because of the lack of moon, and the fact that the oceans are freshwater, I’ll get into that shortly.

“My ancestors spawned from a different ocean than yours.”

-Spock, The Man Trap

In the Star Trek: The Original Series (third) pilot The Man Trap, there is a creature that kills its victims by draining their bodies completely of salt. Spock encounters the creature but does not die, implying his (and Vulcans overall) body contains little to no salt. His justification is that his species did not evolve from a salinized ocean.

What does it mean to have oceans with no salt?

This has to mean that sodium is a very rare mineral on Vulcan, as the reason our oceans are so salinized is due to erosion of minerals by rainfall, carried from river to ocean. Salt in the ocean is also generated by submarine volcanic activity, which means either that the volcanoes on Vulcan (which we definitely know exist) somehow don’t produce salt, or the vast majority of the submarine volcanoes have been inactive for millions if not billions of years. The active volcanoes on Vulcan must be very far inland and/or Vulcan has almost no rivers, which given how hot the planet is, wouldn’t actually be too much of a stretch of the imagination.

Which means every single lifeform on T’Khasi, including Vulcans, evolved biosystems that exist without (or with very little) salt content. Any salt that exists would likely be deep beneath the planet’s surface, and within volcanoes.

No saltwater has a ton of consequences:

Plants (like underwater algae) are rarer and may not photosynthesize the same way Earth plants do, meaning less oxygen and more carbon dioxide, which means more greenhouse effect, which means higher temperatures.

The lack of salt would also mean less diverse plant life (at least as humans know it) and given the lack of visible rivers and vast swaths of desert on Vulcan, we can safely say vegetation must be hardier and infrequent.

Lower sea levels as the oceans would have lower density due to lack of salt.

Little to no water convection, which salt is crucial for on Earth. Which means warm ocean water doesn’t move to cold regions and vice versa. Creating extremes, the equator being obscenely hot, and polar waters freezing at the poles more extensively.

Lack of convection means more frequent and stronger storms like hurricanes.

If you thought the lack of a moon made Vulcan inhospitable, compound it with the low sodium factor and you’ve got a planet of even more severe extremes than before. The heat, and the decrease of plant diversity definitely explain why the vast majority of Vulcan is rocky desert, even being near the water poses more extreme dangers than it would on earth due to the increased frequency of hurricanes.

“Mr. Spock is much stronger than an ordinary human being.”

-Kirk, This Side of Paradise

I am almost 100% sure that Vulcan is either bigger or denser than Earth. Which would explain why Vulcans are so much stronger than Humans and other species that exist on similar gravity worlds.

Effects of a high-gravity planet or “Super-Earth” include:

Everything is shorter or has very strong foundations, plants, animals, structures, and people.

More “Armageddon” class asteroids would hit the planet (like the one that killed the dinosaurs and created the Gulf of Mexico)

Larger liquid mantle under the planet’s surface, higher pressure under the surface as well.

Weaker magnetic field due to lack of convection in the planet’s core (not to be confused with the mantle interacting with the planet’s crust). Which means a weaker atmosphere, lower magnetism in surface metals, and increased vulnerability to solar flares.

More volcanically and seismically active due the the increase in the mantle’s size and generated heat, more earthquakes, and more volcanic eruptions.

Would have to have a smaller sun but be closer in orbit to it than earth.

Extremely deep oceans, potentially with water under so much pressure at the bottom that it becomes solid like ice. Luckily Vulcan is not an ocean world, because the pressure would block the planet’s core from interacting with the atmosphere, which would prevent life as we know it from happening.

There is plenty of evidence for this on so many levels. We never see any plant life similar to trees on Vulcan. Nor animals significantly larger than Vulcans, the ones that are bigger are much more muscular. Vulcan’s sky is more red than blue because of the lack of oxygen molecules for the light from the sun to filter as blue. I actually headcanon that Spock is unusually tall for a Vulcan because of his human heritage (Leonard Nimoy was around 6ft tall) , and may have had heart and muscle problems in his teens and early adulthood while on Vulcan.

Perhaps Vulcans are the result of many more extinction level events than we are, contributing to their hardiness. Perhaps they are, evolutionarily, not too much older than we are, and had more incentive to develop extraterrestrial technology than we have, so that they could repel Armageddon Class meteors and defend their planet against Solar Flares? Space travel being born out of self-preservation rather than curiosity. Which would absolutely account for their attitudes in the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise.

It could be that Vulcans still maintain a semi-nomadic lifestyle even today because their planet is so incredibly volatile. Unsentimental and utilitarian in anything less than the most sacred of architecture long before they adopted the teachings of Surak. Their own survival more valuable than any structure that would inevitably be damaged or destroyed by their planet’s harsh environment.

In summary, Vulcan is a Nightmare Planet because:

So, so many much natural disasters, like, so many, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, twisters, just, so many more than Earth.

Water is relegated to specific locations in the world rather than spread across it due to lack of flow and lower sea levels.

Extreme temperature changes, intense heat, intense cold, hard to breathe, stronger gravity.

Due to the planet’s hostility, there is a smaller diversity of life than we have here on earth, which means fewer and hardier food sources that, like Vulcans, are very difficult to kill.

So… How do they handle it? What features have they developed to adapt and thrive in such an inhospitable place?

First thing is first, lets talk about

BLOOD

Afficher davantage

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i was really hoping the story about the decomposing babies would be revealed to be slightly less horrible than it is but human rights watch just confirmed it which is making me sick

the doctors left five children behind at al-rantisi (also known as al-nasr) hospital because it was being targeted by the IDF. the hrw report says it was targeted by airstrikes—testimony from a nurse who left there says they were forced to leave the babies under shelling and also rounds of live ammunition by the army to evacuate the hospital. there was also testimony that at least one parent of one of the children left behind was shot and left at the entrance of the hospital

this was a testimony from one of a doctors without borders nurse after they were forced to evacuate.

i distinctly remember another written testimony by a doctor stating that they had left the five children behind at the ICU, and that they had informed the israeli army and asked for them to be evacuated but were specifically asking the red cross to intervene. there is also video testimony of a doctor asking the red cross to intervene before the hospital was evacuated.

one doctor explicitly stated that they had rehooked a child to one of the remaining battery-powered machines before leaving.

this was november 10th.

on november 28th, during the ceasefire, families were finally able to go back to north gaza and get into the hospital, only to discover that the five children left behind had been left to die and were found decomposed in their beds.

from AFP:

Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told AFP that Israeli soldiers had blocked access to the intensive care unit at Al-Nasr paediatric facility, and doctors were finally "able to get into the ward on Tuesday night". There, Qudra said, "the occupation (Israeli) forces left five premature babies" who were found "partly decomposed". "The soldiers forbade the families from going near" the newborns before Tuesday, he said.

there's been an outpouring of anger at the red cross, which was the only international entity capable of intervening. instead, the red cross claimed it was not responsible for evacuating the hospital. they have not provided any assistance to thousands of palestinians in north gaza who were asking for help. the red cross released this statement:

However, their statement in Arabic was far worse, translated here:

"Our teams did not make any commitment to participate in these processes" essentially means the red cross (the only entity capable of evacuating a hospital the israeli military had beseiged) had simply abdicated its duties.

for comparison, because of the public outrage at al-shifa where 39 NICU babies were also beseiged by the israeli military, the red cross was involved in transporting the remaining babies to egypt after eight had already died. the red cross is capable of it, they just didn't care.

worth noting that since then israel has left al-shifa after filming some humiliating propaganda videos proving there was no "hamas headquarters" at the hospital and left al-nasr after finding nothing as well. this is not because the idf failed to find hamas, it's because the idf had succeeeded in its primary goal to make gaza unlivable and prevent palestinians from being able to access healthcare. finding hamas was never a real goal, and anyone who repeats this lie is either an idiot or a propagandist.

destroying a hospital and evacuating patients and medical staff is already a war crime. but leaving five children to slowly die alone of suffocation in a hospital bed and then leaving their dead bodies to decompose for over two weeks is unforgivable. this is what occupation does, what israel does. a war crime committed first by soldiers carrying arms, and then completed by international aid organizations that abandon palestinians in their time of need. it is not possible without international complicity allowing israel to continue committing unspeakable horrors against palestinians with impunity.

and today, december 1st, the ceasefire ended and bombing gaza has resumed.

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Hello how are you my friend I hope you are well I am mohamed from Gaza I am 58 years old My family and I live a very difficult life We are hungry and we do not have flour We cannot get it because of its high price The price of a 25 kg bag of flour is 300 euros We are very hungry Help us with 50 euros to get food My life and my family are threatened I hate myself so much when I ask for money But if I do not ask for money I may lose my life or the life of one of my family members Life has become hell You cannot imagine how difficult the life I live and my family is very Help us please

The campaign is

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We are very sorry for causing you inconvenience

please help and support Rasha Family

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Klingons are a diaspora. They're an empire that span multiple planets with multiple environments. Their history is long and full of expansion and conquest- which inevitably creates cultural differences.

Included in their history are plagues and genetic and surgical manipulation that created physical differences.

That's how this guy is Klingon

And this guy is Klingon

And this guy is klingon

And this babe is also Klingon

Klingon identity as a diaspora is kind of the whole point of the story of the Klingons. What does it mean to be Klingon?

The rallying cry of the Klingon armies during the war with the Federation is "Remain Klingon".

What does that mean? Do they even know?

Is Klingon a racial or cultural identity?

Those are questions B'elanna Torres and Alexander Rozhenko are asking themselves all the time.

Can you convert to Klingon?

Curzon Dax and the alternate timeline "Sons of Mogh" seem to indicate you potentially can.

The planet of integrated Romulan and Klingons managing to strike a balance between both cultures was such a shock to Worf because hate and mistrust for Romulans had been such an integral part of his concept of Klingon identity that it made him ask new questions about himself.

If hating Romulans is not essential to Klingon identity, then what is Klingon identity?

Worf being biologically Klingon and culturally Jewish, I think, was meant to drive home the point that, like the Jewish people, Klingons are a diaspora and not a monlith.

And arguing about which Klingons are "real" ones is kind of funny because it's replicating the same debates the Klingons are having amongst themselves without even realizing it.