Morning, CoSo. 🕊️
Today, I summarize some key regional context and ways to think about the news you're seeing about the violence in Israel and Gaza. Hamas, Iran, political spin, Palestinian struggle with local authorities, Israeli internal politics swept aside by these attacks...
It's titled, simply, "War, again", because there is enough gamified media whenever the world falls apart.
The main goal is to retain the better parts of our humanity every single time it does.
@MLClark Hmmm ... The only woman in the photo is way in the back. A translator, perhaps.
One wonders if there'd be more peace if the genders were reversed.
Not so much reversed, but there's definitely business research that suggests a "mixed" work environment is more constructive than any homogenous one. A greater range of ideas and discourse comes into play the more you bring folks from different backgrounds into conversation.
All speculative history now, though! (And funny how ST crews always bypass the morally messiest parts of our past whenever they time-travel into it...)
@MLClark DS9 did the Bell Riots -- which is coming up September 1, 2024. Ironic, because San Francisco has a significant homeless problem right now.
In general, though, I think the Trek universe writes off those inconsistences as alternate timelines.
The TNG mirror-universe novel I posited established that the mirror universe occurred in the timeline where Edith Keeler did not die.
Ah, you went the Harry Turtledove route!* Time travel too, or did you carry that Nazis-win plotline out another few hundred years to match TNG's chronology?
(*Or maybe the PK Dick route; Dick better encapsulated the psychological weight of living with alternate histories, though Turtledove was always good for an alt-WWII/nuclear age romp.)
@MLClark I started work decades ago on an alt-universe Civil War story -- until I found out that lots of people had already done one.
I still have the chapters, so I might pick it up one day ...
I seem to recall a DS9 scene with Bashir and O'Brien discussing temporal paradoxes. O'Brien said (paraphrasing), "I just don't think about it" or somesuch.
@MLClark I'd been tipped that Paramount was looking for a story to bring back Denise Crosby. (Turned out they went the Sela route ...) I started writing one that was a "Yesterday's Enterprise" sequel, but it got turned down.
The Tasha who left on the Ent-C turned up with Romulan refugees. No one could figure out who she was except Guinan, who had that perception beyond linear time.
(Thanks to the retcon Ribbon ...)