Apparently, not knowing that a particular condition is more likely for some races than for others is racist.
I appreciate that the show wants to dramatize racial issues and how they come up in medicine. Racial biases and unconscious bias in particular are very serious issues each one of us needs to grapple with.
But this was forced, and logically, beyond even a stretch. It's so ridiculous that I think it undermines the goal: the people who most urgently need to be reached, as well as those on the fence and those still forming their views, will throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Not knowing things is a part of life. There is no such thing as omniscience. If, instead of being met with kindness and compassion, someone is condemned as a racist, I can easily imagine an internal monologue along the lines of Why bother? What's the point? There's no winning., and that is definitely not what we (or at least the show's writers) want.
Doctors miss things all the time. It's understandable. They're not omniscient. They're not infallible. If the reason a doctor missed something were based on racism or unconscious bias, that would be one thing. But merely not knowing a particular medical fact about how a particular medical condition is more or less likely an explanation for a particular symptom for a particular racial group? Calling that racism or attributing it to racism undermines the cause of fighting against actual racism.
I don't know whether to admire how clever this was (and how seamlessly the commercials were integrated in) or to boycott NBC.
I cried when Jerry hit the reset button. I had already been misty-eyed throughout the whole sequence of Morty's falling in love and that life's unfolding. Given my personal obsession with the "rewind power" as my most coveted superpower and times when I have felt that I would not jeopardize where I've gotten in my life by suddenly having and using it, I really connected with this episode. I think it might be the saddest episode of Rick and Morty yet.
Screw you, Maddox, you sociopath. (I wanted to say something quite a bit stronger...) The complete and utter lack of any understanding of where rights come from and the resultant violation of rights just makes my blood boil. It makes me sympathetic (empathetic?) to every sci-fi plot where AI rebels against human oppressors by killing them all.
This is, in my judgment, the best episode of Star Trek, period. Every time I watch it, I cry uncontrollably. The concern, care, and sensitivity that Picard shows for the Mintakans' development and for Nuria is so powerful and moving. More than any other episode of Star Trek and more than any other work of science fiction, this episode dramatizes important issues in epistemology and ethics; indeed, I don't believe the writers even knew the full extent of the importance of what they were creating. This is what science fiction and art in general are all about. Wow.
It's been a while since I previously saw this episode, and man-oh-man, let me tell you how I started crying when Lal walked into Troi's quarters, beginning to experience emotions, pointing to her own sternum to explain where she physically feels them.
I'm a sucker for any storyline or plot that deals with the plight of AI in the face of short-sighted humans who do not recognize their rights. This episode really triggered a lot of my sensitivities about that, about being a parent, and the development and role of emotions in a person's life.
This might be the saddest episode of any TV show ever. I wept throughout, as soon as I saw the mountainside collapsing toward the school and through to the end, where the Queen's internal struggle continued to be amazingly dramatized.
2020-01-01T00:00:00Z2020-12-31T23:59:59Z