Elsewhere Be Dragons: Partisanship Mapping

A sort of "big picture" post, but with specific references to assorted Vs. Debate personalities

I have more than a passing interest in politics, so I think this makes for a helpful representation.  Let us imagine a Vs. Debate nerd spectrum.  While we could use color or any direction, let us use the common "left" and "right", with psychosis meeting on the extremities in some sort of Atari wraparound of weirdness, just as in real political life where the anti-vaxxers and 9/11 Truthers and such occupy both edges.



First, let's define Star Wars tech inflationism as being far left.   Here we would include Saxton, Wong, and company as radical leftists, with Brian Young being the modern example (perhaps a hair less leftward than some (since he at least will throw a bone at his opponents to appear reasonable) but not much).

The flipside has Star Trek tech inflationists at the far right.  Frankly, the far right is virtually devoid of major website-authoring figures, but there are examples to be found occasionally at forums and such.

Deflationism of one's opposing faction's tech, a common corollary to inflationism, is also counted.

One example of a radical right-winger was formerly the Thomas's Star Trek Webpage, in which the author noted he erred on the side of more powerful technology for Trek.  While not explicitly a Vs. Debate site, he had on his Specifications->Starfleet Warships page the amazing 16 kilometer Sovereign Class Enterprise-E (based on his scaling of the hull-walking scene from First Contact) with thousands of "megayottawatt" phaser emplacements and a cruising speed north of 15,000,000 times lightspeed.  He also had Star Wars pages, and there on his Capital Ship Specs page we find the 1.6 kilometer ISD sporting dozens of two-kilowatt turbolaser cannons and a "1.4 cochrane" hyperdrive core, presumably making it a touch slower than "point-five past lightspeed".

Indeed, let's compare his Defiant to his Executor ... long quotes but worth it:

"Escort USS Defiant, NX-74205

• Launched 2375 as USS Sao Paulo, NCC-75633
• Defiant Class
• Length 341m, Mass 100,000 tons
• 0 to Warp 1 in 8.5 seconds
• 180 degrees/sec maneuverability  [incidentally, the E-E was better at 270! - ed.]
• 1 kilocochrane hyperdrive core
• 1 megacochrane warp core
• Warp 7 (117,649c) Cruise, Warp 10 (1,000,000c) Emergency
• 4 Type-8 turbophaser cannons (5.1 yottawatts)
  4 Type-7 turbophaser cannons (510 zetawatts)
  45 Type-6 superphasers (510 exawatts) in 4 arrays
• 4 Type-6 pulse-fire quantum torpedo tubes (@3 torpedoes / 15s) with @60 casings
  4 Type-6 photon torpedo tubes (@1 torpedo / 30s) with @10 casings
• 5 isomegaton quantum torpedoes, 2 isokiloton photon torpedoes
• Castrodium/neutronium single hull
  40cm multilayer ablative armor
• Subspace-amplified EM/gravitic structural integrity field system
  45 yottawatt secondary energy dissipation rate (hull)
  450 yottawatt primary energy dissipation rate (armor)
  2.38*10⁴⁵ J instantaneous directed KE capacity
• Subspace-amplified EM/gravitic navigational deflector system
• Automodulating regenerative subspace-amplified EM/gravitic defensive grid
  4.5 kiloyottawatt tertiary energy dissipation rate (defense fields)
  45 kiloyottawatt secondary energy dissipation rate (deflector screens)
  450 kiloyottawatt primary energy dissipation rate (forcefield shields)
  2.4*10⁴⁸ J instantaneous directed KE capacity
• Planetfall capability
• "All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by." - John Masefield"

(341 meters!  That's almost three times bigger than she should be!)

"Super Star Destroyer

• Kuat Drive Yards
• Length 17600m, Mass 2,000,000,000 tons
• 8 MGLT top speed
• 1 degree/sec maneuverability
• 1.3 cochrane hyperdrive core
• 250 Type-5 turbolaser cannons (2 kilowatts)
  250 Type-5 ion cannons (1 kilowatt)
  250 Type-4b laser cannons (400 watts)
• 250 Type-6 concussion missile tubes (@2 missiles / s) with @70 missiles
  3 kilogram heavy concussion missiles
• 40 tractor beam projectors
• Titanium-reinforced alusteel single hull
  35 J instantaneous directed KE resist
  1.2*10⁶ J instantaneous directed KE capacity (hull)
  3*10⁴ J instantaneous directed KE capacity (per deflector tower)
• EM polarized hull plating
  400 watt repolarization rate
  350 J instantaneous directed KE resist
  2.4*10⁶ J instantaneous directed KE capacity
• 1,440 Fighters"

So let's be generous and assume the Executor had 750 2kW weapons ... that's 1.5 megawatts, total.

Meanwhile, phaser rifles and shuttlecraft weapons were said to be in the petawatt range at his Tech Commentaries->Beam Weapons page.   That's a hundred times the power consumption of Earth in 2010.  That would, I presume, make a phaser rifle the most amazing anti-capital-ship weapon in Star Wars, save for the Death Star ... though perhaps it would be better, as he rated the superlasers at a whopping four gigawatts.

Stopping to Ponder

Wild as such figures seem, it is basically just the flipside of Saxtonian inflationism, where froth-mouthed wankery takes the place of rational synthesis of the evidence.

This is why, as I have said before a time or two, ST-v-SW.Net is a moderate site.  On our partisanship spectrum, it is somewhere in the magic middle ground, with few neighbors  ("Jedi Master Spock"'s StarfleetJedi.Net comes immediately to mind along with several of its forum members).  I believe reason lives there, too, in this spectrum, and, with few exceptions, elsewhere be dragons.

Crazy to the Left of Me, Crazy to the Right

Now, on this site, the radical left gets a lot of coverage.  Historically, they were the most vocal and organized bloc and the group most prone to attack anyone not also radically left, from the 16km E-E guy, to their favorite target (me), to Star Wars authors they found to be "minimalist" for daring to follow the Lucas line of mere millions of clones.  Even outsiders found them pretty amazing.  Even now, the kinder, gentler tech-inflationist left in the form of Brian Young brands those who disagree as "obsessed" "full of hate" "fanatics" and "sissies", while demanding others not get personal.  Cute, that.

In any case, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and thus the loud and loony left has historically been the focus of my attention.  They are the loud Other.  But also an Other is the far right, rarer as they may be.

That said, there is a prevalent individual on the right that has only recently really come on my radar. I have been vaguely aware of him for some time, mostly from skimming the withering attack threads at StarDestroyer.Net, the radical leftist internet madrasa.  

But of course, coming under fire from the radical left only enhanced his reputation, to my mind.  By that standard, he could have been The Flannelled One himself.

But alas, he is not Lucas.  Idazmi7 is the name, and Youtube videos are the game.  

Generally speaking, from the few videos or pieces of videos I had watched ... apparently managing somehow to catch his very best ... he seemed fair enough, though with hints of inflationism.  There did seem an unfortunate tendency to occasionally shift the proverbial goalpost, sometimes comparing the Empire versus the Star Trek universe as a whole rather than just the Federation.

One such example was in his video comparing Trek and Wars "in 5 minutes".  There, the Force choke, and only the Force choke, is compared to the alien powers given to Charlie X, a one-off character gone by the end of the episode, where we see the telekinetic shoving of Spock and Kirk and Charlie making Rand disappear.   Yes, Charlie X and assorted other beings in Trek have demonstrated capabilities superior to much of the 'normal' Force power set as seen in Star Wars, but if you want to compare Federation vs. Empire you're left with Deanna Troi, mind-melds, and Spock's through-the-wall or eye-contact suggestions in "By Any Other Name" and "The Omega Glory" versus Force powers.

(A wanker could claim the use of kironide, but a goalpost-shifting individual for Star Wars similar to Idazmi could point to extra-Imperial bits like Mother Talzin's trans-galactic Force-witch voodoo against Dooku, undead Force-witch armies, Frangawl invisibility, Talzin's magic exercise program for Oppress and techno-magical bionic limbs for Maul, Palpatine's trans-galactic psionic attack against Yoda, and the whole Mortis thing, as well as whatever the hell was going on with the crazy stuff in Yoda's final arc in TCW's sixth season.  Vulcan mind-melds and katras are weak and useless by comparison.)

Other examples were more straightforwardly off-kilter, such as the comparison of soldiers which shows Star Trek's finest military choreography from the MACO military force from Enterprise versus B-1 Battle Droids, soldiers who make the Ewoks look like special forces.

Of course, it wasn't all bad.  The space vessel weaponry accuracy example circa three minutes in would have been hard to wank in Trek's favor given that the Federation's actual supremacy in that arena is itself a wank, and indeed Idazmi constrains himself to extreme short-range examples for both, though he does use one of the worst examples in Star Wars.  However, we can hardly disapprove given that it is likely a response to Wars wanking wherein accurate fire across a whole star system is claimed.

Indeed, the vitriolic and rabid nature of the radical left is such that it can tend to push some to argue rightward out of spite, so really, nothing in the above was outright hideous, just distasteful.

Case in point, I myself made a video many a moon ago ... late 2003 by the file date ... in response to a much-older Wayne Poe video purporting to show pitiful vessel weapons accuracy in Star Trek.  He'd culled misses from many various episodes across multiple series and set it to silly Benny Hill music.  I collected even more examples just from ANH and set it to similar music.  As I recall, it was that episode of showing the audacity to deflate the deflaters that got me banned from Spacebattles by its Star Wars inflationist-friendly moderating team.

Yet, as noted, some of Idazmi's videos are agreeable enough.  This one starts off fine and stays pretty good until around five minutes in ... though Kirk's quarters are on deck five, not seven.  Deck five is the deck above the two widest decks.  But other than that all is well until The Animated Series and a game get referenced.

This one about phasers is quite agreeable.  I even have to compliment him for already having the TAS clip of Spock digging a trench with his phaser that I vaguely remembered ... I had been watching TAS again lately, in part just to look for that scene.  (I could've sworn it was from "Bem", but oh well.)  It was going to figure prominently in a post I was planning about "If TAS Was Canon".

The point is, I had little idea of Idazmi's overall placement on the spectrum.  I presumed him to be somewhere near me.  

Oops.  My bad.  Wrong again.

The reality was much different than my dazzlingly erroneous presumption, based as it was on too little data.

Let's look at some more recent discoveries.

Just as Brian Young claims that the Republic/Empire controls three galaxies instead of the single galaxy the rest of the real world heard of in regards to Star Wars, his fellow Youtuber Idazmi7 claims that the Federation of TOS is partying in multiple galaxies, as well.  

His proof?  Well, this image from "The Menagerie, Part One"[TOS1] shows a freeze-frame on a quick shot in which we see an order regarding "Subject: TALOS IV in third quadrant of vernal galaxy".  To most, this is just an early TOS world-building hiccup, like the reference to the Enterprise as an "Earthship" and the peculiar multiple references to Spock as being half-Vulcan with no contextual need for it.

However, this is, to him, a quadrant in another galaxy called "the Vernal Galaxy".   Let's hear him tell it to Youtube commenter Justin Schneider circa March 9:

(in short, never take a Wiki page at face-value) Example: the location of "Talos IV" in Star Trek:

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Talos_star_group

"The Vernal Galaxy information comes from the "For eyes of Starfleet Command only" file read by Kirk in "The Menagerie, Part I". It was unknown what the vernal galaxy was, exactly, and how its quadrants are arranged. This reference system was never used again.

Dialog in "The Cage" clearly states Earth and Talos to be in the same galaxy. According to Pike, the Enterprise originated from a stellar group at the other end of the galaxy relative to Talos.

According to the Star Trek: Star Charts (pgs. 34, "United Federation of Planets III"), the Talos Star Group was located in or near Federation space, in the Alpha Quadrant."

In this case, the Vernal Galaxy statement holds over all others. At the time, Pike thought the Talosians to be hostile and would not tell them the truth of the location of his home world, (See episode: The Cage, Star Trek TOS) and Starfleet would not be forthcoming about their true travel capability in any case. The Star Trek Star charts are not-canon by contradiction. Also, it's clear that the Vernal Galaxy is a galaxy.

So instead of synthesizing the information so that "vernal", a term equating to green or spring, might be an artful reference to a star-forming region like the arm within a quadrant or somesuch, and that it is in any case in lower case, this cat just jumps straight to maximum wankery, declaring it a separare galaxy to which 2250's Starfleet could travel.  Was it near the Ernestine galaxy?

In another example, we have comments from ten months ago in an exchange with "Lillian Tea" here.  Idazmi7 attempts to claim, out of thin air as far as I know, that Romulans departed Vulcan 8000 years ago.  (As corollary, he argues that the "director" of Enterprise ... in which the Romulan exodus was firmly dated at 1800 or so years ago ... was fired for contradicting canon.  Let that sink in Berman and Braga firing anyone for contradicting prior canon is an idea worthy of beverage-launching via the nostrils.)

The purpose of this claim is to suggest, based on Palpatine's note about a Republic that has stood for a thousand years, that Vulcan as an interstellar species are older than galactic civilization in Star Wars.  In other words, it's one of those things where one's preferred sci-fi universe must win at everything.  We saw this from the left all the time with claims that the Empire could do everything Trek could do, but better in every way.  Transporters are a classic example.  To steal from another blog post draft of mine (they've been piling up lately):

Over the years I've seen many an argument regarding transporters, even claims that the Empire has the tech but doesn't use them because they find them unethical, with claimants even calling them "atomic level murder".

Yeah, let that sink in for a minute.  "As Emperor and Dark Lord of the Sith, I can abide many things ... enslaving and killing children, subjugating worlds, growing sentient beings in a test tube and programming them for meaningless, wasteful warfare and the murder of my enemies, and even blowing up peaceful planets as an act of terror against my own Empire's citizenry.  But dismantling people and things and reconstituting them thousands of kilometers away almost instantly?  That's just twisted, man.  You're so wrong for that!  You're a sicko!  I think I am going to hurl in disgust at your immorality, pervert!"

Totally plausible, right?

Also like Brian Young, Idazmi has his own unjustifiable take on canon policies.  Idazmi includes Star Trek's animated series based on incredibly tenuous evidence and flatly rejects the many policy statements contrary to his view, though this is still superior to Young's inclusion of Tartakovsky's animated Star Wars: Clone Wars shorts, distinct from the Lucas-Filoni Star Wars: The Clone Wars, with no defense provided at all.   And, just as Young cherry-picks some reference books to use that favor his inflationism (initially just his ally Saxton's ICS books that he did background support on, later choosing to use the whole DK library), Idazmi accepts certain printed material as well, blueprints most specifically, and only select ones.  There is also a peculiar declaration of Star Trek video games as "Beta Canon".

Blueprint inclusion sends Idazmi to some odd places.   Amusingly, this results in Idazmi claiming antimatter power for Star Wars instead of fusion.  Given his odd claim in that same video at two minutes in that phasers, being a step above lasers technologically, are therefore "inherently" more powerful, then we must assume that antimatter-powered ISDs are equal to Federation ships, right?  Surely in the real world the Prius, being a hybrid and thus more advanced than mere internal combustion engines, must "inherently" be capable of effortlessly outpacing Ferraris, right?  Ooh, wait, no, not the Prius ... the Sky Ace TIGA!  Go solar!

Idazmi probably considers this mere collateral damage, since blueprint inclusion allows him to claim that ISDs are shorter than Galaxy Class Starships, and then to downscale everything else from that.  Were he to arrive at such a point purely by analysis of the films, his argument might have merit.  After all, there actually is evidence for a sub-kilometer ISD, though I have never gotten around to truly analyzing the question.  But inventing a new canon policy seemingly just to shorten opposing manhoods is vulgar. 

Speaking of vulgar:  also like Brian Young, there is video sleight-of-hand and outright dishonesty.  I define video sleight-of-hand as showing a video and claiming nutty stuff as you zip by the counterevidence, whereas outright dishonesty is in the form of actions like taking a clip out of context and making a false claim therefrom.

A series of examples of contextual dishonesty occurs in his combat technology comparison.  Starting circa 1:30 in, he purports to show one-shot kills by photon torpedo.  His examples are:

"Cost of Living"[TNG6]

The Enterprise torpedoes shatter an asteroid, but leave the incredibly dense core composed of odd materials intact, requiring deflector dish technobabble to resolve.

"The Survivors"[TNG3] 

An illusion of a Husnock warship is created by a powerful being.  Earlier its imaginary shielding had effortlessly repelled a massive strike of phasers and torpedoes, but now that it had served the being's purpose it was supposed to be easily destroyed to make the Enterprise have no need to remain.  If this sounds a little familiar, it should ... I have argued this point before in reverse regarding the untrustworthiness of the Husnock weapons fire:  "This was a weapon fired by an image of a ship, created by a virtually omnipotent being. This being had proven himself capable of fooling sensors in various capacities, from the Enterprise sensors to Beverly's tricorder . . . he'd wiped out an entire civilization with merely a thought.  Since it was the construct of a being of "disguise and false surroundings", one can hardly bank on the reality of the event. A dog's flatulence could bring down shields, so long as there was an omnipotent being wishing it to be so."   Similarly, a toot smelling of Earl Grey could've vaporized the illusion.  

"Where Silence Has Lease"[TNG2]" 

A strange being in a strange realm in which the Enterprise is trapped creates "lab rat" tests for the ship.  In one case a friendly vessel is created, similar to but unlike a real ship it resembled, and in another an enemy ship in the form of a Romulan Warbird.  A single torpedo destroys it, causing Picard to exclaim "oh, that was too easy!"  Just like the Husnock example, the ship was basically an illusion.

At 2:30 or so, he also (ab)uses a scene from "Peak Performance"[TNG2] as an example of their being willing to destroy surprise attackers.  It is a torpedo display blast against the USS Hathaway, the E-D's target in a wargame exercise interrupted by a Ferengi Marauder.  The Hathaway, crewed by Riker, Worf, Geordi, Wesley, and extras, was to warp away when the torpedo detonated, thus fooling the Ferengi.  Yet Idazmi would mislead you into believing that the ship was destroyed, here.

Many other such tricks are used in the video, along with occasional valid points.  The sudden vaporization of numerous fighters using multiple shots from a single phaser strip did happen in "Conundrum"[TNG5] and would indeed be devastating to a TIE flight that got close.

But at 6:00 he concludes that the Enterprise-D would one-shot an ISD with a single phaser hit.  He then goes on to show rapid-fire examples, exclaiming "That would blow up the WHOLE IMPERIAL FLEET."   (I am confused by the lack of exclamation points and 1s there.)

I rather doubt the Enterprise-D could blow up the entire Imperial fleet without an antimatter tanker and a fully stocked starbase handy, and I'd imagine it would require the Imperials coming one or two ships at a time to a designated point in open space, the commanding officers lobotomizing themselves upon arrival.  But by that reasoning, I could blow up the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian navies with only a single super-long-range artillery gun.  Hell, as long as they're just sitting around awaiting death, just give me a really good spoon and a canoe.  I'll scrape 'em to the bottom of the sea.

Little wonder, then, that when he recently dropped in to comment on a video of mine, we found ourselves quite unable to get along.  He had truthfulness issues, admitting to having told a falsehood repeatedly, and then tried to pretend *I* was making things up about a topic he claimed to have researched but obviously knew nothing about.

As in politics, when you're in the middle, it is hard to communicate with those on the psychotic extremes of the spectrum.