While trying to suss out what happened to history, the Enterprise crew determines that in the altered timeline, Nazis managed to triumph in WW2, and this eventually led to a nuclear war that exterminated all life on Earth. +
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It's really common in sci-fi to portray militaristic fascist space empires. They do it in Star Trek: Picard season 2, with the jingoistic, xenophobic, expansionistic fascist future Earth. Pops up in Starship Troopers, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate all in some measure. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 7 0 • view
Thing is, fascists are incapable of building something like that. They always make grandiose plans for how they're going to build a postwar Berlin or geoengineer the Sahara or colonize Mars, but fascism is incapable of doing that, most especially in space. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 7 0 • view
A signature weakness of fascism is that the people in charge are toadies and sycophants, chosen for their ability to please the leader rather than for any expertise. This means that they don't understand the problems they face and couldn't solve them if they did. Actual competence doesn't matter. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 15 1 • view
As human population grows, so too does the complexity of the problems that must be solved for people to survive. You have to clothe, house, feed masses via scaled-up processes. You have to deal with crises like natural disasters and diseases and power usage. Your material problems escalate. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 7 0 • view
Solving these problems requires expertise. You must understand the nature of the problem and devise a solution based on principles grounded in real, actionable, possible technology and organization. If you lack competence, you cannot solve these problems, and people die. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 8 0 • view
Fashies, billionaires, and fashy billionaires are convinced that they know better than everyone else. They don't care about "facts," because they believe they are remaking the world according to their whims through some "will to power." Facts tend to disagree. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 9 0 • view
Billionaires concerned with saving money, fashies concerned with shaving time, and sycophants looking for quick approval without understanding the problem cut corners, take the wrong approach, and convince themselves of their invincibility right up until they are crushed in a cheap submarine. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 10 0 • view
Deep space travel, not to mention combat, has a difficulty profile not unlike going to visit the Titanic. You are trying to live in a tiny metal can with an artificial life support system and if anything goes wrong, you all die. One rubber O-ring freezes, your engine explodes and you all die. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 8 0 • view
Fashies are congenitally incapable of solving the kinds of difficult problems necessary to handle space exploration. They can barely run a country as an oppressive, corrupt regime of exploitation. Best they can do is suppress a populace for a couple generations. +
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 8 0 • view
"The City on the Edge of Forever" nailed this understanding. If fascists take global power, they are incapable of rising to the challenge of the problems posed by maintaining a global population, and they will self-destruct, potentially taking everyone else with them. ~Fin~
aug 29, 2025, 8:13 pm • 10 0 • view