Trekkie Dating, is it Good for the Gene Pool?
Eloketh writes "It seems that Tucker Carlson of MSNBC thinks that Internet Dating services are a somewhat disturbing trend. Specifically, when talking about Trekkies, he says 'Is this good for the gene pool?' He also goes on to question whether allowing Trekkies to meet and mate is 'in the national interest.'"
... pairs of males can't procreate. No, the Star Trek universe does not afford a real work-around for this problem, and procreation and replication via androids just isn't feasible.
I really wanted to see Tucker Carlson making an ass out of himself too.
..one should have a look at the Darwin Award statistics. How many Darwin Awards have been given to Trekkies, how many have been given to non-Trekkies? I'm afraid this will come out in favour of the Trekkies. However, that doesn't necessarily say anything. Trekkies are just as useless as non-Trekkies, perhaps just wee bit more able to survive.
This article is pretty weak all the way around. Trekkies looking for a wormhole to asexuals looking for a couch mate. All in all, the title is much more interesting than the actual story, much like anything Uwe Boll has directed.
I figured that after Jon Stewart emasculated him on Crossfire people would have written the bow tie wearing blowhard off for what he is -- a moron.
"Editors Zonk and Scuttle Monkey: Are they good for Slashdot or are they better in a white wine sauce?"
--
BMO - It is hot here, like a cow on fire
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Unfortunately this site came a little late into my life, for myself, and some of my friends, we had to resort to finding our mates the hard way.. on IRC.
At every trek convention I attended to in Brasil, the m:f ratio is 2:1 and the non-hot-f:hot-f ratio is 5:1
IOW: A party with 4 female trekkies is EASY.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I haven't seen that many men all trying to bang the same woman since the last time I watched...wait, I wasn't supposed to admit to owning that movie. Nevermind.
What does online dating have to do with "trekkies"? :-/
At least in the country I live in, online dating services have people from 18 to ~60 with interests ranging from gardening to space science to hair styling...
Online dating is very accepted and mainstream here. It's just one form of dating along with visiting clubs. Heck, it may even be seen as more hip than that nowadays, because it's more new and "in".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
He also goes on to question whether allowing Trekkies to meet and mate is 'in the national interest.
Wow, what a coincidence! Here I was just wondering if allowing Tucker Carlson to mate was in the national interest.
Trekkies are a national security risk. Trekkies are everywhere. I might even be a Trekkie. See, Trekkies tend to believe that people must be tolerant, and progress in science, in order for any aliens to pay serious attention to them. You can see why this isn't in the national interest. The effects were minimized before they started breeding. Luckily, many Trekkies are male, leading to certain problems in mating, and a Trekkie and a `Normal' have a good chance of having a normal child. However, the number of female Trekkies is not decreasing. We must stop this infection of our society.
Every Trekkie who ever lived is worth million Tucker Carlsons.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My wife is a low-level Trekkie; a fan of the series, especially the original, but not one who goes to conventions or wears Trek-based costumes.
We met before the Internet was open to the public -- the old-fashioned way, in a coffee shop where we were sitting near each other.
I wasn't aware of her Trekkie tendencies for several months. Finding out about them changed nothing. We (obviously) ended up married anyway.
'Is this good for the gene pool?'
I don't know about other people but statement like that really scare me. We as humans should really stop trying to control our evolution and let nature take its course.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Trekkie dating is OK, although somewhat dangerous. Particularly if bystanders don't move quickly when the Klingon gets excited.
Which proves that you will eventually grasp the concept... The original post was just offensive.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
And it's not necessarily good for the human race as a whole.
Take okcupid for example. Answer 500 muliple choice questions and the statistical grouping algorithm it uses matches you up with well lots of people who answered in a similar manner. You end up talking to people who think in a very similar way, often with similar interests. In fact it can be damned near telepathy at times. OK, that's great and getting on with someone is very easy but... As well as the influence of the nurture stuff there are underlying genetic mechanisms to the way people think and act but guess what, we're sorting these similar "good" and "bad" genes to be close to one another.
The result is potentially increased incidence of genetic diseases. Ultimately I think things like this will weed out the bad genes naturally as they express themselves in children but there's the suffering and potentally increased healthcare costs.
Deleted
Seriously, what is "wu-oo-hu-woo music"??
And, no, my rate is accurate: one in six trekkies I knew was hot, one in forty was uber-hot ("Victoria's secret catalog level") -- and I knew 100+ trekkies.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Well, first of all, you're assuming that these services match for similarity, that someone who put in the exact same answers as you will score the highest. While the early dating programs did exactly that, I highly suspect that the more modern ones work on a black box based on data from existing relationships. Odds are, the people who set it up don't even know whether it's a case of "like to like" or "opposites attract"; they just plug in all the data in and get back what appears to be the statistical patterns. The more people who sign up for your service, the more data that you have.
The result is potentially increased incidence of genetic diseases. Ultimately I think things like this will weed out the bad genes naturally as they express themselves in children but there's the suffering and potentally increased healthcare costs.
There's an additional fallacy you've got here, assuming that genetics are that influential. Unless the system is specifically matching to get blue-eyed, blond-haired, fair-skinned people together (eAryan?), I suspect a lot of the factors are personality-based, which is more of an environmental thing. I'll assuming that you're not arguing that a fondness for long walks on the beach correlate to a recessive gene coding for receding hairlines and color blindness.
That said, there is some interesting data regarding the rise of autism in Silicon Valley which is suggested to be the result of a generation or two of geeks breeding with geeks due to the environmental concentration thereof. While this is more of a case of them living in a target-rich environment rather than specifically matching for it over personality matrices, there is some fit there in that today's society allows you to pretty much pick your mate rather than having to select from the small pool of your local area.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The most interesting aspect of this species of critter is their seemingly complete lack of self-reflection. They've got images -- the bow tie -- but they're entirely externally facing, and seem not to be subject to introspection. It's like the trade requires a sort of obtuseness in that area, to the point where stuff like Jon Stewart reaming him probably got filed away as "People who didn't follow the script" by Carlson.
Small example of this lack of reflection: Carlson himself has an extremely high "nerd radar" presence for me. He doesn't seem that far from Trekkie country himself. Does he?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Well, when it comes to Eugenics Wars it's better late than never.
KHAAAAAAAAAN!
-Peter
...like men who wear bow ties.
Lighten up, it was just a JOKE. No need to be all serious and aloof as in "WELL THIS IS NOT FUNNY BECAUSE WE HAVE THOUSANDS OF FEMALE TREKKIES AND THIS IS S TIRED STEREOTYPE", if it's only just that. Geez, you sound like a furry who thinks he's persecuted and posts that rainbow image on /b/.
Come on, mod me troll, you humorless bastards!
PS : If you can't laugh at yourself, you're never gonna get laid.
especially for trekkies, it's here:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/romance/
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
On that rationale, why are the tens of thousands of redneck bars where high-school and no-school dropouts meet and mate causing further damage to the gene pool allowed?
Take into account that a large proportion of these are incestual relationships and I think it becomes clear that in order to save the human race it is urgently necessary to nuke the whole of rural South-West USA!
Why wouldn't you want to marry a Trekkie? I'm a Trekkie, my friends are Trekkeis, my husband's a Trekkie, my Father is a Trekkie. all of us managed to find love, some have even reproduced. I've yet to have someone come to my home while I had Star Trek on (NG or DS9) and said anything negative about it. infact, normaly it's something to the effect of "Oh, I remember this episode!!"
Trekkies just aren't really all that rare anymore.
"Just call me Girly Blank"
When I was a kid, my Mom and Dad used to let me stay up late on Thursday night to watch a strange new show, Star Trek. Star Trek's view of the universe, science and technology stuck. Like many people I meet of my generation (I'm 44), I was inspired to a scientific/technical career by Star Trek, the space race, and so on, while I was a kid. This has to be A Good Thing, IMHO.
The one real issue in all of this is the way that lots of mildly autistic engineering folks (most engineering types live life their own way, in their own world) are meeting and mating with other mildly autistic engineering folks, producing profoundly autistic kids.
Some years ago I owned a chunky silver chain necklace, long before the hip hop morons started sporting such things. It had a definite Klingon look to it, and if anybody asked I would tell them I had had a relationship with the Klingon Ambassador's daughter, and it was a going-away present when her dad was posted back to Kronos. An interesting relationship. If anybody asked about the bruises, I looked them right in the eye and told them. :-)
...laura
I'm a Trekkie, my friends are Trekkeis, my husband's a Trekkie, my Father is a Trekkie...
OH NO! THEY'RE MULTIPLYING! GAHHHH!
*Jumps out the window*
Just think if the US populace had more intelligent/nerdy people get together and procreate, why, there might be more intelligent people out there. And then who would be left to watch Tucker Carlson?
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
As people tend nowadays to leave their house less and less thanks to the news media and their condemned perspective on the world in general. And since there are now less social venues as parks and drive-ins turn into parking lots and shopping malls, online dating has exploded. Now people like Tucker Carlson are going to say that's bad too? What is a person who doesn't want to pick up a mate at a bar supposed to do if they aren't in a friend circle with a bunch of single females? You know, real life isn't like Friends or Seinfeld for everyone. Sometimes people have to venture outside of their social group for a mate. Everyday the choices of activities outside the house get slimmer, and the social ones even more so. It's getting to the point where everyone is a potential online dating candidate because nobody is meeting anyone new anymore.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
William Shatner on SNL
My wife has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. She's not an uber computer geek, but lives in unix for her work environment, so she has an Apple laptop. She has major addictions in Harry Potter and now Stargate: Atlantis, not to mention renaissance festival fan.
We met online at a dating site called eMode, now operating under a different name, and were married 18 months later. We have our first anniversary coming up in June, and have yet to have a fight or even cross words.
And you'll never find Carlson, CNN, or Fox News on at our house. We get our news online, from Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert, and NPR. We have this horrible habbit of wanting to form our own opinions, not having them forced upon us by the likes of Limbaugh.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Allowing Trekies to breed can't possibly be any worse for the gene pool than, say, allowing rednecks to breed...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Interesting... my wife is also a librarian, and a big Star Trek fan (taped all the original episodes when they first aired). She can name the title of any original episode within the first eight seconds of viewing (without seeing the title displayed, of course).
If you're not in the US, you can search only by country.... Not very useful when you're in a country bigger than the US.
Tucker Carlson is right, of course - trekkies mating is not something we can have. Why, if intelligent people had children, then the children might be intelligent, too - and who would still vote for the republicans in 50 years then? Just think about it - George IV. might not even become president anymore!
So we definitely need a program to keep this from happening. I wonder what we should call it; since it's a program for trekkies, how about "4T"? Or better yet... T-4! Yes, that's perfect!
Thanks, Tucker. Just what would we do without people like you?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Takei: ....You see, the show was banned after the Star Trek wars.
Zapp: You mean after the vast migration of Star Wars fans?
Nichols: No, that was the Star Wars trek. [Some mechanical hands come out of her jar, pick up a video tape and put it in the VCR.] By the 23rd century, Star Trek fandom had evolved from a loose association of nerds with skin problems into a full-blown religion.
[On the screen, a service is held at the Church of Trek.]
Priest: [on TV] And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship where they would be no Tribble at all.
Congregation: [chanting; on TV] All power to the engines.
Nichols: As country after country fell under its influence, world leaders became threatened by the movements power. [In Berlin a sign is unveiled saying "Welcome To Nazi Planet Episode Land. Formerly Germany".] And so the Trekkies were executed in the manner most befitting virgins.
[On the rim of a volcano two men throw Trekkies into the flames.]
Man: [on TV] He's dead, Jim! [They throw another in.] He's dead, Jim! [Another.] He's dead, Jim!
Nichols: Finally, the sacred texts were banned.
[The episodes are put inside a torpedo casing.]
Takei: The last copies of the 79 episodes and six movies were dumped on the forbidden world, Omega 3, along with that blooper reel where the door doesn't close all the way.
[As he speaks, a ship that looks like an Eagle from Space: 1999 fires the torpedo. It hits the planet like Spock's coffin in Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan. The video ends.]
Nimoy: Thus, Star Trek was forever scoured from human memory.
Bender: Another classic science-fiction show cancelled before its time.
I thought it was great! Did you go to the website?!?! I counted 4 women in the first 50 personals!
My parents aren't trekkies and I am. I find it highly unlikely that "trekkies breeding" will result in a generation of inherent trekkies. In fact, if both your parents are trekkies you're probably more likely to rebel and like something different during adolescence, I'd think.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
What stupid slashdot post. Post something that has at least some truth to it. Geez!
They're enthusastic to go where no woman has gone before.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
...and people wonder why he was fired from CNN. Sheesh.
Oh yeah, John Stewart showed him up, and in my book was shown to be a more consumate television professional in the entire debate that was once called "Crossfire".
As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest sonova bitch in the valley!