May 17th, 2014

George Takei did an interview for washingtonpost.com which was posted yesterday. While pretty much anything this magnificent man says is gospel, he had a number of comments which this writer feels were incredibly pertinent and incisive statements as to what's going on with Net neutrality, in regards to how the broadband companies are acting:

"Well, this audience was built not by them, but by our efforts, by our creativity. And once we have that audience built, they want to charge us for it? So, I think that, too, is an issue that needs to be examined and debated and in the interest of fairness, a policy has to be created to deal with the fact that access to large numbers of people was built by us, using [the broadband companies'] platform. They can't unilaterally say, 'All right, it's our platform, we're going to charge you for it.' They didn't build that audience."

Edward Snowden and how he's handled the unveiling of secrets:

"I think what Edward Snowden's done, he's started a lot of important conversations. However, he has violated certain rules that we have already. It's like (pauses) Dr. Martin Luther King. He was fighting for civil rights, because the laws we had at that time were not democratic. And so he willingly broke those laws, fully aware of the consequences, ready to go to jail for having broken that law, because it was an unjust law. Snowden's broken the law, but he runs away. I think the discussion would be more intensified, and there'd be a greater urgency about it, if he had stayed and dealt with what he had done. But you know, these are very complex issues."

And, perhaps more important than those two issues combined, the future of Star Trek as a television series, and why it should be set in the Prime universe:

"Frankly, that's the one I'm very comfortable with. And I find that more engaging, because you know, the rebooted one is essentially action-adventure and a terrific space opera. But what "Star Trek" did was, it used science fiction as a metaphor to comment on burning issues of the time. Certainly the times of the 1960s, but there are burning issues today."

Read the entire article here

What do you think? From the mouth of Mr Sulu himself, do you agree with his points? Yay or nay?! SOUND OFF IN THE COMMENTS!

Frank Mitchell