I guess I thought my point was clear in my first sentence. "This isn’t a propaganda win."
Of course they needed a pretext and this turned out to fit the bill.
They don't need a pretext either. They've already enacted draconian policies against monitory groups based upon race and against LGBTQ folks. They needed no rational pretext for those. They didn't need one for any other horrible things they're going to do in the future. They would do those things anyway.
This isn't a propaganda win. Its simply a pretext for what they wanted and had the power to do anyway. Propaganda win would be if there was universal popular support for Kirk, and there wasn't before and simply isn't now. Most people didn't even know who Kirk was before this.
While the sexy answer is more desirable, the real answer is much more mundane. The thermostat on the bridge always ran cold during Pike's captaincy. Pike is just chilly at work. Once Scotty joins the crew, Engineering finally got around to fixing it, and Kirk could dress lighter.
"Frakes went on to say they had to repeatedly ask the Borg Drone actor to stop softly saying 'yes daddy' while performing the hand work in that scene" /s
We're old. We don't set the trends or standards anymore. If we want to keep participating, we have to adapt to their style. They aren't going to adopt our older standards.
This isn't just a problem with women's jeans which have arbitrary size numbers. Even men's jeans which are size by the actual waist and inseam measurement can be wrong. In addition to vanity sizing, cheaper jeans are also made from larger material cuts out of the patterns at the same time to save manufacturing cost sometimes twice as many as shown here:
Those at the top or bottom of the stack may end up a bit smaller or a bit larger than the pattern, but they all get marked with the same size.
Whether it was this manufacturing problem or vanity sizing, this is why I stopped buying Old Navy jeans. I could pick out 3 jeans all labeled with the same size and one would fit okay, one would be too small, and one too large. I have never had this problem with Eddie Bauer jeans.
Edit: I found picture showing the larger stacks (which can introduce the mismatched sizing) I was referring to:
When I saw those, the font was so bad I thought they said "Slut Life". I thought "Thats a bold statement to put on the back window of your car, but you do you, slut."
When you’re stuck with the same crew trying to get home for years, they all get that way eventually.
Imagine being stuck at work and being told you're going to be 75 years before you're allowed to leave. I don't care how much you like your job, that would still be soul crushing. Even on your "days off" you're still stuck at work looking at the same walls, eating the same food, and seeing the same people. Its a wonder they didn't have more crew members abuse drugs or off themselves.
That's my thought on both the book and the movie. Perhaps its not the book's fault. There was so much hype surrounding it when it came out I thought it must be awesome. Instead I found the same simply story I'd read in a dozen other books, except this one drowning in a sea of 80s and 90s pop culture references. If it was a simply summer read without the hype I likely would have liked it for what it was.
I had similar disappointment when I finally read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". I read that same type of story a dozen times in other much better books but everyone was saying it was a groundbreaking book.
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