From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos   
   From Address: graemecree@aol.com   
   Subject: Re: Vulcan Racism Vs. IDIC?   
      
   I'm not sure how much of that was deliberate and how much was simply   
   the difficulty in writing dialogue for someone who is supposed to be   
   smarter than the author.   
      
   The Vulcans in Star Trek XI are certainly intended to be annoying.   
   There's no way that fact could have escaped the writers' notice.  But   
   something like Spock being unable to beat the computer at chess   
   because he "gave it all his knowledge", or not knowing the difference   
   between a draw and a stalemate, was the writer's fault, not Spock's.   
   He almost surely didn't intend for Spock to look silly there.   
      
   The bits about Spock being able to calculate precise odds, down to   
   decimal points (2224.7 to 1 that the Horta won't get us both even if   
   we search together) were semi-whimsical situations, but the joke seems   
   to be that Spock would be anal-retentive to actually calculate this   
   stuff, rather than that he was just pulling numbers out of his a$$,   
   and hoping that nobody would call him on it.  So again, that seems to   
   be the writer being ridiculous rather than him intending for Spock to   
   be ridiculous.   
      
   Ditto with Sarek having nothing better to do than keep a mental tally   
   of his age down to two digits, in EARTH years (a number he'd have to   
   update about every 53 minutes).  I think the writer was trying (and   
   failing) to make Sarek look brainy, rather than ridiculous.   
      
      
   Also ditto with the long-running Trek schtick that super-intelligent   
   beings can NEVER grasp the concept of slang, no matter how much   
   exposure they have to it.   
      
   I suspect (but am not old enough to really know) that a lot of Vulcan   
   philosphy was based on Ayn Rand.  She called her ideas "Objectivism",   
   but constantly sneaked in suppositions without recognizing them as   
   BEING suppositions.  I remember a friend and I reading one of her   
   books once (Possibly "The Virtue of Selfishness", but I'm not sure   
   now), and she explicitly addressed a question that we had both asked.   
      
   To put it very simply, there are statements about how things are   
   (descriptive statements), and statements about how things ought to be   
   (normative statements).  Basically, she was claiming to reach   
   normative conclusions simply from the facts (i.e. without making any   
   normative assumptions).  We didn't think this was possible.  She   
   addressed the question, but her answer to this was something about   
   "Every IS implies an OUGHT".  It was a principle that helped her reach   
   the conclusions she was trying to reach, but which had to be   
   frequently ignored whenever inconvenient.  She was very anti-   
   socialist, for example, and would NEVER have argued that the IS of   
   socialism implies that it OUGHT to be.  So, the principle was   
   forgotten when discussing that topic.  That sounds a LOT like Star   
   Trek's Prime Directive, and Vulcan philosophy, doesn't it?  I wonder   
   if that's a coincidence.   
      
      
   Anyway, most of the time in TOS, when the Vulcans looked idiotic, I   
   didn't think it was the writer's intention to make them look bad.  But   
   in Trek XI, yeah, no question, the writers were trying to make them   
   look bad that time.  They were nasty, they were racist (by 2009   
   standards), they were unlikable.  And by the end of the movie, they   
   were dead.   
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