Category: Politics

Posted on
by

We finished re-watching Deep Space Nine a few days ago. Quark’s rants in the second-to-last episode about rolling back the reforms regarding gender and worker protections, complaining that Ferengi society has been infected by a disease, and declaring that if he becomes Nagus he’ll bring back what made Ferenginar great again sound eerily familiar.

There’s even a bit about a latinum-plated toilet seat — I mean waste extractor.

It certainly sounds more like what Musk, Trump and Hegseth have actually been saying and doing than any other kind of “making Star Trek real”. Unless Musk’s obsession with eugenics and passing on his genes is enough stronger than his racism that he plans to make sure Khan exists. (Eeeeew.)

Wait, maybe that’s why Khan is white in the Kelvin timeline.

Seriously, though, the Ferengi have always been an extreme caricature of American culture and capitalism taken to absurd lengths. They were even compared to “Yankee traders” in their first appearance on TNG. In 2016, Trump campaigned as an extreme characature of a conservative, the kind that viewers a decade earlier would have dismissed as unrealistic. And since he won, the GOP embraced that caricature and has remade itself into a political/business alliance that makes Quark look downright progressive by comparison.

After all, Quark once brought up the horrors of Earth’s history: slavery, devastating wars, etc. Ferengi never had government death squads rounding people up off the street for being undesirables. They would have just let someone new in town pay the requisite fee and let them go about their business like a civilized culture.

Posted on
by

In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.

Posted on
by

I’ve long disliked the term “culture war,” partly because it’s tossed around in a way that trivializes the issues and partly because “War on whatever” framing tends to confuse the issues.

But I keep thinking of a line in Cat Valente’s novel Space Opera about what war is. And when it comes down to it, what we’ve got now is a war: It’s about who gets to be treated as a person, and who doesn’t:

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

Posted on
by

Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting the Literary Arts charity, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing…

I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I’m totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories. Plus I get another format for my Earthsea reread that’s not the giant collected hardcover tome or my old fragile paperbacks.

I’m going to have a lot of reading material next year.

*As ebooks through Kobo

Update: Unfortunately they aren’t DRM-Free. Kobo does have some of her books without DRM, but as far as I can tell, the only one in this bundle is The Unreal and the Real.

The others I’ve found just now are: Worlds of Exile and Illusion, The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest, and The Beginning Place. Tor seems to be big on requesting non-DRM formats. These may be all of them currently available without DRM: eBooks.com, where I previously bought Forest, has a filter on their search for DRM-Free, and only turns up the same four books.

It seems kind of ironic to sell The Dispossessed (of all books!) encumbered with DRM.

Posted on
by

The part that kills me — and I hope that doesn’t turn out to be literal — is that Trump actually won the popular vote on a platform of hurting large segments of the population. It’s not hidden. It’s not some weird bogus claim made by the opposition. He’s been shouting it from the rooftops. And it’s not just Trump, it’s all the other Republicans riding his coattails as they push against civil rights and promise to punish people for the crime of being different.

That means large segments of the American population either:

  • Want to hurt their neighbors (or at least the people in the next town over, or maybe that big city down the highway, maybe not you, you’re an exception, but everyone else there is a horrible person and needs to be punished).
  • Are willing to inflict massive collateral damage for whatever they think they’ll get out of it.
  • Really aren’t paying attention.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it amounts to the same thing: Trump and the people around him can credibly make excuses about having a mandate to hurt people. Lots of people.

I was really hoping that if nothing else, the Trumpist scapegoat-and-punish brand of politics would be discredited. Instead it’s been rewarded.

I hope the people who voted for him eventually realize: He will turn against you too, just as he turns against everyone the moment they stop being useful to him.

You handed power to someone who’s big on retribution and revenge and just got a court ruling granting him absolute immunity from prosecution. What do you think is going to happen?

And don’t count on anything less cruel from the people around him, because they’ve seen that bullying works and they’ll keep going, tearing down everything they can, blaming some group for the problems it causes, promising to punish them, lather rinse and repeat.

Related reading: Last year A.R. Moxon wrote an insightful piece about how Republicans’ own actions have convinced him that Republicans are fascist. And a “what now?” post from Ken White at Popehat.

Posted on
by

If you haven’t voted yet, make sure you vote in favor of Proposition 3. While court cases have *blocked* 2008’s language defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, that language is still in the state constitution.

And as we’ve seen with, for example, Arizona’s pre-Civil-War law about abortion being reactivated when Roe vs. Wade was overturned, all it takes is another court case.

Proposition 3 removes that language entirely and replaces it with an affirmation of the right to marry, future-proofing marriage equality.

Continue reading →

»All pages site-wide with this tag