Insider
Published Jun 18, 2024Historian Michael Taylor rates depictions of ancient Rome in Gladiator, Spartacus, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
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October 16, 2024
Roman Historian Rates 10 Ancient Rome Battles In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider
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October 14, 2024
The reviews are in for this season of The West and it’s as bad as you think
Spaceman Spiff has been a longstanding fan of The West, but the current season is doing much more than giving him the sadz:
The current season of The West is a disappointing mishmash of bad writing, wooden acting and implausible plot lines.
Critics have known the show has been in decline for years although have been reluctant to say openly.
But with cancellation rumours growing it is difficult to see how it can survive. If the current season is any measure they simply don’t have the writers even if the producers hadn’t lost their minds.
The plot thickens
The West has always been known for its compelling plots. Epoch-defining inventions, new technologies and globe-spanning empires. Even grand moral crusades no one else would consider such as ending slavery or elevating women to equal status.
Just some of the storylines they said would never work and yet we were glued to our screens as they unfolded.
Unfortunately, more recent seasons have shown none of the flair of the past.
The latest drama is the threat of another plague. It is difficult to know how this got the go ahead so soon after the Covid storyline.
The original pandemic idea got off to a roaring start since it was then a novel idea. But as the drama unfolded the plot became increasingly contrived. The writers became carried away and eventually struggled to get out of the hole they had dug themselves.
It ended in absurdity with obvious conflicts between the original lockdown plot and the later mask and vaccine subplots.
It was almost as if different teams of writers were competing with each other instead of cooperating on the story arc, exactly the kind of mistake audiences are increasingly complaining about.
The latest version is a species-jumping virus and is already facing criticism for lazy writing and reheating ideas from last time. Audiences are unimpressed. Time will tell if they can pull it off again.
The second plot they seem to be exploring is even more implausible, war with China.
After the last few seasons mired in the Ukraine storyline it beggars belief the writers went in this direction.
There were rumours of production overruns and expensive reshoots as the Ukraine storyline dragged on. We will never know the full extent of their production woes but tough decisions were clearly made as well as a shakeup of the production team.
Critics had warned wars were rarely popular. People like the drama of course, but audiences quickly get bored. None of this stopped the producers and the writers dutifully did as asked.
Now it is China.
Many are saying this is just a sign the producers have been there too long. It is time for another clear out.
At least war is exciting. But after numerous attempts to sell immigration storylines they are trying it again despite its unpopularity.
Previous attempts to promote immigration plots failed to resonate with audiences although it has always been popular with a small, loud minority.
Most found it too farfetched, millions of young foreign men just wandering into Western nations as if no one would stop them. The critics had a field day.
But this season they are going with climate migration. People moving around because of the weather.
This is partly to shore up their failing climate plot. It was obvious several seasons ago this long running theme, a strong favourite with the showrunners, was no longer popular.
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Rumours of a caucus revolt against Justin Trudeau
The polls are historically bad, but Justin Trudeau seems determined to hang on until he has to call an election which is reported to be generating panic among Liberal backbenchers. Any Liberal Party leader is tough to unseat, but especially Trudeau after the most recent changes to the party’s operating rules instituted after he became party leader.
Image from Blazing Cat Fur
Could the season of Thanksgiving see the fall of Justin Trudeau?
Unlikely, but there will be no Happy Thanksgiving for the prime minister as he contemplates rebellious Liberal MPs trying to engineer a palace coup.
Such news may not surprise Trudeau, but the fact that it is now public is a starting gun. It is at times such as these that Sherlock Holmes tells trusty sidekick Watson, “The game’s afoot”.
As Trudeau returns from a trip to Asia, he is likely to hunker down with his faithful entourage to plot strategy while plotting of another kind will be on the minds of the Gang of 20 (the approximate number of Liberal MPs said to have signed a document in support of replacing the prime minister before the next election.)
The Toronto Star first reported on Friday that “anxious Liberals” were worried about the state of the party under Trudeau. People were saying on the doorstep that “your guy’s gotta go,” while one party source said two dozen sitting MPs were deciding whether to run again at the next election.
Fast exits and furry rodents are all associated with sinking ships.
The Star quoted Wayne Long, the only serving Liberal so far to publicly call for Trudeau to quit as leader, saying, “The status quo is leading us to obliteration”.
Party leaders never want to hear the word obliteration when it refers to their own electoral fortunes and certainly not when it comes from the mouth of one of their own MPs.
But Trudeau probably isn’t even listening to the shrill chorus of the caucus. Why now, after nine years, should he start listening to his members?
Meanwhile, the CBC reported that Liberal MPs were meeting in rooms across Parliament Hill to sign a document that pledged them to call on Trudeau to resign. They were signing their own names and “in ink”, said CBC’s David Cochrane, making it sound like a Faustian bargain rather than a parliamentary coup.
Perhaps it is?
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October 12, 2024
Classics Summarized: The Oresteia
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Jul 19, 2017Nobody look at how long ago I promised to do this.
That’s right! The sequel to Iphigenia, which itself was a prequel to the Iliad, has finally been given the ol’ OSP treatment! And it only took me TWO AND A HALF YEARS
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October 11, 2024
German free speech – only applicable when used to criticize the “far right”
C.J. Hopkins discovers the stark contrast between actual freedom of speech and German freedom of speech:
The first rule of New Normal Germany is, you do not compare New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. If you do that, New Normal Germany will punish you. It will sic the Federal Criminal Police on you. It will report you to its domestic Intelligence agency. It will ban your books. It will censor your Tweets. It will prosecute you on fabricated “hate-crime” charges.
I know this, because that’s what happened to me. I broke the first rule of New Normal Germany. I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. I did it with the cover artwork of my book.
Yes, that’s a swastika on the cover. A swastika covered by a medical mask. I tweeted that artwork in 2022. The German authorities prosecuted me for that, and convicted me for that. So, now I’m a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.
That’s the second rule of New Normal Germany. You never, ever, display a swastika. Displaying a swastika is not “in Ordnung“. Displaying swastikas is totally “verboten“.
Unless you are the Health Minister of New Normal Germany, and you’re comparing your political opponents to the Nazis. Or unless you are a popular German celebrity, and you’re comparing the Russians and their supporters to the Nazis. Or unless you are a mainstream magazine, and you’re comparing German populists to the Nazis.
In which case, displaying a swastika is fine. And is not “verboten“. And definitely not a “hate crime”.
And that’s the third rule of New Normal Germany. If you agree with the government, obey their orders, and parrot their propaganda, you are not a “hate criminal”. If you are the government, like an actual minister in the government, like the Minister of Health, you’re definitely not a “hate criminal”. And, if you are part of government’s propaganda apparatus, needless to say, you’re also not a “hate criminal”.
However, if you criticize the government, or if you compare the government to Nazi Germany, and if you do that using your book-cover art featuring a swastika behind a Covid mask, then you’re absolutely officially a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.
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October 10, 2024
The malignant persistence of snotty Millennial slang into adult life
At The Upheaval, a guest post by Dudley Newright tries to decipher what the hell all of the permanently online Millennial snots are saying:
Back in May, a black studies professor – an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce – “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.
Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:
“I mean, I’m sorry –“
“Let’s be *very* clear here”
“So true 🙄”
“You’re so right 🙄”
“This is an *extremely* bad look for you”
“Umm, frankly…”
These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.
“History PhD here, and uh, this thread is…a lot!”
You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio. The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back – public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat”. This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now.
I call it “Millennial Snot”.
It’s the defining feature of our degraded public discourse, and the apotheosis of secular enlightenment liberalism. The last 20 years of economic decline and consolidation of blue America into fake laptop work culminated in tweets like this:
What is Millennial Snot? Where did it come from? How did it become the prevailing liberal voice? What exactly is the matter with these people? And are we going to have to suffer this obnoxious style forever?
The nerds who never got over high schoolLiberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do. The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’erdowells.
Pity the “front row kid”, the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot. If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school …
That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment”. This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs”, and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.
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HBO’s Rome – Ep. 2 “How Titus Pullo brought down the Republic” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jun 26, 2024A look at episode 2 of the first series/season of HBO’s Rome drama. Once again we talk about the actual history and how the characters, events and institutions are presented in the series. This time this includes Antony becoming tribune of the plebs, as well as a meeting of the Senate and Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Vidcaps taken from the dvd edition, so copyright belongs to HBO.
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October 9, 2024
QotD: The hijacking of the Canadian identity
The anniversary of that first May 27, 2021 unmarked-graves announcement came and went a few weeks ago, with barely a peep from prominent figures in the Canadian progressive firmament. And the same Trudeau who’d recently served up lurid sermons about our status as a blood-stained genocide state has now switched into proto-campaign mode, gushing manically about the Liberal horn of plenty set to deluge this nation with riches. According to the latest Liberal agitprop, in fact, patriotic Trudeauvian boosterism isn’t merely permissible — why, it’s obligatory. So light up those Canada Day backyard barbecues. Canuck Yom Kippur is finally over.
But before we dismiss this three-year interregnum as a dystopian fever dream, it’s worth asking how our collective Canadian identity could be hijacked — even temporarily — in such a radicalized manner. And the truth is that it isn’t just progressive ideologues who bear responsibility; but also their counterparts on all parts of the political spectrum, few of whom exhibited any inclination to offer pushback while these falsehoods took root in the media. Even many writers at this newspaper, generally held to be a right-leaning outlet, greeted the unmarked-graves claims by heaping shame on their country.
In every other comparably advanced society, there exists a natural tension between conservative nationalists who reverentially sentimentalize their history, and the progressive critics who reflexively denounce it. And it is from out of that tension that something approaching the historical truth emerges. Or, at least something close enough to the historical truth that it provides a stable and coherent basis upon which a society can confidently pin its collectively embraced national identity.
What we learned in 2021 is that this necessary tension doesn’t exist in Canada, because traditionalists can no longer describe their nation’s history in a way that gives voice to their emotionally felt patriotism without attracting claims of racism and neocolonialism. As a result, our marketplace of ideas lacks the checks and balances required to inure us against — oh, gee, I don’t know, let’s take a crazy example — apocalyptic medieval fables in which legions of Indigenous children are thrown into furnaces and shallow graves by cackling nuns and diabolical priests.
So yes, shame on Trudeau for lowering the Canadian flag on federal buildings for half a year to honour victims entombed in non-existent mass graves. But shame on the rest of us for staring at our shoes while this blood libel was being signal-boosted. And now that Trudeau seems on his way out — and, with him, the maudlin, tear-soaked, bent-knee political shtick that accompanied this descent into hysteria — we might turn our attention toward developing a national self-identity sufficiently robust that it doesn’t fall to pieces the next time someone claims to have found genocide’s residue under an old tetherball court.
Jonathan Kay, “Don’t let politicians misinform you. Learn about Canada’s true history for yourself”, National Post, 2024-07-01.
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October 8, 2024
For progressives, “freedom” means getting to choose who rules over you
Chris Bray reacts to an Anne Applebaum podcast hosted at The Atlantic which certainly demonstrates that progressives have a very different definition of the word “freedom” than most people:
Opening the discussion, Applebaum and co-host Peter Pomerantsev “explain” that there are two competing models of freedom in the American past. One model is adherence to American political norms, centered on submission to the authority of the federal government. Read this carefully:
Pomerantsev: Anne, the common conception — the one that I have, anyway — is that freedom is meant to be a good thing. Freedom is meant to be the same thing as democracy. Those two words — I hear them used interchangeably. Freedom means the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to choose who rules you.
Freedom is choosing who rules you. “Freedom is meant to be a good thing.”
There’s a scene in The Forty Year-Old Virgin in which a bunch of young men sit around drinking beers and talking about sex with their slightly odd older co-worker, and he starts trying to agree with them about how hot it is to touch a woman. “Yeah, man,” he says, fidgeting in his chair. “It’s so hot! It’s like … touching a … bag of sand.” They instantly realize that he’s never done the thing he’s describing.
So. Just a few days ago, I argued that whole layers of high-status American political and cultural figures are “no longer culturally American”. They don’t see the country, they don’t like the country, and they don’t have the most basic American instincts. Peter Pomerantsev thinks that living in America is like touching a bag of sand.
If freedom is “the Bill of Rights” and “the freedom to choose who rules you”, then no human being on the planet was ever free before the Bill of Rights was ratified, and no one outside the United States currently has freedom. You become free only with the promulgation of formal governmental rules on the existence of your freedom. Freedom is a federal document. “Freedom is meant to be democracy”, and those words are interchangeable. Freedom is voting. A stateless society without authorities who rule over the people is unfree: they don’t vote. You have to be ruled to become free.
This man is a dangerous idiot.
But then, incredibly, Anne Applebaum outdoes him:
Applebaum: Not quite. There’s another equally old American version of freedom, which is freedom to defy the federal government — you know, the freedom to go out into the Wild West and make up your own rules.
Applebaum begins a discussion with a history professor, Jefferson Cowie, who “explains” that this sick and dangerous idea of American freedom centers on the freedom to dominate others. “He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.”
Cowie: And so you have this really explosive moment where white settlers were promised, in some broad sense, access to land. They were denied it. And they took their claims of freedom against the federal government that was denying them the ability to take the land of other people — their freedom to steal land, basically.
Applebaum and Cowie go on to make other comparisons in which, for example, George Wallace argued for the freedom to impose racial segregation against the federal insistence on equal rights. Cowie winds up for the big finish:
We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination. And that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.
So in every conflict over this model of freedom, a relentlessly emancipatory federal government — benevolent, respectful of minority rights, committed to justice for all — slams into state and local knuckle-draggers who say they want freedom, but are only using that word to mean that they want to hurt and dominate other people. The federal government is social rules, fairness, decency; resistance to federal authority manifests a sick conception of freedom at the inherently unfair lower levels of American society. State officials are mean; communities are vicious; the federal government is nice. Unclear how the mean locals turn into angels when they move to hold office in the District of Columbia, but there’s somehow a magic process of transformation in which a cruel people have a wise and decent central government. Power always makes people much kinder and more restrained.
This is derangement, and an assault on the most basic American history. It’s madness, but deliberate madness.
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Young Canadians turn right – “the average Canadian 21-year-old is more conservative than the average Canadian 65-year-old”
I don’t have a lot of contact with twenty-somethings, as my son’s friends are now in their 30s, so I’m just as surprised as anyone else to hear that younger Canadian voters seem to be switching their preferences to the right unlike most young voters around the world:
Voting intentions among Canadians, September 2024.
Detail from a recent Leger poll.
In one of the more surreal twists of sky-high Canadian public dissatisfaction, the country now ranks as one of the world’s only places in which young people are supporting conservative parties at rates well beyond those of their parents.
A Leger poll from last month found that Conservative support was stronger among voters aged 18-34 than any other age cohort. The under-34s backed the Tories by 47 per cent, as compared to 45 per cent for those aged 35-54, and 41 per cent for voters over 55.
The phenomenon has also started to show up at the provincial level. With about two weeks to go until the B.C. election, the B.C. Conservatives have been put in sight of a majority government due largely to an unexpected wave of youth support.
According to a Sept. 30 Leger poll, voters under 34 were backing the B.C. Conservatives by 47 per cent as compared to the 39 per cent who intended to vote NDP. Among voters over 55, the allegiances were reversed: 48 per cent supported the NDP against 43 per cent for the Conservatives.
Nothing like this has really happened before — at least as long as Canada has had age-stratified opinion polling.
It’s not the first time that a majority of young voters have flocked to a conservative option. The Progressive Conservative landslides of 1958 and 1984 were both secured in part by winning over voters under 30.
But what’s happening now appears to be the first time that the average Canadian 21-year-old is more conservative than the average Canadian 65-year-old.
For now, at least, the phenomenon is somewhat unique to Canada. In the rest of the Anglosphere, political sentiments are still hewing to their traditional pattern of young people leaning progressive, with old people leaning conservative.
The current U.S. presidential election has Democratic candidate Kamala Harris commanding up to 60 per cent of the under-30 vote, as compared to roughly one third of young voters who said they would vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump.
In the U.K., the July general election found that support for right-wing options was directly proportional to the age of the voter. A mere 17 per cent of British voters under 24 voted either for the Conservatives or the populist Reform UK. Among Brits over 70, those same parties commanded a smashing 61 per cent.
In Australia, a recent YouGov poll asking voters if they wanted “more socialism” found that 53 per cent of Australians under 24 did.
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October 7, 2024
A grim anniversary
In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes the anniversary of the Hamas attacks along the Gaza-Israeli border that killed many Israeli civilians and led to the still-ongoing captivity for hundreds more:
One year on, Jews in the West have had time to process the primary shock of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel and the secondary shock of hateful blowback against Israel and Jews worldwide. We learned in a span of hours that where lethal antisemitism is concerned, “never again” was for us a mere objective, not a guarantee against those consumed by a mission of “again and again and again”.
But should we have been so surprised? Gaza was riddled with tunnels, their sole purpose to prepare for a war of extermination against Jews. The West’s intellectual “tunnels” have been operating in plain sight for many years. Under the aegis of “Israel Apartheid Week” and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, vicious anti-Zionism has been a campus fixture since 2001, when the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa erupted into a “festival of hate” against Jews. After decades of aggressive Israel-bashing, Palestinians have been elevated throughout western educational systems to the summit of intersectional victimhood. Those indoctrinated in this hierarchy over the last 25 years consider it a duty and a virtue to demonize Zionism as an original historical sin. October 7 popped the cork on that long-seething volcano.
Throughout the past year, we’ve seen hostage posters vandalized, Jewish schoolchildren bullied, Jewish-owned businesses attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods tormented, Jewish institutions burned and shot at. Downtowns are routinely plagued by foul-mouthed protesters shrieking mantras that call for Israel’s elimination. University campuses have tolerated long-term encampments, Judenrein except for Jews who earn their laissez-passer with a denunciation of Israel.
It’s getting worse. On Saturday in Toronto, a demonstration featured Hezbollah flags, banners extolling violence against Israel and portraits of the (recently eliminated) Hezbollah leader and arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah. Last Sunday in Montreal, a band of black-garbed protesters attacked Concordia University and smashed several downtown store windows. During a foot chase, one even threw Molotov cocktails in the direction of police, an ominous escalation.
More ominous in my opinion: Post-October 7, we saw the emergence at rallies and on western social media of the image of a Jewish star being dumped into a trash can accompanied by the words “Keep the world clean” — for years a meme favoured by Hamas, inspired by the Nazis.
The Nazis used the image and words in their propaganda to normalize the idea that Jews, like vermin, were a hygiene threat requiring drastic action to preserve the nation’s health. That such messages are tolerated in the public forum points to a growing acceptance of outright eradicationist antisemitism as a “respectable” opinion to hold, even among supposedly enlightened people in fields such as mental health, as evidenced by anti-Zionist blacklists targeting Jewish members of the profession.
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QotD: Social media mobs
More important, most mobs aren’t committed to the effort beyond flicking a thumb. Institutions that ignore the mob are often astonished at how little difference all the outrage makes to their business — and I’d bet Rowling won’t see much evidence of this controversy in her royalty statements.
The censorious power of Mrs. Grundys always depends on the cooperation of the governed, which is why their regime collapsed the moment the baby boomers shrugged off their finger-wagging. If Rowling provides an unmissable public demonstration that it is safe to ignore the current crop, we can hope others will follow her example, and the dictatorship of the proscriptariat will fall as quickly as it arose.
Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post, quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, 2020-01-02.
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October 6, 2024
QotD: Putting the past on trial
Historical context is all very well. When it comes to Woolf, perhaps a few details about her novels To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway would be appreciated, or some information about her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. But no, instead we are to be hectored about her “challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which would find unacceptable today”. One wonders what the person responsible for these judgmental remarks has ever accomplished, if anything at all. These petty moralists are like the crabs in the bucket, pulling down the most accomplished out of envy and spite.
The best approach to writers of genius is humility, but this quality seems to be on the decline. We see evidence of this in the self-importance of those who have rewritten books by P.G. Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl. It should go without saying that Wodehouse’s prose cannot be improved, least of all by know-nothing activists who have inveigled their way into the publishing industry.
I recently bought the complete set of Fleming’s James Bond books, but I had to seek out second-hand copies to ensure that they had not been sanitised by talentless “sensitivity readers”. Yes of course, these books include sentiments that are unacceptable by today’s standards. But what’s so wrong with that? “All women love semi-rape” is a shocking sentence – in this case, it’s by the female narrator of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) – but what purpose does censoring the passage actually serve?
The rewriting of books and the creation of cautionary QR codes are symptoms of our current strain of puritanism. These are the descendants of those religious zealots who shut the theatres in 1642 out of fear that the masses might be corrupted. And while I concede that Ian Fleming’s views on relationships between the sexes may not have been progressive, I don’t feel the need to be berated about it before enjoying the adventures of James Bond.
It’s not as though Bond is even meant to be a likeable character; the man has a licence to kill, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t someone you’d wish to invite to a dinner party. In that regard he’s reminiscent of the hero of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, a character based on the bully from Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes. He’s a violent boorish rapist, but the novels are still entertaining because most of us aren’t reading them for moral instruction.
In exploring the gamut of human experience, writers will often feel compelled to recreate the grotesque, the uncomfortable, the outrageous, even the downright evil. Who ever supposed that works of fiction should restrict themselves to rose-tinted idealisations of human existence? Imagine Macbeth without the regicide, or King Lear without the eye-gouging, or Titus Andronicus without the cannibalism. Would Dante’s Divine Comedy retain its power if some “sensitivity reader” excised the Inferno?
Andrew Doyle, “Putting the past on trial”, Andrew Doyle, 2024-07-04.
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October 4, 2024
Star Trek – “From Quoting Shakespeare to Diversity Woman’s Hour”
Every week, Substack helpfully compiles a list of posts that might be of interest to me, like this one by Isaac Young, discusses the fading phenomenon of Star Trek. (Disclaimer: I was a huge fan of the original TV series, but stopped watching the various Star Trek TV shows late in the Next Generation era and haven’t seen much after that … this essay covers parts of the canon that are largely terra incognita for me.)
In order to understand what a thing is, I believe you must first understand how it dies. Endings are the most important part of a story because they are the culmination of everything that came before. They dictate the legacy and the memory. It is through the ending that we can finally put the body of work in its proper context. What is Romeo and Juliet if we cut the final act out, and can you really understand the play if you stop just before their suicide? So therefore, in order to understand this franchise, I have to begin this essay with Star Trek‘s suicide.
Whatever we make of the heroism of James T. Kirk, the high-minded principles of Jean-Luc Picard, and the reactionary realism of Benjamin Sisko, we have to come to grips with the tragic reality that those things did not last. They were discarded for feminism, queerness, and diversity. And what do those things mean? Modern Star Trek has been quite clear about that. It’s about emasculated men and raging girlbosses. It’s about celebrating every sexual appetite except the one that produces functional families. It’s about fetishizing racial revenge and elevating mediocrity at the expense of excellence.
You’ll find Star Trek has never been more vulgar, more profane, more debauched. It’s small-minded in everything from the cast to production values to the storytelling. It’s about lecturing to the untouchables about their privilege and holding victimhood as the highest virtue. All those tiny elements which we ignored or snickered at in previous shows became the substance of their successors, while those parts we loved about Star Trek — the parts that made it great — were left behind or turned into nostalgia-bait.
The awkward reality of being a normal person from twenty years ago is that every franchise and IP has stabbed you in the back — viciously. And yet despite this, I still harbor a great love for the films and tv series of yesteryear. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. It is out of a great sense of love and admiration that I am dedicating this piece, and that is how I want readers to understand my review. I’m not here to tell you Star Trek was evil or anything like that. I’m here to tell you that Star Trek was great — brilliant even, but the rot was there from the beginning.
Looking back, what should I say was the core of Star Trek? Or rather, what was the nature of Star Trek? Was it in those ephemeral elements which turned out to only be in passing? Or was it those elements which had been there from the beginning, and are only now being noticed, like flesh peeling away to reveal the bones of a rotting corpse? And to continue this metaphor, what should I make of this bloated, festering body when its soul has clearly long departed?
But how can I judge old Trek for the new? How can I possibly analyze this franchise with this lens when it has clearly fallen to ideologically captured writers? Surely this once beloved series will course correct once Hollywood hears all the negative feedback from fans.
I don’t know who still believes that anymore, but I feel obligated to address this criticism for that one person who still doesn’t understand how we got here. The world didn’t suddenly turn crazy in 2016. Wokeness is not an aberration or an anomaly, but the logical endpoint of liberalism. It is egalitarianism, personal freedom, and materialism taken to their natural conclusions. It is Star Trek‘s values as they actually operate in the real world.
I can look at franchise, see it as a product of the Left, and reliably chart its degeneration through understanding those values and their decline. Star Trek isn’t bad because it fell to a bad writer’s room or predatory corporate interests. It’s bad because we’re currently in a culture-wide crisis that is affecting every form of media entertainment.
If there is one thing I want to get across in this essay, it’s that what we’re witnessing is the real Star Trek as it springs from its stated values. This is the most honest the series has ever been. Once you strip away the Shakespeare, the heroic characters, the sci-fi concepts, the witty banter, and all the moral framing, this rot is what you’ll find underneath. It’s always been there. The bad news is that Star Trek as the political propaganda it has always been is quite ugly. The good news is that those things which made Star Trek great, those things which reached for the good, the true, and the beautiful—those things are eternal. And they aren’t going to die with Star Trek.
October 3, 2024
Refuting one old myth about “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”
In the visible portion of a pay-walled post, Andrew Doyle explains why we should stop using the hoary old anti-free speech cliché that was refuted nearly 50 years ago by the US Supreme Court:
There are few people who are courageous enough to openly admit that they oppose freedom of speech, and so we would be forgiven for thinking that the authoritarian mindset is rare. In truth, those who believe that censorship can be justified typically resort to a set of hackneyed and specious arguments. It doesn’t seem to matter how often these misconceptions are conclusively rebutted, they continue to be trotted out with depressing regularity.
Take yesterday’s Vice Presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, in which one of these very misconceptions was parroted once again. This is how it happened:
JD Vance: You guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to …
Tim Walz: Or threatening, or hate speech …
JD Vance: … use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.
Tim Walz: You can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.
The cliché that “you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” originates in the 1917 United States Supreme Court ruling against Charles Schenck, a socialist who had issued a broadside calling for young men to refuse military conscription and was convicted under the Espionage Act. These were the circumstances under which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the statement: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a theatre and causing a panic”. Note that the word “falsely” is invariably dropped when quoted by advocates for censorship.
Leaving that telling little edit aside, it should be remembered that this was never a legally binding statement. Walz maintains that this is “the Supreme Court test”, but Holmes merely used the analogy to justify upholding Schenck’s prosecution. In fact, the decision of the court in Schenck v. United States was overruled in 1969.
Do I need to say that I didn’t watch the debate? I don’t even watch the debates when I actually have a vote to cast, so I’m going on highly selective sources to at least pretend to care about the VP debate. I do like a waspish line on almost any politician, so Bridget Phetasy’s description gave me a mental image of the event that seems highly truthy: “The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him”. J.D. Tuccille has more:
To illustrate the contrast between the recent presidential debate and this week’s vice-presidential match, I’ll say that I dread either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris taking office as president, but I fear the policies of veep hopefuls J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. At the top of both party’s tickets are individuals of uncertain competence and shaky basic decency, while their sidekicks come off as the designated adults, ready to step in if the winning presidential candidate falters, and more than excited to implement their chosen programs, God help us. That said, Vance had a much better night than Walz.
From the very beginning, J.D. Vance gave us a glimpse of what Trump might be like minus a personality disorder and with focus. He looked cool and collected, with his arguments organized in his head. He was also able to quickly pivot to address — or dodge (this is politics, after all) — the CBS moderators’ questions.
By contrast, Walz appeared like he was sweat-soaking his notes into illegibility as he tried to remember which part of the previous night’s memorized cram session he should spit out. He eventually regained some of his footing, though he generally seemed nervous and unprepared.
“The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him,” quipped podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy, who isn’t known for being merciful.
The Democrat’s discomfort probably came to a head when he was asked to explain why he long claimed to have been in Hong Kong in 1989, with front-row seats to the Tiananmen Square massacre, when news reports and photographic evidence showed he was at home in Nebraska. Much hemming, hawing and references to a small-town upbringing ensued, which was painful to watch. The closest he came to admitting he lied was conceding, “I’m a knucklehead at times” and that he “misspoke.”
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