Feral Historian
Published 21 Mar 2025Ursula K. le Guin’s The Dispossessed is one of the most in-depth examinations of how a large anarchist society might function, addressing both the problems it solves and those it creates for itself. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the communist-leaning variants of anarchism in particular.
00:00 Intro
01:58 Anarres is not an Island
04:45 Shevek goes to Urras
07:00 Abolition of Property
08:30 Social Pressures and Pravic
12:30 Necessity and Ossification
14:45 Necessity of Conflict
15:45 Shevek’s Wild RideThis video is in part a companion to this one — Cloak of Anarchy : Gradations of Stat… from a few weeks ago. The original cut of that one had a brief mention of a couple details from The Dispossessed, but it really needed its own video.
August 13, 2025
The Dispossessed: State Happens
August 3, 2025
The Running Man: Prescient Subversive Shlock
Feral Historian
Published 1 Aug 2025Most of the satire in this film is so on the nose that commentary is redundant, but there are a few subtleties that are often missed in the bombastic spectacle of it all. More than that, many of the film’s best elements come from the ways it deviates from the book it’s based on.
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July 20, 2025
Star Trek and the New Frontier Story
Feral Historian
Published 28 Feb 2025Star Trek has been the “new frontier” story for so long that it’s become more retro than futurist. But that doesn’t mean the frontier story itself is dead, only that there’s a disconnect between the future we want and the visions of it that we have.
00:00 Intro
02:19 Time and Space
06:06 Inhabited Spaces
09:44 A story of the Past
July 15, 2025
“A Cloak of Anarchy”: Gradations of Statelessness
Feral Historian
Published 21 Feb 2025“A Cloak of Anarchy”, written by Larry Niven and published in 1972, is a simple story. But it offers us an entry to examine the basic ideas of Anarchism without diving head-first into the political theorizing of the big anarchist philosophers. This one is a 3-minute look at a simple short story wrapped in a 20-minute attempt to cast aside the most basic misunderstandings of what anarchism is.
I don’t consider myself to be an anarchist, but by most standards I’m damn close. Take what I say here in that light.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Cops-Eyes
03:09 Absence of Rulers
06:37 AnComs and AnCaps
10:07 Is Anarchism Leftist?
11:30 Practical Considerations
16:17 Anarchism and Environmentalism
19:00 Closing Ramble
June 25, 2025
H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.
Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …
June 19, 2025
The Guns of the South: Checkmate, Alt-Hist Plausibility Sticklers
Feral Historian
Published 24 Jan 2025Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South gives us a look at a victorious Confederate States as they grapple with the consequences of slavery, war, and the challenges of building a new nation. It also skewers a favorite activity of alt-history readers, the nitpicking of plausibility in the points of divergence, by dropping South African time travelers with AKs into the middle of the Civil War.
00:00 Intro
02:08 America Will Break
04:49 Right and Left
05:36 CSA at odds with AWB
08:08 Forrest
10:16 Technology
13:16 “Why then …”
June 10, 2025
They Live SG-1: Conquest and Paternalism
Feral Historian
Published 26 Jan 2024Stargate and SG-1 generally don’t go together, but they’re based on the same underlying premise. Our leaders are lying to us, denying us knowledge of fundamental truths about our world. Truths that can be the difference between freedom and slavery for all of humanity.
Sidenote, this is the first time I’ve shot one of these videos indoors instead of in the mountains. It’s -24 out on the day of recording.
00:00 Intro
01:05 Stargate
03:11 Ruling Class
04:18 Secrets
06:02 Illusions
06:48 Conclusion
April 29, 2025
1984 and the Politicizing of Language
Feral Historian
Published 16 Aug 2024A dive into 1984 in relation to modern politics can’t be done without pissin’ in everyone’s Froot-Loops, so grab a tall glass of Victory Gin and let’s talk about how The Party functions, how doublethink makes us crazy, and how it’s not just those nutters on the other side that do it.
I take a few jabs at current sacred cows of the Left and Right here. Hopefully the comments won’t look like Hate Week.
00:00 Intro
01:46 Thoughtcrime and Doublethink
12:27 War is Peace
17:46 Oligarchal Collectivism
22:12 MiniTruePost-release edit: It’s been pointed out that I grossly oversimplified the military analysis later in the video, which is true. Man-portable air defense systems and maneuver warfare are a lot more complicated than this video implies. As for that one particular doublethink example mentioned so very briefly, some of the counterpoints have been … impressive contortions of language in their own right. But not interesting enough to discuss the matter further.
March 30, 2025
Dies the Fire and the Founder Effect
Feral Historian
Published 15 Nov 2024The first book in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, Dies The Fire yanks modern technology out of the world and sets the stage for a multi-faceted exploration of how distinct cultures emerge from small isolated groups and the profound effect individuals can have the societies that coalesce around them.
00:00 Intro
01:28 Founders
03:37 Desperation
04:51 Flawed Assumptions
07:05 Composites and Rhymes
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March 21, 2025
Star Trek: Jobs, Money, and Replicators
Feral Historian
Published 14 Jun 2024So the Federation doesn’t use money and magic walls give you anything you ask for. What kind of economy are we really looking at here, and is some approximation of this possible without first having those replicators?
First we have to talk about what money is, what a job is (vs just being employed) and a little historical detour into modern efforts at Universal Basic Income. All of which lead to a very hypothetical look at how we might be able to build a rough approximation of a Star Trek economy in the near-term future.
This is all analysis and thought-experiment. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these ideas, just bouncing things around for consideration.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Qualitatively Distinct Model
02:27 The Triple Revolution
05:00 Jobs ≠ Employment
06:32 Universal Basic Income
11:35 Federation Credit
13:45 Impacts of Currency
15:16 Can We Really Do This?
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March 14, 2025
Firefly and the Lost Cause
Feral Historian
Published 8 Nov 2024I’ve often been questioned for making Civil War comparisons when discussing Firefly. Here I explain why Firefly not only reflects but is based on the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy.
For further background on how secession was framed at the start of the American Civil War, battlefields.org has plain text copies of several of the Confederate States’ declarations of causes for secession up at https://www.battlefields.org/learn/pr…. You can see how slavery is mentioned a lot, but often framed in terms of the second-order effects of Northern policy damaging their economy, infringing on sovereignty, etc. It varied by state of course, Virginia kept it vague with references to the Federal government “perverting said powers” granted it, while Mississippi was very clear about slavery being the cause.
00:00 Intro
01:12 The Lost Cause
03:27 Selling the Peace
05:28 Causes
06:59 Firefly as a Lost Cause
February 21, 2025
Firefly and the End of Serenity
Feral Historian
Published 29 Mar 2023Serenity did an admirable job of wrapping up Firefly after the series was cancelled. But the ending, which depends on the idea that exposing government misdeeds forces change, doesn’t work today. Serenity‘s ending is premised on the idea that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” but the last few years have illustrated that we’re dealing with sunlight-resistant corruption these days.
00:00 Intro
00:24 Backstory
01:27 Chimerica
02:08 Unification
03:37 Secrets
05:12 Serenity‘s Ending
