I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, “Last Man” in The Portable Nietzsche. Walter Kaufmann, Translator. (Penguin, 1982)

you can oppose something without advocating for making it illegal

As long as carceral logic prevails, there will never be freedom of speech or expression or association.

For years, I've worried about the tendency of the left to support restrictions on free speech for the right, knowing that the liberal order creating such restrictions would not hesitate to use it on the left once they felt threatened by it. The reaction to pro-Palestine protest has proven me correct. Just remember that this is what you supported for years and now the chickens have come home to roost.

everyone loves to talk big game about how they hate carceralism and punitive justice until it comes to the topic of sexual violence in which case half of the prison abolitionists will revert immediately to being constitutional literalists for the code of hammurabi without missing a beat--good thing that the accusation of sexual violence hasn't been historically leveraged against people of colour or gay people or trans women or anything or this capitulation to kneejerk reaction would be uhhh pretty bad!

Things I want to see in 32nd-century Star Trek:

The Klingons have moved away from their warrior aristocracy and now bear about as much resemblance to their 23rd/24th depictions as modern Danes do to Vikings

The Jem'Hadar, like many slave soldiers before and since, have overthrown their former masters and now rule the many thousands of small kingdoms that make up the former Dominion

Socialist Ferenginar

Major new religion: Siskoism. Very loosely based on traditional Bajoran religion, except most of its followers aren't actually Bajoran

More transhumanism: let's see consciousness uploading, generic augmentation, deliberate creation of transporter duplicates to get a sort of immortality, etc., etc.

The Borg assimilated the Organians many centuries ago but the Organian philosophy actually managed to spread throughout the hive mind such that they've abandoned their imperialistic ways

A new threat from outside of the galaxy and, oh, let's say that some obscure planet from Voyager is now a major galactic power

I wonder what's going on in the world of Star Trek today

Huh

In 5000 years it won't matter what books you read or what ideology you followed or the cool friends you had. All that matters will be the scraps of clothing you wore, the permanent markings on your body, the surgeries you had, and the method of preservation of your corpse.

The implication that the top picture is some glorious expression of freedom and human vitality (in contrast to the below picture's drab grey HGTV look cultivated by soulless communists) is so fucking funny to me. Both of these architectural styles are pretty typical of capitalism — one's just loud consumerist maximalism while the other is gentrifying yuppie minimalism. Brand nostalgia is peak late-stage capitalism anyway. This picture is such a perfectly-distilled expression of our times and I really hope it ends up in the history books of our eventual eco-socialist society of the future.

If I was a utilitarian, I would be a capitalist supporting a future for humanity in pleasure pods as an inhumanized capital expands throughout the cosmos. But I am not a utilitarian. Such a future is not desirable to me. I am a socialist because I value a broader spectrum of human values - happiness and safety, yes, but also struggle and striving, exploration, the sublime and the mysterious, relating with others and the world, and freedom. I reject capitalism and despotism both as ways of stagnation and domestication and death in one form or another for future humans.

academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”

bootlicking doesnt look good on your blog

Look, nationalism is stupid. Nationalism is a grift. Nation-states are a bad basis for the global international order. But “your nation is fake” is just… it’s an inane argument! It doesn’t matter of your nation is 350 ethnicities in a trench coat, or if it’s not old enough to drive, or if it was invented to justify the rule of some inbred tyrant in the Middle Ages. Nations exist by virtue of people identifying with them; the only way a nation can be fake is if nobody identifies with it. And people plainly identify as Americans! Enthusiastically so! Of diverse ethnicities and languages!

“America isn’t a nation” is just a basic category error. You have misunderstood what a nation is. It’s not a bloodline or a patch of land or even something that has to be philosophically coherent and defensible. It’s a feeling! It’s a vibe! You think Germanness is any more coherent than Americanness? It’s completely fuckin’ arbitrary! They all are!

a good rule of thumb imo is that if someone is really fixated on 'trafficking' you can safely ignore whatever they have to say like nine times out of ten

excitedly waiting for this