Friday Ephemera

“… the smug leftists whose disdain for half the country gave rise to Trump continue to frame half the country as the villains in their own culture.”
It’s all straw men, isn’t it? Trump’s a “white supremacist”, Meyers is posting “hateful rhetoric”, and “capitalism […] requires us to believe […] that everything we gain comes at someone else’s expense”.
I think the problem the rest of us have understanding them is that we didn’t appreciate the extent to which they actually believe this bollocks. We thought it was just the usual hyperbole of political activism. But that “secret Facebook page” unearthed by PJM wasn’t for public consumption. They’re talking among themselves in the same terms as they yell at everyone else. They’re actually living in this absurd nightmare of their own invention where evil lurks around every corner and they’re brave warriors fighting for justice and safety.
God help us all.

I think the problem the rest of us have understanding them is that we didn’t appreciate the extent to which they actually believe this bollocks.
I’m not entirely convinced they do believe it. For such people, in-group signalling is important and can get very competitive. Though I’m sure they enjoy flattering themselves. And I’m also sure they enjoy the pretext for spite. In this case, conspiring to harass and bully some guy who doesn’t care to play the same kind of game.

It occurs to me that, were he alive today, Martin Luther King would get exactly the same treatment from the Left as Ben Shapiro.
Oh hell, Dr King was denounced as an “Uncle Tom” in his own lifetime by more radical Black Nationalists.

Quillette takes the centrist obsession with objectivity and facts, the centrist’s only antidote to “fake news,” and applies it to academia.

Quelle horreur!!!

Jeeze, Darleen, how did you find those twerps?
Unfortunately, it’s not that hard.

“Quelle horreur!!!”
So… one of the world’s biggest businesses fires an employee for stating a mainstream opinion, Quillette publishes a sympathetic article, suffers a DOS attack in response, and they’re “playing” the victim?
Leftist Rule #1: Anyone designated “right-wing” is fair game.

So… one of the world’s biggest businesses fires an employee for stating a mainstream opinion, Quillette publishes a sympathetic article, suffers a DOS attack in response, and they’re “playing” the victim?
This is the new verbal judo coming from the left. About a year or so ago, before all this confederate statue nonsense started, on a friend’s FB post I questioned why Seattle had a statue of Lenin. Oooh, snowflake conservative is threatened by a statue. Language is wasted on these people. The only form of communication that they understand is physical.

3 Quarks Daily links to Quillette occasionally. This prompted one of their left-wing regulars to complain about linking to a “prestige alt-right” site. Naturally, she did not respond to commenters, including the site owner, asking her to explain what she even meant, let alone provide anything like evidence. Classical liberal, conservative, alt-right, fascist — it’s all just a fun game of taxonomic Twister as far as they care.

“Classical liberal, conservative, alt-right, fascist — it’s all just a fun game of taxonomic Twister as far as they care.”
Leftist Rule #2: Anyone failing to rigidly espouse all the current Leftist talking points without a hint of criticism is to be designated “right-wing”.

Another one for the “Giant Vaginas” series, I think:
http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/23/this-ceramic-vagina-jewellery-plate-is-all-anyones-ever-wanted-6950262/

an extremist Klingon sect
#NotAllKlingons
The villains don’t sound terribly interesting. I wait with bated breath to see how the other Klingons are portrayed – the ones whose preferred pronouns are net and ‘e’, who maintain that when you get down to it the Ferenghi are more Klingon than anybody, and it’s extremely problematic to think otherwise (in the current Stardate especially).

It’s on CBS All Access. Nobody’s going to watch it.
Between siloing off their content in a service that costs as much as Netflix and then insulting a good chunk of their potential audience, it’s like they’re trying to fail.
That said, the franchise is in an interesting place right now. Trek fans hate the movies, but they’re doing exceptionally well at the box office. The producers have implied this show is for those fans (by being very clear it is not in the new movie’s milieu).
Looking at what they’re doing, it seems increasingly clear they’ve decided traditional Trek fans are a small but affluent minority with monolithic tastes that will pay to have those tastes pandered to.
Sadly, based on the last couple of cons I’ve been to, I don’t think they’re wrong.

I wait with bated breath to see how the other Klingons are portrayed
One of the interesting bits of Enterprise was the episode where they finally answer the question “how the hell did a bunch of barely-literate comic opera barbarians end up a starfaring empire”. The answer is that the Klingons are literally Nazis – a once-diverse, peaceful, artistic and scientific society (“My father was a poet. My mother was a botanist.”) was taken over by a violent, nationalist political movement espousing a return to a Golden Age (this is where the Kahless cult starts, apparently).
Ten out of ten for continuity, minus several million for originality, as Douglas Adams might have said. The fact that if the Bad Klingons are Nazis, that perforce makes the Good Klingons the famously decadent and economically unsustainable Weimar Republic goes unmentioned, of course.

“Ten out of ten for continuity, minus several million for originality, as Douglas Adams might have said. The fact that if the Bad Klingons are Nazis, that perforce makes the Good Klingons the famously decadent and economically unsustainable Weimar Republic goes unmentioned, of course.”
Indeed. But it also holes the whole “warlike species” thing under the waterline, too. Which is probably intentional, to be fair, because it’s kinda-sorta racist… speciesist… er, whatever, and gives another opportunity to haul out the Warning From History storyline (and, as you say, totally fail to understand what that warning is, as usual).
However isn’t having a completely different evolutionary history that might endow a different sense of morality (just as other species on Earth clearly do) kind of the point of science-fiction aliens? They’re not human. They think differently. The Klingons are aggressive and warlike because they… are… alien. If they’re Just Like Us, then what’s the point of writing them in? You might as well have them as a bunch of rebel humans.
(Incidentally, that fat Welsh bloke buggered up Doctor Who in exactly the same way, trying to show the Doctor’s “human side”, as if he had one.)

If they’re Just Like Us, then what’s the point of writing them in?
The alien races in Star Trek have been allegories for real-world cultures or social mores since Day One, though. It was how Roddenberry sneaked his moralizing about current events past the CBS censors. The Klingons are the Russians, the Romulans are the Chinese, the Edenites are space hippies. Now, I happen to agree that SF should treat alien races more intelligently than that, but holding Star Trek to task for it seems unfair; they staked out their territory early and haven’t deviated from it.
The Voyager episodes that delved into Tuvok’s adolescence as an angry and hormonal Vulcan were some of the best alien writing in the entire franchise, I thought, but that kind of thing is extremely rare. Alien Nation did the best job of portraying a truly alien culture, but even then they were doing it explicitly as an allegory for racism against immigrants.

Hey, I’m going on what I’ve been told.
Even more oddly, they’re invariably made by women, who, one would assume, should know better. o_O

I always preferred Babylon 5 myself.
I’m sure I’ll be pilloried for saying so, but I don’t consider Babylon 5 to be science fiction. It’s fantasy. It’s not quite Lord of the Rings IN SPAAAACE, but you can see Rivendell from the bridge, if you know what I’m saying.
I quite enjoyed The Expanse, and I think near future solar system hard SF is a fertile milieu for accessible adventure stories. I’m pleasantly surprised it’s gotten three seasons.

Unfortunately, it’s not that hard.
What I find funny about that post in “theoutline” is how they go to great lengths to mock conservatives comments to Quillette articles, and yet “theoutline” doesn’t allow comments to its posts…