Risk Is Our Business

The Continental Congress ^ | 2 Jan 2024 | George MF Washington

[Rummyfan]

Happy New Year! I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas filled with a family and friends, much love and a bare minimum of political combat… for my part, right before Christmas, I got sucked into a really dumb social media political vortex…

Yeah yeah, I know…

But this kerfuffle was exceptionally stupid… In this case, some terminally online Leftist went to Twitter to announce that they (it almost had to be a they/them right?) couldn’t imagine why any Conservative would enjoy watching STAR TREK, since there’s nothing about a science fiction future which values diversity and civil rights that the fascists of the modern Conservative movement could ever appreciate, much less understand.

Well…

Much like the idea that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is rape culture, or “ZOMG you guys, Jesus Christ was not white!”, we have to repeat these same stupid cultural fights every few years… roughly every time a new crop of college freshman emerges from the chrysalis of their very first Intersectionality class with their eyes fully opened and their minds completely blown.

It’s unclear whether this “persyn” was referring to the original Star Trek series which aired over the course of three seasons in the late 1960’s, or one of the more modern Trek-ish series where it’s just as likely that a transgender alien is going to show up to tell you how rewarding their gender confusion is for them, as it is that there’s going to be a good old fashioned phaser fight… (and if you think I’m kidding about that transgender alien bit, I can assure you that I am not).

Whichever the case, it’s impossible to discuss the politics of Star Trek without focusing on the original 1960’s series, which is where the entire ethos of the Star Trek Universe received its DNA. No series produced since then could exist without the context, the canon if you will, that this first series provided.

So first, let’s be clear about what the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry’s first creation, actually was… it was a smart, muscular and unapologetic defense of the power of Western Civilization to change the world (universe) for the better… and it was a series which celebrated courage and risk taking as among the most important of all human virtues.

If any of that sounds like something that would send Conservatives fleeing for their lives like vampires before a runaway garlic truck with a busted brake line, well then you’re probably a BLM activist… or at the very least you are admitting that you’re entirely ignorant of the things that modern Conservatives actually believe.

The problem, in my experience, is that most Progressives have not actually seen much of the original series (TOS), and have only a very rudimentary understanding of the show’s ethos. To the extent they are familiar with TOS at all, it is often through modern media “criticism” of the show which focuses on what mainstream critics, which is to say Leftists, have concluded… that the show’s politics were proudly and unapologetically Progressive.

The problem is that this conclusion just ain’t true… it’s a misunderstanding often based on a single episode… “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, which has become the most famous episode of Star Trek precisely because it is about race… our modern culture’s most fraught, most talked about, most obsesssed-over issue.

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (S3; EP15): In this most broadly well-known episode of TOS, Kirk and his crew stumble on two aliens, one of whom is a criminal being pursued across interstellar space by the other. These two men’s faces are split down the middle, one side is black, the other white. The intractable problem, these aliens explain to a befuddled Captain Kirk, is that while the right side of one man’s face is white, the other man’s face is white on the left side.

Other than that, they are identical in every way… the only thing that differentiates these two men is… the color of their skin.

[Rummyfan]

More at the source, a long interesting take on Star Trek: TOS. Which by the way is the only one I ever enjoyed, TNG being much too touchy-feely and once they hired Whoopie Goldberg, well.....

[left that other site]

Yeah...Whoopie ruined it for me forever.

[Rummyfan]

Star Trek, and in particular its iconic lead character, celebrated those things about Human nature from which Progressives, and our participation trophy culture in general, tend to recoil like slugs from salt... courage, risk taking, steadfastness, self-sacrifice and confidence in one’s culture and principles. One need only to have survived the COVID pandemic and its concomitant lockdowns and mandates to understand that Progressives no longer admire these things, that indeed they often seek to use their political advantage to suppress or even eliminate them altogether.

Risk IS Our Business

[Rummyfan]

But William Shatner... what a ham!

[Leaning Right]

TNG had better special effects. But the original series had better scripts.
What breaks the tie? For me it’s:

(Yes, I’m that superficial.)

[Leaning Right]

> But William Shatner... what a ham! <

Yep. But Shatner really annoyed George Takei. So Shatner can’t be all bad.

[KC Burke]

Science Fiction is speculative fiction, not philosophy or non-fiction arguements of what the world should be or is in reality. As such there has been over a hundred years where the genre has contained speculation about sex, faith, reincarnation, Heaven, Hell, adulthood, man as opposed to animal, and all sorts of topics to allow a vehicle for imaginative speculation. There are plenty of conservatives that understand the value of the culture they have inherited who speculate and consider such worlds or times as described in Science Fiction.

We can whistle while we ride a bike.

[Rummyfan]

LOL! She’s miles ahead of Yeoman Janice and Nurse Chapel (who had the hots for Spock?!).

[left that other site]

Oh definitely!

But a FUN Ham nonetheless.

[bigbob]

But tending bar was at least a job Whoopi was qualified for. Like AOC.