I think this makes sense, especially since most women seem to not want to put anything over their ass when the pants themselves are so form fitting that it leaves nothing to the imagination. If it were comfort, a pair of shorts covering the ass, or maybe a skirt for walking about town etc.wouldn’t be a big ask. Or,sweatpants. Instead, they’re choosing crop tops and leggings where they display every curve they have. Doubly annoying when these people go to gyms with every curve displayed, do bent over exercises and film the guy’s reactions in order to shame him for noticing the barely hidden ass displayed before him.

I’m a woman and I do work out and I do want to be comfortable. But I find basketball shorts to be nearly ideal for the gym, sweats or lose fitting jeans to be comfortable around town, and skirts (I do use leggings under if it’s cold) to be perfectly comfortable. And because I don’t display my body in provocative fashion, people do tend to not stare at my ass/boobs and take me fairly seriously.

I think the issue especially for the employer is that much like other environments you can’t prevent Steven in the cubicle next to a woman from being a perv. Sure you fire him afterwards, all well and good, but there are lots of situations where the proper decorum must be kept and the business must be done with a minimum of fuss. And if you can’t say no to provocative clothing and remarks in the name of creating a neutral space where the company business is getting done and so on, then it’s not goin* to happen.

In theory sure. But an essay by nature gives all kinds of information that they’re likely using as proxies for leadership, and most of them are indicative of race, religion, social class, and political affiliation. They want people who volunteer, but be honest, if one kid volunteers at a Pro-Life organization and a second in a soup kitchen and a third at a Pro-Palestinian group, who gets that one spot even if all three show “leadership?” Does it sound better if the things they were doing happen in America, near their home, or in Kenya? Keep in mind that only people likely to be able to afford to give gifts to the college post graduation are likely to be able to afford sinecures in NGOs doing interesting work in a far away country.

There isn’t really a way around this. The nature of an essay is that it cannot help but give out information that has nothing to do with “leadership”.

I think the Alicuberre drive is worse because it’s expensive science working on a project that violates known scientific principles in multiple ways. At minimum LLM has some good uses in business and to create boiler plate journalism. It might turn into something more eventually. Alibucurre drives can only end in futility because none of the stuff proposed can exist. Negative mass and negative energy are fiction. The theory of relativity closes off FTL travel and must do so to preserve causality.

I mean if we were talking about science fiction fans in the 1989s, I’d agree with you for the most part. The problem is that as science education has declined for the general population (alongside mathematical and general literacy) I’m seeing more and more often that fans of these series have no idea what actual space looks like and the hard limits on speed. It doesn’t help when grifters like Albucurre come along with a mathematical curiosity in a physics equation and goes “Behold the Warp Theory”. I don’t blame NASA for playing along, they need those fanboys calling congress to fund them.

What’s disturbing is how many people are taking the idea seriously.

I guess my point is that I don’t think there’s actually much of a paradox to be has here. Space is extremely big, and for most types of communication and transport, there’s no reason to even start with us being able to see or hear anything. If travel to the nearest star is measured in years at speeds that don’t need eye-watering amounts of energy, weird matter, etc. there’s no reason to even start looking for aliens. It would be like Native Americans in 1300 using their best technology to look for humans in Europe and formulating lots of theories about why they never see anything to indicate intelligent life in Europe. They probably are out there, not even hiding, just that in 1300 nobody could possibly cross the ocean and they weren’t really trying to communicate across the Atlantic.

The Fermi paradox only matters because it’s an easy way to fleece money out of the scifi nerds who believe that Star Trek represents a realistic future in space. It’s why the people running NASA and SETI and other similar agencies have an operating budget despite doing nothing other than being make-work projects for nerds. I don’t expect to see humans on Mars as anything other than a photo opportunity in this century and maybe the next.

I just mostly find the theory-making amusing. Maybe they’re hiding? Maybe they’re using super-secret technology. Maybe they’ve gone into a higher levels of being and aren’t physical anymore. Maybe they’ve gone Borg, maybe the Grey goo got them. It’s just anything to avoid dealing with the obvious— space is simply too big for aliens or us to effectively colonize or control and thus communicate that crosses tge nearest heliopause is unnecessary.

I think honestly all the handwringing about why we can’t detect aliens may point to something else. Maybe the kinds of technology that would enable us to gather enough material to build Dyson spheres and escape the solar system simply are not feasible. If the best speed we can make is 75% of the speed of light, even the short distance to the nearest Star system becomes a generational journey. And getting up to that speed is going to take a lot of energy. As much as I love my space opera, I just don’t see it as a plausible future.

What seems possible is akin to the maximum ground speed on earth being limited to walking speed. At such a speed knowing about tribes a thousand miles away just isn’t going to happen, long distance communication makes no sense when the entire civilization might well be trapped in the nearest star system and maybe if super advanced, tge one next to theirs. They don’t need to broadcast anything beyond that, so they’re not going to develop it. What would we detect? Unless we somehow manage to detect them directly, there’s nothing to see, and nothing to hear.

The paradox seems to rest on the assumption of interstellar travel being feasible. If it’s not, Theres no paradox. They’re here, but too far away to hear or see.

I’ll agree with almost all of this, although I’m agnostic on the alcoholism. But I think the other huge weakness here is just how “inbred” the entire thing is. There’s a lot of people working on the series who have done almost nothing else. If there’s a way to kill the vision of a scifi series (or really any series) getting a second or third generation of people who have done nothing else is a great way to do it. There’s not really an outside perspective, what exactly can aging trek actors turned directors bring to the series? What can Spock’s son literally raised on the set see here? In all cases, it’s soaked in that vision of what was. And it generally means taking fairly safe routes and going to the familiar, or going for the modern mania for deconstruction where you simply subvert and change things in odd ways just to change them.

The Dune book series had the same problem. Brian Herbert simply is not his father. And so you have things that are safer if boring and bland. Or you have Kralizec in which Duncan Idaho teaches computers to share with humans. It’s lost a lot of tge mojo it had. It’s an adventure story now, with no more of that boring philosophy or science or weirdness that made the original story interesting.

As someone who grew up with it, that’s what turned me off of it. Back in the day, it was perfectly willing to try new things, to say things about culture and science and ask deep questions about reality and so on. At present, it goes in one of two directions.

First you have the Nostalgia Trek, which seems mostly interested in catering to people who like Star Trek as an aesthetic setting. People who like the setting of Guys who Explore Space and Lecture Aliens about Neoliberalism. They like the aliens, the ships, the politics, they like to see their favorite childhood stories and heroes on their TVs. But they have no interest in the ethos of Trek, or even Science Fiction as a genre of fiction. This version in essence is Sci-Fi for people who want to pretend to like sci-fi but hate all the stuff that makes it actually science fiction— the hard science, the philosophical questions about reality and the questions about things that modern Americans take for granted. To them the Federation is America, but in space, and Starfleet is the USA military who are always right and never fail.

Second, you have the too-cool-for-school Trek. It’s not any more willing to tweak noses or really shake things up. They just decided they don’t like the old Trek aesthetic and therefore “deconstruct” it, or lampoon it, or “subvert” it in utterly predictable ways. What if … the federation is the bad guys? What if we totally glued teeth all over Klingons for no reason? What if we suddenly discovered the Roger’s and Hammerstein Nebula? Or turned Spock human just before his mother comes to visit. None of this is deep or interesting it’s more like a kid deciding it’s cool to deface a painting.

I think too that a lot of the fantasy is the loosening of restrictions. You can shoot people in the apocalypse. You can leave your normal responsibilities and bug off to the woods and do nothing but fish hunt and garden. No more commutes and shopping for ramen at piggly wiggly. No more spreadsheets and emails. No more shuffling the kids off to soccer practice. Just a simple little life.

Somehow none of that surprises me. But I’ve always found the weird psychology around a lot of the fears rather fascinating. The things Americans tend to fear are violent catastrophes that seem borne out of movies and television and especially superhero comics. Countries that actually have these sorts of disasters tend to be pretty laid back about it. In Puerto Rico, they stock up on rum and have bock parties to care for their neighbors. They don’t cower in their homes with an arsenal of automatic weapons. They help each other out.

Most prepping is basically LARP. They aren’t preparing for survival in an actual emergency, they’re preparing for Walking Dead or Red Dawn. If you pay attention to the stuff they emphasize, it’s weapons, hardware, solar panels for long term power loss, and tons of survival food. It’s probably more a masterbation to the image of themself as a tough, manly survivalist who can take care of his family alone and can absolutely shoot someone in the face.

The problem with the pandemic is that it’s was a feminine disaster. The solutions did not feel masculine. It wasn’t “go shoot something”, it wasn’t go out to the woods and hunt. It wasn’t man craft kinds of stuff using tools and high tech gear. The power didn’t even go out. It was basically boring. And the stuff you had to do outside of the mask were normal things. Stay home, wash your hands, and so on. And the mask didn’t feel manly. So they decided the real threat was something more like the movies — the big bad government doing a psyop. Now they could be brave and defiantly demand their rights. Now it looks like 1776.

I think real prepping (and you can find sensible ideas on ready.gov or any site that gives advice on getting ready for natural disasters) has some usefulness. You don’t want to be down to your last can of beans when a disaster strikes.

Shooting CEOs might feel good in a moment (other than the obvious Thou shalt not kill thing), but it’s not a policy, and it doesn’t fix any of the underlying problems. The next CEO isn’t going to change how he does things because he’s beholden to shareholders who will replace him if he doesn’t do exactly like the last guy did.

I honestly don’t read the MAGA types in general caring, they just don’t. If we end up having more people than they can feed, it’s not like tge people cheering it on are goin* to demand that something be done about it. And that’s assuming that we get honest reports, which would require a press willing to challenge Trump. That seems unlike given how major press outlets are already sucking up to him pretty hard.

He wants to, sure. But I’m not sure he can get his way on this. There are, to quote Dune, “plots within plots”. Blue states and cities are absolutely looking to resist here. This probably means no cooperation or even actively hiding people. There will be court cases beyond that. And even if they lose, there might be a situation that’s the reverse of the border stuff from last year, where Blue areas call up the National Guard to protect people from deportation, giving Trump no good options. You can’t simply order your troops to fire on the National Guard, you might have a hard time arresting them. You can’t arrest sitting governors or mayors or whatever if they haven’t broken the law. And so what we have is a standoff and I’m not convinced that if he goes full retard and tries this stuff it goes the way he thinks it will.

Except that there have been incidents of antisemitism in the USA as well. It’s not something that you can easily guarantee because Jews in NYC are at the mercy of the rest of us, and like most in NYC are not allowed to be armed. I really don’t have a good answer, but as I said, the history of Judaism when Jews don’t have an Army and Navy is pretty bleak. Even leaving aside the Nazis, Jewish history pretty much shows why they need an ethos Tate somewhere with an army and navy under their control.

I’ll have to be fair to their argument though. The reason Jews are so gung ho about Israel and so willing to do anything to defend it it’s basically about hundreds of years of Jewish history. Jews got kicked out of their homes, exiled, pogroms everywhere, often for things that they had nothing to do with. And of course there’s the holocaust after all of that. From that perspective, Israel is basically the only place where Jews can at least to some degree control their own fate. And that’s not something they’ll give up, obviously.

I agree. But until you have a message you believe in and are willing to put out far and wide without apologizing for having an agenda. Look at the GOP — they believe in stupid things, but I guarantee you that everyone reading my words can absolutely tell you what the6 want to do and why they want to do that. The words are repeated in every organ of the GOP, every radio show, every news organ, every podcast, every white paper issued by a GOP think tank all have a message. And because they have that message and actually not only believe in that vision but are absolutely committed to it. I don’t think I could make the same bet on the democratic side. They have no vision of government, of culture, or why they think that. The democratic organs of culture mostly document GOP bad and snipe at other democrats. There’s nothing really to hold people to doing.

Honestly I think part of the problem is how long the campaign is. It takes several years to run for president, and the formal kickoff is often more than a year out. People in formally elected offices basically spend 70% of their time in office preparing to campaign and actively campaigning for office. Of course they need that much money.

I think the first step to getting the party back on track is to invest in getting the message out there. Have a network or three on the radio or TV, have news sites, etc that can explain what the ideas are and why they work and where they’ve actually done good things. Start talking about your ideas.

And when you do something TELL THE PEOPLE. It’s like the democrats almost want it to be top secret. I’ve had this conversation a few times with conservatives convinced there’s a conspiracy to poison Americans with additives in foods. Exhibit A is that a lot of things that are common in American food are not in European foods. So the government is obviously trying to kill us, population control and so on. No, the European Union is simply much more willing to ban poison from their foods than our FDA is. So this would be an excellent thing for democrats to be actually talking about and making the case for smart regulations to protect people. They’re generally MIA. And the same is true of other things. The infrastructure bill Biden passed is building lots of highways. Not one will have any sort of signage telling people that this is the infrastructure bill at work making roads better.

Democrats are not doing anything because they’re captured. They take money from the same business interests and banks that the Republicans do. It’s almost a controlled opposition party— they exist to hold things in place until the next republican term. They aren’t there to do things, they barely bother to pretend to be interested in that. In fact, I’d say they’re not even really an “ideas” party. If they had ideas, they’d want to get them out. They don’t, which is why Heritage Foundation can spend millions on Right Wing media outlets, radio, TV (multiple channels), websites, and so on. Democrats had Air America, but didn’t really invest in it. So now it’s NPR, MSNBC, and Bread Tube. That’s how into getting things done they are. Podcasters, Vaush, and MSNBC and the three political shows on NPR. They don’t even believe in their message enough to bother getting it out there. The way most people find out about anything the democrats actually want to do is republicans telling them it’s bad. Completely rearguard action.

Honestly, to me, the world of the people making it is so insular and insulated that most people involved have been involved since the early days of Trek. If you read the roster there are a lot of former Trek actors moving on to directing Trek. Another produce is … Adam Nimoy famously son of Spock, who married a former Trek actress. These people are probably nice and have at least middling talent. But at the same time, there’s no fresh ideas, no interesting takes, no story ideas that haven’t really been done before. That means you end up stuck with either warmed over old stuff (Strange New Worlds clearly wants to be TOS but made by people who never understood what TOS was in its time) , deconstructions (Picard and Discovery) or remakes of other, better ideas … but in Trek (the upcoming Academy show sounds ridiculous, basically Hogwarts but Trek with none of the charm because Trek features overly serious Starfleet Academy and a distinct lack of Hagrid).

If I were in charge, I’d start by cleaning house. Get some young hungry directors, producers, and writers passionate about really great science fiction TV, and tell them to pitch me the next Trek as if nobody had ever heard of Star Trek, Starfleet, the Enterprise, or Kirk. They’d be more or less bound by the canon, but even within that boundary, there’s a lot you can do with the universe. Set an entire series in the Ferengar. A series featuring the Marquis. Maybe and entirely Mirror Universe series set in a fascist Federation. Even the Klingon Empire could be somewhat interesting. But come up with a concept that isn’t “hey, look, we got the TNG crew out of retirement, please clap”, or “Hey, look, we pot Kirk and Spock on a set together,” or “Hey, we heard you guys like Harry Potter, but have you seen Star Trek: in school”. In short, start trying to figure out the interesting settings in your universe for great science fiction series, then make episodes that fully explore the concept and the settings.

Just for an example, the Marquis show is literally about people who we consider insurgents or terrorists or freedom fighters. And in main it’s about people fighting for freedom in their home worlds against a much more powerful enemy. Fully exploring the concept of things like whether or not the Federation gives them weapons because of threats from Kardassia would be interesting. I think dealing with the topic of what happens to civilians in areas like that again could be interesting. You’d also have to deal with the tactics used, and the basic necessity of fighting a war like that.

The Klingon one might look a bit like Game of Thrones, although I think it would also be a bit like Dune. Lots of political games and occasional actual fighting to secure your house’s position in the Empire. There’s plenty of drama in tha5 kind of setting. I’d be disappointed if they have.a dwarf, but political intrigue is probably good frame in the right hands.

A fascist federation would be a bit on the nose ATM, but I think if you play it straight and lean into it, as in Warhammer levels of leaning into the fascism, it would be fairly interesting. Exaggerating th3 hell out of it, just doing really terrible things because of some supposed external enemies (maybe Borg or Q or something). Do an I can’t believe it’s not an exterminatus. Have fun with it.

Part of the problem with screaming about fascism is that the claim is vague, and political rhetoric is absolutely full of “most important election in the history of forever.”

Fascism is vague because we do an absolutely terrible job in explaining what it is and what it actually means. Most people know precisely two things about fascism. First, Auswitz, and second, goose stepping and straight arm salutes. This doesn’t explain anything, and can lull people into a very false sense of security because until someone hangs up a swastika or starts making angry speeches about minorities, it simply doesn’t look like fascism to the average American who was given a Marvel Comic Universe understanding of fascism.

Second, we’ve been playing the exact same game in every election. George W Bush was a threat to democratic ideals. That was 24 years ago. Every election I can remember has had democracy on the ballot and has been the most consequential election ever. It’s been done so much by all parties that nobody’s going to be convinced to vote for someone because their opponent is a “danger to our democracy.” It’s been done too many times. And people are now pretty suspicious of “my opponent is Literally Hitler” not because it cannot happen, it obviously can, but because it’s been used for decades as cover for basically not having to convince anyone you can do the job. Trump is Fascist, okay so tell me, what are you going to do about Russia? Or the price of food? Or education? Or … anything of actual importance to regular people who are listening to you prattle on about democracy while they’re figuring out whether or not they can cut something else out of the budget because gas is high and groceries are high, and they just want to live life.

I’m going to give the same pep talk I’ve been giving for a while. For the vast majority of people, unless you’re directly interacting with the government, you can pretty much tune out and not care if you want. In fact, I contend for most people, unless, again there’s a specific policy that’s going to affect you or someone or something you actually care about (in which case obviously follow that and take action on that) you can safely ignore most of the news that people think is important. Of the stuff that will be important, it’s almost always going to be something that people are still talking about a week from now. I think that unless you are going to be involved, you’re probably paying too much attention to news and that’s why you’re freaking out. Take a breather, touch grass, and stop worrying. Take the time to decide which issues you actually care about and can take action on. Get involved in that stuff, contribute to organizations that fight those things. Go to a protest rally or three. But as for the rest, you really don’t need to be breathlessly reading every news article and angry tweet. It’s actually not good for you.

I’ll be honest in saying that the fundamental problem is that democrats don’t understand power. They have this idea that you come up with policies and that people will thus hand them power. Republicans understand that power is the first order of business. If you don’t take power, your policies don’t matter. You want to help people? Cute. You aren’t even trying to take power, and when you do, you don’t use it to consolidate your power, you pretty much give it away.

Case in point was RBG. She knew it wasn’t a given that there would be a democrat in power when she retired, she didn’t quit when there was one. And thus Trump got a free SCOTUS pick. When it’s the GOP, they only resign when their party will pick their successor.

I think that unless you’re a minority or LGBT life isn’t going to change that much. Americans have seen far too many horror fantasies about WW2 or Soviet Union stuff or Shariah to really understand what life in those states is like. It’s not tanks, goose stepping and speeches nonstop. It’s normal life. Go look at video of China. It’s not horrible.

I’m in a similar space though I seem to have landed on a more Stoic Taoist path. I follow Shi Heng Yi on YouTube which got me interested, but I landed on Stoics simply because I find most of Buddhism to be so passive that it’s simply an excuse for navel gazing and escapism. Stoicism promotes active participation in the world and trying to make it better (while remaining unattached to results) where a lot of people practice Buddhism tend toward meditation and being personally nice while not caring what happens in the wider world.

I’ve been trying to write short stories and while I’m thinking at the moment of getting a blog to put them on, I’m wondering what else is out there where I could get them in front of eyeballs without getting tons of spammers trying to sell me services related to writing fiction.

Except that in almost every instance where a profession has been automated, that’s exactly what happened. Having a computer that keeps track of your inventory makes the workflow better for the logistics department, and then using a computer to schedule deliveries makes that part easier as well. And you keep doing that and eventually you’re doing the work of twelve professionals and your team shrinks down to 1/12th of what it was. And then you chip away at those tasks until you halve the workforce again, and eventually the computer is doing all of those tasks and the people who used to do those things are obsolete. Then they go back to school hoping to find a training program where they can make money before AI takes those jobs too.