I am reminded of the detail in The Office where Michael Scott is stirring sugar into his diet coke.

I grew up having to learn everything about network security at home, on a windows PC, in a family with no regard for the concept of internet security because basically the idea didn’t exist yet. I was the one who scrubbed the PC every week and removed the 1300 toolbars and spyware apps, I was the one who had to repair the registry every time a sibling downloaded a file sent to him by a “hot girl” claiming it was a picture of her boobs.

So it’s maddening now working in a company of adult humans who are so bad at safety and security that our workstations have even had their settings menus neutered because everyone is so bad at security. Yesterday someone asked how to install the file they received in email titled “security update, please install asap!” from “rnicrosoft. com.”

There are two types of churches out there in the US.

Tiny little congregations who meet up in an old gym or single-wide trailer and organize and connect community like humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years and have no goals beyond their faith and community.

And money-making grift operations who just want to fleece as many as possible by latching onto whatever controversial social issue can make people so inflamed and blinded with emotion that they hand over stacks of cash just to feel like they’re hurting the people that conservative media tells them they should hate. These churches come in all sizes and seem to vastly outnumber the other kind, because this tactic is so, so easy to pull off.

Intentionally seeding radical and absurd social and political narratives on both sides of every issue is part of the KGB handbook for destabilizing nations. Russia has done it repeatedly, but it’s not isolated to them, basically it’s how politics is conducted entirely now by every actor.

When you stop trusting the narratives and stories you hear, you start tuning out all arguments on either side of an issue and either lose interest entirely, or you default to trusting the “official” channels like state media.

I was going to suggest that he might be on the spectrum, as it’s pretty stereotyped that autistic spectrum disorder can make it hard for some people to pick up subtext, nuance, overtones and other forms of communication that aren’t direct. (I was diagnosed recently as an adult but I’ve never had problems dismantling all the layers of media or reading emotions so it’s probably a different part of the spectrum.)

But this is also exactly why so many people on the spectrum identify with science fiction and fantasy, because in many of these franchises the social narrative or analogy isn’t exactly subtle.

And it opens up so many questions - like, what DOES communicate social messages and life lessons? What kinds of media DO convey ideas about society? Only documentaries about politics? What about non-fiction movies? What about fiction stories and movies that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy? Does he even watch stories about human emotion or abstract works of fiction that are STRICTLY social commentary? I would immediately start asking him so many questions LOL.

Honestly though, I would take this. I would prefer someone who says openly that they’re disconnected from social narratives than the people who pretend that they understand ethics and values communicated to them, but are actually just horrible sociopaths trying to act human.

Your time and energy here is being misspent. I have nothing against challenging people and their group think and biases and do that quite a lot here, but after watching you a bit, you simply do not possess the rhetorical abilities to sound like more than a troll or bad-faith contributor. You fail at both challenging anyone, and you fail at even hurting anyone because of your lack of effort.

You are baiting a ban or someone lashing out at you at least, and with that the same kind of emotional validation/masturbation you likely despise seeing in others.

Either contribute something meaningful that actually makes someone else engaged and think about something, or find a nice, big patch of grass and start touching.

He’s not wrong that the reader/viewer can take what they will from a work and translate it through their own lens… but come on, that is some neutron-star density if you can’t read the deliberate social commentary in Star Trek. Roddenberry himself has spoken about it.

It makes me pretty convinced that person, and those who share his views, are people who feel called-out or attacked on some level by whatever social issues are being highlighted, or feel insecure that they don’t “get it.”

There is a really wild segment of the human population who seem totally incapable of working out abstract ideas like ethics and values on their own and rely on systems like government or religion or unfortunately, content creators to guide them. This is a bigger problem than we realize and we take for granted that just because we all grew up watching the Ninja Turtles beat Shredder that we can all discern that “good is better than bad.” Not everyone gets that, and this is everyone’s problem.

Scientists predict that by the year 2120, the entire solar system will be nothing but cop shows.

Russia did this in the USA starting before Trump’s first election. They had/have giant “troll farms” of people with dozens of social media and reddit accounts who are paid by the state to just insert themselves into every social conversation. They poisoned every well by ruining words broadly - they are the ones who started the whole “if the left keeps calling everyone a nazi the word will lose meaning” trope, at the same time as they started pretending to be leftists calling everything that moved a nazi. That word is now meaningless thanks to them.

It’s in the KGB playbook for destabilizing nations, to sabotage the discourse and have agents take the most extreme, toxic sides of every issue on both sides, so that social discourse on actual politics becomes so corrupted and untrustworthy that average people just tune out and default to trusting state media and no longer wanting to get involved with social issues or politics broadly.

Sound familiar?

edit: I find it really telling that no matter how many times and in different places I talk about this, there’s always some segment of people who downvote or attack this, despite being proven true by the NSA, with extensive records of foreign interference in our culture and society.

“Coming soon to Paramount+, a unique look at Hitler: A tyrant? Yes, but also an artist and dog lover, let us explore the middle side of history this fall!”

I’ll start by continuing to not watch nor consume Paramount shit in any way.

They are, in case it wasn’t immediately clear.

Basically, my eyeballs just slide off the word “antisemitism” like it’s fucking mental Teflon at this point.

Good fucking job Israel, we spent nearly a century committing our entire civilization to stamping out ideas like antisemitism and bigotry against ethnic groups, and you just dragged us back to the start.

RIP any future Star Trek property.

I’m sure they will find new ways to try to reboot it, completely stripped of any social commentary or social thought experiments, devoid of all optimism and inspiration for what our species can become. Probably like, another retelling of a plucky crew getting into space battles with generic, non-stereotyped-but-kinda alien terrorists who don’t have relatable reasons for being bad guys.

It won’t have heady concepts and wild ideas about how civilizations can develop and what humans can become, but that’s okay because it will have a roguish captain who likes to break the rules and a strict, by-the-book 1st officer that he has sexual tension with.

People can still sit through a whole movie??

Wait, people have that?

Israel has set back the push against actual bigotry and antisemitism by a century by literally leaning into every right-wing conspiracist talking point and wild notion about jewish conspiracies.

The fact that you care at all shows you’re not a MAGA monster.

It’s wild because I was raised conservative and was one until I left the family compound (let that one sink in) and it was reading, learning and experiencing human life that turned me around pretty fast. I saw science being ignored, I saw heartlessness, I saw them fabricate justification to start a war, and one particular night I saw FOX news play a live feed of a US humvee entering Baghdad shred a civilian truck to pieces with a grenade launcher for no reason, and they were playing patriotic music and had American flags all over the graphics and I got really sick and never watched FOX news again.

Platypuses - Now have added echolocation, flight, extra limbs, and bioluminescence. Too many skill points to spend, no build guide.

Kiwi birds - Will have finally switched places, now they are large eggs that give birth to a smaller bird.

Armadillos - Form a union with pillbugs and turtles, finally get better pay and benefits.

Golden Retrievers - No change to perfection, now the dominant life form.

Giraffes - Short necks and really long legs.

Daddy Longlegs - Surprisingly, develop more balanced proportions and are called “Paternal Medium Legs” but are still quite horrifying and love to hide under your bed.

Zebra - More tasteful patterns, like a nice vellum eggshell with fine, elegant pinstripes and a watermark with floral trim.

I’ve let myself watch just one short video of atrocities committed by Israel in the last couple years and I still think about it and choke up thinking about it daily. Just one of many like it.

I am not the strongest person emotionally despite a really tough exterior, I have seen a lot of death and been through some shit. So to think about what’s been happening there all day, every day, to families and children, it’s too much to process. I have to advocate in a completely detached frame or I will be unable to form a cognitive thought.

Ungulates - Even MORE stomachs.

Cetaceans - why not even bigger?

Cephalopods - Starships and philosophy and tragic poems about how short life is.

Bivalves - even less brain, brain make feel bad, brain bad

Felines - Find and domesticate the nearest dominant life form

Murmurations of birds and schooling fish - Horrifyingly surreal swarm intelligences that can take the shape of things like pointing fingers and signs to communicate or a big pair of cartoon scissors that chase you.