Okay, so I’ll point out that Murray Rothbard and David Gordon are prominent in the “Everything should be completely equal and fair as long as we first enshrine my generations of privilege” Austrian-school economists, beloved of white guys everywhere who never got over their Ayn Rand phase.

Makes it much funnier, actually.

With apologies to the baseball fans in the room…

The definition of woke:

You can’t just be up there and just doin’ a woke like that.

1a. Woke is when you

1b. Okay well listen. Woke is when the woke mob

1c. Let me start over

1c-a. The blue haired liberal is not allowed to say to the, uh, patriot, that prohibits the patriot from doing, you know, just trying to oppress the fringe groups. You can’t do that.

1c-b. Once the blue haired liberal is in the kindergarten classroom, she can’t be over here and say to the patriot, like, “I’m gonna get ya! I’m gonna teach your kids about pronouns! You better watch your butt!” and then just be like he didn’t even do that.

1c-b(1). Like, if you’re about to teach about racist history and then don’t teach it, you have to still teach. You cannot not teach. Does that make any sense?

1c-b(2). You gotta be, pooping in the right bathroom, and then, until you just wash your hands.

1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the drag queen, like this, but then there’s the children you gotta think about.

1c-b(3). Okay seriously though. Woke is when the teacher, err drag queen, says or does a thing that, as determined by, when you do a move involving the history and CRT

Do not do a woke please

My buddy’s older brother did the thing where you remove the little filter cylinders from the coax in, I think(?), the curbside junction box. I saw the cylinders and the result, but not the deed.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-effects-workers-psychological

The article is… fine… I guess.

Have you been privy to any of the discussions about what it means for the show to be set a thousand years later than most of the franchise, like where it makes sense for a previous entry to guide the interpretation, and where it maybe makes as much or more sense to let things go a little crazy. The interplay probably has to drift more toward storytelling realities within the brand than it does gaming-out what would “really” happen over a millennium of Star Trek time.

Honestly, when I think about it, the post-Burn era seems downright conservative in terms of societal change, certainly at least within Starfleet. That’s obviously necessary for it to be recognizable as a property, but it’s kind of funny to think that it’s as static as it seems, like closer to the difference between 426 and 1426 than between 1026 and 2026 CE, and I’m probably understating how different the first two were.

They’re about to find out what we actually were getting in return.

This is one of the huge under-analyzed aspects of all this. The US “over” invested in defense and foreign aid, and got virtually all the soft power benefits of a hegemonic power, and by simply setting an upper limit on the worst abuses of imperial overlords, it generally had its allies saying “Thank You” for the privilege, with no particular signs that the bloc was weakening.

If the US is not an accessible market or a reliable guarantor of security, or if (for fuck’s sake) it’s threatening the territorial integrity of its own allies and trading partners, then it’s just China with less cheap shit to sell. Hell, even China doesn’t do the last one (offer not valid in Taiwan).