The UK can claim half the industrial world as some flavor of “British”. Hong Kong and Singapore, the Gold Coast of Africa and the Mandate of Palestine, New Zealand and Canada and the Falkland Islands. They’ve got their footprints everywhere and can really go wild with what passes as British.
But if an American makes a TV show that isn’t starring a 5’11", square jawed, blonde haired, dudebro dipshit, half the internet loses their fucking minds.
Various Star Fleet officers have periodically violated Federation rules and guidelines to achieve some ideological goal or moral imperative that cuts across the fleet’s stated mission. Like with anything there’s limits - Starfleet has its own police, crews can mutiny, eventually you run out of dilithium to gas up your warp drive so you can’t go rogue forever. But for a deep space galaxy class vessel, they’re regularly stuck making their own decisions under a military autocracy.
The Starfleet Admiralty Problem is a chronic plotline in the series, with admirals routinely engaged in all sorts of corrupt practices and villainous endeavors. Every captain from Kirk to Freeman has to deal with their share of higher ranking officers fucking around and being dumb assholes. Hell, Kirk himself is demoted from Admiral to Captain for going rogue in The Voyage Home.
A Starfleet Captain commands the wealth of nations. I don’t think it’s fair to say Billionaires Don’t Exist so much as to say the liberal ideal Meritocracy is made manifest.
Things regularly get bad and then good again. The Star Trek lore is modeled on the Hoover Great Depression giving way to a New Deal and Great Society.
The fact that it was written in the 1960s, when that monumental economic transformation was just wrapping up, isn’t a coincidence.
Places like Texas and Florida were being transformed from agricultural backwaters to the forefront of interplanetary travel. The distance spanned between 1929 and 1969 is borderline magical.
Elon’s caught in a liminal space between Wine Mom Liberal and Extremely Divorced Chud. He remembers people being excited about Star Trek, but he only grasps the “pew pew space lasers!” part, not the “ethical dilemma of the Kobayashi Maru” part.
If he’d been fully MAGA’d, he would be raving about Bringing Christ’s Holy Message Beyond the Stars or doing Heinlein callbacks to Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Instead, he’s still got this latent impulse to convince whatever dregs of the 1960s Space Race liberals left at NASA that he’s still cool.
Has all the hallmarks of a good idea that never got properly implemented.
Google-fication comes for us all.
Trump was rewarded for regurgitating a philosophy of eugenics that a bunch of other Silicon Valley psychos believe in.
A punishment for undesireability.
When you’re too old, too uneducated, too unattractive, too disabled, too beligerent, or an obstacle to further extraction, you’re rendered homeless.
Homelessness is a socially acceptable method of eugenics. A homeless person has no right to property or personhood. They can be abused, imprisoned, and executed without excuse or much effort.
Homelessness is, at its heart, a form of social murder.
It doesn’t matter. The meme needs individual it can blame, and those individuals can’t be the folks in the other three images.
Can’t stop Zuck. Can’t stop Trump. Can’t stop the IDF. So we need someone we can scream at. That means we’re going to scream at you.
It’s just an exercise in scapegoating. Pretend random individuals who are insufficiently pure of deed are the root of all your problems. Ignore that the fourth panel is more properly “government contracts for police surveillance and military services”.
How ELSE will they be able to BOMB CHILDREN AND PREGNANT WOMEN while feeling Good about Themselves?
Censor enough people and keep the focus on “We have to beat Hamas”. Eventually you’ll get a public as rabidly genocidal as the Israelis themselves.
Then move from Palestinians to Muslims, generally. And on to Latinos and East Asians. And anyone who is non-White.
Well do not stop there, you should explain why the other side doesn’t get more votes.
Listen, we can’t upset the conservatives. If Republicans say they’re going to round up and deport all the migrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador, we need to say we’re going to only to it to half the migrants. If Trump wants to bomb China, we have to settle on bombing North Korea (again). If the Heritage Foundation has a plan to turn every public school into a Catholic Church, we need to sell people on turning them into Unitarian Churches.
We are doomed
Only because you didn’t vote harder! Nobody would be complaining right now if Kamala Harris had won. Everything would be happy and fine and good. But you people had to ruin her campaign by talking about medical debts and foreign wars. Damn you to hell! We could have had the a Neoliberal Utopia!
This game gets played every election cycle. Popular legislation is proposed. Corporate media is inundated with “Actually this legislation is terrible and everyone who supports it is a Satanist”. Popular opinion turns on the idea. Candidates run on a platform of “You didn’t ask for this! It was an evil trick by the Far Left Antifa Terrorists!” Lather, rinse, repeat.
At some point, popular opinion isn’t going to compete with a deluge of aggressive propaganda. Well-financed marketing teams can scream in your ear longer and louder than random conglomerates of local activists can fight back.
Add in widespread, strategic voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and roll purging. You end up with a state of 6.2M residents of which 4.6M are eligible voters. Of that 4.6M, only 3.7M are registered. And only 3.2M cast a ballot. This allowed a 1.7M voting majority to control the state’s elected offices. A meager 26% of the public has a super-majority of representation across the state.
Liberal Democracy, folks!
He did not support abolition until well into the civil war look it up.
He opposed the spread of slavery into Free States and made it a central message of both his Senate and Presidential bids.
Lincoln did not even want emancipation
Lincoln campaigned at the head of an abolitionist party on the platform of halting slavery expansion in the territories and gradually phasing it out nationwide.
After the civil war broke out, he saw rapid emancipation as a means of collapsing Confederate resistance. And in the immediate aftermath of the war, he was a full throated supporter of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
What you’re saying is categorically untrue.
Emancipation. Pretty revolutionary
anytime the new deal is brought up
The Pre-Nixon Era was defined by more than just the New Deal and the Great Society.
to accelerate the decline mistakenly believing something better would replace it
Understanding history is very different from advocating for “accelerationism”
In the post-war years until the 1970s.
A famously great time to be an American, assuming you weren’t colored, Latino, LGBTQ, or a woman.
In 1972 the business Round Table made a long game and it has since been refined.
American corporate collaboration didn’t begin in 1972. You can trace it back to the antebellum era and the birth of American industrialization.
The New Deal was a historical aberration that came through the rapid economic attrition of the Great Depression. Prior to the Depression of '32, Henry Ford, JP Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller were individually as powerful as any half dozen elected officials combined.
Wanting a restoration of the Republic is not playing Make-Believe
Clinging to the mythology of the American system is.
But within the rules of the government we have we could fix the government
That’s been disproven repeatedly and categorically going at least back to Nixon. We’ve been repeating the cycle of Conservative Breaks Rules / Liberal Sweeps It Under The Rug for 50 years, easily.
How many more generations plan to get Rope-a-Doped by toothless establishment hacks?
It is just a matter of getting good leadership to get us there and organizing behind them.
Who could you name that would qualify? Are we going to get a big name blue state prosecutor like checks notes Kamala Harris?
Oh man. That’s fair.
And they don’t make actors like Michael J Fox anymore