Star Trek for Adults

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This week I’ve begun re-reading Iain M. Banks’s Culture series of science fiction novels, and am even more impressed by the subversive humor in them than I was the first time around. Purely as science fiction they’re entertaining enough, although what passes for science in them is science only if you can actually bring yourself to believe that the pursuit of it will someday actually free us from the barbarisms of need that always seem to short-circuit our progress as sentient beings.

Banks’s plotting is intricate and satisfying enough, the dilemmas faced by his characters and their responses to them plausible enough, but what I treasure most about his storytelling is the sheer maturity of the civilization he imagines. Intentionally or not, the chronicles of his future galaxy hold up a devastatingly unflattering mirror to the ruling class dumbshows of our present century. Comparing his protagonists to the morally and intellectually truncated inhabitant of today’s White House, and the belligerent idiocy of his MAGA legions, I somehow find it as easy to laugh as to cry, a state of ambiguous bliss which is not on offer in many other places, real or virtual, in these new dark ages of ours.

Now and again the economist Brad DeLong calls us as we are these days East African Plains Apes, and has referred in interviews to the millennial imaginings of post New Deal liberalism as Star Trek Socialism. I suppose both are true enough, but I think I’d be tempted to shave my head and take up a begging bowl if such witticisms were all we had to look forward to as a species. Star Trek Socialism would bore me to death, leave me grimacing and staring at my shoes, praying for the bullshit please, please to be over in time for a drink before dinner. Running a bar in some back alley tucked away in an insignificant corner of a General Systems Vehicle (GSV), on the other hand, would be a delight, especially if the shipmind would pipe a little Mozart in as I was busy squeezing limes for the evening’s margaritas.

Days Of Infamy

William Timberman4 Comments

The only thing that’s saving Trump’s attack on Tehran from more apt comparisons to Pearl Harbor is the observation that the Khamenei regime was an order of magnitude more odious than his own. The fact remains that Trump likes taking things that don’t belong to him or to the United States, including the lives of innocents. He needs to go.

Almost Imaginary Poll

William Timberman2 Comments

On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most comfortable, how comfortable are you waking up to the news that Pete Hegseth has just started WWIII?

Republicans: MAGA! MAGA! SIS. BOOM. BAH!

Democrats: Well….

Independents: (sic) Where’d you hear that?

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Oligarchs, edgelords, influencers. The manosphere. Algorithms, blockchains, chatbot haruspications. Data centers, concentration camps, genocide. Stephen Miller in sunglasses and a shiny suit. The crooked cross at the base of Pam Bondi’s throat. The gig economy, the attention economy, the awake all night calliope of dread.

Does the Pope approve of Samuel Alito? Has Harvard made its deal with our new devils yet? Will someone please show me the way to the next whisky bar?

But never mind. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Deus vult.

Unbidden Bits—January 30, 2026

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I hate to say it—and this is the first place I’ve said it publicly—but my personal doomsday clock for how close MAGA-style Republicans are to getting the civil war they’ve spent the last 40 years jonesing for is telling me that it’s now about 2 seconds to midnight. The inhabitants of the great cesspool at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should be well pleased. The rest of us can only repeat what every previous victim of the human impulse to carnage and destruction has long since been forced to acknowledge. Knowing what’s coming has never saved anyone from disaster except those with the means to escape it. Einstein made it through the last world-wide cataclysm. Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl did not.

On the Morality of Violent Political Resistance

William Timberman2 Comments

From Ken White at the Popehat Report comes a long inquiry into the morality of political violence, ending with this concluding paragraph:

I think I have been perfectly clear. However, for the benefit of people easily offended by implication over bluntness, I think there is a plausible argument that it is morally permissible, and even morally necessary, to use political violence against the Trump Administration and its agents and supporters under the current circumstances in America. The arguments in favor are likely to grow.

Here is my response, edited to correct the name of the of the Border Patrol “commander at large” apparently in charge of ICE operations in Minneapolis:

I’m afraid I feel compelled to offer a different answer than the one Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. gave their lives to defend. No community is morally obligated to suffer what Gregory Bovino and his murderous thugs have done in Minneapolis to Renee Nicole Goode, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and Alex Pretti. Any community attacked the way ICE has attacked Minneapolis is morally justified in taking up arms against their attackers and driving them back to the sewer that spawned them. Our Declaration of Independence, as well as our own right to defend ourselves, says as much.

Practically speaking, of course, an armed response by a community under siege in the circumstances that Minneapolis finds itself in today would simply result in ending the lives of a few depraved assholes in exchange for the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocents. Abstaining from violence in these circustances has nothing to do with morality, but it does have everything to do with a resistance that is prudent as well as courageous. That’s why I agree, for the moment at least, that Governor Walz has the right strategy, if not the right tactics, to respond to the Federal Government’s atrocities. If we’re serious about our resistance, more consistent and more effective tactics will come to us eventually. In the meantime, sadly, we can count on continuing news of blood and cruelty that a genuinely moral person will find extremely hard to endure without striking back.