fiasco

As things were in the 60s, production order was different from release order. I'm following production order because I think it's better to look at it in terms of how the sequence of episodes were put together, versus how the studio decided to put them out. That is, in terms of the development of ideas, characters, and themes—it's a lot more coherent in this order.

I'm taking this ordering from Memory Alpha: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series

Tonight's episode is a three-fer: "The Cage" and "The Menagerie" (parts 1 and 2).

You have to enjoy a hobby in itself, if you're too focused on results then you'll have problems with the gulf between your ability and your aspiration. Is there anything you've tried doing that you just enjoy doing? Like do you just enjoy banging on a piano or drawing or writing, regardless of the output?

Yeah, I've always marveled at the Federation's hypocrisy on Section 31. Like first we've got Garak's best line—

"If your conscience is bothering you, you should soothe it with the knowledge that you may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost was the life of one romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain."

So it's a little rich for Sisco to then go and be righteous about Section 31.

But just looking at the changeling virus, the Federation pulls off a "peaceful" end to the war, but it only worked because the Federation was holding the entire Dominion hostage. Odo's big act of contrition was only possible because there was something to be contrite about. If not for Section 31's war crimes, how would the war have ended?

On a side note, I have such mixed feelings about "What You Leave Behind," because the ending of the Dominion War is perfect. And then they fuck up the perfection with Dukat and Winn.

"Conscience of the King" has that going on. I didn't really talk about it, but Kodos did what he did because there was a food supply collapse and he had to choose between winnowing the population or letting everyone starve.

You could argue that Section 31 is like that; after all, in times of war the law is silent.

It was actually way more perverse in "The Measure of a Man," since the old flame was the judge, and Riker was the prosecutor. I guess Starfleet JAG has some real staffing problems.

One thing about the original series is, they don't have A/B plot structuring. By and large, every episode is about one thing, and the result is that a lot of episodes really drag on. "The Galileo Seven" was particularly guilty of this since, how much can you really say about how you can't command a starship on logic alone?

This episode suffers the same structural problem: "Welp, we've got forty-five minutes to kill. Better have the lawyer who should've been in a seersucker suit go on a long, tedious rant."

I went back and rewatched "The Drumhead" as a palate cleanser, and it was even more obvious how different it is. It isn't even an inquest... One of my criticisms of "Court Martial" is how indifferent everyone seems to be to standards and reliability of evidence, so it's a good thing they found incontrovertible evidence clearing Kirk. "The Drumhead" is what happens when you don't care about the reliability or credibility of evidence.

And god what a spectacular villain.

I think the counterargument is, if you continue to be a huge dick, have you really accepted Jesus into your heart? It's the actual reason Pascal's Wager is such a shit argument: one of the unstated premises is that you can pull a fast one on God.

This phenomenon is as old as history.

Socrates was killed because he made fun of powerful people. Anaxagoras was exiled from Athens for arguing that the sun and moon are just fire and rock, rather than gods. Galileo was persecuted because he got into a pissing match with the Jesuits over the nature of comets, then when the Pope's support for Galileo's (geocentric) views wavered (...they wavered for political reasons), Galileo wrote a treatise ridiculing the Pope. Hearst and Pulitzer propagandized the US into the Spanish-American War. Mondale lost the election because the media decided he looked ridiculous.

Yeah the internet is terrible for discourse, but the more basic fact is that almost all humans suck at discourse. Even, or maybe especially, Galileo.

Given how unstable and user unfriendly computers are now, just imagine a future where programmers know even less about what they're doing.

YouTube is already awful, so whatever.

Probably the biggest issue is getting all the "find a community" stuff together: the communities for new communities, and the crawlers that list communities and let you search them.

And it isn't actually clear if rate hikes affect inflation anyway. Since the interbank rate also benchmarks the Treasury yield, for example, higher interest rates will cause the government to spend more on debt service. If inflation is supposed to be related to the amount of money, then why is increasing public spending the preferred way of decreasing the availability of money?

Interest rates for inflation targeting are in fact pure class war. The fear is something called a wage-price spiral. Basically, inflation erodes real incomes, and the question is, whose income should be eroded? Workers or owners? In the presence of strong labor unions, inflation becomes an intense battlefield, of whose income gets eroded. Labor negotiation raises wages, which maintains higher demand, which raises inflation, so unions demand yet higher wages. But this is also because the companies aren't willing to take the hit to prices, so they ratchet prices up in tandem with wage increases. The result is a feedback loop: unions score higher wages, businesses raise prices to compensate, unions need to push for higher wages to compensate, and so on.

This is what the interest rates are about. The goal is to create a recession, by making both investment and debt-financed consumption more expensive, to kill off workers' ability to negotiate higher wages.

This form of class war gets masked behind economic terms like the Phillips Curve and the Nonaccelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, since after all, that sounds a lot better than Get Fucked, Workers.

Glow-in-the-dark heating elements...