Star Trek Culture

Popular culture, by definition, is of the moment–movies, television programs, music and other entertainment that reflects contemporary concerns or embraces current social preoccupations. Many examples–probably most–have limited staying power; even fewer can be shown to have influenced the development of the culture rather than simply reflecting it.

Star Trek is one of those; it continues to exert significant influence over the broader culture. (Disclosure: I’m a huge fan.)

The original series has been followed by several others incorporating creator Gene Roddenberry’s humane and very explicit moral themes celebrating the pursuit of knowledge, justice, and mutual understanding. Trek’s various iterations promote diverse, open and welcoming cultures populated by people committed to reason, tolerance and the common good.

An interesting article from the New York Times explored Jewish influences on the social vision that animates the Star Trek universe. it was prompted by an exhibit mounted by The Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish museum in Los Angeles.

Many fans of the show are aware that Spock’s signature “live long and prosper” greeting, with its distinctive hand gesture, originated from a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue as a boy and brought to the role.

The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.

The Times pointed out that Jewish influence didn’t stop with the Vulcan blessing; according to one of the writers quoted in the article, Jewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality.

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”…

Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

The exhibition explored the outsized influence of the Star Trek vision on American culture. As one of the individuals quoted in the article put it,  “‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents,” and especially the moral vision it promotes. Brooks Peck, who helped put the original exhibition together, observed that a Star Trek exhibit at a Jewish museum wasn’t as far-fetched as it first seemed.

“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”

The operative word is values. Star Trek’s influence is a direct result of its coherent and appealing value structure. Those values were influenced by Judaism, but they are also congruent with the message of other non-fundamentalist religions and non-theistic philosophies: commitment to an open and welcoming society, a respect for intellect, science and truth, and a fierce advocacy of social justice and the common good.

The crews that populate the Enterprise and other Star Trek vessels are visual representations of the worst nightmares of the Hoosier culture warriors I wrote about yesterday, and of the retrograde throwbacks who attacked the U.S. Capitol. They are filled not just with diverse humans, but also diverse species, working together with civility and mutual respect in a society that places an especially high value on the ongoing search for knowledge and exploration.

Americans have a choice. We can emulate the ignorance and disordered bigotries of people like Donald Trump, or we can aim for the enlightenment values of Star Trek characters like Jean Luc Picard.

We can join the Neanderthals who are resentful of “others” and terrified of being “replaced”— or we can choose the humane and affirming values that animate Star Trek, humanist philosophy, and many liberal religions.

Values that will help us Live Long and Prosper.

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“Protecting” Indiana’s Children

When Hoosier legislators talk about “protecting children,” they are rarely taking aim at tangible harms. Quite the contrary: in many cases, they are  the harm. (Just this session, Dennis Kruse has authored S.B. 34; it would deny appropriate medical and psychological services to gay youngsters.)

Indiana’s legislature is filled with culture warriors eager to appeal to the GOP’s increasingly  racist base, so I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked when legislators with absolutely no background or expertise in education take it upon themselves to prescribe what shall be taught– and how.

GOP pooh-bas are constantly complaining that reasonable efforts to protect public health are government “overreach”–yet the measure introduced by Representative Scott Baldwin is an absolute monument to overreach–much of it too vague to enforce properly, all of it likely to empower a subset of angry and uninformed parents, and–if passed– likely to drive teachers out of Indiana.

The bill was obviously motivated by the GOP’s trumped-up hysteria over Critical Race Theory (which none of its opponents can define, and which has never been taught in public schools). What opponents of CRT are really against is teaching anything suggesting that racism is bad. Obviously, when proponents of these “anti-CRT” bills accidentally admit that, it causes a bit of an uproar. So Baldwin has had to “walk back” a previous statement.

An Indiana state senator who is facing criticism for saying teachers must be impartial when discussing Nazism is walking back his remarks.

Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin said he wasn’t clear when he said a bill he filed at the Indiana Statehouse would require teachers to be impartial in their teaching of all subjects, including during lessons about Nazism, Marxism and fascism.

Baldwin evidently believes that discussions of Nazism, Marxism and fascism should be “fair and balanced.” Like Fox “News.”

During a committee hearing Wednesday about Senate Bill 167, a wide-ranging bill inspired by the national discourse over critical race theory, history teacher Matt Bockenfeld raised concerns about what the bill would require of teachers. He gave what he thought was an extreme example.

“For example, it’s the second semester of U.S. history, so we’re learning about the rise of fascism and the rise of Nazism right now,” Bockenfeld said. “And I’m just not neutral on the political ideology of fascism. We condemn it, and we condemn it in full, and I tell my students the purpose, in a democracy, of understanding the traits of fascism is so that we can recognize it and we can combat it.”

Baldwin’s response was instructive (pun intended):

“I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms,” he said. “I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position on those isms …  We need to be impartial.”

Baldwin said that even though he is with Bockenfeld “on those particular isms,” teachers should “just provide the facts.”

“I’m not sure it’s right for us to determine how that child should think and that’s where I’m trying to provide the guardrails,” Baldwin said.

There is much more that is dangerous–not to mention stupid and offensive–in Baldwin’s bill. (It is discussed in more detail at this link ). The bill is being described as an effort at “transparency,” which is wildly misleading. It would require teachers to post their syllabi and materials so that parents can access (nitpick) them; not only would such a rule be an extra burden on teachers who already have plenty to do, not only would it impose rigidity on what might otherwise be organic discussions (as teachers at the hearing pointed out), it is totally unnecessary.

Transparency already exists.

Parents who supervise their children’s homework, who visit their children’s schools, who show up for parent-teacher conferences, already have access to this information. Those parents, however, aren’t found among the angry anti-CRT, anti-mask activists who’ve descended on some school board meetings. (In several cases, it’s turned out that people in  those groups didn’t even have children in that school system.)

In my experience both as a long-ago high-school teacher and as a parent, teachers are absolutely delighted to share information with parents who are genuinely involved with their children’s education.

I know that today’s Republicans hate “elitists”–defined as people who actually know what they’re doing. The GOP is at war with climate science, dismissive of epidemiologists and medical experts, and convinced that anyone capable of reproducing knows more than classroom teachers who have earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in education.

It’s Indiana’s great misfortune to have a legislature populated with so many walking, talking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Why Judges Matter

I was astonished when I read this report in The Washington Post, mostly because the judge was so obviously, incredibly wrong about both the law and the facts.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor found that the pandemic “provides the government with no license to abrogate” the freedoms that any American has, and that the service members had a right to avoid getting a vaccination on religious grounds.

“This Court does not make light of COVID-19′s impact on the military. Collectively, our armed forces have lost over 80 lives to COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic,” O’Connor wrote Monday in a 26-page order.

But the judge added that the “loss of religious liberties outweighs any forthcoming harm to the Navy” and that “even the direst circumstances cannot justify the loss of constitutional rights.”

A first-year law student would know that “religious freedom” does not give citizens the right to harm others. I used to explain to my students that your sincere belief that God wants you to sacrifice your newborn does not trump laws prohibiting you from doing so.  As “originalist” Justice Scalia wrote in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, general laws prohibiting drug use take precedence over the plaintiffs’ right to participate in tribal religious observances that included smoking peyote.  

Smoking peyote during a religious ceremony didn’t harm anyone. A requirement that military personnel be vaccinated  protects others against a very dangerous disease. It would clearly be constitutional even if vaccine denial posed a genuine religious concern.

But it doesn’t.

The fact is that no religion  (with the possible exception of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists, who don’t believe in any medical science) teaches vaccine denial. If I simply invent a “religious” precept that is not grounded in the actual doctrine of my faith, I can hardly demand that American courts respect my “religious” beliefs.

I was sufficiently incensed by this ridiculous ruling that I decided to Google the judge, who–unsurprisingly–is a high-profile member of the Federalist Society.

Here’s what the Texas Tribune had to say about him when he ruled that Obamacare was unconstitutional. (Remember that?)

In 2015, it was an Obama administration effort to extend family leave benefits to gay couples. In 2016, it was an Obama administration guideline allowing transgender children to use school bathrooms that align with their gender identity. And on Friday, it was the entirety of Obamacare that U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor struck down as unconstitutional after a Texas-led coalition of 20 states sued this year to kill it.

Over the past four years, O’Connor has handed Texas major wins in several high-profile Texas v. United States lawsuits. And it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that those cases landed in his court. The North Texas judge has emerged as something of a favorite for the Texas Attorney General’s Office, a notoriously litigious legal battalion known for challenging the federal government in cases and controversies across the country.

Since 2015, almost half of challenges to the federal government that Texas filed in district courts here landed in O’Connor’s courtroom, attorney general’s office records show. He is one of several dozen federal judges of his rank in the state.

The Obamacare decision, which was reversed by higher courts, was criticized by both conservative and liberal legal scholars as misguided and politically motivated.

The conservative legal scholar Jonathan Adler and the liberal legal scholar Abbe Gluck came together to write in The New York Times that the decision “makes a mockery of the rule of law and basic principles of democracy.

O’Connor is routinely described as a reactionary, and his vaccine decision is just the most recent evidence that he ignores legal precedents incompatible with his far-right politics. In 2015, he held a portion of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 unconstitutional and enjoined the federal government’s definition of marriage in the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.

In 2016, as previously noted, he struck down an Obama administration rule requiring that transgender students be allowed to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. In 2018, he ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act was unconstitutional. That 1978 law was passed in response to concerns over the high number of Indian children that were being removed from their families by public and private agencies and placed in non-Indian families. It gave tribal governments exclusive jurisdiction over children who reside on, or are domiciled on a reservation.

It goes on.

O’Connor’s rulings are frequently reversed, but the damage done goes far beyond the time and money wasted on appeals. The initial publicity garnered by his off-the-wall rulings gives an aura of legitimacy to arguments that have no legitimacy, and that are inconsistent with settled constitutional precedents.

Thanks to this decision, people will die. Unnecessarily.

Judges matter.

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Just Watch This Interview!

The Indiana legislature has begun its session, and the usual “culture warriors” who dominate that body thanks to Republican gerrymandering are already posturing about covid mandates and suggesting legislation that will incentivize and reward vaccine denial.

Despite GOP rhetoric about “freedom,” and the party’s steadfast, “pro-business” opposition to most regulation (Republicans pander to business through low tax rates and by turning a blind eye to pollution and other anti-social business behaviors), several lawmakers are proposing to overrule individual business owners who require their workers to be vaccinated.

This video sent to me by a reader shows the utter stupidity–and danger–of such intrusions into what should be decisions made by private businesses.

You really need to watch at least the first five minutes of this interview with the head of OneAmerica, an insurance company headquartered in Indianapolis. He makes two extremely important points:

  1.  Some businesses–his among them– need to have their employees return to the office, but large numbers of vaccinated employees are unwilling to do so if any of their co-workers will be unvaccinated;
  2.  Insurers are finding that death rates among working-age Americans have skyrocketed--they are 40% higher than actuarial tables and prior experience would predict, and the pandemic is responsible, both directly and indirectly. (Not all these deaths are from contracting Covid; many are the result of hospital overcrowding that has prevented or delayed needed care. Etc.)

You need to WATCH THE VIDEO.

The GOP politicians who are feeding anti-vaccine mythologies and rewarding dangerously anti-social behaviors are making a mockery of freedom (we are “free” only if we agree with them, evidently).

Their proposed tax give-backs/bribes cannot hide the fact that they are waging war on business– and in the process, killing Americans.

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Disorder In The Court(iers)

Schadenfreude alert!

I really shouldn’t have been surprised by this article in The Washington Post. After all, we’ve  all encountered the sorts of people who have continued to support Donald Trump, and –to put it as kindly as possible–maturity, mental health and measured analysis are not among their most obvious characteristics.

The far-right firebrands and conspiracy theorists of the pro-Trump Internet have a new enemy: each other.

QAnon devotees are livid at their former hero Michael Flynn for accurately calling their jumbled credo “total nonsense.” Donald Trump superfans have voiced a sense of betrayal because the former president, booed for getting a coronavirus immunization booster, has become a “vaccine salesman.” And attorney Lin Wood seems mad at pretty much everyone, including former allies on the scattered “elite strike-force team” investigating nonexistent mass voter fraud.

After months of failing to disprove the reality of Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss, some of the Internet’s most popular right-wing provocateurs are grappling with the pressures of restless audiences, saturated markets, ongoing investigations and millions of dollars in legal bills.

The article characterizes the current state of affairs as a “chaotic melodrama,” and notes that it is being conducted–childishly, as you might suspect–through “secretly recorded phone calls, personal attacks in podcasts, and a seemingly endless stream of posts on Twitter, Gab and Telegram calling their rivals Satanists, communists, pedophiles or “pay-triots” — money-grubbing grifters exploiting the cause.”

I’m sure “snowflake” is in there somewhere too……

Our old catch-phrase–“follow the money”–is apt. The article notes that the infighting reflects the “diminishing financial rewards” for the individuals and groups peddling right-wing disinformation. They are fighting over a limited pool of viewer donations and subscriptions, over fees for appearances at rallies and conferences, and over sales of  books and merchandise.

In addition, tensions have evidently been exacerbated by the sudden, mysterious silence of QAnon’s faceless wacko, Q. Without Q, who should they follow? It’s a puzzlement!

The cage match kicked off late in November when Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted of all charges after fatally shooting two men at a protest last year in Kenosha, Wis., told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that his former attorneys, including Wood, had exploited his jail time to boost their fundraising “for their own benefit, not trying to set me free.”

Wood has since snapped back at his 18-year-old former client, wondering aloud in recent messages on the chat service Telegram: “Could his life be “literally under the supervision and control of a ‘director?’ Whoever ‘Kyle’ is, pray for him.”

The article reports on the insults each faction is lobbing at the others: betraying the pro-Trump cause, or–much more serious–misusing the millions of dollars in funds that have gone to Pro-Trump groups.

Wood has posted recordings of his phone calls with Byrne, who can be heard saying that Wood is “a little kooky,” and Flynn, a QAnon icon who can be heard telling Wood that QAnon’s mix of extremist conspiracy theories was actually bogus “nonsense” or a “CIA operation.”

Best of all–at least from my perspective– the various groups are looking at massive financial liability.

Beyond the infighting, both sides are also staring down the potential for major financial damage in court. A federal judge last month ordered Wood and Powell to pay roughly $175,000 in legal fees for their “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” in suing to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And Powell and others face potentially billions of dollars in damages as a result of defamation lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems, which they falsely accused of helping to rig the 2020 race.

If you want to help them cover their legal bills and likely losses,  you can buy a four-pack set of “Release the Kraken: Defending the Republic” from Powell’s website, which also offers drink tumblers at $80. Or you can visit Flynn’s newly launched website and buy  #FightLikeAFlynn” women’s racerback tank tops–a “steal” (but not the “Big” one) at only $30.  Wood’s online store is selling $64.99 “#FightBack” unisex hoodies.

Evidently, the merchandising theory is that the “base” likes to wear items that advertise its politics. (Well, there are those red MAGA hats…)

A researcher of conspiracy theories is quoted as saying the arguments “increasingly resemble the performative clashes of pro wrestling.” (He also points out that there is a limited number of people susceptible to being fleeced.)

There’s a lot more in the linked story, and it is all pretty much what you’d expect when  people who are different kinds of crazy go after each other. As a friend told me back in 2016, she was counting on the Trumpers’ sheer incompetence to save us…

What’s that definition of schadenfreude– Pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.

I plead so guilty.

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