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The recent flurry of posts on family formation, @PyotrVerkhovensky's post on Chesterton and MAGA, along with the proliferation of Penguin and Starfleet Academy memes in my feed has gotten me thinking about Star Trek again, and the role that aspiration plays in fiction, politics, and life in general.
What can a 24 year-old spin-off of a 60 year-old TV series teach us today's Culture War?
Star Trek is often presented as utopian, but it would be more accurate to describe it as post-post-apocalyptic. While the date and circumstances of "Post-Atomic Horror" have shifted over the decades, the idea that Trek's world is separated from ours by a massive catastrophic event that wiped out a significant portion of humanity has been present since Trek's inception. I find this interesting not, only from a lore perspective but in context of how the real-world has changed around it over the last six decades.
From the original series' premiere in 1966 through the end of the 20th century Star Trek had always been "linear" always moving forward into its own future. That is until "Star Trek: Enterprise". (STE) Enterprise jumped backwards in Trek's timeline to the early days of Starfleet.
In Trek's lore this is a frontier period full of unbounded optimism, but Enterprise premiered in September of 2001, and as those Americans here old enough to have first seen Fight Club in the theater or experience 9/11 as adults will recall, the early 2000s were not exactly an optimistic time. The dot com bubble had just burst, and the US was on a bit of a downs-slope both culturally and economically, the first cracks in the presumptions of progressivism had already appeared, and the quiet suggestion in Star Trek's backstory that "you can't get there from here" was starting to feel much louder. Enterprise sought to be a bridge, not just between the atomic wasteland and utopian vision of the original series, but between the progressive optimism of the late 20th century and the cultural "funk" of the year 2000. This is why, for me at least, Enterprise is simultaneously the most under-developed and under-rated iteration of Star Trek.
The series opens approximately 30 years after a drunken mad scientist living in the black hills converted a surplus nuclear missile into mankind's first FTL-capable spacecraft (*1). This triggers an intervention on the part of a paternalist Vulcan civilization to prevent this band of psychotic gun-monkeys from disrupting the delicate balance of power in our local galactic region. Earth now exists as sort of an indulged vassal of the Vulcans. A vassalage that while largely benign has begun to chafe. There is an increasing vocal faction of humans, most of whom who came of age post-Horror, who wish to see Earth set its own path and develop its own technology base. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of Japan in the 50s and 60s, economically vibrant but also still somewhat traumatized, the mass death and devastation of the Horror still very much within living memory. It is with this as background that the NX Program, a project to build and launch mankind's first proper Starships, is undertaken.
Our heroes are the captain and crew of the NX-1. All through the first season, there of this of their mission being this watershed moment that will determine whether Humanity sets its own path in galactic affairs or simply settles for having ended hunger, war, and disease. At best stagnating under the benevolent colonialism of the Vulcans, at worst losing some vital part of our collective soul.
Unlike the smugly enlightened Starfleet of the TNG era, the humans we meet in STE are clearly rooted in our modern world both aesthetically; The NX series ships follow NASA naming conventions (Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger), while their crews wear uniforms based on contemporary NASA astronaut uniforms. And more fundamentally; They have bitter political disputes and a bit of xenophobic streak. They can also be recklessly forthright when something gets their ire up. They have one ally, the Vulcans, and Archer burns them by revealing one of their covert listening posts operation to the wider galaxy. These humans are arrogant, violent, impulsive, illogical, and they're effectively betting the future of their entire species on a single ship. If the Enterprise gets destroyed or accidentally starts a war with the Klingon Empire that might just be the end of humanity's story right there.
Speaking of the Klingons, let's take a moment to talk about them...
The modern pop-culture image of Klingons as these weird Samurai space-orcs with bumpy foreheads talking endlessly about "honor" while they stab each other in the back mostly comes from Christopher Lloyd's Captain Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kruge seems to be more of a pirate or privateer than a naval officer, operating on his own initiative rather than as part of a wider organization. While subsequent portrayals would try to walk this back, they were never quite able to shake that image. Even in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, a series that was usually pretty good about giving its aliens depth and nuance, the Klingons come across as a remarkably simplistic and socially primitive society. This is in substantial contrast to how they were presented in the original series.
While originally envisioned by Star Trek producer Gene L. Coon as a mash up of the Soviet, Ottoman, and Mongol Empires, ie a stand-in for every "Eastern Horde" that has threatened Western civilization throughout its history, the original series gives them a lot of background for what could have easily been a just another throw-away villain of the week. The Klingons of TOS are presented as a fully functional society with scientists, lawyers, and diplomats, as well as warriors. They engage in diplomacy and undertake organized campaigns as seen in their introductory episode Errand of Mercy, they make use of proxies as shown in the episodes like Day of the Dove and A Private Little War. They have deep cover operatives as shown in *The Trouble With Tribbles". We even get passing references to famous Klingon actors, popular songs, and mytho-historical figures. While aggressive and expansionistic the Klingons of TOS are a civilization that venerates its warriors rather than a civilization of warriors. A distinction that STE explicitly calls out in the Season 2 episode Judgment.
Though much of it is now considered non-canon, the Original Series expanded universe novels, fan-guides (presented as in-universe guidebooks), and TTRPG took this even further, fleshing out the Klingons' history, and religion. Even giving them an entire constructed language that would be spoken on-screen in subsequent Star Trek movies and spin-off series. These Klingons are not just mindless brutes slobbering Gahg, while their children may train for war as part of their basic schooling, they also enjoy theme-parks and schlocky teleplays. Klingon adults listen to opera and have nuanced conversations about history and philosophy over glasses of Blood Wine. These Klingons are warlike, but they aren't obsessed with war for war's sake. Rather their militarism is an expression of a broader multi-domain aggressiveness.
And it is through this aggressiveness that they perceive something crucial about the other races they come in contact with. There are "Eev" that is beings like themselves, possessed of individual agency and ambition (The Humans,, Vulcans, Romulans, and Andorrans, all falling into this category), and then there are "Kuve", zombies, servitors, livestock, contemptible creatures worthy only of being conquered or consumed. There are shades of the Bene Gesserit's Gom Jabbar test in this distinction complete with Klingon youth having to be "tested with pain sticks" before becoming a legal adult (Coon, Fontana, Ford, Et Al. had clearly read Dune).
It is with this as context that I would like to highlight a scene from the novel The Final Reflection by John Ford, published the same year that Star Trek III would cement the pop culture image of the Klingons. In this scene a Klingon envoy is meeting with a wealthy Earth tycoon, Maxwell Grandisson the Third (this was written before Star Trek IV dropped that line about people in the 24th century not using money into the lore without any thought about how it would work). This man, Grandisson, is the leader of a "Back to Earth" movement that wants to do away with all this expensive and dangerous colonization of other planets bullshit in favor of building a paradise on Earth and he is trying to convince the Klingons to back his political campaign on the basis that if he wins there will be no need for conflict between their two peoples. The Klingon response to his overtures is worth thinking on...
To me, this speaks to the core story/premise of Enterprise. At the start of the series Earth is well on it's way to becoming a post-scarcity society but humanity is also starting to lean toward the Khesterex side of things. A vassal to the Vulcans, a junior ally at best. The NX Program is the physical manifestation of a conscious decision not to sink into comfortable dependency. This isn't the end of the humanity's story where we live boringly ever after, it is the beginning of "To Boldly Go..."
...and it is by "boldly going where no man has gone before", by inserting themselves into the middle of galactic affairs as though they belong, that by the end of Season 3 Humanity has gone from an indulged vassal to regional player and full partner in a powerful 3-way alliance that would have never come about had this band of psychotic gun-monkeys not disrupted the status quo. It is a quintessentially "American" story in that it's both the story of a child culture supplanting its parent as Hegemon and deeply rooted in the frontier mythos. But it's also a more universally human story about how cultures rise, fall, and occasionally merge. At the start of the series the Vulcans are powerful but also stagnant. Too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances and too conservative to tolerate uncertainty or risk even when doing so is arguably necessary. Meanwhile Humanity is both staggeringly ignorant and boundlessly confident. A confidence buoyed in part by the fact that there is nothing anyone can threaten them with short of extinction that they haven't already done to themselves. By the end of the series the two have moderated each other and become the closest of allies. It's a story about finding that balance between realistically assessing your limitations but also having the sense of confidence, self-worth, and "fuck it we ball" attitude necessary to pursue greatness. A worthwhile message for not just for individuals but for entire cultures.
Which brings us to the Culture War angle.
A common critique I see leveled against conservative populists on this forum be is that they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital". MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was, but I've seen similar complaints leveled against Abe and the LDP in Japan, and as as characters like Javier Milei in Argentina. But something the critics don't seem to grasp is that positive vision or no, their messages resonate, they win elections, and their rallies draw passionate crowds because it's a better story than anything the other side has to offer. A question our resident anti-Populists are going to have to grapple with is what does "elite human capital" have to offer the base-model human other than growing social dysfunction and death via "managed decline"?
I still think we can get to a better future without a catastrophic hard reset but we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces. Grievance-mongering might stir up a crowd but gripes alone are not a solid foundation to build upon, nor are the likely to inspire anyone to greatness. If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left. We need a unifying myth, and I feel like we might be in the early stages of figuring that out.
Are you the Feral Historian?
If so many thanks and all my impressiveness, that channel is full of has absolutely fascinating takes on media and culture!
I am Charlie.
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The post certainly sounded an awful lot like FH. But might just be an FH watcher giving us an abridged version of the relevant video?
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As a total tangent, John M. Ford has one of the strangest bibliographies of any novelist out there. The Dragon Waiting is an excellent fantasy/historical fiction that more people should read, but he also wrote 2 Star Trek novels, a coming-of-age story involving elves in Chicago, a scholarly cold war thriller about a lost Marlowe manuscript (Scholars of Night, a bit dated but another good one of his), a space opera, and a vaguely cyberpunk thing.
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Ratzel and Kjellen wrote important books about this.
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Great assessment of the Enterprise setting. “And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’”
But you completely lose me at the CW bits.
Elites don’t demand either of those things. The traditional substitutes are money and power. Conservatives are quite willing and able to reward elites with such; populists are not. Intellectual and technocrat discomfort with MAGA was directly proportional to the amount of time it spent reminding them that they were class enemies.
In fact, this class consciousness was an essential part of MAGA’s positive vision. America is supposed to be great. We beat all our rivals, so what gives? It must be the liberal, coastal elites. Get them out of power so we normal Americans can resume our upward trajectory.
Wild material prosperity is a good start. Really, the question is absurd unless you draw a very unintuitive box around “elite human capital.” Purging your best and brightest is not conducive to scientific or cultural wealth.
It doesn’t appear to prevent social dysfunction, either. There is a direct line from the Chinese intellectual purges to the starvation of millions of peasants. Then China had to redevelop its own oligarchic class before it could play in the big leagues. Hollowing out institutions comes with consequences.
Wait, wait.
You gestured at all those examples of conservative populism, but now it’s “blue spaces” at fault? I don’t think you’ve properly made the case. Presumably, you’re thinking of critical theory, reparations, the intellectual backlash against America. But what you’re describing is just populism. Swap the word “blue” and you’d have the standard criticism of MAGA. It gripes, it does damage, but it has yet to build anything that lasts.
Do you believe that we are living in a state of "wild material prosperity"? If so, do you believe that people like Noam Chomsky and Gavin Newsom are the ones who created and maintain that state?
How would you respond if I were to argue that what prosperity we have is largely in spite of such people rather than because of them?
When talk about "the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces" I'm talking (in part) about spaces like this one, and opinions that I have read here.
Yeah, I’d say our material conditions are pretty close to the best in history. No, Newsom and Chomsky probably didn’t have much to do with it. I’d probably agree with you, in a general sense, that intellectuals consume rather than produce material goods, turning them into something else. I would say that such professions are the privilege of a ridiculously luxurious society.
But why those two? Why not the Clintons or the Bushes, political dynasties who went to Harvard and Yale? Why not Kennedies and Roosevelts, Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Rockefellers and Rothschilds? There are uncountable examples of wealthy, connected families with elite educations and real impacts on material and societal conditions.
Is Elon Musk “elite human capital”? Why not? He got his degree from the same school as Chomsky, and he’s made a hell of a lot more material difference out of it. How about other governors, like Ron DeSantis?
I don’t think there’s a convenient line around people like Newsom and Chomsky. Certainly not one which maps to Khesterex thinking. Conservatism, in the sense of cautious introspection, is not unique to elites; utopian idealism does not make one a populist.
On the other hand, if the Motte is your idea of a blue space…maybe we’re speaking a different language.
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...I think you left off a third element, which is "immunity to consequences." There's lots of ways to get money and power. There are few ways to get or wield money and power that are protected from consequences deriving from the getting and the wielding, and almost all those ways involve "be an elite" among them. Include this element, and the hostility toward elites you correctly identify with gains a heaping helping of necessary context. Our elites have almost completely insulated themselves from negative consequences arising from their wielding of money and power, and the resentment this lack of accountability breeds is probably not something the present system can or should survive.
Do you believe elites have delivered wild material prosperity? Does the current generation understand that it is living amid wild material prosperity? If not, why not? Was Mangione mistaken? Are his fans in the public and the press and the justice system aware of that fact?
Like, the basic problem with the anti-populist defense of elites is that elites by definition are the people running things, and we can look at the world around us to assess how they're actually performing. So we repeatedly get, as you offer here, vague appeals to how wonderful things are in this best of all possible worlds, which die a death the moment you compare them to the PANIC PANIC PANIC elites themselves observably resort to in order to goad the populace down their preferred policy chute, into their preferred policy captive-bolt-gun.
The public at large believed that "police shooting unarmed black men" was a crisis, because Elites spent a decade intentionally generating the illusion of such a crisis. But the largest spike ever recorded in violent crime was actually real, and was very clearly a direct consequence of the public reaction to that elite-generated illusion.
And so for Education, and the Afghan war, and the GWOT generally, and the criminal justice system generally, and for offshoring manufacturing annd arguably for the economy generally, for the whole of the Trans Rights issue, for the LGBT movement in at least a large part, the COVID response, immigration and on and on and on.
I can't find the X.com link at the moment to the academic lady with a prestigious fellowship, arguing in an interview that reporting child abuse is racist. So instead, I'll note that I disagree that our present elites are in fact "our best", and that intelligence is very clearly orthogonal to goodness.
We straight-up cannot afford these people. They have to go, and if they do not go peacefully they will absolutely go violently, and much that we value will go with them, and that will still be preferable to the ruin of letting them continue to run things.
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You're mixing up terminology here. The elites are people with actual power. "Elite human capital" are a bunch of influencers with status anxiety, a Joffrey Baratheon complex, and a hate boner for populism.
If that were the definition, why would conservative populists want to attract them?
I’m pretty sure that I’m using it as the OP did, which is much closer to the first sense.
Because they're Elite Human Capital, duh. They think they're all that, and populists not seeing their worth is evidence of how incapable they are.
The term was popularized by Walt Bismarck, an Alt-Right guy who, in the wake of the Charlottesville crashout, went to some all-white small town, and later wrote a substack seething about the normies there not being interested in his brand of politics. I think one of our posters even found the article, and was indirectly responsible for it going viral. Later it was picked up by people like Richard Hanania, and Alexander Turok.
https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist
Under "Reason #3"
Normal white Midwesterners don't get his will to power ideology.
Also their women do not like him and he doesn't seem to actually like white women. Really hampering his aspirations to make white children. So he pivots to rationalizing how having kids with Hispanics is okay.
More power to him on that front, but this part:
...Is kind of indicative of why this guy and people like him are not the future of Red Tribe.
He's a Blue. His values are Blue to the core. It doesn't matter if he were Von Neumann reborn; he doesn't want what we want, he isn't interested in our values and so he's never going to be on our side in any meaningful way. If he were supremely competent, then he'd be dangerous; as is, he appears mainly to be an instructive, cautionary example.
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Originally, "Elite Human Capital" meant, well, elite human capital. For example, the sort of people who became Communists in first half of the last century.
Any movement who wants to move somewhere should attract such people.
Yes. This is the steelman / nugget of truth in the EHC idea, but in practice "populists can't attract EHC" is a personal complaint at not being wined and dined by the plebs.
More than nugget. Whether you love or hate communism, you must admit that the old guard early 20th century communist veterans were among the most capable people in history (comparable perhaps only to 16th century Jesuits).
If it was year 1926, Communist agitator of the time would in open, no holds barred debate demolish whole Motte with ease.
More like: these people are my White brothers, but they care only about sportsball and fentanyl and struggle for Whiteness leaves them cold.
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Maybe people in this forum can help me:
I've got an 8 year old boy I'd like to introduce to Star Trek. I specifically want:
So my questions are:
For my part I got into trek around 9 or 10, the gateway drug was re-runs of the original series that one of our local stations would play along-side Lost In Space, Twilight Zone and a few others. Regarding specific episodes, A Piece of the Action, The Corbomite Maneuver, and Trouble With Tribbles all stick in my mind. From there I got into the TOS crew movies, practically wearing out our copy of Wrath of Kahn on VHS.
Additionally my grandad had a whole shelving unit full of old paperbacks in his study/man-cave that included a bunch of the Star Trek expanded universe books as well as a lot classic sci-fi. Stuff like Doc Smith's Lensmen books, Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom stories, and a bunch of Heinlein and Bradbury's early stuff. Grandad would let me check books out like a library and between those two vectors I was well and truly hooked.
I've tried to infect with my own kids with the Star Trek bug but it hasn't taken. That said over the last year or two, my eldest and a couple of their friends (all middle-school aged) have gotten really into Stargate, and it's clear from talking to them and watching them play that Stargate is to them what Trek was to me when I was their age, which is probably worth a post in itself.
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Introducing children to pop culture that you liked as a kid but is too old to be popular among kids today is usually a bad idea, regardless of whether you think it introduces him to any useful ideas. If you really think that old pop culture would benefit your kid, it would be a bad assumption to think that old pop culture that you liked is the best choice for that purpose. You should do research on 1960s-1990s shows and pick the ones with the best balance of merit and entertainment, not pick the ones that excited kid-you. It may turn out you should be showing your kid Gunsmoke instead of Star Trek: TOS.
If the kid is a scifi geek, or is clamoring to look at your TOS blu-rays or otherwise showing obvious interest, of course that doesn't apply.
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I started watching Star Trek at 8-9, so if your son is interested I don't see any reason to wait. As far as specific recommendations of what to watch, these are things I remember enjoying as a kid:
And here are some that I think a kid might enjoy or display some of the virtues you mentioned:
Mostly these are fun, swashbuckling episodes but there are obviously some thinkier ones in there as well. I do think that even the more serious episodes will be fun if he's enjoying Trek, but maybe don't start him on those.
I didn't list any DS9 or Voyager not because I don't like them, but I think DS9 isn't quite what you're looking for here (as much as I love it). It tends to be darker and more serialized, not the fairly standalone and unambiguously heroic stories I get the sense you're looking for. And I just don't know Voyager well enough to recommend any episodes.
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That might be about right. My oldest started around then, and is still the biggest Star Trek fan among my kids. I thought TNG would be the smoothest introduction (and I may have been right - we've watched a bit of TOS and my daughters find Kirk annoying), but especially when he was around 10, my son thought that TNG was often too boring and sometimes (well, just the Borg episodes, as of Locutus) too scary to be enjoyable. But even my youngest daughter was picking Star Trek episodes for her turn at "movie night" back when she was only 8.
We started with but skipped the vast majority of season 1 TNG (just skipping ahead to the best episodes), and honestly the exact watch list wasn't a big deal. Trek of that generation was mostly written to be episodic, with background knowledge helpful for adding nuance but with the most important exposition slipped (or sometimes crammed...) into each individual script. Occasionally an episode will be a 2-parter and you can't possibly skip the first part, occasionally an episode will be a "sequel" to a story like Moriarty or Picard's Flute (but of course in those cases you wouldn't want to skip the first part), but in general each episode stands alone well.
If you want to challenge yourself with some tricky choices, then you move on to Babylon 5. Also kind of a slow start in season 1, but in its case even the slower episodes more often than not packed in some characterization or backstory or foreshadowing or outright arcplot development that makes the later episodes much more enjoyable. We skipped the pilot and maybe half of the first season there, because I didn't want to waste too much of my kids' time if they decided they still didn't like the good parts of the show, and in hindsight (they all liked it) we skipped too much.
Could I talk you into the 1950s and late 1940s? That was mostly a previous generation of scientists, but 8 is a great age for most of the Heinlein juveniles.
Whoa... I didn't know about the Heinlein juveniles. Thanks!
Seconding the recommendation of Heinlein's Juveniles, Star Beast and Farmer in the Sky are both excellent reads for a kid of that age.
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"The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve."
If you want something to tide him over until he is older, try Space Cases. It's basically Voyager for kids.
What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.
That said, the first full episode of Star Trek I ever saw was "Blink of an Eye", which a Trekkie teacher of mine put on when I was in 10th grade; I fucking loved it, though I later learned it is basically just a remake of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. It helps that, much like an episode of Wagon Train, "Blink of an Eye" is actually the planet's story, with the crew of Voyager serving primarily as viewpoint characters; this means you do not need to know anything about them, or the wider setting.
Outside of missing ENT which I quite enjoy, I don't think this would have worked for me. I came back to it later and I love it all now, but when I was a pre-teen/teen in the 90s, there was reruns of all of the Star Trek show playing all the time on TV, and TOS, TNG and DS9 never had much interest for me. TOS because it looked stupid: the action is robotic and looked stupid, and the plots basically all felt like they boiled down to sufficiently advanced aliens act like gods, until Kirk says "nope" and somehow he'd end up clumsily wrestling with a goofy looking alien somewhere along the way. I know it hit different for kids in the 60s and 70s, but you'd need a kid with a specific interest in "retro" shows to enjoy TOS on its own now, which I would guess isn't too common unless you live in a bunker and have deprived them of modern media. TNG and DS9 didn't interest me because it seemed like non stop politics and relied on too much built up lore that I didn't care about.
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Only that this is like watching two hours of tv everyday for a year. That's way more tv than is appropriate for a kid.
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"The Cage" was not published first! Part of it was filmed first, but it was broadcast much later!
And it's also not such a good place to begin.
I should have said production order, not publication order.
I am a firm believer that TOS should start with "The Cage" followed by "Where No Man Has Gone Before", rather than "The Man Trap" followed by "Charlie X".
Have to agree "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is a better opener. But "The Cage" isn't; it's less polished and about a completely different crew.
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I mean, shit, I was watching Star Trek as early as 8 years old on my lonesome. If they're into science fiction and have any sort of attention span, it's going to be hard to keep them away from that stuff.
Cut them loose with some of the more fun stuff in seasons 2 through 7 and see what happens. It'll build some foundations for them to appreciate the deeper stuff when they get older.
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13ish is fine, but a sharp younger kid might like it earlier.
I have three suggestions for starting points.
As you suggested, Wrath of Khan is a good one to start with. the TOS movies, from two onwards (the first one might confuse as to why these characters coming out of retirement is a big deal), are detached enough from the series that they won't feel like you're missing half the plot if you just watch them on their own. They have enough action to keep a child's attention. The action is modern enough that it doesn't look goofy the way the action from the 60's does.
For my second suggestion, I'll go very much against the grain and suggest maybe the most divisive series as a starting point: Voyager. It is "my Trek" in the sense it's the one that introduced me properly to the series, and I posit it's a good starting point, because its concept inherently reduces the requirement of knowing the lore that was built up on, without discarding it wholesale either. Yes, it's "lesser" in that it's not as good an example of the virtues you would hope the show would demonstrate to the kids, but those virtues are still there. Janeway is not the greatest role model, but in most episodes she's a decent one. Sometimes she does a cheeky little war crime, but what Starfleet captain hasn't?
The Animated Series might also be a good starting point, especially if you want to start him earlier than 13. It's simpler, introduces to the universe, and while it hasn't aged all that well, I think it probably aged better than TOS has visually. Or maybe I just forgave it because I had different expectations of cartoons back then.
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Appropriate age is going to depend a lot on maturity and attention span, but certainly I'd think no later than 13. I'd probably skip TOS entirely to begin with and start with the TNG pilot. Then skip to Measure of a Man, then some more plums from seasons 3-7, and the finale. If it takes, he'll fill in the rest of the episodes on his own volition and want more.
I'm pretty sure this is the worst episode possible as an intro. It's got lots of great philosophical nuggets to chew on, but there's no reason to identify with why Picard/Riker are so troubled by disassembling a "mere machine" if you haven't actually built a relationship with Data yet by watching him struggle to learn to be human. Without understanding that background, the JAG and cybernetics professor are "obviously right" and the whole episode is boring.
My problem is that all of the recommendations on trek sites I've seen are like this: they are geared towards the "best episodes for experienced fans" rather than "the best episodes for introducing the series".
I think both the pilot and the episode itself does enough to bring that background. You could, I guess, watch Skin of Evil after the pilot to cement data's personality and account for the disappearance of Yar, or Elementary, Dear Data to show his more whimsical side (which also sets up the clever Moriarty episode later). The good thing about TNG generally though is that it was conceived and written as an almost 100% episodic show, so while episodes can benefit from familiarity with the characters and the world lore, it is generally not necessary. That's one reason it was very popular in syndication.
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Modern Trek is not my Trek, and that's okay. But the latest show is so clearly not for the older/original fans, and so clearly "Dawson's Creek In Space", that it's over-done. (Also, how Holly Hunter plays her character makes me want to slap the face off her.)
As well, if anyone thinks it's too gay and queer and multi-culti? Excuse you, it's packed to the gills with racism! I would have thought this was a parody, but "he/hymn/it/xe (and more neos)" seems (on the face of it) to be serious.
Oh noes they separated a mother and child? Yeah, because Mommy is a convicted criminal accomplice to murder and even AmeriKKKa doesn't send six year olds to jail with their criminal parent. Of course, the right thing to do is let all criminals off if they have kids, because you can't send the kid to jail, you can't separate a parent and child, so that only leaves letting the parent off scot-free (else you get headlines about ICE arresting and detaining a five year old as though they're acting like the child is the criminal, and not abandoned by family who refuse to take him):
Guy goes to military academy and they insist on a haircut? Brutal non-consensual attack!
Gosh, with a modern audience like this, how can it be anything but a smash hit?
EDIT: More seriously, for a show supposed to be set centuries in the future, it's weirdly "all the 21st century West Coast liberal talking points". Apparently we now have canonical drag queens, because of course SF of the 32nd century is still Progress Pride Flag Central. (Although, seems like the performer may indeed be a Trek fan, so good on that). It's just the anvil to the face nature of it all that is tiresome. I don't object to having a sensitive Klingon who just wants to study medicine! Of course not all Klingons, just like all historical societies with ruling warrior/kingly castes, were not all warriors, you had different castes as it were, so a doctor is perfectly fine career path. But on top that make him a refugee gay polycule kid? Sigh, when is he coming out as nonbinary otherkin?
This wouldn't be out of place in the earlier Trek canon either: a good chunk of the Worf-centered episodes of TNG and DS9 focus on how to straddle "warrior culture" and "modern neoliberalism" to attempt to satisfy both, not always succeeding. Worf ends up teaching martial arts (Mok'bara) to crewmates, takes up prune juice as "a warrior's drink", and manages to be a questionable father to Alexander.
Honestly, some of the best Trek episodes are reflections on the human conditon like those.
If you think about it for five seconds, of course Klingon society has to have farmers and doctors and construction workers and all the rest of it. Even if it is a warrior-ruler society, they need people who work for them doing non-warrior stuff. Mr. "I'm a lover not a fighter" kid need not be spectacularly different, but the show can't resist piling on the agony to make the point about No, Seriously, We're Talking About Anti-Immigrant Racism In America.
Grew up in a refugee camp (because home planet was destroyed during The Burn), abandoned by both his dads in the polycule (er, what?) and now he just wants to watch birds and become a healer.
Knock yourself out, kid, would be classic Trek attitude here.
I didn't watch the show. What motivates such a character to attend Starfleet Academy of all things?
No freakin' idea. I can't watch this slop for more than seconds at a time, else I'll explode from apoplexy. It really is a teen show for teenagers, because functionally it's Starfleet High. We got yer bullies! We got yer nerds! We got yer Cool Principal! We got yer love triangles, figuring out romance, navigating relationships, and becoming an adult! We got yer Parental Issues by the bucketload in both Mommy and Daddy flavours!
We also have I ate my combadge and sweet Kahless in Sto'Vo'Kor, the only thing that makes sense of this entire morass is that this is not the real, actual, genuine Starfleet Academy for training future Starfleet officers, it's Remedial Education for the crayon-eaters. Hence why Principal Galboss who can't sit properly in a chair, see she's relatable to the kids who also can't sit straight, walk straight, or refrain from eating their combadges.
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You're preaching to the choir.
I am constantly amazed how each new version scrapes that barrel bottom even thinner. New one is "we're a queer show for queer people, wait why is nobody watching? it must be racism and transphobia is why!"
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I don't think this is the right frame.
OK, I guess if the Western political class was made up solely of EU or UK officials, there would be no productivity growth, just anemic faux-technocratic tweaks, Nudging even though Nudging has been debunked... Technocracy without technology. From that point of view it's declinism.
But there would be large and ever growing numbers of migrants. Is that not a radical policy, an ambitious vision to reshape the world? Spain legalized 500K illegals this week. Australia imported about 300K legal immigrants last year in a country of 27 million. The left have big ambitions for growth in the size of the state, fiscally as well as demographically. The left are big fans of renewable energy too, they want more solar panels and wind farms. Some favour war to impose their values overseas, war against homophobic or racist autocracies who deny their people Human Rights. From a certain point of view, some are imperialists.
Is Trump opposed to new technology, new ideas? No, he's a big fan of AI and crypto, he's eager to have new investments, new battleships, the biggest and the best. Not a big fan of electric cars or windmills, he prefers oil and gas. Trump's desire for overseas expansion is manifest. Right-wing populism has close ties to jingoism and imperial expansion historically and today.
One man's nostalgia is another man's 'this is obviously correct and good, the more good the better!' another man's failure is 'we clearly didn't try hard enough (this is correct and good), all these ____ists and Russian bots were in the way'
Each side has their own unifying myths. The left have a vision of evil white supremacy, white colonialism, racist capitalism... a world divided between whites and People Of Colour (with some subdivisions for educated/ignorant whites, model minorities, LGBT, intersectionalism). There's some variation between pursuing social democracy or socialism/communism and liquidating landlords. There are some on the left trying to push for more embrace of technology: how can you have fully automated luxury gay space communism without data centres? But by and large, the left's unifying myths unite the left.
The right's unifying myths are somewhat more diverse: good white supremacy, Judeo-Christian values, 'we abolished slavery', rallying behind the flag, market capitalism as an end in itself, leftists being gay (pejorative) and cringe... But they are also myths of the right.
I don't think you can unify left and right, only align everyone to be on the left or the right.
Nudging in the economics sense has been debunked? At least in the form presented in Nudge (by Thaler and Sunstein), I highly doubt that.
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Trump gave us Space Force, that's not Khesterex.
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Well... that's an interesting post! As a fellow Star Trek nerd I'm conflicted on how to respond. You've made so many different, interesting points that I'm disoriented.
On the Enterprise series, personally I still hate it. I hate the opening theme song (trading the classy dramatic music of previous series for a cheesy pop song), I hate the way it retconned an earlier ship named Enterprise, I hate Scott Bakula as an actor, I hate how the showrunners were obviously running out of ideas, and I especially hate how they were trying to shoehorn in then-current year politicals about 9/11 into Star Trek. But I suppose it does have its place as the last of its era, and as something of a time capsule for early 2000s network TV.
I agree with you that Original Series Klingons deserve more respect. They get a lot of shit because of their appearance (which admittedly does look like a weird racial caricature of Turkish or Mongolian people, plus hilariously low-budget). But they're written as intelligent and respect-worthy adversaries. In many ways, not that different from Kirk. When they're first introduced Kirk is trying to blend in among a planet of pacifists, but the Klingons instantly sus him out as being different and more like themselves. They both share contempt for the pacifists, even when it's revealed that they're secretly a more advanced race. And the Klingons are very much a match for the Federation and a huge threat. Later series make them look cool, but act kinda goofy, just blundering around with swords and being stupid. "Samurai/vikings in space" turn out to be no match at all for hyper advanced humans.
Culture War angle: basically, I agree. But this is admittedly a spicy hot take. Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger. The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life. Trump's recent rhetoric on Venezuela seems to be a step in that direction- he says that he did it partially for security, but also partially just to take the oil and make us all richer. We'll see if that's actually the case, but I can appreciate the vision.
Even assuming it works and we never come across a power that manages to beat us or disrupt us in a significant manner (there's a reason peace is the default), genetic engineering and technology is multiple times more efficient for this purpose.
Because we already have a better method, it's called markets. They're naturally efficient and have consistently proven themselves to be better than centrally controlled economies. It's one of the reasons why even slavery has died off too, the free market is simply far more efficient than wasting resources on enforcement of what essentially becomes a mini form of a centrally controlled economy. Slave ownership helped to keep the American south in the past while markets industrialized the North and made them richer.
The empire model didn't go away because of morals. If that was the case, then the empires would have outcompeted the moral pussies who ceded power and they wouldn't be gone to begin with. The empire model is gone because it is inferior to the market. You notice how the three examples you gave of modern empires all failed?
The British empire kept losing territory and power, not just the US but plenty of other colonies. The American South lost to the North. The USSR racked up loss after loss until it fell apart. Over and over again the empire model is filled with losers.
The market model keeps winning. The US, one of the earliest and most ardent embracers of capitalism who largely kept war away from us is the greatest and most powerful country in the world. While Europe was ruined by war, we innovated and grew. The only thing now that is even close is China, and that's despite them having significantly more human capital to rely on because they insist on self sabotage with communism.
You're making the "end of history" argument ala Fukuyama. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but I think we're starting to see the cracks in this sort of market-focused liberal democratic model. Plumeting birth rates, rising social problems, and a general sense that people are not as good as they used to be. Technology is very good at solving market problems like "how can we target people with ads," but not so good at actually enhancing human lives. And genetic engineering has yet to overcome basic human differences, eg men and women are still different despite the best efforts of feminists and trans activists to erase those differences. Ditto the racial differences.
So what? The US has also lost lots of wars. Just a few years ago we had a humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of failing to accomplish anything there. It doesn't matter. The nice thing about being a big, powerful military empire is that you can afford to lose wars. Losing some random territory in Africa was hardly an existential threat to the British Empire- even losing their American colonies wasn't. The southern planter caste lost their slaves, but they kept their land and went right back to their traditional way of life after the war ended, just paying the former slaves a small amount. Even now they make up a disproportionate share of US military officers. And while the USSR fell apart (due to economic reasons, not from war—it's kind of amazing that they kept their empire running as long as they did when it was so ramshackle), Russia kept its nukes, its space program, and a lot of its power. Its former KGB leader became president. Its currently at war in Ukraine to regain its lost territory, and it will probably win despite the west sending significant aid to Ukraine. It's not just some minor footnote in history!
Then of course there's China, which seems to be charting its own unique path with both centralized state control and dynamic markets. I don't even know what to say there, except that it's clearly a rebuke to the idea that liberal free-market capitalistic democracy is the only model that will work from now on.
Even if/when there's problems, is there any indication that the war hungry empire wannabe nations are fixing any of these? Russia has been killing off hundreds of thousands of their young men trying to take even a small portion of nearby territory.
China is probably the only working example whatsoever and that's still because Deng Xiaoping the so called "number one capitalist roader" introduced market reform to them and allows them to actually meaningfully grow. And even then they're still fucked. Even just among the other majority chinese Nations, China is the poorest per capita. They just make up for it through sheer numbers.
Technology cooks your food, gets you from one place to another, brings you entertainment, saves your life and all sorts of other things. You have more jesters (comedians) available at the press of a single button than even the richest and most powerful kings would have had through their whole life just by turning on YouTube. You can listen to and watch the best stories by the best bards around the world with barely any effort. You can travel long distances without needing a stinky awful horse. I can cook delicious meals that some poor Victorian boy would never get to taste. Every single meal filled with spices and herbs that they've never even heard of. Thanks to restaurants, I don't even have to cook them either! And thanks to delivery, I don't even have to leave my home to have food beyond the imagination of prior centuries. Even many poorer Americans can access these wonders nowadays, I have a poorer friend from a rural county nearby I met in school whose family has a PS5 and PSVR. They are "poor" and have virtual reality technology just in their home casually. And just ask the basic question of what are the ads even for? For things people want to buy to enhance their life.
Markets are making the sci fi dreams of the yesteryear real and all anyone can do is complain, psychology is incredible.
Well, I haven't done a robust statistical analysis of this, but there does seem to be a trned where the more war-hungry nations have a higher fertility rate. Africa and the Middle East most especially. Israel also, and they might be the best example of what I'm thinking of- they seem to have accepted that they'll just be at war in Gaza forever, never going full genocide but never finding a peaceful solution either. The US isn't very warlike, but we are somewhat more warlike than Europe or East Asia, and correspondingly have a higher fertility rate. Russia is admittedly an outlier, but I think they're just slowly finding their way forward after the absolute devastation of the USSR breakup in the 90s.
China really needs to be judged on a curve. Remember they went through the century of humiliation, followed by Mao just absolutely ruining whatever was left with his retarded policies. The fact that they still exist at all is incredible, and they seem to be quickly making up lost ground.
Sure, there's obviously some good uses for technology. I just dispute that technology on its own can make people happy or give us meaning in life. As you noted, even poor people now have plenty of access to technology, so we don't need to be rich to enjoy it. This is going past what we can prove with statistics, but my impression of most poor people in the US is not that they want more technology, but a deeper meaning in their life. Put another way- they want social capital, not technological capital.
...and there's something to be said for having an actual human cook food for you or provide live entertainment, instead of a robot and a screen. Nothing I've ever watched on a screen is as memorable to me as some of the events I've seen in person from a real human.
I havent either and wouldn't know the cause if so, but your examples also match up with the "poor countries have more kids" idea as well so if there's any relation it could be that war hunger makes us poorer by being less efficient and being poorer makes us fuck more.
The east asia hypothesis falls apart pretty quick if you consider South Korea is still prepared for a war, just with a long ceasemate for peace currently. And China is ramping up against Taiwan for decades now.
Well yes that's the point, Mao along with the other commies fucked things up and it took Deng Xiaoping's market reforms to make them even close to the capitalist competition of Singapore and Taiwan, despite having a massive advantage in population.
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That doesn't sound Roman. That sounds Greek, particularly Athenian or Macedonian(Sparta preferred foreign bribes over directly extracting tribute).
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That doesn't sound particularly Roman. More Roman would be offering citizenship to any migrants who joined the army to conquer Cuba or Greenland, on the condition that they remain there afterwards and helped develop the new territories.
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I agree that "the Franchise" is too important to to entrust to accidents of birth which is why, if we are going to openly embrace empire, I would say that we ought borrow a page from the late-Republic / early-Empire and go full Heinlein. Tie citizenship and voting rights to military service or at least being a revenue-producing taxpayer. We want voters who feel invested, and granting citizenship at birth, be it by blood or by soil, has the opposite effect.
As for the rest, I have the same questions for you as @sun_the_second.
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Starship Troopers explored this concept seriously as well (disregard the movie, which may be fun but has little to do with the book). In the book, the franchise is only extended to people who undertake hazardous and/or unpleasant duty on behalf of the human federation. A right to be able to do this is guaranteed, and they will even invent difficult tasks for someone with disabilities, but the point is to ensure real skin in the game for the franchise-holders. The book also discusses the concept of human expansion as a sort of evolutionary force.
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Oh, Enterprise burned me so badly. I was delighted to hear Scott Bakula was cast as Archer. Then they gave me "a well-balanced captain, he has a chip on both shoulders", turned the Vulcans into racist xenophobe ableists and I don't know what-all else, that goddamn dog, and Trip Tucker.
No thank you!
Then they seemed to go on a spiral of "you thought the last re-imagining was bad? Hold my Romulan ale" and we got Disco Trek with mushroom-powered space ships and the biggest Mary Sue of Mary Sues, Michael (I'm a gal but I got a guy's name, ain't I daring?) Burnham.
Making "Spock's Brain" not the worst ever Trek episode produced for twenty years now.
I recently rewatched a bunch of Berman-era Trek including a good chunk of Season 1 Enterprise in part because I needed a pallet cleanser from the latest Kurtzman nonsense, and pop-song aside I feel that it is unfairly maligned. See the various re-dubbs of the Enterprise opening using other series' scores
TNG was "my Trek" but even I have to admit that the first season was pretty rough, if we compare season 1 of Enterprise to season 1 of TNG I'd argue that the former acquits itself well.
Season one of TNG was trying a little too hard to copy original TOS, to the point of remaking some episodes from the parent show. Once they got their own cast and setting established, and ventured out to do original stories, it was way better.
I really, really wanted Enterprise to work because I thought going back to the early days of the Federation and how it was built up was a great idea. The struggles, the coming together of the different founding members we knew from later series, the history behind it all. Instead we got decontamination gel rubdowns where any alien microbes presumably died of second-hand embarrassment.
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I wanted to give Enterprise a chance. The soft rock-jazz AOR fusion warbling of the theme song took me aback a bit, but I soldiered on.
Then we got "the fucking idiot* showrunners made it canon that this is not a bad shitty joke, it is now established in the Trekverse that Humans literally smell, so far as Vulcans are concerned, and they have to wear nasal filters to be around us".
I could not believe, over several episodes, that no this was not a shitty joke some dumb Human (Tucker) was trying to make a running joke, it was to be taken as real true fact of the setting.
Then we had Archer going to go to war (or a diplomatic incident) over his dumb dog where a bunch of aliens who had never seen a dog before and had no idea what kind of animal it was neglected to warn him that some plant on their world would give poor doggy-dums the equivalent of an allergic reaction.
The stupid, stupid, stupid attempts at fanservice sexiness (but not too sexy, and let's pretend that you treat radiation by rubbing gel on your half-naked partner. Yeah, hard science for the win!)
I liked Reed. I liked Hoshi. I was willing to give T'Pol a go, even though they plainly had her in the Seven of Nine catsuit and heels role, until they infected her with the mind-controlling Ceti eel and diverted what little character she had apart from being the sexpot to "Imma rebel against everything Vulcan and be 200% pro-Archer, pro-Humans and pro-romance with stinky Human Tucker".
It's a toss-up whom I loathe more, Tucker or Phlox, but given that Phlox is such an insufferable pain in the backside I'd be happy with an episode where they blew up Denobula (they blew up Vulcan, damn them, in the franchise but they couldn't destroy this lair of prats?)
My viewing dropped from "it's new Trek, that's every week sorted!" to "occasional if I remember" and ended with the first whispers of the Time war or whatever that plot was, when they decided they'd re-do Voyager's Year of Hell (the most popular season for that show) and re-cast Archer in the Janeway Action Hero mould. At this period, the Federation doesn't even have working transporters for people, but they're going up against a civilisation that can manipulate time? That's bows and arrows against nuclear missiles. I noped out because Braga and Berman and their bloody love of convoluted time travel episodes, plus some things are just beyond suspension of disbelief, and I didn't like any of the characters or setting enough to stick with the show.
*Yes, I am salty about this. It's reducing Trek to the level of "jokes twelve year old boys would think funny".
The thing that always really annoyed me about Enterprise was the decision to come up with a canon explanation for why the Klingon look changed. Just no. It was done for real world reasons, the audience is capable of rolling with it, move on. There's no need for a convoluted explanation, or indeed to acknowledge the change at all (unless it's to wink at the audience like in Trials And Tribble-ations).
I think the funniest meta-solution would have been to have Micheal Dorn spend the episode in ToS-style makeup.
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From the Wiki link:
Yeah, if we're doing 60s Cold War analogies, the Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were the Chinese.
This really depends on which era and episode you're talking about. They did say that the Romulans were distantly related to the Vulcans but less friendly, so some people made a vague analogy to that with Vulcans=Japanese and Romulans=Chinese... but then the crew meets the Romulans and they're just space Romans, with all sorts of references to the ancient Romans. After that they only showed up a few times in later TOS episodes, mostly sidelined behind the Klingons. Meanwhile there's Sulu and Chekov on the bridge, as an actual, literal Japanese/Russian man, showing how the humans in the future had overcome these sort of petty national conflicts.
Later, the movie Star Trek 6 made the Klingons a heavy-handed metaphor for the USSR and the end of the cold war, revolving around a complicated spy plot. But after that, TNG made them more like space Vikings who looked down on any sort of treachery, while the Romulans became the sneaky spy enemy. So I think the analogy is pretty garbled and there's room for the writers to do whatever they want.
It was never solidly "X is a metaphor for Y in our world" (except for the few Very Special Episodes about race or whatever) so there is always room for interpretation. Definitely the movies made the Klingons more villainous ("you killed my son!") than the show had done, so TNG with Worf was a correction to that.
Currently, what with the conflicting explanations for why TOS Klingons and modern Klingons look different, and now with this mess that I refuse to recognise as genuine Trek, they're all over the place. I go to my happy place and imagine that Disco Trek onwards are all happening in the Reboot AU timeline and not in Prime timeline so Vulcan still exists, Vulcans are not raging racists, and Starfleet is not full of narcissists and failures for whom every day is Pride Day or else they are being oppressed by being required to act like professionals.
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And Roddenberry was definitely doing '60s Cold War analogies.
Oh, yeah. But he also wanted that balance between "human nature has done terrible things" and "but we can change, here's a vision for the future of optimism and hope". The Federation works for its happy ending, which is why the puerile easy nihilism of over-using the Mirror Universe and Section 31 annoys me. "Guess what, suckers, your shiny future is built on grubby spy manipulation!" and then we get Picard etc. which are then "guess what, suckers, your shiny future is obsessed with late 20th century/mid 21st century SJW tropes as expressed in terms college student Marxists can understand!"
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What happens when you run out of inferior people to pillage and loot?
Also, who exactly provides the "services" won in war if not the underclass that you defeated?
Capitalism's greatest virtue was enabling continuous growth through continuous competition. Making competition physical either creates a real risk of winning and stagnating, lacking enemies, or you have to make the entire war a 1984-esque sham.
Also also, war isn't even fucking fun in a rah rah primal kind of way anymore. You don't get to see the whites of the enemy's eyes. Unless you're stomping primitives through vastly superior firepower in a way that can hardly be called war and certainly isn't edifying, all you get is cowering in a foxhole, waiting for a drone to pinpoint your location and either get you shelled or drop a grenade on you.
Well you don't kill them all. Don't commit mass genocide, that's barbaric and wasteful.
(@JeSuisCharlie this is also my reply to you)
Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.
(I feel compelled to mention at this point that I'm just offering this as a thought experiment, using all three of those plus the Klingons from Star Trek as a very loose example. All three of those have some obvious horrifying parts, and I particularly despise slavery)
The thing that all three had in common was that, although they were a heavily militarized society with many of their upper class men serving in the military, they weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory. They already had all the territory they could possibly use—arguably too much. Of course, to some extent they did go to war with other nations, but most of their normal military action was either:
(a) preparing ever greater amounts of force to make sure they never had to go to war (the best weapon is one that never has to be used) or (b) internal force against the tribute states of their empire (Czech or Afghanistan for the Soviets, India for the British, Blacks and American Indians for the Antebellum South)
Of course, the most obvious benefit of such an empire is the resourcees it provides. Natural resources like oil and minerals, but also humans to do all the work that no one else wants to do: work the farmland in harsh rural areas for example, or low-wage service work in the cities. In our capitalistic meritocracy, this leads to an endless dog-eat-dog struggle as everyone is in competition for the "good jobs," leading everyone in fear that they'll be stuck with one of those lesser jobs, and no one will offer them any sympathy—it's their fault for not doing better in school, or hustling harder, or something like that. With the empire model, things are much more clear—you're born into the lower caste, and you stay there, so there's a little more stability to build a culture there and offer some stability.
In our society, military service is usually offered as a path out of poverty for the lower class, while those in the upper class either making a token gesture of it (like the royal family in England) or skip it entirely (like Trump). In the "empire" model, it instead acts as a test of merit and one of the most respected careers, with many of the upper class choosing to make their career there. After leaving the military, they then get a huge advantage for later careers in things like law and politics, which seems a lot more fair and just than offering them to kids who got a high LSAT score and went to top law schools with no prior career experience. Or they can simply retire and live the rest of their life as a gentleman of leisure, with their military pension and discipline keeping them on a respectable path, which is much better than the aimless NEETS of today who have ample leisure time but nothing to show for it.
I would certainly not expect it to be "fun," and I'm aware there would be a heavy price paid in blood for all of this. But it might lead us back to an actually "great" society, where people have a sense that they are part of something truly grand and have an important role to play. The current vision of "you are all residents of an economic zone, go forth and maximize GDP" is somewhat... lacking in its appeal to our nobler spirits.
The South actually was pretty interested in expanding its territory. I think in a scenario where they successfully separate from the United States they probably end up with Cuba and possibly large parts of Mexico and South America.
As I understand it, that was mostly for political reasons. They felt outnumbered and wanted more congressional votes to survive.
Political power of the slave states was a major consideration, but they also contended (I think sincerely) that if slavery was not permitted to expand, the system would collapse.
http://civilwarcauses.org/al-nc.htm
Hmm, that's interesting. It seems like they were afraid of runaway population growth in their slaves, to the point where the entire south would just be overpopulated with slaves if they weren't allowed to expand territory. Suffice to say that kind of population growth is no longer a concern these days.
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…this is TND with extra steps. I mean, you’re totally allowed to argue for the total dispossession of and presumed eventual extinction of the non-white/east asian peoples of the earth, but that is indeed the proximate outcome of such a Darwinian process.
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