About My Blog

My blog is about history, popular culture, politics and current events from a democratic socialist and Irish republican perspective. The two main topics are Northern Ireland on one hand and fighting anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia on the other. The third topic is supporting the Palestinians, and there are several minor topics. The three main topics overlap quite a bit. I have to admit that it’s not going to help me get a graduate degree, especially because it’s almost always written very casually. But there are some high-quality essays, some posts that come close to being high-quality essays, political reviews of Sci-Fi TV episodes (Star Trek and Babylon 5), and a unique kind of political, progressive poetry you won't find anywhere else. (there are also reviews of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and reviews of Roseanne)

(my old blog was not showing up in Google search results AT ALL (99% of it wasn't being web-crawled or indexed or whatever) and there was another big problem with it, so this is a mirror of the old one although there will be some occassionnal editing of old posts and there will be new posts. I started this blog 12/16/20; 4/28/21 I am now done with re-doing the internal links on my blog) (the Google problem with my blog (only 1% of this new one is showing up in Google search results) is why I include a URL of my blog when commenting elsewhere, otherwise I would get almost no visitors at all)

(The "Table of Contents" offers brief descriptions of all but the most recent posts)

(I just recently realized that my definition of "disapora" was flawed- I thought it included, for example, Jews in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and with the Irish diaspora, the Irish on that island. I'll do some work on that soon (11/21/20 I have edited the relevant paragraph in my post about Zionism))

(If you're really cool and link to my blog from your site/blog, let me know) (if you contact me, use the word "blog" in the subject line so I'll know it's not spam)

YOU NEED TO READ THE POST "Trump, Netanyahu, and COVID-19 (Coronavirus)" here. It is a contrast of the two on COVID-19 and might be helpful in attacking Trump. And see the middle third of this about Trump being a for-real fascist.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Star Trek: The Original Series Reviews A

This is one of my posts where I “review” Star Trek episodes. I will be giving each one a star rating. I sometimes will make some comments about non-political parts of them that I like or don’t like. I’ll sometimes use the issues raised in the episode to discuss similar issues in real life. And I will sometimes simply high-light the progressive politics of ST. ST is in-line with the three original themes of this blog, as I explain in the first ST post where I offer some general thoughts about ST.

I have been more or less ignoring this- the need for me to become familiar with The Original Series. In general I don’t like much of what I’ve seen. In any case, I am now watching it and will be doing reviews of those episodes. I will be giving pretty low scores, probably no higher than three stars out of five- I just don’t like TOS.

Lastly. multi-culturalism is such a pervasive theme in ST that I only comment on it when it goes beyond the norm (i.e. inter-species partners).

“The Man Trap” See this for a plot summary.

A non-political episode. I give it two stars out of five.

“Charlie X” See this for a plot summary.

A non-political episode. I give it one star out of five.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” See this for a plot summary.

A non-political episode. I give it one star out of five.

“The Naked Time” See this for a plot summary.

There is one thing that probably needs to be mentioned- I believe this is the first episode where we hear about Spock’s mom being human (in one earlier episode it was mentioned that some of his ancestors were human, but I can’t remember which episode). This takes ST’s multi-cultrualism a bit further than normal.

I give it two stars out of five.

“The Enemy Within” See this for a plot summary.

A non-political episode. I give it two stars.

“Mudd’s Women” See this for a plot summary.

I found this to be a fairly sexist episode (although the series in general, as far as I can tell, makes some progress on this, it is still fairly-very sexist).

UPDATE 11/17/11
I wrote the following in the most recent review:

"UPDATE 11/9/11 I think that with this post and maybe a couple others where I accused ST *TOS* of being sexist I went a little too far. I mean, there ARE two statements by kirk that are sexist, and I think the whole women crewmembers wearing skirts (or dresses?) thing is sexist. But when it comes to Kirk and in this case also Scotty, referring to adult female crewmembers as "girl" or "lass" I have to wonder, how often has kirk called adult male crewmembers "boy?" I think probably rarely or never, but I'm not going to re-watch the series anytime soon, so I don't know. It is possible I'm being too harsh with the characters and writers over the use of "lass" and "girl." And I could be wrong about the skirts."

I cannot remember much from this episode ("Mudd's Women") but wouldn't be surprised if I have mis-judged it and it's writers too. Especially if the only sexism came from Mudd, who is close to a villian in this episode.


I give it one star out of five.

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