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’m not very familiar with The Original Series and there might be some small amount of material there that would affect what I say about Star Trek (i.e. how often religion is mentioned)
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).
“Peak Perforrmance” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it three stars out of five.
“Shades of Gray” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it two stars out of five.
“Evolution” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it three stars out of five.
“The Ensigns of Command” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it three stars out of five.
“The Survivors” See this for a plot summary.
One bit of politics when Picard says that refusing to fight is a right, sort of a statement in favor of conscientous objectors, and maybe could be seen more broadly as anti-draft.
I give it two stars out of five.
“Who Watches The Watchers” See this for a plot summary.
This episode contained a fair amount of anti-religious stuff, although it could be interpreted as only being hostile to fundamentalists. I think there’s probably a large minority of religious people who do NOT take their religious beliefs that seriously- among the Christians they rarely if ever ask themselves “what would Jesus do?” (a lot of those asking that question would be progressives thinking about politics (I’ve even read something by an atheist who talked about this sort of thing from a progressive standpoint)). And they don’t beliieve in creationism (they probably believe in Intelligent Design, which is different from Creationism, or something else similar).
So, to whatever degree ST was using that episode to bash any form of religion (and it’s not very clear how far they were taking it) I disagree with that. I’m basically the sort of Christian I described above.
This blog is mostly about 3 themes- Irish Republicanism, Star Trek, and opposition to bigotry, primarily in America (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc.). It is mostly about Northern Ireland. It will mostly be about these issues in general and past events and will only sometimes touch on current events. Feel free to comment on the earlier posts.
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)
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