Star Trek: SNW Reviews G

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“Lost In Translation” Episode Six, Season Two. See this for a plot summary.

My Environmental Record

There isn’t much here. The idea is that in that small part of space some kind of living, sentient race (which apparently can’t be seen with the naked eye or any StarFleet technology) has become attached to a substance that becomes starship fuel and the alien race is being killed by that industrial process. Crew members are getting contacted by this race who cannot communicate with us as we do and are trying to stop the collection and exploitation of the substance.

I think it’s an environmental issue. And the thing is, I’m not that familiar with environmental issues. I mean, I AM a tree-hugger- in fact, I start making out with the tree!  :  ) Just kidding. 

To be serious, I AM a bit weak on environmental issues. I think it might be partly that I never completed High School chemistry (I have almost no idea what “parts per million” means and no idea what’s a high number for that and what’s a low number). In Jr. High and High School I probably got a no better average grade for science classes than a B- or C+. In college I DID take a course about physics and the environment and I got a C- and in “Environmental Geology” I got a C. I wasn’t a great student in general (for a lot of reasons, some of which can’t be held against me) but I think I deserve a little credit for trying to be a good environmentalist- which is the main reason I took those two courses. I also spent, around 1998, a total of about 4 years working an average of about 25 hours a week at a company in Boulder called Jade Mountain (it sold environmentally-friendly tech like energy efficient light bulbs, solar panels, etc.). I did practically zero sales work that involved answering technical questions from customers, and 90% of what I did was data-entry, shipping, copying, mailing, filing. But, I accepted a relatively low wage compared to what I would have gotten at an entry-level job at Dairy Queen (no one at JM got paid what they should have but were there at least partly for the environmentalism) and made an okay/almost good contribution (a vague measurement of how valuable I was to the operation (not very) and how infrequently I screwed up (overall extremely infrequently), etc., etc.)

In the last 30 years I have a fairly good record as an environmentalist. I probably recycle about 75-95% of what I can recycle (I have been told, twice, “when in doubt, throw it out,” and I probably have thrown away some recycling). I have been using energy-efficient lighting about 1/3-3/4 of that time. I am not half as good as I should be when it comes to not driving a car. I sign a lot of the environmental petitions I hear about and have gone to some marches and protests, etc. and done a little bit of “light lifting” organizing on environmental issues. In the 18 years-archive of this blog there are a total of 14 posts labelled “environmental.”

I almost forgot, I took a class called “Race, Class and Pollution,” and failed it- a few small flaws in me as a student and a few small problems in my life chipped away at the B I probably should have gotten and I failed it.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews OO

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Prima Nocta” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.

Racism Towards Inter-Racial Couples

One of the rape survivors is in a interracial relationship. I include a note about that sort of thing when doing these reviews because I got the (flawed) impression about 30 years ago that hostility to such couples was sort of the more-widely-acceptable form, and/or pinnacle, of white supremacy (although White hostility towards mixed-race couples IS more common and more intense than the more basic facet of white supremacy (see the next paragraph), the more basic facet is still a massive problem). Another reason I mention it is that I think there is some much smaller degree of hostility towards such couples from some small minority of people of color. As I have explained here, although I understand that calling it racism is inaccurate and unhelpful and I understand that it’s a TINY problem which White people shouldn’t worry about, I believe it does exist. I would say something sort of similar about interracial relationships where both people are non-white- I imagine the frequency that such relationships are treated with hostility by people of color is incredibly low, but it's still noteworthy since they can be described as “multicultural” in a very positive way.

As far as the hate from white supremacist bigots in connection to the first kind of interracial relationship, I WAS open-minded about 1-3 years ago that maybe it’s declining and I should ignore it (part of that math is the fact that the show is set in NY City and there are plenty of minor characters and extras that are people of color, and I already had a policy about this show where I did not high-light everything anti-racist, because of course there are plenty of minor characters who are people of color). But racism has resurged in the last 10-17 years and I believe that white supremacists ARE much more hostile to mixed-race couples than they are to people of color in general (I’ve attached greater value than I used to to a letter the Southern Poverty Law Center published after they received it from a Jewish man in state prison in America and one thing he focused on was the Nazi skinhead-enforced rules about fraternization between different races in prison).

“Fractured” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

First, there’s a fair amount of vague talk about widespread hostility towards the police in NYC, which is probably a continuation of the ramped-up anti-racism that the show started expressing (not necessarily vaguely) in Season 22 about a year after the 2020 Black Lives Matter-aligned protests.

At the risk of asking for trouble, I have typed and might soon publish an essay about incels (“Involuntary Celibates” which refers to misogynistic men who complain about not getting laid) and a major theme of this episode. It will be published as it’s own post, probably in mid-March. 

“Cornered” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

Anti-Muslim Bigotry

In some ways it’s not political but in some ways it is. A minor character that the Assistant DA for SVU had become close to is killed by criminals robbing a bodega and this is I think fairly significant because the character has a first and last name (Ali Imran) that is Arabic and also Muslim. The ADA is so upset that in the next episode (“First Light”) he has a graphic flashback to when his friend is killed. As I have said elsewhere about something kind of similar involving a handful of episodes of Star Trek TV shows, I believe this kind of thing can (at least) chip away at anti-Muslim bigotry in this country.

“Deductible” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

Capitalism and Women’s Sexuality

This episode is basically about something that I don’t think comes up very often in the show. I may have failed to comment on this sort of thing 1-2 times that I should have but didn’t because I thought it was what I have decided to call “pretty basic feminism” (I have no intention of mentioning everything feminist on the show, that content would clutter my posts and surprise no one, so it has to be a pretty significant and/or extraordinary manifestation of sexism). I know I commented on this episode’s topic very briefly with one episode that was a bit different but very similar (“Hell’s Kitchen” in Season 20).

At the risk of greatly exaggerating how intellectual I am, I think it is the kind of thing that can set off Marxist Women Studies scholars. It’s about an insurance business where the boss manipulates female employees into using their sexuality to confirm new clients. He uses his power as a capitalist to exploit not just the labor but also the sexuality of female employees in order to maximize profit. It’s not clear to what degree if at all his male employees are aware of this and/or to what degree if at all they cooperate (we learn that one of his earlier female victims is now COO and helps him- it’s not clear how many of his female employees are not being exploited sexually). The imminently-signing new client featured in this episode seems slightly decent. After being misled by the woman’s boss, he, without permission, tries to give her oral sex and it’s slightly possible he may have gone further without permission if she hadn’t gotten away from him and locked herself in the bathroom till he left. But there are some statements indicating he was far from fully okay with what the boss did. I say that because it seems like, if the show SVU has the pulse of the population, maybe a surprisingly large majority of the male population is against that sort of thing.

What is “that sort of thing?” It’s bad enough that you have exploitation of labor in general with capitalism and then what I believe is called “super-exploitation” of female workers in a non-sexual way. I am, to a large but not blind degree a pro-porn feminist and I believe that sex-work should largely be seen as just another kind of labor. If a woman FULLY consents to let her body be exploited, I’m not going to complain if I get to see pictures of her naked. But basically forcing a woman to put her sexuality to work for the company (a company that has nothing to do with sex and where her official job description says nothing about sex) as a whole and/or her male boss is sickening. Sexuality is something that is usually very personal, private and sacred (unless this protected status is waived BY THE PERSON INVOLVED in a fair and mutually beneficial and respectful agreement (I’ll be honest I can’t think of how to make a comprehensive and legalistic yet general and concise statement about this and I believe it is a little complicated, but what the defendant in this episode does is a GREAT example of what powerful men should NOT use their power for)). 

And it might not hurt if I say something here that I have wanted to say in recent years. At the risk of patting myself on the back too much for being a good feminist, when I think of non-trafficked pornography I am horrified by the possibility that some women do it with little or no enjoyment simply for desperate financial reasons and I think the possibility of that scenario is damning of the fact that women in our society get paid less, are often saddled with ALL the child-rearing expenses, etc. etc.

Michael Parenti: Socialism and World War II (Two Brief Notes)

(Below is an edited version of something I published on Facebook a week ago)

Michael Parenti passed away recently. He was a fairly or very important Marxist scholar, maybe comparable in some ways to Noam Chomsky but less well-known and certainly more comfortable being called a Marxist. There is some information about him here (I am NOT endorsing that site- a progressive I used to be a political acquaintance of seems to think that web-page is a good source of info about Parenti, so I am linking to it but that’s all).

Although I listened, in the late 1990s, to two of Parenti’s talks (I got them on tape from Alternative Radio), I have never read one of his books and probably just a few articles that I can’t remember. 

As some of you may suspect, I am not great at political theory. But part of my personal grasp of socialism was improved a little bit by something he said in one of those talks on tape. He said that socialism is not the utopia. I can’t remember exactly what he said socialism is, but I think it was something very close to, as I put it- the final stage or two (of how many? Maybe a few) of BUILDING the utopia. I’m not saying it’s crucial- in fact it’s pretty minor (I can’t imagine a socialist group splitting over this). But I don’t think we should be promising the utopia. Another way I put it is this- there’s something in that part of math where, in High School Algebra they hand out graphing calculators where a line goes almost parallel but not quite to one of the axes and will, indefinitely get closer and closer and closer to intersecting that axis but it will never actually intersect.

Anyway, I liked Parenti enough that I typed up something similar to this for a Facebook thread. There were a handful of things he said besides the utopia thing that I liked (the algebra thing is all mine). I just remembered one more that I feel like sharing. 

He said that the D-Day scene at the beginning of the movie “Saving Private Ryan” was great but that the rest of the movie should have been called “Saving Private Ridiculous.” I understand what he meant and I agree with the first part but only sort of agree about the second part of what he said. That first scene, I imagine, captured how chaotic and bloody and nightmarish war probably is (independent of things like the political cause involved). When looking back at history I am probably more fond of the Allies than most American progressives are. I’m not sure how Parenti felt about that cause, but I can’t totally endorse what he said about almost the entire movie. Also, if anyone responds by explaining that the US was just as bad as Nazi Germany and that my failure to totally agree about that is evidence that I’m a bad ally of, for example, American Indians, let me explain that I got three As and one B in the four Native American Studies courses I took. Although I did do better as a white ally of American Indians IN THE CLASSROOM than I did OUTSIDE of it, I WAS a fairly good or okay ally OUTSIDE of it.  I’m also fond of what the British did in WWII, and I have a pretty good record as an Irish Republican. Also, I criticize the IRA and the South of Ireland for their behavior towards Nazi Germany. IT IS A REALLY GOOD THING THAT NAZI GERMANY WAS DEFEATED.

Tom

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Trump, Putin, and Zelensky

Although Trump has significantly corrected his attitude towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are several things that people should know about Trump’s record on that issue. 

First is the fact that in general he is very deferential to Russian President Vladimir Putin. This has taken the form of Trump siding (for example) in July 2018 with Putin over his own intelligence community when it came to the allegation that Russia interfered with the 2016 election hoping to help Trump get elected. Trump’s initial response to the February 2022 full-fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine was that Putin was “smart.” In the Spring, Summer and Fall of 2025 Trump would occasionally express a negative opinion of Putin’s behavior in relation to the war but continued to occasionally act as if Putin was a partner for peace (i.e. at the August 2025 Summit between the two leaders).

Why is Trump so deferential to Putin? In addition to reading a huge number of relevant articles at CNN, Politico, the BBC and some miscellaneous sources, I read the 2018 book “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. They don’t analyze hardly anything AFTER the 2016 election, but there’s plenty of material about how Trump admires Putin and is connected to him in a few ways. There’s some small possibility that Putin has a compromising video of Trump.

More generally we know that Trump likes strongman leaders (including El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and many others). Although this will not be a lengthy description of Russia’s democratic deficit, Putin is widely seen as a strongman. Some bases for this includes the legal shackling of pro-democracy foreign NGOs, the extreme suppression of gay rights and information about homosexuality itself, and the muzzling of any anti-war voices in the last four years. In Trump’s first administration Mike Pompeo was for one year Director of the CIA and then spent three years as Secretary of State. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pompeo said that Putin, with his KGB background, knows how to “use power” and should therefore be respected.             

It’s also possible that Trump is friendlier to Putin than Ukraine’s President Zelensky partly because the latter is socially liberal. Although Trump makes it difficult to say that he hates the LGB in LGBTQ+, he is certainly on the HOMOPHOBIC half of the spectrum between HOMOPHOBIC and ANTI-HOMOPHOBIC, while Zelensky has expressed support for gay marriage. Zelensky is also against anti-Muslim bigotry. And as far as I can tell, Zelensky has also lobbied non-white nations for support without referring to them as “shit-hole countries.” (On a brief, related note, between this paragraph and the fact that Zelensky is partly Jewish, Putin’s propaganda when the war started, that there was a serious Nazi problem in Ukraine, was nonsense)

Although it is almost ancient history at this point, we need to take a closer look at the February 2025 meeting in the Oval Office where Trump and VP Vance attacked Zelensky. There’s a lot of details about the amount of aid sent Ukraine’s way that I won’t go into here but which undermine Trump’s idea that Zelensky was an ungrateful brat. There’s one thing about that which seems to have been barely mentioned in the mainstream media. When Zelensky came to the White House that day he brought a special gift for Trump. Trump is at least moderately if not seriously into martial arts and Zelenksy brought Oleksandr Usyk's 2024 undisputed heavyweight world boxing championship belt as a gift for Trump. He made a small mis-step and postponed presenting it to Trump- after Trump and Vance ambushed him he left the Oval Office and almost nothing has been heard about the belt since then.

There are three more aspects of Trump’s failure to support the VICTIM of the invasion, and one is that he briefly pushed the idea that UKRAINE was the aggressor in the war. Trump was probably saying it because he’s pro-Putin, but it also reminds me of what a lot of American progressives believe about the war. Whether it’s coming from Trump or the Left, it should be understood that Ukraine is definitely the victim- the Russian military crossed the border, it wasn’t the other way. Some progressives believe that Ukraine’s desire to join NATO justified the invasion. I have no idea how people who are usually driven by a strong opposition to state aggression believe that WANTING to join a military alliance which MIGHT be a threat to Russia is worse than ACTUALLY INVADING Ukraine. If Ukraine had invaded Russia that would be as bad as what Russia actually did. Ukraine was nowhere near invading Russia and they are clearly the smaller, weaker state which had already been militarily violated twice by Russia. It’s Orwellian. 

(Trump leans towards supporting Russia not because he thinks the invasion is legally a good cause, but partially for the same reason that he recognized Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights- he agrees with his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller who said “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”)

Trump has some times suggested that Zelensky is an illegitimate President because elections haven’t taken place since the invasion. This is nonsense. Because of the war martial-law has been declared and elections held under those conditions would be illegitimate. No one has said that the United Kingdom (outside of Northern Ireland) was no democracy during WWII even though they suspended normal politics and did so when practically ZERO parts of the Union were occupied by a foreign power and when there was a barrier (the sea) between them and their enemies.

The very last thing I’ll talk about is the main thing that inspired me to write this- it’s something that I don’t think anyone has said in defense of Zelensky. Part of the rationale for the Oval Office ambush of Zelensky was that he dressed very casually for a meeting IN THE OVAL OFFICE WITH THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT. At the beginning of the war Zelensky decided that he would dress in a military style to express that he was symbolically with Ukraine’s soldiers in harms way. He wore that outfit all the time, including meeting with other governments. Apparently Trump and his supporters decided that was dis-respectful of Trump. The thing is, Trump loves the idea of being some kind of “war-time president.” During the first several months of the Pandemic he tried that, apparently thinking that leading during a major health crisis was similar enough to leading during armed conflict with a foreign nation. In Aug 2025 he declared that he was a “war hero” (apparently because he decided that Netanyahu was a “war hero” and Trump was supporting Netanyahu or maybe Trump just felt left out and so declared that he and Netanyahu were “war heroes”) The thing is, Zelensky was a war-time leader for real, in a conflict where a decent chunk of his country was either occupied or made up the front lines, where initially a massive effort was made to seize the Ukrainian capitol and where the invasion involved tanks, soldiers armed with powerful fully automatic rifles etc. Zelensky’s status as a war-time leader is twice as legitimate as George W. Bush’s was, and Trump has ZERO claim to being a war-time leader. Although this can be taken too far and I’m not sure if I can be totally non-political about this, tweaking some of the rules of statehood to accommodate a real War-Time leader seems appropriate, especially in this case (in the movie “Iron Jawed Angels” when suffragettes continue protesting the President after America entered World War I they were severely criticized for protesting a war-time President but they shouldn’t have been).

Trump is on the side of aggression, land-grabs, social conservatism, and is in no position to be criticizing political leaders when it comes to how democratic they are. Although the cause of Ukraine is not something that energizes me as a socialist, it is an important cause and I’m glad to say that most Saturdays when I protest Trump with local progressives near a Tesla dealership in Superior (CO), there’s usually one or two Ukrainian flags held by the protestors.

 

An earlier post on the war is here. 

Star Trek: SNW Reviews F

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“The Broken Circle” Episode One, Season Two. See this for a plot summary.

There is some good dialogue about the need to avoid war. There is some talk about the Enterprise’s second-in-command being prosecuted for lying about her species and the fact that she was genetically engineered, something I go into here. And there is an incident of a StarFleet officer, a main character on this show, engaging in torture.

War and Profits

The main story is that a mining syndicate on a planet that had benefitted financially from the Klingon-Federation War of a few years earlier was determined to get the war started again in order to make massive profits again. I think that sort of thing happens fairly often in reality. One thing I want to highlight is that in this case it isn’t a BANK that wants war, it’s a MINING COMPANY. I think that sometimes the role of banks in capitalism is exaggerated by some people who oppose capitalism and the role of banks in war is exaggerated by some people who oppose war (I also believe that some socialists, as tempting as this is, exaggerate the role economic forces play in the development of wars) . Although banks might be somewhere between important and key to capitalism, they are/were part of social democracy and Soviet communism and in capitalism are often not on the front lines of the class war- corporations are not puppets whose strings are pulled by banks- corporations that bust unions do it for there benefit, not because banks want them to. Arms manufacturers are thinking more of their profits when they push for militarism than they are thinking of whether or not they can get a loan. Believing that banks are key to capitalist efforts to push nations into war for their own financial reasons is a good fit for anti-Semitism, considering the untrue stereotype of Jewish people and bankers.

Torture and Star Trek

There is one scene where a StarFleet officer very briefly engages in what is basically torture- about 60 seconds of questions and physical assault. Star Trek and it’s fictional creation the Federation are generally against torture, but there was a tiny bit on Voyager, a bit more on Enterprise, and now on this series (and maybe one more on Discovery and/or Picard that I can’t remember). On Voyager, the second-in-command objects when Captain Janeway tortures and I wrote the following in a review of VOY episode “Equinox”:

“There is one bit of politics. At one point Janeway engages in what is basically torture and is stopped by Chakotay. She ends up suspending him but shortly after she re-instates him, she says something which could be acknowledged as admitting that she was wrong (she says that Chaoktay might have been justified if he had taken control of Voyager in response to what the Captain was doing).”

On Enterprise the torture was also limited to 1-3 incidents and I wrote the following in a review of the ENT episode “Home”:

In the last post (while discussing the episode “Zero Hour”) I talked about how Archer did some things that were immoral during the mission to find the Xindi weapon. I basically said that although he shouldn’t be tossed in jail or even tossed out of StarFleet, he should get some punishment, to make other officers understand that there are consequences for breaking or bending the rules, even for hero Captains, and they should only do so when very necessary. There is nothing about him getting in any trouble in this episode, nor the three after it (I sometimes do reviews at a slower pace than I watch the episodes at). At the end of his de-briefing, the Vulcan ambassador says that he (Archer) did some immoral things, but says they were necessary for his mission to succeed.

It turns out that in some ways, Archer is doing what needed to be done about his immoral tactics. Mountain climbing with a fellow Captain (Erika Hernandez), Archer explains why he wanted to go climbing.

Archer: I figured this was the last place I’d run into anyone who’d want to shake my hand or take my picture or tell me I’m an inspiration to their children. If they knew what I’d done...

Hernandez: You did what any Captain would have done.

Archer: Does that include torture or marooning a ship full of innocent people- Cause I don’t remember reading those chapters in the handbook.


I’m still disappointed that he didn’t receive some kind of punishment, but that exchange is better than nothing.

In this episode, the StarFleet officer is trying to stop something that could easily re-start the war and he is very familiar with what war is like. It might also be relevant that he injected himself with some kind of sci-fi version of the spinach that Popeye the Sailor ate, which might possibly have had some effect on his brain.

Some of the writers, etc. behind the show and many people in America might say that it’s just realistic to have them torture once in a while. The problem is that, in addition to torture being amoral and illegal, the idea that it is effective is what’s UNREALISTIC. Something like most of the time, or at least a lot of the time and maybe all the time, people being tortured for information will say whatever they think will end the torture- if they DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEIR TORTURER THINKS THEY KNOW, THEY WILL MAKE SOMETHING UP. This is well illustrated in the 2007 movie “Rendition.” People acting on information gathered through torture might not realize it’s bad intel until they do something horrible and/or unjustified, and/or unhelpful, and/or dangerous to those acting on the bad intel.