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How Star Trek’s twenty-first-century reinventions illuminate the unique challenges and opportunities of franchise-style corporate storytelli

I’m maybe/probably late to the party on this one, but Late Star Trek is one of the most interesting books I’ve read about the franchise.

#star trek #star trek universe #star trek franchise #late star trek #adam kotsko #books #good books #star trek novels #star trek novelverse

If we buy into the narrative of personal responsibility and agency, then our financial insecurity and underemployment must be our own fault—leading to a feeling of shame when we prove persistently unable to overcome them. If we recognize the systemic forces at work, it can be difficult to avoid a feeling of utter despair. And meanwhile, not even the system’s ostensible beneficiaries seem to be enjoying themselves, as our ruling classes—most notably the billionaire who has reached the pinnacle of power and fame—continually complain of being unappreciated and unfairly attacked.

from "Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital" by Adam Kotsko

#capitalism #personal responsibility #quotes #adam kotsko #economics

#innovation #adam kotsko

[T]he first wave of Tea Party candidates was characterized by a shocking number of callous comments about rape, including claims that women could not become pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape” and that women routinely make rape accusations as a way of avoiding the embarrassment of admitting they had consensual sex with an undesirable partner. These comments, which most commentators treated as bizarre non sequiturs, provoked considerable outrage, and thankfully all of the rape-apologist candidates lost their respective elections. In retrospect, however, they arguably paved the way for a presidential candidate who openly boasted on tape about committing sexual assault. […] Like the Reagan Revolution before it—though at a considerably lower level of sophistication and refinement—the Tea Party movement represented an attempt to reassert the proper order of the household, in order to solve a moral crisis of which the economic crisis was only a symptom. The initial focus was on race and gender, but once their power was solidified in individual states, they moved on to sexual norms in the bizarre controversy over transgender bathroom access.

In contrast to the Reagan moment, however, the emphasis was not on positively cultivating desirable family structures, but on making sure that those who failed to conform were stripped of any assistance or subsidy. These efforts were pitched as an attempt to correct an injustice whereby undesirable populations had achieved unfair advantages over the more deserving straight white population. Within this outlook, blacks should not get federal housing assistance that gives them a leg up over whites, for instance, and women should not get the supposed “unfair advantage” of being able to make spurious rape accusations at will and ruin a man’s reputation. […] The fact that these issues, rather than libertarian bromides, were the real libidinal center of gravity for the Obama-era neoconservative movement should be clear from the fact that many of those same aggrieved voters coalesced around Donald Trump, who has no apparent interest in conservative economic nostrums but virtually embodies the ideal of “political incorrectness.”

Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford University Press, 2018), pp. 105–6.

#adam kotsko #tea party

Almost 16000 people liked this Tweet! I’m almost sorry Freddie deBoer brought it to my attention! Kotsko is characteristically[*] wrong here, not to mention shamefully demagogic. Are people no longer capable of embarrassment or what?

I would define the “contrarian” more neutrally as an artist or humanistic intellectual who takes some form or other of “centrist” stance against the post-1960s expectation that all institutionally sanctioned artists and intellectuals must be left-liberal. (“Centrist” here doesn’t mean temperamentally moderate or exactly between right and left necessarily, but rather combining elements of left and right; though sometimes it merely consists of defending liberalism from radical-chic assault.)

Sociologically, the contrarian may come from outside the upper middle class that mostly fills the ranks of left-liberal artists and intellectuals. It is the upper-middle-class left-liberal intellectual, not the contrarian, who has in fact never rebelled against his or her milieu, has complacently replicated its bad-faith politics. The contrarian, by contrast, often grew up amid working-class or petit-bourgeois conservatism only to flee its benightedness and hope to be liberated into the fair fields of thought by joining the experts. But the contrarian finds upon reaching this class of intellectuals—finds in journalism or publishing or academe or the art world—forms of lazy but also aggressively policed herd-mindedness even worse that the admitted bigotry prevailing among the lower classes of his or her origin; at least these classes could plead the excuse that they had better things to do than think all day.

So the contrarian, an outsider in two classes, still tied by communal loyalty to one and by intellectual affinity to the other, seeks some synthesis and often tries to recuperate early values and experiences in expert language so that these ways of life cannot be so easily dismissed as mere backwardness. And like Camus—along with Orwell, the most famous early example of the type—we may end up choosing our mothers over justice.

Some major contrarian names include infamous and reviled figures, yes: Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, Armond White, perhaps V. S. Naipaul. But also consider Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick. Indisputably major figures, not as easy to dismiss. And what about the Susan Sontag who asked the ultimate contrarian question: “Can it be that our enemies were right?”

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[*] Someone with a better memory will have to remind me if Kotsko was actually part of the group blog that also included Nina Power and me. I’ve mentioned it before, but, to review for new readers: the group blog was part of a broader (though quite small) radical blogging circle in the early-to-mid 2000s. We formed it in opposition to the still-extant Crooked Timber and its now-forgotten literary offshoot, The Valve. It was called Long Sunday—a compromise name; I was among those who didn’t care for it; we thought it sounded like an emo band à la Taking Back Sunday. The name’s source was a somewhat ambiguous line from German playwright Georg Büchner’s radical manifesto The Hessian Courier: “The life of the rich is like a long Sunday.” For our subtitle we also borrowed Büchner’s call to arms: “Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!” Anyway, I can’t always recall who was actually a member—i.e., in on the private email chains—and who was just adjacent, especially after it collapsed into the classic factional infighting of all radical-left ventures. “Why not look it up on the Wayback Machine?” you ask. For some reason—though, honestly, thank God!—it’s not available in their archive.

#contrarianism #adam kotsko #leftism #liberalism #centrism #conservatism

Adam Kotsko's definition of Satanism: "A sophomoric blend of libertarianism with garbled quotes from Nietzsche."

#that about sums it up #adam kotsko #satanism

Tuesday Links!

* Something I wrote a few years back about Black Panther has finally popped up at Mayday: “Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda.”

* And Grad School Vonnegut #10 is up, on “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and Watchmen with Adam Kotsko. I’m proud of the tweet hyping it.

https://twitter.com/gradschoolvonn/status/1290344934629875713

* SFRA is seeking a web director. The Huntington has a new…

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Neoliberalism Has Radicalized a Whole Generation, by Conor Lynch

Though it is still hard to imagine the end of capitalism, it is no longer universally accepted that capitalism is simply part of the “natural” order, or that there is “no alternative”