Racism pre-dates the slave trade, but otherwise, that last paragraph is my point. History is relevant in certain contexts because its effects still linger and have continuing impact on real people's lives.

True. Honestly, I dislike the premise that things that happen to your distant ancestors give you the right to say shit. The experience of modern minorities is definitely informed by our national history, but Black Lives Matter isn't a response to slavery. It's a response to black people getting gunned down in the…

It's bizarre. The paradigm has shifted from a situation where most of the party defended the bulk of candidate's views or ideas. With Trump, it's not at all unusual to find someone who thinks he's wrong more than 50% of the time, but because he's definitely suspicious of Mexicans, they're voting for him anyway.

What really sucks about anti-black or Muslim sentiment is that many of the people it's directed at have no way of "passing" long enough for people to get to know them as human beings first. Not that they should have to, but whereas a second generation Irish-American is, in most cases, only as publicly Irish as they…

I don't know that it's reversible, but I do think it's a fight that's winnable. There's a generation of mostly older Christian white men who are used to being treated like the nation's supreme authority, with all the rights and privileges thereof. They're going to fight tooth and nail to avoid surrendering that…

I feel like "liberals are obsessed with political correctness" is just the particular form that a backlash that was coming either way has taken. Despite Trump's best efforts, we've moved just far enough that it's kinda socially unacceptable to say "I enjoy being treated better because I"m a straight white dude, and…

I should scroll down, but yeah, this.

Janeway's character is wildly inconsistent. There's no telling which of her most deeply held principles she might throw overboard next week for convenience sake or even start passionately arguing against.

Worf is my favorite. His kid has some new weird emotional problem every time they see each other, and after 10 minutes of fisticuffs/therapy, off he goes to more foster parents/murder school.

Me, too. Stewart's a better actor who pulls off the frequently Herculean task of selling the corniest and technobabbliest moments, but Sisko's a better character as written. Kirk has some cachet just for being first. Other choices are madness. But the best redshirt is clearly Lt. Leslie:

I dunno, I think some element of serialization enhances character development rather than detracts from it. Characters can change in non-trivial ways, events can affect their worldviews and emotional reactions in the long term, stuff matters for longer than this one specific adventure. In short, you can have an arc.…

Yeah, that seems like an explanation, except the illusion of "realness" was never that great. Even if everything else were perfect — and it wasn't — there's still the massive unlikelihood of law enforcement allowing and a major studio agreeing to the wide commercial release of what would essentially have been a snuff…

I worked at a grocery store that had a video department within it (ask your parents, kids!), and for a movie that was an undeniable left-field box office smash, it appeared to do absolutely dismally on the home video market. We had comically large crates of them on the floor — double packed with a second video of…

I think the reason so many of these "I don't like that you used my song" cases, whatever the actual legal justification, haven't gone to trial is just because candidates usually don't want embarrassing headlines about being sued by The Monkees estate or whatever cropping up when they're running for the highest office…

I think a large part of it is roughly the same kind of backlash that's come against work like Catcher in the Rye. For fans who have now aged up a bit, there's a complicated relationship between the technical skill, honest themes that (once) resonate(d), satire, and legitimately shitty sentiments.

Various Middle Eastern nations have and will be dealing with the consequences of uninformed and/or self-interested foreign meddling in their internal politics for longer than our lifespans. American continuation and further exacerbation of that meddling via troop deployments is demonstrably and objectively far less…

True, but down from 170,000+ in November 2007. Also, they're there at government request. Should we be involved? I dunno. I can certainly see the arguments against it.

I've seen terrible wigs — mismatched to the wearer's complexion; poorly fitted to the face — but it's rare to see a wig so terrible that it looks that bad from the rear.

It gets lost in the (rightful) vitriol directed at the politics, but I think it's important to note that the F is deserved just for the ineptitude of the filmmaking.

Yesterday's Enterprise is great.