Category: Celebrity Culture

Forewarned: this is culture war stuff. So, if you trigger easily: don’t read this. Then again, you’ll be missing out on some excellent counterintuitive culture war rabble-rousing.

I guess I ought to declare right here and now before I get trounced for being an out of touch GenXer neobigot. So, say it with me, loud and clear: I’m for every human on this planet being treated with the innate dignity they possess and deserve and that they not be denied the rights their ancestors fought so hard for. Rights are not entitlements, they are earned. And much of humanity has, in the past, earned them and passed them down. They should not be denied to anyone.

Now that my virtue signaling is out of the way I can move on to some cultural war criticism.

First, why must a gay man be portrayed as simpering and overly sensitive? Why does this portrayal as queens persist in pretty much all visual media? And FFS, folks, don’t get all sensitive, I’m going somewhere awesome with this.

Why not portray a gay man very much in touch with his masculinity? Need a few historical examples of powerful, masculine gay men that changed the world?

Easy-peasy. First, Alexander the Great and his lover Hephastion. If you disagree, because Iskander has to be a man’s man, well, fuck off. It’s historically inaccurate to believe otherwise. Seriously, the Greeks buggered each other left and right and all were married. Then there is the Prussian King, Frederick the Great, who out maneuvered the armies of Maria “Always Weeping, always Annexing” Theresa of Austria at almost every turn? Both men were as gay as Freddy Mercury, and both were indomitable warriors and strategic geniuses par excellence.

So, when Starfleet Academy wrote in a gay Klingon, I confess, my interest was piqued. The Kurtzman era franchise had a chance to change in a new powerfully positive way. But, the show-runners took the easier, softer way.

For real, they just turned down the wrong alleyway.

See, fiction has rules. You create species or characters and portray them a certain ways; they have to obey their own rules of internal logic. That way the reader or viewer knows what to expect. When a character or species acts contrary to canon, the reader and the viewer are not only confused but lose interest. So, what happened with the gay Klingon?

Let’s discuss Klingons in general first, okay?

Klingons, in case you don’t know, are fierce warriors, poets, singers and deeply, deeply romantic. Klingons are the antithesis of brooding self-actualized pansies, looking for closure or healing. They love killing almost as much as they love dying. “It is a good day to die,” is their constant refrain. And bloodwine? They make the Russians look like pikers when it comes to imbibing alcohol. So, would it not make sense that a gay Klingon ought to have been written in character? To write a gay Klingon any other way than as an awesome bad-ass killing, drinking and fucking machine is to fundamentally misunderstand Klingons and their crucial role in the Star Trek canon.

Let’s take Worf, from TNG and Deep Space 9, as an example. If Worf wanted to fuck another male Klingon, Worf’s idea of foreplay would have been sparring with bat’leths, followed by bending his paramour over a barrel of blood wine, blowing his load, screaming a blood-curdling Klingon scream and then a blood-wine toast, ending with a little spooning and a love poem.

You know I am right.

A gay Klingon could have been immortal. A gay Klingon had the potential to be Star Trek’s equivalent of a honey badger: he don’t give a fuck. A gay Klingon Dahar master? Dip me in a vat of melted cellophane!

Kurtzman and crew had the chance to create an immortal, utterly amazing Klingon in the mold of Alexander the Great or Frederick of Prussia. Instead they opted to tick off the wokester checklist with an absolutely pathetic, weepy, whingy, sniveling crybaby of a Klingon

What a waste.

The Kurtzman iteration of Star Trek has been nothing but failure after failure to understand what Star Trek was. It was never, ever true to Gene Roddenberry’s vision.

The franchise needs a fifteen year rest.

I’ll be ready for a do over in my late sixties. Get it fucking right next time.

Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

By Ian Welsh

On November 25, 2024

15 Comments

Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.^[71]
In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.^[72]
In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.^[1]
In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.^[73]
In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.^[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.^[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Celebrity Culture

Starfleet Academy’s Gay Klingon Could’ve Been Epic

Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase