Samaritan Prime

WARNING: 🇺🇸 Congressman Tim Burchett says anyone found guilty of sexual crimes against children should be publicly hanged.

Benjamin Netanyahu: “I demand that Western governments do what’s necessary, to fight antisemitism, and provide security and safety for Jews worldwide.” “They would be well advised to heed our warnings. I demand action from them NOW.”

The reason I am on this US Grant kick is that I spent many days last week in the back room of a fabled Washington DC restaurant, eating crab cakes and drinking iced tea with my gorgeous wife while looking up from my barstool at this painting. It just got to me after a while.

Benjamin Sisko is the darling of the Dissident Right, the based Captain who made all the edgy choices, and I’m going to explain why that was a bad thing. Well, thankfully it wasn’t bad for us. Sisko was in many ways the death knell of the Left’s high-minded principles. He was the first major character in Star Trek to substantially voice the power of the exception. And after that, Star Trek was philosophically finished. Now it’s very useful to think of values and morals as problem solving tools. They are ingrained compasses which are designed to optimally guide you through every situation you encounter in life. Of course, “optimally” does not need to mean the most materially well off. As most of us would agree, being a “good” person is more valuable or “optimal” than being rich. But what if these problem-solving tools are unable to solve the problem at hand? Not from an ignorance or a failure to apply the moral system, but rather a fundamental defect in the system itself? What happens when the tools you use no longer work? What happens when you are no longer able to reach the desired outcomes? You either have to compromise with a less than desirable outcome, or you make an exception. You step out of the framework in order to solve the problem. In other words, you make a moral compromise. Benjamin Sisko was Star Trek thinking it could get away with a moral compromise. But the problem with moral compromises is that you generally find yourself making more and more exceptions as time goes on. Sure, you say to yourself that it will be just this once, and maybe it is for a while, maybe a long time, but another situation will come along. And then you make another exception. The problem is that Star Trek had nowhere to go after Sisko’s blatant exceptions. It didn’t offer any alternative morality other than the naked use of power. After Sisko, there was no salvaging the utopia and keeping it internally consistent. The Federation owes its continued existence to a man who betrayed everything it stood for: of mutual understanding, peaceful negotiation, and violence as the last of all resorts. But it was more than that. Sisko’s betrayal was in such a way that it wasn’t clear that he had any other choice. In other words, it’s difficult to caricaturize his decisions as merely a character flaw but rather a greater systematic failure of his worldview. Sisko is the reactionary’s Captain not because he made the most ethical choices, but because he exposed the flaws underpinning the Left’s worldview. And once those flaws were laid bare for all to see, it was impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Sure, we can continue like nothing had happened, and Star Trek did continue like nothing had happened, but it’s impossible to forget the problems that Star Trek had voiced against itself. And all the enemies of the Left needed to do was to repeat the Left’s own unanswered objections back to them.