9 thoughts on “The Twilight Of The Liberal Gods”

  1. I think more of the Ring of the Nibelungen “cycle” of four plays (which is not surprising since her article is a play on the title of the last of the series), the Wagner play where (*spoiler*) the gods are destroyed by the breaking of their word. I guess Wotan didn’t hear of diplomacy resets.

    That really is what’s described here. It’s not inability to communicate, but loss of credibility. You have a group which bases much of its power on appearances and promises. When they can’t keep up those, then they lose much of their power over those who are listening.

    Unfortunately, not all their power is based on that. Willful thinking is the other part of their power. As long as people heed what they want to hear, are willing to pay any price in other peoples’ money for the things they want, and think a million is much like a trillion, we’ll always have these credible monsters among us – with new ones to replace the old ones when they go off the deep end.

  2. The following is not a political comment, it is a literary comment.

    When I read Sarah Hoyt’s first two paragraphs, I was very surprised that Hoyt hadn’t bothered to look up the Jorge Luis Borges she referred to!

    Maybe it is just her casual style, and maybe it appeals to her readers, but I would have been embarrassed to refer to a story and not reread it to make sure it said what I thought it said, and I would have cited it.

    It took me mere seconds using google to retrieve the text of the story – here it is for your enjoyment. It is very short, just four paragraphs long:

    https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/07/28/ragnarok/

    Furthermore, I think Hoyt could have used the story’s ending, which she remembered only vaguely, to good effect in her essay, to make her argument more poignantly. Here is the entire fourth and final paragraph:

    We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.

    1. I like her ending. The Democrats have embraced regressive thinking about how to gain and use power over other people. Every time they open xer mouths, gibberish comes out of xem. People see them as possessing unearned status, who have bad motives, and are not nearly as elite as xey think xey are.

      This is shown not only be the Tea Party but by Trump and also by a literal Socialist nearly winning the Democrat nomination. The Bernie thing is important because Democrats are not only unhappy with their own leadership, who rigged the primary, but that they also want to take the country further into xer demented cultural marxism.

      Everyone paying attention can see this but it is also being forced on people who would rather ignore politics and this is why Republicans have been winning state and local elections. It is a ground up movement and will soon be affecting the national stage not just in DC but also in the media and education.

  3. And then Star Trek Discovery (now more STD) took a knee too, to stand with the NFL for… something. As though their rather stinking script wasn’t already bad enough, their having announced the racially obsessed Klingons were “Trump voters.”

    Watched the first couple episodes and if it is a take down of Trump voters, it shows just how out of touch the entertainment industry is.

    The main Klingons have a belief system open to any Klingon and family or clan doesn’t matter. Race doesn’t play a role. The Klingons do view Starfleet as a threat to their culture but not because of race but because of ideology. At one point the head Klingon says Starfleet wants to wipe out their individuality.

    Starfleet are the ones thinking that race determines actions, as if genetic rather than a culture or ideology. And Starfleet does have a collectivist ideology, kinda like the Borg.

    Its only just begun, so who knows where it will go but the show might not be sending the messages they think they are sending.

    1. I have trouble getting around their whole premise, which is that the main character is a mutineer. We was sentenced to life for mutiny.
      Everyone keeps calling her “the mutineer”.

      That’s absurd. It’s not legally possible for one person to mutiny, as mutiny is defined in both the UK and US military law as a conspiracy of two or more people. The charge would also fail on other measures, such as the fact that we wasn’t trying to overthrow the lawful authority and seize control, she was just trying to get a weapon fired in a critical situation that the captain was misperceiving. And she was correct in her analysis. The captain was wrong. People sometimes get medals for taking actions like that.

      And the writers thought they’d show how clever the captain was by having her beam a torpedo warhead next to a dead Klingon, which constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions (booby trapping an enemy combatant’s body).

      1. I will contribute nothing to the new star trek. It’s psychological and cultural warfare. I’ll vote by not participating (and I can quote almost any of TOS scripts.)

        1. I wouldn’t be so hard on them. Everyone has their favorite Star Trek and can point out the flaws in other but we all know real Star Trek has never been tried. They just need the right Captain.

      3. ” It’s not legally possible for one person to mutiny, as mutiny is defined in both the UK and US military law as a conspiracy of two or more people”

        Whenever you run into something like that, assume the writers are ignorant of whatever the topic is, and/or stupid.

        Trivia: the chest badge logo they use, an obvious variation of the Enterprise’s, is an anachronism, as at the time of TOS, every ship had it’s own insignia, just like how US Navy ships all have their own patches. In canon, after Kirk’s 5-year mission, the Enterprise was honored by having the entire Starfleet use Enterprise’s logo.

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