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adamkotsko.bsky.social
Writer, teacher, and translator. Views do not represent those of my employer. Most recent book: www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919108/late-star-trek/ Star Trek Substack: akotsko.substack.com Academic blog: itself.blog Professional site: adamkotsko.com
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People seem to lose track of the fact that a bad society produces bad people. And even if it's not 100% "their fault" that they're so bad, they actually are bad.

submitted 2 hours ago • 3 comments

A version of original sin that I am tempted to believe is that our evolutionary history has created deeply ingrained impulses toward status-seeking and in-group behavior for their own sakes, where they have no practical benefit or are even actively detrimental.

submitted 2 hours ago • 2 comments

somehow, Biden returned

submitted 2 hours ago • 3 comments

"The reality is, if you can’t [...] win elections in a liberal democracy with free speech, free association, and a universal franchise, you’re not suddenly going to be able to win in authoritarian herrenvolk democracy without any of those things [...]." www.liberalcurrents.com/a-disease-of...

submitted 2 hours ago • 1 comment

I wrote a reflection on some of the most foundational books in the Star Trek novelverse, with special emphasis on @davidmack.bsky.social's contributions: open.substack.com/pub/akotsko/...

submitted 2 hours ago • 1 comment

Speculative question: do you think that George W. Bush, the individual man, knew that the intelligence supporting the Iraq War was false? That is to say, was he consciously and deliberately lying, or did he actually believe his own case? Relatedly: which option is worse?

submitted 3 hours ago • 14 comments

Anyone want to take a shot at "it's socially unjust to criticize Trump just because he happens to prefer non-textual communication"? Does it "count as reading" if he listens to his briefings in audiobook format?

submitted 6 hours ago • 2 comments

While I'm spouting TV opinions, I still think that The Last of Us was graded on a curve because people were excited about the idea of a video game becoming a prestige drama. All but like two of the episodes were slow and boring.

submitted 6 hours ago • 1 comment

Proposed rule: if a TV show is not enjoyable watching one episode per week, if you can only really follow it by bingeing, then it is by definition not a good TV show. (Note that this is different from saying that a show reveals new things if you rewatch it in rapid succession.)

submitted 6 hours ago • 2 comments

Non-redemptive Narration (Prophetic Maharaja Book Event) 1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of…

submitted 15 hours ago • 0 comments

Interestingly, despite widespread misconceptions, Game of Thrones was not actually good.

submitted 17 hours ago • 6 comments

Seriously, The Pitt is the best season of television in the last decade, no contest.

submitted 17 hours ago • 6 comments

Have there been any attempts to quantify the number of deaths that social media medical misinformation has caused?

submitted 18 hours ago • 1 comment

The hardest thing to get our heads around is the scope of disintegration of anything like an American body politic. We don’t know who the “we” is, the result of too little good representation & too much bad. Trump represents this *failure* of representation, this is his singular gift.

submitted 18 hours ago • 1 comment

It’s possible that “more and more people are going to be forced to rely on a deposit of knowledge from prior to 2019 — one that can be remixed and perhaps commented on, but not really expanded, because the skills and resources that it takes to expand it have somehow withered away.”

submitted 19 hours ago • 1 comment

I'm rewatching Picard season 2 and I gotta say a temporal incursion in 2024 splitting us off into an authoritarian xenophobic regime kinda cuts close to home

submitted 5 days ago • 12 comments

Proposed new abbreviation: TTYN

submitted 22 hours ago • 0 comments

This is really good. (Via @beamarovich.bsky.social ) jacmullen.substack.com/p/before-and...

submitted 23 hours ago • 2 comments

Talking to a conservative who seemed to think RFK Jr. was a potentially more sympathetic Trump admin figure for liberals because he "has some good points," I brought up the roadkill stories as evidence he's just a crazy person and immediately realized that they would never believe me, ever.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments