October 2018 – James Gillen

Squirrel Hill

I am not shocked. I am not surprised.

I am angry and I am disgusted.

I will agree with Mr. Trump on one thing: If there was an armed guard at the synagogue in Pennsylvania, the result would have been different. That’s the case regardless of what you think of our gun laws. People have a basic right to defense in cases of physical danger.

But even more than guns, what we need to protect from danger are votes.

I have looked up a few conservative sites, and one of the general themes is that even the people who know better will hold their noses and vote for Trump, they will abandon all their suspicions and rally behind Brett Kavanaugh, because they think the stakes are too high. In their assessment, if Those People in the Democratic Party take over, then Good Christians like themselves will be under physical threat.

Oh, I take it that when you’re in the political minority, the majority are a threat to you?

Did we see anything like this in the eight years that Obama was president? I will say, as racist and reactionary as a lot of Obama’s opposition was, what heartened me in retrospect was that there was never a serious assassination attempt against him. As much as emotions were escalated, there was still a basic impression that we were capable of having political opinions without coming to violence.

No more. This week, at least 12 separate pipe bombs were sent to various people in politics and the media, all of whom were targeted as enemies by Trump and his people in social media. President Obama and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were among them. And when the suspect was found – because he left fingerprints among other evidence – law enforcement found a van whose windows were completely covered in pro-Trump stickers and similar decoration, including pictures of liberals like Michael Moore in crosshairs. As one person on social media put it, “it’s like Steve Bannon if he were a Transformer.”

Now you have this character coming into a synagogue during Sabbath – apparently during a children’s naming day ceremony – and killing 11 people. According to his tags on Gab – a social media network for people who think Twitter is too politically correct – the last thing the shooter posted was: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Now, why exactly is anyone concerned with optics?

Just before the Feds caught the pipe bomb suspect, Trump tweeted, “Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows – news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!” Prior to the bomb threats, “talking politics” meant Trump and other Republicans railing against the thousands-strong caravan of refugees from Honduras and other parts of Central America coming together to migrate north towards the US-Mexico border. In their minds, this whole thing is a giant conspiracy ginned up by various people – including George Soros, another one of the bomb targets – to flood the country with non-Americans and change our way of life. The reality is more prosaic: once enough people contacted each other on social media and realized they were all coming to the same place anyway, they decided it was easier to band together and come to the border at once than sneak across with a “coyote” smuggler who could betray or abuse them. So, thanks to ingenuity and social media, the coyote business has been rendered obsolete. (Gee, thanks, Millennials!)

And while Trump can be given credit for repeatedly and specifically condemning the Squirrel Hill shooting as an anti-Semitic attack, the shooter was one of those people who attacked Jewish charities on the grounds that they were letting more refugees into the country. If anything the shooter attacked Trump as a “globalist” (which is one of the buzzwords used by reactionary movements). But if Trump is, for whatever reason (perhaps remembering how many Jewish relatives and friends he has) doing the right thing now, he and the rest of the Republican Party really need to come to grips with how things got to this point.

Trump announced his presidency specifically saying that Mexicans were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”. He said that an American-born judge in one of his civil cases couldn’t be trusted because he was of Mexican ancestry. Recently he name dropped George Soros in his culture-war attacks on migrants. Moreover, whatever one may think of Antifa and the various “woke” crusaders on the Left, they aren’t the ones building pipe bombs. Maybe in the Weather Underground days, but they’re not the subversives now. What you have specifically is a combination of a subversive culture that wants to destroy political norms and a dominance by one political party, and the danger is that they are the SAME entity. This is why it matters that, say, Trump praises Congressman Gianforte of Montana for doing a “body slam” on a reporter during a special election in 2017. It matters that Gianforte is a Congressman because he won his election after the assault. It matters that the president is going along with George Soros conspiracy theories and morally equating left-wing protestors at Charlottesville with right-wingers who commit assault and vehicular homicide.

These are not the same. If right-wingers want to rationalize their sellout to reactionaries and racists on the grounds that leftist dominance would put them in danger, well, “conservative” dominance has now put large sections of the country in real physical danger. Are they supposed to put up with it so that you’re not threatened? If your motivations are valid, why aren’t theirs? If there is “polarization” in this country, are you able to acknowledge how it came about?

You have a “conservative” (more anti-liberal) movement that ultimately came down to telling liberals “Fuck Your Feelings.” If liberals and other non-Trumpniks are now, without question, physically threatened by Trump’s fellow travelers, they are coming to the realization that more than guns, what they need are votes. More than laws to disarm the public, what they need is to disarm the Administration that is giving these criminals aid and comfort. The Republicans in Congress have done nothing but enable and look the other way, and things will not get any better if we let this continue.

And that is what Republicans are afraid of, because as Steve Bannon said, as long as they could phrase things in culture-war terms of “Right” vs. Left, they could win. When the reality becomes clear that it’s the Trump cult versus the rest of the country, the dynamic shifts. At this point, more and more Americans are looking at “conservative” enablers and their conspiracies and accusations of threats to their way of life, and their response to Trump fans is: “Fuck your feelings.”

Vote Republicans out.

Take your country back.

Vote, Already Continued

As I said last time, I want to go over the ballot questions for Nevada on the 2018 ballot. This is probably of limited utility elsewhere, but these ballot questions are worth reviewing as general examples of how the ballot is used to post policy to voters. This is especially important because as I noticed in 2016, the ballot questions are phrased very generically as to what is being proposed, and even though the sample ballot sent in the mail gives a lot of Pro and Con arguments for each ballot question, these also are fairly generic when they are not slanted towards one opinion or the other. Thus in my efforts to examine each question for myself before voting, I usually relied more on other sources, especially ballotpedia.org.

Nevada Question 1 (aka ‘Marsy’s Law’)

“Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) remove existng provisions that require the Legislature to provide certain statutory rights for crime victms; and (2) adopt in their place certain expressly stated constitutional rights that crime victms may assert throughout the criminal or juvenile justice process?”

While it isn’t referred to as “Marsy’s Law” on the ballot, Question 1 is based on legislation called “Marsy’s Law” in California and taken up as ballot initiatives in other states besides Nevada. It refers to Marsy Nicholas, whose ex-boyfriend killed her after he was released from prison after assaulting her and her family had not been made aware of his release on bail.

The fact that the text of the question was adopted from another state’s bill is one reason that the “No” lobby on Question 1 gives for opposing the legislation. I myself was leery of the phrasing that the amendment will “remove existing provisions” that already provide for statutory rights for victims. However, on Ballotpedia, the actual text of the measure is reviewed including the parts where it actually amends the Nevada Constitution. It would add a Section 23 to the Nevada Constitution, specifically asserting: “Each person who is the victim of a crime has the following rights”. These include “(to) be reasonably protected from the defendant and persons acting on behalf of the defendant”, “(to) have the safety of the victim and the victim’s family considered as a factor in fixing the amount of bail and release conditions for the defendant” and “(to) prevent the disclosure of confidential information or records to the defendant which could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family.” It goes on in this manner, but the text is intended to replace Section 8, Article 1 of the state Constitution, which states that victims of crime are to be informed of the status of a criminal deposition “only upon written request”. Thus, the burden is not on the victim (or plaintiff) to prove need in these cases, and there is an acknowledgement that defendants can attempt to intimidate victims in criminal cases.

Thus I ended up voting YES on Question 1, albeit with some reservation. Still, this is another example of where you really need to research the fine print in order to make an informed choice.

Nevada Question 2

“Shall the Sales and Use Tax Act of 1955 be amended to provide an exemption from the taxes imposed by this Act on the gross receipts from the sale and the storage, use or other consumption of feminine hygiene products?”

A libertarian would still question whether we really need taxes at all. I would like to try funding government by Kickstarter. Or, as the hippies once suggested, a bake sale. But as long as we do need taxes to fund government, the burden should not fall primarily on consumers and end-users who have the least disposable income. But that’s what Nevada does with sales taxes. Question 2 is meant to modify Nevada’s Sales and Use Tax Act to add onto the existing list of tax exemptions “feminine hygiene product” which is interpreted to include tampons and sanitary napkins.

I voted YES to add this tax exemption. Incidentally, the Bernie Sanders-founded Our Revolution announced itself in favor of the initiative. Which proves that libertarians and “progressives” can agree on one thing: It is not progressive to nickel and dime the average person to fuel government, and if government is going to go bankrupt unless we charge women extra for tampons, there really needs to be better budgeting.

Nevada Question 3

“Shall Article 1 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require the Legislature to provide by law for the establishment of an open, competitive retail electric energy market that prohibits the granting of monopolies and exclusive franchises for the generation of electricity?”

This is a ballot initiative that was first proposed in 2016 and by procedure needs to be approved by vote a second time after passing. I mentioned in 2016 why I voted YES, and my reasons haven’t changed. For one thing, if the consumer protection agency (Public Utilities Commission) charged with monitoring the state monopoly energy company (NV Energy) acts more in favor of that company than the consumer, and generally discourages efforts to create cleaner energy sources outside the provisions of NV Energy, then it’s not acting in any “public interest.”

This year, there has been a LOT more advertising, especially on TV, for the “No” vote, largely on the point that the text of Question 3. According to Ballotpedia, the “Yes on 3” political action committee had raised $33.26 million. The “No on 3” committee has raised $66.13 million. “The top contributor to the committee was NV Energy, which provided 99.99 of the committee’s total funds.”

It’s a good thing NV Energy was able to finance their position almost single-handedly. It makes it seem like no one else was supporting it.

Nevada Question 4

“Shall Article 10 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require the Legislature to provide by law for the exemption of durable medical equipment, oxygen delivery equipment, and mobility enhancing equipment prescribed for use by a licensed health care provider from any tax upon the sale, storage, use, or consumption of tangible personal property?”

This is another ballot initiative that had been approved in 2016 and needs to go for another pass. As in 2016, I voted YES. Similar to Question 2, I do not see why taxes in this state or any other have to fall on those who are least able to pay. Such objections as there are to this ballot question hinge on the point that the text requires a constitutional amendment that is not spelled out (unlike Question 1). One will note that similar objections were raised against Question 3 (the initiative to remove the energy monopoly) but there were no serious campaigns against Question 4 in 2016, nor are there any PACs set up to oppose it now. The fact that the same constitutional objection applies to both Question 3 and Question 4, but one is encountering much more, and much wealthier, opposition, should tell you something about Nevada establishment priorities.

Nevada Question 5

“Shall Chapter 293 of the Nevada Revised Statutes be amended to establish a system that will automatically register an eligible person to vote, or update that person’s existing Nevada voter registration information, at the time the person applies to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles for the issuance or renewal of any type of driver’s license or identification card, or makes a request to change the address on such a license or identification card, unless the person affirmatively declines in writing?”

From my knowledge, once you are registered to vote in Nevada, the state actually makes it pretty easy to go to the polls – for one thing, they mail you a voter guide which you can take to your polls to check against registration. Thus, if you’ve already been registered, they set up the system to work with you, not against you, as opposed to some places I could mention. Measures such as Nevada Question 5 are supported mainly by the Democratic Party after they lost enough elections to realize that they couldn’t take voters for granted. Republicans generally oppose such measures in favor of a default “opt-in” system in which the citizen has to take the initiative to confirm a right to vote by registering. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Moderate Republican Governor Brian Sandoval had vetoed the initiative when it was first proposed, saying “IP1 advances a worthy goal by encouraging more eligible Nevadans to register to vote. However, such a result must partner with sound policy. IP1 fails this test because it extinguishes a fundamental, individual choice—the right of eligible voters to decide for themselves whether they desire to apply to register to vote—forfeiting this basic decision to state government. … the core freedom of deciding whether one wishes to initiate voter registration belongs to the individual, not the government. ”

Philosophically, I’m inclined to agree. Still, if we assert that a thing is a right rather than a privilege, we shouldn’t have to “opt in” to it, because that creates the opportunity for government to put barriers in the path of the ostensible right. This is why the Miranda rule says “You have the right to remain silent.” You do not need to opt in to it, and it is the government’s responsibility to confirm that this right is protected unless one decides to “opt out” by speaking to law enforcement after being informed of one’s rights in the matter. All the more odd that this is the “conservative” position being that the philosophical Right has always asserted the premise of “negative rights” that are inherent and cannot be restricted without cause.

There is also the strictly pragmatic matter that I referred to last time, namely that you’re not going to have any checks on abusive government unless Republicans are flushed out of power, and if you can’t even elect Democrats they sure as hell aren’t going to let in Libertarians or anyone else. So I ended up voting YES on 5. Still, it’s worth noting that the more likely a given state is to need such legislation, the less likely it is to pass it.

Nevada Question 6

“Shall Article 4 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to require, beginning in calendar year 2022, that all providers of electric utility services who sell electricity to retail customers for consumption in Nevada generate or acquire incrementally larger percentages of electricity from renewable energy resources so that by calendar year 2030 not less than 50 percent of the total amount of electricity sold by each provider to its retail customers in Nevada comes from renewable energy resources?”

This measure mandates that energy companies derive an increasing percentage of their energy production from renewable resources. It is technically not related to Question 3 and could apply to “all providers of electric utility services” whether they are provided by a monopoly or multiple companies.

Again though, it’s telling that Question 6 hasn’t attracted nearly as much negative attention or campaigning as Question 3. I ended up voting NO on Question 6, though I could just as easily have gone the other way. I agree with “fiscal conservatives” who think that mandates are difficult to implement and sometimes counterproductive. However, we have seen that most “fiscal conservatives” don’t care much about budgets when they’re in the majority. With regard to the ecology and climate change, other parts of the world may be worried about a world where the temperature is 100 degrees at midnight. In Nevada, we’re already there. And again, I think that the history of NV Energy has demonstrated that we’re not going to get that far on an ecology “mandate” if there’s only one company in charge of energy. That is, if you want the state to “invest” more in renewable energy, that will be more likely if you vote Yes on 3 to provide market competition, as opposed to voting Yes on 6 and No on 3, in which case progress is determined by the monopoly whose “juice” is more political than electrical.

Vote, Already

The early voting ballots for Nevada finally came in the mail this week.

Thank goodness. Now we can finally start getting this over with.

In my previous ballot analysis for 2016, I’d gone over reasons why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson for President but Democrats for most of the other races. In this election I’m just going to go ahead and vote Democrat for all the races. Even though Libertarians are actually in some of them. This is a tough decision.

I have already stated that in the short term it may be necessary to vote in Democrats strictly to tip the balance back, but in the long term that won’t be enough. I had also said during the 2016 elections that the main goal in voting third-party is not so much to make Democrats lose as to make the Republican candidate come in third. In Electoral College terms, if you’re going to be a “spoiler” then you want to aim to spoiling the greater of two evils, whichever you perceive that to be. Liberals will never forgive Libertarians who voted for Gary Johnson, since third-party votes in 2016 were enough to swing the election in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even conservative North Carolina. By the same token, if the Electoral College means that the president is elected on a state-by-state basis, I could only vote for president with regard for how my state would go rather than the national vote total, and as it turned out, the number of people in Nevada who voted for Johnson was enough to keep Donald Trump from getting that state, and it was also enough to keep him from getting Colorado, New Mexico and even Minnesota. This is why I refuse to apologize for voting Johnson in the first place. But at the same time, I did vote nearly all Democrats down ballot in 2016, because I did know that the vote in those cases had a direct effect on the result that it didn’t have in the Electoral College system, and I knew that the margins were close enough to matter. I can still support going Libertarian in the current circumstances if the result for a non-presidential election will end up causing the Republican to come in third. According to the most recent polls in FiveThirtyEight, that may be the case in New Mexico, but then Gary Johnson has name recognition in his home state. I don’t know how things play elsewhere, but as a rule, the polls are too close to let Republicans have a chance.

What it really comes down to is that the Republican Party needs to die.

What we have seen in the last few months, especially with Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, simply demonstrates why “conservatism” is a barren label, not just because the nominal conservative party once defined by Christian traditionalism, “economic libertarianism” and muscular patriotism is willing to twist itself to please a womanizing tariff addict and Putin bitch, but because when the premises of modern government have more to do with FDR and LBJ than Jefferson and Hamilton, the real conservatives are the mainstream liberals trying to preserve that system.

In her dissent to Janus, Elena Kagan actually said that the court were “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.” Now, I remember when that was the conservative position on the Supreme Court. Before they were in charge, of course.

But still, here we are. And with the Supreme Court back in focus, it actually starts to clear up why Trump has such cultish loyalty among Republicans, and why even the so-called “NeverTrump” Republicans are not really willing to stick their necks out against him. It isn’t cowardice. It’s priorities. Some of this is because there are “conservatives” who really don’t have a sense of morality. But at core, the fact is that we are dealing with two totally different views on what constitutes morality.

Knowing that, how does a liberal expect to persuade a conservative to vote Democrat this year?

Well, that’s the thing, I’m not sure any liberals have asked conservatives face-to-face to switch allegiance. But let me imagine if a “NeverTrump” conservative came up to one.

Conservative: Why should I vote for Democrats in November?
Liberal: To put a check on Donald Trump.
Conservative: Let me ask: Do you think that life begins at conception and that therefore abortion is always murder?
Liberal: NO.
Conservative: Do you think the Second Amendment should be defended?
Liberal: Not really.
Conservative: Do you think the government should force every citizen to pay for private medical insurance that they may not need or want?
Liberal: If that’s what it takes to get everyone insured.

Conservative: Then why should I vote to strengthen your party at my party’s expense? What do we have in common?
Liberal: We both want to stop Trump.
Conservative: Yeah, I don’t like Trump much at all. But from what I’ve seen, he’s more willing to deal with me than you are.

Of course, that is my imagination. When one position is that abortion is always murder, there is no negotiation or “meeting halfway.” But otherwise, it used to be possible for politicians to negotiate in the abstract and on practical levels. Now negotiation is entirely internal.

There seems to be a Devil’s bargain (almost literally) on the part of right-wingers with the current Administration, where they go along with its various abuses in exchange for the pro-business policies (and pro-business judges) they want. Of course these are the same people who accurately point out that Democrats ignored the creeping powers of government and the executive branch as long as the executive promoted the “progressive” policies that they wanted. Right-wingers point out that the same people tagging “metoo” now were praising Harvey Weinstein for contributing to Democrats in 2016. And the Right were pointing out in 1998 that Democrats would defend the indefensible just for the sake of keeping Bill Clinton in power. Which is why they ought to know better. The fact that they don’t (or act like they don’t) is a big part of the problem.

And it needs to be stressed that this goes beyond Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s last Supreme Court pick before the 2016 Republican presidential nomination was confirmed. The Affordable Care Act got absolutely no Republican votes. It would be one thing for Republicans to be obstructionist if Republicans had something better to replace Democratic “progressive” politics with, but as we saw when they got the majority, obstruction is all they have, and it was all they could do to pass the tax cut that they did, promising that it would be paid for by growth, and blanking out the point that growth depends on the average consumer having more money, which isn’t going to happen when most of the monetary gains go to the upper percentile and the average guy with a paycheck gets maybe $20 extra.

That in itself betrays the bad-faith premise of the Republican Party, because they wouldn’t have to resort to force and deception if their programs actually benefited the majority. Were that the case, they would be trying to get more voters, rather than appealing only to the most hard-core Republicans mostly on cultural grievances. In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won 49 of 50 states. In 2016, Donald Trump won Democratic “firewall” states only by a few thousand votes. This is the difference between actually having a popular mandate and running only on hate.

Put another way, if the only way you can get pro-business or culturally conservative policy is to thwart the majority in a democratic republic, you’ve already lost. Rather than trying to convert more people to your side, like Reagan did or even George W. Bush sometimes did, modern Republicans, especially since Obama, are only trying to force things through their own clique because that’s all they have and they won’t try for anything better.

That’s why Jeff Flake will hem and haw about principles and “conscience” and vote with Republicans anyway. That’s why “pro-choice” Susan Collins made a big production about weighing her options on Brett Kavanaugh and voted for him anyway, knowing that he will vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, except maybe if she shares the suspicion of cynical conservatives that Kavanaugh will vote to uphold Roe precisely because his reputation would cause too much blowback if he did otherwise. Again, on strictly pragmatic terms this may make sense. Why would you go against Republicans if the alternative is to let Democrats win?

Well, what doth it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his own soul?

Over the last two weeks, as the nauseating details of Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance are revealed, it becomes more clear that the government of Saudi Arabia assassinated a dissident with the approval of the Trump Administration. This only highlights atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and elsewhere that were allowed to occur even before Trump got in office. Now, for all the Republicans protesting Saudi actions, what makes anybody think that a Republican Congress will actually call Trump to account on this?

And how much longer will Republicans be able to keep up the stonewalling, and what will the results be for their brand when, NOT if, they lose the majority? At this point, the only way to stop that is to counter changing demographics with attempts to demoralize the electorate, or actually grow the government for the specific purpose of preventing people from voting, or using existing agencies to stop people from getting to the polls.

So much for freedom and small government.

This is what it comes down to for me. If right-wingers are afraid of what the Left will do with power, or “conscientious” conservatives are leery of supporting Trump (yet tacitly do so anyway) they should consider that not only does the Party of Trump magnify all the vices and corruption of the Democrats, they do so with no redeeming factors. Such benefits that Republicans create not only accrue to the already well-heeled, even those people are endangered by Trump’s erratic policies on trade, which will only be exacerbated if he fumbles foreign policy. And the only way the current state of affairs to continue is for Republicans to pursue policies that are not only counter-majoritarian but anti-majoritarian. And while counter-majoritarian policies can often protect freedom, deliberately acting against the majority in all cases makes it that much less possible to correct an erroneous course, and endangers the freedom that libertarians and conservatives seek to preserve.

And in the long run, if Democrats do once again become dominant, it will be because Republicans present themselves as the guardians of traditional American government and capitalism, but their actions undermine both. If “free market” capitalism means using government force to gin the rules to benefit the already rich and powerful while killing upward mobility, that does more to promote socialism than anything the timid Democratic establishment is doing. If Republicans destroy the comity, traditions and rules of Congress, they will have no protections when Democrats have the upper hand. They by their actions are creating the very situation they claim to fear. As I keep saying, the worst case scenario is that the Party of Trump really will turn America into a one-party state – that one party being the Democrats.

If one wants to preserve freedom, there are two choices. You can do what Republicans did in the early 60s with Goldwater, Reagan and Buckley and build up an intellectual tradition that can sustain itself and grow from a minority (and anybody who thinks that the political environment is hostile to the Right now doesn’t know much about the 60s). Or you can focus on a demographic that is only motivated by grievance and try to enforce a situation where only their votes matter. The Republican party made its choice after 2012 when they rejected the “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s campaign telling them to acknowledge women and the non-white demographics of America and build common ground to grow the party. That choice is becoming increasingly untenable. I went Libertarian because for one thing, it has no choice but to appeal beyond its current confines if it wants to go anywhere, and again, the Right has actually gone through worse. However, the Republic as a whole has not. I need to support a party that actually can promote an alternative to “progressive” Democrat thinking. The Libertarians can still do this. The Republicans are far too stained for that. And ultimately they are the short-term reason that the government is a threat to freedom now.

I am not terribly happy about only voting for Democrats, but I am becoming convinced that if Republicans stay in charge, I may not get to vote for anyone besides the government party again.

Next time, I want to go over the various Nevada ballot initiatives for 2018.

REVIEW: Star Trek Discovery – Season 1

In light of the second season of Star Trek: Discovery being promoted on CBS All Access, I decided to review the series thus far. I have remained adamant in refusing to buy All Access myself, however I was able to temporarily access a friend’s account to binge the episodes. Of course the pilot episode was shown on broadcast and set up a dramatic and unusual premise where the heroine, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) put herself on the outside of Starfleet looking in, and the body of Season 1 details how she is nevertheless brought back into the fold. There were elements I liked about the series and some that I disliked. These were the things that I liked about Discovery:

Overall Quality. The production values and acting ability of the principals that I had noticed in the pilot episode remained high throughout Season 1, including such details as the prosthetics design on Saru (Doug Jones), an elongated alien with digitigrade legs. Of course it all hinges on the character of Burnham and the performance of Martin-Green, who has the potential to go in multiple directions and whose choices are critical and must be conveyed as such by the story.

I am not sure what to make of Cadet Tilly, (Mary Wiseman) Burnham’s Chatty Cathy bunkmate on the Discovery. On one hand, she is a welcome ray of sunshine in the setting, but by the same token, she threatens to pull the mood away from grim Military SF towards a comedy-drama series where Burnham is a young ambitious female professional and Tilly is her Funny Best Friend, only in space. It’s sort of like how Killing Eve is a series about a fun, fearless female protagonist who just happens to be a mercenary assassin, and Sandra Oh, instead of being the funny best friend of Meredith Grey, is the funny best friend who also happens to be the detective trying to bring the assassin to justice.

Science. One of the things that distinguishes Discovery from other Star Trek titles is that the USS Discovery is an experimental ship. That experimental technology creates a certain conflict between Discovery’s militaristic captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and the more pacifist crew, including the transferred Officer Saru and Paul Stamets, the engineer/science officer. When Stamets explains the concept behind the “spore drive” and a mycological communications network to Burnham, it’s a genuinely fascinating bit of speculative fiction in a direction that Star Trek doesn’t usually go (towards theoretical organic tech rather than electronics). The spore drive element also brought in the question of how theoretical technology is used for military purposes, and what the ethical consequences of such are. As dark as the story arc gets (see below), what keeps Burnham on the side of heroism is her commitment to reason things out and learn new things. Of course, a lot of this comes back to Martin-Green’s acting and her ability to sell the perspective of the audience’s point-of-view character. This show conveys a humanist sense of wonder and, well, discovery in a way that Star Trek media hasn’t in some time.

This was the cool stuff. What follows is my opinion of the elements I didn’t like.

(spoilers to follow)

It’s Too Dark. The appearance of Star Trek: Discovery on a pay channel, as opposed to CBS or another broadcast network, gives the producers freedom to make the presentation more “adult” in that they can use the F-word a couple times, or indirectly reveal that male Klingons urinate with two penises. But such elements aren’t the same thing as tone, and decisions made by characters in Discovery Season 1 make it darker than even Deep Space Nine, which was largely centered on espionage and moral intrigue.

In the first half of the season, Harry Mudd (played by Rainn Wilson, which is genius casting right there) ends up in the same Klingon prison as Captain Lorca, and turns out to be a cowardly. self-serving backstabber. Which is no surprise if you saw the original series. But a couple episodes later, Mudd shows up using an experimental time-travel device in repeated attempts to seize control of the Discovery. In the course of the episode, Mudd proves to be completely ruthless, killing Lorca multiple times over the course of his time jumps. Now, given the premise of the episode, the result was not permanent, but you still had a case where a lovable rogue type was recast as something more sinister.

In the same episode with Harry Mudd’s first appearance, the series introduces Lieutenant Tyler, a security officer and eventual love interest for Burnham. Tyler is a sympathetic character who has clearly suffered trauma (including sexual trauma) at the hands of the Klingons. But when he starts to suspect that there may have been more to it than that, he asks the ship’s doctor (Stamets’ love interest) to do advanced tests on his body and brain. Dr. Culber is disturbed by his initial findings, but by this point, Burnham is on an important mission and Tyler wants to be at her side. So even though Tyler requested the exams, when Culber demands that Tyler stay for deeper medical examination, Tyler snaps – and then snaps Culber’s neck.

Ironically, this effort to explore the moral quandaries of a grey universe falls apart when, late in the season, a spore drive accident sends the Discovery to the Mirror Universe, where doing evil actually is the prevalent social ethic, and everybody dresses like they’re on War Rocket Ajax. This only serves to undermine both settings: the Pulp melodrama of the alternate universe becomes simply cartoonish, while the situational ethics of the “Prime” universe pale in comparison to the naked fascism of the Terran Empire, and at the same time, fail to provide it the same moral contrast as the previous iterations of the Federation. Although at one point, Burnham observes that the stars in the Mirror Universe are actually dimmer, and a native observes that her people are more sensitive to bright light than “Prime” humans, which causes Burnham to make an important deduction about another character. But that physical element leads to my second point:

No, Seriously, It’s Too Dark. At this point, Trek fans expect the interior of Klingon ships to be dark, claustrophobic submarine holds, but it’s rather telling that the Klingon Ship of the Dead is a more spacious and well-lit set than the bridge of the Shenzhou or most of the interiors on Discovery.

The tone of the scenes is set by darkened bridges and window shots with a great deal of “lens flare” from the sunlight of a given solar system, which causes Discovery ship scenes to greatly resemble those of the last few Star Trek movies. Which leads to the question –

What Universe IS This, Anyway? Supposedly, this is again the “Prime” universe of the Original Series and original Star Trek cast, so called to distinguish it from the “Kelvin timeline” reboot of the J.J. Abrams films, which was specifically explained as a parallel universe. But the aforementioned aspects of tone and visual elements cause Discovery to resemble Abrams’ Trek much more than (say) Enterprise, which was likewise set before the Original Series.

The issue is complicated slightly by the fact that the spore drive has been shown to allow travel of parallel dimensions as well as space, so there’s no reason that the Discovery universe would actually turn out to be the “Prime” one. Especially since it still hasn’t been explained why the spore drive hasn’t become the standard propulsion system for Starfleet by the time of the Original Series, or why we hadn’t heard about it before now.

Anticlimax. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery set up multiple climaxes in the story arc, each less successful than the last. The fight with the Ship of the Dead led directly to the Mirror Universe jaunt, and when the crew returned home, the consequence of their absence led to yet another confrontation with the Klingons, which was not quite as satisfactory from a dramatic standpoint as the earlier defeat of the Klingon artifact battleship. Not only that, the last third of the season made the film version of The Return of the King look snappy (especially since the film version WAS the streamlined account compared to Tolkien’s novel).

So overall, I think that the acting and dialogue in Star Trek: Discovery are top-notch, but plotting leaves something to be desired, and while the overall story arc – basically, should the “good guys” adopt the tactics of the “bad guys” to survive? – has even more relevance now than it did a year ago, it gets to the point in a pretty roundabout way that almost undermines it.

(I didn’t even bring up the whole thing with making Klingons totally hairless. I’m still not on board with that.)

But, overall, I can now say that Discovery is better than The Orville. The Orville of course is the imitation Trek/Seth McFarlane vehicle that is on free TV and did debut at about the same time as Discovery, but has since proven to be just pleasantly mediocre. McFarlane’s series has a lot of potential, but often just falls flat. Discovery at least takes chances, and when it goes wrong, it isn’t because they failed in execution, it’s because they went forthrightly in a certain direction that just turned out to be the wrong one.