Death by Stupidity Squad (Review: 'Star Trek: Section 31')

Alternative titles are "Let's Hire Hitler", "I'd happily kill all of these except the haughty Starfleet brunette", "Alias but in the Star Trek universe and awful" and "There are better ways to spend a commute".

80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz

As someone who works in administration, the people I deal with are often just characters on a screen. I usually don't see their faces, I don't hear their voices.

People administered the Holocaust. They put together the transport lists, they ordered the Zyklon-B, they paid the invoices from the various companies that built the architecture of mass murder. They could distance themselves from it in a way.

However, there were clerks in the camps as well. People who typed up the death certificates with false causes of death so the Nazis could claim the estates of their victims. They would have heard, seen and smelt what was going on. Alcohol abuse was extensive, being used as a coping mechanism and fuelling violence itself.

But they were of course not the real victims in all this. They, mostly, got to survive and live out their lives, unpunished for their actions for many decades, if it all in this world.

The Nazis and their allies reduced people to creatures with numbers, exploited until they were of no further use and then killed. Indeed, many of those in Auschwitz-Birkenau never even got the numbers survivors still bear to this day, being gassed on arrival, cremated and then used as fertiliser.

It is still hard to believe even when you've been to two concentration camps and a cargo facility used to ship people to the camps, now memorials. If you've not been at all, then it is sadly easy to see it as fiction.

We're seeing a worrying rise in Holocaust misunderstanding and denial among younger people. We're also seeing the same rise in alt-right views, demonstrated by Donald Trump's recent election. I suspect those two are linked and it remains important to continue educating people, even when the survivors are all gone.

We need to remember that people are more than just a label a politician might stick on them for the sake of election. They have their dreams, their hopes, their fears, their foibles.

If we forget that, then that is the start of a very nasty road.

Never again.

An Officer and No Gentlemen (Review: 'Star Trek' 3.18, "The Lights of Zetar")

One has to remember that while Star Trek could be remarkably progressive, it was a product of the 1960s and so could be very much of its time. A time when women could be paid less than men and viewed as the "weaker sex".

People, the prosecution presents Exhibit A.

Gaza ceasefire

Five days before Donald Trump becomes President, in a move reminiscent of the ending of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1981, a ceasefire agreement has been reached.

15 months of war has resulted in a victory for neither side, but the Palestinians have lost far more. Hamas is a decimated force with much of its structure dead, seriously injured or captured. Hezbollah has gone the same way. The fall of the Assad regime has eliminated a major weapons supply route for both forces and Iran is much weakened.

Israel has badly damaged its international reputation. While it may not have sought to commit genocide, it has clearly committed war crimes in its quest to destroy Hamas and it is likely that only pressure from the international community stopped it from doing far more.

Palestinian extremism has become ingrained in their society by nearly 80 years of conflict and Israel isn't a great deal better; this war has probably hardened attitudes on both sides.

Unless some cooler heads enter the scene, there may well be another throw-down in a few years and I can't see that ending any better for the Palestinians if they're stupid enough to try that.

Of course, it could resume sooner if this ceasefire doesn't hold. The Palestinians should not give the extremists in the Israeli political world a chance to say "told you so".

In any event, a lot of people have suffered and died. For rather little. Thus is often the case for war.

'Fringe' 1.13, "The Transformation"

In this episode, another passenger aircraft gets destroyed by a piece of crazy science gone wrong as a man literally turns into a beast while in the toilet. Insert joke about EasyJet here.

The Return of Donald Trump

I could go a full analysis of all the various factors that led to Trump's narrow win in November, which shouldn't really have been the surprise that it was.

However, it's probably best to keep things fairly brief as others will have done far more than this. There are two main reasons for Harris losing.

Firstly, she was basically an unpopular incumbent in an economy many felt was performing poorly and so they voted for a change of government. Something happening in a good many countries at the moment. It is quite possible that if Trump mucks up the economy with his tariffs etc. that the Democrats will sweep back in come 2028.

Secondly, the left in general has become quite seriously out of touch with ordinary voters. Some frankly view anyone who would vote for Trump as beneath contempt, deserving of the pain that is about to come their way. They will not even associate with them socially, which means that they are rather unlikely to convert them or even present them with an alternative to the right-wing distortions that Elon Musk is happily amplifying right now. Also, they don't really look like "working class" people anymore. Who is the most working-class person in the government right now? Probably Angela Rayner.

Trumpism may collapse from its own internal contradictions, but the left needs to get its act together. It is no longer guaranteed the Latino vote or the working class vote; the black vote is better for them, but that could go with the right Republican candidate.

There is a decent chance, as two other politicians observed the other day - and it's happened in other countries with Thatcher and Merkel - that the first Madame President will be of the elephant persuasion rather than the donkey.

2025 Plans

My blog last year totalled a respectable 47 posts - not my biggest number, but not my smallest. Most of those were reviews of one form or another.

I'll definitely be doing more of those, but I also plan to cover some other stuff - it's going to be a rather "interesting" year, I'd say.