It’s so disheartening to hear of the passing of Michael Brooks today. Of the contemporary media on the Left, he stood out to me and thousand others with his intellectual curiosity, a firm internationalism, and his personal interest in synthesizing spirituality and politics.
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I’m separating the Asides category, along with Links, from the main feed of this blog. Asides are more informal, ephemeral posts that don’t make sense between other things I’ve been writing about. The RSS feed still aggregates everything.
Pensive Alqo
How Starship Troopers Aligns With Our Moment of American Defeat
For most of “Starship Troopers,” humanity, in every possible facet, gets its ass kicked. A culture that reveres and communicates exclusively through violence—a culture very much like one that responds to peaceful protests with indiscriminate police brutality, or whose pandemic strategy is to “dominate” an unreasoning virus—keeps running up against its own self-imposed limitations. Once again, the present has caught up to Verhoeven’s acid vision of the future. It’s not a realization that anyone in the film can articulate, or seemingly even process, but the failure is plain: society has left itself a single solution to every problem, and it doesn’t work. Donald Trump didn’t empty American politics of everything but violence; he’s just what was left afterward. He is more an emblem of American defeat than its author. The world of “Starship Troopers” aligns with our moment in its wastefulness and brutality, and most of all in being so helplessly recursive.
I didn’t take my own advice from last year and installed the iOS14 beta on my phone for a few days. I’ve now learned my lesson and have a fully functioning phone after spending the morning getting everything back to normal.