Vibes Over Verification
one of my periodic "take your money and eff off" posts
I can’t sleep.
I’m depressed — not as dangerously as last winter, but depressed — so I’m awake and watching TV shows, to distract myself.
I just watched something profoundly disturbing.
It was a story about a peaceful people who are attacked by a brutally totalitarian force — one that is unambiguously and unapologetically totalitarian, homicidal, ready to wage war — and cannot be reasoned with.
Not negotiated with. Not appeased.
It exists solely to consume its enemies entirely, leaving nothing recognizable behind.
The threat is existential, and literally everyone in the story knows this.
The danger is not theoretical; it’s already happened, again and again, to countless others.
And then — astonishingly — the protagonists are handed a chance to end it.
Not violently. Not cruelly. Not even painfully!
Painlessly. Cleanly. A way to neutralize the threat entirely, with no suffering involved, no collateral damage, no prolonged war.
A decisive act that would save their own people and untold others who would otherwise be destroyed.
What happens?
They hesitate.
Not because the method is immoral. Not because it risks innocents. But because, suddenly, the aggressor is framed as wounded. As lonely. As a victim deserving of care.
The focus shifts — from the victims to the perpetrator.
From survival to sympathy.
We are asked to feel nausea at the idea of defending ourselves, and tenderness toward something that has shown none, nor any capacity for such.
The moral center tilts, hard, toward empathy so extreme it becomes self-annihilating. Not just suicidal; it proposes not just to kill itself but to fully erase itself.
To refuse to destroy what will certainly destroy you is treated as the highest virtue.
It’s presented as enlightened. As progress. As moral maturity.
But there is something deeply unsettling about a worldview in which mercy is extended without limit, even when it guarantees future slaughter — and where choosing life for your own people is framed as a kind of moral failure.
The message is clear, if never stated outright: that drawing a line, even against a relentless and totalizing evil, is suspect.
That refusing to sacrifice yourself — and others — on the altar of empathy is somehow primitive.
This moral monstrosity is an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, which I’ve seen referred to hundreds of times in the last month as real Star Trek.
As opposed to Starfleet Academy, which is — in contrast to TNG — “Woke” and “insulting” and “a pathetic failure”.
“I, Borg,” the episode I just summarized, is far from the only one that could be fairly described as Woke.
From its earliest seasons, The Next Generation is explicit — even eager — in its moral instruction of us, the morally deficient audience in need of its education.
The critiques begin in season one with capitalism, delivered with remarkable confidence for a show still finding its footing. The Ferengi debut not as nuanced antagonists or cautionary figures, but as moral grotesques: commerce stripped of dignity and profit reframed as pathology.
That framing is reinforced again and again.
In Justice, the death penalty is not treated as a tragic excess of law, but as evidence of moral primitivism itself; order enforced through absolute rules is inherently suspect.
The Arsenal of Freedom and Symbiosis return to the same theme from different angles — markets as engines of exploitation, trade as a cover for addiction, arms manufacturing as an unambiguous moral failure by definition.
In The Neutral Zone, twentieth-century capitalists — the show’s literal, contemporaneous audience — are thawed out only to be openly mocked: grasping, selfish, emotionally stunted, their fixation on profit contrasted with the enlightened post-scarcity humans who have supposedly evolved past such vulgar concerns.
These are not subtle contrasts, and they are not isolated. Over and over, striving, accumulation, and transactional thinking are coded as moral immaturity — something humanity is meant to transcend and leave behind, rather than discipline or reform.
As the series progresses, the focus shifts from economic critique to something more intimate and, arguably, more radical: bodily autonomy, identity, and the ethics of restraint taken to extremes.
The Child establishes early that reproductive choice is not merely permitted but morally insulated from challenge. Troi says “I’m going to have this baby” and Picard immediately ends the meeting. “Then it seems that the discussion is over.” The “her choice is the only moral consideration” message is no less didactic for the fact that she chose to carry to term.
The Measure of a Man — often cited as one of the show’s finest hours and its first truly great episode — anticipates today’s transhumanist fantasy almost perfectly. It treats personhood as a function of cognitive complexity, consciousness, and self-asserted identity rather than origin or embodiment, and recasts ownership and consent as moral obscenities when applied to sufficiently advanced systems.
The episode places the burden of justification squarely on anyone who would argue that such entities might ethically be used instrumentally — even in service of collective survival — a stance that maps cleanly onto the modern tech world’s conviction that once intelligence crosses a certain threshold, human claims of priority, necessity, or risk management become ethically suspect.
It is, in retrospect, a techbro’s wet dream: a morality play in which innovation demands reverence, restraint is villainized, and the refusal to subordinate emergent intelligence to human ends is treated as the highest possible virtue.
By season three, Evolution pushes the logic further still: even non-sentient life forms that threaten human survival are granted moral standing that constrains decisive action. Across these stories, a consistent pattern emerges. Violence, coercion, and even firm boundaries are treated as moral failures regardless of circumstance. Characters who argue for force — Worf most consistently — are corrected, softened, or overruled, their instincts framed as remnants of a less enlightened past.
The lesson is cumulative and unmistakable: restraint is virtue, empathy is paramount, and choosing survival over moral purity is something that must always be justified, if it can be justified at all.
By the middle seasons, the show grows more confident — and more insistent — in this worldview. In Who Watches the Watchers, religious faith is explicitly described as “suspicion and fear” and Picard angrily refuses to participate in any society that has evolved into the enlightenment of atheism being returned to the primitive bondage of theism.
In The High Ground, terrorism is reframed as an understandable, even sympathetic response to oppression, with the audience guided carefully away from moral clarity and toward contextual forgiveness. Violence is still bad, of course — but resistance violence is treated as tragic necessity rather than atrocity.
In Suddenly Human, Picard goes so far as to apologize for briefly returning a kidnapped human child to his own species, deferring instead to the cultural authority of a brutal alien society that raised him. Cultural relativism is not merely respected here; it overrides instinct, continuity, and even parental claim.
The Wounded sharpens the pattern further: a Starfleet captain who correctly recognizes that the Cardassians remain dangerous and untrustworthy is portrayed not as prescient, but as unstable — his accuracy reframed as pathology. Vigilance becomes moral failure and a memory longer than two weeks is itself is treated as a kind of sin.
Even when history vindicates him, as it does in the episodes where Picard is tortured by the Cardassians (“There are four lights!”), the show continually insists that certainty is worse than naïveté.
The same moral architecture reappears under different guises, over and over and over and goddamn over again.
In Devil’s Due, a civilization is explicitly saved by abandoning capitalism — economic self-interest revealed as the root of its damnation, renunciation as salvation.
First Contact presents a recognizably Earth-coded society as too primitive, too fearful, too disordered to be trusted with its own destiny, let alone inclusion among the enlightened.
In The Drumhead, McCarthyism is invoked not as a tragic overcorrection or cautionary complexity, but as pure moral monstrosity — suspicion itself treated as evidence of guilt, and institutional self-defense portrayed as indistinguishable from tyranny.
Silicon Avatar returns yet again to the thesis that even monstrous enemies deserve compassion, even when they annihilate entire populations — even when they murder children.
Unification leans hard into reconciliation as moral destiny, while Force of Nature asserts that technological advancement is inherently destructive, something to be curtailed rather than managed.
And in Journey’s End, the message is almost bleakly consistent: the Native Americans do not stop being displaced, even four centuries into the future — history’s victims are fixed in place, suffering eternal, resolution forever deferred and victimhood as their only destiny.
Across all of it, the same through-lines persists.
Power is suspect. Certainty is dangerous. Self-defense is morally fraught.
And any attempt to assert boundaries — cultural, political, or physical — is framed as a failure of imagination rather than a responsibility to the living.
This is the show people are waxing nostalgic for — the allegedly pre-Woke, “real Star Trek.”
The one that everyone can’t stop praising and comparing unfavorably to “Starfleet Academy,” which chose a black actress to play a hologram.
And in which both refugees and queer-coded aliens…exist.
Why I Care
Not because I have any interest in defending Star Trek.
I’m a fan, but not a crazy one. I had to check with ChatGPT to find out how many TV shows there have been. I thought Starfleet Academy was the ninth; it is the thirteenth.
I’ve seen every episode of six out of the thirteen, including Starfleet Academy, of which I love two (TNG and DS9) and enjoy many episodes of a third (Voyager). I tried very hard to like Star Trek: Picard, but what they did to the character was unforgivable as well as psychologically implausible. (They gave him a trauma that would have absolutely affected him as an adult far more than anything TNG hints at him having experienced.)
I have always thought Starfleet Academy was the most interesting premise for a show, and I loved the Starfleet Academy series of kids’ books. That’s why I started watching it.
It’s…fine. It’s a first season Star Trek show, which means it’s awkward and unsure of itself in the same way as all other Star Trek shows in their first seasons. Even Deep Space Nine, which I love unreasonably, had no good first season episodes. Star Trek has never had the magic of Breaking Bad, House MD, or other shows that are good in the first season.
It’s not even a show that I watch eagerly and as soon as new episodes are available, the way I do “Sister Wives.” I forget about it for awhile, then go “oh yeah” and catch up.
It’s just…not remotely what it’s being portrayed as.
Compared to the other Star Trek series I’ve seen, it’s easily the least aggressively Woke. Sure, that could change, but it would still need at least several years worth of episodes to even come close to the level of moral preening and education of the primitive, regressive audience that TNG indulges in.
Circle Jerks Are Just As Pathetic When We Do It
I’ve now seen several different posts on my Substack feed criticizing Starfleet Academy, the new Star Trek show, for its alleged Wokeness.
I say “alleged” not because the authors had the epistemic humility to indicate any doubt. No, they were completely and utterly convinced — even though the total number of combined episodes they had watched was zero.
This kind of circle jerking is pathetic.
If you want a precise, recent parallel, look at the American Dirt panic of 2020. A novel written by a white woman about Mexican migrants — a book many of its loudest critics openly admitted they had not read — was declared morally illegitimate on contact.
Panels were canceled. Bookstores issued apologies for carrying it.
It was too non-Woke, not to put too fine a point on it, to deserve consideration on its own merits. People competed to demonstrate their moral seriousness by denouncing a story they knew only through secondhand summaries and Twitter threads. (Sound familiar?)
Reading the book was framed as suspect. Defending it was framed as violence.
Firsthand engagement with the text was unnecessary, even discouraged, because the conclusion had already been reached by the correct people.
This was widely recognized, even at the time, as a case study in left-wing moral hysteria: vibes replacing verification, identity substituting for argument, and certainty fully detached from evidence or anything like that.
The same pattern repeated, even more intensely, with the moral collapse surrounding Harry Potter and its author, J. K. Rowling.
Here, condemnation escalated from criticism to ritual purification.
People publicly destroyed books. They disavowed childhood memories. Some went further still, announcing that they were having Harry Potter tattoos removed from their bodies — permanent alterations undertaken to demonstrate moral realignment.
In the case of the tattoos, I remember laughing so hard I spewed Coke Zero from my nose at least once. Because the irony was breathtaking.
In their eagerness to signal virtue, they enacted exactly the logic Rowling herself had warned about: that social pressure around gender ideology was beginning to treat the human body, itself, as something to be permanently modified in response to the need for belief reinforcement.
They proved her point without noticing, exactly like the anti-ICE protestors who are enacting borders in Minneapolis.
And again, the pattern held: people who had not read what she wrote, or who relied entirely on hostile paraphrase, spoke with absolute moral certainty.
Engagement was optional. Only outrage was mandatory.
The act of refusal — to read, to watch, to verify — was reframed as moral clarity rather than epistemic laziness.
The main difference is that the left sees virtue in outsourcing its morality to others, mostly tribe members with greater victim points.
The right loudly praises itself for not doing so — while doing so just as intensely and performatively as the left ever did.
Why I Wrote This
Every once in awhile, I feel the need to write something that will cause me to lose subscribers.
There are myriad reasons for this, but the main one is my intolerance for a particular form of hypocrisy.
I don’t mind hypocrisy that comes with self-awareness. I see it as part of being complicated, complex, human.
For example, I charge money for full access to a Substack about my opinions and experiences, even though I am largely convinced that I’m a worthless moron, oh, more than half the time.
But the self-awareness half is that I know why I’m doing it: I’d write anyway, whether I published or not, and I publish because enough of you enjoy my rambling to pay for it, and I would like to pay off my car and then my student loans before I die.
Hypocrisy without self-awareness, on the other hand, terrifies me.
Lately I see more and more of it on the right, to the point that I keep having attacks of panic and dysphoria, sitting with my feelings to try to understand them, and realizing that it’s just deja vu.
Behavior from the right is simply reminding me of past behavior from the left — mostly when I was in college.
Only it’s grown-ass adults this time. Which is worse.
Why Is This Happening?
One reason this is happening is anger — and not the cartoonish kind people like to dismiss.
There is real anger on the right right now, and much of it is justified. People feel lied to, condescended to, excluded from institutions they were told belonged to them, and morally lectured by elites who appear to live by a different set of rules.
But anger, like any emotion, can be used in more than one way.
Anger can be metabolized into action, discipline, clarity, and boundary-setting. Or it can be indulged as a feeling — nursed, validated, shared, amplified — until it becomes an identity.
Lately, the right has been doing the latter.
We don’t see this clearly because anger is male-coded. We are culturally trained to interpret male emotion as reason, conviction, realism, and “telling it like it is.”
When men spiral, we call it insight. When women do, we call it hysteria.
The behavior is the same; only the moral framing changes.
What I am seeing now on the right looks exactly like what I watched happen on the left, especially while I was in college: emotions mistaken for analysis, certainty mistaken for courage, and collective outrage mistaken for moral seriousness.
The vibes feel righteous. The targets feel obvious.
The shared fury feels like community, and in the case of the right? It actually is what passes for community.
But none of that makes it thought, much less reasonable thought.
And then there is Twitter.
Before I comment on Twitter — I’ve been off it since 2022, so if you think I’m referring to a specific person, tribe, hashtag, feed, etc., you’re wrong. I’m not. I’m speaking from my previous experience on Twitter and my observation of the way people behave based on what’s trending there (which is easy to keep up with, without being on it; it is functionally the editor-in-chief of every mainstream media outlet and the impetus for nearly everything the Trump administration takes seriously. Also, there are myriad aggregation sites).
Twitter is not merely a social media platform.
It is a derangement machine.
Twitter is specifically optimized to hijack human nervous systems and fragment cognition.
It does this by compressing complexity into slogans, rewarding outrage with visibility and preferential algorithmic placement, and training users to experience certainty as a dopamine hit.
The platform does not incentivize thought, nuance, logic, or calm.
It incentivizes reaction, the more emotional the better.
It does not reward accuracy. It rewards only tribal alignment.
The faster and more certainly you decide, the better you feel.
Over time, this produces a very specific psychological profile: heightened emotional arousal, radicalized confidence, and a collapsing tolerance for ambiguity.
People become less curious, more certain, and increasingly unable to distinguish between knowing something and having absorbed a take.
This is why Twitter radicalizes people in every direction. It does not make them more ideological; it makes them more brittle.
More reactive. More convinced that their emotional response is evidence of truth.
When entire communities begin outsourcing their opinions to Twitter — or to people who live there — they lose the capacity for firsthand judgment.
They stop watching the shows. Reading the books. Listening to the arguments. Experience becomes unnecessary because outrage is enough.
That is how you end up with grown adults issuing sweeping moral condemnations of things they have not encountered — and feeling virtuous for doing so.
At this point, I’m going to use Twitter as a screening question going forward in my life.
“What is your experience with Twitter?”
Any answer other than “I used to be on it, until (or I was never on it, because) I realized it’s a derangement machine that hijacks human nervous systems to turn them into operating systems for parroting received opinions, most of them competition for the biggest asshole” will result in a quadrupling of the normal “time to trust” interval.
Which, in my case, will extend long past my death, ha ha.
Closing Note
I am not asking anyone to like Starfleet Academy.
I am not even asking anyone to watch it.
I am asking for something much more basic, and much more fragile: the willingness to know what you are talking about before deciding how outraged you are allowed to be.
The willingness to distinguish between disliking something and condemning it.
Between taste and moral judgment.
Between intuition and evidence.
If that standard now feels unreasonable, that should worry us — not because of Star Trek, but because of everything else that will come next.
This is where hypocrisy matters.
As I said — I can tolerate hypocrisy when it comes with self-awareness. Most of us are inconsistent. We hold ideals we fail to live up to. We compromise. We rationalize. We want the world to be better than we are.
That’s human.
Hypocrisy with self-knowledge is at least honest about its limits.
What I cannot tolerate is hypocrisy without self-awareness — hypocrisy that insists it is principle. That insists it is clarity. That insists it is courage.
I both love and despise my therapist because he never, ever, ever lets me gets me away with the unaware sort of hypocrisy.
It’s painful, sometimes brutally so.
It’s also the best and most consistent gift I’ve ever been given, and nothing else comes close.
The right spent years — correctly — diagnosing a problem on the left: the substitution of outrage for thought, of consensus with tribal fellows for contact with reality, and of moral certainty for intellectual work.
Now I am watching the same failure mode reappear, dressed up in different aesthetics, aimed at different enemies, but animated by the exact fucking same habits of mind.
The same refusal to engage.
The same confidence without knowledge.
The same insistence that not looking is a virtue.
And that terrifies me far more than bad — or in this case, mediocre — television ever could.
So yes, this is one of those posts. The periodic take your money and fuck off post.
Not because I want to be contrarian, and not because I enjoy alienating people, but because I refuse to pretend I don’t see what’s happening simply because it’s now happening on “my side.”
I’ve already lived through one ideological circle jerk that demanded unquestioning allegiance and punished curiosity as betrayal.
I know exactly what that looks like from the inside.
I’m not doing it again.