How Starship Troopers Aligns With Our Moment of American Defeat

Posted on by Jimmy

David Roth in The New Yorker:

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.

Results from Eleccións Galegas

Posted on by Jimmy

After a few days camping around Portomarín and Sarria, I’m back home and have a few points to summarize the results of the Galician elections.

  • Feijóo’s fourth and “last” absolute majority will probably springboard him back onto the national stage and replace Pablo Casado as national leader of the Popular Party (PP).
  • The Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) overtook the Socialists (PSOE) as the lead opposition. Though they carried five of the seven Galician cities, in the rural areas, I saw much fewer campaign posters from Caballero’s socialists than from Feijóo or Pontón.
  • Galicia en Común collapsed and is left out of parliament. Outside of BNG, for whom my household voted, I’m partial to their ideas but they aren’t popular and have only fared worse with each election, regional or national. Leftism, at least those projects implicitly holding a centralist message in Spain, doesn’t seem to be working.
  • Vox will go without representation in parliament. In fact, after yesyerday’s regional elections, only Galicia and Navarra remain without the ultra-right party. Out of 313 concellos, the party only reached 5% of the vote in Ribeira.