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A utopian novel is almost an oxymoron, because a novel requires conflict, and a proper utopian society would have none. Earth is supposedly a rather idyllic place in the Star Trek universe, which is why they spend all their time out there among the stars, where there are obviously monsters and villains all over the place. “Earth,” commander Sisko said, “is the problem.” Because they had no war, or poverty, or crime, and were well behind the front lines in the wars against Cardassians, ,Romulans, the Jem Hadar and the Borg. So they have a utopian society on Earth, but outer space is dystopian as hell.
Some people say that we just can’t have a utopian society, because everybody wants different things. Well, sure. Any proper utopia would have lots of different lifestyles available within it, There would have to be urban utopias and rural utopias and small town utopias and wild utopias and island utopias and so on and so forth. And a utopian, world wide transportation system linking them all. Yeah, the naysayers say, but (because the naysayers will always say ‘yeah, but,’ it’s the thing that the naysayers say) even within those parameters not everybody wants the same things.
True. If you and I walk into a diner, I may have a donut and you may have pancakes. It doesn’t mean we can’t both be in a nearly perfect place.
Some people like big cities. Almost nobody likes garbage in the streets, covered with rats, almost nobody likes unwashed people sleeping in public, almost nobody likes traffic jams. Cities should be designed accordingly.
Nobody likes war. Nobody likes starvation. Nobody likes homelessness. These are things we have the technology to eliminate, and we should. A utopian world would not make a great novel, or an entertaining film. But, it would be a great place to live.

I was watching Voyager on Netflix the other day, in which a Klingon Janeway was being murdered to death by a Hirogen hunter on the holodeck and I noticed something that I’ve noticed before, and it’s something we all know, at least anybody who has ever watched conventional TV knows, and the number of those people will fade with time and disappear. That is, that when the super dramatic scene suddenly cuts to black and returns 2 or 3 seconds later to the exact same point, maybe even a second or two previous, that’s where the commercials went.
The whole show would be abruptly interrupted for about 5 or 6 minutes of 8 or 9 commercial messages, selling everything from laundry detergent to tooth paste. I’m old enough to remember when they still allowed advertisements for cigarettes. In fact, I have been told that the first complete sentence I ever spoke in my life was “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”
But, I don’t miss them. Nobody misses them. Just like nobody misses the massive amount of bugs that used to be caked on your windshield after any moderate length road trip in summer, and we know that is a harbinger of ecological disaster, nobody misses that because it was a damned inconvenience. We notice when something positive is added to our lives although, ungrateful shits that we are, we soon come to take it for granted. Mobile phones, for instance. We notice when something positive is removed, and we scream like a stuck pig when something negative is added, like a requirement to wear masks. But, when a negative is taken away, we barely even notice.
I am not sitting here right now thinking, for instance “Oh, I’m glad I don’t have a piece of chicken stuck between my teeth” although for an hour or two yesterday (it was probably about ten minutes, but about two hours perception-wise) that was the focus of my thoughts and my vision of paradise was to not have a piece of chicken stuck between my teeth.
It’s just a couple of seconds of blackened screen, but it is also the ghost of something we will not miss, a quiet and brief reminder of something we used to complain about, which is now gone.

When I first heard about this, I thought “Well, that’s nice,” but the more I hear about it, I’m tending more towards “That is fucking brilliant,” and it makes me proud to live in Prague.
Przewalski’s Horse is a breed native to Mongolia and, at the time of Genghis Khan, they were quite numerous. By the 1960s, they were down to about a dozen, in captivity. Now, I’m aware of the arguments against the existence of zoos, and some of the animals there could be treated better, but preservation of endangered species is one thing they’ve got right.
Now, the city of Prague, whose zoo has had one of the most successful breeding programs (by their own estimate, approximately 70% of those which have been reintroduced to the wild in Mongolia are descendants of the Prague herd) has done something super cool (and simple, inexpensive, and replicable). They’ve taken that herd out of the zoo and given them a place of their own, a much bigger grassy plain, about 20 acres, a bit south of Smichov. They’ve set up observation towers around the perimeter and (although I haven’t been there yet) I’ve been told the views over the river are lovely.
Their paddock in the zoo wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t impressive. Whether you started your trip to the zoo on the upper trail, with the Indonesian Pavilion, the polar bears, the otters, the elephants and giraffes, and the kangaroos, or the lower route, starting with the penguins, and the flamingos, and the apes, the big cats, the snakes and the giant tortoises, you would hit Przewalski’s horses right about in the middle, as your feet are starting to hurt and you’re getting irritated at all the crowds.
This is a win for the horses, and for the people.
I’d like to see more zoos decentralize like this.

This is a bit of a cheat blog because I didn’t write one last night and it is just an internet comment which went a bit long, and since there’s no difference, in a literary sense, between a long comment and a short blog, here you go.

When does a hill become a mountain, when does a pond become a lake? The argument I didn’t like was “If Pluto is a planet, there are 3 or 4 others that would have to be designated as planets” because that would have been cool, to have several new planets to talk about, like new dinosaurs.
Personally, I think it should be about sharpening the definition, but whichever way you go you run into contradictions (what in the hell is a platypus?) If you define a planet as a body orbiting a sun, then you’d have to include all the asteroids. If you define a planet as a body orbiting the sun which has natural satellites (moons) of its own, then you’d have to declassify Mercury and Venus as well, which would make Earth the closest planet to the Sun and we’d burn up (just kidding). If they’re defining it strictly by size, then I guess Pluto got the shitty end of the stick.

But no matter what we call it, like the platypus, it’s still there.

It’s strange how many Westerners who grew up with Star Wars still side with the evil empire on every foreign conflict – Caitlin Johnstone

It is strange indeed, and yet not so. People are weak, and yet want to think of themselves as strong. Even the stupidest among us want to think they are smart. When we go to movies, we want to be entertained, and we always identify with the heroes, and the heroes are usually the little guys, because that’s what makes a good story. It goes all the way back to David v. Goliath, and carries on through Rambo and Catniss Everdeen.
It’s why so many movies of WWII are focused on a small band of misfits (a fast talking guy from Brooklyn, a simple midwest farm boy, a Texas sharpshooter) who practically win the war single handed. The idea that we won that war through massive force and overwhelming industrial capability, while the truth, would make for a shitty war movie. It’s why we have so few good war movies about Viet Nam. The David character is clearly the Viet Namese, and they just don’t have the American’s capacity to crank out the films.
But films are not like real life, and most people are not heroes. They don’t root for the underdog in real life. They want, more than anything, to be on the winning side. You see it again and again – in sports, in fashion, in politics. Most people wait to see what everybody else is supporting, and then they go with that.
I do hope that we manage not to destroy the planet through our greed and disregard for nature, and that we manage to avoid blowing ourselves up in a nuclear war, and that we survive as a species for billions of years, and colonize the universe, but I don’t for one second believe that we deserve it. Because people are shit.