Yes, bikes are political. Since their invention, they have been political. “Bicycle riding came to embody the individuality women were working toward with the suffrage movement. It also gave women a mode of transportation and clothing that allowed for freedom of movement and of travel.” (source) Have you ever thought about the trails you ride? Are they city? Or on state land? Do you know who the original stewards of the land were? What tribes? Remember when our federal lands were at risk last year? They still are, by the way. Do you ever ponder how you’re allowed to ride there? And what happened with the areas you’re not? Well, turns out, the reasons about where and how we ride bikes are because bikes are political.

As tensions arise in Minneapolis and across the United States, Monumental Loop co-founder, Bikepacking Roots board-member, and Outdoor Alliance ally, Matt Mason, has penned a Dust-Up stating the obvious to many, but it clearly needs to be said: “BIKES ARE POLITICAL!”

Editorial note: The communities in Minneapolis are reeling right now and can really use your help. If you can, please consider donating to Support Phillips Families in Urgent Need, Support for Critical Housing Needs, and there is a massive list of grassroot aid organizations on the MPLS Mutual Aid Linktree.

This week, several bike brands spoke out against ICE operations and expressed their support for immigrants. Predictably, and sadly, the comments were filled with “keep politics out of it” or some variation of “I ride to escape politics”. At my most generous, I can refrain from assuming these folks are all bootlickers, but there’s certainly an unhealthy dose of privilege in those statements. Setting aside my own judgments, the idea that bikes aren’t political is simply incorrect. Bikes are political… and we’re doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring that fact.

Frankly, we don’t need to stress ourselves searching for examples of politics shaping where and how we ride. Bike lanes? Political. No bikes in designated wilderness areas? Political. Cattle shitting in the spring that you rode all day to reach? Political… and the ranchers know it! Tariffs increasing bike prices? Political. Every level of government, from town councils to the President of the United States, makes decisions that affect cycling.

Because “keep politics out of bikes” is such an obnoxiously ignorant statement, I won’t spend much time on it. Instead, let’s dive deeper into what is possible when we unify our voices and engage with the political world. Yes, that’s a sneaky Bob Dylan reference.

We live in a political world
Love don’t have any place
We’re living in times
Where men commit crimes
And crime don’t have any face

Over the past decade, I’ve been attempting to secure long-term protection or recognition for the Monumental Loop. Originally, the idea for the route sprang from a meeting with local, state, and federal elected officials, along with community members, in 2009. Political. At the time, there was a push from Senators Udall and Bingaman to designate nearly 500,000 acres of Doña Ana County as wilderness areas.

Ultimately, the ranching community, along with off-roaders, was able to use its political influence to squash the designation. Quick side note: the ranching community/meat industry is so proficient at politics that the government essentially pays them to degrade our public lands. It’s an infuriating example of how an industry can use political power to get what it wants, even when it isn’t supported by the majority of citizens.

By 2012, a coalition of hikers, scientists, and public lands lovers, but oddly not many cyclists, had gathered enough steam to push for a National Monument designation on the same half a million acres. In 2014, President Obama designated Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks a National Monument. Political. Because cyclists, specifically mountain bikers, were absent from the coalition, the language in the monument designation has since been interpreted to disallow any new mountain bike trails in the monument.

That’s a huge missed opportunity with lasting consequences, all because we “stuck to bikes.”

Now twelve years into OM-DP’s existence on the landscape, I (with help from a bunch of folks) have been able to get bikepackers and mountain bikers a seat at the decision-making table here in Las Cruces. Politics, it turns out, is built on relationships. Relationships can be messy and draining, and keeping them healthy requires sustained effort.

Taylor Rogers at Outdoor Alliance says, “Imagine what’s possible when you skip a few rides and instead advocate for the places we ride”.

Unfortunately, I’ve skipped more than a few rides lately and spent far too much time on Zoom! Those missed rides were replaced by meetings with Senators, a role on the Bikepacking Roots Board, a training program with Outdoor Alliance, and a personal commitment to always mention getting livestock off public land at every meeting. Is this a meeting? And what’s come of my visits to D.C, my new bolo tie, and my efforts to build relationships with lawmakers?

Well, not much yet (my midwestern humility and humor showing there), but I’ve put Doña Ana County and the Monumental Loop in position to be among the first batch of routes to receive federal recognition through the B.O.L.T. Act. Political, and a huge win for a place that wasn’t on the map for cyclists until recently.

There are countless more examples of how politics shapes the who, where, and why of cycling. It’s literally an endless list. The one currently in the news is, you can’t ride a bike if ICE kills you. The sooner we recognize how powerful our collective voices can be and put them to work, the sooner we’ll have safe streets, fully funded land management agencies, well-maintained and legally protected trail systems, and a diverse, thriving community of cyclists.

Or we hide our heads in the sand, use bikes as an escape, and watch as we slowly lose everything from our constitutional freedoms to our public lands.

Bikes are political, and you are too.

Editorial note: The communities in Minneapolis are reeling right now and can really use your help. If you can, please consider donating to Support Phillips Families in Urgent Need, Support for Critical Housing Needs, and there is a massive list of grassroot aid organizations on the MPLS Mutual Aid Linktree.

If you’re new to this series, welcome to The Dust-Up. This will be a semi-regular platform for Radavist editors and contributors to make bold, sometimes controversial claims about cycling. A way to challenge long-held assumptions that deserve a second look. Sometimes they will be global issues with important far-reaching consequences; other times, they will shed light on little nerdy corners of our world that don’t get enough attention.

The post The Dust-Up: Bikes are Political appeared first on The Radavist.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future

The revenants of Star Trek’s past inform where it’s going — and that might be a good thing.

By Val Nolan

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Published on February 18, 2026

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

Grab your raktajinos, activate your spoiler warnings, and take your seats, cadets; class is now in session! What class, you ask? Maybe Advanced Subspace Geometry? Perhaps Xenolinguistics? No, it’s something even more exciting… Cultural Criticism! Specifically that of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his notion of hauntology. Admittedly Derrida can be a tough read but, broadly speaking, hauntology (which is a pun: “haunting” + “ontology”, the latter being, well, the study of being) offers a framework for understanding how big and transformative ideas, though they may seem defeated, never really go away.

Hauntology is the kind of philosophy—or cultural/literary criticism more broadly—which can often sound like science fiction (ontological shock at disharmonic anachrony, anyone? Wasn’t that an episode of Voyager?!). It comes complete with its own technobabble, canon of texts, and occasional reboots or retcons, as well as its own very niche, very passionate fandom. These days it is often interpreted as an inability to imagine a future (partly but not exclusively on account of how influential British academic Mark Fisher deployed the term) but that reading is more applicable to, say, a prequel series such as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

In the case of Starfleet Academy, however, we find something which is both much closer to Derrida’s original conception of hauntology as well serving as a toolkit to help us unlock the deeper themes behind the show: a series of metaphorical ghosts which emphasize vital connections between the past, the present, and the future.

Essential to this is how Starfleet Academy takes place in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known as The Burn, a disaster which has disarticulated the narrative of the franchise’s storyworld. The Burn is a literal historical rupture which has left time, to quote Derrida quoting Shakespeare, “out of joint” (for Derrida, “time” here broadly encompasses “history” among other things). In fact, spacetime itself has been left out of joint after The Burn in a manner extensively explored on Star Trek: Discovery.

On that series, the largely collapsed Federation is reintroduced as a specter without a body, a quasi-secret concealed behind a distortion field whose representatives are rare and frequently intangible (consider the holographic Starfleet officers glimpsed via recordings in the episode “Su’Kal”). After The Burn, the myth of progress and forward momentum (particularly that of the Federation) has been left askew. The galaxy is thus haunted in this era. It is haunted by the lost idea of the United Federation of Planets (something we see throughout Discovery’s third season in particular, especially through the eyes of characters such as Aditya Sahil).

However, if much of Discovery was about mourning the Federation, Starfleet Academy is about rebuilding it (that’s right there in the imagery of the opening credits). Because here the revolutionary idea of the Federation comes back. Though of course it has, technically, already come back by the end of Discovery, so Starfleet Academy essentially begins with this specter returning again (which is very Derrida; it’s a notion he derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet).

As such, the narrative gestures of Starfleet Academy are largely resurrectional in nature. The most obvious example is how the USS Athena’s arrival at Earth—and so the institution’s physical return to its old campus in San Francisco for the first time in over a century—is depicted as a significant moment of rebirth (as, for that matter, is the emergence of new Academy buildings from the ground in the title sequence). But, more than these visual cues, it is among the teaching staff of Starfleet Academy that we see the greatest hauntological energy.

Here we find a preponderance of specters in the Derridean sense, what the philosopher calls “revenants” (a term which he borrows from folklore and meaning a returned spirit or resurrected corpse). And while we could get bogged down in differentiating specters from spirits or from ghosts (in any event, all true Star Trek fans know that ghosts live in candles), that’s not strictly necessary to appreciate what’s going on here. It is perhaps more illustrative to picture Derrida’s go-to example of a revenant in literature, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the kind of urging figure which, as academic Kathy Shaw says, “confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation.” Which is to say that such characters, and Academy has an abundance of them, typically call on protagonists to put things right.

Doing this, Derrida says, asks characters not just to “learn to live with ghosts” (a reasonable description of the post-Burn era), but to speak of them, to them, and with them. This is something which Starfleet Academy cleverly literalizes by marshalling a variety of common science fiction tropes—the alien, the time traveler, the hologram, and even the ascended being—in order to depict multiple avatars of the Federation’s golden age (as well as some of the franchise’s most significant iterations), all without the concept becoming repetitive.

We can in fact arrange the show’s characters on a spectrum of revenants in fascinating fashion. On the most straightforward level, Captain Ake is a 420-year-old educator who was there centuries earlier when Starfleet was “at its best” and who still remembers how the Federation used to be (this is, in fact, why she is tasked with the role of Academy chancellor). Half-Lanthanite, Ake is said to experience time differently from other humanoid species. She begins the series by coming back to Starfleet (again we see the Derridean return) after leaving the organization for fifteen years on a matter of conscience.

While she may not be of the show’s present (or, at least, not entirely of the show’s present), Ake actively shapes those who are about to come of age in that present (with her cadets further symbolic of the future-to-come). She is, to take a big hit of Derrida, a “disjointure in the very presence of the present, [a] sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself.” As such, Ake embodies what academics such as Shaw see as the “dual directions of hauntology”: both the presence of the past and the anticipation of the future. The perspective which this provides the character is crucial in setting the tenor of the Academy. Her resulting idiosyncrasies grant permission for the next generation to live life joyfully and messily (#TeachableMoments).

Next on our hauntological spectrum we find Commander Jett Reno, who jumped almost a thousand years into the future aboard the USS Discovery in that series, and so is a revenant who begins by physically/temporally coming back from the past (“I should not be here,” as she says in her introduction). Entirely in keeping with the franchise’s tone, she attributes her return to the laws of physics rather than something supernatural as in Derrida’s examples (that said, she almost immediately asks cadet Caleb if he’s ever seen a ghost, flagging up more traditional conceptions of haunting). Reno so, in addition to supplying deadpan humor, brings to the Academy a lived experience of the Federation’s early years.

Further along the spectrum again we come to The Doctor. This character’s return is more metafictional in nature (and more substantially so than, say, Reno’s): a return to the franchise after his time on Star Trek: Voyager in the late 1990s (and a return rehearsed more recently on the second season of the frankly wonderful Star Trek: Prodigy). On Starfleet Academy, The Doctor serves as a witness to seven hundred years of galactic history. As a hologram, he already exhibits a spectral incorporeality (Caleb’s hand passes through his arm in their first encounter) but he doubles down on that here with a tendency to “pop in now and then” by appearing out of nowhere (or, if you prefer to see him in the fashion of the Derridean revenant, “one cannot control [his] comings and goings”!) Where Reno lived through the first century of the Federation and Ake lived through its collapse, The Doctor represents a broader experience of its ups and downs throughout a great sward of the human calendar’s third millennium.

Nonetheless (and please remember your spoiler warning!), Starfleet Academy’s truest revenant must be Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko. In the episode “Series Acclimation Mil,” Sisko appears but does not appear. He is both present and absent. He is simultaneously dead (in the Fire Caves of Bajor) and alive (assumed into the Celestial Temple). Though not a member of the teaching staff, the character is a tangible influence on cadet SAM in particular (“completely changed me, my whole life,” she says). Sisko further displays the paternal quality of the revenant which Derrida draws from Hamlet. He is the avatar of the father, or the “Anslem,” that being the Bajoran word for “father.” This is of course literal in the case of his son Jake—who here manifests in revenant-adjacent holographic form—but also, metaphorically, in the case of the equally holographic SAM who looks up to the elder Sisko as a role model.

Yet what further elevates Sisko on the revenant spectrum is the unreality of his presence (helped, perhaps counterintuitively, by Avery Brooks’s retirement from acting). Sisko’s image is prominently displayed on the screens in the Academy classroom as one of the unexplainable mysteries of the last thousand years, however, as with Hamlet’s father, we never see his face. This is a rights issue, surely, but it is used smartly by the show’s creators. By essentially shrouding Sisko’s face in shadows, the character appears to look out from the screen at SAM (and, to an extent, at the audience) without himself being seen in much the same way the ghost of Hamlet’s father looks out from behind the visor of his armor. The revenant therefore observes without being observed in a way which prefigures the spectral suggestion of Sisko’s face in the clouds over San Francisco at the end of the episode.

Of course, in Derridean fashion, the ultimate revenant requires a scholar—as Marcellus calls for in the opening scene of Hamlet—in order to interpret the specter. But, crucially, Derrida maintained that the scholar, who he characterized primarily as an observer or a recorder of events, may not the best person to speak to the specter (“It is offended,” Marcellus remarks of Horatio’s failed attempt to speak to the ghost; “’Tis gone and will not answer”). Thus Illa Dax, the Academy’s professor of the unexplainable, literal witness to Sisko’s life, and another candidate for revenant (on the spectrum somewhere between Ake and The Doctor) is able to guide SAM in her investigation; however, it is only SAM herself who can successfully speak to Sisko as she is revealed to be doing in the episode’s final moments.

In this way, Illa Dax is emblematic of how, together, the Derridean “radical untimeliness” of Starfleet Academy’s various revenants challenges the cadets to understand the Federation’s past as a stepping stone to imagining a new version of its post-Burn future. The show’s young characters are thus called upon, as Derrida and any number of temporal agents might have it, “to put time on the right path, to do right, to render justice, and to redress history.” The show’s rhetorical strategy is to tackle this in a manner which, in the best spirit of science fiction, prompts audience reflection upon the ills of our own world. In such a light, Ake’s assertion that democracy “lives in continuous action” certainly hits home in the present moment.

Hauntology therefore reveals itself as a powerful theme for Starfleet Academy, one particularly apt in this year of Star Trek’s 60^th anniversary (the new celebratory intro which debuted at the start of Academy episodes is just one signifier of this). It is obviously not the only way to interpret the series, but watching Starfleet Academy through this lens makes visible deeply embedded storytelling elements and techniques which, in the longstanding tradition of Star Trek, resonate with our real world (such as how The Burn serves as a stand-in for any number of hugely disruptive twenty-first century events).

Applying some of Derrida’s ideas to Starfleet Academy is thus both a fun thought experiment and an unexpected means of appreciating the decisions behind why many of the show’s characters were chosen to begin with. Fittingly, it also asks questions of us, the viewers and fans, about how we see the connective narrative tissue between the past and the future. It offers a different way of thinking about a different type of Star Trek, one which has been created to reflect the anxieties which haunt our present day. Indeed, just maybe, it is an illustration of why Starfleet Academy is the Star Trek we need right now.[end-mark]

The post How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future appeared first on Reactor.

Edited by Sam Thielman

I THOUGHT IT would happen after the next round of scheduled talks and Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio's announced trip to Israel. I woke up to learn that I fell for the ruse. 

To say the first thing first: This is dying-empire behavior. The bellicosity of the late-phase Ottoman Empire comes to mind. But we're in no danger from breakaway territory, nor have we missed out on a leap in military technology, though the economic foundations of the country display atrophy. Dying is not the same as dead. I'm not trying to predict where we are on a trajectory of historical collapse. I'm only pointing out that launching an unprovoked war to overthrow a longstanding enemy under cover of negotiation to resolve a pretextual crisis is the sort of aggression typical of empires in, at a minimum, steep decline. 

Overthrowing the Islamic Republic addresses none of the compounding social and economic crises the United States faces. Accordingly, from a certain rot-at-the-heart-of-decisionmaking perspective, such a war looks like an opportunity, in the sense that it defers addressing such crises. 

The next thing to say: This is an unambiguous aggression by the United States and Israel. Trump spoke of "imminent threats from the Iranian regime." There were none. Out of one side of the warmongers' mouths comes the satisfaction that Iran has difficulty projecting power after the 2024 Israeli decimation of the Resistance Axis and the 2025 Twelve-Day War. Out of the other side, this claim of imminence that no one believes and no one, certainly not Trump, devotes much effort to presenting as believable. Already the Israelis have bombed a girls' elementary school—not the only school they hit today—and killed dozens. That's not what you do when you face an imminent threat. That's what you do when you want to seize a sick opportunity. 

While the bombs fall on the regime and its opponents alike, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu say that they come as liberators. Only they won't be the ones who do the dirty work. "The time has come for all sections of the people in Iran… to remove the yoke of tyranny… and bring a free and peace-loving Iran," al-Jazeera quotes a statement from Netanyahu. "Our joint operation will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands."

In 1991, as the First Gulf War entered its terminal phase, President George H.W. Bush told the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When they did, Bush realized he would be stuck occupying Iraq if he aided them, so he didn't, and the regime held on through massacres. 

This morning, Trump sounded even less concerned with the fate of the people he was encouraging to join his war (even as his allies bombed their children's schools). He told the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the rest of the Iranian security apparatus it could have "complete immunity" if it puts up no resistance—a contradiction, as this is the regime's apparatus of domestic repression; but more like a tell that the Iranian people's desires are irrelevant.

"To the great, proud people of Iran: I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand… Bombs will be falling everywhere. When we finish, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations," Trump said. "No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. Let's see how you respond." 

Let's see how you respond. 

The U.S. and Israel may have started this war in Iran but already the war is regional. Reprisal attacks are hitting everywhere from Bahrain to Kuwait, targeting at first the U.S. military presence in the region, and will likely spread to Iraq. My older daughter spoke this morning with a friend in the region. The little one was heading into a bomb shelter. 

Congress did nothing here. There was supposed to be a vote on the Ro Khanna-Thomas Massie War Powers Resolution next week. Congressional lethargy, which conceals political comfort with the war, provided time for Trump to ignore Congress entirely. I am not making a process critique. I am pointing out that this march to war was deliberate enough for politicians to have attempted to obstruct it and they did not. That is yet another sign of a necrotic political system and symptom of a dying empire. It's a sick joke that Dario Amodei speaks about America's democratic values and its authoritarian enemies. 

So, congratulations to generations of American and Israeli warmongers. You worked tirelessly to seed the bed for today. You made sure Bush's son in 2002 rejected Iranian pledges of assistance with the War on Terror. You demanded time and time again that the U.S. military expand the Iraq occupation to attack the Iranians who exploited it to facilitate attacks on U.S. troops. You ginned up crisis after crisis over Iran's nuclear program, and then rejected the 2015 diplomacy that verifiably ended it. You pretended that Iran was not the ground force that kicked ISIS out of Iraq under American air cover. You lied relentlessly and unconvincingly when insisting that you did not desire war. You did the same sort of thing the last time you got the war you wanted, which was Iraq, and which was an epochal disaster—the sort of epochal disaster that many people figured would spell your political marginalization. 

But because there were never any consequences for it, we are right back here, only worse now. Will there be consequences for the warmongers this time? 

Transgender residents of Kansas have received letters informing them that a new state law requires them to forfeit their driver’s licenses if they include a gender marking that doesn’t match the sex identity they were assigned at birth. Kansas House Substitute Bill 244 changes the state definition of “gender” to mean a person’s “biological sex at birth,” a definition that is rejected by many…

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