Seriously. I love Star Trek.

National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke is the kind of dim bulb who likes to write "the Left" with a capital L, and he also has a rambling and incoherent essay about Neil deGrasse Tyson and contemporary liberalism out that levels a very scurrilous allegation at me and some other media figures (emphasis added):

One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox's Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left's social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.

The pose is, of course, little more than a ruse - our professional "nerds" being, like Mrs. Doubtfire, stereotypical facsimiles of the real thing. They have the patois but not the passion; the clothes but not the style; the posture but not the imprimatur. Theirs is the nerd-dom of Star Wars, not Star Trek; of Mario Kart and not World of Warcraft; of the latest X-Men movie rather than the comics themselves.

I don't want to speak for everyone on this list, but I'd like to be very clear about the fact that I am a totally genuine Star Trek fan. I have watched every episode of every series of Star Trek, and all twelve feature films. I wrote a 3,300 word essay about it for Slate. I ranked Captain Ransom from the Voyager Season 5 episode "Equinox" as the sixth best Star Trek villain. I can explain the difference between the Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki (canon series and films) and the Memory Beta Star Trek wiki (non-canon material — novels, games, etc).

I am not screwing around here.

Star Wars is nice, too, I guess.

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