netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18hr ago
What’s your model for a “traditional” civil war? I’d like to see this analysis applied to the Romans, the English, the Bolsheviks, whichever you think is most typical. I suspect the extreme asymmetry of various third-world conflicts is a modern phenomenon more than a traditional one.
Also, I don’t think Jefferson was slumming it with weirdos like us.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
Hm. Maybe we shouldn’t try to drift towards the UK.
And Japan has had its fair share of unhinged opposition.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
No, I want the opposite! Everyone else should automatically block politicians. No POTUS Twitter account, no Senators chasing TikTok trends. Think of how much cringe we could avoid.
Holding office should constrain you to official channels, which should be both boring and delayed. If the leader of the free world needs to address the population, he can damn well set up a press conference.
If Congressmen weren’t allowed to broadcast their reelection propaganda like this, nothing of value would be lost.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
Does that mean you agree this isn’t a crime?
Surely a cause-and-effect enjoyer like yourself can recognize that this could not be incitement.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21hr ago
As tempting as it is to haggle over price, I suspect we’d just be shouting “nuh uh!” at each other.
So—sure, whatever, fuck those guys. What’s that got to do with the price of semiconductors in China? Do you think Trump’s Jan 6 speech was incitement or not?
Because if you don’t, there’s no way this video rises to that level. It shows motive but not means or opportunity. That makes it shameless posturing.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21hr ago
This is stupid. I hate that a stitched-together video is what passes for an official statement. I hate that Twitter is the de facto source for partisan drama. And Libs of fucking TikTok, no less! I don’t want to watch this slop.
I wonder if elected officials could be banned from social media. Let them appear on TV or release a boring document if they want to puff up their feathers. It’d greatly improve faith in the political process. Make it take more work to bait outrage.
You’d probably just end up with a secondary industry of ghouls like LoTT laundering those official appearances into an allegedly unofficial party line. But I genuinely think our politics would be improved if seated politicians had to put a little more effort into public appearances.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21hr ago
Maybe if they were making this appeal to the security detail outside a Trump rally. “I know that everyone here will be marching into that rally to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
There’s no route where this stupid video causes the “intelligence community” to plot a coup. At worst, you’re going to get a couple partisans refusing to do their jobs. That’s categorically not as bad as gatecrashing a session of Congress. If you don’t think Trump was culpable for that, you shouldn’t think these chucklefucks are somehow worse.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21hr ago
Paging kulakrevolt! Amphetamines and high T for everyone!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Right. Fascism quickly and efficiently degrades them—once the bombs start falling.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Am I the only one who…
No. You’re rehashing perhaps the most popular argument against letting women do anything. Any career, any education, any effort that isn’t spent on popping out more kids for the Fatherland.
It is a stupid argument. WW2 wouldn’t have gone any better if America forced its women to stay out of the factories, too. Keeping half the population locked into one role is an socioeconomic own-goal. Especially if, as you suggest, that role is necessary for “self-actualization.” Let them choose.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
It’s discriminating on ability to pay, which isn’t a protected characteristic.
“We’ll charge him more because he’s white” is illegal. “We’ll charge him more because he has good insurance” is, uh. Complicated.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Yeah, it sucks.
I got a $500+ bill from a lab recently. Their reasoning? Insurance said I wasn’t covered. Check insurance, nope, they definitely have coverage on the date. Maybe they ran the wrong one? Explain this and ask them to run the current one. Month later: bam. Exact copy of the previous bill.
What do I do at this point? Pay the bill and then file a claim, I guess. Except that feels like accepting liability for what is, ultimately, a bullshit charge. The insurer and the provider are gonna laugh at me for holding the bag. Monkey brain says fuck that.
And all of these steps involve going through some combination of 2FA, patient portals, website “assistants,” and phone dungeons. I don’t want to deal with it. This kind of shit is what makes me feel least like a functioning adult.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
The Empire basically never defends its people. Sometimes it actively sells them out. This is because the Empire doesn’t really have people. It has subjects, measured only by their value to the Emperor.
It might be more accurate to compare the New Republic to Imperial splinter warlords (Zsinj, Isard) or to Pellaeon’s Imperial Remnant. None of those have a great track record vs. alien interlopers or even each other.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Absolutely.
Watching the Darth Vader LARPer wake the fuck up? Adam Driver totally could have sold it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
It’s a fix because “hothead learns to respect the bigger picture” is a Star Wars narrative in a way that “young prodigy becomes cowed by failure” is not. The latter is less fun and even more sanctimonious.
Like, imagine if Luke’s response to losing his hand was “huh, I guess Yoda was right,” and then he goes back to Tatooine for the rest of his life. Lame!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
You’re forgetting something.
TLJ was written in 2015 and rewritten in early 2016. This was circa season 5 of Game of Thrones. Subverting Expectations™ had never been more popular. Johnson wanted to make a twisty movie because he thought it would be good. If you don’t believe me, look at this interview.
So that really is where it all stemmed from. It was thinking about Kylo's path, thinking about where I wanted him to be at the end of the movie to set him up for the next film. And thinking okay, that means we're gonna clear away this slightly more familiar dynamic of the Emperor and the pupil. Clear the boards from that, and then that's much more exciting going into [Episode IX], the notion of now we just have Kylo as the one that they have to deal with.
Hilarious in hindsight, sure, but not at all what you’d expect from someone trying to salt the earth. He knew, by this point, that he wasn’t writing or directing the next movie. Dude just didn’t want to remake ESB or RotJ. Hence Luke contrasted with Yoda. Kylo with Vader. Snoke with the Emperor. None of the scenes which call back to the OT play out the same way.
This is…actually a good idea? It’s crucial to a lot of high-quality sequels and reboots. Take the initial conditions and play with them. Invite viewers to jump in and out of the original mindset. I could derail into all sorts of examples from comics to anime; deconstruction is popular for a reason, especially among outsiders. Auteurs.
Rian Johnson was not hired to play that auteur. He certainly wasn’t given free rein to redefine canon. I’d say the game was rigged from the start, but the January ‘16 rewrites suggest otherwise.
(As an aside, the production timelines for these films are absolutely insane. Trevorrow was hired for RoS before TFA even released. What fraction of those TLJ rewrites was a response to TFA’s mediocre foreign performance?)
Point is, the movie we saw was thoroughly made by committee. All the stakeholders got something by sacrificing, well, the fundamentals of plot and likeable characters. You’re not seeing Johnson’s devious plan to disarm the franchise. You’re seeing his team’s attempt to ride the deconstruction bandwagon.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I promise you, that’s not what committed leftists think they’re doing.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
You’ll want to link it as a top-level comment in the Culture War, per the reasoning here.
Aside from that, welcome to the Motte!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Huh?
I don’t know what specific comments you’ve got in mind, but there’s a pretty obvious difference.
Arguably an accurate choice for a setting designed by Ed Greenwood, though.
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