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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Because America loves Star Wars.

They want a clear bad guy and a clear good guy and it'd be best if the bad guy's sword was red so they could tell he was bad.

You might like this Substack piece by Librarian of Celaeno (assuming you haven't read it already): "Jedi Brain":

Jedi Brain is a term (I’ve also heard Disney Brain, Marvel Brain, and the like) for a mental state wherein people’s main frame of reference for understanding politics, war, and the interrelationship between them is mass media entertainment products. There are good guys and bad guys, each occupying a respective political identity, and it is the job of the former to seek a more just order by destroying the latter. Narrative coherence tends toward the personification of each side in small groups of heroes on the one hand and one big villain on the other. This latter figure is the wellspring of Team Evil’s grand scheme; if he is destroyed, so goes with him all the bad stuff he represents.

…

This final point is key; Jedi Brain is a form of groupthink that flourishes largely (but not exclusively) among people who expect neither to suffer nor inflict violence themselves. They are secure from it. For them, killing people is an abstract question decided on the basis on whether the good guys will be helped by it, which will in any case occur far away. Negative forces in the world are under the direction of supervillains, who must be destroyed for good to flourish, and upon their destruction peace, harmony, and the sort of personal safety and well-being the Jedi-Brained individual has will simply arise as a kind of emergent property of his noble efforts, or rather the noble efforts of the heroes who will engage in the actual violence, far from the clatter of keyboards. It’s not only neocons who think that every third-world dictator is Adolf Hitler; it’s arguably the default way most of the population now imagines the world, even if only implicitly.

…

Politics- sublimated violence- follows the same trajectory. One can see Jedi Brain on full display deployed against Donald Trump and his MAGA storm troopers, right down to the “Resistance” imagery from the terrible new Disney trilogy being circulated among those terrified at his election in 2016. In addition to being Darth Vader, he’s also Hitler, and also Voldemort, because to the people who deploy those allusions, they’re all the same thing. The boundaries between fiction and reality collapse into a media machine that undifferentiates them, blending them into a narrative where the evil on a page or a screen is the same whether it’s a dark wizard, a wrestling heel, a murderous dictator, or a random internet istophobe. The proper response to any evil, which is all evil, is to demonstrate emotion comprehensible and acceptable to others with whom you wish to identify, in much the same way the public expression of consumer choices validates one as a member of a fandom. Zelensky and the latest Dr. Who trailer- liked and reposted, of course- it’s just the right thing to do.

I think the final point is what gets me, the one about the rebuilding after Shock and Awe receiving no more thought as if Good People naturally get Good Outcomes, medals and a parade. The idea that good is an emergent property of killing all the bad people is something I don't understand except as a seductive lizard-brain problem of having some people to blame. Solzhenitsyn's line about good and evil has stuck with me all my life.

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