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It's funny to watch people squirm, yes, but plebes making a bad argument for their position doesn't mean there aren't good arguments for it. The bottom line is "Well, you can't tell the difference" is not actually an acceptable criterion for an ersatz, and AI is not even related to this principle.
If you walk into an artisan coffee shop and the baristas correctly sniff you out as an unwashed peasant, that in no way justifies them replacing your high-altitude Kenyan light roast with Folgers ash and sniggering at you as you blissfully drink up. If a nearby patron looks over to see who's smoking and gracefully informs you that you may have been bamboozled, you'd be rightly upset. If the baristas respond with "Look, we assumed you couldn't tell the difference and decided to save money. But if you insist, we'll do a proper double-blind test, and if we can reject the unwashed peasant hypothesis at p=.05, you get your money back, but if not, sorry," you'd be justified in being incensed at them at never returning to that establishment again, despite the fact that they're correct. This is basically the AI scenario above, just without any AI, which shows that the argument has nothing to do with AI (you just gotta add AI to everything nowadays and pretend it was relevant). The same principle applies everywhere: a jeweler selling quartz instead of diamond, a luthier giving you a street cat instead of a Strad, etc.
Now, as this is a rationalist forum, I have to assume at least half of people are going to be like "um, but I personally am totally fine with drinking ash, decorating my home with pyrite, and listening to my daughter summon the street cats, so what's the big deal?" Well, I'm glad you asked:
First, just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean there isn't a difference, and being consistently exposed to correct labeling is how you learn to tell the difference! You can, in fact, with relatively little effort, learn to tell the difference between a good Kenyan coffee and Folgers ash, but you can only do this if these are honestly labeled in the first place. Having a malicious barista exploiting your lack of culture inhibits you from learning the difference and becoming cultured.
Second, quality is usually grounded in general principals that actually make a lot of sense. For example, good coffee beans are largely a matter of exploiting stress responses in bean development, and bad coffee beans are basically fat beans (much like the People of Walmart buying them, incidentally), which is why high-quality beans often come from high-altitude plantations -- it's difficult for the coffee to grow there! -- and why they tend to be expensive. The fact that there is a pretty real correspondence between "good/poor quality human" and "good/poor quality coffee bean" and that this is basically consistent with other interesting trends in agriculture is the kind of thing you never notice if your worldview just stops at "Well I couldn't tell the difference."
Third, provenance is an essential form of discrimination for learning about the world. I can fabricate a bunch of Egyptian artifacts and sell them to you under the logic "well, you clearly can't tell the difference, so what's the big deal?" The big deal is by studying my fraudulent artifacts, you will likely come to false conclusions about what was actually going on in ancient Egypt. And yes, this is a constant source of trouble in fields like anthropology and paleontology, which often gives these fields a bad name, but the problem isn't the fields themselves: it's that polite society prevents dealing with fraudsters at the level of violence required to actually prevent fraud. Fraud of this sort is destruction of knowledge about the past, in the sense that information can be destroyed by burying it in enough noise (aka, "Is the Library of Babel full or empty?" Well, it contains zero information entropy!)
Anyway, part of the reason progressives have such difficulty articulating their case is that being concerned with authenticity and provenance is not at all compatible with the rest of what they do. Concern with authenticity and provenance lands one squarely at "Ok, then transwomen aren't women, Africans with German passports aren't German, and fresh agitprop from Disney released under the Star Wars brand they bought isn't Star Wars." You can't whine about the value of artists and faithfully representing their intent, then march off and re-release Classic WoW with the male and female genders removed.
I was with you until then. Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian and Andor were some of the best Star Wars stuff since the 80s. And as much as the sequels were soulless derivative nonsense, you can’t say “only the good shows/films are Star Wars” otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.
Well, yes, relatively speaking, they were best among the class of "Star Wars stuff", but they were ultimately just ... okay, not particularly amazing. And make no mistake, creators of Andor were intentionally packing it with liberal-leftist agit-prop. People just have forgot propaganda can be done well.
Sure but how is that not in line with what Star Wars is all about? George Lucas wasn’t exactly shy about the leftist political messaging, he admitted being influenced by the Vietnam war with the rebellion being the Viet Cong and the Galactic Empire the US, he compared the Emperor to Nixon. Imagine if he’d made the films while Trump was president.
Like c’mon, the main arc of the prequels is about democracy being willingly handed to an evil strongman dictator over a manufactured threat!
I think it is more "Democracy, Fuck Yeah" than left-wing - the aesthetics of the OG Empire are generically evil rather than distinctively Nazi* and the reading of the original trilogy where the Empire is the USSR works just as well (hence Reagan using it in his famous speech), and Lucas moved between endorsing and not endorsing it depending on the political winds. The Empire of the prequels is a consolidating dictatorship following an autogolpe, again with generically evil aesthetics - Lucas cited Napoleon and Caesar (who are not obviously left or right-coded in 2026) as inspiration as well as Hitler. The First Order is obviously fascist, but that is just lazy filmmaking. Lucas gets the thing Orwell gets in a way the makers of the sequels don't - that it is the nature of tyranny and not the political rhetoric used to justify it that matters.
If "Democracy, Fuck Yeah" comes across as a left-wing political message to you, that says more about the right-wing in your country than it does about George Lucas.
* The only scene in the original trilogy directly ripped off from Triumph of the Will is the finale of ANH where the Rebels put on an awards ceremony with aesthetics that Hitler would have approved of.
The aesthetics of the Empire in SW:ANH were definitely Nazi; of course, that was (and remains) an American's conception of "generic evil". What they didn't have is the Nazi's signature Jew thing; the Empire was human-supremacist but they didn't really play that up.
Democracy isn't really a big thing in ANH either. We hear the Empire dissolved the Senate, but the Senate contains aristocrats and royalty (like Princess Leia). The whole elective royalty thing in the prequels is a total retcon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the human supremacist thing is mostly an EU thing, it wasn't really part of the movies?
Agree that the original trilogy at least was basically apolitical and the empire is portrayed as 'generic ruthless tyranny' with Nazi aesthetics being there mostly because they look cool.
It wasn't an explicit part of the scripts, but they did pointedly only have humans as Imperial officers, never any aliens. I don't know if that was a worldbuilding decision, so much as wanting the dour totalitarians to all look alike while the plucky ragtag goodies come in all shapes and sizes because it's useful visual shorthand; but it was by no means a retcon.
Aliens in these sorts of space opera stories are commonly representative of the 'other' or cultural diversity or what have you. Exploring the vast galaxy was about exploring our own formerly interesting planet. When Luke goes to the cantina with Obi Wan, much emphasis is placed on the bizarre habits of the locals. I'd say it's fair to assume the directors knew what metaphors they were playing with, although maybe not pointedly.
Furthermore, back in the timeframe the sequels were made, colonialism was still alive, minorities were sometimes mistreated by the police (uniformed white men primarily), and immigrants were, and still are, exceptionally precarious population groups, in many cases. So I'd say it was fair of them to employ this dichotomy.
I'd say it's less of a worldbuilding decision than an expressive one, perhaps gotten secondhand from stewing around with all the other genre works and their tropes.
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