OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Those scenes present Ren as a petulant child, which suffices for my point, I think? The ST fails to develop truly credible villains.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This scene is in TFA. As is this one.
Ren was a figure of mockery from the first film.
I mean, I do find TFA near-unwatchably bad, but I'll grant that maybe I have an unusual hatred for it. But I think that if your contention is that TLJ is to blame because it didn't radically swerve course and reinvent the whole ST, then that still seems like a position where a lot of blame would unavoidably fall on TFA for contributing so little to the trilogy that the second film had to reinvent it from scratch.
Considering that TFA was an Abrams contribution, and the universally-despised RoS is also an Abrams contribution - could even a hypothetically perfect TLJ have rescued the trilogy beyond even Abrams' ability to screw up in the third act? I doubt it.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Eh, I feel like that reading could only make sense if The Force Awakens by itself was a tolerably good film, and it just isn't. TFA already sucked. Maybe you think TLJ made it worse, but I really don't think TFA is defensible on its own merits.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I like the observation around spiritualism in politics, though I don't agree with the denominational framing. It seems to me that even in the 16th century, and continuously both then, both Protestant and Catholic traditions have included both strong intellectual and mystical currents. For every pietist movement, among the Protestants, there's a resurgence of interior practice among Catholics. For every Catholic intellectual spring, there's a flowering of Reformed theology. The identification of Catholicism as more systematic, analytic, or 'ordered', versus a more experiential, personalistic Protestantism strikes me as a bit too cute to be plausible.
I think it is true that within a left wing of politics that has largely abandoned traditional Christianity there are new outlets for spiritual or mystical practices, and interest in Buddhism and New Age practices are one sign of that. The rise of spiritual-but-not-religious people would also fit into that category. Across different political tribes there is a common need (not in literally all people, but in enough people) for some sort of spiritual engagement, and if traditional religion becomes unpalatable to one tribe, they will find some alternative way to express that need. The risk of this on the left, I suppose, is that doing this from step one again carries with it all the risks of individualist religion - solipsism, narcissism, or even just falling into common pitfalls that a mature tradition might be able to warn you against.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Look, I don't want to defend TLJ overall, because I think it's a bad film, but I feel like this deserves a reminder of what the OT was about. Remember that the dramatic climax of the OT is Luke Skywalker throwing away his weapon and refusing to fight. The idea that what a Jedi needs to do is lay huge beatdowns on people is explicitly contrary to the text. Jedi are humble servants of peace, remember? Wanting a flashy show of power, a character demonstrating his dominance by crushing his foe, is Sith logic.
I thought that scene worked, actually, because even though Kylo Ren has all the physical power in the scene, he is obviously a pathetic loser and nobody, not even his own underlings, has respect for him. He has power but no presence. Meanwhile the projection of Luke has no physical power at all, but he has all the presence. He does not even need to be there to be more powerful than Ren could ever be. He, like Obi Wan before him, is more powerful than someone like Ren could possibly imagine.
The OT repeatedly makes that point. Just being able to destroy stuff, just being able to win fights, is not what makes one great. You may recall that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Again, I am not defending TLJ in totality. I think that the entire Sequel Trilogy is a creatively bankrupt exercise in point-missing and I never want to watch that film again. But in this one, very limited context, I think it is really missing the point of what the OT was saying about power to conclude that Luke was in some way a failure because he didn't physically dominate Ren.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
That description is also untrue.
I feel like I'm only going to have to say this more and more in the future, but do not trust AI summaries about anything, especially not niche subjects. Come on, if you want to know what I, Jedi is about, the Wook has a detailed plot summary right there.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
...I was going to make an objection here to including Legacy of the Force, but then I saw that you mentioned The Crystal Star as well, so I assume you are taking the piss.
There are indeed a lot of excellent Star Wars novels and sequels, though, and Rogue Squadron and New Jedi Order are definitely among them.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'm half-convinced of a theory by Adam Roberts - Holdo has to be incompetent because the narrative logic of the film demands it. We want to see the heroes pull out victories against impossible odds, the more impossible the odds the more dramatic the victory, and at some point that requires incompetence from the commanding officers who got the heroes into that terrible situation in the first place.
On the other hand - in the original trilogy, nothing like this happens. The Rebel commanding officers in ANH, ESB, and RotJ are consistently professional, authoritative, and well-reasoned in their decision-making. If they make a bad call (and probably the only one is falling for the Emperor's trap in RotJ), it is nonetheless a bad decision that we can imagine a sensible person making, given what they knew at the time. If we look at how the background Rebels behave at Yavin, Hoth, or Endor, they are generally calm, reliable, and seem to know what they're doing. They seem like people you would trust to have at your back. So clearly it's possible to tell a dramatic story in this genre, where the heroes win a desperate victory against overwhelming odds, without incompetent commanders.
On the other other hand, though... that works in the OT, at least in part, because the villains of the OT are credible and intimidating. The OT has Tarkin, Vader, and Emperor Palpatine to work with, all of whom are convincingly threatening. The films never undermine their villains. The Rebels might be capable professionals, but so are the Imperials. That is not the case in the ST. The sequels have devoted significant screen time to establishing that their villains are a clown show. Kylo Ren is an immature brat who establishes screen presence through mere physical violence - he's a thug, with none of Vader's presence. Hux is a resentful boob, seen quivering with impotent rage more than he is genuinely threatening people. The heroes do not take these villains seriously. In the opening scene of TLJ, the heroes ring up and sass the villains. This undermines them as threats. (Comparison: in the OT, the heroes never mock the villains. I think the closest it comes is Han referring to the Imperials as slugs. But Tarkin, Vader, or the Emperor are always treated with deathly seriousness.) So the sequel films cannot rely on the villains to establish a sense of threat. The villains are too weak, in narrative terms, to do that.
Now the obvious response here is, "Well, then they shouldn't have had awful villains." I tend to agree. But I think there's a case you can make that the ST has lame villains for a valid storytelling purpose - Kylo Ren isn't supposed to be the second coming of Darth Vader, but rather him being an insecure Vader fanboy is part of the point. Where the Empire in the OT was generally composed of mature adult men with confidence and a degree of professionalism, the First Order in the ST are insecure twenty-something alt-right imitators. Maybe the films are trying to make a point about neo-Nazis or something. Okay, sure. But if you go with that, if the films are meant as some kind of deconstruction of youths imitating the patterns of evil regimes of bygone eras, then all of the films need to support that, and they can't just re-run the plot beats of the OT.
And unfortunately they do. Even TLJ, honestly, is a pretty by-the-numbers re-run of ESB; I don't know why people think it's subversive or deconstructive. But you can't just re-run those plot beats while changing the things that made them work in the first place. Re-running the OT can work and produce a genuinely beloved Star Wars story - the original Knights of the Old Republic is just a straight OT re-run and everybody loves it - but it has to be done with more skill than went into the ST.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'm far from convinced that TLJ was what actually killed Star Wars. For my money TLJ is easily the best of the Sequel Trilogy, though I admit that is a low bar. The Force Awakens had a positive reception at the time, but that reception was based almost entirely on hype, and as time has passed, I think audiences have cooled on TFA and have mostly come around to realising that it's bad. And, of course, The Rise of Skywalker was obviously garbage from the moment it hit theatres - I have never seen anybody, even the most devoted of fans, try to defend that mess.
My sense is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to cook a meal with the ingredients he was given, and while the result was kind of crap, it was, given what he was working with, about as good as could have been expected. J. J. Abrams did more to make more Star Wars impossible, and the profusion of forgettable Disney TV slop only did more to undermine the brand.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now, but I think that death began with the Disney acquisition, its first signs were evident with TFA, and then by RoS it was too obvious for anyone to deny. TLJ is a bad film. But it is not as bad as either its predecessor or its successor, and while it took part in the franchise-killing Sequel Trilogy, I don't think it can be accused of either the first or the last blow in that killing.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Well, the word 'everyone' was obviously hyperbole, but as I think my links showed, dislike of AI appears to be widespread and more popular than support for it. Many people have tried out LLMs, but that by itself doesn't tell us how much it is genuinely liked.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'm not even sure that the left specifically hates AI, or if they're not just part of the general case, which is that everyone hates AI. People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos, and even they get roundly jeered at by other tech-obsessed weirdos.
There are specifically left-coded critiques of AI, but likewise for right-coded critiques. I think the technology is just widely hated in general. Per Ipsos, Americans' views on AI do not appear to split by political tribe. It may change in the future, since AI optimism skews towards the young, the wealthy, and as per Stanford's HAI, the educated, which are all more left-leaning demographics. I'd cautiously predict that if AI hate becomes partisan coded, it will be coded more as right-wing or Republican.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
And yet at no point does Bartender even attempt to criticise Count's point. That's the issue. The top-level post is, essentially, arguing that James Watson was a kook - someone who held not merely weird or unusual views, but views that are essentially bigoted, judging entire people because of inherited characteristics that do not reliably cluster with the traits he ostensibly cared about.
Bartender cedes this entire issue. Bartender accuses Count of trolling or baiting, and argues that Count's various points are carefully chosen to provoke the Motte. But at no point does Bartender defend Watson, or argue that the points Count chose should not be relevant to a judgement of him, or that the points Count chose are out of context and unrepresentative, or try anything else similar. The closest Bartender comes to an actual argument is suggesting that the comparison between Watson and Josephson is ill-chosen, but since that comparison is not necessary for Count's criticism of Watson to land, it hardly suffices as much of a rebuttal.
I don't think the top-level post here is great. I think Count would benefit from doing more work to explicitly stitch together an argument. Count's post ought to link those quotes together into a worldview, show more compelling evidence as to the general worldview that Watson held, and then indicate why that worldview is wrong. I'll even grant that there's a bit of consensus-building in the top-level post, which is against Motte rules, though I also think that Bartender and some of those around him are trying to consensus-build in the other direction.
But just as an argument? Count puts forward at least the sketch of an argument against James Watson's character. Bartender does not engage with that argument in favour of accusing Count of trolling. Well, that's as may be. But it means that the argument around Watson slips past. Bartender is arguing about Count, but he is not arguing with Count.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Clearly you rate me higher than I myself do.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This isn't debating, though. Bartender_Venator's post is not debating with BurdensomeCount - it's deflecting by making a post entirely about the person himself. It is a very well-polished deflection, but it is nonetheless a deflection.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I think I'd be more sympathetic to that if, well, I hadn't tried that. It usually goes badly.
Yes, there is probably a useful conversation to be had around capitalism and climate and hope for the future somewhere down the line, and I've had those as well, but it is almost never helpful to respond to a person expressing irritation or exhaustion with, "actually, you're wrong, here's why".
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
As I've gotten older, I find I've become more tolerant of liturgical and musical diversity, while at the same time less tolerant of theological diversity. It has become increasingly evident that you can find faithful believers at Hillsong concerts or at Anglican evensong or even listening to incredibly tacky, Disneyfied worship music, or even the infamous My Little Pony mass, and I think I am scripturally commanded to be tolerant and broad-minded in matters of taste. At the same time, we are also commanded to not be neutral with regard to the essentials. So while I won't judge a church for singing hymns that I think are musically ugly, I will judge a church if, for instance, it omits prayers of confession, or denies original sin, or takes God's name in vain.
It's not that aesthetics are totally irrelevant - I tend to agree that worship should be reverent, or should be structured, as much as possible, to incline the believer's spirit towards God. Some music may not be appropriate for that. But for me the category of what can be acceptably reverent is an expansive one, and it includes everything from plainchant to something like Joe Praize.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'd agree with that failure mode. I don't think there's any single form of liturgy that is guaranteed to never fail - there is no substitute for constant vigilance.
One failure mode is that worship is just receiving a service. You go in, you don't interact with anybody else, you mechanically recite the approved words, the priest dispenses the Eucharist, you consume it, you leave, and you never experience any form of fellowship or community. But as you say, another failure mode is that worship is just a tedious bit of ritual you have to get through before you get the morning tea potluck. You're really just going to meet up with friends in the community and worship is just an excuse.
My sense, theologically, is that both the liturgy, which is fundamentally oriented towards God, and the community, oriented towards each other, are essential. Christian gathering is for and about God, but it is also gathering as community. It's a core Christian claim that God himself is a relational community, as the Trinity, so by having that fellowship with each other we are mirroring his own being. We come to worship to know God and to know each other and the two cannot be isolated from each other - the same way that, when asked the greatest commandment, Jesus weaves together our duties to God and our duties to each other. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I remember a Catholic friend of mine once joking that there is nothing so Protestant as caring deeply about the Vatican's opinion on something.
To be fair to them this kind of casual disobedience of otherwise-well-understood rules is very common among religions. There are large parts of the world where Muslims casually drink alcohol. Most Jews don't entirely keep kosher, though many partially keep it. Catholics, of course, famously disregard the rules on everything from contraception to the Friday fast to the Sunday mass obligation. Even when the bright-line rules are universally known - as they generally are among practitioners of the religion - they are often only casually or partially observed.
In this context scrupulous observance is more common among converts than among people raised into the tradition. If you're born and raised Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or anything else, you have nothing to prove - you are confident in your inclusion in that community. Converts, however, do have something to prove. They need to work harder to fit in, especially since they may not know all the subtle, hidden signs of membership in a tribe. Moreover converts are on average more pious than cradle members of a faith (since changing religion is a cost), and also more likely to have made some kind of study of their new faith.
I notice that the Catholic postliberals have a lot of converts in their ranks. Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, J. D. Vance, etc., are all converts. Not all of them are - Patrick Deneen is from a Catholic family, and I'm not sure about Pilkington, Pecknold, or Feser - but I think they're overrepresented. Converts usually take the official, legible doctrine much more seriously.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I don't want to get bogged down in an assessment of his career or character - what I would say is that this is explicitly the position that he argues for. Whether he's hypocritical or ineffective is, strictly speaking, beside the point, and I would argue that even evangelicals that strongly disagree with or even loathe David French as an individuals adopt a similar strategy.
What is, say, Al Mohler's strategy for Christianity in a de-Christianising America? I think it is, much like French's stated approach, summarisable as "just win the argument". The base structure of the American polity is not the problem - Christians don't need to seize the government or radically change the meaning of the constitution. What they have to do is get out there and win the culture. In this way both Mohler and French are operating in an evangelical tradition that goes back decades. It's the same playbook that someone like Billy Graham followed. Teach the nation. Nourish the public square. Win souls to Christ through public witness.
For what it's worth there are absolutely Catholic apologists who will argue that the modern day Catholic Church resembles the early church in form and structure. For instance, from Surprised by Truth, a book of testimonies by former-evangelical converts to Catholicism:
[Paul Thigpen:] Second, when I studied the history of Jewish and Christian liturgy, I found that even if we could return to the “primitive” Christian experience, that experience would not resemble most of the Protestant, especially the charismatic, churches of today. The congregations I’d been part of were for the most part assuming that they had recovered a “New Testament” model of strictly spontaneous worship, local government, and “Bible-only” teaching. But the early Church, I found, was, in reality, liturgical in worship; translocal and hierarchical in government; and dependent on a body of sacred tradition that included the scripture, yet stretched far beyond it as well.
[Steve Wood:] During my Calvary Chapel days, I had a very low view of the sacraments; I was almost antisacramental. But when I discovered the true role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship and living, a corresponding appreciation for the role of the Church began to blossom. That’s when I did something really dangerous. I started reading the early Church Fathers firsthand. I had studied some early Church history, but too much of it was from perspectives limited by Protestant history textbooks. I was shocked to discover in the writings of the first-, second-, and third-century Christians a very high view of the Church and liturgy, very much unlike the views of the typical Evangelical Protestant. The worship and government of the early Church didn’t look anything like the things I saw at Calvary Chapel or in my own congregation. It looked a lot more, well, Catholic.
[Bob Sungenis:] Many Protestants claim that the Church of the first three centuries was a “pure” church, and only after the legalization of the Christian faith by the Roman emperor Constantine (in AD 312) did the church become “Catholic” and corrupt. But upon studying this issue, I found that the doctrines of post-Constantine Catholicism are the same doctrines, some in more primitive form, that were held by Christians for the preceding three centuries.
My study of the writings of the Church Fathers revealed that the early Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confession of sins to a priest, baptismal regeneration, salvation by faith and good works done through grace, that one could reject God’s grace and forfeit salvation, that the bishop of Rome is the head of the Church, that Mary is the Mother of God and was perpetually a virgin, that intercessory prayer can be made to the saints in heaven, that purgatory is a state of temporary purification which some Christians undergo before entering heaven. Except for the perpetual virginity and divine motherhood of Mary, all of these doctrines were repudiated by the Protestant Reformers. If the Catholic Church is in error to hold these beliefs, then it was in error long before Constantine legalized Christianity. This would mean that the Church apostatized before the end of the first century, when the apostles were still alive! An absurd theory which even the most anti-Catholic of Protestants can’t quite bring themselves to accept.
[Julie Swenson:] John Henry Newman, the famous Evangelical Protestant convert to Catholicism, once said, “Knowledge of Church history is the death of Protestantism.” He was right. My study of the early Church showed clearly that it was Catholic in its beliefs and practices—in fact, it had begun calling itself “Catholic” at least as early as the end of the first century.
Now, most of this is cherry-picking similarities and ignoring differences, or misrepresenting an early church that is a lot messier than this text admits - but nonetheless "the early church looked like the Catholic Church" is a claim that apologists make.
(And who the heck thinks that John Henry Newman was ever an evangelical Protestant?)
Realistically, I'd bet that if you had a time machine, the very early church would not easily slot into any of these confessional disputes. The early church was a scattered, often incoherent mess, and Catholic attempts to, for instance, project an episcopacy (much less a papacy!) back into the early church are extremely implausible. Probably partisans of every tradition would find elements of the early church that feel uncomfortable to them. Unfortunately much of the early church is poorly-known, leaving it something of a blank canvas for later traditions to project their presuppositions back on to.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
In my experience that's just a Catholic thing? Every non-Catholic church I've ever been to, even the woolly, beige, mainline, progressive/hippie types, has had a social gathering after church, tea and biscuits, the whole shebang, and if you're new they will invite you to join them with almost aggressive friendliness. As far as my life has gone it's pretty much only Catholics who go to mass, receive communion, and then get out without socialising.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This might be your view on "separation of church and state." But I've encountered quite a lot of people, over more than 20 years, who disagree. Who argue that no, you can't vote your faith; or, at least if you do, that vote can't be allowed to influence the laws and government, because if it did, that would violate the separation of church and state, because said separation means the government is forbidden for doing anything that originates in religious belief.
I remember it coming up on euthanasia as well: note the question "Is your personal conscience so intertwined with your faith that you can’t make a distinction?", as if the interviewer thinks that people of faith ought to somehow divorce their entire worldview from their decision-making process.
Now Williams gives the correct answer, which is that of course his thought process is shaped in fundamental ways by his understanding of reality, which includes God, Christ, and so on, but that he also understands himself to have an obligation to speak into the public square in ways that are morally and intellectually legible even to non-Christians, but I think it's still striking that he even needs to explain this very basic principle.
But of course religious people can and should make political decisions based on their faith commitments. How could they possibly not?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This is probably the biggest barrier separating me from evangelicals at this point. I understand the temptation to burn down all the institutions, or to have our guy who hits back, or however you want to frame it, but I can't help but see that as strikingly inconsistent with the Christian behaviour, especially that of the early church, that we aspire to. Nowhere in scripture do I find anything that seems to support making pragmatic deals with villains for temporary benefit - on the contrary, the advice we are given is as follows.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Does this mean to give into every single progressive cultural issue? No, of course not. But I think it does rule out a certain kind of means-end pragmatism, where we do evil so that good may come. As you say, this does not demand total and unqualified meekness. We don't have to be doormats. But we should show moral integrity, forgiveness, and mercy, even in the face of persecution. "Never avenge yourselves" is pretty darn black and white.
I actually think that TLJ itself is extremely derivative and not deep. Critics who said that it was were, in my opinion, engaging in, if not cope, then I think a type of reflexive disagreement with fans. TLJ is mostly a by-the-numbers retread of ESB, in the same way that TFA was a by-the-numbers retread of ANH. You have the desperate flight from the Empire, bickering on a spaceship in an extended escape sequence, an excursion to a corrupt world run by shady businessmen, the protagonist being disappointed and challenged by a cranky old Jedi Master living in exile, a dramatic showdown between protagonist and central villain in which the villain reveals a horrible secret about the protagonist's past, and then the movie's conclusion is the heroes just barely managing to escape and regroup. TLJ isn't a swerve - it's the same damn thing as TFA.
The people hailing it as a clever subversion or deconstruction of Star Wars were mostly people illiterate in the wider Star Wars canon and therefore ignorant of the many superior deconstruction stories already in the franchise.
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