Even if he did obey the Emperor and strike down Darth Vader in anger, there's no plausible reason he would switch sides, he'd just strike down the Emperor too.
Taking ESB alone this is a bit of an issue, though Yoda does explain it with "forever will it dominate your destiny". But ROTJ definitively answers this.
The Dark Side isn't just the target of a rival cult. It's literally space heroin, with the attendant mental and physiological changes. As with heroin, under no circumstances should you take a "sample", even for good reasons, from a weird man in a robe.
The Emperor was clearly willing and able to incapacitate Luke. If he actually had struck down Vader and resisted the Emperor, he would have woken up in a very small cell, having lost everyone he cared about and betrayed his values facing psychological torment until he broke. No amount of post-nut clarity would save him at that point.
And if he managed to kill the Emperor he would simply be the most powerful junkie.
This is perhaps the best fic detailing what would happen if Palpatine got his hands on Luke at the end of ESB and maybe my favorite series in the fandom, period (and a lot of the EU). It certainly does a better job of selling the fall than Dark Empire.
Tanista
13d ago
It's a real mind fuck to want Trump to lose but not to lose so soon that everyone goes back to business as usual.
Our solution to that was to just split the kids into four or five classes based on their performance. Seems vastly cheaper than individualized coaching or trying to figure out the specific issues.
The answer was, TL;DR: "Because good person does not do such things, and you want to be heckin' good person"
Putting aside whether Christianity triumphed because it was distinct in its focus on morality (Julian the Apostate certainly thought lacking this focus on charity was a weakness of traditional religion), it was often "you would be a bad member of the clan/city/people". You either insulted your worshipped ancestors or the very kin you needed to survive.
Sam Seder's ideology suffers from coming at an incredibly individualistic time and encouraging those tendencies more and more.
I don't blame him that much for speaking up, he was dealing with a debate-bro in a format ill suited for it. But it is a legitimate problem when your ideology simultaneously attacks all things that impose duties on people, push them to live their best lives and then have to turn around and try to jerry-rig some new commandments without many of the tools we've traditionally used for that and without admitting what you're doing.
In fact, if we're going to criticize people's performance, the debate-bro allowed Sam to say ludicrous things, like imposing one's beliefs being mainly a feature of theocrats. That is a ludicrous thing to grant given how the secular supposed-cosmopolitans act when they feel they have the whip hand. Ultimately, there's no escape from needing to have a set of values for a community. What you'd hopefully do is shrink the size of communities but everyone is going in the opposite direction.
Tanista
16d ago
But man, i am an outlier, people here hate america now, moreso than ever before
I think it was mostly a LARP before, except for a few people deeply invested in a sort of left-wing anti-Americanism.
Now? It'll be interesting to see what happens after Trump is gone because Canada needs the US but the loathing may linger.
Tanista
16d ago
Trump has a way of dragging the party/base towards him.
I've seen some right wing figures who in no way expected a tariff war with Canada falling somewhere between joking about it now (a coward's way to not take a position) and going "well, maybe we should let him cook and see" or uncritically repeating his statements about the trade imbalance.
I think it's the attention gap: the average American doesn't think about Canada enough to immediately jump on this. If they start feeling the pain themselves (especially if the EU and China are also implementing their own tariffs), that may change and there may be some pullback.
I prefer to know those people by name.
You know who is to blame for trans madness by name (off the top of my head Rachel Levine had a pivotal impact on WPATH's removal of age guidelines). You could easily find out who to blame when the American Anthropology Association says something batshit.
What you mean, I think, is that you can't hold them accountable. But that's not just because they're obscure.
It cuts both ways: Elon Musk isn't accountable to you either. The AAA at least has to pretend to hold to some code of conduct because that is what allegedly justifies the outsized power bequeathed to them.
What are institutions?
An organization with set of norms, traditions and procedures meant to direct people towards a goal over extended periods of time?
I know what you're getting at. I don't think an accretion of Twitter reposters make a good institution.
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.
Even if that were true (and it could be argued) does it matter? The Pax Romana was clearly a matter of military domination no matter how the Emperors justified it, and it clearly led to practical benefits for as long as it lasted.
The American-led, rules-based liberal international order was a better deal either way.
And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective.
Yes. It's actually lawless, contrary to what the supporters of this status quo claim. They are actively providing law-breakers an incentive to violate the actual laws of war because they don't want to feel mean.
This may apply elsewhere.
That said, some US wars were just stupid and that doesn't help. The sense of a lack of legitimacy doesn't make people want to jump into the meat grinder.
I'm blanking too tbh. The Trump administration is doing things suggested by many right wing policy wonks but there doesn't seem to be a central court philosopher . Someone like Patrick Deneen seems welcome in the Ezra Klein bubble last I checked but I don't think he has much say in the party and seems better as a critic than someone actually charting a path conservatives listen to. Other members of the DR right with their own ideas like MacIntyre are in the same Twitter economy grinding for likes.
Maybe Yarvin? He has pull with Silicon Valley types right?
This was basically Bad Blood's take on how Theranos happened. Young, demented girl looks out at all her SV heroes faking it till they make it. Wants to do the same thing but is too young and demented to realize it's one thing to say that for a digital widget and another to apply it to a much more unforgiving domain.
It has come to mind before with Elon, like when I heard him talking about cutting $2 trillion.
So, in fairness to Musk being incorrect sometimes: So to was the prior system sometimes incorrect! And just how incorrect it got and how impossible it was to fact check is practically why we have Musk where he is now.
His rejoinder might be that the prior system is a system. Randoms with social media sites doing it live isn't.
You've noted the downsides to systems but there are benefits.
One can imagine a different academy and press and have a coherent vision of how they might be better, even if it won't/can't happen for structural reasons. Some guy and his cronies just randomly being right continually seems unlikely even in theory. Why did we need institutions in the first place then?
I think the cancellation attempt right as his book was coming out damaged him more than it appeared at the time.
He can't become a "serious" right wing intellectual, either by gaining a patron in the Trump admin or being welcomed unto the Ezra Klein show and other such places when they need a steelman of what the Republicans are doing (by his own account the GOP is now too dumb to support them on its own - I suppose his behavior is congruent with his claims there).
So he's trapped in the Twitter/Substack attention economy and so has to find a niche. The current one works for him since he just seems to be of a disagreeable and trollish nature in general, and there is a lot in Trumpism to disagree with.
Tanista
19d ago
And market dominant minorities haven't worked as well in Africa. Consider, for example, the fate of the Indians in Uganda.
The Lebanese and Indians were disproportionately, visibly powerful in business as I was growing up in the 00s . The Lebanese had Islam and Arabophilia going for them I suppose. The Indians seemed fine without it.
I wonder how it's going with the Chinese now...
Tanista
19d ago
If anything, I'd argue that black Americans having the highest in-group bias disguises the fact that Americans as a whole, black Americans included, really aren't that racist.
They tend to be very good at absorbing black migrants from a different ethnicity in a way that other groups might struggle with (including those blacks in their own countries*). But it's just taken for granted that those people are the in-group, even by people criticizing the AA in-group bias.
A legacy of the focus on race I suppose.
* Or outside of them, sometimes.
Tanista
20d ago
Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the inferiority psycho-sexual complex arabs have towards whites. Can be seen in these reddit threads: here, here, and here.
It's very funny that the first one is from a Pakistani because I've heard them and other non-Arab Muslims be accused of the exact same thing except toward Arabs.
That's not my point. I said the LPC hasn't been banging the racist drum even though it's clear that basically every US administration has been getting more and more hawkish on China. Even when it demands actions that create problems for Canada.
Y'know, as we discussed all of a day ago.
it's just agitprop.
As opposed to blaming a lack of further integration on Canadian wokeness when Trump is the one taking a cleaver to his own trade deal because ?? tariffs.
Please
It can be argued that a lot of these things actually suit the class interests of the symbolic capitalist class.
Immigration, for example, is defended by the business elite on economic grounds. These people are not overly rich but they often work to manage these corporations and are not directly threatened by Uber drivers and can in fact make use of them to benefit from services that are far cheaper than they would be in a tighter labour market.
Censorship isn't even hard. It's a demand that power be taken from unaccountable social media billionaires (or just the general public) and placed in the hands of another group of allied bureaucrats in an organization filled with people they went to school with. Journalists and other groups demand outsized respect in the name of the special role they play in a democracy: informing people and, now, fighting "hate".
It's a noble lie. But a noble lie with some value.
This doesn't mean that they're actually purely pragmatic. In a more responsive system they would have tossed the worst excesses like trans nonsense overboard. But a religion acts on the elites who coopt it just as the elites act on it. The Saudis lived under some constraints too.
A big part of it, I think, is that SocJus mentality, of all of reality being dominated by power differentials, and as such, each individual of [demographic] is necessarily disadvantaged compared to each individual of [some other demographic]. This means that if that individual of [demographic] fails or just doesn't succeed as much as they imagine an individual of [some other demographic] would have, then their failure is due to the bigoted society that created these power dynamics that made them disadvantaged, rather than due to that individual's own flaws. This, of course, is how millionaire stars can claim to be lacking in "privilege" - the claim isn't that they're not wildly successful, but rather that they aren't as wildly successful as an equivalent person of [some other demographic] would have been. Also of course, this is completely unfalsifiable.
It's not actually clear that "the oppressed" succeed less in the industry. They succeed at different things because groups are different. Barbie dragged up Oppenheimer's numbers, not vice versa. It's just a naive form of blank slateism at play.
AFAIK Marvel movies usually skew at least 60% male* . Is it a shock that it takes them longer to have a female lead? Is that oppression?
The blank slateism is what convinces them that a boy brand like Star Wars is just as equally marketable and valuable if turned into a space princess brand. Hell, moreso. Since boys and girls both want to watch the exact same things you can just keep all of the legacy male fans from when the fandom skewed male and gain new fans who have the same autistic fixation on just how the hell Han did the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs when that is a unit of distance not time. You can swap in a five foot woman for a scarred John Connor and who but a bigot could feel their suspension of disbelief straining?
This might even be viable; these brands skew in one direction but have plenty of fans of both genders. But they can't sell it because they're in an echo chamber that validates their contempt for the audience. Claiming oppression is not just a way to try to create jobs for themselves, it allows objectively privileged people to "punch down" without that term ever being applied.
EDIT: apparently this is worse in the opening weekends, might even out more later as some sources claim. The Marvels was apparently 65% male, funnily enough
The point is not to change your mind. It's to draw in the sort of audience who moralizes their consumption in the way they want, that wants to "own the chuds". They want the fans that'll go stream Taylor Swift's re-recorded music ad nauseum because it's a blow against Scooter Braun and misogyny
although things will even out faster than a lot of people think.
It would. In the sense that America would simply become more like Canada.
The current partisan status quo works because neither side can seem to dominate Congress for an extended period of time. A bunch of Canadians come in - especially if they're pissed at how Trump managed it - and that changes. The GOP would have to be pulled to the left.
I guess it depends on whether you think the US would be better off being more like Canada rather than vice versa.
Canadians can’t agree with each other now, you think they’ll like their politicians better when they’re in Washington?
The Quebecois are one thing but I honestly think the rest of Canada will get over losing things like interprovincial barriers and bitchfights over pipelines quite fast.
Hell, some of them might appreciate no longer having to deal with all of the distinct society stuff.
In the meantime, why not play along? Trudeau or whoever is Canadian PM should go to Washington and tell Trump they’re very interested in the joining the USA, but the people aren’t all for it, it will take time to clear some internal hurdles, and while he tries to sell it to Canada he needs some tariff relief for goodwill purposes.
The problem is obvious: Trump cannot be trusted on anything, even his motives. This is not some separate issue from the OP's question.
How do you guarantee that, ten minutes after you leave, Trump will not be on Truth Social laying out the entire meeting and putting you in the worst light possible?
Canada didn't take a stance of "attacking China is racist" over the past few years when the past few administrations have increasingly become China hawks and drew Canada into things like the Huawei fight.
Trump on the other hand has shown himself to have a disdainful attitude towards the very countries he'd presumably be creating a unified bloc with for ?? reasons that no one can agree with.
All anyone wants is greater integration with America. If anything, part of Canada's weakness here is from becoming too complacent and relying on that. It was already going to happen if the US was bringing back manufacturing. The only impediment to more of that is Trump.
Imagining them deploying Dean Withers to Pied Piper Gen Z into a war in Ukraine has already made my morning brighter.
I think it's just a demographic thing. The Democrats especially have become even more dominated by the over-educated and, frankly, the feminine side of the party. The disdain for Rogan made no sense strategically, he was already reflexively left-wing on many things. The hall monitor/schoolmarm contingent simply couldn't help loathing the fact that this blue-collar rube had such a large audience without their gatekeeping. So they wrecked it. As they'll wreck the next thing.
These people might find it hard to pivot from "bro" being a pejorative to having those same bros fighting for their freedoms.
But hey, maybe the educational/gender polarization isn't as bad in Europe.
True, but also even academics with imagination have defended the idea that trans-inclusive gender schemes are incoherent
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