I actually have met a concerning number of people who idolize The Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy. The one who was always loudest about it willingly moved to Florida recently and is turning sadly right wing. He used to be a super smart punk rocker, too.
That’s strange since the movies don’t really try to give The Empire any redeeming values. It’s pretty literally and figuratively black and white.
But The Empire has a better costume department. …Man I guess I’m in.
Better costumes, better toys, no restrictions on the use of force power (can choke out anyone you like).
Let’s face it, Darth Vader is one of the coolest villains of all time. Tons and tons of kids who grew up on Star Wars fantasized about being powerful like him and choking out their enemies in the schoolyard.
Through victory my chains are broken. For the Empire! In all seriousness though, it’s fictional space fantasy. When I was a kid, watching the OG trilogy, I always supported the rebels, but as I got older I slowly became way more into the empire. Sometimes it’s just fun to root for the bad guys. Also the dogmatic nature of the Jedi becomes glaringly more obvious as you get older.
The Republic turned on and tried to assassinate the democratically elected leader because of his religion, and because they didn’t want to stop all the wars Republic was constantly fighting, supporting crime syndicates etc.
Turns out siding with the resistance in a movie doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t have the potential to have your family tracked and killed by the state. It doesn’t have the potential for you to end up even worse off than you already are.
A lot of people side with their own resistances in the real world, but there’s a reason all of the resistance fighters in the movies are beaten-down, destitute people. They’ve got nothing to lose. We’ve still got our bread and circuses, so we don’t have the fight.
The problem is that people can map fictional resistance movements onto opposite real life parties. In my college poli Sci class, both I (a known lefty) and the most conservative guy in class excitedly supported the idea of showing V for Vendetta. I guarantee the January 6 guys thought they were in an underdog resistance movement.
The problem is that both sides see themselves as the resistance.
Obligatory Independent contractors working on the uncompleted death star…
He’s so right. Free Puerto Rico!
Hooo boy. Try saying that in PR. Some of them want statehood, some of them want to stay a territory, but I’m not aware of any of them that actually want to leave the US.
Are there any advantages to the average resident to being a territory vs statehood?
I understand the advantages of being part of the US vs not being part of the US, but are there any drawbacks to statehood?
They might be looking at how native Hawaiians are treated in Hawaii
https://raginithewriter.medium.com/pros-and-cons-of-puerto-rico-becoming-a-state-e2c15ddac230
This seems to be a fairly neutral analysis of the situation. I don’t believe that the tax and debt points are actually cons for PR, as much as the greater US. I do see the potential for loss of culture to be a potential disadvantage to PR. Economically it’s kind of a no-brainer on their part.
One reason for this is these shows don’t tend to show the morally questionable things a resistance has to do to be able to win. So it’s a lot easier to side with the resistance in Star Wars when they’re just fighting conventionally against the empire. I think a much better depiction of resistance can be seen in Star Trek Deep Space Nine with the Bajorans. They fought the Cardasians in a guerilla war which often led to civilians on both sides being killed. It’s a lot more murky but the Bajorans are still unequivocally viewed as the good guys since it was the only way to resist and get rid of the Cardasians and stop them from killing their people.
What about the Maquis? That’s another side to a resistance. Most times resistance movements accomplish exactly nothing and everyone would have been better off if they just worked with the existing government to improve things. Sometimes it’s just about egos and personal vendettas more than they are about any kind of cause. A lot of people die for nothing.
Other than the Maquis, we mostly tell the stories about resistances that were successful. This serves to romanticize the idea of a resistance and makes people feel that victory for a resistance is inevitable. It’s not. Most of the time it’s just causing death and destruction so that a few resistance leaders can have power over people before the resistance movement fades out.
Nearly every resistance movement ever has been pushed by outside actors. It’s extremely rare for these outside actors to have the best interests of the people they’re supposedly supporting. Countries don’t have friends, they have interests. This aspect of a resistance is rarely portrayed in fiction too.
While I do generally agree there are times when working with the government isn’t possible, much like with what’s happening in Israel. Israel has shown they’re not gonna make things better unless they’re forced to. Sure you can argue the resistance isn’t gonna work and is just a way for the leaders to have power but that doesn’t mean resisting in general isn’t justified. Even if resistance is futile it doesn’t mean that trying to resist is bad.
Israel’s primary motive has always been the safety of their people. Currently there’s Israelis being held against their will in Gaza.
It’s not really all that complicated really. Biden is doing his best to get Hamas to release the hostages, but Hamas just isn’t doing that. Israel isn’t going to just say “I guess it’s fine for Hamas to do whatever they want with our people”.
With the Palestinian resistance, it’s a “you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain” kind of thing. If land was taken from you, sure the people that took it from you have done you wrong. But if you’re using violence because to restore the ethnic makeup to how it was in a history book, then you’re a fascists. Over time it has changed from the first to the latter. They should’ve taken taken the deal offered in the 1990s but they chose to continue using violence instead. So now if there ever is a Palestinian state it will be much worse off than it would’ve been had there not been a resistance. People could be living good lives, their families would be safe living in a Palestinian state if not for this romanticized resistance. As the resistance continues a potential future Palestinian becomes more and more diminished.
This is the problem with the romantization of resistance, and war in general. We have a strange respect for Germans who fought to the bitter end in WWII and we don’t respect Italian soldiers who surrendered at first contact with the enemy. Personally I respect Italians who refused to fight for Mussolini over the Germans who fought to the bitter end for Hitler. Similarly I also don’t respect people who fight for the authoritarian Hamas who are only hurting the Palestinian people.
The world would be a better place if we didn’t romanticize using violence for lost causes under authoritarian leaders.
I’m not arguing that Israel should just sit down and let them do whatever they want. I’m just saying that resistance is justified when it’s clear all the other side wants to do is take your home and push you and your people out. Israel is ultimately responsible for giving evil groups like Hamas support as it’s hard for Palestinians to care about their beliefs when the other side is indiscriminately killing your people and trying to either push you out or treat you as a second class citizen. All they see is a group that is trying to fight against the people doing that so they support it. Cause the only other option is to lay down and get bulldozed by Israel. Without fighting Israel has no reason to care or negotiate, and even with fighting they barely have a reason to care with all the support they get from the western world.
Also it’s pretty clear they don’t really care about the safety of their people. See all the protests against how the government is handling the situation in Israel and the fact that their indiscriminate fighting against Hamas has killed many of the hostages they’re trying to save. It’s just an excuse to expand their control and get rid of more of the Palestinians from the region.
I do agree that the goals of getting rid of Jews from the region are terrible and not possible but the solution isn’t to let them keep pushing the Palestinians out more and more. That would be like saying during the time of manifest destiny well it’s impossible to give the native Americans all their land back cause we live here now so they should stop fighting back and let us take more of their land.
Do you think Palestinians are animals? You’re talking as if Palestinians aren’t responsible for their actions and aren’t capable of making rational decisions. So it seems to me that you think Palestinians are animals and no one should expect them to act like civilized people.
And that’s where we disagree. I think Palestinians are people and therefore are responsible for their actions. What Hamas did on October 7 was a decision they made. They are responsible for that decision. They should face justice for what they did just as any other people in the world would. Because they aren’t animals, they are people that committed a horrible crime.
Ideally the Palestinian people would turn on Hamas and send the leaders of Hamas to either Israel (or the ICJ if they’re capable of considering Palestinians as humans that are responsible for their actions) to face justice for the crimes they committed. But they aren’t doing that. That is a decision they are making. Because they are people making decisions, not animals.
Because of the inability (or unwillgness) of the Palestions to remove Hamas from power, military action is required. At the very least to get the hostages out. Ideally to bring the leadership of Hamas to justice if that’s possible.
I think because you’re thinking of Palestinians as animals that aren’t capable of making decisions and therefore aren’t responsible for their actions you can’t understand the magnitude of the crimes Hamas has committed.
Please make more of an effort to think of Palestinians as people that are responsible for their actions, ok?
No I’m just saying that Israel is more responsible for Hamas than the Palestinians. If Israel wanted to they could stop their oppressive programs and the expansion of their state through settlers. They could take more care when trying to fight Hamas which it’s pretty clear they don’t right now with the number of civilian deaths and massacres that have happened. You’re trying to say instead of resisting that they should try to negotiate, but without the threat of violent resistance if the negotiations don’t go through then what reason does Israel have to negotiate? If there’s no resistance they can just ignore the Palestinians attempts to negotiate or stall them indefinitely while they continue to push them out of their homes. And yes Hamas is bad and them winning wouldn’t be a good thing but it’s understandable why Palestinians would support them when the only other option is to lay down and die. And yes their resistance is probably not gonna stop Israel in the long run, only international pressure and sanctions on Israel would actually get them to stop the terrible things they’re doing. But that doesn’t mean trying to resist is bad cause again the only other option is to lay down and let the Israel state bulldozer over you and your people.
The Palestinian struggle is one source of inspiration for the Bajorans. It boggles my mind when I read comments that ‘Bajoran’ episodes are boring.
The Palestinian struggle would get more sympathy if Hamas wasn’t involved. Hamas is delighted with the high civilian death toll because of the backlash against Israel from people who place far more value on human lives than they do.
They blew up the death star! That was full of people. Thousands and thousands of soldiers and engineers, pilots etc. We all cheered. Id say it was pretty morally questionable.
Isn’t the death star specifically a military spaceship? You can’t just choose not to fire at a battleship just because there are engineers who won’t personally shoot at you in it.
The fucked up part is that the right wingers think they are the resistance. And that the liberals are the evil empire trying to take over everything.
Lol, is this dude a right winger? I just assumed lefty commie based on the rhetoric. Clearly we need to lower taxes on the rich to solve the problem.
Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age or a neo classical economist what tax breaks for the rich doesn’t fix.
Clearly we need to lower taxes on the rich to solve the problem.
This is what’s literally been happening since the early '80s. So far it’s not working out very well. And all those dipshits who want to roll back our country to the “Great Again” 1950’s and 60’s don’t seem to realize that that is when we had the absolute highest tax rate on the wealthy in the country. It was at almost 90% marginal tax rate.
But no, you think what’s holding them back from spending their massive wealth is that the government is taking too much right now. 🙄 What a joke.
Imagine a movie where some random guys and a scientist need to find a cure to a zombie outbreak or some chemical attack. They did it, we saved the world, now people just have to take our medicine. Uhm, seems kinda rushed. Are zombies even real? My cousin said he knows a guy who worked with a guy who took it and now he’s blind from birth.
Yeah but in a movie there’s just as likely to be a twist that the medicine is what was turning people into zombies in the first place.
You watched starship troopers and sided with the humans… Oh wait…
FOR MANAGED DEMOCRACY AND SUPER EAAAAAARTH
/c/helldivers2 is leaking again
You were awake when your elementary school teacher taught you about the American Civil War, and you didn’t side with the resistance.
At this point, I alone am the fucking villain. I don’t CARE what you subscribe to. You can be a vegan solarpunk eco-terrorist, you can be a gun-weilding nutjub, you can be reasonable, you can be unreasonable, fuck it. I want you dead or me dead because I fucking hate all of humanity.
a well adjusted lemming here ^^
You watched “Ender’s Game” and sided with the humans (almost) annihilating an intelligent species.
It depends a lot on how the story is told.
Nobody sided with the military in Ender’s Game once they understood what was really going on. That’s the whole point of the story.
You clearly did not read the book
And which side in the real world is the “resistance”? The one that is portrayed by state sponsored media? The one that has a president in the White House? The one that dominates modern culture? If you’re a Democrat or a Republican, all of these statements apply to you, and you’re not part of the resistance, you’re part of the institution.
This is about Hamas not the uni-party theater in America.
Hamas isn’t “the resistance.” They’ve been in power in Gaza for almost twenty years. They murdered their political opposition and became a single party Islamic dictatorship.
Furthermore, they committed a massacre to provoke Israel into a war, in hopes that Israel’s response would lead to the brutal deaths of a lot of Palestinian civilians and lead the world to naively become sympathetic to their cause (destroying the state of Israel, instituting an Islamic dictatorship with Sharia law in Palestine, and eliminating all Jews, Christians, atheists, Hindu, and Shia Muslims from the region).
Hamas is cartoonishly evil. Much like Netanyahu.
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Yep
If I’m going to have such brain rot that I’ll be supporting Hamas after 8 months here I should probably just leave now.
Imagine if neo had been throwing gay people off buildings or jedi were honor killing women that stray from their strict rules. V was a bit brutal and psycho but he didn’t parade dead women in the back of a pickup…
If you can’t understand why people don’t see the situation as simplisticly as a movie then you surely haven’t been paying attention to anything except what you want to hear
Link me your evidence of Hamas throwing gay people off buildings, mister well informed person.
In real life the “badies” think of themselves as “goodies”, so what some see as “goodies” vs “badies” others will see as “badies” vs “goodies”.
I mean, it would be really nice if the “badies” were going around openly admitting they’re hurting other people because of the pain of others makes them feel good or that they simply want to take their shit and not to have to worry about payback “because we killed the fuckers”, but that’s not what they do: they give justifications like “they attacked us, we’re just defending ourselves”, “they’re the ones who want to hurt/genocide us”, or even “we have Western (i.e. good) values whilst they’re human animals” (if this sounds a lot like Zionists propaganda points, that’s because they are, though it’s really a more general “Fascist etnostate”-speak genre).
they give justifications like “they attacked us, we’re just defending ourselves”, “they’re the ones who want to hurt/genocide us”
This is also the justification for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. The goal is to protect Israelis… it’s just there happens to be some Israelis in Gaza against their will right now as they’re being held hostage. And it’s not just Hamas that celebrates the massacre of Jews on October 7, you see signs at protests in the west celebrating it now.
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The NAZIs also claimed their goal was to defend the Arian Race from the Jews who had infiltrated they system and wanted to destroy it.
All ethno-Fascists (who are far the worst and most violent kind of Fascist) claim that their goal is the protection of their ethnicity.
The way you spot their excuses are just ethno-Fascist bullshit rather than truthfull, is because they’re very overtly racist about their enemy (such as calling them “human animal” and claiming they’re all as an ethnicity violent based on the action of just a few), have calous disregard for the life of innocents (more thank 10k children murdered, journalists targetted, hospitals targetted, medical personnel executed and burried in common graves) and inflict incredibly disproportionate hurt to those they deem to be defending themselves from (the number of Palestinians killed just in Gaza now is already over 30x the Israelis killed on on the 7th of October and even before all that the rate of Palestinians killed vs Israelis killed in the ongowing occupation was in average above 10x, most of Gaza has been razed versus a few houses burned in Israel).
People genuinelly defending themselves don’t do those things.
It’s not by chance that the broader opinion in the West changed over time against Israel as the Gaza invasion went: people kept seeing more and more indications that what the Israelis were doing was not at all the “defending themselves” they claimed because it was a needlessly excessive and violent way, by quite an incredibly distance, to reach the goal they stated it was. So more and more people concluded this wasn’t defense, it was violent murderous offense to the level of Genocide.
Do you imagine anyone is triggered by comparing Israel to Nazis? Do you think anything you wrote is original. Nope. It’s boring. And wrong. Get some new propaganda, ok?
The IDF exists to protect Israeli people. You don’t seem to be aware of this, but there are currently Israeli people being held against their will in Gaza. Therefore the IDF is in Gaza. It’s not that complicated.
Lets make it extremelly simple to understand:
- Even the most violent murderous sociopathic regime in the History of Mankind claimed their actions were for “defense” of their ethnicity.
Hell, fucking Ku-Klux-Klan claims they’re defending “the white race”.
Every single violent racist fascist sociopath out there claims their murderous ways are “defense” and it’s always for an ethnicity and it’s always against people of another specific ethnicity.
Normal people who are not Fascists or Sociopaths do not claim they stand for an ethnicity, and they certainly do not murder tens of thousands of innocent civilians of a different ethnicity whilst claiming they’re doing it as “defense”.
So when the Zionists and the murderous sociopathic dogs in IDF who kill children and laugh about it, claim their murder of tens of thousands of children and other innocent civilians from another ethnocity is “defense”, everybody who is not a Moron or a Sociopath gets reminded of all the other violent murderous sociopathic regimes who did the exact same thing and used the exact same excuse, and, yeah, that includes the bloody Nazis.
Don’t want to be compared to the Nazis, don’t act like the fucking Nazis, don’t use the exact same fucking propaganda tricks as the Nazis.
Interesting that you think Hamas has the right to fight for the rights of their ethnicity but Israel doesn’t have the right to defend their people from Hamas making ethnic attacks.
I wish we lived in a world where a Jewish state wasn’t necessary because antisemitism didn’t exist anymore. But unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. Antisemitism is still alive and growing stronger. On October 7, Hamas succeeded in removing all doubt in my mind of the necessity of a Jewish state. The antisemitic acts of protesters in the West has only re-inforced that. The UN and many countries around the world showing sympathy for Hamas after they committed genocide, makes it certain there needs to be at least one country in the world where Jews can find sanctuary when the endless cycle of antisemitism turns people towards irrational hatred of Jews.
You will likely deny the antisemitsm happening in the world right now because that fits with the narrative being pushed on you by authoritarians. Your denial means nothing, because there’s more people that know what’s happening then there are people like you that rationalize your hatred. And even if you can get people in positions of power to fall in line with your hateful thoughts about Jews, there is a place they can go to escape that oppression that you want to inflict on Jews.
It’s not because of me that there needs to be a Jewish state. It’s because of people like you there needs to be a Jewish state.
That’s one big strawman you built there and I’m sure you thoroughly trashed it with that long post of yours.
Shame that I never said any of that and all you’re fighting is your own presumption that others think and see the World like yourself and hence that those who disagree with you must be a mirror image of you “on the other side”, complete with looking at everybody as “ethnics” and judging people’s actions based on their ethnicity.
Your entire post reads like The Racist’s View Of The World complete with thinking your “adversary” must be a racist of the “other side”, with race-based double standards and hypocrisy and riddled with prejudiced generalisations and presumptions about people belonging to various ethnicities including Jews, and is a wonderful example of the very ethno-Fascist sloganeering I’ve pointed out comes from Zionists.
Not a single Humanist argument in sight, not a single “respect for all human life independently of ethnicity” consideration, it’s all about race.
The term Jewish is complicated, as it’s a vague concept around both ethnicity and religion. Israel has conducted military operations in Africa to save Jews that are ethnically black in the past. So it’s not exactly an ethno-state as the narratives you want to believe tell you.
For the most part Israel is the anti-antisemitsm country. Victims of antisemitsm are welcome there because in the past there were no countries that would provide sanctuary to Jews fleeing oppression. And it’s easy to see that occurring again with the rise of antisemitism around the world lately.
The term Zionist is an attempt to create a permission structure for antisemitism. Overt racism towards all Jews will turn people off. But if you create a subset of Jews that it’s acceptable to attack then more people will be sympathetic. Once you’ve turned people against a subset of Jews then they will look the other way on overt antisemitsm by their allies.
Look into the term “Cosmopolitan Jew”. This isn’t the first time this has happened.
I am making humanist arguments, but if you’re having trouble understanding it may be because you’re not seeing Jews as being human.
People side with the version of events they are told
Why is it so hard to grasp? Do you think people are siding with the resistance in the works if they’re presented as the bad guys? Did you side with Scar in Lion King?
I did… the elites were oppressing the hyenas for generations spewing out bullshit propaganda about it being cool to kill sentient beings because of some “circle of life” bullshit.
Sure, Scar wasn’t a good leader, but toppling the Mufasa regime wasn’t wrong.
Scar would have gone on to improve living conditions of zebras if only he’d had a second term.
Weird. I dont remember Neo murdering civilians and then parading their naked bodies around while pelting them stones. I also dont recall the rebel founding charta mentioning something about a holy war of eradication against all clones in the galaxy.
Maybe, just maybe, the real isnt like a neat 3 hour film with clearly established sides and maybe we could acknowledge that neither Hamas nor the fucking IDF is remotely close to being good. But nah, that would require us to not make cheap point for likes on twitter.
You know that the hamas is not the whole resistance neither the only one being bombed, right ? Also, you should watch Andor
it is the largest armed group in Gaza. And the largest force of armed resistance. The other parts of the armed resistance that also participated in 7/10 arent better.
did i ever claim they all deserve to be bombed? The civilians in Gaza and the West Bank certainly dont deserve be bombed. Just like the rave attendents didnt deserve to be murdered.
