Buzzion

I mean....

In celebrations and love of Star Wars Expanded Universe: What is your favorite Star Wars Game (George Lucas Era)?

This is a complicated moral question, it's been troubling me for years, and I still don't have a stable answer. Most of the arguments for leaving the Sentinelese alone are romanticizing noble-savage bullshit. We know what life in societies like this is like - nasty, brutish, and short to a degree modern Westerners not only fail to understand but have difficulty even imagining. Technology and wealth can fix that. On the other hand, it is undeniable that contact with modern civilization would in a very meaningful sense destroy the Sentinelese; this experiment has already been run on their kin in the rest of the Andaman Islands and the results were dolorous. Many would be killed by disease. Many others would become addicted to alcohol. Still others would evade both those fates only to find that they're still incapable of having any role in modern society other than as dependents and impoverished day laborers. Only a lucky few at the right-hand end of their IQ bell curve would integrate successfully. The utilitarian question is whether improving the quality of life for their talented tenth outweighs what modernity would do to the rest of them. And there's another point: the Sentinelese have made it very clear that most of them want to be left alone. It's easy to argue that we're obligated to respect their autonomy, but - what of the children who gaze at passing ships and dream of escaping the primitive grind of their lives? This is a more significant question when you reflect that in societies like these a significant fraction of those children are quite likely to be raped by the men in their tribe before reaching adulthood. Such behavior is sometimes ritualized as tribal custom; field anthropologists know this, but generations of them have been politically conditioned never to reveal facts about the societies they study that could be construed as arguments for Western superiority. There are no facile answers. It's a variant of the trolley problem - we know that leaving the Sentinelese alone conduces to many kinds of harm, but busting their isolation would open them up to many different kinds of harm. Hands-off is an easy policy. At least we can tell ourselves we're not actively doing damage, and that what they do to each other is on them. I do wonder how often the children are being raped, though.

Marty O’Donnell, the composer behind the iconic soundtrack of the original Halo video game trilogy, is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District as a Republican. After placing fourth in the 2024 GOP primary, he has received President Donald Trump’s complete and total endorsement.

Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Han Solo at Galaxy’s Edge