Jed Dawson

"Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins." - Jacques Ellul

"Say, Paul - can we encircle you and beat you with wiffleball bats until we tire of it? We can put it on Netflix. Don't answer yet. Marinate in it."

@XusernameLW610 @StarWarsDaily_ Oh, sure. The Force as telekinesis is a pretty useful power fantasy. But the Force as it exists in Star Wars is much more sophisticated, and it opens the door more a more elevated story to tell.

@TheRealJed @StarWarsDaily_ Thanks, I usually get grief ha ha

What is your biggest Star Wars hot take?

@somanyshrimp When I think of how many female stars that followed saw Janet as the template...can't argue.

@TheRealJed Not even the most influential in his own family

People really want “popular” to mean “influential”. Those are different things

@_DJShort Marvelous.

D'Angelo covering 'The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker' by Prince

This sounds like a lo-fi Van Halen circa 1986 and it is immensely appealing.

This is a very useful perspective for considering this franchise. In Star Wars, the Force is this unseen, unseeable connection to life itself. In Empire, it becomes a tool. Something to leverage to impose one's will.

@XusernameLW610 @StarWarsDaily_ This is quite good.

@StarWarsDaily_ The Empire Strikes Back destroyed Star Wars by turning The Force into telekinesis.

@Clint_Davey1 The people who don't understand the reference to World War II need to seek out The Dam Busters or 633 Squadron.

The original Star Wars movies were so loved because: -Spaceships and laser swords are cool. -It's WW2 in space mixed with a Western in space. All-American tropes like gunslinger and fighter pilot, but in a space opera. -It has a religion that is real. Yes its kind of cringey 1970's California Buddhism but it's still in there. Plus the religion assists with laser sword fights. -The setting has a delightful archaeo-futurist tone. It's after the fall of a cleaner, better civilisation ("an elegant weapon....from a more civilised time...") and it has a mix of hard sci-fi tech and scrappy junkyard tech plus all kinds of aliens that just exist as a kind of backdrop. -The acting is fine, the pacing is excellent, the dialogue has just enough exposition to let you figure out what's going on but not too much to ruin the mystery. -Nothing like it had ever been made. It felt genuinely new. And the scale of the story was so large, it felt impossibly epic. For the 70's it really did blow people's minds.

This all happens at a point when guitar music had been bulldozed by corporate mandate into this garish, limited artistic ghetto. They should be hailed as liberators.

Not to be too reductionist, but Sonic Youth wove together disparate strands of guitar music, including the abrasive boundary-pushing of Downtown in the 70s, the ethereal tones of Joni Mitchell, the raw exuberance of the early Grateful Dead, and the power of hardcore.

As someone who started listening to Sonic Youth over 30 years ago, the fact that they are still so polarizing is only a testament to their power. If they were frauds, if their work had no meaning or weight, if they were grifters of a sort, they would be forgotten.

It is perverse to hear Fela Kuti's music in a commercial for a gambling app.

@BRyvkin Regardless, it seems our friends in the academy are needing a period to grieve a loss of sorts.

Marx was a ne'er-do-well bum whose ideas grew dumber and more ridiculous the more he had to leech off family and friends (and family of friends, in the case of Engels) to pay the bills and avoid being productive. So best to treat his pontifications on this and most other things with the same contempt as he held those closest to him.

David Reich on how much ancient DNA evidence has overturned so much consensus thinking how ancient cultures spread. "It wasn't peaceful, it wasn't friendly, it wasn't nice. Some of our archaeologist co-authors were just really distressed."

Since when was it consensus that ancient cultures were peaceful, friendly, and non-violent in their expansion? What’s this guy playing at?