Thorakitai Enthusiast

"Those people made war on us, defied and dared us to come [...] boasted they would kill us and do all manner of horrible things. We accepted their challenge, and now for them to whine and complain of the natural and necessary results is beneath contempt."

@IR_Wonk It'll be just like 1929 again!

@elephant_ben Given the relative scales of both condemnations and fighting over Israel as compared to Azerbaijan/Armenia, Germany/Czechia, Italy/Yugoslavia, Greece/Turkey, etc. a utilitarian would likely conclude ethnic cleansing is the lesser evil.

All the apartheid analogies in the world can’t avoid this is an ethnic conflict resembling Armenia and Azerbaijan if they didn’t fully expel each other than a system of colonial domination.

"And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived." Has any other phrase done more damage to online structural discourse?

@BlueRepublik Succs gonna succ

This is bad history, on at least two grounds British colonists who resisted the Tea Act did so because it validated the Townshend Tax on tea As a simple defeater - you cannot name a single Whig who staged the Boston Tea Party who supported the Townshend Act They don’t exist!

@cgp42 @estherzelda0514 I don't know how else to characterize the incompetent goings on between Hux, Holdo, Poe, and Leia. Bad intelligence, bad planning, bad execution. And slander not the Ewoks, for it was their local auxiliaries who made the only uses of indirect fires and engineering on screen.

@JTHReturns @estherzelda0514 TLJ has no idiot B plot. It does get a bit campy but so does RoTJ. I also love the direction TLJ took Luke & think it was a beautiful arc for his character. Sure, I was taken aback a bit when he flipped that saber, but we were supposed to be. I'm glad we didn't get the expected.

Because I'm old and was of an age to be sentient when the Prequels were released, I can tell you that, until The Clone Wars was released and redeemed the series, the hatred for the Prequels was incandescent and pervasive and much worse than the hatred for the Sequels, although the Sequels (IMO) are much worse. You have to understand, the Prequels were not "nerdy" when they began releasing in 1999. They were as mainstream as Jurassic Park or Titanic. Everyone watched them. You would be made fun of if you didn't, actually. Back then, we had a distinct monoculture, where everyone was expected to know of certain things. We did not have the fragmentation of the market into niches or gatekept streaming services. The Prequels were absolutely one of those things. Picture the cultural event of the Barbie movie, except ten-fold. The Phantom Menace was released in 1999. The hype was absolutely massive. However, this was then met with almost uniform backlash. Most people, even famous standups or talk show hosts, were making fun of how incredibly annoying Jar Jar Binks and young Anakin were. This was extremely mainstream, it was not consigned to just fans. While the podracing and Obi-Wan's duel with Darth Maul were praised, the rest of the movie was considered childish, with stupid dialogue, and bad CGI. While Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, and Natalie Portman were sparred, the voice actor for Jar Jar, Ahmed Best, and the child who played Anakin, Jake Lloyd, faced such severe harassment that they later admitted in a documentary to suffering severe, long-landing mental health issues. Attack of the Clones came out in 2002, and this was was considered not as childish as the Phantom Menace, but still very stupid. Everyone harassed Hayden Christensen for his wooden dialogue. The cultural consensus was that he was a pretty boy that lacked talent. This took its toll, as after the Prequel series, Christensen left mainstream Hollywood entirely. People really started concluding, around this time, that Lucas himself was to blame for how bad the Prequels were, citing the incredibly unconvincing romance between Padme and Anakin, and the ridiculousness of the dialogue in those scenes. However, Ewan McGregor remained very popular, Natalie Portman grew in popularity, and the key action scenes (e.g., Kenobi versus Fett, Yoda versus Dooku, and the Battle Of Geonosis sequence) were praised. Outside of the action scenes, people still criticized the CGI. Revenge of the Sith is what this sequence was from, and it came out in 2005. This was, far and beyond, the most well-received of the Prequels. People liked the dark tone, increased action, and how it finally linked the Prequels to the Original trilogy. However, Padme's death sequence was the subject of mainstream and late night talk show ridicule, and people still noted Christensen's poor performance, melodrama, and stilted dialogue. There were some slap fights among fans whether this was on par with any installment of the Original trilogy, with people who had spent the last six years despising the Prequels extremely loud and insistent that it was still unredeemable garbage. None of these movies were at all safe to admit that you liked until The Clone Wars, nostalgia, and the poor quality of the Sequels redeemed them in retrospect. However, what is interesting is that the action sequences in the Prequels were always its strongest point, and most reasonable haters could admit that they were quite good. In contrast, the action sequences in the Sequels were always noted to be lackluster in comparison, and were criticized at release. However, the Sequel hate did not reach anything like the volume of the Prequel hate. Even The Last Jedi, the most controversial installment, was criticized only in niche circles. It wasn't the topic of mainstream jokes. When The Rise of Skywalker bombed, we all collectively winced and agreed it was bad, and moved on. There was little of the overwhelming monoculture discourse that accompanied the Prequels. Remember, the Prequels were released at a time when the monoculture was relentless in immiserating pop stars it deemed fair game. That dynamic of the culture no longer existed by 2015.

@cgp42 @estherzelda0514 SW of old worked because it had two interacting plots (the shenanigans of the space wizards and the conventional conflict) which reinforced each other. It doesn't matter how good the A (IMO Rey was the only character not trampled in TLJ) if the B is practically an idiot plot.

@JTHReturns @estherzelda0514 TLJ played more as a twist on the standard mythology (or even the trope). That was what people who hated it were sp upset by. If the 3rd film just goes with that it all fits together just fine. Sure, they could have preplanned the trilogy but that rarely happens or holds.

@cgp42 @estherzelda0514 But the same can't be said for sequel antagonists. The arms dealers are an insufficient explanation for their armament, if they had the cash to afford fleets and planet killers at market they'd have the infrastructure themselves and would have been a state, not an LRA-analogue.

@cgp42 @estherzelda0514 It makes sense there: that the emperor is arrogant and refuses to change his strategy even as it fails before his eyes is a crucial point for both the conventional war and the space wizard plot. And he controlled the same infrastructure and taxing potential that built the first.

@cgp42 @estherzelda0514 Really, a problem with TFA too, since it contrived to revert the ending of the original trilogy as quickly as possible. New republic? What new republic?

@cgp42 @estherzelda0514 Ironic since walking back plot hooks and characterization from the previous installment was part of TLJ's problems as well. The inability to commit to anything was a big impediment to caring about the sequels.

@DerekPederson3 V-Dem is a terrible index to use, tbh.

By the standards of the Arab world, yes, but this is mostly just indicative of how bad those standards are for democracy. Israel OTOH is a democracy, even if a flawed one, by Western standards for the term. Some selected 2025 V-Dem scores for reference: Denmark: 0.91 Canada: 0.84 Iceland: 0.81 United States: 0.73 (was 0.90 pre-Trump) Israel: 0.69 Peru: 0.67 Armenia: 0.61 Mexico: 0.47 Somaliland: 0.45 Hungary: 0.42 Lebanon: 0.42 Tunisia: 0.40 (was 0.71 before the self-coup under Saied, and that brief period represents the most liberal democratic government to ever exist in the Arab world) Ukraine: 0.39 (was 0.54 before the war) Iraq: 0.37 Turkey: 0.29 Jordan: 0.26 Venezuela: 0.21 Egypt: 0.18 Oman: 0.17 Russia: 0.17 Iran: 0.16 Sudan: 0.13 Syria: 0.13 The UAE: 0.10 North Korea: 0.08 Afghanistan: 0.07 China: 0.07 Saudi Arabia: 0.02

@TonySopranoLCN @estherzelda0514 There is a certain poetic justice that their presumed rush for SW caused them to wreck GoT and the resulting public furor in turn cost them SW.

@JTHReturns @estherzelda0514 Now that I think about it...the GoT ending made my hate for Disney Star Wars WORSE...I'll elaborate... At the time, it was rumored D&D were getting a SW trilogy. I think they rushed GoT last 3 seasons in order to get to that Star Wars money...effectively ruining GoT and SW both

@nobodyknows2322 We already let that horse out of the paddock when we handed over China's seat.

And fully buried when we allowed the Russian Federation to inherit the USSR's legal personality and, thus, the veto This was a grave error. Russia was on its back in 1991. We could've refused, and insist 'no, you are a new nation. No permanent UNSC seat.'

With hindsight? It was dead the moment the Soviet Union was giving a permanent Security Council seat and a veto

@MadelaineLucyH I actually agree. So much of the books is wacky magic school hijinks barely connected (if at all) to the larger plot. Tight focus on the adventure robs the writing of its youthful whimsy.

I’ll be beaten for this but I think there is actually a version of Harry Potter that works well as a TV series. Think more The Worst Witch than Lord of The Rings. More cosy cute one episode stories. But this? Why?

I have never heard anyone make a convincing argument for why the US regime change being morally responsible for the actions of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq wouldn't also make the Union's decision to topple the Confederacy morally responsible for the formation of the Ku Klux Klan insurgency in the South. But I think there's four reasons here: A) Time distance, and particular sensitivity to racial issues in the American South today. Many people probably actually would have made this argument in the past. B) The soft bigotry of low expectations. In the eyes of many people, American Southerner Whites can be held morally responsible for their own actions but Arabs can not be held to this standard. C) It's not the real reason they oppose the Iraq War, they just think it was a costly and unnecessary war that harmed the United States, but in order to maintain their self-image as a good person they claim that it is because of their dubious "humanitarian concern" for Iraqis who supposedly benefitted from the barbaric Sunni minority-led Hussein regime. D) Perhaps even more important, they're not really than engaged in the Iraq War on any level, but they are depely engaged in the meta-conversation surrounding it in which it is seen as a good "gotcha" against certain politicians that they dislike for other reasons and they don't want to give that up.

I’m a ferocious critic of the reparations movement at the best of times, but the idea that *Ghana and African states* should get slavery reparations is a new level of abject absurdity. African kingdoms in for example today’s Ghana were the ones who SOLD slaves to European powers!

The talk was interrupted by a scuffle after audience members spotted three pro-Israel attendees (who were livestreaming/filming). Robinson spotted them, and according to critical accounts, he invited the 60–80 mostly anti-Israel audience members to “decide their fates,” after which the pro-Israel individuals were kicked, punched, and dragged out. In footage, Robinson reportedly suggested the situation could lead to “murder” and appeared amused rather than de-escalating.

Won't someone think of the poor Chinese farmers who could be lifted out of poverty if it weren't for the evil Ukrainian destruction of innocent civilian Russian petroleum products. –Human Rights Watch, probably