
Yoda Is Dead but Star Wars’ Dubious Lessons Live On - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/yoda-is-dead-but-star-wars-dubious-lessons-live-on
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legulere
I think the worst about our media, is that most stories are based on dividing
people into good and evil. This way of thinking is also very common in our
society.

Why do criminals and terrorists act like they do? If you ask people they will
tell you because they're evil. But actually nobody is evil, everybody wants
something positive. The question is just for whom they think it will be
positive and why they think it is positive to do. When you think that they're
evil on the other hand you don't have to think about anything and just fight
them, because good needs to fight evil.

~~~
ignoramous
I don't know why you would think that killing innocent people isn't evil.

If you delibrately disturb harmony, or deny someone their rights, or take away
something by force that isn't yours, you need to be stopped. Because one thing
would lead to another and life as everyone knows it would become a living
hell.

Step back and look at oppressive regimes over the course of history. They all
have traces of evil in them. It's that simple. I admit that good for one might
be evil for another, but there's a basic set of things, I guess, the majority
can agree on about what's good and what's not.

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delluminatus
Are you familiar with the Trolley Problem? [0] It's a simple thought
experiment, which is intended to make you re-think whether murder is always an
evil act.

Suppose a trolley is barelling down a track towards five tied-down people. If
it continues, it'll kill them. But, you have access to a lever which would
send the trolley down a side-track instead. But the side-track also has one
person tied to it. By pulling the lever, you are effectively murdering that
helpless, innocent person -- but you would save the other five. If you don't
touch the lever, then you are just an innocent bystander who happened to see a
quintuple homicide.

In this case, if you insist that murder is evil, and you refuse to be evil,
then you have no choice but to let the five people die. But if you allow that
murder is sometimes okay -- which is a utilitarian perspective, in the sense
that you care more about the ends than the means -- then it becomes much
fuzzier whether murder is inherently evil. Indeed, as soon as you give an
explicit definition for evil, it becomes very difficult to defend it. The fact
of the matter is, the good/evil dichotomy is false and artificial.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem)

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oldmanjay
Philosophizing abstractly about edge cases is fun but it doesn't really offer
anything useful for day-to-day basic living. It's pretty clear that to a
vanishingly small gap, murder is 100% evil.

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jpfr
Discussing edge cases is just the way to find out if a concept (either a
technical model or a qualitative worldview) is generally applicable.

Especially if those concepts are touted as being all-encompassing, holding
without exception or being superior to other concepts.

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bshimmin
I get the feeling this guy takes _Star Wars_ (and probably himself) just a
little worryingly seriously.

I can't really understand what he's saying - that George Lucas is evil? That
the _Star Wars_ films are promoting Lucas' evil agenda? That no one has
actually noticed any of this and that's bad?

The cynic in me wonders if perhaps David Brin has a new novel coming out
soon...

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RodericDay
If I wanted to understand a culture via their movies, I would not reach out
exclusively for their serious dramas, historical pieces, and solemn biopics. I
would certainly rope stuff like Star Wars in.

The way I see it, there was a fascinating trend in action movies throughout my
life, when the hero went from plain good 100% hero (say, a late 80s hero), to
a grizzled guy that's ultimately got his heart in the right place (Wolverine
types, Die Hard types), to fairly despicable people that "go out like men"
doing epic stuff (Walter White), to completely messed up manipulative people
that are triumphant and that's it (House of Cards dude).

People find this kind of analysis very non-rigorous, but I often feel like the
fact that these were successively popular with American audiences matches
pretty well the changing self-image of America-the-nation. From pretense of
full-righteousness to cynical "realism" and taking pride in "somebody has to
do it" to "at least we're on top".

So, I think extremely deep reads of fairly shallow but resonant fiction are
often very worthwhile.

edit: Of course, someone will point out that these are popular with different
demographics and whatnot, that my cohort aged, etc.- I'm not going to turn
this into a rigorous statistical analysis. It's just musings.

~~~
chr15p
I was about to laugh at you for not realising that Netflix's House Of Cards is
actually a remake of a BBC series from 1990, but on reflection that probably
adds to your point.

Many British films of the 1950's and 60's (also being non-rigorous!) are
morally very black and white, lots of war movies, but also things like the
early James Bond films have an absolute faith that Britain was a world power,
maybe alongside the US and USSR, but still important, whereas by the late
1980's that self confidence had pretty much gone and instead you get the
shades of grey and cynicism of things like House Of Cards.

Of course Britain's loss of empire was much more definitive then any US
decline, which is mostly a post-9/11 post-iraq war loss of confidence but
there is an interesting parallel.

Most programmes are a commentary on the time they are made, not the time they
are set so I agree deep reads can be very revealing.

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babatong
He obviously has the right to his own opinion, but it would help if he
actually gave the impression of watching the films thoroughly.

To quote:

"The force was only a little bit about talent and more about training: Obi-Wan
offers to teach it to Han"

This simply does not happen anywhere, neither in the films nor in the now de-
cannoned EU.

He also gets the plotlines of Ep. II and III quite mixed up in a few
paragraphs about Yoda, and fails to realise that the Republic is hardly
modelled on a modern-day parliamentary democracy but rather the fatally flawed
Weimar Republic.

While this doesn't necessarily invalidate his trains of thought, it certainly
makes their basis scientifically dishonest.

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mratzloff
Some commenters disputed the Han statement, and some others flew to his
defense. His own defense of that statement was rather uncharitable to the
objectors and he coyly avoided pointing out where exactly it occurred.

I myself reviewed the script several times, and I couldn't find it anywhere.
The only time the topic came up with Han and Ben was while Luke was training
with the helmet and droid, and Ben definitely does not offer to train him. So
I'm confused where he seems to think this occurred.

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enlightenedfool
I think what I didn't like is that while it required lot of training to be
Jedi in the past, Rey seemed to have miraculously acquired congenitally. Or
did I not notice/heard how she got trained?

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piptastic
The current thought is that she had training from Luke as a kid in the school
they mention. But then when the school was disbanded they suppressed her
memories and left her on that planet. Then when Kylo used the force on her
mind, he broke loose the training.

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vlunkr
I really hope this isn't accurate. Amnesia plots are so cliche

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tgb
"They say the Force can do terrible things to your mind. It can wipe away your
memory, and destroy your very identity!" —Carth Onasi

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vlunkr
That character is non-canonical :)

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rdlecler1
A bit off topic, but was anyone else disappointed that a sanatation trooper
was able to have a decent light saber fight with a Jedi!!?? Unless Finn has
special Jedi powers that we don't know about yet. That would be like my
Luddite artist friend taking an hour of code and beating out Linus in a
hackathon.

(Still the movie was very special).

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spchampion2
I got the impression that Kylo Ren was toying with him. The whole chest
thumping bit was Ren saying "I'm kicking your ass without even trying."

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QuercusMax
He had just been shot by a bowcaster and was severely wounded. He was hitting
his wound to get himself pumped up with rage.

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ZanyProgrammer
" I’ve issued a challenge for anyone out there to come show us even one scene
in the latest flick that was not an homage to earlier Star Wars episodes. " I
hate it when people give these pseudo-challenges. There were quite a few, and
I fear I run the risk of some easily mocked nerd rage if I attempt to list
them.

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ZanyProgrammer
When Kylo killed Han, how was that an homage to any earlier scene in a SW
movie? No character in any Star Wars move had ever killed their parent-
Anakin's mom was killed by the Sand People, and Vader/Anakin succumbed to
injuries sustained by Palpatine's force lightning, that shorted out his
circuitry.

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tgb
That scene was overt homage to the "I am your father" scene in V. With a
number of inversions, of course.

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ZanyProgrammer
Except Luke didn't murder Vader in cold blood.

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tgb
Yes, but it's still an obvious homage. Father/son meet on narrow path over
giant pit, father begs son to join him, son summons the strength to do what
his mentors taught, etc. Sure the light / dark sides are swapped but it's very
much not subtle.

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blazespin
The big thing about Force Awakens I missed was the advances in technological
film making. That was always George Lucas most important contribution to film.
He always raised the bar.

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rquantz
I thought the effects looked amazing. Since the turn of the millennium we've
had movies switch over almost entirely to digital effects, but pure cgi still
just doesn't look _really_ real. It's missing some ineffable emotional weight
that makes its fruit not quite believable. TFA, in trying to recreate some of
the look of the original films using practical effects, also had the effect of
saying, look what we can do when we combine real things that are actually in
front of the camera with state of the art digital effects. I don't think I've
seen a big special effects movie that looked so actually real since the golden
age of practical effects in the 90s – movies like Jurassic Park come to mind.

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theoh
I hadn't come across the term "practical effect" before, and Wikipedia defines
it as meaning no use of computer generated imagery. Jurassic Park used a lot
of CGI for the dinosaurs so I'm not sure what you mean by your comment.

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rquantz
Jurassic Park used something like 3 minutes of computer generated effects.
Most of the dinosaurs you see on screen are actual puppets and robots.

Edit: the internet says 4 minutes

