Introducing St Wars to the kids. Questions: 1) When U Owen says he needs Luke the most at harvest, what harvest is there on a desert planet? 2) Why does L want to transmit his application to the academy (of the Empire) when he just got excited about C3PO’s story of the rebellion?
So Owen harvests water? Not a crop? That’s an odd verb choice
Next, I forgot just how lucky Lucas got casting Alec Guiness, Peter Cushing, and James Earl Jones. And getting John Williams to do the music. They add a lot of depth to what’s basically a fairy tale.
Even Guiness can’t save dialogue like ‘you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.’
Next the bar scene...is what? the Muppets of the 1970s after the the wildest, drug-fueled bender of all time?
Han shot first.
The general staff of the Death Star have phenomenally bad haircuts and sideburns
Wait! Han just said ‘traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops.’ So does that mean Owen was raising crops after all? On a desert planet? (I haven’t seen the original in years.)
‘It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense’ is a good line for Solo.
Ok. We’re back. The kids had to sleep yesterday. Next question: how did Obi-wan go creeping around the Empire’s most important military installation without getting caught?
Princess Leia has the most amazing cosmetics in the history of political prisoners
So what’s going on with Princess Leia’s hair? Seriously. Are those swirly muffiny things really her hair? No way
Why do they have to maneuver down the trench to the exhaust port? Why not just approach it from above?
Wait, did Lucas really name the overweight pilot ‘Porkins’? Good grief
What is ‘Beggars Canyon back home’?
There’s something really endearing about the first one, with all the models and almost no CGI. Even when Ben and Vader are schwacking away at each other, and you can tell the Vader guy can barely see. At least it’s real, not CGI. And I forgot how much quotable dialogue there is.
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Good thread, nicely illustrating how de-linked the GOP evangelical base is from the rest of America.
They wanna go after abortion, IVF, birth control, gay marriage, and the rest. GOP leaders know this is electoral suicide, but they don’t know how to get around it. If Biden is
smart, he’ll make personal family & sexual freedom the center of his campaign.
Evangelicals may overwhelm the GOP internally, but the rest of the country thinks they’re weird & creepy
This is the result of social isolation: churches which provide a whole separated lifestyle,
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a TV ‘news’ network which only tells you what you want to hear, home-schooling, a sealed media ecosystem of faith-based movies and influencers telling you that social change is the apocalypse.
Catholics once had parallel institutions like this, especially the schools. But we
This thread makes a point political science emphasizes a lot - and which I tell my students constantly:
Competent democratic government is actually really boring. A lot of it is unappealing trade-offs, wonks diving deep into detail the public won’t track, maintenance instead
of flashy new initiatives politicians can put their name on, compromise between parties which leaves no one happy, incremental, unexciting improvements only visible over the medium-term, and so on.
This is not entertaining or engaging, & doesn’t make for exciting journalism.
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But it is how you mostly want democracies governed. This is why you don’t elect showboats like Trump or Jesse Ventura, and you do elect competent administrators like George W. Bush or Biden.
Sometimes I think Fukuyama is right: wealthy democracies get so bored that they
Yes, NK's rhetoric seems more belligerent lately. Yes, this Kim seems to enjoy making scary threats more than his father did. Yes, the US is distracted by Ukraine & Gaza. But
NK constantly talks like this. I made this point back in 2013👇when Kim told foreigners to leave SK bc war was imminent (jerk). Perhaps Kim means it this time. That is possible,of course. But it's impossible to reliably infer that f/ NK rhetoric anymore
National elites say outlandish stuff all the time. Look at Putin. Threats are a cheap signal. What matters instead are costly signals, which in the NK case would mean something like a seventh nuclear test, a missile test flight over SK, or border skirmishes.
Latent capacity is not capability. Khrushchev said we will bury you, and Mao thought he could fight a nuclear war bc of China’s huge population.This is not how conflict works
Sacks says stuff like this all the time. I’ve no idea why he’s taken seriously as a geopolitical thinker
In fact, Biden’s dealt with these crises pretty well.
In Ukraine, he’s helped that fledging democracy fight off increasingly overt fascist imperialism. On Israel, he’s robustly supported Israeli security while discouraging Netanyahu’s legal coup, and has encouraged Israelis
and Palestinians toward the negotiated solution which is the only durable way out of the cycle of violence they’re locked in.
Yeah, it’s choppy and messy, but that’s how the sausage gets made and it could easily be a lot worse.
Were Trump were POTUS, Russia would be on the
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Dnipro and NATO would be fracturing as Eastern Europe armed to the teeth while Western Europe dithered.
In Israel, the hard right government would feel unbound in the coming offensive, and the US and Iran would probably be in a shooting war by the end of the month.