Which is why the Prequels were the worst thing ever. It made kids think Anakin Skywalker was a good guy and it’s the Jedi Council’s fault they didn’t give him the respect he deserved because he was strong and powerful. Dude was a creepy weirdo when talking to Padme, told her fascism was cool, massacred a village, but because he’s so powerful and awesome, Padme (a Senator) instantly becomes a trad wife.

Then came a bunch of cartoons showing how awesome this guy is (biggest Mary Sue ever) while making it seem like being a storm trooper would be a cool and honourable thing. And now we’ve got a bunch of video games that showcase how awesome and bad ass Darth Vader is.

It’s not like a pro-fascist interpretation of the Prequels comes out of nowhere. An adult watching those movies sees these things and dsimiss it as George Lucas phoning it in while making those movies because he only cared about toy sales. But it’s easy to see how a kid watching these movies would identify with Anakin Skywalker and be influenced towards having fascist tendencies.

Also The Last Jedi is the most misogynistic movie in the franchise if you ignore the marketing and think about how a child would interpret it. But that’s a story for another time.

That makes it really easy to have the empire represent anything you want.

Isn’t that kind of the point? When you make villains too specific then it’s easy to differentiate the villains in a movie from the evil in real life. Donald Trump doesn’t resemble the villain from the movie so therefore I can hate the villain from the movie while still liking Donald Trump because they’re not the same person. The evil that happens in the movie is because of that particular bad guy, now that bad guy is dead and it’s all wrapped up in a nice little bow.

When a movie is about archetypes it’s a little more difficult to ignore the ideas. The Rebellion is a diverse group of people, even a fish guy can be an admiral. A little green weirdo could be the powerful Jedi. The imperials are not all that diverse, are they? It’s harder to rationalize that you’re on the good guy side because that means taking orders from Admiral Ackbar which is contradictory to your political views which would be about wanting Ackbar fired because he must be a DEI hire.

Also Lando making a deal with fascists and constantly getting screwed over because fascists don’t give a shit about doing as they promised seems a little relevant now. Lando was fine with some random guy called “Luke Skywalker” getting screwed over as long as he and his friends came out ok. Seems a lot like people voting for Trump knowing immigrants would get screwed but that’s fine because they would come out alright. There’s a lot of Landos on Wall Street right now. Trump altered the deal, pray he doesn’t alter it further.

The ones made by JJ Abrams are really great about showing all of the reasons for people getting sucked into fascist movements… indoctrination (Finn), wanting to eliminate freedom to have order (Hux), bad relationship with their father (Kylo Ren), nostalgia for past greatness (Pryde), and ancestry (Rey). With Hux we even get to see how fascists are really just spiteful assholes that don’t actually believe in anything, they just want power.

With Rey we see hesitation about being part of the movement against fascism because of her ancestry. Maybe she’s unworthy because of her ancestry? Nah that’s bullshit, you don’t need to identify with the shitty people in history because they’re your ancestors, it’s up to you how you identify yourself. The repeated message of “they [fascists] make us feel like we’re alone” seems particularly relevant given how social media divides us now.

And Palpatine… yeah fascism has come back to life again even though it’s been defeated before. But ok, I guess we gotta do this shit again. People get all butt hurt they didn’t explain the details of how Palpatine came back, but that’s the point. Fascism comes back and you gotta oppose it when it does. Somehow fascism returned, and it doesn’t matter how, because we have to oppose it no matter what. And if you really want to know how fascism returned, just look at the motivations of the fascist characters in the movies.

Nobody watched Andor LOL.

History is like a mystery book that you’ve read the last chapters first and know how it’s going to turn out. The colonialism done by European powers hadn’t yet happened at the time of Crusades. In fact had the various warring factions in Europe hadn’t found common cause, their religion and culture would’ve been wiped out by Muslim colonialism. Yup, the Caliphate was conquering the Christian lands in Iberia and Anatolia and colonizing them. This is what triggered the Crusades.

The Crusades were an anti-colonialism movement, and if they hadn’t found something to unite over, then their cultures, languages, and religion would’ve been wiped out and the whole thing would’ve been a minor footnote in history. They had managed

In the end, the Muslim colonization of Iberia was defeated (with the Spanish and Portuguese becoming brutal colonizers afterwards) while the Byzantine Empire ultimately fell to Muslim conquest and colonization. Today, there’s only a few hundred thousand Christians left in Anatolia because of assimilation and genocide. Some of that has been relatively recent… you ever hear of the Armenian genocide?

So yeah, not exactly a clear cut good guys vs. bad guys kind of thing as popular narratives suggest. The crusades were triggered by Muslim aggression into Christian lands. While that doesn’t excuse the atrocities committed by the Crusaders, the Crusades also don’t excuse the atrocities committed by Muslim empires either. History is complex, and reductive bias towards europe=bad or religion=bad just results in not actually learning anything from history.

Yeah it’s a movie that nails “then suddenly… all hell breaks loose.”

Yup. Trump said he’d only deport criminals and we see how that’s going. PP said he’d only use notwithstanding to take away the rights of criminals… wonder where that’s heading.

You’d rather have a guy notwithstanding your rights away just so that your little hobby can be a little more easier for you. And if that makes it easier for someone to massacre school children, you’re cool with that too as long as you have a little less paperwork for a fucking hobby.

Single issue voters are the death of freedom.

Proportional representation sucks (see Israel for an example of how that can go wrong) and it will never happen because nobody can promote it without also indicating they like it because it will give their preferred political party an advantage. So it all sounds like “I want to change the democratic system so that my party will win” which puts you on the same level as people that want to rig elections.

Ranked choice voting would be a better thing to promote for people that find it difficult to accept democracy is about making compromises. In the end you’ll never have a system where millions of people will get exactly what they want, but if the goal is to give immature people warm and fuzzy vibes when they vote for a party that doesn’t have chance of winning, then ranked choice is a way to do that without giving political parties even more power than they already have.

What are you doing here then? If you don’t care enough to take an hour to go vote then you shouldn’t be spending any time discussing politics. If voting doesn’t matter, then discussing politics on lemmy definitely doesn’t matter.

So you prefer to have PP to notwithstanding your rights away?

Hell I’d be open to an EU style organization between Canada, California, and any other state that secedes because they prefer democracy over fascism.

It’s funny that Trump says Canada isn’t a viable country because he’s making the USA into non-viable country. The hatred in the red states towards states like California was kinda there already, but he’s just fanning those flames. It seems various regions of the US are forming into distinct cultures with very different values. Maybe the US is just too big to be sustainable.

Tankies are permanently stuck in backwards day. Left is right and right is left. They do this because they’re just fascists that don’t like to be associated with other fascists. So they call their fascist group “leftist”, but they hate democracy, liberalism, the jews, etc just as much as any other fascist.

I’ve heard a carwash will take them out.

Yeah it will be much worse since so many things people use are a lot more technologically advanced and therefore more complicated to replace. Like my grandfather was a young man in the 1930s and he used a horse for transportation. Didn’t have a landline phone much less a smartphone. Much easier to replace imports with domestic production when most people just needed food and maybe electricity.

Are people now willing to go back to that kind of a life even for a few years under the promise that things will be better someday? It’ll take at least two years (in most cases, closer to five) to build a factory to produce many of the products we have.

And who’s going to invest the billions of dollars needed to build the factories? Wealthy people under the belief Trump will keep the tariffs in place for years?

Yup. There’s a significant cost to having a war with a country you do a lot of trade with. You don’t want to pay that cost while having a war at the same time. That could lead to economic collapse. It could even result in your military lacking the resources need to execute the war.

But if you sever trade beforehand, pay the costs of that first, then once your economy has stabilized you can invade other countries without risking economic collapse.

Cool… if I ever need leather boots I’ll check out the ones from Germany or Japan then.

Yeah people keep saying California should be a province of Canada which is ridiculous. Why not suggest something that’s plausible?

California should be it’s own country. It’s got a higher population than Canada and a much larger economy. They’d no longer need to continue subsidizing states that are happy when the guy they put into power denies them emergency aid in a disaster. They could have their own emergency relief fund they’d administer themselves, and they could set their own immigration policy.

Biden was not deporting people without trial to torture prisons. You may have been consuming too much tankie propaganda if you believe that.

Almost nothing in the story line followed through the next two, it was a stand-alone movie. I should have said ‘both of them’ instead of ‘all of them’. Maybe the next one will be filmed in Canada as well.

I don’t know about that… the primary motivation of Riddick in the second one was to help the girl from Pitch Black. She’s in the prison mentioned in Pitch Black because she wanted to get eyes like Riddick had, which was something she asked about in Pitch Black. He finds out where she is from the priest from the first one. The Necromonger plotline was new, but that plotline and the prison plotline felt like they were from different movies.The Necromonger plotline was abandoned in the third movie (which was disappointing since I liked that part) and the third movie has more in common with Pitch Black than the previous Chronicles of Riddick movie.

I think it’s more accurate to say the Necromonger plotline in the second movie was the outlier in the series. Which is unfortunate since I would’ve like to see where that went, but it wasn’t a good fit for a “Vin Diesel is an awesome baddass” kind of movie.

That’s a lot of words to say that you believe the Jews control the media.

Like it or not, you’ve become indoctrinated into having antisemitic beliefs.