The big social media sites and entertainment rags are aflutter over Disney firing an actress from their Star Wars brand. She’s been charged with antisemitism, but her real crime was failing to understand that America now operates under two sets of rules: one for the ruling uniparty and another for the dispossessed subjects they stole the country from.
One-party rule in America now means there is no opting out of the game. Losing means banishment from polite society and the economy, and not losing requires learning the rules. The first step is knowing that there are two rulebooks.
That’s not a double standard, contra incessant Conservative whining. That is the ruling party internalizing and practicing the first rule of political power, viz. help your friends and harm your enemies.
The sad spectacle of self-described culture warriors crawling back to Mouse Wars after the slap in the face that was The Last Jedi proves the Right has not learned this rule. The fact that all it took to lure them back was a C+ TV show gives actual dissidents an idea of how much work we’ve got cut out for us.
Now, outraged fans did get #CancelDisneyPlus trending. But if past behavior is any indication, Disney just has to throw them a bone, and they’ll come flooding back. The Mouse knows this, which is why rumors of Carano’s replacement by the star of a camp 90s action show are making the rounds. Just watch the consoomers trip over themselves to get back in line.
Even though Carano’s firing should serve unambiguous notice that Star Wars is still dead, and it isn’t coming back.
There are hopeful signs. I can’t speak for other counterculture creators, but hardly a day goes by that a reader doesn’t send me a grateful testimonial for helping him reclaim his dignity from the Pop Cult.
What can’t go on won’t, and our increasingly unhinged elites’ soft war on their own subjects is doomed to fail. That doesn’t mean they won’t take millions of innocent people down with them. If you haven’t taken steps to make yourself antifragile, start now.
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"You're quoting Carl Schmitt – a literal nahzee BYYYYYE"
Some moron on twitter who didn't like me tapping the sign
And I'll reiterate what I've said before: I'm amazed that there's both A). People who still gave a shit about stah wahs up until this point and B). conservatives crowing on about the hypocrisy as if that'll accomplish something against people who absolutely just dont give a shit about it.
The Cultist made Schmitt's point for him.
The friend/enemy distinction – which defines the state's purpose as identifying and making war on enemies – is indeed from Carl Schmitt. He is, however, the Left's main guru, now that Marxism proper has failed. Accepting his thought concedes the moral ground from which we can condemn the Death Cult. It isn't enough that the Cult sees us as its enemy – that's reason for us to fight it, but we need to persuade others to help us.
Civic nationalism defines the purpose of politics, and thus the state, as making a peace in which human life can flourish. Schmitt and those like him (of which the Death Cult are the main current example) think that war is the only place where human life flourishes; thus they are enemies of civic nationalism in all its variations. Don't imagine that you can beat the Death Cult by adopting their basic premises but inverting their scale of value.
Using Rommel's blitzkrieg tactics did not make Patton a Nazi.
You're confusing yourself about Schmitt. The Cult loathes him. The only one here accepting their moral frame is you.
As for civic nationalism, what it is is impossible, since putting it into practice with any internal consistency would require expelling dissenters in an ideological purge no less tyrannical than the Left's.
The Cult knows nothing about Schmitt, except perhaps that he was a Nazi – but they owe him a massive debt nonetheless.
And the friend/enemy distinction is not a tactic. It's a theory of politics, hence moral philosophy; and it expressly denies key Christian doctrines (which I thought you cared about?) If the USA had adopted it in WWII we would now be ruling West Germany and Japan as colonies.
Using Leftist tactics against them is possible. For instance Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is mostly about political tactics, and non-Leftists can use those without a qualm when the situation calls for them. But adopting their assumptions on what politics is for would be fatal.
You can't fight "Critical Race Theory" by saying the black race is inferior and has to be ruled by their betters – that just feeds into its characterization of "whiteness" as inherently tyrannical. The only way is to point out how CRT itself is built on vile stereotypes ("blackness" in it is worse than "whiteness", if you think about it at all) and offer an alternative that makes race irrelevant. Which civic nationalism is.
So is Christianity. And do you think Christianity can be put into practice – by a community – without expelling dissenters? The difference is that Christianity doesn't require dissenters to exist for its own coherence. Schmitt's theory does. That's what's evil about it.
Thanks for demonstrating my point that fixation on abstract ideas blinds CivNats to concrete realities.
The uniparty that's now firmly in charge sees you and every Christian as its enemy and is acting to crush you as we speak.
Maye pointing out the Cult's philosophical debt to the Nazis will dissuade them from throwing you in the gulag. Best of luck with that.
Civilized rules are for the civilized. You will never shoot a man at the agreed twenty paces when he shoots to kill on the fifth.
Your enemies aren't civilized, and they know you are. This is why they are winning, and will continue to win.
Until you realize this distinction, you can enjoy all the moral victories you want. I'd personally rather not see more souls risked in the meantime.
Ironically, it's identity politics that keeps the JV Debate Club Cons from understanding that the enemy is in fact the enemy. They're not racists like those evil dissidents, and one day they'll find the right syllogism to prove it!
Who spoke of civilized rules? I spoke of goals and root principles. If you think politics should be a fight between factions that have nothing in common, you are working for the same goal as the Death Cult, even if you oppose the Cultists.
It's quite true that politics has become a fight between factions with no common ground. But we have to recognize this as an aberration, brought about by our declared enemies. Accept it as normal, and no one will lift a hand in our defense, or mourn our passing.
That's the thing, my man. You're the only one here speaking of *should*. The OP and the other commenters are grappling with what *is*.
We are trying to wake you up to the high likelihood that in the near future, you will be faced with some rather unpleasant moral choices.
Are you willing to lie for food?
What about kill?
If you haven't given serious thought to questions like these, you are not in a position to offer relevant comments.
I know I'm the only one speaking of "should be" here. That's what I object to. Lose sight of "should be" while you're grappling with "is", and all your grappling will be futile, because it's aimed at the wrong goal.
To put it at its starkest, are you willing to deny Christ, if you think that will serve Him?
"It's quite true that politics has become a fight between factions with no common ground. But we have to recognize this as an aberration, brought about by our declared enemies."
Is it, actually, or have Americans national politics been terminally toxic since Roe vs Wade (at the latest)? That's not an aberration. That's the new normal, which has enabled the decimation of three successive American generations. The SJWS screaming "No middle ground" don't know how right they are.
We aren't talking about a church business meeting to debate whether to plant a new congregation across town or renovate the existing facilities, where no matter what happens, everyone worshiped together the Sunday before and will receive the Holy Communion again together the Sunday after. There is no common ground anymore: no common goals, no common values, no common frame of reference. There is nothing left to save, because the Republic was dead to begin with.
We know very well what the goal is – to save our churches, our families, our friends, and ourselves. We know the "ought" and how far it is from our "is"
These CivNats are going to have a tough time watching the younger Trads take up the banner of Integralism.
Republicanism has clearly failed. Is there a good, noble, faithful Catholic monarch somewhere we can persuade to conquer the former U S of A?
For the record, I am not the least bit joking. I would rather pledge loyalty to a king who would call me a heretic and a schismatic, as long as he does it in Christian charity, than an "elected" government that is hellbent on doing things like persecuting the Little Sisters of the Poor and legislating Roe vs Wade.
There are people in Minnesota who will leave the cars running while they are in the store, because it gets so cold. Often they do this just by leaving the keys in the ignition. Many of them when asked about the possibility of having their cars easily stolen will say that that never happened when they were growing up, and that in a decent society that shouldn't happen.
It's absolutely true that people shouldn't have to worry about their cars getting stolen when they go to groceries. Doesn't change the facts that carjackings are at an all time high in the state.
@Michael Brazier: One advantage Christians have over Death Cultists is we know exactly who has moral authority. Since it needs clarification, it ain't you.
All of us here profess that Jesus is the Christ and God raised Him from the dead. None of us know if we'd have the courage to say the same with a gun to our head.
@A Reader: Some people still think this is high school model UN. This is Thunderdome.
Nice job of missing the point, sir. Well, when you find that you've shot yourself in the foot because you wouldn't take care where you aimed, don't expect much sympathy.
All those normal people getting ready to wear two masks at once are not going to care how rational your arguments are. You let the enemy tell them you were evil for the past half a century.
There is no one left to convince rationally. This isn't 1993 anymore.
Civic Nationalists tend to rapidly alternate between moral and pragmatic arguments instead of following through on either of them. When pressed for why something is intrinsically immoral they talk about how doing otherwise will lead to our defeat. When shown tactics that could win they will say that we cannot use them because they are immoral.
@Michael Brazier
If we're talking about should, here's my take. We should pay, in blood, for the blood we've shed as a nation. To the extent that we've idolized our "principles" and our form of government, we should watch them fail in slow and excruciating detail, until we at last see our idolatry for what it was and abhor it. To the extent that we've gained our fictive wealth at the expense of the children we were too cowardly and too selfish to have, we should watch that wealth turn to dust and ashes until we repent in dust and ashes and pray one and all, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner."
It is past time to pray for God's blessings on this nation, and more than time to pray for His mercy.
@Michael Brazier: No, kiddo. As everyone here has been laboring to inform you, I'm not the one who's missing the point of the post I wrote.
If you want to sperg out on your personal hobby horse, do it on your own blog. You're done derailing this thread.
@Rudolph Harrier: Exactly right. They disguise cowardice as prudence.
Francisco Franco has more life in him than Star Wars does.
Zing!
Said it before, but given current events, it bears repeating. The thing about not giving money to people who hate you, is you have to commit to it.
You have to stop, you have to stop right now, no ifs, ands, or buts.
>I'll cancel Disney plus over this!
You should have never had Disney plus to begin with (You in this case being a helpful Caricature of a pop cultist). Even now as you claim this is the last straw, you forget the time you claimed Rise of Skywalker was the last straw, Last Jedi was the last straw, Chuck Wendigs crap was the last straw, and etc.) It's not going to stop, unless you stop it. They threw you a bone just to yank it away again. I can see why people stick to Doomcock and other's leakers assurances, like a Q-Anon victim, -Just trust the plan Favrau and Filoni will make it right- but your hope and trust are better placed elsewhere.
Videogame fans have the same problem where they get upset with something, raise hell over it, but buy the game anyway. In the meantime the publisher/dev assume their crappy work went over just fine since people bought it.
No matter how much you complain about their ride, it's still their ride, and the most powerful you can do is not to get on the ride.
YouTubers pushing the Lucasfilm civil war cope really are the pop culture version of Q. All they accomplish is lulling SW fans into a terminal case of bystander syndrome.
I'd understand it more if the cope was actually any good but Mandalorian was a C show at best and Favreau and Filoni are both hacks who can suck it
I love me some Critical Drinker and he is an honest critic, which is great. But he is a big pusher of the civil war myth.
The thing is, the SJWs who pointed out that it is flatly contradicted by all statements and interviews are absolutely, 100% correct. It totally is. Favreau and Filoni are just the soft drugs for people not ready for the hard stuff.
Something is slightly off about the a analogy but you get the gist.
Don't sell yourself short. It was fine.
Star Wars fandom was entirely carried by tie-in novels and video games.
Everybody forgets this. After RotJ, about a decade passed during which Star Wars fell off the radar. There were the yearly cable TV showings at Thanksgiving and July 4th weekend, but otherwise nobody really thought about Star Wars.
That didn't change until the Expanded Universe novels returned the brand to prominence in the early 90s.
Don't forget the comic books, and the foundation laid by the West End Games TTRPG, which gave Tim Zahn and other authors a great way to start from more than just the sketchy material in the OT.
I lived that falling-off–was just old enough to be aware of RotJ and the last gasp of the OT, saw the Ewok movies and the Ewoks and Droids cartoon series on TV, and then more or less forgot Star Wars until the WEG RPG and the Zahn novels.
I came in watching the OT on TV and VHS with my dad and playing the Super Star Wars series and TIE Fighter at friends' houses.
The TIE Fighter/Dark Forces combo was a powerful draw for Star Wars. Two games which were legitimately quite innovative and well designed in their respective genres while at the same time making great use of being in the Star Wars universe.
Before that the stage had been set by Rebel Assault, which while honestly pretty mediocre, launched at the exact right time to capitalize on the dawn of CD-ROM gaming (along with Myst and The 7th Guest).
Marvel made Star Wars Comics from 77 to 86. Claremont loved to drop in SW references throughout his Uncanny run. There were Droids and Ewoks cartoons in the mid 80's. And then there was, of course, the RPG from WEG.
@M.L. Martin: TTRPG players and comic book fans tend to forget that our hobbies have historically occupied rather small niches. That goes double for the 80s, when playing D&D or reading comics could still get you stuffed in a locker.
Jim Shooter famously credited Mavel's Star Wars line with saving the company, but sales fell off after the original trilogy ended. By 1985, Star Wars was a third-string title with an average circulation of less than 150,000 copies.
By comparison, The Thrawn Trilogy has sold over 15 million copies in print. That's mainstream, and that was when the Star Wars brand returned to the A list.
Oh, I have no illusions about the TTRPG's relative obscurity. What I do credit it with is providing a foundation for the novelists to just pick up and use without having to do the work themselves, and producing it in a way that was easy for other authors to reference rather than having to dig through novels for consistency. It was essentially the novels' equivalent of a TV bible.
As for comics, I was thinking of the Dark Horse series in the 90s, which went along with both the launch of the EU and the 90s comics boom, and became considered an integral part of the EU. Like the TTRPG, the influence on the novels allowed them to punch above their weight class in terms of influence, although that wound up being a double-edged sword in numerous ways.
You've got a point. Lucas sent Zahn a complete WEG Star Wars box set as reference material after he was signed to write Heir to the Empire.
"The Mouse knows this…"
Darth Maus.
Aka the Mouseferatu, which devours living properties and transforms them into hideous undead mockeries of what they once were, spreading its own curse.
It is truly shocking to me how utterly blind people are to the "get the Catholic!" reflex STILL wired into a lot of the Anglo – used advisedly – mindset. In Australia it takes the form of a /particular/ distaste for the people, regions and strata that historically working class, Irish Catholic.
There's a whole "greetings fellow white people" joke in here somewhere, all the more savage for the irony that so many SJWs in their anti-racist fervour perpetuate the most historically important racial hatred in the English speaking world.
Pay close attention the next time one of these people points out the Wrong Kind of White Person, I mean when they're really fired up and doing impersonations. Maybe 8/10 times they're targeting a different tribe and religion* to themselves.
*by the old definitions, where different religion was Protestant versus Catholic and nobody else was granted the dignity of having their animistic nonsense elevated to the status of "religion". 😉
That perception faded in the US because American Catholics spent the 20th century bending over backwards to be liked by the culture at large.
They bent so far that now there's no practical difference between the outlook and lifestyle of the typical consoomer and the average self-identified Catholic.
Don't feel bad. Us proddies did the same thing. What all of us should have been asking was why we were working so hard to be tolerated within nations that, collectively and separately, we built.
We are to be in the world but not of the world.
You have been on the money consistently about Star Wars. It is a testament to the powerful hold nostalgia has over people that they are willing to forgive so much so long as they get a little bite-sized snack of nostaglia overload. Mando season 2 was absolutely bankrupt of ideas and entirely leaning on nostalgia. The very fact that people are interested in that show at all imo is mostly because an
entire generation of 40 year olds are attached to an action figure. Nostalgia is a powerful tool – an emotional one – which seems to forgive any and all intellectual, moral, or aesthetic trespasses, all for that momentary emotional rush. Which itself will ring hollower and hollower the more it is repeated.
The snake of meaninglessness eating it's own tail.
Therein lies Generation Y's besetting vice.
You repeatedly take jabs at the show, but I'm telling you, it wasn't C grade. It genuinely had its moments. Maybe you saw a bad episode or two and wrote it off? If so, that's fine. Not all episodes were winners, especially during season 1. And I can't blame you for not wanting to touch it with a 10-foot pole after the disasters we got on the silver screen (I can't stomach The Last Jedi long enough to get through it, and I will never watch Lando or Rise of Skywalker. It just doesn't interest me.)
At any rate, I'm still floored we got a great season 2 out of this show. That was juuuust enough time for it to do what was needed. Aside from a few mild missteps, in the end & at its best, it stirred feelings of old-school Wild West heroism and boosted cultural morale. More importantly, it has now told its entire main story arc, so season 3 will suffer the downward spiral I expected to begin with season 2. Not that I'll be around to see it. As far as I'm concerned, Season 3 is now anathema like Episodes 8 and 9, modern Pixar, and all those stupid spin-off movies. I know when to eject and never look back, and that time is now.
Mandalorian is rightfully boycotted due to the House of Mouse's treatment of Carano and its fans, but unlike 99% of Disney/Pixar's modern offerings, believe it or not, this show did deserve an audience. It was a clear outlier, given the chance to operate outside of the iron claw grip of radical feminists like Kathleen Kennedy, if just for a moment.
Of course, Disney never deserved anyone's money. The number of Disney+ subscriptions out there makes me feel ill. If any of you decide to watch the first two seasons, please, don't even buy the Blu-rays second-hand. Find another way.
I did see it. You are underestimating a C grade. That means it was an average show, not bad, and has its moments.
I agree the show had merit. I also agree that you don't actually have to give Disney any money if you want to see it. At least that's what I have been told. 😉
Arrr! ;D
As Bellomy said, I graded according to David Stewart's method of evaluating a work – not like a TV critic, like a teacher.
C+ means that despite some moderate to large flaws, other production values like cinematography, effects, music, etc. are high quality. It's a passing grade.
That grade is also on a scale with the other Star Wars productions, Empire Strikes Back being an A+.
Mando has the advantage of being compared to the sequel movies. Since it doesn't completely suck, it comes off looking like a masterpiece.
Here is the thing. In another world where it was only the original trilogy and Mando, then nobody would have any issue with Mando at all. It would be fine, not as good as the original films but still pretty decent and everyone would happily accept it as Star Wars canon with no fuss.
That is not, however, the world we live in.