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Mother of the Rebellion

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A Good Quote:

“Socialism and democracy are not identical, but they are simply different expressions of the same principle; they belong together, supplement each other, and one can never be incompatible with the other. Socialism without democracy is pseudo-socialism, just as democracy without socialism is pseudo-democracy. The democratic state is the only feasible form for a society organized on a socialist basis.” ― Wilhelm Liebknecht

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During my last rewatch of the prequels I was actually shocked by how much I've misremembered or decontextualized certain moments in my mind because of how they're often talked about in fandom as showing the Jedi as too arrogant, too bureaucratic, generally just burying their heads in the sand while everything goes bad etc. So I'm gonna try to address every individual scene that typically gets brought up to argue that this is an actual theme in Lucas's portrayal of the Order.

The Council doesn't take Qui-Gon's account of meeting a Sith seriously.

Mace and Ki Adi Mundi do both express doubt this guy could be a Sith. (Understandably! Historically they've never known Sith to be able to hide their existence, and for them to have survived totally in secret for a thousand years is a pretty wild thing for Qui-Gon to be so sure of.)

BUT Yoda admits that the dark side is hard to see, and Mace assures Qui-Gon they'll do everything to find out the identity of the attacker. Later he's ordered to go back to Naboo and try to draw out Maul to discover more. Qui-Gon accepts this and doesn't ask for backup. Why should he? He held his own against Maul before, and Maul's probably not gonna show himself again to face a ton of Jedi. They end up missing the chance to learn who trained Maul because of how things go down, but Qui-Gon's death isn't the result of the Council mishandling the situation.

At the funeral, Yoda says the presence of one Sith means there's another out there. They know they've got to be on guard now and will be, but they've got no more leads for now.

2. Qui-Gon's not here to free slaves.

There's this idea that slavery existing on Tatooine shows the Order is apparently too tied up doing shady things for self-interested politicians (footage not found) to help the people who really need it. But Padme's shocked to know the Skywalkers are slaves for a reason. The truth is there isn't a lot of slavery in the galaxy at this time because the Jedi have helped keep it that way for centuries only by working with the Republic. In TCW we see that Zygerrian slavers have a particular hatred of Jedi because they're literally The Anti Slavery People and did so much of the work to crack down on their trade. But Tatooine is controlled by the Hutts and they simply don't have the resources to start a war with them.

(And honestly, it's crazy how people talk like Qui-Gon's a monster for honestly and apologetically telling Anakin no, that's not why he's here. This is a child he's already indebted to and who has a hero-worshipping idea of Jedi, it would be fucked up for him not to be clear about how he can't help him and his mom.)

3. They doubt Dooku could be behind the assassination attempt.

This I understand shows the Jedi to be a little naive. But they knew Dooku as a good man, and at this point he and his followers are still putting on a show of wanting to secede for idealistic reasons (and a few of them, manipulated by Dooku, actually do have good intentions). Only later do the Jedi learn they're illegally building an army before they've even officially left the Republic and clearly have no interest in the peaceful resolution Padme's been advocating for. And they only find this out because they have Obi-Wan investigate the assassin and this very quickly leads him to Dooku.

4. "Arrogance, yes. A trait more and more common among Jedi. Even the older, more experienced ones."

In context, this line from Yoda is clearly not meant to be taken so seriously. Obi-Wan says he fears Anakin is too arrogant, and this is Yoda's light-hearted way of telling him not to be so hard on him. Part of training a Padawan is learning to trust them so they can grow, and Obi-Wan perhaps needs the reminder that he isn't done learning himself.

Of course Yoda saying this could be partly motivated by them having been caught off guard before by the existence of Darth Maul and the dark side clouding their awareness, as we're told repeatedly throughout the PT they know is a problem. But it's kind of contradictory to take this as confirmation that this is a serious fatal flaw of theirs. If someone acknowledges their own arrogance then they're aware of their ability to be wrong, which means they can't actually be that arrogant. If truly meant in a general sense and not just as a gentle reproof of Obi-Wan, it's a pretty self-deprecating comment coming from Yoda.

5. "If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist."

Chief Librarian Jocasta Nu gives this haughty response to Obi-Wan looking for Kamino, a system that's not in the Jedi Archives. So being so overly confident in the infallible knowledge of the Jedi, he takes her word for it and totally drops this lead.

Except no, he goes to someone older and wiser to figure out what this actually means. And he and Yoda are forced to conclude that the unthinkable - a trusted person among them somehow had reason to erase information from the archive - must nonetheless be what happened. This is honestly an exception that proves the rule: Kamino, and we can assume only Kamino, is missing from the archive only because it was removed, which is so suspicious it just shows he must be on the right track to discovering something. Jocasta is kind of snooty about it but theirs obviously is supposed to be one of the most accurate and complete databases in the galaxy.

6. Obi-Wan doesn't believe what Dooku tells him about the Senate.

For one thing, in this conversation Dooku's lying about basically everything but this. And I can't ever stress enough that Palpatine is a threat unlike anything the Jedi have ever dealt with before, who's already taken control of so much before they even know they're fighting anything, so the idea that a Sith is controlling the Senate would be really hard for anyone to believe.

Still, we know Obi-Wan reports this to the Council anyway. But it's a vague statement and they still don't have any information to act on. Palpatine soon has them very busy putting out fires in the war, and naturally fighting the Separatists who are led by Sith seems the best way for them to get to the bottom of what exactly is going on with the dark side. And they do finally turn their attention to how power-hungry Palpatine is getting once the war is nearly over and they've got the bandwidth for it, and think about what they might have to do if he's the threat to their democracy they fear, but of course he's too many steps ahead of them all the time.

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So basically, what we see the Jedi being so guilty of in these examples are thought crimes. When confronted with the crazy explanation that happens to be true, their instinctive reaction is "No, I don't think that's possible." And then they do their due diligence to uncover as much of the truth as they can anyway. And Yoda, the Grand Master of them all, is often the first to admit that their first assumptions could be wrong. But Palpatine wouldn't be a good villain if his moves were predictable and he couldn't get an advantage over the good guys - that's just how storytelling works sometimes and it's not that deep.

It honestly felt stupid typing so much of this out because it's 90% just describing what actually happens in these scenes. But I guess it's a lot to ask that people actually carefully watch the films they discuss. 😒

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Some more thoughts:

The Catholic Church is much more problematic, repressive, and stagnant then the Jedi ever where, but if tomorrow 99% of Catholics (or even just 99% of Catholic clergy) where killed by the UN I doubt you be saying the "deserved it" or "they brought it on themselves".

So yea, stop victim blaming the Jedi.

Random: Scale of the Jedi Genocide (SW)

There where ~10,000 Knights, likely around as many younglings, and (given the scale of the religion) very likely hundreds of thousands not more then a million adjutant lesser Monks and (non-force using) Followers.

~100 major survivors by 5 BBY does not sound like much in that perspective. Especially when the confirmable number is less then 30.

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Milton Friedman's Economic Theory is Bougie Bullshit.

Was watching a video on Commie Blocks when I got to 3:46.

Now I may not be a fancy degreed economist with a noble prize, but this sounds like massive bougie bullshit.

This theory is only true within a Mammonist mindset of personal greed and egotism. A person who cares about others is going to care about the quality of the work done for other, and likewise a person with a since of responsibility is going to care more if its others peoples money then if their own (after all their own money is theirs to waste but others money is something they where entrusted with).

In a socialist (or even christ-like) mindset it would be more like this:

Case 1, Your money on yourself: You care about price or quality, not necessarily both. Its your money to waste and your money to lose. You care either about survival or self-improvement.

Case 2, Your money on others: You can about the quality but less about the price. You're not worry about the price, its yours to save or waste as you please, you're worried about the other person and how your choice will effect them. (we are often willing to spend much more on friends and family then ourselves)

Case 3, Others' money on you: You can about the price but less about the quality. You care more about not wasting their money then enriching yourself

Case 4, Others' money on others: You care about the price and quality. You care about efficiency, giving the people who entrusted you with the money the most bang for buck.

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Random: Scale of the Jedi Genocide (SW)

There where ~10,000 Knights, likely around as many younglings, and (given the scale of the religion) very likely hundreds of thousands not more then a million adjutant lesser Monks and (non-force using) Followers.

~100 major survivors by 5 BBY does not sound like much in that perspective. Especially when the confirmable number is less then 30.

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Made by @mattxiv on Instagram.

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“The world is overpopulated.”

Nope.

“Well, that’s just carbon emissions. What about places for all those people to live?”

If the world’s population all lived in one city that was as densely populated as Manhattan, that city would be the size of Ecuador. The space taken up by ourselves and our toys is actually rather insignificant next to that taken up by our farmland.

“Ah-hah! Farmland! We’re not producing enough food for all those people!”

The problem here is we are insanely wasteful with our food.

Firstly, half of all food grown in the US goes straight into the dumpster.

Secondly, we grow it very inefficiently. We could very easily increase the food yield of a given area of land by building a greenhouse on it (which also reduces water loss) and using poly-cultures instead of mono-cultures; the reason our preferred method is open-air mono-culture farms, which are susceptible to erosion and blight and requires a god-awful amount of water to stay hydrated, is that labor is expensive and land is cheap.

In fact, if we took it even further–growing our food in carbon dioxide-rich environments lit with artificial lighting 24 hours a day (or at least at night)–you only need 1-2000 square feet of farmland per person. Admittedly, you pretty much have to have fusion power for this to be an environmentally and economically viable option, but still; the point is, we could easily condense our environmental footprint by a shit-ton (and even more options will be available in the future) without decreasing our population one iota.

“There is still a maximum carrying capacity the planet has.”

Indeed there is. And do you know what that carrying capacity is? It’s ten trillion. And the cut off isn’t space or resources–it’s waste heat. The things we’d have to do to get there aren’t exactly the sort of things we could do overnight–hell, we don’t actually know how to fusion yet–but they’re all well within the realm of the physically possible.

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Princess Kushana appreciation post! (Part 2)

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EVERYONE(!) I’m blazing this post because at this pace we might barely hit 1,000,000 signatures—or just fall short. PLEASE reblog this post, no matter where you are from, so we can reach as many EU citizens as possible and end this horrible practice!

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Émile was still years away from his first of two nominations for a Nobel prize in literature, of course, mainly because Nobel prizes wouldn’t be invented until 1901.  While Nobel HAD died in 1896, his family had contested the latest of his many wills - and once cleared, it took a while for the proper foundation to be formed.  This work was largely done by Ragnar Sohlman, who was born in 1870, became Alfred Nobel’s assistant in 1893, and who will absolutely not be appearing in this story.

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Barotrauma is set on Europa

the Ice War on Europa...

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The Strand magazine

England

1911

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Guess What!

Age of Empires 2 Janissary

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Reminds me of Ultrakill art.

after some time I finally drew something (I've been trying to write a fic)