Category Archive 'Star Wars'
15 May 2016

Darth By Darthwest

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Cary Grant in a Hitchcock/George Lucas Mashup.

20 Dec 2015

Ken Burns: The Galactic Civil War

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13 Dec 2015

Imminent Star Wars Movie Opening Commemorative Post

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Next time you watch Star Wars, I need you to remind yourself that all the dialogue you hear was recorded by a man in pink short shorts.

Milo Yiannopolis argues that everybody has got the good guys and the bad guys confused in the Star Wars movies. Jabba the Hutt, for instance, is a good example.

Jabba the Hutt is treated as this huge villain in Return of the Jedi, but this is simply unwarranted. Jabba is a responsible employer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is a capitalist hero. In the case of Han Solo, he took reasonable steps to recover a debt from a known intergalactic criminal. His agent Greedo was acting within the law when he was shot down by the notorious outlaw Solo. Lucas had to edit in special effects to cover this accidental glimpse of the truth, by showing Greedo shooting first.

Jabba the Hutt was actually pretty progressive. He ran a melting-pot society with criminals of every race, colour, and creed working together in harmony. He even employed the differently abled, like the Rancor monster. He personally financed entertainment for the downtrodden masses of Tatooine; imagine the trouble they’d get into without pod races to watch. In fact, I believe America’s rash of midnight basketball programs were based directly on Jabba’s pioneering work in the field.

Jabba disposed of his waste in an extremely eco-friendly manner, feeding enemies to the Sarlaac beast he kept as a pet. Human bodies digested over 1,000 years are way better for the environment than straight burials. The fact is Jabba would fit right in at Burning Man. He’d have his sand barge — destroyed by the terrorists, of course — and would hang out with Elon Musk and maybe sign a few multimillion dollar deals.

Jabba the Hutt, or as I call him Jabba the Hero, was brutally murdered by a white woman. Why don’t I see a single #GreenLivesMatter protest? Jabba’s main crime as far as I can tell was being an invertebrate of size. Leia brutally slugshamed him. No doubt if he had survived his throttling he would have had PTSD and would have started a Tumblr, except being an entrepreneur he’s not a whining loser so maybe not.

Speaking of Leia, a straight white princess murdering a minority businessman with no repercussions is the ultimate example of white privilege.

Read the whole thing.

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A Jedi’s Path to Jihad:

From introducing him to us in A New Hope (as a simple farm boy gazing into the Tatooine sunset), to his eventual transformation into the radicalized insurgent of Return of the Jedi (as one who sets his own father’s corpse on fire and celebrates the successful bombing of the Death Star), each film in the original trilogy is another step in Luke’s descent into terrorism. By carefully looking for the same signs governments and scholars use to detect radicalization, we can witness Luke’s dark journey into religious fundamentalism and extremism happen before our very eyes.

When we first meet Luke Skywalker, he’s an orphaned farm boy with barely any friends, living with his Aunt and Uncle, and wanting to join the Galactic Academy like all the other guys his age. You see, Luke didn’t become a space terrorist overnight, but he did exhibit signs that would make him a prime candidate for terrorist recruiters. The process of radicalization, as described by Anthony Stahelski in the Journal of Homeland Security, notes terrorists tend to:

    Come from families where the father is absent (check)

    Have difficulty forming relationships outside the home (check)

    Be attracted to groups offering acceptance and comradeship (checkmate)

Luke is just the kind of isolated disaffected young man that terror recruiters seek out.

Obi Wan — a religious fanatic with a history of looking for young boys to recruit and teach an extreme interpretation of the Force — is practically salivating when he stumbles upon Luke, knowing he’s found a prime candidate for radicalization. …

Obi-Wan whisks Luke off to Mos Eisley using a Jedi mind trick to bypass security, knowing full well he likely appears on numerous terror no fly lists. After contracting a local drug smuggler for transportation, Obi-Wan and his newest Skywalker recruit are off. They are soon captured, however, and attempt an escape which culminates in a battle between Obi-Wan and Vader. During the fight, Obi-Wan notices Luke watching, and seeing an opportunity to fully inspire Luke to radicalize, says a Jedi prayer while committing suicide. Can you think of any other groups who try to inspire terrorism by yelling a prayer before a suicide attack?

Once Luke escapes and regroups with a terror sleeper cell, he joins them on an attack mission. As he nears his target, hearing Obi-Wan’s words in his mind, Luke closes his eyes, says a prayer and bombs a space station, killing everyone aboard. Young Skywalker has proven himself a quick study in the ways of armed religious extremism.

As the Empire Strikes Back begins, Obi-Wan appears to Luke as an apparition and gives him clear instructions on continuing his radicalization. Luke is ordered to travel overseas to receive training and religious instruction from Yoda, an extremist cleric who runs a Jedi madrasa on Dagobah.

Yoda accepts Luke into his religious “school,” teaching Luke Jedi fundamentalism and guerilla warfare. Like many extremist mullahs, Yoda demands total adherence to his strict interpretation of the Force and seeks to strip Luke of independent thinking. Yoda’s push to radicalize Luke, rob him of an identity, and instill obedience are apparent when at various points he instructs Luke to “Clear your mind of questions,” “Unlearn what you have learned” and, most grimly, “Do, or do not, there is no try.” The Jedi know it is imperative to force mindless devotion in warriors they recruit for their holy war. Armed with new combat training and cloaked in a hardline religious fervor, Luke leaves Dagobah, impatient to put his terror training to use.

In Return of the Jedi, we see a darker, hardened Luke, fittingly dressed in black and eager to use violence as a tool to enforce the twisted “judge, jury, executioner” value system of the Jedi. During a rescue mission, Luke exhibits their extremist binary worldview of “if you aren’t with us, you’re a viable military target” when he blows up Jabba’s barge, killing every man, woman, and child on board. Excited by so much bloodshed and mayhem, young Skywalker seeks to assassinate the Emperor and even his own father (!) if they won’t convert to Luke’s extremist interpretation of the Force. Luke enters the Death Star, hoping to gain martyrdom if he is killed. As Luke’s insurgent friends successfully bomb their target, Luke succeeds in killing the Emperor and, eventually, his own father. Luke’s path to radicalization is complete, his bloodlust sated … for now.

With Darth Vader the final casualty of Luke’s jihad, Obi-Wan and Yoda have succeeded in catching yet another young man in their web of Jedi extremism. As is now evident, Star Wars is clearly a cautionary tale of the dangers of radicalization, and how even a seemingly harmless young man who kept to himself on Tattooine can become the terrorist next door.

10 Dec 2015

Darth Trump

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04 Dec 2015

Libertarian Star Wars Parody

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From Reason Magazine:

23 Oct 2015

Ukrainian Sculptor Improves Statue of Lenin

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A local sculptor, Alexander Milov, in the Ukrainian city of Yuzhne, outside Odessa, converted a statue of Lenin which was scheduled for demolition as the result of de-Communization legislation requiring the removal and demolition of all Soviet-era monuments into a statue of a figure more popular in today’s Ukraine: Darth Vader.

The Vader statue contains a router in its head, broadcasting WiFi locally.

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28 Jul 2015

All the Changes Made to the Initial Star Wars Trilogy

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Marcelo Zuniga illustrates in a series of videos all the changes that Lucasfilm has made to the original Star Wars Trilogy (and he found a lot of them).

(Watching in Full Screen modes is recommended.)

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15 Jul 2015

First High Resolution Photo of Pluto Raises Concern

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05 May 2015

“The Binks Awakens”

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Jar Jar Binks apparently does not appear in The Force Awakens.

But Murdock Motion used software to add one of the most hated characters in cinematic history into the trailer of the highly anticipated new Star Wars film. It’s a great reminder to fans of the horror that could have been.

Hat tip to Chico Kidd.

16 Apr 2015

New Star Wars Trailer

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Glenn Reynolds will be so happy!

07 Dec 2014

Tweet of the Week

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

03 Dec 2014

Spengler Hates Star Wars

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That old grouch Spengler dislikes Star Wars & Harry Potter & Wagner’s Ring. They are too European pagan for his tastes, which evidently run in the direction of the Hebrew Bible and heathen Chinese Empire. What would Nietszche say?

George Lucas will inflict yet another Star Wars film on us momentarily. I detest the series, along with its successor, Harry Potter, and its antecedent, Wagner’s Ring cycle. Luke Skywalker is a retreaded Siegfried, with inborn powers that make him nearly invincible, asserting his will against authority (Wotan/Darth Vader). There are minor differences; at least Harry doesn’t have to kill Dumbledore. George Lucas explained on a recent American Movie Channel retrospective that he dipped into this swamp first as an anthropology student, reading the likes of Joseph Campbell.

Skywalker/Potter/Siegfried are a carryover of the pagan idea of heroes, which is simply the pagan idea of a god: a being who is like us, but better. …

I suspect that the popularity of Star Wars and the Potter series arises from the generation of obese, pimply-faced young losers we are now raising, who know their real-life prospects to be miserable, and compensate by playing the hero in video games. Very few of them know how to code a computer, to be sure, and even fewer know how to build one.

Think of Skywalker/Potter/Siegfried as the pop-culture equivalent of the self-esteem movement in education. If we can’t persuade our kids to accomplish anything, at least we can enrich their fantasy life.

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