SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Does anyone actually care about, like, the citizens of cloud city or whatever? What about the people of Alderaan? Where’s the blood that would force us to care?!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

So: Star Wars!

Does anyone actually care about, like, the citizens of cloud city or whatever? What about the people of Alderaan? Where’s the blood that would force us to care?!

I’m thinking ‘maybe.’

Tezzorb posted:

Can I just spend a quick ten dollars to point out what a complete sty this place is? I can? Great! Look at this blithering rear end in a top hat still doing decade-old bits so tired they'd embarrass Yakov Smirnoff, trying to troll people into saying the N word to pretend to Wokely Argue that completely imaginary comedy robots are like oppressed minority groups in real life, something neither he nor anyone else actually takes seriously. Yet a cool and fearless large-dicked poster can't call him a dipshit without getting banned because the mod is a coward who can't deal with a bunch of autists keening like dying elk and rocking back and forth and chewing their fingers to the bone when someone tells them their stupid films are bad. The snake rots from the head.

dracky posted:

I like the droids more than the humans honestly, they’re just doing what they’ve been told to do and people give them poo poo for it regardless, like man, I’ve been there. Who watches star wars and is like, oh those two robots are just fake, they’re not people, throw them in the trash compactor, who cares. Like drat, why are you even watching star wars then?

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

I dunno about that. Aside from the sheer volume of the aggro posts, Tezzor (amusingly autocorrected as “Tizzy” by my phone) shows every indication of just being unfashionably regressive and dumb. Like, they’re using terms and concepts incorrectly but in a consistent way.

They’re very bad at forming an argument, but seem aware of that fact - consciously switching over to blunt hate speech when flustered. Despite continually failing the Challenge, they’re 100% down with calling everyone ‘autistic animals’ and demanding their elimination by the authorities. And while there might seem to be a contradiction there - ‘I’m not bigoted; you’re just subhuman’ - it’s easily understood as a case of that “lib brain” I mentioned earlier.

Being like a caveman youtuber from the prehistoric mid-2000s, unfrozen and ejected into the present year, Tizzy understands that racism is bad but not that ableism is bad. This is because there’s little to no awareness of the reasons why slurs became considered bad in the first place. They understand “racism” not as an ideology but as a sort of essential evil in the individual, revealed through the use of select prohibited words. Calling someone an autistic dog’ doesn’t usually trip the sensor, and is even encouraged if you’re doing a ‘comical rant’ about the Star Wars prequels on Digg or Fark or Neopets(??? idk; I don’t use other websites).

This is again pretty consistent with everything else Tezzor has written. It’s why they - rather vocally! - don’t care about slavery unless there is graphic bloody violence, desperate crying women, whatever. The act of hitting people and using (certain) slurs is bad, while the institution of slavery minus these elements is ‘cartoonish’, ‘bloodless’, etc. It’s what allows Tezzor to watch a movie featuring literally millions of slaves and say slavery doesn’t exist in the movie. This failure to understand socioeconomic violence is of course related to the moral idiocy where an action can’t be understood as bad unless we care - viscerally. Caring makes it real.

Tezzor’s stance here recalls an argument made by professional idiot Sam Harris, circa Abu Ghraib, that our only real objection to torture is that it produces an empathy response - so, we can make torture acceptable, in a utilitarian way, by just rationally eliminating empathy:

“We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.”

Of course, that sounds extremely monstrous and evil, and Tezzor is aware of this. Hence, the recourse to the figure of “George Lucas” as one who has stolen Tezzor’s empathy and therefore caused slavery to become good through sinful idleness or whatever. This is how Tezzor flips the logic of ‘caring’ to depersonalize his opponents: ‘you don’t actually care, and therefore you are an autistic animal.’

Again, this is a fairly coherent worldview! It just one that only makes sense if slavery is understood purely as a subjective state of pain - like how exploitation is often not considered to be something experienced by all workers under capitalism, but an exceptional case where people experience egregious sweatshop conditions or are made to do undignified porn or something.

And that’s why a fairly basic satire of liberalism has heavily impacted this person for decades.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The Challenge is 100% deadly serious - and 100% deadly successful - but it is also mainly a way to get people thinking about stuff.

I mean, hopefully.

Tezzor may be really perplexed by many concepts, but they consequently serve as a helpful negative example of why you gotta establish things like “what is racism”, “what is a person”, “what is reality”, etc. It’s why I gravitate towards science fiction.

Like, it’s genuinely wild to discover multiple people not understanding that, when watching a fictional movie, they themselves are real. Like, it’s not okay to write out an interpretation of LOTR that’s Mein Kampf but with orcs. Because, while orcs may be fictional, the nazi propaganda you’re writing is very real. And very bad. But, yet, we’ve seen that people have enormous difficulty with this. ‘How can the nazi propaganda be real if orcs aren’t real?’, ‘I’m a good person who would never say such things in real life!’, etc.

And you, know, I believe that: you probably wouldn’t be saying this wild poo poo without first being confronted with a speculative fiction. When shown a person made of metal or an android made of meat, previously-unexamined weird thoughts are suddenly off the chain.

The Challenge has proven remarkably successful at, at least briefly, snapping nerds out of that “nothing’s real” delusion. poo poo suddenly gets very real very fast, to the point that even fuckin’ Tezzor admits “Mace Windu is played by a human being who is black and to call him that is to call the actor that as well, and also in reality it's a deeply offensive slur.” Suddenly there’s this realization that they themselves exist, and that they’re actually writing things down & communicating real ideas to other real people in reality.

But then they just revert straight back to posting Elf Kampf, without skipping a beat - again demonstrating that the goal is not to stop doing racism, but to escape consequences by making it seem palatable. ‘Orcs aren’t real! Nobody cares about the orcs! You’re trivializing real racism by criticizing my manifesto!’ Etc.

Thinking over why that reversion takes place is what led to the fairly obvious conclusion: that they just really, genuinely, do not understand what racism is. Like, if you go back to Tezzor’s explanation for failing the Challenge, they conceive of racism purely in terms of offence: people would be offended, Samuel L. Jackson will be insulted, etc. And, like, sure; that’s something. But Tezzor’s solution is to just switch to softer language and easier targets. There’s no moment of ‘oh, I’m perpetuating a very bad ideology regardless of whether people are offended.’ Like I wrote earlier: maybe constantly downplaying things and keeping them at a dogwhistle frequency is actually worse?

So: Star Wars!

Does anyone actually care about, like, the citizens of cloud city or whatever? What about the people of Alderaan? Where’s the blood that would force us to care?!

Could it be that the ‘visceral empathy’ thing is yet another smokescreen?

I’m thinking ‘maybe.’

Robot Style posted:

I think part of the vagueness about whether droids are living beings or just machines partially stems from how the themes of the movie evolved over time.

George Lucas was inspired by The Hidden Fortress using two peasants as the POV characters for the movie, and wanted to do the same thing for Star Wars. In his initial outline, they were Imperial bureaucrats, but when he actually started writing the movie, they became droids. And in the beginning they were, for all intents and purposes, just metal people.

Then as Lucas began exploring the Force more during rewrites, the themes of humanity vs technology became more pronounced. Rather than Darth Vader, early drafts included cyborg characters who were heroic mentors, with their robotic parts just being a sign of age rather than corruption. C-3PO was even the one to make the killing shot on the Death Star in the second draft script, because his robotic brain was able to make calculations faster than a human could.

So the movie is kind of at odds with itself - wanting to have the robots as empathetic POV characters (which requires them to be imbued with a certain amount of humanity), while also wanting to demonstrate that technology is cold, unthinking, and evil.

As a result, Droids are "alive" because they're characters in a movie and need to think and and feel and act as human beings, but they're not alive because true humanity isn't thematically attainable by mechanical things.

It's similar to the situation presented in Heroic Animal movies like Air Bud or Homeward Bound. The animals in those films are usually presented as "just" animals, but have heightened intelligence and human-like traits for the sake of telling the story to a human audience. Can the animals really talk to each other? Does Air Bud actually know the rules of basketball? If so, pet ownership in the worlds of those movies is highly immoral, because the distinction between animal and human is only physical rather than mental or spiritual. The same goes for the droids of Star Wars.

But the opposite is also true. If Air Bud doesn't know what basketball is, R2-D2 doesn't have a soul.

bunnyofdoom posted:

Ain't no rule that says an ewok can't play basketball fly an x-wing

Prolonged Panorama posted:

Grendels Dad posted:

Yes there is. "You must be *this* tall to fly an X-Wing" is painted on every one, and an Ewok is not this tall!

bunnyofdoom posted:

Don't you disrespect Lt. Ketchh like this!

quote:

Kettch was a fictional Ewok X-wing pilot serving with Wraith Squadron, invented as a prank by pilot Wes Janson.

Grendels Dad posted:

Ah HAH, if Lt. Kettch was fictional, then how could the rules account for them, huh?

bunnyofdoom posted:

What about Kolot then?

quote:

Kolot was an Ewok male upon whom Imperial Warlord Zsinj's Project Chubar experimented.

Blood Boils posted:

SMG you probably didn't know this but comparing Tezzor to Sam Harris is really twisting the knife lol

Before driving himself insane over star wars (many such cases) Tezz's claim to fame was a fairly successful thread discrediting the nu-atheists, years before it was commonly accepted that they were obviously irrational and reactionary.

I'd give him more props for it but he just had to come for my very real bestest boys, artoo & threepio, and that I cannot forgive

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The Challenge is 100% deadly serious - and 100% deadly successful - but it is also mainly a way to get people thinking about stuff.

I mean, hopefully.

Tezzor may be really perplexed by many concepts, but they consequently serve as a helpful negative example of why you gotta establish things like “what is racism”, “what is a person”, “what is reality”, etc. It’s why I gravitate towards science fiction.

Like, it’s genuinely wild to discover multiple people not understanding that, when watching a fictional movie, they themselves are real. Like, it’s not okay to write out an interpretation of LOTR that’s Mein Kampf but with orcs. Because, while orcs may be fictional, the nazi propaganda you’re writing is very real. And very bad. But, yet, we’ve seen that people have enormous difficulty with this. ‘How can the nazi propaganda be real if orcs aren’t real?’, ‘I’m a good person who would never say such things in real life!’, etc.

And you, know, I believe that: you probably wouldn’t be saying this wild poo poo without first being confronted with a speculative fiction. When shown a person made of metal or an android made of meat, previously-unexamined weird thoughts are suddenly off the chain.

The Challenge has proven remarkably successful at, at least briefly, snapping nerds out of that “nothing’s real” delusion. poo poo suddenly gets very real very fast, to the point that even fuckin’ Tezzor admits “Mace Windu is played by a human being who is black and to call him that is to call the actor that as well, and also in reality it's a deeply offensive slur.” Suddenly there’s this realization that they themselves exist, and that they’re actually writing things down & communicating real ideas to other real people in reality.

But then they just revert straight back to posting Elf Kampf, without skipping a beat - again demonstrating that the goal is not to stop doing racism, but to escape consequences by making it seem palatable. ‘Orcs aren’t real! Nobody cares about the orcs! You’re trivializing real racism by criticizing my manifesto!’ Etc.

Thinking over why that reversion takes place is what led to the fairly obvious conclusion: that they just really, genuinely, do not understand what racism is. Like, if you go back to Tezzor’s explanation for failing the Challenge, they conceive of racism purely in terms of offence: people would be offended, Samuel L. Jackson will be insulted, etc. And, like, sure; that’s something. But Tezzor’s solution is to just switch to softer language and easier targets. There’s no moment of ‘oh, I’m perpetuating a very bad ideology regardless of whether people are offended.’ Like I wrote earlier: maybe constantly downplaying things and keeping them at a dogwhistle frequency is actually worse?

So: Star Wars!

Does anyone actually care about, like, the citizens of cloud city or whatever? What about the people of Alderaan? Where’s the blood that would force us to care?!

Could it be that the ‘visceral empathy’ thing is yet another smokescreen?

I’m thinking ‘maybe.’

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

I dunno about that. Aside from the sheer volume of the aggro posts, Tezzor (amusingly autocorrected as “Tizzy” by my phone) shows every indication of just being unfashionably regressive and dumb. Like, they’re using terms and concepts incorrectly but in a consistent way.

They’re very bad at forming an argument, but seem aware of that fact - consciously switching over to blunt hate speech when flustered. Despite continually failing the Challenge, they’re 100% down with calling everyone ‘autistic animals’ and demanding their elimination by the authorities. And while there might seem to be a contradiction there - ‘I’m not bigoted; you’re just subhuman’ - it’s easily understood as a case of that “lib brain” I mentioned earlier.

Being like a caveman youtuber from the prehistoric mid-2000s, unfrozen and ejected into the present year, Tizzy understands that racism is bad but not that ableism is bad. This is because there’s little to no awareness of the reasons why slurs became considered bad in the first place. They understand “racism” not as an ideology but as a sort of essential evil in the individual, revealed through the use of select prohibited words. Calling someone an autistic dog’ doesn’t usually trip the sensor, and is even encouraged if you’re doing a ‘comical rant’ about the Star Wars prequels on Digg or Fark or Neopets(??? idk; I don’t use other websites).

This is again pretty consistent with everything else Tezzor has written. It’s why they - rather vocally! - don’t care about slavery unless there is graphic bloody violence, desperate crying women, whatever. The act of hitting people and using (certain) slurs is bad, while the institution of slavery minus these elements is ‘cartoonish’, ‘bloodless’, etc. It’s what allows Tezzor to watch a movie featuring literally millions of slaves and say slavery doesn’t exist in the movie. This failure to understand socioeconomic violence is of course related to the moral idiocy where an action can’t be understood as bad unless we care - viscerally. Caring makes it real.

Tezzor’s stance here recalls an argument made by professional idiot Sam Harris, circa Abu Ghraib, that our only real objection to torture is that it produces an empathy response - so, we can make torture acceptable, in a utilitarian way, by just rationally eliminating empathy:

“We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.”

Of course, that sounds extremely monstrous and evil, and Tezzor is aware of this. Hence, the recourse to the figure of “George Lucas” as one who has stolen Tezzor’s empathy and therefore caused slavery to become good through sinful idleness or whatever. This is how Tezzor flips the logic of ‘caring’ to depersonalize his opponents: ‘you don’t actually care, and therefore you are an autistic animal.’

Again, this is a fairly coherent worldview! It just one that only makes sense if slavery is understood purely as a subjective state of pain - like how exploitation is often not considered to be something experienced by all workers under capitalism, but an exceptional case where people experience egregious sweatshop conditions or are made to do undignified porn or something.

And that’s why a fairly basic satire of liberalism has heavily impacted this person for decades.

End of Shoelace posted:

I'd say that Tezzor claiming droids are not people is definitely racist, because his entire argument is that the non-personhood and inferiority of droids is intrinsic to their being droids. They're just machines, a sum of parts, soulless computers, as in decidedly not human (this is also an argument for "human supremacy.") Being a droid is, in itself, an inferior state, and all bad qualities of a droid are inseparable from droid-ness.

quote:

You said:
Is it racist to say that ChatGpt is not a person?

ChatGPT said:
Nope, that’s not racist at all—ChatGPT isn’t a person!

I’m an AI, so saying I’m “not a person” is just factually accurate. There's no race involved, and no human identity to insult. You're just pointing out the difference between a human being and an artificial intelligence.

1st AD posted:

Touch grass

Zeta Niloticus posted:

I was gonna make a joke yesterday about tezzorb becoming tezzorc in a day or two but it looks like I'm a little late

bunnyofdoom posted:

What is everyone's favourite spaceship? I kinda am a sucker for the Tie Defender

bunnyofdoom posted:

What is everyone's favourite spaceship? I kinda am a sucker for the Tie Defender

ruddiger posted:

Can Princess Leia be considered a spaceship since she flies through space in the sequel trilogy?