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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 fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Apr 17, 2025 |
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# ? Jun 25, 2025 00:39 |
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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?! I care about the ice cream maker, does that count
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Willrow Hood successfully evacuated with the ice cream maker, so there is still hope for ice cream in the galaxy. The same cannot be said of the unknown, but surely exquisite, science-fictional delicacies that were lost with the destruction of Alderaan.
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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
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
There's a council of elders or like a court in the background of most of the settings we see in the Phantom Menace. There are hooded Gungans around Boss Nass, Nemoidian senators or socrateses in the palace on Naboo, Jabba's gang. Sio Bibble! What happens in their meetings?
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Darth Vader carries around pieces of Alderaan to give to worlds that resisted the Empire as a reminder
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That's kind of the root of this whole bizarre discussion, isn't it? People accept the personhood of stormtroopers and Imperials and move on with their lives when the heroes of the original trilogy kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of them because they're fighting for good reasons and killing a lot of people is acceptable under those circumstances. The protagonists of the prequels kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of droids, but the premises on which they're fighting their war are deeply flawed. But rather than just defend the Republic as an institution worth fighting a war to protect - as the characters do - it becomes critically important to some that the Republic's enemies are not people and therefore there's no moral complication whatsoever. ...Which is the exact mindset satirized in advance by Attack of the Clones! That's why there's a clone army!
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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. Oh that weirdo is still being weird about black people 10 years in. Some things never change.
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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.
End of Shoelace fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Apr 17, 2025 |
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Stop talking about tezzor and the mace windu bit. They've been successfully ![]()
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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?
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Well when I was 6, it was clear to me that Luke was committing suicide when he jumped into the bottomless pit, but some people need to look back and rationalize that that could not possibly have been what was happening.
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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? The second best thing a science fiction story can do is have a cool robot. The first best thing is have a robot that kind of sucks. Star Wars is good because it does both.
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"We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life."
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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. 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. you are hosed in the head dude
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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.
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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. Well, it was moral that Air Bud went to live with the kid who gave him pudding instead of an abusive clown.
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Ain't no rule that says an ewok can't play basketball
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bunnyofdoom posted:Ain't no rule that says an ewok can't
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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!
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Please release the docking clamp for my tall, furry, trenchcoated friend, Darth Insanius.
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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! Don't you disrespect Lt. Ketchh like this!
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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. Ah HAH, if Lt. Kettch was fictional, then how could the rules account for them, huh?
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Grendels Dad posted:Ah HAH, if Lt. Kettch was fictional, then how could the rules account for them, huh? What about Kolot then?
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It's incredibly disappointing that the old Expanded Universe was so granular that they explained the canonical identities of the player characters from the Star Wars VHS game, but these brave heroes languish in anonymity.![]()
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quote:Kolot was an Ewok male upon whom Imperial Warlord Zsinj's Project Chubar experimented. ![]()
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So a little about me: a few years ago I went to the opening night premiere of The Rise of Skywalker, and there were some kids there - couldn't have been more than 10 - who were wearing brown robes and white tunics. Of course, I immediately began crying and throwing up. What sociopath would dress up these innocent children like the Nazi Waffen Gestapo Mafia SS. And the worst of it was they were waving their light-up implements of Genocide around. Tears and vomit still dripping from my beard, I got down into a squat and explained to them firmly yet hysterically that they might as well be playing with toy gas chambers and they have to call a black guy the N word. Let's just say that what happened next made me like the thug cop police even less (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Blood Boils posted:SMG you probably didn't know this but comparing Tezzor to Sam Harris is really twisting the knife lol None of this is true
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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. 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. If you understandably didn't read this, I'd like to highlight three salient points: he a) wrote it in response to being trolled about the personhood of goofy robots in a children's film, b) claims to be completely serious about it, and c) apparently wrote all of this on his phone Tezzorc fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Apr 18, 2025 |
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Anyway, did any of you notice how nice the foley work is in those movies? pew pew
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Jesus loving christ. Tezzor you are more pathetic than trioculus
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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. That's crazy let's check in with the marginalized group instead of presuming to speak for them quote:You said: Tezzorc fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Apr 18, 2025 |
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Touch grass ![]()
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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
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What is everyone's favourite spaceship? I kinda am a sucker for the Tie Defender
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1st AD posted:Touch grass I've been gone for eight years. You've been here. I'm the debt coming due. I know what you did last summer (posted here) 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 I'd make an Orc avatar for fun but I'm too broke from losers getting mad at me to pay a real artist and of course using a chatbot is slavery
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bunnyofdoom posted:What is everyone's favourite spaceship? I kinda am a sucker for the Tie Defender Can Princess Leia be considered a spaceship since she flies through space in the sequel trilogy?
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bunnyofdoom posted:What is everyone's favourite spaceship? I kinda am a sucker for the Tie Defender Tie Defender is cool. I think the Calamari cruisers have a cool design as well
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ruddiger posted:Can Princess Leia be considered a spaceship since she flies through space in the sequel trilogy? I'll allow it
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# ? Jun 25, 2025 00:39 |
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