noumenology

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Urban Nature 2011 by Naoko Ito

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sebseballade:

Adrian Villar Rojas

costumepartypolitics:

wait this fool is basically me…

I WISH PEOPLE WOULD SOURCE THESE THINGS… thousands of notes and no indication of where it came from. I had to dig to find out this is a vlogger on youtube named david so, of davidsocomedy

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thenoobyorker:

kohenari:

My most recent post — a tongue-in-cheek consideration of Luke Skywalker’s troubling body count in the Star Wars movies — has met with all the pushback I envisioned.

Luke remains heroic in the minds of a great many who commented because he only kills storm troopers and other imperial baddies. Even the contractors who are working on the incomplete second Death Star — as the roofer in this scene from Clerks argues — shouldn’t be considered innocent casualties because they made a choice with complete information about their imperial client. And, of course, it’s Lando who actually blows up that second Death Star … though the whole affair has Skywalker’s fingerprints all over it. The venerable Admiral Ackbar might be nominally in charge of the moment-to-moment battlefield maneuvers, but do we really believe that Skywalker isn’t the brains behind the whole operation?

Having said all of this, I think there’s a lot of really interesting things we can say about Star Wars and political theory (beyond that great relativist notion that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”).

First of all, the rebels understand themselves to be at war with the Empire, not simply engaging in occasional guerrilla strikes against it. What’s more, it’s clear that the vast majority of the people in the galaxy are imperial citizens in name only; they’re kept under the Palpatine’s sway by the power he wields, not because they’ve chosen him as their Emperor. In this sense, Skywalker and Co. aren’t simply freedom fighters to some; they’re freedom fighters to everyone who isn’t fully pledged to the tyrannical regime.

Secondly, I think there’s no doubt that both the first and the second Death Star are legitimate military targets. They’re both fully-operational battle stations, capable of destroying planets. 

In the first instance, we witness the Death Star’s awesome power as it wipes Alderaan and its millions of peaceful Alderaanians out of existence. In the climactic battle — as my friend Miguel Centellas points out — it’s only seconds away from doing the same to the Rebel Alliance’s planetary base when Skywalker and Co. manage to destroy it. And — apart from the innocent people who are imprisoned on it (remember all those holding cells?) — we never get any indication that non-imperial personnel might be hanging around on board.

With regard to the second Death Star, it’s clear that it has the same destructive firepower as the first. With that in mind, I don’t think Skywalker and Co. have an imminent self-defense argument, but they could make either a case regarding long-term self-defense or perhaps a case about the Responsibility to Protect. It’s not clear who might be the target — many wish it could be the Ewoks, but it seems unlikely that the Death Star would blow up Endor when its shield generator is housed there — but no one can mistake that building a second Death Star and putting it to use go hand-in-hand.

That said, the contractor problem remains. The dialogue in Clerks is clever, but neither Dante nor the roofer deal with the issue of totalitarianism. The contractors on the Death Star don’t have the choice that the roofer had, as rejecting the imperial contract would have grave consequences. That blood is, I think, decidedly on the hands of Skywalker and Co.

This leads to my final point, which concerns a sort of utilitarian calculus. If the Death Star is capable of taking millions of lives in an instant, is it acceptable to destroy it (and the thousands of people who are on it when it explodes)? I’m not one for utilitarianism, personally; I don’t think we can simply stack up the bodies into two piles and then add them up to determine if we’ve done the right thing.

What I want to suggest, at bottom, is that Star Wars rests on the presumption that pacifism or isolationism isn’t going to free the galaxy from the Emperor’s deadly grasp. Luke could have stayed on Tatooine forever, of course, helping Uncle Owen with his little farming operation … but that wouldn’t have saved the people of Alderaan. It might have saved the lives of countless clone storm troopers, Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, Palpatine, and even all those contractors … but that would have meant the deaths of most — if not all — of the Rebel Alliance and perhaps billions more people.

At some point, there’s no getting around the fact that we need to take a stand against tyranny, recognizing that people always get killed in war and that, as much as we can, we must minimize non-combatant deaths. So, there’s a way to answer my question from the previous post about Luke Skywalker’s body count … but it necessitates the recognition that some battles need to be fought even though the costs might be high.

Decolonize space.

The real problem with Star Wars is the problem with most fictional narratives and mythologies - they deal with totalizing themes which present moral conundrums that can be dealt with, perhaps not easily, but through decisive and unambiguous action. Shades of  complexity and the nuances of ethics, arguments of “just war” versus pacifist concerns, not to mention any deep political philosophy is lost to familiar cardboard cutouts. There are archetypical characters who are “more machine than man” yet bear a glimmer of redemption. The galactic empire, which is wholly evil, is never thought of as more than a fascist organization, an autocratic concentration of power - there is no thought to the structures and rhizomes which produce or enable that power. The rebellion, its pure values, invoke contemporary discussions of “freedom fighter versus terrorist” - yet the films give us little to believe they are anything but the best of people. Overall Star Wars presents a difficult problematic which mirrors most shallow contrasts of authority and subversion.