celecos

I'm genuinely pissed to see how much her character is flattened and hollowed-out to fit into the "virtuous and pure" mold.

She is a conservative icon—dare I say, a proto-trad wife. She is an aristocrat, a classist, a xenophobe, a colonizer, and a moralist. She believes in her own hype, deeming herself a superior and the only real fighter for democracy and liberty.

Padmé embodies an aristocratic worldview that’s often left unexamined in her characterization. She’s grown up in a royal, elite setting, and though she speaks about democracy, her actual practice is often more about benevolent governance than shared governance. Her “democratic” efforts are aimed at maintaining a sense of order and protecting the stability of a privileged system, not at leveling the playing field. Recognizing her classism doesn’t make her a villain; it makes her a realistic character with complex beliefs and biases rooted in her upbringing.

Padmé’s approach to diplomacy often echoes a colonial mindset, where she sees herself—and the Republic—as civilizing forces in the galaxy. Her attempts to “help” are frequently rooted in a belief that the Republic’s values are inherently superior. Like many well-meaning figures in real-world history, she wants to help the galaxy, but her approach is paternalistic, assuming that others should aspire to the Republic’s model of governance and culture. Her role as a “savior” figure who tries to bring peace to other worlds isn’t driven by understanding those worlds on their own terms, but rather by a belief that the Republic’s order should prevail.

Happy star wars day to all who celebrate 🌟

Lines:

Am I the only one who saw these two and thought, yep I'm shipping these two. You are telling me we have depressed overworked divorced dad and a soft spoken villain who is tired of the world stepping on him, please give me more. I haven't seen episodes 3-4 but 1-2 were enough to make me wanna see them fuck

it's true, we don't know much about them in canon.

but we know the artists made them all white, blond, and blue-eyed when nearly all previous Mandalorians we met were Brown

we know the writers decided that it's fine if they banish all the people who don't conform (not just Kyr'tsad) to a reservation Concordia - not a prison, and yes a place they can leave where they have their own government, but subordinate to the Sundari government and still away from their indigenous homeland explicitly because they were interacting with their indigenous culture

we know the directors decided not to use the already constructed indigenous language and to have them make wearing beskar'gam - Boba Fett's armor, the thing Mandalorians have been known for since before they were Mandalorians - one of the reasons for banishment

and if you look at the ten stages of genocide, we have an us vs them mentality, we have visual differentiation via the presence or absence of beskar'gam, we have being banished from the main planet, we have armed and armored Mandalorians (again, not just Kyr'tsad) said to be irrationally violent, we have defense forces trained against other Mandalorians (not 👏 just 👏 Kyr'tsad), and we have literal speeches that on the surface denounce violence but overall denounce the traditional Mandalorian way of life

that's over halfway there

6 out of the 10 stages, the 9th of which is the extermination stage that everyone thinks of when they think "genocide"

(even one stage is bad, btw)

and, yes, the Resol'nare and Jaster Mereel's Supercommando Codex are no longer canon. a lot of things are no longer canon, and the producers decided to take Mandalore in a different direction than previous iterations

but they still chose that direction

and that is why I don't like the New Mandalorians

not because they're canonically guilty of anything in particular, but because I am an indigenous person whose people have barely survived genocide and are still healing, and because the decisions made by the people who wrote them not only impact the public perception of us by association but also directly parallel many of our own struggles, past and present - struggles which I hope no Star Wars fan would ever dismiss as "not that bad"

i keep noticing that the vast majority of maul’s scenes in tcw take place at night. most of the nightsisters’ and nightbrothers’ scenes are at night as well. they seem to be active during the day, true, but it’s fully possible that either or both societies work on day crowd/night crowd schedules, or they simply. get up before the sun has fully set.

the twilight forest where the nightbrother village is? covered in snow. it's melted off the roofs, but you can see it all over the ground. dathomir chilly.

nightsisters -> lots of hoods, living underground -> have hair

nightbrother -> holes in clothes, no hoods or cloaks, living above ground -> no hair

normal/iridonian zabrak -> hair both genders

“it’s not as simple as good and evil”

Okay, first of all, I will admit that calling Maul lawful is a bit of an oversimplification because he slides all over the lawful-chaotic spectrum as his character evolves throughout his story. The alignment very much depends on what era he’s in. For example, when he’s in his early Kill Kenobi era, and his plan is essentially “kill as many villagers as it takes to get Kenobi’s attention,” I’d say he’s more in a chaotic era.

However, I think in more eras than not, he falls more on the lawful side. Now, he’s not lawful as in following The Law but he is following some set of standards most of the time, be it his Sith indoctrination or whatever self-made set of principles Sam hints are coming up in Shadow Lord.

Pre-Phantom Menace, he is at his most lawful, as this is when he’s deepest in his indoctrination. He follows the Sith doctrine and unquestioningly carries out Sidious’ orders to the letter.

Later in the Clone Wars, once he’s gotten his rampaging out of his system, we see him being more methodical. He forms alliances, builds a power base, and makes deals. While he’s not acting within The Law, he is still acting within the Sith framework.

Shadow Lord hasn’t premiered yet, but according to Sam Witwer in interviews, he’ll be reevaluating and “drawing new lines he won’t cross.”

(I can’t speak on Rebels, since I haven’t seen it, just clips from it. From the little I have seen, he does still use the Sith code as a framework, even after renouncing the Sith. Maul, honey, you left the cult but not the mindset.)

But a big reason I feel Maul leans towards the lawful category is that he has loyalties. It’s not everyone, not even necessarily everyone he allies with. But the people he is loyal to, he is loyal up til the end or until they betray him first. (Whether they deserve it or not.)

Palpatine, as already mentioned, he is unquestioningly loyal to. It does come from a place of trauma, but I do believe that, had he not been cast aside after Phantom Menace, he would have been loyal up until Palpatine’s inevitable betrayal. (I’ll get back to that later.)

Next, we have a relatively healthier loyal relationship with Savage. With them, the loyalty is mutual. Though Maul takes more of a leader role, and doesn’t always treat Savage the best, he and Savage act as a true partnership. At no point do I believe they would ever betray each other. Maybe have a fight from time to time, but never betrayal.

Finally, he’s loyal to Mother Talzin. Whether or not this is a good relationship depends on your interpretation of Maul’s multiple choice backstory, but it’s there. In Son of Dathomir, after Maul is freed from Palpatine’s prison, the rest focuses on Maul seeking revenge on Palpatine and trying to return Mother Talzin to a physical form. As is tradition, this doesn’t work out for Maul. Almost as quickly as she’s revived, she sacrifices herself to allow Maul to escape. However, he refuses to leave her behind and needs to be dragged away by his Mandos.

So to sum up, Maul’s lawfulness is shown in his adherence to a code of some sort, though that code evolves overtime, and his loyalty to the people he deems worthy of it.

Now let’s look at Palpatine. On the surface, he may seem like a lawful type. I mean just look at the empire. It’s so full of rules and regulations that it’s literally oppressive and any deviation is severely punished. It’s a tyrannical regime.

But here’s the thing. The rules are there for OTHER PEOPLE. Palpatine, himself, believes he is above the rules. (And really, what else do you expect a spoiled rich kid whose family money kept him from experiencing consequences?) He cares about one thing and one thing only, and that is himself. I’m not sure the Sith code is even all that important to him. He certainly doesn’t give a damn about the rule of two.

Everything is a means to get all the power for himself, and everything is expendable including his apprentices. I don’t believe he ever had a true apprentice, because that implies having a successor. But what use is a successor to someone who has no intention of dying?

He discarded Maul, and later tried to kill him. He ordered Anakin to kill Dooku. He probably would have betrayed Vader in the eventually, if something better came along. No matter how well his apprentices serve him, they will be discarded as he sees fit.

There’s not much else to say about Palpatine in this regard. There’s only so many ways to say he values no one and nothing except the acquisition of power for himself.

So to conclude, Maul, though his alignment shifts through his narrative, most often works within some set of rules or personal boundaries and does have loyalty to a select few. Palpatine, on the other hand, is a total void of virtues and has no regard for any set of standards.

planets with no moon that don’t have a time increment between days and years

planets with a dozen moons where understanding their cycles involves university courses

multi-planet star systems where the position of the other planet features prominently in calendar systems

tidally locked planets with no days (or years, really, because even though they’re orbiting a star they wouldn’t have significant changes in seasons)

and not only do they not have days or years, they have no cultural concept of those things and are bewildered by the rest of the galaxy’s obsession with measuring time

planets with years so long that they’re useless as a way of measuring age, so people give their age in months instead

planets with like 6 hour days where people are used to sleeping frequently for only a couple hours at a time

the space equivalent of jetlag involves adjusting to a new day length, not just a new time zone

when two planets have slightly different day lengths, the days shift relative to each other, so if you travel frequently between two such planets, sometimes the days line up perfectly and sometimes you have to deal with 12 hours of “jet”lag

And there are tons of interesting cultural implications that go along with using Coruscant time as a standard throughout the galaxy:

standard Coruscant dates have basically no correlation to seasons on planets with different year lengths, so to even guess at the weather during a historical date given in standard time you need to do calculations

everyone has a different age in local years and standard years, and a different birthday

some planets have days much longer or shorter than standard days, so your standard birthday might be spread over a few local days or vice versa

stuff like being old enough to drive – it tends to go in round numbers of local years, so even on planets where the rule is “about 18 standard”, you have some planets where it’s actually 17.36 standard years, or 19.1, or whatever works out nicely in local years

planets that follow Coruscant standard time and totally ignore natural phenomena on their own planets

up to and including days – they force themselves into sleep cycles with nothing to do with the sun rising and setting

planets that refuse to use standard time even in official settings, and pilots hate having to travel there because the space port is always chaotic because no one knows what time it is

the Separatists try to switch to another time system than Coruscant standard and it’s a total mess but it would be embarrassing to switch back

the Rebellion learns their lesson from this and doesn’t try to change the standard time system even though the New Republic government is no longer based on Coruscant

people pay less and less attention to standard time as you get farther from the core

Though Coruscant is mostly endless city with no access to natural light, so doubtful it would make such a difference. Except for the few and wealthy who live in the top levels on the far side of the planet, who might kick up a fuss.

Prosperitism for capitalism and Consymmetrism for neoliberalism. Yes, these terms are pretty cumbersome, but I think that contributes to why it feels Star Wars appropriate.

I would elaborate on these concepts and their integration into the story-world, but I lately learned that complexity scares the average Star Wars fan.

Consymmetrism is now Consynergism.

Synergy is an interaction or cooperation giving rise to a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts.

It captures the "trickle-down economics" lie better than the concept of "symmetry".

It is a really interesting insight into how fascism and eugenics developed, and how entwined both of those things are with the history of psychiatry.

Nordau believes in a Lamarckian idea of evolution where if an organism's body is damaged or altered by the environment, those acquired traits can be passed onto offspring. This is very important for understanding the arguments of the book.

Nordau thinks that modernity is damaging the bodies and minds of humans, making them perpetually exhausted and weak, which makes them susceptible to "degeneracy," the decline of health, morality, and reason through regression to an animal-like state. His explanations for how this works, which I assume from his citations are basically what experts thought at the time, are fascinating to read. He gives theories for how the brain and the senses work that are a little bit right but dreadfully limited and mostly wrong.

Many of Nordau's main points, though, are basically identical to today's arguments about art, morality, sexuality, and censorship.

Furthermore, the social and human phenomena he describes, including psychiatric phenomena, are much more familiar and easily mapped onto modern concepts than I thought.

I wish I could find it again, but there was a book from...1904? maybe 1914?...describing the treatment of mentally disabled kids in an asylum, that I found online.

It was STRIKING to me how the descriptions of the kids matched perfectly to modern descriptions of ADHD and autism. This book also contained numerous descriptions that seemed unmistakably, obviously like ADHD or autism.

But the labels they used were: "mental defectives," "imbeciles," "idiots," and other things even more offensive.

What is so interesting is that Nordau describes, and singles out, what are popularly considered harmlessly quirky or even positive traits of neurodivergence, and identifies them as part of "degeneracy," categorized along with more noticeable or stigmatized forms of mental disability. He especially emphasizes sensory hyper- and hypo-reactivity as a trait of "degeneracy" in many places.

Here's an example of his descriptions:

“Imbeciles (weak minds) present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of fugitive thought (Gedankenflucht), i.e., the incapacity to retain, or to unite in a concept or judgment, the representations automatically and reciprocally called into consciousness in conformity with the laws of association, and also that of reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought, but which differs from it in that the particular representations of which it is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who in the midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is not able to state exactly what happens to be present in his consciousness. All observers maintain that the ‘higher degenerate’ is frequently ‘original, brilliant, witty,’ and that whereas he is incapable of activity which demands attention and self-control, he has strong artistic inclinations. All these peculiarities are to be explained by the uncontrolled working of association.”

This book made me consider the possibility that what we now call ADHD was actually significantly more disabling and stigmatized in the early 20th century, because criminality and mental illness are so closely linked in here, and it is highly visible how traits like impulsivity and emotional dysregulation were extremely costly to have.

At one point he gives a really detailed description of synesthesia, including grapheme-color synesthesia:

Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments[...]That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his Farbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.

And he is REALLY pissed off about it.

In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.

The effect of war on the nerves of the participants has never been systematically investigated; and yet how highly important and necessary a work this would be! Science knows what disorders are produced in man by a single strong moral shock, e.g., a sudden mortal danger; it has recorded hundreds and thousands of cases in which persons saved from drowning, or present at a fire on shipboard, or in a railway accident, or who have been threatened with assassination, etc., have either lost their reason, or been attacked by grave and protracted, often incurable, nervous illnesses.

Everything, EVERYTHING I have ever read about the history of our understanding of PTSD and trauma, says or implies that post-traumatic symptoms were first recognized in soldiers, and later were realized to manifest in other people who experienced trauma.

But THIS is saying "You know how people can develop long term mental illness from a traumatic event? Shouldn't we look into whether that happens to soldiers who have experienced war?" And then he goes on to theorize about how a nation having recently experienced a war could affect everyone because of the "moral shock" the soldiers bring home with them.

Something in the history of psychiatry isn't adding up here.

Here's one of the paragraphs addressing sensory differences.

Maudsley describes some cases of degeneration among children whose skin was insensible, and remarks: ‘They cannot feel impressions as they naturally should feel them, nor adjust themselves to their surroundings, with which they are in discord; and the motor outcomes of the perverted affections of self are accordingly of a meaningless and destructive character

This sounds an awful lot like autism

Here's what he says about psychiatric diagnoses like phobias

the principal phenomenon which lies at the base of all the ‘phobias" and ‘manias,’ namely, the great emotionalism of the degenerate. If to emotionalism, or an excessive excitability, he had added the cerebral debility, which implies feebleness of perception, will, memory, judgment, as well as inattention and instability, he would have exhaustively characterized the nature of degeneration, and perhaps prevented psychiatry from being stuffed with a crowd of useless and disturbing designations.

Okay, so this is closely related to the synesthesia thing. Nordau focuses heavily on "abnormal" sensory perceptions because he thinks that the brain's inability to properly process sensory stimuli is the cause of a lot of mental disability or "degeneration."

And, bizarrely, he actually got pretty close to being sort of right. Studies (like within the last 5 years) that ask questions of autistic adults commonly indicate that sensory differences are one of the most if not THE most disabling aspect of autism, and I (autistic) suspect that a lot of traits of autism are just downstream effects of the sensory differences.

The other thing Nordau focuses heavily upon is the ability to regulate one's own attention and action, and other traits that would be considered to fall under "executive function."

What I was able to gather, is that he is extremely panicked and upset about all kinds of art that don't fit an EXTREMELY narrow aesthetic and moral standard. He is upset by Impressionistic paintings, because they don't represent reality "realistically," and it sounds like he might actually think that exposing people to Impressionistic paintings might cause them to lose their ability to accurately perceive visual stimuli?

So it all builds up to this central thesis, which is that "degenerate art" is a vector that spreads degeneracy.

Since he thinks "degeneracy" arises from incorrect perception or processing of sensory stimuli, it makes sense that he would identify art that doesn't literally visually represent things as "degenerate."

But the idea of "degeneracy" also extends into morality, and therefore into depictions of human behavior in art: "degenerates" can be disgusted by good things and feel positively towards evil things, which is once again, something physiological that's wrong within the brain.

So he argues, in the late chapters of the book, that artists who create art showing immoral, disgusting things are no different than people who actually do immoral, disgusting things, and that such art should not get made:

It is easily conceivable that the emotion expressed by the artist in his work may proceed from a morbid aberration, may be directed, in an unnatural, sensual, cruel manner, to what is ugly or loathsome. Ought we not in this case to condemn the work and, if possible, to suppress it? How can its right to exist be justified?... The artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it. It is a question of the intensity of the impulsion and the resisting power of the judgment, perhaps also of courage and cowardice; nothing else.

Furthermore, people who read or enjoy these works are themselves disgusting and immoral, and usually criminals:

Who would experience feelings of pleasure from the perusal of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Andrea de Nercia or Liseux? Only one species of human beings—that of the degenerate with perverted instincts. Portrayals of crime and vice in art and literature have their public; that we well know. It is the public of the gaols. Besides dismally sentimental books, criminals read nothing so willingly as stories of lust and violence.

He proposes that there should be some sort of council to determine whether art is moral or not, and if the council says

of a man, ‘He is a criminal!’ and of a work, ‘It is a disgrace to our nation!’ work and man would be annihilated. No respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book; no respectable paper would mention it, or give the author access to its columns; no respectable family would permit the branded work to be in their house

"Annihilated" can only mean one thing, right? D:

One of the things that was extremely interesting about this book was reading about the contents of the supposed evil, bad, immoral books, and how upset Nordau gets about them.

For instance:

His figures of women and their destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual perversion of degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing ‘masochism.’ Masochism is a sub-species of ‘contrary sexual sensation.’ The man affected by this perversion feels himself, as regards woman, to be the weaker party; as the one standing in need of protection; as the slave who rolls on the ground, compelled to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his happiness in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural relation between the sexes.

This is continuing the trend of surprisingly accurate descriptions of things, utterly ruined by the author being a hateful little asshole about them.

Another example I thought was funny:

Let us remember Count Muffat in Zola’s Nana (p. 491): ‘At other times he was a dog. She threw her scented handkerchief to the end of the room for him, and he had to run on all fours to pick it up with his teeth. “Fetch it, Cæsar!... Look out; I’ll give it to you if you’re lazy!... Very good, Cæsar! mind! nicely!... Sit up!” And as for him, he loved his abasement, revelled in the joy of being a brute. He wanted to sink still lower; he cried: “Hit harder.... Bow wow! I am mad; hit me then!”’ That is the liberty of one who is ‘emancipated’ in the sense of the degenerates! He may be a dog, if his crazed instinct commands him to be a dog!

I was very surprised to learn just how little kinks have changed in the past 130ish years.

The author goes on a bracingly vitriolic anti-pornography rant:

And still more determined must the resistance be to the filth-loving herd of swine, the professional pornographists.[...]The systematic incitation to lasciviousness causes the gravest injury to the bodily and mental health of individuals, and a society composed of individuals sexually over-stimulated, knowing no longer any self-control, any discipline, any shame, marches to its certain ruin, because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks. The pornographist poisons the springs whence flows the life of future generations.

I wonder what precisely he means by pornography. This was written in 1892, so he could be referring to photographs, but every time he gives specific examples of immoral art in this section, they are written works, so it seems more likely that he's referring to books.

These are the exact qualities that conservatives and quite a few "left-leaning" folks attribute to internet pornography, often with the assumption that this degenerating influence upon human sexuality is new.

But apparently, for people of similar political ideology back in 1892, the "pornography" they had seemed equally likely to destroy healthy human sexuality.

The ebook is displaying page numbers today. It wasn't doing that yesterday. Therefore I can give page numbers. On Page 80 Nordau says this about paintings:

the pleasurable feelings which are produced by the contemplation of a picture are not aroused by its intellectual import, but by it as a sensuous phenomenon.

I don't think that is true, Max.

The art of painting awakens through its media of colour and drawing (i.e., the exact grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of light), firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour; secondly, it produces an illusion of reality and, together with this, the higher, more intellectual pleasures arising from a recognition of the phenomena depicted, and from a comprehension of the artist’s intention; thirdly, it shows these phenomena as seen with the eye of the artist, and brings out details or collective traits, which until then the inartistic beholder had not been by himself able to perceive.

What is he arguing against here? These things: the idea that visual art can contain symbolism, tell a story, or evoke emotion through anything other than the viewer's pre-existing feelings toward a subject and how well the painter captured the subject.

Page 83:

Now, the subject-matter of painting is the visible, not the conjectural; the real, not the possible or probable; the concrete, not the abstract.

I keep doubting myself on whether I understand what Nordau is saying, because he contradicts himself a lot. He condemns the "degenerates" for being too emotional about art, but then says the purpose of art is to evoke emotion, not intellectual thought.

But then he gives the example of this painting, Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death:

and gives this HILARIOUS rant about how stupid it is (Page 85-86)

Holman Hunt imagines Christ in prayer. Through the association of ideas there awakes in him simultaneously the mental image of Christ’s subsequent death on the cross. He wants, by the instrumentality of painting, to make the association of these ideas visible. And hence he lets the living Christ throw a shadow which assumes the form of a cross, thus foretelling the fate of the Saviour, as if some mysterious, incomprehensible power had so posed his body with respect to the rays of the sun that a wondrous annunciation of his destiny must needs write itself on the floor. The invention is completely absurd. It would have been childish trifling if Christ had drawn his sublime death of sacrifice, whether in jest or in vanity, in anticipation, by his shadow on the ground. Neither would the shadow-picture have had any object, for no contemporary of Christ’s would have understood the significance of the shadowed cross before he had suffered death by crucifixion. In Holman Hunt’s consciousness, however, emotion simultaneously awakened the form of the praying Christ and of the cross, and he unites both presentations anyhow, without regard to their reasonable connection. If an Old Master had had to paint the same idea, namely, the praying Christ filled with the presentiment of his impending death, he would have shown us in the picture a realistic Christ in prayer, and in a corner an equally realistic crucifixion; but he would never have sought to blend both these different scenes into a single one by a shadowy connection. This is the difference between the religious painting of the strong healthy believer and of the emotional degenerate mind.

Our buddy Max is furious over how unrealistic it is that Jesus's shadow would evoke the shape of a cross. First of all, it's not like the sun would magically position itself to make sure Jesus's shadow looked like a cross, and if it did, nobody would notice that in REAL LIFE, because Jesus hadn't died yet! That's why this painting is STUPID!!!11!!!!!

...

Nordau goes on to discuss the parallel phenomenon in poetry.

All poetry no doubt has this peculiarity, that it makes use of words intended not only to arouse the definite ideas which they connote, but also to awaken emotions that shall vibrate in consciousness. But the procedure of a healthy-minded poet is altogether different from that of a weak-minded mystic. The suggestive word employed by the former has in itself an intelligible meaning, but besides this it is adapted to excite emotions in every healthy-minded man; and finally the emotions excited have all of them reference to the subject of the poem.

He gives an example of this. It's presented in German, and I ran it through Google Translate, so it's not a very good representation of what the poem is supposed to be.

'Green shoots, violet scent, Lark's trill, blackbird's song, Sunlit rain, gentle breeze: When I sing such words, Do I still need grander things To praise you, spring day?'

This is the first specific example I've been able to find of a piece of art that Max thinks is good. Here's what he says about it:

Each word of the first three lines contains a positive idea. Each of them awakens glad feelings in a man of natural sentiment. These feelings, taken together, produce the mood with which the awakening of spring fills the soul, to induce which was precisely the intention of the poet.

He contrasts it with a line from one of the poems he hates, Dante Gabriel Rosetti's The Blessed Damozel. The poem discusses a girl who has died and gone to Heaven, and from her perspective, only a day has passed, but for her lover left on Earth, it feels like "ten years of years."

To the maiden in bliss it appears that she has been a singer in God’s choir for only one day; to him who is left behind this one day has been actually a matter of ten years. ‘To one it is ten years of years.’ This computation is thoroughly mystical. It means, that is, absolutely nothing. Perhaps Rossetti imagined that there may exist a higher unity to which the single year may stand as one day does to a year; that therefore 365 years would constitute a sort of higher order of year. The words ‘year of years’ therefore signified 365 years. But as Rossetti portrays this thought vaguely and imperfectly, he is far from expressing it as intelligibly as this.

Oh my god, Max. Max. Max. It's figurative language, Max. It's not supposed to literally represent the amount of time, Max. How can you be writing about poetry when you think that all figurative language is bad.

While I doubt he actually thought Wilde was gay when writing this, he’s still criticizing Wilde for a stereotypically gay thing to do. (Once again making assumptions in the right lane while being a hateful douchebag about it.)

But this tells me that he really didn’t understand Wilde at all, and just reading one of his works would have (should have) made that obvious to him. The Picture of Dorian Gray’s whole theme is… Vanity is bad. Morals are far more important than aesthetics. But Nordau doesn’t care and just sees a person dressing flamboyantly as a bad and immoral person without looking deeper.

In my opinion, there are different approaches to elaborate on this, and there are two in particular that intrigue me.

Both ground on the consideration that rising and successful fascism is a group effort; hence, I'll look at, like, clusters of characters rather than single individuals.

First, there are the Kaminoans, who seem to be criminally glossed over in relation to discussions on (the portrayal of) fascism in Star Wars (at least, as far as I'm aware). There is a lot to unpack there, especially regarding aspects of Italian fascism, which drew inspiration and ideas and aesthetics of the art movement Futurism. (I'll go into detail in another post.)

Did we all watch the same moments where Satine very clearly says to Obi-Wan, "just because I'm a pacifist, doesn't mean I won't defend myself"? Or when she's so furious at the fact that children have been hurt and poisoned by drinks brought into the schools in the wake of the shortages of food that, instead of preserving any evidence, she demands the Sundari police and her Protectors burn the warehouse down?

The government is an institution and should not be armed or involved in violence, the police is an institution and should not be armed or involved in violence, the army is an institution that should not even exist. This much of what I'm talking about is partially her canon view, yes. (And I say partially because the police is still armed in canon, even if probably not lethally.)

But what you and canon fail to get is, individuals are not institutions. She canonically treats individual and institutional acts of violence as being on the same level. In canon the mandalorian cultural practice of wearing armor and carrying weapons is not allowed in Mandalore, even if done as individuals and not as an organized group. And in the very episode where your quote came from, she refused to shoot the traitor because it would be "hypocritical"

If she had the views I'm talking about here, she would not act solely in self defense, or only when provoked to the extreme by social injustice. She would not exile the traditionalists and forbid the practice of an entire facet of mandalorian culture by individual, because she could distinguish personal expression from institutional violence. She would not have a problem with shooting that traitor herself, because she wouldn't be doing it as the ruler of Mandalore, she'd be doing it as a person who moments ago was being held hostage with that very gun.

🔊Echo's new hand & punch test (?