![From kohenari:
Just when supporters of a strong military were celebrating their success with a petition to urge the Obama administration to begin building a small moon with the capacity to destroy an entire planet, Gregory Koger returns to the Monkey Cage blog to urge against both wasteful government spending and the potential destruction of trillions of lives.
He is now urging people to sign a new petition to ban the development or deployment of a Death Star or Death Star-esque weapon. Thus far, the petition looks to be as unsuccessful as the original pro-Death Star petition was successful.
Its only signatory is of its creator, one Luke S.
Honestly, if this upstart Luke S. can’t even get noted galactic pacificists and anti-interventionists like Han S., Lando C., Ron P., and Chewbacca W. to sign on, what chance does he think he’s got against a military industrial complex that relishes both a challenge and the chance to push back against the claim that a weapon could ever be too expensive?
But what about the government jobs it can create for independent contractors? [from the film Clerks, “Death Star Politics”]
It’s worth considering, at least.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/929218cddda9018d9db6c9b5822368e1/tumblr_mg03f5SXJf1qzy2emo1_1280.png)
Just when supporters of a strong military were celebrating their success with a petition to urge the Obama administration to begin building a small moon with the capacity to destroy an entire planet, Gregory Koger returns to the Monkey Cage blog to urge against both wasteful government spending and the potential destruction of trillions of lives.
He is now urging people to sign a new petition to ban the development or deployment of a Death Star or Death Star-esque weapon. Thus far, the petition looks to be as unsuccessful as the original pro-Death Star petition was successful.
Its only signatory is of its creator, one Luke S.
Honestly, if this upstart Luke S. can’t even get noted galactic pacificists and anti-interventionists like Han S., Lando C., Ron P., and Chewbacca W. to sign on, what chance does he think he’s got against a military industrial complex that relishes both a challenge and the chance to push back against the claim that a weapon could ever be too expensive?
But what about the government jobs it can create for independent contractors? [from the film Clerks, “Death Star Politics”]
It’s worth considering, at least.
Finally, an important use of the petition website.
HT: Seth Masket.
Silly petitioners, don’t they know that the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force? We need to petition the White House to devise a way to count midi-chlorian levels.
This is the actual jacket cover of Slavoj Žižek’s book, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, or as my friend Dave Nelson wrote when he passed it along to me earlier this week, The Year of Being Clumsily Photoshopped into Pics of Kids Rioting.
Good grief.
This is the jacket cover version of The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony music video.
With that said, I’m excited that he’s coming out with a new book, another one to add to the list of books that I’ll ignore in 2012.
From kohenari,
Kevin Williamson’s latest piece for the National Review is staggering.
Buried underneath all the misogyny and personal insecurity, Williamson’s take-away point is that Mitt Romney is successful, in both the money- and baby-making departments. Given all of his success, Williamson can’t understand why people — and women especially — don’t want Romney to govern them.
Compare Romney — with his lustrous hair, his fancy horses, his car elevator, and his numerous progeny — to Barack Obama and the choice is obvious:
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
My only wish is that Williamson had titled this piece, “Here’s a thing that a million people will make fun of but they’ll all click on it and we’ll make money by putting a bunch of ads all over the page” because that’s pretty much what’s going on here. The only problem with my idea is that this is how so much of Williamson’s writing works that nine out of ten pieces would have the same title.
From a biological perspective, I love the reference to Game of Thrones.
Since today is Star Wars Day and everyone I know is having a fantastic time writing, “May the 4th be with you” on Facebook and Twitter, I thought I’d ask a question that’s been troubling me for weeks now:
When are we going to deal with the troubling fact that Luke Skywalker is one of the most successful and best respected mass killers in history?
Not only does Skywalker kill tens of thousands — in hand-to-hand combat and by blowing up two iterations of the Death Star — but he’s celebrated as a galatic hero for doing it (to say nothing of that fact that Earth-bound movie-goers consistently name him as an exemplar of heroism decade after decade).
I understand that the Empire is an unquestionable evil and that bringing an end to Palpatine’s reign of totalitarian terror is laudable, but the body count that Skywalker racks up along the way surely must give us pause.
When that Death Star explodes and thousands of lives are lost, and then the very next scene shows Skywalker and his friends cheering and laughing, isn’t our moral compass taken for an uncomfortable spin? How can we explain these celebrations to our children?
This reminds me of the Death Star politics scene from Clerks. [Youtube]
Randal: So they build another Death Star, right?
Dante: Yeah.
Randal: Now the first one they built was completed and fully operational before the Rebels destroyed it.
Dante: Luke blew it up. Give credit where it’s due.
Randal:And the second one was still being built when they blew it up.
Dante: Compliments of Lando Calrissian.
Randal: Something just never sat right with me the second time they destroyed it. I could never put my finger on it-something just wasn’t right.
Dante: And you figured it out?
Randal: Well, the thing is, the first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries- the only people onboard were Imperials.
Dante: Basically.
Randal: So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished.
Dante: And the second time around…?
Randal: The second time around, it wasn’t even finished yet. They were still under construction.
Dante: So?
Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I’ll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you’re getting at.
Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they’d hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante’s confusion) All right, look-you’re a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn’t ask for that. You have no personal politics. You’re just trying to scrape out a living.
Also I’m going to evoke Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth to lazily justify these actions to my children.
