A More Civilized Q&A - November 2022

Grassy Gnoll

Regarding Krieger's pilot, I always read the situation as he had to shop about for the air power that Saw would have supplied, so increasing the risk of what happened happening.

Katie Knaebe

Please skip Resistance. It is not worth covering.

Kzinssie

This is a tangent, but talking about first exposure to Star Wars is making me remember that the thing that got me hardcore into the franchise was Lego Star Wars, and now I'm realizing the process of turning Star Wars into a collectathon platformer where you platform on recreated sets and spend your coins to unlock random background characters as playable might have been the origin of at least some of the Easter egg poisoning people have around this franchise

MythicalMothman

Every time they talk about a character whose canon death they haven't seen yet 😬

The Inner Moon

In Nemik's specific case, we can get at his philosophy without much abstraction. Tyranny requires constant effort; that is what makes it unnatural. His account of the natural is as something which is effortless, self-sustaining. The Empire is anything but.

The Inner Moon

This also ties into a larger problem about Star Wars' engagement with 'Eastern' philosophy (a reductive concept to begin with). In its warped framing thereof, a lot is lost in translation. Unfortunately, the critique of what is facile about the Force can then easily cross over into an uninformed takedown of what are real and practiced religious philosophies. Perhaps that's an interesting discussion to have sometime.

The Inner Moon

As a spiritually inclined anarchist and political philosopher, I feel like I simply must comment on your little discussion of Nemik's manifesto, and the broader question of philosophies of nature vis a vis revolutionary leftism. While I agree that most work on the 'state of nature' is trash, this framing of it is also very Eurocentric. Different accounts of what 'nature' might mean (I'm thinking here of Daoism specifically) don't identify themselves with how nature happens to be right now, but neither do they confine themselves to some abstract semantic impossibility. Rather, nature becomes a non-coercive creative force (quite like the titular Force) which we take to be a necessary condition and origin point for our utopia. This idea then produces a kind of balancing act which escapes both the hubris of high modernism (where nature exists to be controlled) or the passivity of primitivism (where we cannot move beyond some arbitrarily defined natural existence). In a way, you create the Nature you want to have, and it sustains you in turn. The importance of this perspective is not just as a rhetorical strength or a comforting thought, but rather as an ongoing deliberation on our place in the universe, and the balance between our will and that of others. I think there's real value in that.

wolfstar5

thrilled to have had my 15 minutes of fame punctuated by that WILD theory about Dedra - thanks so much

logan

Cannot believe they talk about Remember Me on this podcast lmao

me desperately screaming “DONT LOOK UP FULCRUM ON WOOKIEPEDIA” at my phone so they don’t spoil themselves lmfao

logan

Idk, I kinda hope Dedra isn't Andors sister. This show hasn't been going for that type of shocking reveal so far, and I kinda like that. Also, maybe I'm wrong, but if the Kid Andor stuff takes place before the CIS exist, then there wouldn't be clones either, right? It would just be normal Republic soldiers showing up to investigate the crash

"He has a fourth toe." "WHERE." "On his foot." "Did the center one split...?" I am dyinggggg this is ICONIC Looking forward to y'all covering Rogue One!