1331 réponses à ce sujet

[AlanC9]

Well, the Empire never did lose. Sure, it got pushed back. But it's still 1 of the 3 ruling parties of the Triumvirate.

Until the new movie screens, anyway.

[AlanC9]

Thrawn had a system of high central order and meritocracy, where everyone was to contribute to the state in a meaningful way. They were afforded each to the needs they had, and given the opportunity of advancement with more luxurious benefits. They of course had to compete within the system, but under Thrawn, who had the power to ensure that power and political games were minimized, the competition worked to the benefit of the state, increasing the resources to allocate to the people, thus providing more growth and capability to grow. Pellaeon tried his damndest to follow suit, but didn't have Thrawn's unifying presence and had to contend with the Moffs. Fel was the same, with a strong, centralized, singular power vested into one ruler who held reign over the dealings of the Empire. Of course, once the Sith gained control, this ended.

So, fascism the way it was supposed to work, eh?

[KaiserShep]

I'm still mad that Disney got the title too Star Wars cries!

I don't see what's so bad about it. Star Wars has been hacked up rather thoroughly long before Disney was involved. I honestly don't see it getting any worse than the likes of the prequels.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

So, fascism the way it was supposed to work, eh?

 

From a strawman perspective of fascism, socialism, meritocracy, and communism as well as a demonstrated misunderstanding of all 4 theories on your part, yeah.

[AlanC9]

From a strawman perspective of fascism, socialism, meritocracy, and communism as well as a demonstrated misunderstanding of all 4 theories on your part, yeah.

Where does communism come in? Or socialism? I wasn't quite sure how the "competition" you mentioned worked.

I guess you'd better just give me the whole lecture. You know you want to.

[Ryriena]

I don't see what's so bad about it. Star Wars has been hacked up rather thoroughly long before Disney was involved. I honestly don't see it getting any worse than the likes of the prequels.

However, the prequels were planed installments of Star Wars. How were the prequels worse, I grew up on the originals. Did you not like the fact Darth Vader was turned in a kid that turned to the dark side?

[KaiserShep]

I have no issue with the premise; I simply don't like that Lucas abandoned any modicum of logic or sense of drama when he created that dreck.

[Ryriena]

I have no issue with the premise; I simply don't like that Lucas abandoned any modicum of logic when he created that dreck.

Oh I see!

[KaiserShep]

Oh I see!

I think the animated series (both cgi and 2D) was executed far better. It's actually kind of sad how much better they are.

[TheOneTrueBioticGod]

Let's see, how are the prequels horrible movies?

Let's see. No trilogy-spanning antagonist. No protagonist in TPM. Poorly written dialogue. Forced romance. Emotionless acting. CGI that looks so fake it's funny. Midichlorians. 30 minutes of political dialogue in TPM. Then some more in AOTC. No action in AOTC until the last twenty minutes. I don't like sand. The two main characters knowing each other for three days then getting married, then being portrayed as deep. Emotionless CGI just shoving things onto the screen. Yoda and the Emperor with lightsabers. A majority of the dialogue consisting of two people sitting on couches talking. Completely destroying the character of Darth Vader. 

And I could go on. 

[Aimi]

So, fascism the way it was supposed to work, eh?

No. Fascism's overriding ideological mark was the submission of everything to the national will, to the point that it was actively anti-individualistic. There is no nation in what Massively has to say.

Due to the close international association between the Fascists and the Nazis, many observers then and since have associated the two groups ideologically, as well. Yet this falls apart rather quickly. Nazism did draw from ideological currents that had some relationship to Fascism: the völkisch form of German nationalism, for instance, and Hitler paid lip service to the sort of Third Way corporatism that Mussolini espoused. But fundamentally, Nazism was really Hitlerism: a personal cult of the Leader, structured according to the leadership principle, and designed around the personal whims and politics of the Leader, regardless of whether those whims made any sense. Fascism was anti-individualistic, but Hitlerism was all about the individual...albeit only specific individuals. Both Fascism and Hitlerism emphasized the nation, but each gave it a different role in the ideological constellation.

Hitler's rule was an intensely personal and charismatic one, as highlighted by Ian Kershaw in his elucidation of the "working towards the Führer" trope. And that, honestly, is what strikes me most about Massively's vision of the Empire. His Empire is led by individuals and defined by them. When ruled by powerful, charismatic individuals, the Empire prospers; when ruled by weak or foolish ones, it suffers. Competence is not good enough, as his portrayal of Gilad Pellaeon makes explicit: for him, only a genius would rule correctly, could rule correctly.

Hitlerism also emerges in Massively's description of the way in which Thrawn ruled his Empire. Now, we know from other sources (e.g. the Essential Atlas and Guide to Warfare) that this depiction of Thrawn is not really correct. Ars Dangor and his Ruling Council provided the theoretical political leadership of the Empire; Ardus Kaine's Pentastar Alignment formed its military and economic backbone. Neither subjected himself to Thrawn, and both provided only token military support. Initially, Thrawn controlled a relatively small portion of the forces that the totality of 'Imperial' warlords had at their disposal: he was never the sort of supreme leader that Massively seems to think that he was. His use of cloning facilities and his acquisition of new warships helped to set him free from those other constraints, near the end. Yet even then, he couldn't order Kaine's Super Star Destroyer, the Reaper, into battle. (Imagine what it would have done at Bilbringi!) Nor did he have control over the rest of Kaine's fleet, or over the Imperials in the Deep Core. And without access to things like the Velcar Free Commerce Zone, he still lacked the industrial weight to contend with the Republic in a long war.

But never mind that. We aren't really here to discuss Star Wars; we're apparently here to discuss Massively's political inclinations. What Massively thinks was good about Thrawn is useful because Massively thinks it was good, ergo it tells us something about him - not because it actually was good about Thrawn, because it wasn't.

No, Massively chooses to show Thrawn as someone above the fray, who set his subordinates against each other in competition and reaped the benefits. Although this bears little resemblance to Thrawn's position in the Empire, it is exactly the idea that Hitler had in mind when running Germany. Hitler wanted a personal, charismatic regime, and the way he wanted to manage it was to keep all his subordinates competing for his personal favor. The Nazis created a whole host of redundant networks of bureaucracies, mutually exclusive hierarchies, and actively encouraged competition. Waffen-SS against Wehrmacht. Gauleiter against Gauleiter. Reichsstaathalter against Oberbürgermeister. Stellvertreter des Führers against Reichsministerium des Innern. The "working towards the Führer" trope mentioned above.

And it didn't work. In fact, by the virtually unanimous consensus of historical academia, it was a humongous disaster. Redundant organizations and competitive politics turned out to be a colossal waste of resources. Giving the same job to multiple bureaucracies meant that no individual one of those bureaucracies could do its job properly (because information and logistics were split between them) and if they tried to do their jobs, resource allocation would be wrong. Power was centralized in the person of the Führer, but Hitler had neither the ability nor the inclination to control his state and society in the way that that centralization would have demanded. Nobody would have: the fundamental weakness of centralization taken to an extreme. The result was chaos. Hitler's rhetoric may have conjured up the specter of a thousand-year Reich; in reality, it was lucky to have lasted the twelve years that it did.

This is without discussing the issues around things like the consent of the population and the problem of determining who should govern and why. It's purely from an efficiency-based standpoint, which is what Massively appears to value, not from a morality-based standpoint. And in terms of efficiency, the historical regime that worked more closely to Massively's touted concept than any other regime in history was...well, it was a disastrous flop.

[TheOneTrueBioticGod]

The Nazi regime wasn't a complete flop; Germany's economy did manage to recover from it's period of rampant stagflation. No, the government was terribly inefficient, but the average German(read: non Jew/Catholic/Gay/etc) was better off under the Nazi regime than it was before. 

Until WWII, that is. 

[DeinonSlayer]

It's funny where a thread will go when you're away for a few hours.

[TheOneTrueBioticGod]

Now, now. I was unaware Mark Hamil, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford were Canadian. Or bad at acting. 

Tarkin is far menacing, cold, calculated, ruthless, arrogant, and awesome than that. 

[Aimi]

The Nazi regime wasn't a complete flop; Germany's economy did manage to recover from it's period of rampant stagflation. No, the government was terribly inefficient, but the average German(read: non Jew/Catholic/Gay/etc) was better off under the Nazi regime than it was before. 

Until WWII, that is.

Meh. Not really what I was talking about, but I guess I'll bite.

Economically, the Nazi regime never measured up to Weimar in its better days. Real wages and compensation never reached 1928 levels under the Third Reich, much less the levels from before the Great War. Furthermore, the Nazi regime benefited from anti-unemployment and revalorization programs put into effect under the republican governments that immediately preceded them (but which didn't reap the benefits themselves due to time lag). The Mark also gained strength due to a series of bizarrely preferential trade agreements contracted with client regimes in southern and eastern Europe and South America.

The one place where Nazi management of the economy obviously helped was in employment: Germany reached full employment before the Berlin Olympics and managed to retain it into the war years. On the other hand, it's not clear how relevant full employment would be considering the number of people removed from the work force to be placed in political prisons and concentration camps. And the remainder of the employment was driven by sky-high spending on arms that Germany was not really prepared to finance. Had Germany not avoided the debt-rescheduling issue by invading Poland in 1939, that unemployment level would have been difficult to sustain.

It would be foolish to claim that Hitlerism benefited nobody in any way. But at the same time, I believe that there is a sort of persistent myth surrounding the Reich's history. Many people appear to believe that the Nazis benefited from some sort of 'German efficiency'. This is not really the case. Many people appear to believe that Hitler's military was qualitatively superior to those of its opponents for a variety of reasons. It is difficult to sustain this argument in a general sense. Many people appear to believe that Hitler's economic policy was a godsend for the German people. This is slightly right, but mostly wrong. And so on, and so forth.

But this is window-dressing, and we're straying away from the basic topic, which was Massively's - and Hitler's - approach to the problems of leadership and governance, not the minutiae of economic or military policy.

[DeinonSlayer]

Now, now. I was unaware Mark Hamil, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford were Canadian. Or bad at acting.
Tarkin is far menacing, cold, calculated, ruthless, arrogant, and awesome than that.

"Remastered" original trilogy still sucks. Han shot first, damn it.

Right. Topic.

[Sovereign330]

You cant say you want or dont want something until you are exposed to it...usually

[TheOneTrueBioticGod]

Snip

Oh believe me, I know that. But the fact remains, when compared to people starving in the streets, what they had was better. No, it wasn't close to ideal or even good, but it was an improvement. 

But yeah, to think that social experimentation and forcing individuals within an organization to compete with each other causes greater efficiency is misguided, and I'm pretty sure Thrawn didn't even do that. He commanded what he had as a pure executive, and was damn good at it. 

The collapse of the GE has some parallels to Alexander's empire post mortem; it fractured and died out after its emperor's death.  
 

"Remastered" original trilogy still sucks. Han shot first, damn it.

Right. Topic.

Well, there are digital copies from a laserdisk rip, with the theatrical cut still intact on the internet. 

[DeinonSlayer]

Well, there are digital copies from a laserdisk rip, with the theatrical cut still intact on the internet.

I'm gonna have to look for that. Wish they'd release it on blu-ray. Approach it like an archivist, not "enhancing" or modifying it in any way, just restoring it.

EDIT: Rumored that Disney will release it unaltered on blu-ray when the next one comes out... fingers crossed.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

No. Fascism's overriding ideological mark was the submission of everything to the national will, to the point that it was actively anti-individualistic. There is no nation in what Massively has to say.

Due to the close international association between the Fascists and the Nazis, many observers then and since have associated the two groups ideologically, as well. Yet this falls apart rather quickly. Nazism did draw from ideological currents that had some relationship to Fascism: the völkisch form of German nationalism, for instance, and Hitler paid lip service to the sort of Third Way corporatism that Mussolini espoused. But fundamentally, Nazism was really Hitlerism: a personal cult of the Leader, structured according to the leadership principle, and designed around the personal whims and politics of the Leader, regardless of whether those whims made any sense. Fascism was anti-individualistic, but Hitlerism was all about the individual...albeit only specific individuals. Both Fascism and Hitlerism emphasized the nation, but each gave it a different role in the ideological constellation.

Hitler's rule was an intensely personal and charismatic one, as highlighted by Ian Kershaw in his elucidation of the "working towards the Führer" trope. And that, honestly, is what strikes me most about Massively's vision of the Empire. His Empire is led by individuals and defined by them. When ruled by powerful, charismatic individuals, the Empire prospers; when ruled by weak or foolish ones, it suffers. Competence is not good enough, as his portrayal of Gilad Pellaeon makes explicit: for him, only a genius would rule correctly, could rule correctly.

Hitlerism also emerges in Massively's description of the way in which Thrawn ruled his Empire. Now, we know from other sources (e.g. the Essential Atlas and Guide to Warfare) that this depiction of Thrawn is not really correct. Ars Dangor and his Ruling Council provided the theoretical political leadership of the Empire; Ardus Kaine's Pentastar Alignment formed its military and economic backbone. Neither subjected himself to Thrawn, and both provided only token military support. Initially, Thrawn controlled a relatively small portion of the forces that the totality of 'Imperial' warlords had at their disposal: he was never the sort of supreme leader that Massively seems to think that he was. His use of cloning facilities and his acquisition of new warships helped to set him free from those other constraints, near the end. Yet even then, he couldn't order Kaine's Super Star Destroyer, the Reaper, into battle. (Imagine what it would have done at Bilbringi!) Nor did he have control over the rest of Kaine's fleet, or over the Imperials in the Deep Core. And without access to things like the Velcar Free Commerce Zone, he still lacked the industrial weight to contend with the Republic in a long war.

But never mind that. We aren't really here to discuss Star Wars; we're apparently here to discuss Massively's political inclinations. What Massively thinks was good about Thrawn is useful because Massively thinks it was good, ergo it tells us something about him - not because it actually was good about Thrawn, because it wasn't.

No, Massively chooses to show Thrawn as someone above the fray, who set his subordinates against each other in competition and reaped the benefits. Although this bears little resemblance to Thrawn's position in the Empire, it is exactly the idea that Hitler had in mind when running Germany. Hitler wanted a personal, charismatic regime, and the way he wanted to manage it was to keep all his subordinates competing for his personal favor. The Nazis created a whole host of redundant networks of bureaucracies, mutually exclusive hierarchies, and actively encouraged competition. Waffen-SS against Wehrmacht. Gauleiter against Gauleiter. Reichsstaathalter against Oberbürgermeister. Stellvertreter des Führers against Reichsministerium des Innern. The "working towards the Führer" trope mentioned above.

And it didn't work. In fact, by the virtually unanimous consensus of historical academia, it was a humongous disaster. Redundant organizations and competitive politics turned out to be a colossal waste of resources. Giving the same job to multiple bureaucracies meant that no individual one of those bureaucracies could do its job properly (because information and logistics were split between them) and if they tried to do their jobs, resource allocation would be wrong. Power was centralized in the person of the Führer, but Hitler had neither the ability nor the inclination to control his state and society in the way that that centralization would have demanded. Nobody would have: the fundamental weakness of centralization taken to an extreme. The result was chaos. Hitler's rhetoric may have conjured up the specter of a thousand-year Reich; in reality, it was lucky to have lasted the twelve years that it did.

This is without discussing the issues around things like the consent of the population and the problem of determining who should govern and why. It's purely from an efficiency-based standpoint, which is what Massively appears to value, not from a morality-based standpoint. And in terms of efficiency, the historical regime that worked more closely to Massively's touted concept than any other regime in history was...well, it was a disastrous flop.

 

I probably should have stipulated more in a few points; You made a lot of assumptions on my ideas and supplanted it with accurate information that is out of the context of what I was meaning (that'd be my fault for not being clear enough), and I will say I found it a bit unfair to my position where you made supposition as to my meaning. To suffice, you took my admitted lack of meaning and ran with it in a direction that I wasn't intending. You made an argument against a position you ascribed to me based on undefined statements, and added a historical basis for a realm of fiction with a separate history. So while it's not necessarily an inaccurate argument, it's fairly irrelevant to where I was going. There isn't much I need to address here because there isn't anything I really disagree with (minus putting my name to it and the certain things with Thrawn I don't think we'll agree on - suffice to say, agree with it or not, narrative word of god stated that had Thrawn not been betrayed by Rukh, he would have defeated the New Republic. For starters, Bilbringi was acknowledged in universe as being lost by the Empire solely to the loss of Thrawn himself in that matter. On the next matter, we'd disagree on Thrawn's supposed value to the Empire. Of course, Thrawn is shilled by his writer almost as much as the Mandalorians under Karen Traviss were, and he crosses into Villain-sue territory). I will say that you are correct in seeing that I do believe in a stronger, centralized, and streamlined government that is unitary in form and ideology supporting an efficiency based perspective. 

[Fayfel]

Back when Chris L'Etoile spoke with canonical force he made it very clear that the vast majority of the quarian population was left behind ( on Caprica he joked ) when the Migrant Fleet departed. The rest of the galaxy assumed that the geth slaughtered them, but what actually happened is only known to the geth and to those (probably) billions of abandoned quarians. Chris suggested there might be suvivors living beyond the veil to the modern day. No one knows because no one had checked it out since the quarian fleet fled.

 

In my opinion a race which believes itself to be fighting for it's very survival wouldn't go down easy. Fighting must have killed a significant number of quarians. However, geth represented the system that enabled quarian survival. The quarians had come to depend on them to take care of their basic needs; growing food, labor, etc. With the geth's role suddenly replaced with a massive conflict, it's not unreasonable to assume that quarian society completely collapsed. How many quarians died of starvation, disease, etc? Can you blame the geth for these deaths? They just wanted to continue to exist and serve their creators. The quarians are the ones who choose this mess and the geth can't understand why. "What did we do wrong?"

[TheOneTrueBioticGod]

Actually, it would've been very interesting to go back to Rannoch and find some Quarians living there, the ones who had been left behind and the Geth had not deemed a threat, I guess the ones who stood up for them. Now that would be an awesome plot twist. 

[DeinonSlayer]

No one has checked it out because the Geth kill anything coming through the relay on sight. Breaking their infrastructure and starving them to death instead of shooting or gassing them doesn't exactly score the Geth any points in my book - even that wouldn't account for them going extinct on their homeworld. There's a tendency to view alien races in the MEU as monocultures, but nothing says the Quarians didn't have their own equivalent of pre-spaceflight second- and third-world nations. I doubt you could kill 99% of the Earth's population by dropping an asteroid on us.

It would have cast them in a somewhat different light if there were a surviving population, particularly a large one (and it would have clashed badly with everything presented before; not sure it's actually an improvement). Unfortunately, the only conclusion we can reach now is that the Quarians who couldn't escape were hunted to extinction on Rannoch and their colonies.

[justafan]

Back when Chris L'Etoile spoke with canonical force he made it very clear that the vast majority of the quarian population was left behind ( on Caprica he joked ) when the Migrant Fleet departed. The rest of the galaxy assumed that the geth slaughtered them, but what actually happened is only known to the geth and to those (probably) billions of abandoned quarians. Chris suggested there might be suvivors living beyond the veil to the modern day. No one knows because no one had checked it out since the quarian fleet fled.

 

In my opinion a race which believes itself to be fighting for it's very survival wouldn't go down easy. Fighting must have killed a significant number of quarians. However, geth represented the system that enabled quarian survival. The quarians had come to depend on them to take care of their basic needs; growing food, labor, etc. With the geth's role suddenly replaced with a massive conflict, it's not unreasonable to assume that quarian society completely collapsed. How many quarians died of starvation, disease, etc? Can you blame the geth for these deaths? They just wanted to continue to exist and serve their creators. The quarians are the ones who choose this mess and the geth can't understand why. "What did we do wrong?"

 

Considering that the Quarians had pushed the entirety of the Geth fleet back to Rannoch, and as Haestrom showed, were capable of raids on Geth occupied worlds, I think we would have heard if they found any survivors on the former colonies.  Unfortunately, the only conclusion we can come to is that there were no survivors beyond the veil, and while starvation could have killed some, 100% extermination pretty clearly indicates initiative on the part of the Geth.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Legion said the Geth remember the ones who sided with them. Apparently they killed them anyway because he mentioned nothing of their descendants.