I’m not sure I fully agree there. I think it’s absolutely accurate to say that Andor didn’t need to be Star Wars. Like, you absolutely could file all the serial numbers off and get a show that works in more or less exactly the same way.

With that said, I think Andor absolutely benefits from being Star Wars, in a couple of a ways.

The first is that they can skip all the broad strokes world building. We don’t need the concept of the galactic empire explained to us, or the general structure of how the senate works, and so on. The big pieces are all in place, so they can get straight to the small scale world building instead. This would be a solvable problem if you were creating something new, but its definitely nice that they get to skip straight to the important bits this way.

The second, bigger benefit (IMO) is the juxtaposition created by the tonal shift. Something that’s very notable about Star Wars is that the tone and the content are often rather at odds with each other. George Lucas is on record as saying that in his mind the Rebellion were the Viet-Cong (with the obvious implication that the Empire is the USA). That’s some fucking heavy shit. Luke’s adoptive parents get brutally murdered by agents of the state, for absolutely no crime at all, and this inspires him to take up with a group of, well, terrorists. I mean, this is literally the same as a young Palestinian joining up with Hamas. Star Wars is about some really, really heavy shit, but it also starts with the line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” This is a fairy-tale about magic space wizards, but also a story about insurgents blowing up a massive military installation, and eventually performing a coup and assassinating the head of state.

Over the years, the story around Star Wars has leaned increasingly into the “magic space wizards” side of things. It’s seen as a family friendly property, something for kids to enjoy at Disneyland. The creators of Andor set out to intentionally shock the audience by creating something that leans hard away from that family friendly image. Andor is a fucking dark story, about desperate people adopting brutal methods in the face of brutal oppression.

And they’re not just doing that for shock value. The point of this is to tell a story about the ways in which we idealise “rebels” in one breath and condemn “terrorists” in another. To many people, Luke is a hero, but that young man who joins up with Hamas is a monster. Reality is complicated and messy. Hamas are a real political group, with a real ideology, and despite the monstrous oppression they face, some of that ideology really sucks. Their targets aren’t “Storm Troopers”, they’re often civilians, or conscripts. On the other hand, many of those conscripts behave in ways far more monstrous than anything the empire is ever depicted as doing.

Andor is a story about fascism, about the absolute necessity of resisting it, and about the monstrous personal cost that resistance can demand of us. By setting that story against the backdrop of a “family friendly” property I think it really does a lot to drive home the disconnect between our ideals of resistance and the cold, hard reality.

Honestly, fair (and I say that as someone who is a huge, huge, HUGE fan of Andor). Like, if you’re looking for some cheesy fun science fantasy schlock about space wizards, do not watch that show.

Fun fact; in the scene where K2SO slaps Cassian while pretending he’s a prisoner, Alan ad-libbed the “And there’s a fresh one…” line, and Diego Luna immediately cracked the fuck up during the take, but being a total pro he manages to (almost) hide it behind his hand while pretending he’s holding his face. Alan’s delivery was so good that they kept the take.

Andor is the kind of show where I would literally recommend it to someone who hates Star Wars. It’s just such an incredibly raw, powerful, and vital piece of media. One of the finest works of anti-fascist art I’ve seen in a long time.

Anyone who hasn’t watched that show is robbing themselves. Moments like “one way out” and Luthen’s “sacrifice” monologue are going to live with me for a long time. Season 2 can’t come soon enough.

Also B2EMO is the best droid in all of Star Wars (Fun fact; his voice is the puppeteer’s, but it wasn’t supposed to be. They were planning to overdub, but then the guy did such an amazing job on the set that they just gave him the role).

This is a classic example of the Cinema Sins school of criticism that has completely rotted our collective ability to actually engage with art on an intellectual level; identify something that feels incongruous to you, label it as a “plot hole” and mark up one point in the “sins” tally. Rinse, repeat. Many sins = bad movie.

And I’m sorry but this is a terrible way to approach media, and one that will destroy your enjoyment of a lot of truly excellent art.

Also, if you took “hierarchies are important” as being the message of the movie, you really, really didn’t get it, because it’s literally saying the exact opposite. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Your biggest complaint here seems to be that in your opinion Rian hates Star Wars. Which is very much missing the point of the argument you dove into here. First off, I don’t agree; I think he hates what Star Wars is, and loves what it could be. Hence his herculean effort to steer the ship in a new direction. But even supposing that you were right, and that his goal was just to burn Star Wars to the ground… That would still be a movie that deserves to exist. Hatred is passion. You have to care about something to hate it. Frankly, a movie created by someone who truly hated Star Wars would be a very interesting thing to see, because I’d be curious as to why they hate Star Wars and what they hate so much about it that they would invest that much energy in tearing it down. But that’s not what this is. You don’t write and film moments like Luke’s goodbye to Leia for a story you hate. It’s a movie that’s made out of love, but the kind of love that fuels an intervention. It’s a movie that wants Star Wars to be a very different thing to what it’s become. You don’t have to agree with or like Rian’s vision, but it’s clear that he has a vision, and it’s one that he deeply cares about.

See, I feel like you’re missing the point here when you bring up Last Jedi as your negative example.

If you didn’t like the movie, fair play, that’s your deal, but it is most certainly not an example of something being phoned in. Whatever else you may feel about Last Jedi, whether or not you agree with the choices it made, it was clearly made with passion and intent. Rian had an artistic vision for the movie, he had things he wanted to say. The reason it gets so much hate is mostly because the things he wanted a) didn’t mesh with what the fans wanted to hear, and b) didn’t really line up with what anyone else involved in new Star Wars wanted to say. What he offered was a very bold, very different new direction for the series, but it was a road that no one else was interested in going down. And you can fairly make the argument that that’s a failing as a film-maker; sometimes you need to know your audience. But either way, it was the story that he wanted to tell, so much so that it ended up not being the story that anyone wanted to hear.

If you want to talk about movies that exist just to exist, that were made without passion or purpose, you’re looking for Rise of Skywalker.

Yeah, hard agree. “Andor was great because it wasn’t about Jedi” is the wrong lesson to take.

Andor was great because it was made by people who were deeply passionate about what they were doing. They took the set dressing and the context that Star Wars offered and they used it to tell an incredibly powerful story of resistance against fascist oppression, everything that means and entails and what it costs. They created something powerful and vital that deserves and needs to exist.

We need more media that was created out of passion. We need artists to be set free to make art, not shackled to producing whatever a studio thinks is popular. That doesn’t mean it all has to be high minded, subtle or complex; John Wick was a work of artistic passion and it shows. The art is “Look how cool it is when Keanu Reeves shoots people”, but that can be art too. Subtle, complex morality plays or guns and explosions, or Jedi having lightsaber duels. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that people creating it really, really give a shit about what they’re making, and are allowed to make it the way they want to.

Did you actually read this? I don’t think you did. Either that or you’re being extremely dishonest right now.

Doctorow is briefly mentioned in passing in this blog post. His only involvement was a single tweet that in absolutely no way mentioned or even implied it was about Wu. Despite that she decided to make it about her anyway, and declared that Cory was leading some kind of witch hunt against her based on no evidence other than her own decision that she automatically counted as a “garbage person” in his mind. We have zero evidence that this was actually Cory’s intent, just her assertion that it must have been his meaning.

To take that and turn it into “he was involved in the media harassment and witch hunting of a famous Chinese tech girl Naomi Wu” isa disgustingly disingenuous twisting of the available facts.

It’s not impossible that Cory shares some blame in the events described - no one is perfect, every hero is some kind of bastard, yada yada - but the evidence you’ve offered doesn’t come remotely close to backing up the claims you’re making, and it’s dangerously irresponsible to share such a claim on such a flimsy basis.

I say this as someone who’s a fan of big, complicated, hours long games; 90% of the time, the numbers listed on the box are a total fucking lie.

OK, to be more precise, they typically measure how long the designers - who know every rule, never deliberate over what action to take, always pass priority when they’re done, and never stop to grab a glass of water - think the game should take. And probably don’t include set up time.

Deep down, every Vim user just wants one person to tell them that the countless hours they spent leaning to use it weren’t a total waste of time.

Ah, the Skaven solution.

Divorce

Makes sense: Even a marriage is easier to exit than Vim

I’d argue that the obvious desired state is simple; people should not struggle to afford housing. Every other consideration is secondary to that. The question is just how to get there.

To be decided by committee. We’d have to study both options and examine the potential negative and positive impacts.

In general the goal of the rent formula would be to keep average rents at a low percentage of average incomes. That means a typical two person apartment should clock in at, say for arguments sake, around 20% of monthly minimum wage. So even if there was some flex in rental prices, it should basically be impossible for anyone to struggle to make rent.

That said, I think it would definitely be important to ensure that an increase in desirability in an area doesn’t end up punishing the existing inhabitants. That way lies gentrification. This would tend to argue against factoring in desirability. A waiting list system will naturally push people away from areas that are highly desirable, since no one will want to wait that long for somewhere to live. I suspect that alone would be a sufficient solution, but again, I’d like to see it studied.

Obviously, there are problems this can’t solve, but they need their own solutions. More walkable neighbourhoods, better public transit, these are the kind of factors that would help reduce housing pressure on specific areas by making everywhere more desirable to live. Same goes for ensuring fair distribution of resources to schools and other public amenities, and so on.

First off, let’s assess the purpose of this question. If you’re implying that an argument against a system is invalid without a fully thought out proposal to replace it, you’re engaging in pointless sophistry. If someone says “I think my leg is broken” you don’t ask them to tell you exactly how they think it should be fixed before you believe them. We don’t have to know the solution in order to realise we have a problem.

With that caveat out of the way, I’m personally a big advocate for getting private capital out of rental markets. I know a lot of people just want to eliminate renting altogether, but I agree that this is short sighted. It either relies on the idea that everyone owns their home, which isn’t always practical, or that people simply have homes provided at no cost, which opens up its own complications. Basically, while I am in favour of the total destruction of capitalism, I don’t think that has to mean getting rid of money. Money is a very useful way of tokenising resources so that they can easily be exchanged. This allows for more efficient distribution of the correct resources to the people who most need them.

What I want to see is rentals at a price that everyone can afford l. Obviously, in an ideal scenario this would be paired with UBI to ensure that no one ever goes unhoused, but we’ll focus on the housing side for now.

If given total power over my country’s political system, I would look to implement a scheme that would ultimately result in rentals being handled only by Crown corporations (not-for-profit entities operating at arm’s length from the government) created with a mandate to provide affordable rental properties. These corporations would invest building and buying housing in their area in order to fulfill this mandate. They would also be required to offer rent to own schemes. Rental rates would be set by a formula that would account for factors affecting the desirability of a property such as location, square footage and amenities. Conflicts would be solved by waiting lists.

Private rentals would be outlawed (with possible carve-outs for situations like a property owner who is temporarily away from their primary residence - even in these situations, the rental would be handled by the Crown corp with the collected rents passing to the property owner, minus a handling fee). Most likely this scheme would be phased in over time, allowing investment property owners to sell off their properties to the Crown corps. Investors would take a hit on this, but any economic downsides will be more than offset by the upside of the vast majority of the populace becoming, in effect, significantly wealthier (in GDP terms the economy would certainly shrink, but GDP is a terrible measure of economic health).

Unfortunately necessary disclaimer: This is the rough outline of a proposal. Were I actually in a position to implement it, a LOT of details would be worked out in committee, with advice from respected experts. This disclaimer shall be henceforth known as “The Sign”. Do not make me tap “The Sign.”

Just because you can find one example of a good use of a bad system, doesn’t make it a good system. That’s like saying that monarchy was good actually because you can name some good kings.

it just has not worked when it’s been done so far

Big, BIG “citation needed” on that one chief. Just speaking from my own experience growing up in England, council housing schemes were fantastically effective at getting people into housing with reasonable rental costs. And similar schemes have been successful all across Europe. I’m told there are similar success stories in the US as well.

I think you’re just picking one or two bad examples and just treating that as the whole dataset because it fits your prior assumptions. It’s easy to do, because people complain when government efforts don’t work (and often they complain even when they do; there are plenty of “bad” government programs that are actually fantastically effective, people just moan about their imperfections to the point where everyone assumes they’re broken) but rarely celebrate the successes.

Because landlording, as a practice, is a fundamental flaw in the system we live in.

That doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, but it makes you a part of a bad system.

To some degree, we’re all part of a bad system. Every time we buy a latte, or a smartphone, we’re participating in a broken system that causes unimaginable harm. Half the shit you own was probably made with slave labour.

That’s what “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” means. It’s not saying “don’t consume”, it’s saying the idea of living a morally pure life in a morally defunct system is impossible.

We don’t yet know what a future post-capitalist housing system will look like. Maybe your particular scenario is one that will eventually be seen as perfectly acceptable.

For now, if you feel what you’re doing is completely justified then you can simply assume that the hate isn’t directed at you. You don’t have to jump in and justify yourself at every turn. That’s no different than being the guy who has to yell “I’m not like that” every time a woman talks about how shitty her interactions with men are.

And even if what you’re doing isn’t a moral good in the world, it may simply be that it’s the best you can do in a bad system. We’re all just trying to survive, and capitalism demands that we be morally impure in order to live, because there are no morally pure ways left to live. Again, you don’t need to justify that. We’re trying to fix a broken system. No one here called you out personally by name.

Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I’ve seen just how badly gov’t mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There’s very little way to directly hold a gov’t accountable, short of armed revolution.

Anything is bad if you do it badly. It’s ridiculous to dismiss an entire concept because you can name examples of when it was done wrong.

Bad drivers exist so no more cars. Bad laws exist so no more laws. Bad governments exists, so no more governments. It’s an asinine way of arguing.

Unless you can formulate clear arguments as to why government management of rentals cannot work as a concept, you should not dismiss it as a solution.

I mean it’s gotta be Vlaada Chvatil. God only knows what kind of game I’d end up walking out with, but I can guarantee it would be something interesting.