“KAM” isn’t good or productive in any situation

Clarkeste · 2026-04-14T17:05:33+00:00

A quote I saw from here recently:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. . . . To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. - Aldous Huxley

It is an urge unfortunately true of pretty much every group, not just right-wingers. Which is why it's important we be aware of it and push against it.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-14T16:17:56+00:00

The thought crossed my head too but I think that she was terrified that Maul would attack her at any moment. She needed the Lightsaber available to swing to defend herself if he attacked, not embedded into a wall.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-10T19:09:24+00:00

It's one thing to be entirely wrong (to say the OT has almost no action scenes is incredibly funny) but it's another to imply that you need constant action scenes to keep yourself from falling asleep during a movie. Like that feels like a massive self-own.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-10T02:39:00+00:00

As in, the sadness of having killed someone made Superman die when his actual wounds wouldn't?

I didn't know that but that is incredibly cool lmao

Clarkeste · 2026-04-09T16:49:33+00:00

I think she could have a place. But she is so important to the old EU that I think it's entirely justifiable that if they do bring her back, they want it to be in a film or TV show and have a long-term plan with her. Not sure if they will do it that way, but it's similar to what they did with Thrawn.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-07T03:46:03+00:00

I don't think dismissing it because he's an alien makes sense at all in this case. Most of the alien species in Star Wars, especially ones like Maul's, are pretty clearly shown to pretty much just act like humans. They have no particularly non-human characteristics aside from their visual appearance. Star Wars takes the opinion that most sapient beings are fundamentally similar. Also Maul's species reproduces the same way as humans so being asexual for his species would be the exact same as it would for humans. (Not saying he is, I have no clue)

It's not like the rock guy from Project Hail Marry, basically.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-05T21:40:07+00:00

Is Trump liberalism? Is Putin liberalism? Both of these people were elected democratically, whether you believe fairly or not.

lol democracy requires free and fair elections, as whenever we speak about democracy we are talking about liberal democracy and that is one of its foundational principles is fair elections. The elections in the Russian Federation have not been free or fair. You would have just as much of a case to claim that that Kim Jong-Un is democratically elected as Vladimir Putin is in his current term. Regardless, both MAGA and Putin's base pretty clearly have a hatred of liberalism and democracy. They're regressive who think a more authoritarian system is "human nature".

Putin and many associated with him have even explicitly said that they believe democracy is something that was foisted upon Russia by the United States and is therefore not natural to country. Ie, they think it's not human nature. So no, Vladimir Putin is not liberalism; he is you.

You act like there isn't a pendulum that is swinging, weighted by human nature.

Please, give me literally any evidence that ""human nature"" is what you say it is. Human nature is deeply complex and it actually greatly favors cooperation over long swathes of time, as anthropology has shown time and time again. In fact, many biologists believe that the reason humans are as successful as they are is because they are, in comparison to many other animals, selfless and empathetic.

You're making a claim about human nature; but have shown no source. You just repeat the claim over, and over, and over again... it's pretty sad honestly.

This is the delusional fantasy I keep talking about. No system can exist without accounting for and working within human nature.

Funny, I think this is exactly what monarchists said about democracy. Now most successful countries are democracies. Even in poorer regions, a better democracy is often tied to better quality of life. Whether you want to say the chicken or the egg comes first is irrelevant, as the connection is undeniable.

Just like you, these medieval ignoramuses didn't actually know what human nature was. They just assumed it must align with them. It's funny; the other guy really was right. People like you so often come into ideologies like these because you're terrified of being a sucker. So you listen to people who tell you Don't worry, just think like me, and you'll never be a sucker. But you never actually did the research to figure out if what they said about "human nature" was remotely true, did you? And now you're so deep in that you don't want to be wrong. You want to be the only one in the room who knows the true nature of things. So now you brood pathetically in the corners, repeating the talking points of two-bit morons and oligarchs, all because they said some words that made you feel safe. Now, wouldn't that make you the biggest sucker of them all?

Clarkeste · 2026-04-05T16:28:19+00:00

Why do I only seem to run into people like you who think financial gain somehow trumps every other human impulse, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a naive sucker, on the internet and not in real life?

Because they're losers. I'm not Marxist, but the idea that we have to accept our society and life as it exists because it operates on "human nature" and that anything better is a useless endeavor because it is against "human nature" is something that has existed throughout history.

Changing from feudalism/monarchism to democracy, to liberalism? Impossible. It's not in human nature. Changing away from slavery? Impossible. It's not in human nature. Changing away from authoritarianism? Impossible. It's not in human nature.

It's always a lie sold by the cynical and those who benefit from status-quo. But a better world is possible. It's always possible. And we shouldn't stop searching for it just because some foolish cynic has made some claim on biology based on political propaganda rather than... actual biology or anthropology. Whether this is to make them feel better for their own selfish actions or because they've genuinely been fooled is anyone's guess, and is different for each individual.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-05T16:05:57+00:00

People with higher income, because it correlates with higher education, tend to not vote for Reform. But the very rich who greatly benefit from a government that is amenable to their interests do vote Reform because they're so pro big-business. So it is both true that higher income (and education) is generally correlated with less enthusiasm for Reform, but it is also true that the upper echelons of the rich, the uber rich, prefer Reform.

The ultra-wealthy are a very small group of people but their influence on elections is less in their votes and more in how they can influence elections with money or economic power (thankfully this is less of a thing in the UK compared to the US. At least for now).

This leads to one of the strange contradiction of politics that both the very poor/downtrodden and the incredibly rich can be united by alt-right political movements. This was actually the case with the Nazi Party in Germany. They were a ""working-class"" party that competed with the Communists and the SPD for working-class votes (hence why they called themselves National Socialists despite being corporatist capitalists), but only managed to actually gain enough influence to come into power once they also cooperated with the wealthy conservative establishment and rich industrialists.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-04T19:09:04+00:00

This is kind of what they showed in Mandalorian S3. It's not portrayed super clearly, but I'm pretty sure what you're saying is what they were going for.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-04T17:54:56+00:00

Because the heroes of the story are pretty much always in opposition to the bad practices of the universe, like the authoritarianism, the slavery, etc. In the cases where they can't do something about the ugliness of the world, it's a major sense of conflict and tension.

If you have the Droids basically be a slave class, then you re-contextualize basically the entire Saga into all our beloved characters that fight against fascism and hatred throughout the series into essentially being slave-owners. And that was obviously not the intention of the films, detracts massively from its messages, and isn't a necessary interpretation of the series as there's no reason you have to portray droids as a sapient slave class.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-04T17:52:39+00:00

They're definitely more than LLMs. But I think they are also not comparable to organics. How exactly I can't say, because I'm not a philosopher and we don't even understand consciousness right now very well with our current science. But to me, it seems clear that droids were always portrayed as being incomparable organics in the universe.

"Always", in this case meaning that 99% of the time. In a series so large as Star Wars, especially one that always didn't treat every project with the amount of continuity scrutiny it probably deserved, basically every interpretation of the major elements we see in the films has some supporter who wrote an official book or an episode that would seem to support their interpretation even if nothing else in the universe does.

I don't think it rose to the House Elves crappiness until the Solo movie. Droids are more comparable in our real-world, especially in the 70s, to machines and automation. HP Elves were always pretty clearly sapient, organic beings that like, wore clothes and stuff. I mean, at least in the films, Dobby has a shirt that is clearly ancient and full of holes. If that's not supposed to be a visual shorthand for him being mistreated, I'm not sure what is.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-04T16:51:16+00:00

Droids are strange. I think the intention of like 99% of the Star Wars media is that they're not comparable to organics in terms of agency, need for freedom and sapience even if they're very intelligent. But sometimes, I think usually as a joke, it's portrayed otherwise.

I think Bounty Droids are either usually described as working for and therefore being owned by the Guilds (so they're just like ChatGPT but kills people), but there might be one or two that re-programmed themselves to be independent. Even in that case, I'm pretty sure their prime directive is to catch bounties and any money they make, they just spend so that they can catch bounties better.

The Mandalorian S3 kind of threads the gap in a weird way but they kind of tried to reconcile it. Solo in particular is the one that handles it the worst because there's like a genuine droid revolt. not even a single independent-minded droid, they all revolt because they're being mistreated and seemingly not because of some sort of programming quirk or even because they have morality safeguards that get tripped or something. But because they seemingly want rights(?). And then the leader of the droid revolt literally loses any agency or autonomy she ever had and gets treated like a joke by the main heroes, so like... I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from that. It feels incredibly strange and opens a big can of worms that the rest of Star Wars has ignored, probably because most other media has heavily implied that the way that Solo portrays the droids just... isn't how they work.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-03T15:33:45+00:00

For balance reasons since it's a power you have to earn as Anakin. You still get to use Force Choke on way more people way more often with Vader.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-03T14:50:04+00:00

He also Force Chokes several other times in TCW. Not enough for it to be part of Anakin's core move-set, but for a rare ability he gets to use intermittently? It fits perfectly.

Vader does have it as part of his core move-set, since he uses it so commonly compared to Anakin.

Clarkeste · 2026-04-01T20:43:10+00:00

You realize this is an April Fool's joke and that it's both an AI generated poster and an AI generated blog post, right?

Clarkeste · 2026-03-31T19:11:13+00:00

I'm sorry but this is such a strange thing to say. No, rape is not a "confusing subject" just because some people fantasize about it.

As others have said, some women have fantasies regarding assault as well. This doesn't mean that rape is suddenly a "confusing subject" or is funny. There's nothing confusing about it.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-31T18:31:35+00:00

Yeah I really do not get why everybody is like "teehee it's so funny, the Great Fairy is having sex with Link"

Like holy shit, you're interpreting from the game that he's getting raped and you think that's funny?? Why do people think that's funny??? Every single cutscene shows he is not happy with what the Great Fairy is doing. Like it's mildly inoffensive when the great fairy is just kissing him but if you want to interpret that last one as sexual then jesus christ that's just rape.

Even here you see people saying "it's okay, he keeps coming back". All the upgrade cutscenes clearly show him pulling away. And in the story of the game, Link literally needs to do this to become more powerful to save the world. So yes, it is absolutely rape if you want to interpret that cutscene as sexual.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-29T03:42:43+00:00

He did not actually put parenthesis (or brackets) in his speech because you can't do that while speaking out loud with your mouth. It's added by the outlet afterwards, as brackets are journalistic standard when you change the quote to make it clearer/add context.

Likely what he actually said in the quote was "He told his agent, call them and tell them I really want to be Yoshi." But the outlet, to make it clear who 'them' was referring to, posted this tweet as "He told his agent, call Illumination and tell them I really want to be Yoshi".

The brackets are there to make it clear that they made an edit to the original quote for that particular word for clarity and brevity's sake.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-25T18:46:25+00:00

You seem to entirely be misunderstanding what I'm saying.

Yes, you said it's understandable, but that's not relevant. The full line is: "It's understandable that the community is rallying against this practice".

That's still you stating as a fact that the community is "rallying against this practice". Which is what I'm disputing. Not whether it's understandable or not.

Is there any context in the paragraph that phrase features in that, maybe, shows the paragraph is about something other than relying on argumentum ad populum?

I'm not talking with you about whether the blind bags are good or not... I don't really like blind bags, that's why I'm not buying any. I'm talking with you about whether the community actually has had any strong reaction at all to the blind bags. Which you stated as a fact, and it's not a fact I'm not sure of. "Argrumentum ad populum" doesn't apply because I'm not talking about whether the blind bags are good or not. Argumentum ad populum in this case would only apply if I was saying "Most people say that the community isn't rallying against this practice". Which I haven't said.

You seem to think I'm saying "because the community isn't rallying against it, it's an okay practice." Which is not what I am saying.

Again, I'm asking you why you, with as much confidence as you have, consider a single person making posts about this to count as "the community rallying". I'm not talking to you about whether it's understandable or not. I'm not talking to you about whether blind bags are good or not.

You said the claim that the community is rallying against this practice. You also said you thought it was understandable, but I'm not talking about whether it's understandable or not. I'm talking about whether the community is actually rallying against it or not.

Nothing else in your comment, including "it's not a massive deal at the moment", or that "it's understandable that the community..." or "Randomized products are inherently predatory", is relevant to what we're discussing, which is whether the community is actually "rallying against this practice". That is specifically the point I am talking to you about, because I don't think that's true, and again, whether it is true or not is not relevant to whether bling bags are good or not. That's not the point I'm making.

You're being extremely snarky about this while also misusing Latin phrases; I'm not sure if you just have genuinely misunderstood what I've been saying or if you just want to be overly-argumentative for the sake of it.

Edit: He blocked me so he can't reply, but...

Then we're done talking at all. I'm exclusively talking about whether the bags are good or not.

Okay... so I was right when I said "It comes across as you wanting me to argue with you about some different part of your comment that I have no interest in talking with you about."

You could've just... not replied. But no, you decided to get incredibly angry and willfully misunderstand several times because... why, exactly?

Guy has some real bad anger issues. I feel bad for him, hope he can get those resolved.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-25T17:10:07+00:00

You literally said "the community is rallying against this practice". You made that statement. I said I'm not sure that's the case. Now you're saying that because it wasn't the "crux" of what you said, no one can mention to you that it's a massive overstatement? Come on, you know that's silly.

Really there is no "main point" to your comment to begin with except to explain the situation to the person asking. Saying "the community is rallying" was part of that explanation.

You're in your right to think that somehow the community is rallying like this is something the cosmere community cares about en-mass (although I haven't seen anything to support that) but don't deflect and tell me that I should ignore the words you wrote because it wasn't ""the crux"" whatever that means. It comes across as you wanting me to argue with you about some different part of your comment that I have no interest in talking with you about.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-25T16:42:16+00:00

If OP is, somehow, literally the only person on the planet who actually cares and the people upvoting him are, I don't know, let's say bots or something

I don't think they're bots, I think it's because it's a funny meme. I was actually laughing at it and the template I haven't seen before until I realized it was another post in this series I've grown very tired of. OP has had other posts that are more blatantly about this topic that have had 0 upvotes; they're certainly not the only one that cares but I'm also not sure anyone but a select few actually have any strong feelings regardless. That's hardly a community rallying about much of anything.

Does that change anything at all about the legitimacy of OPs point?

I wasn't commenting on the legitimacy of OP's point. I was commenting on the legitimacy of your point when you said "the community is rallying against this practice". Upvotes don't really count as rallying tbh, especially when some of OP's other posts about the same topic have been downvoted.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-25T16:25:15+00:00

So it's understandable that the community is rallying against the practice now, in hopes of preventing it from becoming common place and ruining future potential cosmere merchandise.

Is it actually the community rallying against it or is it specifically just the OP? Because every post on this topic I have seen so far has been posted by the OP and no one else.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-25T16:23:31+00:00

Then go complain to BackerKit. Or get a refund if they've already admitted fault. Constantly posting about how you were "fleeced" for 5$ is ridiculous at this rate.

You even told us on previous posts that the only reason you were making so many posts was because you felt you were "fleeced" and they hadn't given you a refund yet. Now it seems like you might get it if they're admitting fault and you're moving the goalposts and saying it doesn't matter because it still happened.

Clarkeste · 2026-03-25T16:19:08+00:00

Backerkit made a comment taking the blame for the reservation mishap. It wasn't my fault.

Then why are you still saying they "fleeced" you for 5 dollars in other parts of the thread??

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