Aw, man! My pastor spoke about this just last Sunday, and his take was that Christ said, “Anyone who’s not against me is with me.”

Totally different head, man.

But what the hell does he know, compared to His Doughiness? He just spent years studying the scriptures in the original Greek and Hebrew. Oh, and 20 years as an Army chaplain.

Actually Jesus does hate Dubya, and all other rich people. They are the only group whom he banned from his communion (if you would join me first sell all you own and give it to the poor) and he specifically says they are all going to hell (he who has enjoyed his rewards in this life shall not enjoy them in the next).

and, let’s not forget the neocon’s favorite book of the Bible, Revelations:

Revelation 3:15 ‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot.

man … even nearly 2000 years ago, libruls like John (author of Revelations) were hating on Bush …

Wait, so… Jeebus was a sith?

Suddenly, christianity makes a lot more sense.

So Jesus is a Xylon?

Wow, Jonah is deep.

Jonah has an interminable disease: advanced Whinyitis.

in a few seconds unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise

Good thing the moral fiber, or foundation, even, wasn’t unraveled. The franchise might’ve been hurt.

The author of that stupid book gets his moral superstructure from a colorized version of a Republic serial aimed at ten yr. olds. Gaahh!

OK, we admit the spaceship models are better in Lucas’s homage than the serials, but that’s it.

(It all has something to do w/ these people starting pubescence at the same time these movies came out, doesn’t it, & let’s not talk about it any more.)

Actually Christ said it both ways. If I remember correctly, the context of the “whoever is not against us is for us” phrase is that somebody was healing people in Christ’s name freelance.

Of course, you had to be careful if you freelanced (google “Sons of Sceva”).

While not a Star Wars fanboy myself, I have socialized with enough guys who have no hesitation in wearing their “Han shot first” t-shirt for any occasion to know it is recognized fan cannon that the Jedi Knights might be all about serenity and calm and whatnot when pontificating to the Padawan, but to actually beat anybody tough they all get pissed off first (i.e., tap into the dark side). If used in moderation, however, nobody gets particularly pissed off – thinking in absolutes is anything but the middle path of moderation.

That Jonah the Hut, never a fan of moderation with anything, would fail to take this away from it is not in the least bit surprising.

Han shot first… I don’t think Han was a Jedi, could be mistaken.

I’d advise them to give it up, as they are just not good at what they are trying to do, but I fear the reactions would be:

“Abandon ship? In our moment of triumph?!!!”

Han was not a Jedi, ever.

I stare appalledly at Jonah Goldberg being given entrance to the pages of Commentary. You always knew that Commentary was going to pretend to be a scholarly publication with the last editor, however much I disagreed with him.

But in the original Star Wars, the crux and part of the mythic grandeur of the plot was the ambiguity of Vader being, and wanting to be, a loving father and the archvillain whom everybody hated. People are at least more complicated than absolutes, which gets to what prompted this, Anakin saying “Either you are with me, or you are my enemy!”–selfishness. The Dark Side gains entry into you because of the dark emotions of hate and jealousy, which is consistent across series. Simply feeling those emotions does not cause you to give in. There seems to be an effort of will involved.

If all that is not about “absolutes,” then what on earth (or in a galaxy far, far away) is? And Lucas threw it all away to get in a dig at George W. Bush.

His swipe at Bush’s famous iteration of the doctrine that would bear his name—“You are either with us or against us”—in a few seconds unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise.

Lucas borrowed from myth myth is based on the human experience Jonah is close very close to getting thathe and Bush are the villains in this play.

Wonder if the fucksticks at America’s Shittiest Website (c) are whining yet about Ghandi’s picture on teh Google home page.

It’s those monstrous battles that the 101st Fapping Keyboardists fight.

Oh, yeh. WOLVERINES!!!1!!!one!!!exclamationpoint!!

TBogg, man, shorter Goldberg was still way too fucking long. Seriously. This is what keeps him up at nights?

I heard Shakespeare copped a lot of shit from Bush when they went to Harvard together.
Or was it Yale.
Fuck both those elitists.

… thinking in absolutes is anything but the middle path of moderation.

Maybe Jonah should write a book about how the Sith were the real Buddhists, not the Jedi.

Indeed, it’s hard to keep the eyeballs from rolling up and losing consciousness as one reads. But I got this far.

Thus, a show marked by gritty realism about how a decent but flawed civilization modeled on our own tries to cling to its decency while fighting an existential war against an implacable enemy veered wildly off course. The humans were no longer analogized to Americans; rather Americans were analogized to genocidal occupiers. In other words, we are no longer the inspiration for the futuristic Israelites trying to survive. We are now the Nazis.

I suppose he meant “Jews” rather than “Israelites,” but couldn’t be arsed to re-read and make corrections. Or did he mean “We are now the Canaanites?” Which would make the analogy very confusing.

The Israelites overthrow the Canaanites

Anyway, the shortest Jonah: “Complexity. We hates it.”

I read your last line as, “Fuck both those elfists.”, which made me laugh, so thank you for that.

“jonah the hut”

that is so awesome.

You bet.

When I look back at the raw excitement and heady originality of the early Star Wars movies, I don’t now see them as cheesy sci-fi skits buried in soap operas. No, I see them as the touchstones of my formative years, set to guide me through life’s travails.

Right.

Heaven help Jonah if he ever finds out that Gene Roddenberry was a diehard Great Society liberal. There will be a great weeping and gnashing of teeth and deletion of his K/S porn collection.

This explains why conservatives can’t comprehend global warming, international diplomacy, global economics, and other complex systems. Hell, they can’t even understand Star Wars, and that was never meant to be complex.

BTW, be sure to watch the conservatives’ reactions to the upcoming flick Law Abiding Citizen. Should be…interesting.

wasn’t Star Wars a movie?

Lucas revived, if not reinvented, the entire genre of science fiction in the 1970s by embracing bold and mythic depictions of good and evil and the heroic battle of the former against the latter.

So Star Wars’s big contribution to a genre was that it depicted evil as bad and good as good? Ooh, pathbreaking.

Didn’t Joseph Campbell say it was all about a hero’s quest to define himself? Or a vaguely psychoanalytic thing about fathers and sons?

Or, you know, the blatantly obvious subtext in the original trilogy about the fall of an empire and the founding of a republic, with the newer movies explicitly being about the rise of that empire, with visuals that explicitly evoke all the fascist stuff of which Jonah Goldberg is such a careful, caring stu- *blarf*

Whew, I need some rest after this absolutely wonderful Friday morning blog perusal.

First regaled with the hilarious comedian and part-time porn trailer manager, Erick Erickerickerickson at Sadly, No!, then to find that Doughpants has yet again reached a new comedic high.. I’m not sure that any other Friday will ever top this day. Nope. Can’t be done.

Nice comment, but you lost Jonah shortly after “So.”

Here I thought that Lucas had just picked the bones of the 1936 Universal serial Flash Gordon in order to make a shitpot of money. I had no idea that he’d reinvented the entire genre of science fiction in the process.
Fucking Goldberg probably collects the copious lint from his navel in a jar on his desk.

We laugh, but the sad fact is Johberg is considered an intellectual on the right, even by the so-called conservative intellects.

I cite AEI’s Steven Hayward in today’s WaPo. Hayward lost me here:

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book “Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present,” it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

Han shot first… I don’t think Han was a Jedi, could be mistaken.

Oi, guess I’m more of a Fanboy than I thought, since I presumed context would be understood. I just used the “Han Shot First” thing to denote their fanboy nature (i.e. they care about the the original vs. “remastered” Star Wars), not to suggest he was a Jedi himself.

No, no, no Greedo shot first. Any moran knows that!

Here I thought that Lucas had just picked the bones of the 1936 Universal serial Flash Gordon in order to make a shitpot of money.

Shit, I was a nerdy twelve-year-old when that damn thing came out, and that’s what I thought about it then. I had a fun afternoon at the cinema, forgot about it, and then woke up thirty years later to discover that it had somehow become the cultural touchstone of Western Civ.

We are a silly generation. You don’t see our parents and grandparents walking around in Buster Crabbe t-shirts, do you?

Fanboy Jonah probably sits around framing everything in terms of Star Wars/Battlestar/Whatever on an ongoing basis. His fantasy is to be Luke or Han (or maybe Leia, who knows what lurks in the heart of the FatMan?) and to use his powers of the Force to right the world’s (or the galaxie’s) wrongs.

The unfortunate part is that his moral compass comes from his mother, and his philosophical underpinnings are from Robert Heinlein and other conservative sci-fi authors. He’s just a case-study in narcissism meeting lack of critical thinking and being just fine with that.

I was certainly far too cool to be a 12-year old nerd when that shit came out, but after watching and seeing my truly nerdy-Star Trek neighbor Avery go apeshit over it, I knew it was back to the Civil War books and football for me. Next JohBerg will regale us with the lessons he learned from reading penny Westerns and the heroes who fought oppression and injustice while galloping through Waco. Fucking sci-fi fans always creeped me out anyway.

No wonder it took him so long to write Liberal Fascism. He’s about six months late and 2000 words over a 500-word post he could have crapped out the day after the BSG finale.

I can’t wait for his next column, What Would Jack Bauer Do?

“Lucas revived, if not reinvented, the entire genre of science fiction in the 1970s by embracing bold and mythic depictions of good and evil and the heroic battle of the former against the latter. For decades, the established premise of the Star Wars franchise was that the universe is divided into the Dark Side and the Light Side of the “Force.” Jedi Knights—champions of all that is noble and virtuous—were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls.”

Believe it or not, Jonah just gave a lucid explanation why I think the whole Star Wars thing is stupid.

*facehoof*

Jeez, that boy is thick.

And Han shot first.

All this time I thought Lucas wanted to do more fast cars stuff (THX1138 and American Graffiti), got the idea for jumping to hyperspace, and WOOHOO!

And Jonah, where does Willow fit into your contemplations?

If you agree with Iran, then you must be with IRan and you must be against the US. Iran is our enemy and must be defeated.

Laugh, clowns, laugh. They mocked Dan Quayle, too, when he dared speak truth to Murphy Brown.

But, now that America was rejected in its Olympic bid victory is within their reach!! Obama will be crushed by the world community, then Jonah, Michelle, Glenn Beck and their minions will inherit the rubble.

For decades, the established premise of the Star Wars franchise was that the universe is divided into the Dark Side and the Light Side of the “Force.” Jedi Knights—-champions of all that is noble and virtuous—-were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls

I’ll cop to being a pretty big Star Wars nerd in the 1970s and early 1980s. But I don’t recognize this stuff at all. In fact, I don’t know that the phrase “Light Side” was ever used.

And I don’t know that Jedi Knights–of whom we met, what, five?–were “champions of all that is noble and virtuous.” They had mystical powers. That’s what made them interesting, not that they were “noble and virtuous.”

Even as a fairly zealous fan, I have a hard time seeing it his way. It’s not that he’s absurd for caring about Star Wars, it’s that he’s drawing very weird conclusions from it. Good Vs. Evil doesn’t square with my impressions of what makes the series tick.

The funny thing is that he wrote basically this same column, a couple of years ago, as a Cornered post.

It’s like the shitstain has 6 columns, which he just recycles, and cuts and pastes the word/issue/offending party of the hour into.

To add to it, assclown needs to get his rage on about series that are more current than BSG or Star Wars.

Star Wars Episode III: The Sith Were Liberals was released in 2005. The last episode of BSG aired, um, SEVEN MONTHS AGO.

Up next for Jonah, a 1000 word essay on the evils of that Mulder character from the X-Files, followed by a complaint about Deanna Troi’s liberal tendencies in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Also, there is no way Jonah filed that piece of shit in those words. Far too tightly written. He had help.

by Cariboo Barbie you think? also…

Jedi Knights—champions of all that is noble and virtuous—were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls

So of course that awful Sith guy, Darth Vader, was totally irredeemable. The whole story is how the good guys got rid of him and lived happily ever after. Yep, that’s the ticket.