IDEA! Avatar 2: Ava-Tarrer

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, if wishes were horses, I'd have Alejandro Jodorowsky directing the Avatar sequel. So yeah.

[hongi]

This thread guys. Just...this thread.

[Shroom Man 777]

Huh?

Anyway, come to think about it, we don't even have to focus on the Na'vi. Pandora IS a living, breathing, actually self-aware being and it reacted unfavorably to assholes destroying bits and pieces of its interconnected neural network ecosystem body. So not only is this argument about how the RDA is stealing the Na'vi's land and also killing Na'vi, it's also about them being parasitic invasive organisms towards a much larger thinking creature.

It's pretty much like Jack Black Guilliver waking up and finding a bunch of puny human shits trying to excavate a hole through his navel to mine for oil, or if his navel gunk was some precious mineral for the Liliputans or whoever these guys were, and Jack Black going fuck you and thwacking them all away with his fingers.

The RDA were immoral and murderous and callous in killing and invading and crap to extract resources. Not only to the Na'vi, but to a being the size of an entire planet/moon. And not only were they responded to with anger by the Na'vi, but also by a leukocytic immune reaction by the much greater organism. What just happened in the movie was that a bunch of leeches ended up getting burned by a cigarette and scraped off.

Hell, even leeches and mosquitoes have more moral high ground than the RDA. Parasitic organisms need to suck blood and shit to live. The RDA doesn't need these to survive, and was harming both the Na'vi "microorganisms" and the Pandoran mega-organism just to get some dumb rock.

Nobody would die or be harmed if unobtanium was not mined. In invading that planet, in having to mine that dumb rock for monetary gain, these people placed not only human lives at risk, but also caused injury to a mega-organism and also harmed and killed a bunch of native "microorganism" people (who could be considered organs or tissues of the Pandoran mega-organism). Nobody had to die in the first place.

[hongi]

Huh?

It's fucking pathetic, that's what it is. The movie's morality was as one-sided as it could get without plumbing the depths of ham, and yet there are still people defending the corporate mercenaries.

[Shroom Man 777]

People are afraid or hostile to non-industrial things that do not conform to their preconceptions and go outside their comfort zone of rah rah hard metal militarism. It's an amazing study, really, on the mindset of people like this.

[hongi]

Neither you nor I want to go over my high school experience. Suffice it to say, I'm perfectly fine with the majority of my graduating class being machine gunned to death or worse.

I am not at all surprised.

You see scientists examining the mystical flora of Pandora and decide that this is proof that we are researching the plants to repopulate Earth instead of the obvious conclusion that since they are focusing on the planetary "nerves" and "wires" instead of edible plants they are researching the weird interconnectedness instead of finding crops.

No, I see the scientists explaining their hopes that the Pandora flora can help restore earth's biosphere and I take that to mean something's wrong with earth's biosphere and that at least part of their research involves ways to use Pandora's flora to help restore earth's biosphere. It's a huge intuitive leap, so I'll understand if you aren't able to follow me on it, but being so brilliant, it's hard to break things down into simpler steps for lesser intelects.

Delusional and depraved. Nice combo of personality traits there Cesario. I've read through this entire thread. You make claims that have no basis in the film. You've made your own movie in your head, where the characters say what you wish they had said.

For example, no scientist in the movie says that Pandora flora can help restore Earth's biosphere. It can't be found. You pulled it out of your arse.

And then when someone called you up on it, this is how it went down:

So you want to ignore the purpose of Grace's research as spelled out in the movie...

Spell it out for me. Provide the quotes from the movie that prove your point. Just this once.

I'm curious, what did you think the purpose of her botanical research was? They didn't know about the neurology of the planet before they sent her in there to do her botanical survey. Did you think she was here on pure research out of the goodness of the black hearts of the evil demonic human race?

What a fucking dodge. You're called on it, and you run away. And you keep on running away:

Why thank you, my good fucktard. This may turn out to be worth the effort after all.

Hm, it seems I misremembered where I learned the purpose of Grace's botanical research. The film has her on a research/diplomatic mission with no mention of restoring the earth's biosphere.

Where's your sorry? Where's your 'oops I was wrong?'.

Your leaps of intuition may in fact represent the light-year leaps of imagination that are taking place between your neurons. Cesario, watch the fucking movie and stop inserting your fantasies into it.

Indeed. The Navi were shooting at RDA vehicles, we saw vehicles returning with their chassis peppered with arrows. They also killed some humans as Quartich implied. So the Navi were destroying RDA property and killing people for a very long time with no consequences.

Upto the point RDA asked the Navi to move from their tree there was not a single thing we saw that the RDA did wrong.

Except invade and destroy their territory.

I went into the movie assuming the RDA was exploring a weird new planet. I didn't follow much of the buildup to the movie. Just a few random trailer fragments. I was more concerned at the time about the Last Airbender film.

I want to hear your views on the Fire Nation.

[hongi]

And? So? Boo-hoo they don't really want to ask anything from the humans. So what? Why is this, not caring to ask anything from the humans, such a great offense?

Why is it so offensive to you that these people don't want or need anything from the human lifestyle? [...]

If they don't want or realize that they need anything we have then it would be out of ignorance. Which is understandable.

They just need education (like many people.) Then they'll understand.

You know, once I really liked a girl. I came up to her and asked her out for a date. She said no. I was a little confused, but then I put it down to her just not knowing what an awesome guy I really was. No sane person would really reject me. So I made a list of reasons why I was perfect for her. But she still said no. Now I knew she was in urgent need of education. So I kidnapped her, beat her up and now keep her chained in my dungeon. And we lived happily ever after.

[Cesario]

If you can't see the degrees, I really can't help you. Once you evolve beyond pure black and white thinking, come back and we'll have a discussion about the particular shade of grey we are looking at in this instance. Until then, enjoy your magical native americans triumphing forever against the evil european mennace who will never return to Pandora, ever.

If you can't see how it's still a horrible act of murder and destruction and evil, then you can't be helped.

So does that make it okay to kill me? After all, I can't be helped, so I should be liquified and turned into a fish or something and not allowed to die. Because that's better, right?

Then they really should have made the corrupt corporate executive more callous. Ideally not have him need to be overthrown by the mercs and just have him sign on to the Well of Souls bombing. Probably should have also had him less interested in negotiating with the Na'vi from the start. If that's the message we want to actually send.

His greed did make him callous. He still approved the murderous firebombing.

So why not have him remain in charge, callously throwing away the lives of the Na'vi and his own mercs alike? If he's the real villain instead of Quaratch, why make Quaratch go insane and take over to begin with?

Too bad the only ones the film presented as good either died horribly for the sin of being human or were purified into becoming blue space elves themselves.

Uh, Grace Ripley died for the sin of helping the good guys and getting shot by Quarritch. Same with Michelle Rodriguez, except with a missile. Quarritch wasn't killing them for being human.

Whereas that scientist who looked like Shaggy Doo, and a lot of the other scientists (I remember there was also a fat guy scientist helping them?), didn't get killed by anyone and I don't think they were purificated either.

You seem to have missed the bio-wank brain upload thing that was rather important to the scenes of Grace and Jake's deaths. One of them was worthy to be reborn free of the impurity of being a worthless dirty stinking human. The other was found wanting by the all-knowing earth mother.

Was this connected to anything else you've said in this post, or was this just stream of consiousness ranting?

It's a comparison on how in the Alien movies and in the Avatar movies, it's still greed that threatens the people.

In the Alien movies, the Xenomorphs weren't moral agents. Nothing indicated they could be anything more than animals, so that's how the audience treated them. The Xenomorphs couldn't be evil. The Na'vi were too human. They were moral agents, and thus were capable of being judged evil themselves.

Compare the actions, apparent oversight, and degrees of callous behavior towards sapient beings, and I think you'll find (or rather you would if you could actually compare degrees of evil) that the corporations in the Alien franchise were far worse than those in Avatar.

Sure it was. I believe you. It's not possible that you just misremembered the order things happened in. I'm the only one allowed to misremember the film in this discussion after all.

Which is precisely the time you want that military intelligence thing that you've been sitting on for the past three months.

Which is also precisely the time people, especially those who've never encountered this kind of destruction, tend to panic.

Guess they should have been doing more with the last three months than arrogantly pushing their lifestyle on Jake. Maybe learn something from him during that time. They wasted time just as much as idiot Jake did.

Except they obviously weren't talking before that point either, since what Selfridge was asking Jake to get was the most basic information possible about the wants and needs of the natives.

Before that point, the Na'vi were learning English from the humans. Unless they learned English via cassette tapes or sign language, I think an ESL course involves a lot of talking.

And I'm the one who's too litteralminded.

They don't gather into easily murdered groups. Maybe I should hire Jake to rally them.

Maybe the fact that they liked Jake better and voted him as prom queen is the reason why you want to murder those reprehensible blue sophomores and seniors.

Or it might've been having most of the bones in my face shattered and requiring reconstructive surgery. One or the other.

Concession accepted.

Bull.

Either way, the intricate criteria involved in the Na'vi selecting Jake as prom queen over Grace is pretty much a side show over the fact that firebombing the Home Tree is a murderous act no matter what,

And?

and that it turns out your unobtanium = save the earth shtick was wrong.

Or rather, a result of out of film information aquired later.

They weren't brought as far in as Jake.

They didn't go in as far as Jake. They still considered themselves scientists and had lives outside of their Avatars. The whole point is that Jake ended up considering himself more of a scientist than a (pathetic paraplegic) human who had no life outside of his Avatar.

This is like a karate student who only goes to the dojo twice a week while studying in uni or otherwise doing stuff most of the other time, and another student who goes to the dojo every day and dedicates his entire life to the pursuit of the martial art. One of them will impress Mister Miyagi more and get a black belt.

Apparently the one who needs to get lectured by the part time uni student that he should be paying attention because this is important as he mocks Mr. Miyagi behind his back.

GRACE
They killed Sylwanin in the doorway.
Right in front of Neytiri. Then shot the
others.
(MILDLY)
I got most of the kids out, before they
shot me.

A pretty shitty situation all around. I never saw the Children Massacre Edition.

So Grace was being shitty when she "got most of the kids out" before getting shot herself?

Does it really sound horrible the way I tell it? Because you aren't acting like someone who thinks what I'm saying sounds horrible.

You act like the Na'vi choosing Jake to be prom queen over Grace is super-horrible, much more so than slimeballs consenting to murderous firebombings. If it is indeed more horrible than people enacting mass death and destruction, then it's gotta be very... very... very horribel.

Jake Sully being the Na'vi's best friend will be 911 times 2356.

My God, that's... I don't even know what that is!

Nobody does!

One of them saved their children's lives, the other was a charming and personable professional killer. Their choice reflects on the Na'vi's value judgements.

SELFRIDGE
Those savages are threatening our whole
operation. We're on the brink of war and
you're supposed to be finding a
diplomatic solution. So use what you've
got and get me some results.

Yet when it came down to it, he still consented to the murderous firebombing.

Yep, when a diplomatic solution isn't avalible, your one-sided desire to behave diplomatically doesn't just magically make diplomacy happen. Who knew?

Selfridge lost his cool after the psychos took over. Were you paying no attention at all?

Again, the businessmen didn't become scared until they were taken hostage by the mercs who were supposed to be protecting them.

Wow, okay.

I originally thought that witnessing the mass death and destruction of the Home Tree firebombing made Selfridge reconsider what he just did. Apparently, they didn't get fazed by the murderous act, and thought nothing of it and of their acts until the coup.

So if the mercs didn't do anything, Selfridge and co. would've thought what they did (firebombing the Home Tree) was A-OK and continued on business as usual. What a bunch of shitbags.
[/quote]
I just like to see people judged for who they really are, not for who idiots like to pretend they are.

It's a lot easier and faster to calculate the reentry trajectory of one object than it is to work the logistics of a complicated attack utilizing a repurposed shuttle. Especially if you've got a computer specifically designed to calculate reentry trajectories. I presume they might have something like that on their shuttle, but I'll admit I'm making an assumption and it was never stated in the movie that they did, in fact, have such a computer.

That's like saying, just because NASA has a Space Shuttle or an Apollo capsule with the computers in it, they can easily produce KKVs within a week or a month and throw it out of the Shuttle to blow up Baghdad or something.

How long does it take to build a bomber, gather military intelligence on a site, organize supply lines for a ground invasion, and carry out an attack against an entrenched enemy in terrain that prevents half your equipment from working? Compare that to dropping something heavy out of a bay from a great height. Especially when you recall that the RDA was resource-limited.

Traditionally your mustache twirlers (to earn the right to twirl their mustaches) don't take any interest in negotiating except as a means of hurting the other guy for its own sake. Selfridge wanted the negotiations to succeed.

And when the negotiations didn't succeed, the firebombing to him was convenient and he still went with it. Faint praise, he's still a shit.

Concession accepted.

How is it a concession? Selfridge is still a morally bankrupt shitstain who agreed to firebombing the Home Tree and killing countless of people.
[/quote]
Where did I claim he was a saint? That faint praise is a demonstration of something you've otherwise been incapable of grasping. That evil has degrees and shades, and is not an absolute.

Huh, youre right. They did make a distinction. Guess they didn't need to learn anything about the filthy humans, but if he's blue, then he's worth looking into.

I guess English isn't anything.

It's not like they were gonna have a mercenary go over there and get himself interviewed.

Isn't it interesting that the only thing they seem to have learned from the humans at that school is how to listen in on their communications and how to interrogate prisoners?

Still not grasping that "less bad" is not the same thing as "good", I see. Once again, when you gain the ability to percieve shades other than black and white, let me know.

It's still bad, it's still horrible, to such a degree that makes any slight about the Na'vi choosing Jake as prom queen look microscopic in comparison.

Who are the Na'vi? What do you know about their way of life? What do you know about their moral philosophy? How do they react to people who are different from them? What does it take for them to so much as establish a temporary military alliance with neighboring tribes?

I know the answer to the last question. It takes a legendary act not seen in three generations in the face of an enemy capable of bringing devistation unimagined in the last ten thousand years of their history.

This is garrisoning your troops in a church or school territory Jake was in here. I'm not sticking up for him on it. Why are you sticking up for him? Did him being blue at the time make you forget he was still a filthy human on the inside?

The humans suddenly attacked the Na'vi's primary population center in the Home Tree and destroyed it with countless people inside it.

I guess there's no reason why they could possibly want to have soldiers near their refugee site population center filled with people who just survived that previous attack. Unless, uh, maybe... somehow... possibly... some people might probably want to be... uhh... defended from another attack? Just a guess.

So the Na'vi aren't morally bankrupt for doing this, just too stupid to recognize the lesson learned from the destruction of Home Tree. "Your weapons can't fight off the humans." If they could, Home Tree would still be standing.

You still seem to not grasp that it wasn't the Na'vi at all that are scaring Selfridge. Quaritch's coup was what did that.

And if Quarritch hadn't pulled a coup, Selfridge wouldn't have been bothered by the fact that his approved firebombing of the Home Tree killed god knows how many people (and thus pissed the fuck out of the Na'vi)? Okay, man, for a second there I thought he was actually reconsidering the morality of his heinous actions when in fact, he wasn't, and if Quarritch hadn't bullied him, he wouldn't have actually realized just what kind of murderous shit he just pulled off. What a fucker.

Where did you see him realizing anything of the sort in the sequence of events that did happen?

You haven't been bothering to read my responses thus far. If you had, it would be clear that things of actual value, not "some gameboys" were on offer, which the Na'vi either couldn't imagine existing so they didn't ask for it, or they rejected an offer of things that could actually improve their lives, and not have people committing ritual suacide over the shame of being a cripple.

Hm, strange that we don't get more exploration of Jake killing Tsu'tey because Tsu'tey was ashamed of being a cripple. You'd have thought that would be an obvious point to show shared experience, and the sort of thing Jake could help him through.

Well, he also had a chest full of bullets and a backbone's worth of falling over thousands of feet.

As Quaratch pointed out, they're damn hard to kill. Another point that isn't exactly in their favor for gaining sympathy with the audience, I'll note. You'll note that there aren't a lot of things on this planet that can kill humans, and that most of the ones that are still here happen to be endangered. There's a reason for that. Humans killed them all.

But back to the situation at hand, Tsu'tey had nothing to say about the bullets or the fall. Just not wanting to live his life as a cripple, which Jake knew full well human medical technology could fix. This is exactly the sort of thing that could have been offered, but the Na'vi with their perfect lives don't have any need for.

Lies implies a deliberate misrepresentation. When evidence was presented that demonstrated my recollection was in error, I admitted the error and moved on. I realize that sort of behavior makes me look weak to fuckwads like yourself, but I'm not answerable to you and your standards of behavior. I'm answerable to my own.

Okay, so you weren't lying. So you just moved on to griping about how terrible the Na'vi were for accepting Jake as prom queen before Grace, oh god the horror. And haggling over how, because of Selfridge's efforts at being the great communicator negotiator but when the moment came still thought nothing of violence, the whole firebombing of the Home Tree was not atrocious but just murderous - oooh such great lesser degrees of how horrible mass death and destruction is.

See, you're coming around after all.

Kinda, yes.

How can the flesh heal if the people are still continuously wrist-slitting?

Continuiously? There was nothing about that in the brochure.

Screaming and shrieking? I don't recall altering my font in any of the standard indicative ways in my response to Jake's particular bit of nonsense here.

You take every tiny little statement by them, like "nature heals", and conflate it to make them sound oh-so-horrible. While at the same time, trying to play down the RDA's atrocities in firebombing the Home Tree. What the hell, man?

The RDA were trying to give the Na'vi a way out of the conflict. The Na'vi weren't trying to give anyone a way out of the conflict. Point RDA.

Only because they can't. Not because they're morally better people.

Their lifestyle hasn't led them to waste their environment, go to other people's homes and commit atrocities to plunder their lands out of single-minded murderous greed, so yes, they are morally better than the RDA.

You aren't particularly familiar with tribal warfare, are you? They're living in peace with the land. They explicitly aren't living in peace with eachother. That's what having warriors is for.

It may not be vital to earth's survival based soely on the film. I clearly must have read this in the expanded universe material somewhere. You have my concession on this point.

So the whole "unobtanium for humanity's survival" tangent is gone. There is no pressing life-saving need for humans to justify killing others to save themselves.

None that was shown in the film, apparently.

I realize you missed this point, but both sides were killing people.

The RDA was destroying population centers and machinegunning children just to mine some rocks. The Na'vi weren't.

The Na'vi were, instead, killing civilian miners just to protect some ferns. But those civilians were just dirty, misserable humans, so any crimes comitted against them are perfectly excusable, apparently.

Ryan Thunder, you're an idiot. In the context of their environment where there is a living breathing world-mind and where animals have living organic USB-ports, their lifestyle does make sense and it IS a viable alternative to industrialization.

Information storage? Their soul tree can transfer consciousness from one body to another. Ride a train? Drive a car? They can stick their tendrils in a pterodactyl and fucking fly. MP3s? They stick their tendrils on a tree-anemone and listen to divine music of the spheres voices of the ancestors shit that's infinitely more beautiful than any pre-packaged pop music we'll ever hear.

Unlike subsistence societies on Earth, the Pandoran ecosystem allows them to do this - it is a viable way of life because they live in an environment that's not like anything humanity then has ever encountered before. And you going "lol cars, lol industrialization" is just plain blindness to that.

I don't abhor technology. I abhor idiots who can't imagine and who are unable to see, when confronted with the fantastic (in the form of a science fiction planet of strange things that go beyond human understanding no less), past their own shitty preconceptions.

You literally can't see that the live in an entirely different way of existence and immediately assume that they're no different from some pygmies dying of malaria in the Amazon, rather than blue people on an artificial ecosystem who can commune with a living breathing world-mind. You can't imagine it at all.

Simply by virtue of the entire planet of Pandora being a product of human imagination, I think it's quite unfair of you to characterize this as something beyond human understanding.

To add to this, if someone's imagination can't get just how alien the Na'vi are, and how having the Eywa and the living Pandoran ecosystem changes everything, then they should be the last ones who should suggest what the Na'vi should or shouldn't do, or what they should or shouldn't be taught.

You have to understand before you can teach, you have to learn, and if your cup is already full, if you think you know "better" (because you do!!11), then you won't understand jack shit about the Na'vi psychology, the Na'vi way of life, the implications of living on a world where the ecosystem itself lives and thinks and is connected as a one being (with the Na'vi themselves included), and the thousands of years worth of knowledge, belief and understanding the Na'vi have on this. You end up instantly dismissing these due to your own preconceptions of primitive lifestyles on Earth, and so you're the one who should be educated.

Man is encountering something on another world, something alien, something different, something that has developed entirely separately from us. We shouldn't forget this, we shouldn't let stifled imaginations and creativity get in the way of appreciating the strange and the never before seen, and we shouldn't let ourselves be fooled into thinking that these alien things will conform to our preconceptions based on our own entirely different experiences on Earth.

Whether it's better to be ignorant, weak, and happy or to have the power to ensure you can maintain that happiness if something your ancestors didn't anticipate happens is a question worthy of consideration in that case, I should think.

And if, in attaining that kind of happiness, maybe some societies might just relinquish their power due to their contentment.

Yes, they might. But when they do that, they make that choice for all generations that will come after them. They make that choice for their children and their children's children who have no choice in the matter whatsoever.

I think those later generations actually deserve to be given a choice by anyone who comes along and sees the degenerate civilization that's resulted.

Ryan Thunder, you're an idiot. In the context of their environment where there is a living breathing world-mind and where animals have living organic USB-ports, their lifestyle does make sense and it IS a viable alternative to industrialization.

Information storage? Their soul tree can transfer consciousness from one body to another. Ride a train? Drive a car? They can stick their tendrils in a pterodactyl and fucking fly. MP3s? They stick their tendrils on a tree-anemone and listen to divine music of the spheres voices of the ancestors shit that's infinitely more beautiful than any pre-packaged pop music we'll ever hear.

Unlike subsistence societies on Earth, the Pandoran ecosystem allows them to do this - it is a viable way of life because they live in an environment that's not like anything humanity then has ever encountered before. And you going "lol cars, lol industrialization" is just plain blindness to that.

You're kind of touching on something I've been thinking of reading this - I think it might have been interesting if Avatar put more emphasis on developing the idea that, thanks to their symbiosis with an alien intelligent planet-spanning plant mind, the primitivism of the Na'vi is actually superficial and if you scratch the surface their society is in its own way just as "advanced" as ours. Consider needs that industrial civilization meets, and how their symbiotic relationship might serve the same purpose (I'm talking here about how the film might have been done here, not how it actually was done):

Medicine. I think there's actually some background material that Eywa supposed keeps them from suffering infectious diseases. If it can do that, it might also be skilled and capable at repairing other kinds of injuries too, quite possibly being more capable than Avatar-verse future medicine in which having spines repaired is apparently at least too expensive for everybody to get it. Also, even if their bodies do die they have actual factual downloading and immortality, maybe even the capability to swap minds between bodies so a lot of them are actually thousands of years old Methuselahs in their hundredth body or something. It sounds to human observers at first glance like reincarnation spiritual bullshit, but it's actually real.

Food. The thing can control animals, and if it has gardened the whole ecosystem to serve itself, it could probably likewise optimize it to serve the needs of its symbiotes. The forest is stacked with food. When they want meat some random lame or old animal comes along and just lets them kill it. Hunting and shit is stuff they'd only have to do for sport, or socio-religious reasons, much as is the case with ourselves. Sure they probably don't have our kinds of population, because they aren't the dominant component of their gardened ecosystem, but then they're probably themselves engineered by the plant-mind, maybe they can consciously control their own fertility or something.

Entertainment, or the thing that makes you feel more than just alive. If the plant-mind is an organic internet, how about it providing them the equivalent of cyberspace, full of virtual reality environments shaped by their imagination, to fulfill and delight every fantasy both subtle and gross? TV, computers etc. would seem laughably limited by comparison - we're the quaint aborigines making do with singing songs and banging drums while other people watch cable television here, not them.

What about instead of they don't need anything we can give them because they're such perfectly fulfilled Noble Savages it's more they don't need anything because humans at the beginning classifying them as technological primitives have them pegged wrong, and in fact they already have as good or better equivalents to any technological shit we could give them, it's just that human observers don't see it because they're looking at them through their own preconceptions, so say when they hear them say stuff like "I totes had past lives going back thousands of years" they think they believe in some bullshit reincarnation mumbo jumbo when in fact the guy was telling you the actual factual literal scientific truth? Earnest white man wanting to offer them the benefits of blackberries and Jeeps and antibiotics you have it exactly backwards, look a bit deeper and you'll realize that in fact you're the horse and buggy guy here, not them.

You thought Pandora is some primaeval jungle? Ha ha, it's an environment every bit as artificial as downtown New York or a giant corn farm in the Midwest, it's just all set up to serve the needs of something like King Clone on steroids that can think instead of some clever handy animal. You're looking at a highly advanced and extremely alien intelligence rivalling our own civilization in power, which has transformed its world every bit as radically as we have, you just can't see it even when it's right under your nose because you're looking in the wrong place for the dominant species; automatically assuming it has to be the thing that looks most like you, you mistake the sheepdogs for the shepherds.

Personally, my biggest gripe with Avatar is I would have preferred it to push an angle like that more - to be less Dances With Wolves In Space and more Solaris. Eywa strikes me as a potentially much more interesting alien than the Na'vi - it is a truly alien intelligence, with an incredibly different evolutionary history and surely totally different instincts and ways of looking at the world than us, and of the two (apparent) intelligent species on Pandora it strikes me as being the one much more likely to give us a run for our money in knowledge and capability. That would have been a concept I'd find pretty cool personally - human explorers land on planet, it looks to them like wilderness inhabited by savages, they act accordingly, later to find out that it is in fact the home of a civilization rivalling their own, of intelligent plants, while the creatures they thought were the most advanced lifeforms were really more like the plant civilization's equivalent of dogs, and when they were dealing high-handedly with the "savages" from their position of assumed greater power what they were really doing was the equivalent of going into a human city and kicking the shit out of some of the dogs.

That would've been a much better movie.

Huh?

Anyway, come to think about it, we don't even have to focus on the Na'vi. Pandora IS a living, breathing, actually self-aware being and it reacted unfavorably to assholes destroying bits and pieces of its interconnected neural network ecosystem body. So not only is this argument about how the RDA is stealing the Na'vi's land and also killing Na'vi, it's also about them being parasitic invasive organisms towards a much larger thinking creature.

It's pretty much like Jack Black Guilliver waking up and finding a bunch of puny human shits trying to excavate a hole through his navel to mine for oil, or if his navel gunk was some precious mineral for the Liliputans or whoever these guys were, and Jack Black going fuck you and thwacking them all away with his fingers.

The RDA were immoral and murderous and callous in killing and invading and crap to extract resources. Not only to the Na'vi, but to a being the size of an entire planet/moon. And not only were they responded to with anger by the Na'vi, but also by a leukocytic immune reaction by the much greater organism. What just happened in the movie was that a bunch of leeches ended up getting burned by a cigarette and scraped off.

Hell, even leeches and mosquitoes have more moral high ground than the RDA. Parasitic organisms need to suck blood and shit to live. The RDA doesn't need these to survive, and was harming both the Na'vi "microorganisms" and the Pandoran mega-organism just to get some dumb rock.

Nobody would die or be harmed if unobtanium was not mined. In invading that planet, in having to mine that dumb rock for monetary gain, these people placed not only human lives at risk, but also caused injury to a mega-organism and also harmed and killed a bunch of native "microorganism" people (who could be considered organs or tissues of the Pandoran mega-organism). Nobody had to die in the first place.

This is actually wrong. If we're assigning moral value to non-human superbeings made of lesser organisms as component parts, then the RDA itself is also a life form worth considering. While the humans might not have needed the unobtainium (though assuming they don't is every bit as much of an assumption as assuming they do), the RDA did. This corporation won't survive without the wealth generated from the unobtainium mining, so the RDA is precisely the mosquito.

Though another question is worth considering, does Eywa need unobtainium for anything? Is it just a coincidence that this room temperature superconductor happens to exist in this biowank planet, or does it serve some role in all this?

Huh?

It's fucking pathetic, that's what it is. The movie's morality was as one-sided as it could get without plumbing the depths of ham, and yet there are still people defending the corporate mercenaries.

Who's defending the mercs? Did my nickname of Commander Psycho not clue you in about my feelings about Quaratch?

People are afraid or hostile to non-industrial things that do not conform to their preconceptions and go outside their comfort zone of rah rah hard metal militarism. It's an amazing study, really, on the mindset of people like this.

Study would imply a degree if intelectual and moral curiosity that is somewhat lacking in your smug self-assurance that you know all that needs to be known before the first word is said.

Neither you nor I want to go over my high school experience. Suffice it to say, I'm perfectly fine with the majority of my graduating class being machine gunned to death or worse.

I am not at all surprised.

Of course you're not. It makes me lesser in your eyes that people you've never known did me harm that I wasn't able to stop. I must be morally degenerate because I was weak. That's the morality of people like you. It's ammusing that you presume to stand in judgement over me, but that's your nature.

You see scientists examining the mystical flora of Pandora and decide that this is proof that we are researching the plants to repopulate Earth instead of the obvious conclusion that since they are focusing on the planetary "nerves" and "wires" instead of edible plants they are researching the weird interconnectedness instead of finding crops.

No, I see the scientists explaining their hopes that the Pandora flora can help restore earth's biosphere and I take that to mean something's wrong with earth's biosphere and that at least part of their research involves ways to use Pandora's flora to help restore earth's biosphere. It's a huge intuitive leap, so I'll understand if you aren't able to follow me on it, but being so brilliant, it's hard to break things down into simpler steps for lesser intelects.

Delusional and depraved. Nice combo of personality traits there Cesario. I've read through this entire thread. You make claims that have no basis in the film. You've made your own movie in your head, where the characters say what you wish they had said.

For example, no scientist in the movie says that Pandora flora can help restore Earth's biosphere. It can't be found. You pulled it out of your arse.

And then when someone called you up on it, this is how it went down:

Spell it out for me. Provide the quotes from the movie that prove your point. Just this once.

I'm curious, what did you think the purpose of her botanical research was? They didn't know about the neurology of the planet before they sent her in there to do her botanical survey. Did you think she was here on pure research out of the goodness of the black hearts of the evil demonic human race?

What a fucking dodge. You're called on it, and you run away. And you keep on running away:

Why thank you, my good fucktard. This may turn out to be worth the effort after all.

Hm, it seems I misremembered where I learned the purpose of Grace's botanical research. The film has her on a research/diplomatic mission with no mention of restoring the earth's biosphere.

Where's your sorry? Where's your 'oops I was wrong?'.

Didn't you say you'd read the entire thread? I'm not surprised that you've lied about that. Seems you didn't even read the parts you quoted.

Your leaps of intuition may in fact represent the light-year leaps of imagination that are taking place between your neurons. Cesario, watch the fucking movie and stop inserting your fantasies into it.

I'm not rewatching a shitty movie to appease a morally bankrupt creaton like yourself. Consider yourself blessed that I deigned to respond to your pathetic drivel at all.

Indeed. The Navi were shooting at RDA vehicles, we saw vehicles returning with their chassis peppered with arrows. They also killed some humans as Quartich implied. So the Navi were destroying RDA property and killing people for a very long time with no consequences.

Upto the point RDA asked the Navi to move from their tree there was not a single thing we saw that the RDA did wrong.

Except invade and destroy their territory.

Again, that was after the home tree incident. Pay attention.

I went into the movie assuming the RDA was exploring a weird new planet. I didn't follow much of the buildup to the movie. Just a few random trailer fragments. I was more concerned at the time about the Last Airbender film.

I want to hear your views on the Fire Nation.

I actually decided not to see the Last Airbender film after learning how terribly it was butchering the source material. As to the series version of the Fire Nation, I think they were suffering just as much from the war as the Earth Kingdom, and in many of the same ways. We see the Earthbenders pushing around farmers assured that they have the right to because they're supporting the military, and in the Fire Nation, we see the exact same sort of suffering from the fishermen.

It's a wonderful thing that the conflict was resolved when the leadership of the Fire Nation was replaced, and peace was able to break out, rather than requiring the genocide of ever man, woman, and child in the Fire Nation as would have been required if they were the inhenretly evil and corrupt monsters that simpler minds might have cast them as.

General Iroh shares a place alongside Toph Bei Fong as my favorite characters in the entire series.

And? So? Boo-hoo they don't really want to ask anything from the humans. So what? Why is this, not caring to ask anything from the humans, such a great offense?

Why is it so offensive to you that these people don't want or need anything from the human lifestyle? [...]

If they don't want or realize that they need anything we have then it would be out of ignorance. Which is understandable.

They just need education (like many people.) Then they'll understand.

You know, once I really liked a girl. I came up to her and asked her out for a date. She said no. I was a little confused, but then I put it down to her just not knowing what an awesome guy I really was. No sane person would really reject me. So I made a list of reasons why I was perfect for her. But she still said no. Now I knew she was in urgent need of education. So I kidnapped her, beat her up and now keep her chained in my dungeon. And we lived happily ever after.

Given the moral judgement you've demonstrated thus far, I think the only thing you didn't do was the last item on that list. And that only because you would have learned not to say anything about it by this point, not because you actually understand why that sort of thing is wrong.

[Cesario]

If you can't see the degrees, I really can't help you. Once you evolve beyond pure black and white thinking, come back and we'll have a discussion about the particular shade of grey we are looking at in this instance. Until then, enjoy your magical native americans triumphing forever against the evil european mennace who will never return to Pandora, ever.

If you can't see how it's still a horrible act of murder and destruction and evil, then you can't be helped.

So does that make it okay to kill me? After all, I can't be helped, so I should be liquified and turned into a fish or something and not allowed to die. Because that's better, right?

Then they really should have made the corrupt corporate executive more callous. Ideally not have him need to be overthrown by the mercs and just have him sign on to the Well of Souls bombing. Probably should have also had him less interested in negotiating with the Na'vi from the start. If that's the message we want to actually send.

His greed did make him callous. He still approved the murderous firebombing.

So why not have him remain in charge, callously throwing away the lives of the Na'vi and his own mercs alike? If he's the real villain instead of Quaratch, why make Quaratch go insane and take over to begin with?

Too bad the only ones the film presented as good either died horribly for the sin of being human or were purified into becoming blue space elves themselves.

Uh, Grace Ripley died for the sin of helping the good guys and getting shot by Quarritch. Same with Michelle Rodriguez, except with a missile. Quarritch wasn't killing them for being human.

Whereas that scientist who looked like Shaggy Doo, and a lot of the other scientists (I remember there was also a fat guy scientist helping them?), didn't get killed by anyone and I don't think they were purificated either.

You seem to have missed the bio-wank brain upload thing that was rather important to the scenes of Grace and Jake's deaths. One of them was worthy to be reborn free of the impurity of being a worthless dirty stinking human. The other was found wanting by the all-knowing earth mother.

Was this connected to anything else you've said in this post, or was this just stream of consiousness ranting?

It's a comparison on how in the Alien movies and in the Avatar movies, it's still greed that threatens the people.

In the Alien movies, the Xenomorphs weren't moral agents. Nothing indicated they could be anything more than animals, so that's how the audience treated them. The Xenomorphs couldn't be evil. The Na'vi were too human. They were moral agents, and thus were capable of being judged evil themselves.

Compare the actions, apparent oversight, and degrees of callous behavior towards sapient beings, and I think you'll find (or rather you would if you could actually compare degrees of evil) that the corporations in the Alien franchise were far worse than those in Avatar.

Sure it was. I believe you. It's not possible that you just misremembered the order things happened in. I'm the only one allowed to misremember the film in this discussion after all.

Which is precisely the time you want that military intelligence thing that you've been sitting on for the past three months.

Which is also precisely the time people, especially those who've never encountered this kind of destruction, tend to panic.

Guess they should have been doing more with the last three months than arrogantly pushing their lifestyle on Jake. Maybe learn something from him during that time. They wasted time just as much as idiot Jake did.

Except they obviously weren't talking before that point either, since what Selfridge was asking Jake to get was the most basic information possible about the wants and needs of the natives.

Before that point, the Na'vi were learning English from the humans. Unless they learned English via cassette tapes or sign language, I think an ESL course involves a lot of talking.

And I'm the one who's too litteralminded.

They don't gather into easily murdered groups. Maybe I should hire Jake to rally them.

Maybe the fact that they liked Jake better and voted him as prom queen is the reason why you want to murder those reprehensible blue sophomores and seniors.

Or it might've been having most of the bones in my face shattered and requiring reconstructive surgery. One or the other.

Concession accepted.

Bull.

Either way, the intricate criteria involved in the Na'vi selecting Jake as prom queen over Grace is pretty much a side show over the fact that firebombing the Home Tree is a murderous act no matter what,

And?

and that it turns out your unobtanium = save the earth shtick was wrong.

Or rather, a result of out of film information aquired later.

They weren't brought as far in as Jake.

They didn't go in as far as Jake. They still considered themselves scientists and had lives outside of their Avatars. The whole point is that Jake ended up considering himself more of a scientist than a (pathetic paraplegic) human who had no life outside of his Avatar.

This is like a karate student who only goes to the dojo twice a week while studying in uni or otherwise doing stuff most of the other time, and another student who goes to the dojo every day and dedicates his entire life to the pursuit of the martial art. One of them will impress Mister Miyagi more and get a black belt.

Apparently the one who needs to get lectured by the part time uni student that he should be paying attention because this is important as he mocks Mr. Miyagi behind his back.

GRACE
They killed Sylwanin in the doorway.
Right in front of Neytiri. Then shot the
others.
(MILDLY)
I got most of the kids out, before they
shot me.

A pretty shitty situation all around. I never saw the Children Massacre Edition.

So Grace was being shitty when she "got most of the kids out" before getting shot herself?

Does it really sound horrible the way I tell it? Because you aren't acting like someone who thinks what I'm saying sounds horrible.

You act like the Na'vi choosing Jake to be prom queen over Grace is super-horrible, much more so than slimeballs consenting to murderous firebombings. If it is indeed more horrible than people enacting mass death and destruction, then it's gotta be very... very... very horribel.

Jake Sully being the Na'vi's best friend will be 911 times 2356.

My God, that's... I don't even know what that is!

Nobody does!

One of them saved their children's lives, the other was a charming and personable professional killer. Their choice reflects on the Na'vi's value judgements.

SELFRIDGE
Those savages are threatening our whole
operation. We're on the brink of war and
you're supposed to be finding a
diplomatic solution. So use what you've
got and get me some results.

Yet when it came down to it, he still consented to the murderous firebombing.

Yep, when a diplomatic solution isn't avalible, your one-sided desire to behave diplomatically doesn't just magically make diplomacy happen. Who knew?

Selfridge lost his cool after the psychos took over. Were you paying no attention at all?

Again, the businessmen didn't become scared until they were taken hostage by the mercs who were supposed to be protecting them.

Wow, okay.

I originally thought that witnessing the mass death and destruction of the Home Tree firebombing made Selfridge reconsider what he just did. Apparently, they didn't get fazed by the murderous act, and thought nothing of it and of their acts until the coup.

So if the mercs didn't do anything, Selfridge and co. would've thought what they did (firebombing the Home Tree) was A-OK and continued on business as usual. What a bunch of shitbags.

I just like to see people judged for who they really are, not for who idiots like to pretend they are.

It's a lot easier and faster to calculate the reentry trajectory of one object than it is to work the logistics of a complicated attack utilizing a repurposed shuttle. Especially if you've got a computer specifically designed to calculate reentry trajectories. I presume they might have something like that on their shuttle, but I'll admit I'm making an assumption and it was never stated in the movie that they did, in fact, have such a computer.

That's like saying, just because NASA has a Space Shuttle or an Apollo capsule with the computers in it, they can easily produce KKVs within a week or a month and throw it out of the Shuttle to blow up Baghdad or something.

How long does it take to build a bomber, gather military intelligence on a site, organize supply lines for a ground invasion, and carry out an attack against an entrenched enemy in terrain that prevents half your equipment from working? Compare that to dropping something heavy out of a bay from a great height. Especially when you recall that the RDA was resource-limited.

And when the negotiations didn't succeed, the firebombing to him was convenient and he still went with it. Faint praise, he's still a shit.

Concession accepted.

How is it a concession? Selfridge is still a morally bankrupt shitstain who agreed to firebombing the Home Tree and killing countless of people.

Where did I claim he was a saint? That faint praise is a demonstration of something you've otherwise been incapable of grasping. That evil has degrees and shades, and is not an absolute.

Huh, youre right. They did make a distinction. Guess they didn't need to learn anything about the filthy humans, but if he's blue, then he's worth looking into.

I guess English isn't anything.

It's not like they were gonna have a mercenary go over there and get himself interviewed.

Isn't it interesting that the only thing they seem to have learned from the humans at that school is how to listen in on their communications and how to interrogate prisoners?

Still not grasping that "less bad" is not the same thing as "good", I see. Once again, when you gain the ability to percieve shades other than black and white, let me know.

It's still bad, it's still horrible, to such a degree that makes any slight about the Na'vi choosing Jake as prom queen look microscopic in comparison.

Who are the Na'vi? What do you know about their way of life? What do you know about their moral philosophy? How do they react to people who are different from them? What does it take for them to so much as establish a temporary military alliance with neighboring tribes?

I know the answer to the last question. It takes a legendary act not seen in three generations in the face of an enemy capable of bringing devistation unimagined in the last ten thousand years of their history.

This is garrisoning your troops in a church or school territory Jake was in here. I'm not sticking up for him on it. Why are you sticking up for him? Did him being blue at the time make you forget he was still a filthy human on the inside?

The humans suddenly attacked the Na'vi's primary population center in the Home Tree and destroyed it with countless people inside it.

I guess there's no reason why they could possibly want to have soldiers near their refugee site population center filled with people who just survived that previous attack. Unless, uh, maybe... somehow... possibly... some people might probably want to be... uhh... defended from another attack? Just a guess.

So the Na'vi aren't morally bankrupt for doing this, just too stupid to recognize the lesson learned from the destruction of Home Tree. "Your weapons can't fight off the humans." If they could, Home Tree would still be standing.

You still seem to not grasp that it wasn't the Na'vi at all that are scaring Selfridge. Quaritch's coup was what did that.

And if Quarritch hadn't pulled a coup, Selfridge wouldn't have been bothered by the fact that his approved firebombing of the Home Tree killed god knows how many people (and thus pissed the fuck out of the Na'vi)? Okay, man, for a second there I thought he was actually reconsidering the morality of his heinous actions when in fact, he wasn't, and if Quarritch hadn't bullied him, he wouldn't have actually realized just what kind of murderous shit he just pulled off. What a fucker.

Where did you see him realizing anything of the sort in the sequence of events that did happen?

You haven't been bothering to read my responses thus far. If you had, it would be clear that things of actual value, not "some gameboys" were on offer, which the Na'vi either couldn't imagine existing so they didn't ask for it, or they rejected an offer of things that could actually improve their lives, and not have people committing ritual suacide over the shame of being a cripple.

Hm, strange that we don't get more exploration of Jake killing Tsu'tey because Tsu'tey was ashamed of being a cripple. You'd have thought that would be an obvious point to show shared experience, and the sort of thing Jake could help him through.

Well, he also had a chest full of bullets and a backbone's worth of falling over thousands of feet.

As Quaratch pointed out, they're damn hard to kill. Another point that isn't exactly in their favor for gaining sympathy with the audience, I'll note. You'll note that there aren't a lot of things on this planet that can kill humans, and that most of the ones that are still here happen to be endangered. There's a reason for that. Humans killed them all.

But back to the situation at hand, Tsu'tey had nothing to say about the bullets or the fall. Just not wanting to live his life as a cripple, which Jake knew full well human medical technology could fix. This is exactly the sort of thing that could have been offered, but the Na'vi with their perfect lives don't have any need for.

Lies implies a deliberate misrepresentation. When evidence was presented that demonstrated my recollection was in error, I admitted the error and moved on. I realize that sort of behavior makes me look weak to fuckwads like yourself, but I'm not answerable to you and your standards of behavior. I'm answerable to my own.

Okay, so you weren't lying. So you just moved on to griping about how terrible the Na'vi were for accepting Jake as prom queen before Grace, oh god the horror. And haggling over how, because of Selfridge's efforts at being the great communicator negotiator but when the moment came still thought nothing of violence, the whole firebombing of the Home Tree was not atrocious but just murderous - oooh such great lesser degrees of how horrible mass death and destruction is.

See, you're coming around after all.

Kinda, yes.

How can the flesh heal if the people are still continuously wrist-slitting?

Continuiously? There was nothing about that in the brochure.

Screaming and shrieking? I don't recall altering my font in any of the standard indicative ways in my response to Jake's particular bit of nonsense here.

You take every tiny little statement by them, like "nature heals", and conflate it to make them sound oh-so-horrible. While at the same time, trying to play down the RDA's atrocities in firebombing the Home Tree. What the hell, man?

The RDA were trying to give the Na'vi a way out of the conflict. The Na'vi weren't trying to give anyone a way out of the conflict. Point RDA.

Only because they can't. Not because they're morally better people.

Their lifestyle hasn't led them to waste their environment, go to other people's homes and commit atrocities to plunder their lands out of single-minded murderous greed, so yes, they are morally better than the RDA.

You aren't particularly familiar with tribal warfare, are you? They're living in peace with the land. They explicitly aren't living in peace with eachother. That's what having warriors is for.

It may not be vital to earth's survival based soely on the film. I clearly must have read this in the expanded universe material somewhere. You have my concession on this point.

So the whole "unobtanium for humanity's survival" tangent is gone. There is no pressing life-saving need for humans to justify killing others to save themselves.

None that was shown in the film, apparently.

I realize you missed this point, but both sides were killing people.

The RDA was destroying population centers and machinegunning children just to mine some rocks. The Na'vi weren't.

The Na'vi were, instead, killing civilian miners just to protect some ferns. But those civilians were just dirty, misserable humans, so any crimes comitted against them are perfectly excusable, apparently.

Ryan Thunder, you're an idiot. In the context of their environment where there is a living breathing world-mind and where animals have living organic USB-ports, their lifestyle does make sense and it IS a viable alternative to industrialization.

Information storage? Their soul tree can transfer consciousness from one body to another. Ride a train? Drive a car? They can stick their tendrils in a pterodactyl and fucking fly. MP3s? They stick their tendrils on a tree-anemone and listen to divine music of the spheres voices of the ancestors shit that's infinitely more beautiful than any pre-packaged pop music we'll ever hear.

Unlike subsistence societies on Earth, the Pandoran ecosystem allows them to do this - it is a viable way of life because they live in an environment that's not like anything humanity then has ever encountered before. And you going "lol cars, lol industrialization" is just plain blindness to that.

I don't abhor technology. I abhor idiots who can't imagine and who are unable to see, when confronted with the fantastic (in the form of a science fiction planet of strange things that go beyond human understanding no less), past their own shitty preconceptions.

You literally can't see that the live in an entirely different way of existence and immediately assume that they're no different from some pygmies dying of malaria in the Amazon, rather than blue people on an artificial ecosystem who can commune with a living breathing world-mind. You can't imagine it at all.

Simply by virtue of the entire planet of Pandora being a product of human imagination, I think it's quite unfair of you to characterize this as something beyond human understanding.

To add to this, if someone's imagination can't get just how alien the Na'vi are, and how having the Eywa and the living Pandoran ecosystem changes everything, then they should be the last ones who should suggest what the Na'vi should or shouldn't do, or what they should or shouldn't be taught.

You have to understand before you can teach, you have to learn, and if your cup is already full, if you think you know "better" (because you do!!11), then you won't understand jack shit about the Na'vi psychology, the Na'vi way of life, the implications of living on a world where the ecosystem itself lives and thinks and is connected as a one being (with the Na'vi themselves included), and the thousands of years worth of knowledge, belief and understanding the Na'vi have on this. You end up instantly dismissing these due to your own preconceptions of primitive lifestyles on Earth, and so you're the one who should be educated.

Man is encountering something on another world, something alien, something different, something that has developed entirely separately from us. We shouldn't forget this, we shouldn't let stifled imaginations and creativity get in the way of appreciating the strange and the never before seen, and we shouldn't let ourselves be fooled into thinking that these alien things will conform to our preconceptions based on our own entirely different experiences on Earth.

Whether it's better to be ignorant, weak, and happy or to have the power to ensure you can maintain that happiness if something your ancestors didn't anticipate happens is a question worthy of consideration in that case, I should think.

And if, in attaining that kind of happiness, maybe some societies might just relinquish their power due to their contentment.

Yes, they might. But when they do that, they make that choice for all generations that will come after them. They make that choice for their children and their children's children who have no choice in the matter whatsoever.

I think those later generations actually deserve to be given a choice by anyone who comes along and sees the degenerate civilization that's resulted.

Ryan Thunder, you're an idiot. In the context of their environment where there is a living breathing world-mind and where animals have living organic USB-ports, their lifestyle does make sense and it IS a viable alternative to industrialization.

Information storage? Their soul tree can transfer consciousness from one body to another. Ride a train? Drive a car? They can stick their tendrils in a pterodactyl and fucking fly. MP3s? They stick their tendrils on a tree-anemone and listen to divine music of the spheres voices of the ancestors shit that's infinitely more beautiful than any pre-packaged pop music we'll ever hear.

Unlike subsistence societies on Earth, the Pandoran ecosystem allows them to do this - it is a viable way of life because they live in an environment that's not like anything humanity then has ever encountered before. And you going "lol cars, lol industrialization" is just plain blindness to that.

You're kind of touching on something I've been thinking of reading this - I think it might have been interesting if Avatar put more emphasis on developing the idea that, thanks to their symbiosis with an alien intelligent planet-spanning plant mind, the primitivism of the Na'vi is actually superficial and if you scratch the surface their society is in its own way just as "advanced" as ours. Consider needs that industrial civilization meets, and how their symbiotic relationship might serve the same purpose (I'm talking here about how the film might have been done here, not how it actually was done):

Medicine. I think there's actually some background material that Eywa supposed keeps them from suffering infectious diseases. If it can do that, it might also be skilled and capable at repairing other kinds of injuries too, quite possibly being more capable than Avatar-verse future medicine in which having spines repaired is apparently at least too expensive for everybody to get it. Also, even if their bodies do die they have actual factual downloading and immortality, maybe even the capability to swap minds between bodies so a lot of them are actually thousands of years old Methuselahs in their hundredth body or something. It sounds to human observers at first glance like reincarnation spiritual bullshit, but it's actually real.

Food. The thing can control animals, and if it has gardened the whole ecosystem to serve itself, it could probably likewise optimize it to serve the needs of its symbiotes. The forest is stacked with food. When they want meat some random lame or old animal comes along and just lets them kill it. Hunting and shit is stuff they'd only have to do for sport, or socio-religious reasons, much as is the case with ourselves. Sure they probably don't have our kinds of population, because they aren't the dominant component of their gardened ecosystem, but then they're probably themselves engineered by the plant-mind, maybe they can consciously control their own fertility or something.

Entertainment, or the thing that makes you feel more than just alive. If the plant-mind is an organic internet, how about it providing them the equivalent of cyberspace, full of virtual reality environments shaped by their imagination, to fulfill and delight every fantasy both subtle and gross? TV, computers etc. would seem laughably limited by comparison - we're the quaint aborigines making do with singing songs and banging drums while other people watch cable television here, not them.

What about instead of they don't need anything we can give them because they're such perfectly fulfilled Noble Savages it's more they don't need anything because humans at the beginning classifying them as technological primitives have them pegged wrong, and in fact they already have as good or better equivalents to any technological shit we could give them, it's just that human observers don't see it because they're looking at them through their own preconceptions, so say when they hear them say stuff like "I totes had past lives going back thousands of years" they think they believe in some bullshit reincarnation mumbo jumbo when in fact the guy was telling you the actual factual literal scientific truth? Earnest white man wanting to offer them the benefits of blackberries and Jeeps and antibiotics you have it exactly backwards, look a bit deeper and you'll realize that in fact you're the horse and buggy guy here, not them.

You thought Pandora is some primaeval jungle? Ha ha, it's an environment every bit as artificial as downtown New York or a giant corn farm in the Midwest, it's just all set up to serve the needs of something like King Clone on steroids that can think instead of some clever handy animal. You're looking at a highly advanced and extremely alien intelligence rivalling our own civilization in power, which has transformed its world every bit as radically as we have, you just can't see it even when it's right under your nose because you're looking in the wrong place for the dominant species; automatically assuming it has to be the thing that looks most like you, you mistake the sheepdogs for the shepherds.

Personally, my biggest gripe with Avatar is I would have preferred it to push an angle like that more - to be less Dances With Wolves In Space and more Solaris. Eywa strikes me as a potentially much more interesting alien than the Na'vi - it is a truly alien intelligence, with an incredibly different evolutionary history and surely totally different instincts and ways of looking at the world than us, and of the two (apparent) intelligent species on Pandora it strikes me as being the one much more likely to give us a run for our money in knowledge and capability. That would have been a concept I'd find pretty cool personally - human explorers land on planet, it looks to them like wilderness inhabited by savages, they act accordingly, later to find out that it is in fact the home of a civilization rivalling their own, of intelligent plants, while the creatures they thought were the most advanced lifeforms were really more like the plant civilization's equivalent of dogs, and when they were dealing high-handedly with the "savages" from their position of assumed greater power what they were really doing was the equivalent of going into a human city and kicking the shit out of some of the dogs.

That would've been a much better movie.

Huh?

Anyway, come to think about it, we don't even have to focus on the Na'vi. Pandora IS a living, breathing, actually self-aware being and it reacted unfavorably to assholes destroying bits and pieces of its interconnected neural network ecosystem body. So not only is this argument about how the RDA is stealing the Na'vi's land and also killing Na'vi, it's also about them being parasitic invasive organisms towards a much larger thinking creature.

It's pretty much like Jack Black Guilliver waking up and finding a bunch of puny human shits trying to excavate a hole through his navel to mine for oil, or if his navel gunk was some precious mineral for the Liliputans or whoever these guys were, and Jack Black going fuck you and thwacking them all away with his fingers.

The RDA were immoral and murderous and callous in killing and invading and crap to extract resources. Not only to the Na'vi, but to a being the size of an entire planet/moon. And not only were they responded to with anger by the Na'vi, but also by a leukocytic immune reaction by the much greater organism. What just happened in the movie was that a bunch of leeches ended up getting burned by a cigarette and scraped off.

Hell, even leeches and mosquitoes have more moral high ground than the RDA. Parasitic organisms need to suck blood and shit to live. The RDA doesn't need these to survive, and was harming both the Na'vi "microorganisms" and the Pandoran mega-organism just to get some dumb rock.

Nobody would die or be harmed if unobtanium was not mined. In invading that planet, in having to mine that dumb rock for monetary gain, these people placed not only human lives at risk, but also caused injury to a mega-organism and also harmed and killed a bunch of native "microorganism" people (who could be considered organs or tissues of the Pandoran mega-organism). Nobody had to die in the first place.

This is actually wrong. If we're assigning moral value to non-human superbeings made of lesser organisms as component parts, then the RDA itself is also a life form worth considering. While the humans might not have needed the unobtainium (though assuming they don't is every bit as much of an assumption as assuming they do), the RDA did. This corporation won't survive without the wealth generated from the unobtainium mining, so the RDA is precisely the mosquito.

Though another question is worth considering, does Eywa need unobtainium for anything? Is it just a coincidence that this room temperature superconductor happens to exist in this biowank planet, or does it serve some role in all this?

Huh?

It's fucking pathetic, that's what it is. The movie's morality was as one-sided as it could get without plumbing the depths of ham, and yet there are still people defending the corporate mercenaries.

Who's defending the mercs? Did my nickname of Commander Psycho not clue you in about my feelings about Quaratch?

People are afraid or hostile to non-industrial things that do not conform to their preconceptions and go outside their comfort zone of rah rah hard metal militarism. It's an amazing study, really, on the mindset of people like this.

Study would imply a degree if intelectual and moral curiosity that is somewhat lacking in your smug self-assurance that you know all that needs to be known before the first word is said.

Neither you nor I want to go over my high school experience. Suffice it to say, I'm perfectly fine with the majority of my graduating class being machine gunned to death or worse.

I am not at all surprised.

Of course you're not. It makes me lesser in your eyes that people you've never known did me harm that I wasn't able to stop. I must be morally degenerate because I was weak. That's the morality of people like you. It's ammusing that you presume to stand in judgement over me, but that's your nature.

You see scientists examining the mystical flora of Pandora and decide that this is proof that we are researching the plants to repopulate Earth instead of the obvious conclusion that since they are focusing on the planetary "nerves" and "wires" instead of edible plants they are researching the weird interconnectedness instead of finding crops.

No, I see the scientists explaining their hopes that the Pandora flora can help restore earth's biosphere and I take that to mean something's wrong with earth's biosphere and that at least part of their research involves ways to use Pandora's flora to help restore earth's biosphere. It's a huge intuitive leap, so I'll understand if you aren't able to follow me on it, but being so brilliant, it's hard to break things down into simpler steps for lesser intelects.

Delusional and depraved. Nice combo of personality traits there Cesario. I've read through this entire thread. You make claims that have no basis in the film. You've made your own movie in your head, where the characters say what you wish they had said.

For example, no scientist in the movie says that Pandora flora can help restore Earth's biosphere. It can't be found. You pulled it out of your arse.

And then when someone called you up on it, this is how it went down:

Spell it out for me. Provide the quotes from the movie that prove your point. Just this once.

I'm curious, what did you think the purpose of her botanical research was? They didn't know about the neurology of the planet before they sent her in there to do her botanical survey. Did you think she was here on pure research out of the goodness of the black hearts of the evil demonic human race?

What a fucking dodge. You're called on it, and you run away. And you keep on running away:

Why thank you, my good fucktard. This may turn out to be worth the effort after all.

Hm, it seems I misremembered where I learned the purpose of Grace's botanical research. The film has her on a research/diplomatic mission with no mention of restoring the earth's biosphere.

Where's your sorry? Where's your 'oops I was wrong?'.

Didn't you say you'd read the entire thread? I'm not surprised that you've lied about that. Seems you didn't even read the parts you quoted.

Your leaps of intuition may in fact represent the light-year leaps of imagination that are taking place between your neurons. Cesario, watch the fucking movie and stop inserting your fantasies into it.

I'm not rewatching a shitty movie to appease a morally bankrupt creaton like yourself. Consider yourself blessed that I deigned to respond to your pathetic drivel at all.

Indeed. The Navi were shooting at RDA vehicles, we saw vehicles returning with their chassis peppered with arrows. They also killed some humans as Quartich implied. So the Navi were destroying RDA property and killing people for a very long time with no consequences.

Upto the point RDA asked the Navi to move from their tree there was not a single thing we saw that the RDA did wrong.

Except invade and destroy their territory.

Again, that was after the home tree incident. Pay attention.

I went into the movie assuming the RDA was exploring a weird new planet. I didn't follow much of the buildup to the movie. Just a few random trailer fragments. I was more concerned at the time about the Last Airbender film.

I want to hear your views on the Fire Nation.

I actually decided not to see the Last Airbender film after learning how terribly it was butchering the source material. As to the series version of the Fire Nation, I think they were suffering just as much from the war as the Earth Kingdom, and in many of the same ways. We see the Earthbenders pushing around farmers assured that they have the right to because they're supporting the military, and in the Fire Nation, we see the exact same sort of suffering from the fishermen.

It's a wonderful thing that the conflict was resolved when the leadership of the Fire Nation was replaced, and peace was able to break out, rather than requiring the genocide of ever man, woman, and child in the Fire Nation as would have been required if they were the inhenretly evil and corrupt monsters that simpler minds might have cast them as.

General Iroh shares a place alongside Toph Bei Fong as my favorite characters in the entire series.

And? So? Boo-hoo they don't really want to ask anything from the humans. So what? Why is this, not caring to ask anything from the humans, such a great offense?

Why is it so offensive to you that these people don't want or need anything from the human lifestyle? [...]

If they don't want or realize that they need anything we have then it would be out of ignorance. Which is understandable.

They just need education (like many people.) Then they'll understand.

You know, once I really liked a girl. I came up to her and asked her out for a date. She said no. I was a little confused, but then I put it down to her just not knowing what an awesome guy I really was. No sane person would really reject me. So I made a list of reasons why I was perfect for her. But she still said no. Now I knew she was in urgent need of education. So I kidnapped her, beat her up and now keep her chained in my dungeon. And we lived happily ever after.

Given the moral judgement you've demonstrated thus far, I think the only thing you didn't do was the last item on that list. And that only because you would have learned not to say anything about it by this point, not because you actually understand why that sort of thing is wrong.

[Ryan Thunder]

You know, once I really liked a girl. I came up to her and asked her out for a date. She said no. I was a little confused, but then I put it down to her just not knowing what an awesome guy I really was. No sane person would really reject me.

Yeah, ok. Been there a few times.

So I made a list of reasons why I was perfect for her.

Uh...

But she still said no. Now I knew she was in urgent need of education. So I kidnapped her, beat her up and now keep her chained in my dungeon. And we lived happily ever after.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Anyway, you're wildly off topic here.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I never got the impression that Eywa found Jake worthy to be saved but not Grace; I saw it that Jake underwent the transfer from an intact human body while Grace's human body was dying and they were too late to save her.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Anyway, you're wildly off topic here.

Compare hongi's post to the post of yours it is in response to. If you still aren't getting it, hongi is applying your attitude towards the Na'vi to a situation more relatable to see how horrifying that attitude is.

[Ryan Thunder]

Compare hongi's post to the post of yours it is in response to.

Uh ok. Not seeing a relation other than some tenuous hand-waving about education.

If you still aren't getting it, hongi is applying your attitude towards the Na'vi to a situation more relatable to see how horrifying that attitude is.

Maybe if you're dedicated to finding the worst possible interpretation for anything you might not like on the face of things.

While we're at it, let's relate your take on the right course of action here to leaving homeless kids out on the street to fend for themselves, since its just as disingenuous.

EDIT: Actually, less disingenuous, since it doesn't involve actively harming them.

[Junghalli]

Huh?

It's fucking pathetic, that's what it is. The movie's morality was as one-sided as it could get without plumbing the depths of ham, and yet there are still people defending the corporate mercenaries.

Might I suggest that in fact this reaction might have something to do with exactly the very obvious intended message?

I think, as with say Star Wars fans who think the Empire is really the good guys or guys who write essays about how the Federation is really a communist dystopia, it's not that these people don't get what the story is trying to say. It's that, for one reason or another, they want to reinterpret it into something completely different and opposed to its actual intended message. I think this often happens when the person is hostile to the intended message, and so they like to reinterpret it into something more consistent with their view of how the world actually works or should work. It's not that they don't get the intended message, it's that this kind of reinterpretation is a technique for actively rebelling against it.

Basically, I suspect in a lot of cases you could think of the personal canon version of Avatar where RDA is really the good (or at least less bad) guys as sort of something like The Wide Sargasso Sea, only instead of being an attempt to reinterpret the racially queasy undertones of a nineteenth century novel into something more consistent with the modern liberal worldview* it attempts to reinterpret the fairly anvilicious anti-corporatist, anti-militarist, anti-colonialist pro-environmentalist narrative of Avatar into something more consistent with a right winger, pro-capitalist, or technophile world view.

Note: I'm not trying to imply this is why everyone who argues this thinks this way, just saying, I suspect in a lot of cases this is what's happening.

* Note: I'm not saying what's going on here is necessarily equivalent, I'm just pointing out that there is a certain similarity; consumers of media reacting against messages they disagree with by reinterpretation.

Maybe I've just stated the obvious here, but I thought it was worth saying.

[dworkin]

So, were the martians in the right? After all the inhabitants of Blue were inferior monkeys so backwards they barely understood the shape and true extent of the universe. They also lacked telepathy. They could only communicate by rudely agitating particles in the atmosphere. And to talk about their medicine is to require inventing whole new definitions for the word.

Were the monkeys of Blue wrong for refusing to accept the clear and obvious benefits Martian civilisation had to offer? Surely their unprovoked agreesion in daring to aproach their betters demanded a quick response. And their constant attacks afterwards with Maxims, Cannons, Rifles and Thunderchilds put the poor Martians in the unavoidable position of teaching those monkeys a lesson. The Martians went to some effort not to wantonly slaughter civilian monkeys and went after 'symbolic targets' in an effort to resolve the war quickly.

The Martians also came from a dying world. Mars was so far along that even the monkeys of Blue realised this. Were the monkeys therefore wrong to resist the Martians at every turn rather than accept the wholesale benefits of martian civilisation. Humanity under the martians would of prospered, becoming free of disease, racism, class struggles, poverty, war, religion and starvation. Clearly the martians had much to offer the monkeys who were silly, shortsighted and possibly wicked for not recognising this and resisting.

[Cesario]

Huh?

It's fucking pathetic, that's what it is. The movie's morality was as one-sided as it could get without plumbing the depths of ham, and yet there are still people defending the corporate mercenaries.

Might I suggest that in fact this reaction might have something to do with exactly the very obvious intended message?

I think, as with say Star Wars fans who think the Empire is really the good guys or guys who write essays about how the Federation is really a communist dystopia, it's not that these people don't get what the story is trying to say. It's that, for one reason or another, they want to reinterpret it into something completely different and opposed to its actual intended message. I think this often happens when the person is hostile to the intended message, and so they like to reinterpret it into something more consistent with their view of how the world actually works or should work. It's not that they don't get the intended message, it's that this kind of reinterpretation is a technique for actively rebelling against it.

Basically, I suspect in a lot of cases you could think of the personal canon version of Avatar where RDA is really the good (or at least less bad) guys as sort of something like The Wide Sargasso Sea, only instead of being an attempt to reinterpret the racially queasy undertones of a nineteenth century novel into something more consistent with the modern liberal worldview* it attempts to reinterpret the fairly anvilicious anti-corporatist, anti-militarist, anti-colonialist pro-environmentalist narrative of Avatar into something more consistent with a right winger, pro-capitalist, or technophile world view.

Note: I'm not trying to imply this is why everyone who argues this thinks this way, just saying, I suspect in a lot of cases this is what's happening.

* Note: I'm not saying what's going on here is necessarily equivalent, I'm just pointing out that there is a certain similarity; consumers of media reacting against messages they disagree with by reinterpretation.

Maybe I've just stated the obvious here, but I thought it was worth saying.

Might also have something to do with disliking the obvious manipulation techniques involved in getting the audience on the side of the narrative. We can plainly see where all the tropes are pointing us towards, and with all that narrative force pointing one way, any further exploration of the universe will obviously involve looking into the oposite interpretation.

If you don't like the blatent manipulation of the sugar appocolipse shot in full "war movie" slowmo cam, it's more fun to find the faults in the narrative. And how much the RDA were trying to get a diplimatic solution relative to the zero effort the Na'vi were making is a doosie.

So, were the martians in the right? After all the inhabitants of Blue were inferior monkeys so backwards they barely understood the shape and true extent of the universe. They also lacked telepathy. They could only communicate by rudely agitating particles in the atmosphere. And to talk about their medicine is to require inventing whole new definitions for the word.

Were the monkeys of Blue wrong for refusing to accept the clear and obvious benefits Martian civilisation had to offer? Surely their unprovoked agreesion in daring to aproach their betters demanded a quick response. And their constant attacks afterwards with Maxims, Cannons, Rifles and Thunderchilds put the poor Martians in the unavoidable position of teaching those monkeys a lesson. The Martians went to some effort not to wantonly slaughter civilian monkeys and went after 'symbolic targets' in an effort to resolve the war quickly.

The Martians also came from a dying world. Mars was so far along that even the monkeys of Blue realised this. Were the monkeys therefore wrong to resist the Martians at every turn rather than accept the wholesale benefits of martian civilisation. Humanity under the martians would of prospered, becoming free of disease, racism, class struggles, poverty, war, religion and starvation. Clearly the martians had much to offer the monkeys who were silly, shortsighted and possibly wicked for not recognising this and resisting.

Yet another example where the aliens don't talk to the humans. What a surprise.

[Darth Tedious]

Yet another example where the aliens don't talk to the humans. What a surprise.

False comparison.
The Na'vi took the time and effort to learn English.
The monkeys never tried to learn Martian.

[Cesario]

Yet another example where the aliens don't talk to the humans. What a surprise.

False comparison.
The Na'vi took the time and effort to learn English.
The monkeys never tried to learn Martian.

Which version of War of the Worlds were you watching?

[Shroom Man 777]

So does that make it okay to kill me? After all, I can't be helped, so I should be liquified and turned into a fish or something and not allowed to die. Because that's better, right?

Nope, it's not okay. Like how it wasn't okay for a giant androgynous albino mutaloid chick to liquefy everyone at the end of Evangelion.

So why not have him remain in charge, callously throwing away the lives of the Na'vi and his own mercs alike? If he's the real villain instead of Quaratch, why make Quaratch go insane and take over to begin with?

Maybe Selfridge and Quarritch had different degrees of psychosis and Selfridge was an apathetic fuck who'd go "ho hum, I tried, ok authorize firebombing" whereas Quarritch was an entire different league of psycho who won't mind being set on fire while jumping off exploding aerocraft in his kill-armor. The former is still a slimeball shitstain morally bankrupt asshole who authorized an act of mass death and destruction. The latter, well, gets into mecha knife fights with xeno-panthers and is a complete violence for pleasure seeking psychopath. No one's denied this.

You seem to have missed the bio-wank brain upload thing that was rather important to the scenes of Grace and Jake's deaths. One of them was worthy to be reborn free of the impurity of being a worthless dirty stinking human. The other was found wanting by the all-knowing earth mother.

The other one died on the operating table because she was shot full of holes and spent the previous few hours bleeding to death? That's like saying why did the technowank defibrillator hospital-consciousness choose to resuscitate a physically intact adult person, but "chose" to let a stinky filthy old man riddled with bullets to die on the OR table.

In the Alien movies, the Xenomorphs weren't moral agents. Nothing indicated they could be anything more than animals, so that's how the audience treated them. The Xenomorphs couldn't be evil. The Na'vi were too human. They were moral agents, and thus were capable of being judged evil themselves.

Compare the actions, apparent oversight, and degrees of callous behavior towards sapient beings, and I think you'll find (or rather you would if you could actually compare degrees of evil) that the corporations in the Alien franchise were far worse than those in Avatar.

I was getting at the whole message of corporate greed = evil. Yes, Weyland Yutani was totally insidious on a different degree, making weird ass conspiracy shits involving getting people impregnated by aliens and convoluting it up with weird ass schemes. Whereas the RDA's brand of evil is simple, and no different from a modern day oil company shooting up some black people who happen to live in the way of their oil pipelines, or Americans trying to tear-trail some natives.

Guess they should have been doing more with the last three months than arrogantly pushing their lifestyle on Jake. Maybe learn something from him during that time. They wasted time just as much as idiot Jake did.

Horrible horrible mistake on their part. Boo-hoo.

And I'm the one who's too litteralminded.

You went on about how they were arrogant this, didn't want to talk that, never gave a shit about humans this. Turned out, prior to having their children massacred, they were sending their kids to Grace's school to learn English and were on speaking terms with the humans. What exactly they talked about, who knows. Their relations didn't break down because of whatever arrogance you love bringing up, but because their children got massacred.

Or it might've been having most of the bones in my face shattered and requiring reconstructive surgery. One or the other.

Well, that's incredibly shitty and I am sorry for that, man.

And?

And so your whole tangent on the Na'vi being oh-so-horrible for Jaking around is pretty insignificant.

and that it turns out your unobtanium = save the earth shtick was wrong.

Or rather, a result of out of film information aquired later.

Which was wrong.

Apparently the one who needs to get lectured by the part time uni student that he should be paying attention because this is important as he mocks Mr. Miyagi behind his back.

And then later on ends up loving the whole thing and becoming crazy for it to the point of digging it even more than the part time uni student. Oh my god character change. Gasp.

So Grace was being shitty when she "got most of the kids out" before getting shot herself?

I meant, the children being shot was shitty. And getting shot at by psycho mercs too. That was a shitty situation.

One of them saved their children's lives, the other was a charming and personable professional killer. Their choice reflects on the Na'vi's value judgements.

They changed their minds and ended up being OK with Grace again. That Jake was further gone and thinking himself as more of the Na'vi than human, while Grace was still thinking of herself as a human researcher studying alienoids, is why they accepted him.

God, you want to talk about value judgments. What about the value judgments of people who bomb homes and kill people just to mine overpriced rocks? You looove going on about value judgments when the Na'vi befriend this guy or that girl, but not when the RDA murders these guys or bombs that place.

Yep, when a diplomatic solution isn't avalible, your one-sided desire to behave diplomatically doesn't just magically make diplomacy happen. Who knew?

And consenting to firebombing (when you can, you know, not authorize mass murder and destruction) still makes you a morally bankrupt shitstain. Woah!

I just like to see people judged for who they really are, not for who idiots like to pretend they are.

You know that makes Selfridge actually worse. For a while, I thought he had second thoughts about the firebombing. Turns out, as you pointed out, the only thing that made him lose it was the mercenary coup. He didn't care at all about the mass death and firebombing at all. He's an even greater self-absorbed shit.

How long does it take to build a bomber, gather military intelligence on a site, organize supply lines for a ground invasion, and carry out an attack against an entrenched enemy in terrain that prevents half your equipment from working? Compare that to dropping something heavy out of a bay from a great height. Especially when you recall that the RDA was resource-limited.

They didn't need to build a bomber. They just duct taped some mining charges. Military intelligence on the site was just some satellite stuffs. The ground invasion was dropped off by VTOL.

Maybe jerry rigging an orbital bomber would've been easier. Maybe Quarritch was so wrapped up in his whole Marine mindset that he never considered that. Maybe orbital bombardment is not as easy as you make it sound. Maybe the fuckload of flying island mountains made it harder for them to bomb it (this is why the shuttle flew under the flying mountains, rather than flying over them and chucking out its load from a higher altitude). *shrug*

Where did I claim he was a saint? That faint praise is a demonstration of something you've otherwise been incapable of grasping. That evil has degrees and shades, and is not an absolute.

He's still a shit. You're just haggling on the percentages of his shittiness, on whether he's a dried out turd, a diarrheatic glop of liquid shit, or a shit with undigested corn-things still inside it, and all that. A shit is a shit is a shit.

I actually thought that he felt some remorse. But as you pointed out, he didn't, and he only got shocked when Quarritch went crazy and took over. So thanks to that, he's become an even bigger shit than he was.

Isn't it interesting that the only thing they seem to have learned from the humans at that school is how to listen in on their communications and how to interrogate prisoners?

It's like, since Red Dawn never showed any of the actual factual high school lessons, I'll just assume the US schooling system teaches nothing but child soldiery and guerrilla warfare tactics, because the only thing we see Patrick Swayze to have learned is how to shoot Russians in the face.

Your acrobatics are amazing.

Who are the Na'vi? What do you know about their way of life? What do you know about their moral philosophy? How do they react to people who are different from them? What does it take for them to so much as establish a temporary military alliance with neighboring tribes?

I know the answer to the last question. It takes a legendary act not seen in three generations in the face of an enemy capable of bringing devistation unimagined in the last ten thousand years of their history.

You are obsessed with making them into these horrible people by construing and misinterpreting everything in the worst light possible, while trivializing the RDA's firebombing of the Home Tree.

So the Na'vi aren't morally bankrupt for doing this, just too stupid to recognize the lesson learned from the destruction of Home Tree. "Your weapons can't fight off the humans." If they could, Home Tree would still be standing.

They also used their weapons on the Soul Tree attack, and got their asses massacrated before divine intervention came. Spaniards come in with guns and iron, all the natives have are wooden clubs and sharpened rocks, okay they've got no chance, but they're still going to run screaming at the Spaniards to stick them in the face with spiked clubs just to defend their homes and lands.

Where did you see him realizing anything of the sort in the sequence of events that did happen?

He didn't. He had an aghast look when he saw the Home Tree firebombed and he seemed to be in shock. I thought he had an "oh my god, what have I just done" thing going on. Of course, none of this was explicit, but I assumed he had second thoughts and hesitation before Quarritch went all fuckout psycho. Because unlike Quarritch, Selfridge was a shmuck and not insane.

Turns out he didn't have any of these, and turns out he thought nothing of the firebombing and the only thing that ruffled his feathers was Quarritch's going absolutely insane.

But back to the situation at hand, Tsu'tey had nothing to say about the bullets or the fall. Just not wanting to live his life as a cripple, which Jake knew full well human medical technology could fix. This is exactly the sort of thing that could have been offered, but the Na'vi with their perfect lives don't have any need for.

I was under the assumption that Jake's crippleness would be healed back on Earth, when he finished his term and shipped home.

That would be weird if, had Jake not offed him, Tsu'tey would've just gotten up and walked the bullets and the fuckoff fall off, and would be none the worse except for the amputated tendril.

See, you're coming around after all.

They were still mass murderous Home Tree-firebombing shits.

Continuiously? There was nothing about that in the brochure.

So the RDA will just stop wrist-cutting the planet one day and fly off and let nature take its course and heal again?

And god, we're into another tangent with you blowing up some woo-woo figurative statement by some character out of proportion.

The RDA were trying to give the Na'vi a way out of the conflict. The Na'vi weren't trying to give anyone a way out of the conflict. Point RDA.

The way out which involved "get the fuck out of your homes, we're demolishing it". I don't blame the Na'vi for not accepting that. The RDA not taking no for an answer, and going off to firebomb the Home Tree, is a morally bankrupt act of murder and destruction and none of your shitty tangents on how oooh the Na'vi liked Jake better, the horror, or your exaggerations of figurative statements changes this.

You aren't particularly familiar with tribal warfare, are you? They're living in peace with the land. They explicitly aren't living in peace with eachother. That's what having warriors is for.

We're not particularly familiar with how the hell their tribal warfare looks like. Apparently their conflicts can be resolved by plugging into the largest pterodactyl in the sky. And they pray to the spirits whenever they harpoon stray dogs. Their weird ass mindsets involving world spirit worship, and the fact that they are actually evolved tissues and organs of the Pandoran mega-organism (and they know this for a fact via their religion), might make the way they carry out conflicts totally different from how our equivalents do it.

None that was shown in the film, apparently.

Then why the hell should people kill and be killed to mine some overpriced rock? You tried to justify human actions by the whole survival argument, now that's gone.

The Na'vi were, instead, killing civilian miners just to protect some ferns. But those civilians were just dirty, misserable humans, so any crimes comitted against them are perfectly excusable, apparently.

Is this in the Children's Massacre Edition?

Simply by virtue of the entire planet of Pandora being a product of human imagination, I think it's quite unfair of you to characterize this as something beyond human understanding.

In the context of that universe where Pandora is a brand new world with things strange and new to man, and not some made-up thing shown in movie theaters.

Of course, since all works of fiction are made up by human minds, pretty much all fictitious attempts at making great incomprehensible things are still comprehension because, well, they originated from someone's imagination. Lovecraft, Star Trek, etc.

Yes, they might. But when they do that, they make that choice for all generations that will come after them. They make that choice for their children and their children's children who have no choice in the matter whatsoever.

I think those later generations actually deserve to be given a choice by anyone who comes along and sees the degenerate civilization that's resulted.

And if they're satisfied with their way of life, because their environment is so radically different from Earth leading to them developing a mindset way different from us, and so they decide to continue on living as they had before?

It's another interesting thing. They're technically just another part of Pandora, tissues and organs of it. Which makes them even more differenter.

This is actually wrong. If we're assigning moral value to non-human superbeings made of lesser organisms as component parts, then the RDA itself is also a life form worth considering. While the humans might not have needed the unobtainium (though assuming they don't is every bit as much of an assumption as assuming they do), the RDA did. This corporation won't survive without the wealth generated from the unobtainium mining, so the RDA is precisely the mosquito.

Though another question is worth considering, does Eywa need unobtainium for anything? Is it just a coincidence that this room temperature superconductor happens to exist in this biowank planet, or does it serve some role in all this?

Corporations aren't organisms, man. And Pandora's parts do have actual organic tissues interconnecting them and all that. A boardroom meeting and organizational flow chart is no way equivalent to a world-spanning neural network interface.

As for unobtanium, who knows. I'd like to think that it does have something to do with the Pandoran creaturoid. Those rocks apparently emit enough wonky energy fields to lift mountains off the ground and fuck up with sensors. Like how Eywa is an actual factual gaia world spirit, unobtanium could be an actual factual "real" version of all those new age energy crystals hippies go on about - and gives strange energy to the sentient ecosystem.

Study would imply a degree if intelectual and moral curiosity that is somewhat lacking in your smug self-assurance that you know all that needs to be known before the first word is said.

The only ones who are assured that they know all that needs to be known before the first word is said are those who make instant conclusions when they see something strange and unique and different, going "oh it's not good because it's not industrialized!" when they don't even get the context of that thing that might exist outside of their preconceptions.

You're the ones lumping preconceptions and judgments for every blown up and exaggerated piece of figurative dialogue on part of the Na'vi or otherwise making a big deal about inconsequential poops, while making lame ass excuses of the Home Tree firebombing or trying to justify it or treating it like some small thing.

You go on about the Na'vi's "value judgments" because they befriend this guy or what guy, while you never ask the same damn question on "value judgments" on the RDA who kill these people and bomb those places just for some rock.

[Darth Tedious]

Yet another example where the aliens don't talk to the humans. What a surprise.

False comparison.
The Na'vi took the time and effort to learn English.
The monkeys never tried to learn Martian.

Which version of War of the Worlds were you watching?

Fun Fact: War of the Worlds was a book.

The shiteful Spielberg film version was the only version in any medium to have any mention whatsoever of Martian language.

[hongi]

Uh ok. Not seeing a relation other than some tenuous hand-waving about education.

The point is that when someone says no, you accept it. They have a right to reject you.

If you still aren't getting it, hongi is applying your attitude towards the Na'vi to a situation more relatable to see how horrifying that attitude is.

Maybe if you're dedicated to finding the worst possible interpretation for anything you might not like on the face of things.

While we're at it, let's relate your take on the right course of action here to leaving homeless kids out on the street to fend for themselves, since its just as disingenuous.

EDIT: Actually, less disingenuous, since it doesn't involve actively harming them.

I chose the worst possible interpretation because your justification applies equally to that. A person who won't take no for an answer is dangerous and arrogant.

I don't care how great the Europeans were technologically, if the Indians had said no (as I'm sure they did), the Europeans shouldn't have conquered the Americas.

[madd0ct0r]

Corporations aren't organisms, man. And Pandora's parts do have actual organic tissues interconnecting them and all that. A boardroom meeting and organizational flow chart is no way equivalent to a world-spanning neural network interface.

Much as Cesario's flailings are silly, you might be able to make a case for the RDA operating as a hive mind.

Of course, it's not self aware, capable of feeling pain nor reasonably benevolent, so as Eywa i wouldn't worry more about swatting it then swatting a mosquito.

It's a much more interesting line of argument then 'wahh the Naavi are stuck up pricks' though.

[hongi]

Neither you nor I want to go over my high school experience. Suffice it to say, I'm perfectly fine with the majority of my graduating class being machine gunned to death or worse.

I am not at all surprised.

Of course you're not. It makes me lesser in your eyes that people you've never known did me harm that I wasn't able to stop. I must be morally degenerate because I was weak. That's the morality of people like you. It's ammusing that you presume to stand in judgement over me, but that's your nature.

I don't find you despicable because you were bullied. I find you despicable because you won't give a damn at the thought of your entire class being murdered. It's all about you, the victim isn't it? The world revolves around you.

Why not go the extra step and put yourself behind the gun, pulling the trigger and executing them? Are you man enough? Or are you that victim who can't imagine having the strength or capability to fight back even in his sick revenge fantasy.

[Cesario]

So does that make it okay to kill me? After all, I can't be helped, so I should be liquified and turned into a fish or something and not allowed to die. Because that's better, right?

Nope, it's not okay. Like how it wasn't okay for a giant androgynous albino mutaloid chick to liquefy everyone at the end of Evangelion.

Never got into that show. I've heard the ending was less than satisfying.

So why not have him remain in charge, callously throwing away the lives of the Na'vi and his own mercs alike? If he's the real villain instead of Quaratch, why make Quaratch go insane and take over to begin with?

Maybe Selfridge and Quarritch had different degrees of psychosis and Selfridge was an apathetic fuck who'd go "ho hum, I tried, ok authorize firebombing" whereas Quarritch was an entire different league of psycho who won't mind being set on fire while jumping off exploding aerocraft in his kill-armor. The former is still a slimeball shitstain morally bankrupt asshole who authorized an act of mass death and destruction. The latter, well, gets into mecha knife fights with xeno-panthers and is a complete violence for pleasure seeking psychopath. No one's denied this.

So why not leave Quaratch as Selfridge's dragon?

You seem to have missed the bio-wank brain upload thing that was rather important to the scenes of Grace and Jake's deaths. One of them was worthy to be reborn free of the impurity of being a worthless dirty stinking human. The other was found wanting by the all-knowing earth mother.

The other one died on the operating table because she was shot full of holes and spent the previous few hours bleeding to death? That's like saying why did the technowank defibrillator hospital-consciousness choose to resuscitate a physically intact adult person, but "chose" to let a stinky filthy old man riddled with bullets to die on the OR table.

Only works if we ignore Eywa as all knowing spirit god. I can do that.

In the Alien movies, the Xenomorphs weren't moral agents. Nothing indicated they could be anything more than animals, so that's how the audience treated them. The Xenomorphs couldn't be evil. The Na'vi were too human. They were moral agents, and thus were capable of being judged evil themselves.

Compare the actions, apparent oversight, and degrees of callous behavior towards sapient beings, and I think you'll find (or rather you would if you could actually compare degrees of evil) that the corporations in the Alien franchise were far worse than those in Avatar.

I was getting at the whole message of corporate greed = evil. Yes, Weyland Yutani was totally insidious on a different degree, making weird ass conspiracy shits involving getting people impregnated by aliens and convoluting it up with weird ass schemes. Whereas the RDA's brand of evil is simple, and no different from a modern day oil company shooting up some black people who happen to live in the way of their oil pipelines, or Americans trying to tear-trail some natives.

It's simple until you look at the odd actions of the RDA that can really only be explained by them not wanting to kill the natives.

Guess they should have been doing more with the last three months than arrogantly pushing their lifestyle on Jake. Maybe learn something from him during that time. They wasted time just as much as idiot Jake did.

Horrible horrible mistake on their part. Boo-hoo.

Yeah, I know. I don't have any sympathy for them either.

And I'm the one who's too litteralminded.

You went on about how they were arrogant this, didn't want to talk that, never gave a shit about humans this. Turned out, prior to having their children massacred, they were sending their kids to Grace's school to learn English and were on speaking terms with the humans. What exactly they talked about, who knows. Their relations didn't break down because of whatever arrogance you love bringing up, but because their children got massacred.

So why does no one know enough about the Na'vi to make an offer before Jake's infiltration mission?

Or it might've been having most of the bones in my face shattered and requiring reconstructive surgery. One or the other.

Well, that's incredibly shitty and I am sorry for that, man.

Like I said, neither you nor I want to get into that.

And?

And so your whole tangent on the Na'vi being oh-so-horrible for Jaking around is pretty insignificant.

I just don't know what point you were trying to make here.

and that it turns out your unobtanium = save the earth shtick was wrong.

Or rather, a result of out of film information aquired later.

Which was wrong.

Was it? I'll admit it wasn't in the film, but all the EU material I've seen supports this theory:

The Earth is now a decaying world, covered in a haze of greenhouse gasses. Overpopulation, nuclear warfare, pollution, enviromental terrorists, significant deforestation, world hunger, ozone depletion, resources depletion, water shortages, and overhunting of what is left of Earth's very few still living animal species are the main things that are slowly consuming what is left of the once beautiful planet. Anyone left out in the open or in the cities, or anyone who is lucky enough to still have any resources left, must wear oxygen-replenishing cleaners, called exopacks, over their faces just to survive one Earth day.

http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Earth

Without unobtanium, interstellar commerce on this scale would not be possible. Unobtanium is not only the key to Earth’s energy needs in the 22nd century, but it is the enabler of interstellar travel and the establishment of a truly spacefaring civilization.

http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Unobtanium

Like I said, it wasn't in the film. Doesn't mean I made it up on my own. Just misremembered where I heard it.

Apparently the one who needs to get lectured by the part time uni student that he should be paying attention because this is important as he mocks Mr. Miyagi behind his back.

And then later on ends up loving the whole thing and becoming crazy for it to the point of digging it even more than the part time uni student. Oh my god character change. Gasp.

Remind me again which one died for the Na'vi in this film.

So Grace was being shitty when she "got most of the kids out" before getting shot herself?

I meant, the children being shot was shitty. And getting shot at by psycho mercs too. That was a shitty situation.

"All around" was where my objection came from. Especially when you're trying to downplay the good Grace did.

One of them saved their children's lives, the other was a charming and personable professional killer. Their choice reflects on the Na'vi's value judgements.

They changed their minds and ended up being OK with Grace again.

Contingent on Jake vouching for her.

That Jake was further gone and thinking himself as more of the Na'vi than human, while Grace was still thinking of herself as a human researcher studying alienoids, is why they accepted him.

Studying is a bit inappropriate a term what with her dying for them.

God, you want to talk about value judgments. What about the value judgments of people who bomb homes and kill people just to mine overpriced rocks? You looove going on about value judgments when the Na'vi befriend this guy or that girl, but not when the RDA murders these guys or bombs that place.

You spent a great deal of time being pissed at me for analyzing the RDA's value judgements. It seems disingenuous for you to now turn around and say I didn't analyze their moral judgements.

Yep, when a diplomatic solution isn't avalible, your one-sided desire to behave diplomatically doesn't just magically make diplomacy happen. Who knew?

And consenting to firebombing (when you can, you know, not authorize mass murder and destruction) still makes you a morally bankrupt shitstain. Woah!

Though in light of Quaratch's later rebellion, it's somewhat more questionable whether he could have just not authorized the Home Tree attack.

I just like to see people judged for who they really are, not for who idiots like to pretend they are.

You know that makes Selfridge actually worse.

Doesn't change the fact that I want him judged for who he really is.

For a while, I thought he had second thoughts about the firebombing. Turns out, as you pointed out, the only thing that made him lose it was the mercenary coup. He didn't care at all about the mass death and firebombing at all. He's an even greater self-absorbed shit.

Never denied that he was. I'm just objecting to the mischaracterization of him as being bloodthirsty. Genociding the natives was never his Plan A. And given how impossible the universe made peaceful coexistence, I think it's a miracle that a self-absorbed shit like him kept trying diplomacy for as long as he did.

How long does it take to build a bomber, gather military intelligence on a site, organize supply lines for a ground invasion, and carry out an attack against an entrenched enemy in terrain that prevents half your equipment from working? Compare that to dropping something heavy out of a bay from a great height. Especially when you recall that the RDA was resource-limited.

They didn't need to build a bomber. They just duct taped some mining charges. Military intelligence on the site was just some satellite stuffs. The ground invasion was dropped off by VTOL.

Maybe jerry rigging an orbital bomber would've been easier. Maybe Quarritch was so wrapped up in his whole Marine mindset that he never considered that. Maybe orbital bombardment is not as easy as you make it sound. Maybe the fuckload of flying island mountains made it harder for them to bomb it (this is why the shuttle flew under the flying mountains, rather than flying over them and chucking out its load from a higher altitude). *shrug*

Or maybe they weren't authorized to do orbital bombardments on an inhabited planet, and even as off the rails as Quaratch was, he wasn't going to go there.

Where did I claim he was a saint? That faint praise is a demonstration of something you've otherwise been incapable of grasping. That evil has degrees and shades, and is not an absolute.

He's still a shit. You're just haggling on the percentages of his shittiness, on whether he's a dried out turd, a diarrheatic glop of liquid shit, or a shit with undigested corn-things still inside it, and all that.

That's correct.

A shit is a shit is a shit.

And that's you missing the point again.

I actually thought that he felt some remorse. But as you pointed out, he didn't, and he only got shocked when Quarritch went crazy and took over. So thanks to that, he's become an even bigger shit than he was.

Glad to have been of help.

Isn't it interesting that the only thing they seem to have learned from the humans at that school is how to listen in on their communications and how to interrogate prisoners?

It's like, since Red Dawn never showed any of the actual factual high school lessons, I'll just assume the US schooling system teaches nothing but child soldiery and guerrilla warfare tactics, because the only thing we see Patrick Swayze to have learned is how to shoot Russians in the face.

Your acrobatics are amazing.

That's how you handled the "unobtainium is worthless space gold" situation, isn't it?

Who are the Na'vi? What do you know about their way of life? What do you know about their moral philosophy? How do they react to people who are different from them? What does it take for them to so much as establish a temporary military alliance with neighboring tribes?

I know the answer to the last question. It takes a legendary act not seen in three generations in the face of an enemy capable of bringing devistation unimagined in the last ten thousand years of their history.

You are obsessed with making them into these horrible people by construing and misinterpreting everything in the worst light possible, while trivializing the RDA's firebombing of the Home Tree.

What's the alternate interpretation of the Na'vi society? If I'm misinterpreting things, what's the other interpretation?

So the Na'vi aren't morally bankrupt for doing this, just too stupid to recognize the lesson learned from the destruction of Home Tree. "Your weapons can't fight off the humans." If they could, Home Tree would still be standing.

They also used their weapons on the Soul Tree attack, and got their asses massacrated before divine intervention came. Spaniards come in with guns and iron, all the natives have are wooden clubs and sharpened rocks, okay they've got no chance, but they're still going to run screaming at the Spaniards to stick them in the face with spiked clubs just to defend their homes and lands.

Pity nothing needed defending after Home Tree got bombed, isn't it?

Where did you see him realizing anything of the sort in the sequence of events that did happen?

He didn't. He had an aghast look when he saw the Home Tree firebombed and he seemed to be in shock. I thought he had an "oh my god, what have I just done" thing going on. Of course, none of this was explicit, but I assumed he had second thoughts and hesitation before Quarritch went all fuckout psycho. Because unlike Quarritch, Selfridge was a shmuck and not insane.

Turns out he didn't have any of these, and turns out he thought nothing of the firebombing and the only thing that ruffled his feathers was Quarritch's going absolutely insane.

I don't recall the aghast look. But I'll take your word that it was there.

But back to the situation at hand, Tsu'tey had nothing to say about the bullets or the fall. Just not wanting to live his life as a cripple, which Jake knew full well human medical technology could fix. This is exactly the sort of thing that could have been offered, but the Na'vi with their perfect lives don't have any need for.

I was under the assumption that Jake's crippleness would be healed back on Earth, when he finished his term and shipped home.

It was going to be back on Earth. If the RDA could get some doctors and medical equipment out there, I think their profit margins could have handled that a lot better than it could handle a war. Plus think of the awesome PR.

That would be weird if, had Jake not offed him, Tsu'tey would've just gotten up and walked the bullets and the fuckoff fall off, and would be none the worse except for the amputated tendril.

But that's kind of what was implied by that exchange. The Na'vi are impossibly hard to kill. It's a wonder any of the "children" actually died in the machinegunning incident.

See, you're coming around after all.

They were still mass murderous Home Tree-firebombing shits.

Doesn't really change this whole "degrees of evil" concept. The Na'vi aren't angels, the RDA aren't demons, and we can assign right and wrong to both sides. Whatever the outcome, both sides are too human for such simplistic labels to do justice to who and what these people are and what situations they were faced with.

Continuiously? There was nothing about that in the brochure.

So the RDA will just stop wrist-cutting the planet one day and fly off and let nature take its course and heal again?

Kinda. You think there's an infinite ammount of unobtainium on the planet? You think it's litterally impossible to reproduce artificially? It's inevidable that the RDA will eventually just fuck off on their own if the human race survives that long. Pandora's biosphere is resiliant enough that I have no doubt it'll survive anything short of a deliberate effort to burn it off.

And god, we're into another tangent with you blowing up some woo-woo figurative statement by some character out of proportion.

Aren't you enjoying that?

The RDA were trying to give the Na'vi a way out of the conflict. The Na'vi weren't trying to give anyone a way out of the conflict. Point RDA.

The way out which involved "get the fuck out of your homes, we're demolishing it". I don't blame the Na'vi for not accepting that. The RDA not taking no for an answer, and going off to firebomb the Home Tree, is a morally bankrupt act of murder and destruction and none of your shitty tangents on how oooh the Na'vi liked Jake better, the horror, or your exaggerations of figurative statements changes this.

Except, again, the Na'vi weren't given the offer. Jake denied them the right to make that choice. And Selfridge was looking for a carrot. Pity he trusted an important mission like that to Jake, but Eywa choose him. If Eywa is as wise as all that, she clearly intended the RDA to bomb hometree, otherwise she'd have chosen someone competent to bridge the cultural divide.

You aren't particularly familiar with tribal warfare, are you? They're living in peace with the land. They explicitly aren't living in peace with eachother. That's what having warriors is for.

We're not particularly familiar with how the hell their tribal warfare looks like. Apparently their conflicts can be resolved by plugging into the largest pterodactyl in the sky. And they pray to the spirits whenever they harpoon stray dogs. Their weird ass mindsets involving world spirit worship, and the fact that they are actually evolved tissues and organs of the Pandoran mega-organism (and they know this for a fact via their religion), might make the way they carry out conflicts totally different from how our equivalents do it.

Except we see what they do to humans in the film. These are practiced behaviors that they didn't learn overnight from Jake.

None that was shown in the film, apparently.

Then why the hell should people kill and be killed to mine some overpriced rock? You tried to justify human actions by the whole survival argument, now that's gone.

And that changes the equation, yes. I thought this was obvious enough to not need to be said.

The Na'vi were, instead, killing civilian miners just to protect some ferns. But those civilians were just dirty, misserable humans, so any crimes comitted against them are perfectly excusable, apparently.

Is this in the Children's Massacre Edition?

I'm afraid I don't understand the question.

Simply by virtue of the entire planet of Pandora being a product of human imagination, I think it's quite unfair of you to characterize this as something beyond human understanding.

In the context of that universe where Pandora is a brand new world with things strange and new to man, and not some made-up thing shown in movie theaters.

Of course, since all works of fiction are made up by human minds, pretty much all fictitious attempts at making great incomprehensible things are still comprehension because, well, they originated from someone's imagination. Lovecraft, Star Trek, etc.

Was it Lovecraft who suggested that the sanity-breaking elements of his cosmic horrors were soely a result of them being unfamiliar, and that if encountered everyday would be simply treated as normal? I've always disliked the idea that people would respond so baddly to something so trivial as a new bit of information about the universe. Mind viruses, I can accept, but people merely being that fragile in their sensibilities? I could never get behind that.

Yes, they might. But when they do that, they make that choice for all generations that will come after them. They make that choice for their children and their children's children who have no choice in the matter whatsoever.

I think those later generations actually deserve to be given a choice by anyone who comes along and sees the degenerate civilization that's resulted.

And if they're satisfied with their way of life, because their environment is so radically different from Earth leading to them developing a mindset way different from us, and so they decide to continue on living as they had before?

Then they were given that choice, and we offer it to their children when the time comes. Like how the Amish work, but imposed from the outside.

It's another interesting thing. They're technically just another part of Pandora, tissues and organs of it. Which makes them even more differenter.

Not as much as you might think. See the below.

This is actually wrong. If we're assigning moral value to non-human superbeings made of lesser organisms as component parts, then the RDA itself is also a life form worth considering. While the humans might not have needed the unobtainium (though assuming they don't is every bit as much of an assumption as assuming they do), the RDA did. This corporation won't survive without the wealth generated from the unobtainium mining, so the RDA is precisely the mosquito.

Though another question is worth considering, does Eywa need unobtainium for anything? Is it just a coincidence that this room temperature superconductor happens to exist in this biowank planet, or does it serve some role in all this?

Corporations aren't organisms, man. And Pandora's parts do have actual organic tissues interconnecting them and all that.

Oh, so only "natural" supercreatures count, and artificially created superbeings aren't worthy of consideration? Why should anyone give a shit about Eywa if we shouldn't give a shit about the RDA? It's the same principle.

A boardroom meeting and organizational flow chart is no way equivalent to a world-spanning neural network interface.

Sure it is. It's just slower and less efficient.

As for unobtanium, who knows. I'd like to think that it does have something to do with the Pandoran creaturoid. Those rocks apparently emit enough wonky energy fields to lift mountains off the ground and fuck up with sensors. Like how Eywa is an actual factual gaia world spirit, unobtanium could be an actual factual "real" version of all those new age energy crystals hippies go on about - and gives strange energy to the sentient ecosystem.

I like to think of the mineral as serving a function in the processing of the planet-brain, without which Eywa would be less intelligent and less interconnected. Thus giving us a reason it's inherently bad to mine here, rather than the shitty reasoning we get in the film itself.

Study would imply a degree if intelectual and moral curiosity that is somewhat lacking in your smug self-assurance that you know all that needs to be known before the first word is said.

The only ones who are assured that they know all that needs to be known before the first word is said are those who make instant conclusions when they see something strange and unique and different, going "oh it's not good because it's not industrialized!" when they don't even get the context of that thing that might exist outside of their preconceptions.

Why are you bringing them into this?

You're the ones lumping preconceptions and judgments for every blown up and exaggerated piece of figurative dialogue on part of the Na'vi or otherwise making a big deal about inconsequential poops, while making lame ass excuses of the Home Tree firebombing or trying to justify it or treating it like some small thing.

So the only way is to accept everything at face value and burry your head in the sand when anyone attempts to dig deeper and get at less obvious truths. And this is the way to enlightenment, eh?

You go on about the Na'vi's "value judgments" because they befriend this guy or what guy, while you never ask the same damn question on "value judgments" on the RDA who kill these people and bomb those places just for some rock.

You seem to have missed all that "why are the RDA trying to negotiate with these people in the first place when nuking them from orbit is both cheaper and safer?" musing.

False comparison.
The Na'vi took the time and effort to learn English.
The monkeys never tried to learn Martian.

Which version of War of the Worlds were you watching?

Fun Fact: War of the Worlds was a book.

The shiteful Spielberg film version was the only version in any medium to have any mention whatsoever of Martian language.

The book then. Excelent. Because we see in the book that the Martians made no effort to teach anyone Martian at any point. The humans in Avatar went to fairly ludicous lengths to teach English to the Na'vi, and to learn the Na'vi's language in turn.

I am not at all surprised.

Of course you're not. It makes me lesser in your eyes that people you've never known did me harm that I wasn't able to stop. I must be morally degenerate because I was weak. That's the morality of people like you. It's ammusing that you presume to stand in judgement over me, but that's your nature.

I don't find you despicable because you were bullied.

Of course you do. Your kind despise what they think of as weakness. Oh sure, you love to pretend otherwise because you know that other people will judge you for your despicable failure of a moral philosophy, but that's what it's all about for you. The abusers are heroes for hurting someone too despicably weak to protect himself anyway.

I find you despicable because you won't give a damn at the thought of your entire class being murdered.

How many tears would you shed for Hitler, precisely? Oh wait, he's a great hero to your kind, who went and killed all those worthless Jews and Gays who were too despicably weak to defend themselves.

Well in my moral philosophy you lose your right to be treated with default human dignity and respect after a certain tipping point of immoral actions. For you, you lose your right to be treated with human dignity if you're not man enough.

It's all about you, the victim isn't it? The world revolves around you.

Yep, I'm such a monster for not thinking about how the poor, put upon bullies and abusers feel about me not liking them. What a horrible person I must be. Guess I'll go curl up in a corner and cry about how much it hurts their feelings that I don't think good things about them.

All you want to do is take someone who's been hurt, and find a way to hurt them further. Got news for you, I'm beyond your pathetic attempts.

Why not go the extra step and put yourself behind the gun, pulling the trigger and executing them?

Only one I've heard anything about since leaving was about one who died of a drug overdose. I don't keep very good track of them. You will note that they don't have a conveniently bombed treehouse. Oh wait, like all the other idiots responding to me in this thread, you haven't actually read my posts, have you?

Are you man enough? Or are you that victim who can't imagine having the strength or capability to fight back even in his sick revenge fantasy.

Yep, that's exactly the sort of man I knew you were. The sort who judges someone for being weak. For not being man enough. And again you laughably presume to sit in judgement over your moral superior.

[hongi]

Didn't you say you'd read the entire thread? I'm not surprised that you've lied about that. Seems you didn't even read the parts you quoted.

So you're not responding to my points. All it would take is a simple 'I'm sorry, I'm wrong'. It's the bloody internet, you're not going to lose any man-points if you admit you were wrong. You said that the scientists explained what the purpose of their studies were, that is to repair Earth's biosphere. Your words, not mine. They didn't. Is it such a hard thing to admit that you were wrong?

I'm not rewatching a shitty movie to appease a morally bankrupt creaton like yourself. Consider yourself blessed that I deigned to respond to your pathetic drivel at all.

Indeed. The Navi were shooting at RDA vehicles, we saw vehicles returning with their chassis peppered with arrows. They also killed some humans as Quartich implied. So the Navi were destroying RDA property and killing people for a very long time with no consequences.

Upto the point RDA asked the Navi to move from their tree there was not a single thing we saw that the RDA did wrong.

Except invade and destroy their territory.

Again, that was after the home tree incident. Pay attention.

This is what happens when you don't watch the movie. Jake and Neytiri were sleeping at the Tree of Voices after some inter-species sex. Bulldozers come in and smash their grove of sacred trees up. These were places where the Na'vi could communicate with their dead. If this doesn't count as invading and destroying Na'vi territory, nothing does. This took place before the RDA destroyed Home Tree.

[Cesario]

Didn't you say you'd read the entire thread? I'm not surprised that you've lied about that. Seems you didn't even read the parts you quoted.

So you're not responding to my points. All it would take is a simple 'I'm sorry, I'm wrong'. It's the bloody internet, you're not going to lose any man-points if you admit you were wrong. You said that the scientists explained what the purpose of their studies were, that is to repair Earth's biosphere. Your words, not mine. They didn't. Is it such a hard thing to admit that you were wrong?

Why should I apologise? Was there some grand wrong that happened to you because I made a mistake about where I learned it?

I'm not rewatching a shitty movie to appease a morally bankrupt creaton like yourself. Consider yourself blessed that I deigned to respond to your pathetic drivel at all.

Except invade and destroy their territory.

Again, that was after the home tree incident. Pay attention.

This is what happens when you don't watch the movie and make stuff up. Jake and Neytiri were sleeping at the Tree of Voices after some inter-species sex. Bulldozers come in and smash their grove of sacred trees up. These were places where the Na'vi could communicate with their dead. If this doesn't count as invading and destroying Na'vi territory, nothing does. This took place before the RDA destroyed Home Tree.

Because those neurotoxin dipped arrows were clearly only used after the sacred grove got bulldozed, dispite Quaratch's briefing coming before that. What a marvel you are, sir, to have realized that obvious truth.