Why are there so many imperial apologists?

[Xenophon13]

The answer is quite simple.

The Empire is cool.

They fly badass ships, crush/electrocute people with the force, and have the firepower to destroy planets. It's understandable for people to want them to be good.

[jollyreaper]

The answer is quite simple.

The Empire is cool.

They fly badass ships, crush/electrocute people with the force, and have the firepower to destroy planets. It's understandable for people to want them to be good.

I don't see it so much as good but justifiable. "Good" would imply fluffy bunnies and best interests at heart. Who knows, there's probably people out there who feel that way. I think a proper imperial apology follows the whole "making bastardry a virtue" line of thought. Michael Douglas from Wall Street.

The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated.

In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you.

I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Wall Street is really a great example of this. Stone and Douglas set out to make a fully realized villain here. Gordon Gecko was not meant to be a hero. He was meant to be persuasive, charismatic, and convincing. A speech like the one above, it's meant to make someone opposed to him doubt the validity of his own position. Could I be wrong about him? Could he have the right idea? You have to look at the outcome to fully appreciate who and what Gecko is. He's a parasite and a destroyer. This finally became clear by the end. The meant to create a character whose motivations could be understood as well as the clear evil of his actions.

Douglas was absolutely bewildered when stock brokers later came up to him gushing about being their greatest hero. They took inspiration from him! Gecko's downfall was seen as Greek tragedy, a great and powerful man destroyed by the Fates. He found it disgusting and troubling.

A proper Imperial apologist will tell you that ideas of good and evil are for children and that the real galaxy out there is far more complex and sophisticated. The actions of the Empire were a necessity. We had to destroy Alderaan in order to save it.

[Darth Hoth]

As a proud "Imperial Apologist", I have nevertheless found that in these quarters, it is not worthwhile to argue the cause of the Empire. I have, therefore, stopped doing so, at least for the foreseeable future.

However, a question was asked. Since I, more than most other posters here so far, actually do support the Empire as a superior system of galactic government (and not merely because "it's t3h k3wl" or "they have uni4ms"), I suppose I should answer. However, others can do so better than I (or at least, have had more success with their arguments in the past).

In essence, the majority of the pro-Imperial debaters in this thread, and particularly the page linked to, is representative of my position as well. If, for convenience, anyone would like the argument summed up briefly, Darth Wong does a good job of presenting it on said page:

( . . . ) Proving that the Empire is not a noble government is easy, so you keep triumphantly doing so, not acknowledging the fact that the New Republic, by essentially allowing anarchy to flourish, was worse.

Yes, in a vacuum it would be a false dilemma to choose between weak central government (and the inevitable outcome: local anarchy) and a strong tyrannical central government. Nevertheless, we are not operating in a vacuum, and in the Star Wars galaxy where we are asked to choose between the New Republic and the Empire, the New Republic produced worse results.

It's easy to say that utopia is better than tyranny. But how does a dictatorship compare to anarchy? Is it such an easy choice then?

[Darth Hoth]

You know, after thinking about it and seeing some more recent examples of fanboy retardation, I think it may come down to plain stupidity. There are some fanboys out there who just can't comprehend basic scenes and the blatant ethical messages being conveyed. That's why you'll occasionally see someone who honestly thinks that the Sith were sympathetic and did nothing wrong, or that the RDA was totally within their rights to rape and pillage Pandora. Some fanboys are just utter morons.

When you connect that to the fact that a lot of other people in the general population are morons who take up idiotic political positions and fail to understand basic ethics, it makes sense.

The Sith (the ones who are not Cartoon Evil, at least) do have that point in their favour that they view the Force scientifically, as a phenomenon to be investigated and developed for exploitation, rather than as a deity to be obeyed. That strikes me as a superior philosophy/theology to the anti-scientific mysticism and fatalism of the Jedi.

Overall, though, they are assuredly a destructive phenomenon, working to the detriment of galactic civilisation in general. I do not support them.

It's when I see someone seriously telling me that the Sith never did anything evil in the movies, or pushing some kind of fascist ideology and arguing that the blatant corporate villains from Avatar were the actual good guys, that I just roll my eyes. Fanboys are just as prone to retardation as everyone else, and often fail to understand the very movies that they obsess over.

At the risk of diverging off topic, I would support the RDA, if not for the fact that they are so astonishingly incompetent, even were both factions humans of this our Earth. Their general philosophy of techno-progressivist capitalism is much more attractive to me than the deliberate mysticism/primitivism of the Na'vi.

But foremost, of course, in the setting as is, they are human; as such, I would support them over any alien because they are my kin, and represent my planet, which needs Unobtanium.

(Yes, Starglider and everyone else who will bitch about this: In fictional space opera I am an unabashed human supremacist and champion of humans against any extra-terrestrial intelligence, and proud of it! )

But now that they are such utter idiots I cannot for the life of me drum up any sentiment for them. They unquestionably deserved to have their asses handed to them by the moronic ex-jarhead and his primitive friends.

[lordofchange13]

the answer is so simple there need no more posts: citizens in sci fi and real life are lack for a better word..... stupid, plus they just exited a war and whanted a strong leader.

[Stark]

Can citizens in scifi and real life find the 'shift' key?

[Ghost Rider]

the answer is so simple there need no more posts: citizens in sci fi and real life are lack for a better word..... stupid, plus they just exited a war and whanted a strong leader.

It helps to actually spell correctly when you want to call someone stupid. And that's not a reason to explain why real people are imperial apologists.

[Soontir C'boath]

Can citizens in scifi and real life find the 'shift' key?

Or realize this thread's been dead for a month and two days?

[Darth Yan]

The jedi have studied the force in the past. The sith didn't really strike me as studying it in either incarnations

[Havok]

The jedi have studied the force in the past. The sith didn't really strike me as studying it in either incarnations

That is stupid. Of course they studied it.

[Darth Yan]

my point was that hoth was too dissmissive of the jedi. The jedi clearly studied it as well.

[Darth Hoth]

To what extent? The vast majority of Jedi just seem to go by the "Will of the Force"/prophecy stuff we saw demonstrated in the films. They strike me as religious dogmatists, not scientifically inclined people actually interested in subjecting the "universal field of force" to rational inquiry. Palpatine and some Sith do that much.

Even using only the films, one can contrast a Sith attitude towards death (use artifice to prevent it) and a Jedi one (it's the will of the Force, let go of your attachment and let your loved ones die). And even the "Sith alchemy" witch brew-cooking Sith from the KJA comics are arguably more scientific than the Jedi, in that they use the Force to alter the structure of matter.

Although going into more discussion on that might be inappropriate here due both to reasons of thread hijacking and thread resurrection, so starting a new thread might be better for that, if we are interested in such.

[Darth Yan]

Yes except death is a natural part of life. Palpy was only doing it to preserve his own selfish ass,


The Jedi did have that big freaking archive meaning that they obviously cared somewhat about research. The sith research it to further their ends.

[Darth Hoth]

Yes except death is a natural part of life. Palpy was only doing it to preserve his own selfish ass,

Real life analogy: Two speakers on the matter of childbirth.

Scientist: "Modern medicine has made it possible for women to bear their children without pain, or at least with much less such than has traditionally been the case. Since we can make such medical treatment, which to the best our knowledge is without harmful side effects, available to any woman who asks for it, there is no reason for us not to do so, thus decreasing unnecessary suffering."

Fundamentalist Christian: "God wills it and said in Genesis . . . Uh, I mean, the pain of childbirth is a natural part of life for women. We shouldn't let them take it away just for their own selfish ends."

The Jedi did have that big freaking archive meaning that they obviously cared somewhat about research. The sith research it to further their ends.

Research on what? Genealogy? Galactic astrography? The presence of an archive is not proof that the Jedi ever subjected the Force to rational scientific inquiry.

[Darth Yan]

The only way yoda could have turned luke from a novice into a powerful fighter in three months was if he knew a lot. Also, the jedi do have healing. The sith intentionally fuck with the laws of nature, not for the benefits fo others but for themselves.

[Havok]

Uh when is it ever stated or shown that the Jedi refuse science and medical treatment/uses as you are claiming Hoth.

And news flash, the reason they practice the whole 'let go of those you hold dear' thing is because not doing so leads DIRECTLY to the feelings that drive them to darkness and essentially, evil usage of the Force. It is not because of some willy nilly dogmatism.

[Darth Hoth]

The only way yoda could have turned luke from a novice into a powerful fighter in three months was if he knew a lot. Also, the jedi do have healing. The sith intentionally fuck with the laws of nature, not for the benefits fo others but for themselves.

"Know a lot" is not the same thing as "scientifically studying something" at all.

Take an otherwise uneducated gun nut. He knows, by experience, the relative recoil of a number of different kinds of weapons and ammunition, insofar that he can tell you whether one weapon has more "punch" than another. He probably also can tell you that there is an overall correlation between the factors of muzzle velocity and projectile calibre on the one hand, and recoil on the other. But does this mean that he has calculated the momentum and kinetic energy of the guns or bullets, or is even interested in, much less capable of, doing so? No.

(If the example offends you, take whoever else "knows a lot" on a particular field by experience while having flunked the high school science subjects. I by no means want to demean or single out gun nuts, here, it was merely the first kind of real-life analogue that came into my mind.)

And to be frank, what the fuck is this about "benefit for others or yourself"? How does your motivation in any way affect whether your methodology is scientific or not?

Uh when is it ever stated or shown that the Jedi refuse science and medical treatment/uses as you are claiming Hoth.

Rewatch Episode III. Palpatine's advice to Anakin concerns means of staving off death. Yoda's? "You must learn to let go" (or whatever; I am paraphrasing from memory, not quoting from the script). I will add that prophecy-toting is also not a behaviour typical of the scientifically inclined.

And really, I would like some positive proof that the Jedi do study the Force scientifically from those who claim that they do. I cannot prove a negative, after all.

[Srelex]

Except that precognition is an established Force-user ability. So the Jedi aren't that unjustified in taking a prophecy seriously.

[Patroklos]

All this thread appears to have accomplished is to bring out the far more common NR apologists.

[Vympel]

And really, I would like some positive proof that the Jedi do study the Force scientifically from those who claim that they do. I cannot prove a negative, after all.

ANH novelization. Obi-Wan refers to Jedi scientists studying the Force. Best I can do.

[Darth Yan]

we don't downplay the nr's flaws; we attack people who downplay the empire's flaws

[Abacus]

The same reason why some people like the German Army from WWII; they dressed better than the opposition.

[Vympel]

Necro and one liner. Bad!