IDEA! Avatar 2: Ava-Tarrer

[Shroom Man 777]

A whole bunch of stuff, the thing that's relevant to this conversation is that the reason for the Ometicaya issuing a kill-on-sight order for humans is that the humans machine gunned the school with their children in it.

I see.

The Na'vi didn't shut down that school. It was the RDA that just shot it.



YEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

[Cesario]

I do find this "back to nature" idealizing repulsive, because it fundamentally ignores the fact that for us mere humans who aren't blue space elves, nature wants to kill us. Whatever ennobling elements there are in this "simple life" pale in my mind, when compared to the suffering and death that will be visited on actual living breathing humans for these supposed spiritual benefits to the handful of survivors. In my mind it's just like zombie apocolipse fantasy. Can be amusing and fun to pretend, but anyone who seriously thinks that's a good life is going to find no common ground with me.

I find it amusing that you can say this, because that's exactly what my and Shroom's proposition for Avatar 2 mocks.

You have in your mind this idea that industrialized life is better,

Actually, the idea in my mind is that life is better than death, and that the lives of the individual people who would die in the transition to a nativist hunter-gatherer culture outweigh the supposed spiritual benefits for the handful of survivors.

and therefore the humans can lookd down with disdain on the primitive savages who don't know any better, and that's exactly the attitude the Pandoramakers would have towards us if Avatar 2 was made how the OP described it: they know better. Any human who doesn't like it can fuck off and die. Earth will become a nature-worshipping paradise, humans WILL be mutated into blue space elves, because that's what our superiors decided was best.

Where did they give humans the oportunity to die? The build a huge cycle of technological reincarnation that causes their consiousnesses to be endlessly recycled until they're suitably brainwashed into happy little Na'vi. The sweet release of death is something your scenario denies humans.

It's seriously hilarious that you don't see this

Simon tried explaining to you why you can acknowledge industry and technology is good for humanity while also not imposing your only just and proper way of life on others because they think differently.

Where did I say the Na'vi should have started industrializing and acting western? I said shutting down diplomacy was a dick move.

Part of my dislike of the Na'vi does come with how contrived their perfect little "nature" society is, when it's clear someone put a lot of effort into designing an entire ecosystem for them to live their perfect lives in. Especially when they act judgemental towards us for not embracing the natural world that tried to kill us over and over again.

So what if they're judgemental? It's their world. If you neighbor is a hippie who spends his time listening to Native American music and protesting development projects, are you also going to say he's a prick who deserved to get his skull bashed in by strikebreakers?

People's jobs are at stake, after all!

I tend not to spend much time morning the deaths of people I consider pricks. Waste of my admittedly finite ability to give a fuck. As to whether he deserved it, that depends. Did he start mudering the people involved in the development without telling them why their specific development project was something he objected to?

If the humans in this universe could create arbitrary amounts of electrical power, why do they need room temperature superconductors at all? They could tollerate any ammount of energy loss from the grid because they would have an infinite amount to pump into the grid. The humans in this universe obviously don't have infinite resources, and we see that they've actually got so few that they can barely feed their population. There are repeated references to malnutrition among most of the earth population, and despirate attempts to keep the machines working to provide even the meger sustainance that they are currently managing. Their options at this point look to be "get more resources" or "live within our means". Unfortunately "live within our means" in this situation means "let billions of people starve to death so our population gets down to a more manageable number". And even that might not solve the problem if the lost labor force means they still can't produce enough to feed the people who are left after they nobly starved to death so the blue space elves wouldn't be inconveninced.

The Na'vi don't talk to humans, remember? That was one of my major complaints about their supposed moral superiority. They aren't listening no matter what is being said. The people who actively give their lives to save their sorry asses are the same ones they kicked out prior to the start of the movie. They don't listen to Jake when he says "those guys are going to blow up your tree, you should get out of it before it's too late", so why would we expect them to listen to a complicated explaination about a resource and population problem? Heck, attempting to explain it seems to have made human Na'vi relations even worse. Witness "they killed their mother" being repeated a few times.

(bolding mine)

Seriously, dude. Did you watch Avatar, or some other movie?

I think we should both be asking one another if we watched the same movie.

Like I said, it's a fundamental moral disagreement. You don't think there's ever a justification for violating the property rights of a legitimate owner. I think there are situations where that is indeed justified.

Perhaps there is, but you still haven't shown this was the case here.

Mostly because there's no point demonstrating that was the case here if you don't accept the principle to begin with. No point wasting my time proving something you find trivial and irrelevent, wouldn't you agree?

Also, "heavily armed military guys were scared of Quarritch and therefore are blameless". You sure are lucky that you didn't have to defend yourself at Nuremberg, man

Have you considered the options the soldiers at Nuremberg had that the ones on Pandora don't? Desertion, for example is somewhat complicated when you're stranded on a death world and your insane commander has the keys to your only ride home.

First of all, learn to quote properly.

I actually preffer using this quote method. I stopped doing it on this board because I got complaints. I'll happily resume it at your request.

As I understood it, the point of bombing hometree was twofold. One, because richer sources mean you don't have to use as environmentally destructive of mining methods, and two because the Na'vi don't quite grasp that we litterally could wipe them out without effort, and until they realize the technological disparity they're up against, they're going to keep trying to kill our miners until the folks back home run out of patients with people sent home in body bags by the blue space elves. And you know what? If mighty whitie hadn't intervened and rallied the Na'vi, the movie makes it quite clear that the message would have gotten across.

Where the hell do you get this idea that Selfridge wanted to tear down the tree because it would be more environmentally conscious?

Because he spent so much time harping on PR when every one of commander psycho's plans was presented.

Please try to separate out what points I'm actually defending in a given block. I'm defending the chemical weapons because they're being used to minimize Na'vi casualties in light of the firebombing that is coming, not in and of themselves.

No. Just...no. They were a token attempt to make the attack look like it was humane. Quarritch fired the gas, then no more than thirty seconds later firebombed the fuck out of the tree. If police fired tear gas into a crowd, and then fucking machinegunned it half a minute later, would you really be saying with a straight face they were being humane and reasonable?

Trouble is, you (or someone anyway) was treating the chemcial weapons like an agrivating factor, when they were obviously an attempt (appearances or otherwise) to force an evacuation that the Na'vi were too stuborn and stupid to institute on their own.

The tree was doubtlessly still full of civilians and their belongings when it was burned down.

The civilians matter. Their belongings don't. People versus property. That's what this entire disagreement between us boils down to. I care more about the lives of te 20 billion people back on earth, you care more about the property rights of the blue space elves.

It seems like an aweful coincidence that the major mineral deposit is right under the huge tree that the Na'vi make their homes in. Maybe this is again just God dicking with humanity trying to force them into being the bad guys, but otherwise it seems more likely that there's some causation there one way or the other between the tree and the mineral.

It's too bad Selfridge didn't care. He didn't even care what the scientists were finding out about the biology of the forest, despite the fact they doubtlessly published a fuckload of papers on it, and pretty much HAD to write reports to him since Selfridge was, you know, their boss.

Selfridge didn't give a fuck about the enviroment of Pandora, he didn't give a fuck about Na'Vi attitudes and culture or religion (he dismissed the destruction of an "incredibly holy site" as "you can't throw a stick around here without hitting some sacred fern!"). How the hell can you negotiate with people if you hold their entire culture, way of life and religion in disdain? When you think they're being unreasonable because they don't want to leave their ancestral homes in exchange for roads and English?

When the actual offer was "anything you want that our entire interstellar race can possibly provide for this unique resource that you aren't doing anything with anyway that could potentially save our civilization", and the response is "nothing I need from you white devil, so fuck off and die", yes, I call them unreasonable.

Also, is it that much of a stretch to think that Selfridge might have been right about "you can't throw a stick around here without hitting some sacred fern!"? There are a lot of cultures on earth that consider litterally everything sacred, and have a deeply religeous understanding of every interaction with those things.

Also, note that the Na'vi were shooting at humans before they sent bulldozers to their population center. The population center was considered the better choice because the Na'vi were reacting with violence whereever they put the mine. If there was a place they could have mined without facing Na'vi shooting at them, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't just mine there instead of building the fortifications and hiring military personel for security. There's only so much stupid I can believe, especially when it is directed oposite the path of greatest profit.

The extended edition of the movie mentions the RDA machinegunning kids at the school because a Na'Vi who vandalized a bulldozer ran there. It's really transparent you're just doing the utmost to paint the locals in the worst light possible by not mentioning this little incident.

Or it might just be that I saw the film when it originally came out, and wasn't fond enough of being preached at to want to see it again.

Do you think America would react any better if a bunch of cops machinegunned Arkansas kids in a school because a vandal ran inside?

No, I think this incident does change a great deal about the conflict and goes a long way towards explaining why the humans in this film are supposed to be the bad guys.

It also raises further questions. Why was this not in the original version? Why is all mention of this incident restricted in screentime enough that it could have been cut entirely that easily? This should have flavored every interaction between the Na'vi and the humans, and yet, all we get from the Na'vi in the entire rest of the film is how they think we're arrogant pricks for not being at one with nature. No other mention of the butchered children. Do the Na'vi just value their children so little? Did anyone on earth know about this? If they did, why did this not drastically change how things were being done on Pandora? If nothing changed on Pandora after this incident, why were they worried about PR, since this incident demonstrates they can slaughter children with no lasting PR consequences?

If you want to know why people tend to jump to the "why don't the RDA just dust off and nuke them from orbit?" thing is that the RDA are supposed to be the cardboard cutout, imperialist villains here. When your villain has an obvious doomsday device and doesn't use it, and instead keeps getting killed by trying conventional tactics, people start to question why the villain isn't just using his "I win" button. The Na'vi survive soely because the humans in this universe don't want to kill them, so the "humans are evil" thing gets a bit taxing.

The fact that you need to declare that the situation in Avatar is "totally different" means you think the answer to my scenario is that there is some justification for my hypothetical behavior, and you don't want to admit to that in the face of the paralells, so you just won't admit that there's justification, and then you'll move on to talk about how it's totally not the same thing anyway. Got you.

Uh, the fact is that you have to interpret Selfridge's comment on the monetary value of uobtanium to somehow mean that it is vital to the survival of the Earth in order to make your life-saving blood transfusion/the needs of humanity outweighs the needs of the blue people argument even remotely work?

Like PeZook told me, Not only "earth is dying" is a GREAT argument to make Grace shut up, it's also a great and natural way for the screenwriter to set up this fact. So if it was true, Selfridge would've just said so.

Ah yes, exactly what the film needed. An "as you know" moment where characters point out the painfully obvious to eachother. They both knew earth was dying. Their disagreement was in the form of what the best way to save it was.

As I understood it, the point of bombing hometree was twofold. One, because richer sources mean you don't have to use as environmentally destructive of mining methods, and two because the Na'vi don't quite grasp that we litterally could wipe them out without effort, and until they realize the technological disparity they're up against, they're going to keep trying to kill our miners until the folks back home run out of patients with people sent home in body bags by the blue space elves. And you know what? If mighty whitie hadn't intervened and rallied the Na'vi, the movie makes it quite clear that the message would have gotten across.

I know what the demented rationale of the RDA mercenaries were going for in their "shock and awe" campaign. To subdue the Na'vi by not only destroying their homes, but also by depopulating them and thus demoralizing them in a supreme act of violence.

I don't know about the extended edition, but in the movie I saw, people only started dying when the RDA started blowing the shit out of the Na'vi.

That kill all humans on sight order that came down from the Na'vi chief after the children were butchered must have had terrible enforcement if no one on the human side died until after the home tree incident. Also leads to a lot of questions about how all those humans were really dying on the supposed death world of Pandora.

You think they engineered the Avatar bodies because it was more convenient? After all the talk about how impossibly expensive and difficult they were to make, you still think anyone in their right mind would pick that option before the "put on a gas mask, you idiot" option? Like all the miners were actually using, I'll note. No, the Avatars were an attempt to be accomodating to the Na'vi's racism, which manefested in numerous ways throughout the film. That is how far out of their way humanity had already gone to get these people to sit down and talk to them.

And guess what, the humans still shat on that by their monomaniacal desire to destroy the Na'vi's homes and turn it into a pit mine.

If that's all the humans cared about, the Na'vi would have been dead. Period. End of story. The humans obviously had goals that included not genociding the blue people, since otherwise there was no reason not to nuke this death world from orbit, or invest their bioengineering dollars into a plague instead of the fancy diplmatic tool that was the Avatar project.

As to the trailer, you clearly missed the line where Jake remarks explicitly that the Na'vi are now letting Grace and her people come back to the school.

My mistake, I thought the trailer was the school. I guess Jake might've made them rethink their idea of the humans as two-faced conniving people who only came there to, you know, destroy their homes and force them from their land.

Which is odd, since Jake was there for precisely that reason, and it was Grace who they kicked out who was on their side from the start. The Na'vi only respected Jake because he was a warior. They respect professional killers, not teachers or scientists, apparently. Guess the humans' main mistake was not sending commander psycho out to talk to the Na'vi from the get-go. Surely the man who happily ignored being on fire and suffocation for the sake of continuing a battle would have impressed the Na'vi at least as much as Jake did.

Please try to separate out what points I'm actually defending in a given block. I'm defending the chemical weapons because they're being used to minimize Na'vi casualties in light of the firebombing that is coming, not in and of themselves.

The firebombing came within moments after the chemical weapons. That's like, defending the use of tear gas to disperse a crowd, before opening up on them with machineguns mere seconds later.

And in both cases, the chemical weapons aren't an agrivating factor. If they're a factor at all, they're a midigating one in light of the real problem: the firebombing and machinegunning respectively.

It seems like an aweful coincidence that the major mineral deposit is right under the huge tree that the Na'vi make their homes in. Maybe this is again just God dicking with humanity trying to force them into being the bad guys, but otherwise it seems more likely that there's some causation there one way or the other between the tree and the mineral.

Was there also a huge tree full of Na'vi in the mining area the RDA was already using? Were there giant treefulls of Na'vi in all the other deposits, some of which had so much unobtanium that they freaking flew off into the sky?

The Home Tree was convenient and economical. And that's what the RDA wanted.

Now if only the Na'vi were willing to tell the humans where they could mine that wouldn't lead to them openly killing the miners. We could have avoided all this. Instead, with every option that yields the unobtainium likely to result in the Na'vi taking offense and trying to murder the miners, they went with the option that they thought might scare the Na'vi into backing off. Intimidation isn't pretty, but it's got advantages over extermination.

Also, note that the Na'vi were shooting at humans before they sent bulldozers to their population center. The population center was considered the better choice because the Na'vi were reacting with violence whereever they put the mine. If there was a place they could have mined without facing Na'vi shooting at them, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't just mine there instead of building the fortifications and hiring military personel for security. There's only so much stupid I can believe, especially when it is directed oposite the path of greatest profit.

Maybe those other places where they could've set up shop without upsetting the natives were also further than the Home Tree and also not gifted with as large deposits.

Faced with the option of going for further away mines with smaller deposits, and murdering people for a more convenient mine with a bigger deposit, well... it's not like people haven't done this sort of shit before.

They have an interstellar space ship. They can move shop on the same planet a lot more cheeply than they can ferry soldiers and weapons from another star system. War is expensive even when you're not conducting it in a star system where you're cut off from your resources.

[Cesario]

Anyway, the morality of the Na'vi isn't the topic at hand. It's about great Pandora Making aliens coming in to make us "better", by also turning us into the nature-loving tree-hugging worldsoul-communing blue people these guys so despise and abhor.

Also, transcendentalist interpretations of Hinduism and Buddhism with the mind-souls of peoples being subsumed in the worldtree for the metaphysical process of rebirth and reincarnation via the interlinked parapsychic meta-ecosystem of the remade Earth.

And, for added irony, the Pandora Makers thinking exactly like these guys in "enlightening" the human savages. Not by blowing up our home trees, but by fucking mutating and ascending our entire planet into an entirely different form.

Except the whole point of this exercise in petty revenge fantasy is to point out the paralells. For that to happen, you have to understand the original situation you're trying to paralell. In your situation, both times humans are faced with an intractable opponent who Absolutely. Refuses. To. Talk. The better paralell would be for the humans to get huffy and self-suprior at the Pandoramakers and refuse to negotiate with them in the face of their massively advanced technology and them offering us litterally anything they want in exchange for our burned out ruin of a planet.

BTW Strak, I think we can also talk about how people siding with XYZ asshole factions or ABC goody-two-shoes showing some kind of behavioral parallelisms. Guys who are all going might makes right or survival of the species or blue people are savages or Alderaanians should've gotten out of the way of the landing shuttle are using the same arguments, and thinking the same way, as the guys they're rooting for. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that, caps or no caps.

There are reasons to dislike the Na'vi that don't require you to adopt a might-makes-right philosophy or a human supremacist viewpoint. After all, in the movie the Na'vi won. Wouldn't that make them obviously superior to a might-makes-right philosopher? Is not their exploiting the emotional weakness of the humans to acheave their goals a testiment to the Na'vi's superiority over the pathetic humans who were too weak to order the death of any member of a species they see?

I think Avatar, and what it brought out in folks who reacted viscerally to it (either positively or negatively) by touching on the whole fundamental "imperialists versus natives, etc." thing that everyone can relate to (either in the side of the natives getting their asses oppressed, or imperialist assholes), is one of the great things about the movie.

The problem is that the imperialists weren't acting particularly imperialistic. They were acting restrained and diplomatic for some reason, which significantly muddies the waters.

[Ryan Thunder]

I find it amusing that you can say this, because that's exactly what my and Shroom's proposition for Avatar 2 mocks.

You have in your mind this idea that industrialized life is better,

Because it is.

and therefore the humans can look down with disdain on the primitive savages who don't know any better, and that's exactly the attitude the Pandoramakers would have towards us if Avatar 2 was made how the OP described it: they know better.

They pretty clearly don't know better, based on what you've suggested. After all, if they did, there would be progress, rather than regression.

Any human who doesn't like it can fuck off and die. Earth will become a nature-worshipping paradise, humans WILL be mutated into blue space elves, because that's what our superiors decided was best.

Except it isn't best, because it isn't industrialized, so they aren't our superiors; they're just more powerful.

[Xess]

Except it isn't best, because it isn't industrialized, so they aren't our superiors; they're just more powerful.

So only industrialized people can be superior? What the fuck? If a hypothetical society had an infant mortality rate of 0, a long and healthy life expectancy, zero crime, no unemployment and other utopian stuff, and could kick any other society's ass it meets, it wouldn't be superior because it isn't industrialized? I'm not going to claim the Na'vi have such a hypothetical society but your stance is weird dude.

EDIT: Note that whether or not such a society is possible is not the point!

[Mayabird]

I just realized that if Earth really was dying and absolutely needed unobtanium to survive, that makes Selfridge an even bigger prick with his "Twenty million a gram" or whatever quote. Instead of saying, "We need this to live" he's like "I'M GONNA MAKE SO MUCH MONEY OFF IT!" It's not "we need this and oh by the way I'm making dough on it also." All he cares about is his profit margin and fuck everything else. I suppose humans back home can just die if they can't pay for it.

Makes me of Crassus, the Roman who made his fortune by showing up at a burning building and blackmailing everyone around into selling their property to him for nearly nothing or he'd just let it all burn. It's said that even enemies of Rome knew how much of a greedy asshole he was and the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat to quench his thirst for riches.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Cesario, I'm going to help you out here. If you can tell us where in the film we can find the parts where we can see what you say here:

[...] we see that [the humans have] actually got so few [resources] that they can barely feed their population. There are repeated references to malnutrition among most of the earth population, and despirate attempts to keep the machines working to provide even the meger sustainance that they are currently managing.

then I'm sure you could get many if not most of those you are arguing with to come to your side. This forum is full of people who will put the lives of billions ahead of the lives of thousands; the issue is that you seem to be the only one to know where these parts are.

[Cesario]

Cesario, I'm going to help you out here. If you can tell us where in the film we can find the parts where we can see what you say here:

[...] we see that [the humans have] actually got so few [resources] that they can barely feed their population. There are repeated references to malnutrition among most of the earth population, and despirate attempts to keep the machines working to provide even the meger sustainance that they are currently managing.

then I'm sure you could get many if not most of those you are arguing with to come to your side. This forum is full of people who will put the lives of billions ahead of the lives of thousands; the issue is that you seem to be the only one to know where these parts are.

Lives of thousands? I thought we were pissed about them being kicked out of their sweet treehouse?

Edit:
I have to ask, though, did you really not realize that earth's natural resources being depleted was a plot point, or is this just you being deliberately obtuse in an effort to delay and derail with a citation war?

[Ryan Thunder]

So only industrialized people can be superior? What the fuck? If a hypothetical society had an infant mortality rate of 0, a long and healthy life expectancy, zero crime, no unemployment and other utopian stuff, and could kick any other society's ass it meets, it wouldn't be superior because it isn't industrialized? I'm not going to claim the Na'vi have such a hypothetical society but your stance is weird dude.

EDIT: Note that whether or not such a society is possible is not the point!

It is very much the point. If that alternative is impossible, then they cannot create that society and the superior alternative is industrialized.

Which means that Pezook and Shroom, while we love them both, are just grasping at straws because they're angry at milwankers. I don't see why turning humanity into fucking Na'vi and Earth into Pandora II makes a point any more than simply calling the milwankers douchebags for demanding that we bomb them or otherwise catastrophically damage the Pandoran ecosystem instead of putting in the effort to civilize it.

Yes, the RDA are a bunch of dicks. No, I don't think they should have dropped asteroids on the Na'vi. I don't see any reason why they couldn't have, but that's an equally depressing story and I don't think its one that should make it to film.

[madd0ct0r]

ok. so if the issue isn't power, it's industrialization, why is our current level of technology 'better' then the pandora maker's understanding of complex systems, neural nets, bioengineering, genetic fiddling ect?

I mean, for us carbon nanotubes are currently near the edge of our tech - the Navi grow them for bones.

[Xess]

It is very much the point. If that alternative is impossible, then they cannot create that society and the superior alternative is industrialized.

Dealing strictly with reality I agree, hunter-gather level sustenance living is crappy and industrial life is much better. I got the impression from your post that you think any society that is not industrial is automatically inferior because it is non-industrial as opposed to being inferior because non-industrial societies have lower standards of living. I don't see how a magical non-industrial society (say one created by Shroomian wizards of bio-tech) with a standard of living equal to or greater than an industrial society can be said to be "inferior".

[Ryan Thunder]

ok. so if the issue isn't power, it's industrialization, why is our current level of technology 'better' then the pandora maker's understanding of complex systems, neural nets, bioengineering, genetic fiddling ect?

I mean, for us carbon nanotubes are currently near the edge of our tech - the Navi grow them for bones.

Medicine. Agriculture. Electricity. Information networks. We have free time to be creative and expand our understanding of the universe (whether we choose to do these things or not) because of our work-saving inventions.

[Cesario]

If your non-industrialized civilization has perfect health, readily avalible food, and a global internet, what does it matter if the stuff runs on electricity or not?

[Shroom Man 777]

I find it amusing that you can say this, because that's exactly what my and Shroom's proposition for Avatar 2 mocks.

You have in your mind this idea that industrialized life is better,

Because it is.

Amazing. There's this lifestyle that exists in commune with what is most likely an artificially-progenated and designed ecosystem made by sciences or un/natural processes heretofore inconceivable to humanity, with a world-spanning mindlink, where facets of the biosphere have been tailored for organisms to live in relative peace and contentment and harmony - or at least where they can sustain decent lives while living in a way entirely differently from us.

There's an actual engineered sentient world-spirit that can symbionize with the animal kingdom, that is capable of transhumanistic singularity Stargliderian consciousness transferences (that the Na'vi even know the rituals to!), biotechnological evolutionary miracles and phenomenons that we can't even imagine. And when confronted with the question of "does this not match, or even exceed, our own lifestyles", people automatically go "our way is better" because they have smoke-belching factories, ocean-bleaching refineries, and devices that shoot pieces of metal into other people's faces, and economic systems that subsist on the rape of unfortunate and poorer peoples and nations for the excessive gluttonies of the so-called "developed" countries.

It's incredible. Absolutely incredible. The lack of fascination with the mystical, the magical, and the fantastical. The lack of imagination. The lack of creativity. The instantaneous dismissal of other ways, of alternatives, of different things. The obsession with numbers, gigajoules, spreadsheets, industrialization, cold sterile technology, these have dulled the senses of some and made them unable to perceive things that are beautiful because of their differences and non-adherence to the thinks we think to be correct.

This is the exact narrow-minded chudness this mental exercise is designed to address. Because it is this dismissive narrow-minded thought that leads to the problems of people being seen as lesser and castigated and "civilized" by their supposed "betters".

Which means that Pezook and Shroom, while we love them both, are just grasping at straws because they're angry at milwankers. I don't see why turning humanity into fucking Na'vi and Earth into Pandora II makes a point any more than simply calling the milwankers douchebags for demanding that we bomb them or otherwise catastrophically damage the Pandoran ecosystem instead of putting in the effort to civilize it.

Is the concept of analogy, allegory and parable foreign to you? Should the Ghost of Christmas Future have just gone "yo Scrooge bro, I'mma gonna call you out on being a miser" instead of having shown him a vision of what his ways wrought? Should H.G. Wells have instead just said "imperialism is bad" instead of writing about Martians incinerating British people and sucking their blood? I'd imagine this would be the same reaction that Wells' critics had, "oh he's just angry at imperialism wankers/impwankers, he could just say that colonialism was bad instead of writing space squids sucking our blood and then dying of cold."

Hmm... if Avatar is like a War of the Worlds where humans are the Martians, I think that original draft of Avatar involving humanity getting bio-virused is another deliberate parallelism.

Yes, the RDA are a bunch of dicks. No, I don't think they should have dropped asteroids on the Na'vi. I don't see any reason why they couldn't have, but that's an equally depressing story and I don't think its one that should make it to film.

I think they should really do that in the sequel. I think the prejudices, dismissals, arrogances and such of some people, and the logical extremes of that, should be depicted in fiction and in art, and also the consequences of these avaricious actions. No matter whose sensibilities are "depressed" by this, as the more powerful a reaction it evokes, the more effective it becomes. It should discomfit people and take them away, harshly if need be, from their comfort zones and show them things that invoke reactions at the visceral level.



I will address the other guy's points later. We arere busy unloading a Doomvee from a truck atm.

[Cesario]

You're one of those people who thought of Serbian Film as true art, aren't you?

I don't judge the Na'vi savages because their lifestyle mirrors tribal peoples on earth. I judge the Na'vi savages because they've demonstrated closed minds uninterested in the opinions of others and uncurious about the world around and beyond them. I judge the Na'vi savages because their own arrogant refusal to speak to people who are different than them may well have led to the extinction of a species that they could only kill because that species cared more about not repeating the mistakes and tragedies of its own past than their own dwindling ability to feed their children. I judge the Na'vi to be savages because they rejected the scholors, educators, and scientists and embraced the warior.

The Na'vi's environment, biology, and the mysteries surrounding their origins are all quite compelling, and a wonder to explore, but the Na'vi as a people showcase far more of the negative aspects of humanity than the humans in this film which casts the humans as the villains.

[Shroom Man 777]

I don't fault the Na'vi for losing interest and refusing to talk when, you know, those assholes massacred their children and could not take "don't bulldoze our homes plz" as an answer.

After all, before the children-massacration, they clearly showed enough curiosity and interest to learn to speak English.

I wonder how they could've learned English from Grace Augustine if they arrogantly refused to speak to humans. Maybe they didn't speak to Ripley, because they were so arrogant and racist! Gasp, maybe they learned English from... sign language! And mix tapes! Magnetic cassette tapes that can function in the flux vortexes. Yes.

[Cesario]

Ah yes, the masacre that they never mention again anywhere in the movie but was in the deleted scene they re-added for the special addition.

Quite frankly, on my first viewing, it seemed quite likely that Grace was the one who brought about the divisions in the first place. Signs indicated she was actively poisoning the locals against the RDA and their activities. She was in the best position to do so, providing language instruction, and at the same time being the Na'vi's primary source of information about humankind. When their opinion of humankind was so negative, especially with no abuses by the RDA ever seen or mentioned, the best candidate for them coming to the conclusion that humans were evil was that Grace told them so.

[Sarevok]

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.

[Shroom Man 777]

The Na'vi survive soely because the humans in this universe don't want to kill them, so the "humans are evil" thing gets a bit taxing.

There are farmers here in the Philippines who protest against the government because rich land owners aren't returning their land to the farmers. The government and rich landowners send goons to kill some of the farmers, mostly the activists and leaders. Those farmers are also not mowed down indiscriminately and systematically eradicated because the landowners and government don't care about genocide, but just care about getting their land and fucking over some farmers. So... "the landowners and government are evil greedy corrupt vile thieving murderous shits" doesn't really get taxing because it's an apt description.

Ah yes, exactly what the film needed. An "as you know" moment where characters point out the painfully obvious to eachother. They both knew earth was dying. Their disagreement was in the form of what the best way to save it was.

Stop avoiding the point. You're still leaping from "this rock is very expensive" to "earth is dooooomed without it."

It's like:

Brace Hagustine: "You shouldn't mine there. That is the home of the oompa loompas."

Elfridge: "We need to mine there. The chocolate we will extract from the ground will be worth billions."

You: "Earth needs chocolate to survive! For us to live, Willy Wonka must subjugate the Oompa Loompas!"

Selfridge going "what the hell woman, this mineral can save the Earth" would still be a better counterargument than "mang I will make muchos dineros with this". Since Sigourney can't really answer the former, while the latter can get a reply of "you're a greedy fucker".

Were the antagonists also in on your God-mandated conspiracy to make the humans look bad? Like how God hardened the Pharoah's heart and made him oppress the slaves?

That kill all humans on sight order that came down from the Na'vi chief after the children were butchered must have had terrible enforcement if no one on the human side died until after the home tree incident. Also leads to a lot of questions about how all those humans were really dying on the supposed death world of Pandora.

If that's all the humans cared about, the Na'vi would have been dead. Period. End of story. The humans obviously had goals that included not genociding the blue people, since otherwise there was no reason not to nuke this death world from orbit, or invest their bioengineering dollars into a plague instead of the fancy diplmatic tool that was the Avatar project.

If that's all the Americans cared about, the Natives would have been dead. Period. End of story. The Americans obviously had goals that included not genociding the red people, since otherwise they wouldn't have allowed the Natives to go walk down that trail all tearfully?

Unless the humans don't actually see themselves as mustache twirling villains and think they're just doing a job? Selfridge was never going to take a "don't mine from our tree" for an answer, yet he was still shocked and aghast and silent when he saw the firebombing of the Home Tree.

The people might've deluded themselves into thinking that they could just evict the tribe with some tear gas or hokey trade agreements, despite the fact that that was the Na'vi's own land and ancestral home and they've been living there for thousands of years.

We know people can easily go "the ends justify the means" and shrug "collateral damage" off to allow themselves to sleep at night.

Which is odd, since Jake was there for precisely that reason, and it was Grace who they kicked out who was on their side from the start. The Na'vi only respected Jake because he was a warior. They respect professional killers, not teachers or scientists, apparently. Guess the humans' main mistake was not sending commander psycho out to talk to the Na'vi from the get-go. Surely the man who happily ignored being on fire and suffocation for the sake of continuing a battle would have impressed the Na'vi at least as much as Jake did.

The Na'vi had their children shot at by the RDA mercenaries. The Na'vi know the RDA and its mercenaries are plowing towards their Home Tree, and they know the RDA and its mercenaries won't take no for an answer.

So, how is it wrong for them to observe one of the soldiers/warriors of the RDA?

And I have an alternative theory as to why Jake eventually became accepted while the scientists were not.

Try imagining Jake, not as the "professional killer" but as "crippled human who gets to walk and run and fly as a Na'vi Avatar and ends up feeling more alive as a Na'vi Avatar than as a human". That's why he was different from the pointdexter scientists asking questions while having all sorts of scientific preconceptions in their heads, that's why he was different from all the other RDA commander psychos. When he lived with the Na'vi, he was more sincere and all that than any of the other Avatar pilots and/or humans. For all the other scientists, their Avatars were just remote controlled bodies. For Jake, his Avatar body was more real than his human body. For Jake, his life as a Na'vi was more real than his life as a fucking cripple.

That was the whole point of having the main character as a paraplegic.

And in both cases, the chemical weapons aren't an agrivating factor. If they're a factor at all, they're a midigating one in light of the real problem: the firebombing and machinegunning respectively.

Uh, yeah. I think we're all kind of focusing on the fact that humans had no problem blowing up their homes rather than mining somewhere else without population centers to murder.

Now if only the Na'vi were willing to tell the humans where they could mine that wouldn't lead to them openly killing the miners. We could have avoided all this. Instead, with every option that yields the unobtainium likely to result in the Na'vi taking offense and trying to murder the miners, they went with the option that they thought might scare the Na'vi into backing off. Intimidation isn't pretty, but it's got advantages over extermination.

Why should the Na'vi know where the unobtanium is? Do they have sonographic lithometric surveying machines? And how did the RDA find out the unobtanium reserve it was already mining at the movie's start? By dowsing?

They have an interstellar space ship. They can move shop on the same planet a lot more cheeply than they can ferry soldiers and weapons from another star system. War is expensive even when you're not conducting it in a star system where you're cut off from your resources.

They only had two space shuttles and one heavy-lifting C-130 esque Dragon gunship and a bunch of Space Hueys. Relocating their entire mining operation to a further site, after their original mine was exhausted, might not have been an option.

This is not the first time human greed, short-sightedness, stupidity, bad information, delusion, lack of awareness, machismo bullshit warmongering aggression, and the like resulted in mass suffering.

Except the whole point of this exercise in petty revenge fantasy is to point out the paralells. For that to happen, you have to understand the original situation you're trying to paralell. In your situation, both times humans are faced with an intractable opponent who Absolutely. Refuses. To. Talk. The better paralell would be for the humans to get huffy and self-suprior at the Pandoramakers and refuse to negotiate with them in the face of their massively advanced technology and them offering us litterally anything they want in exchange for our burned out ruin of a planet.

As long as it ends in us getting liquificated due to our own faults and remade into a parapsychic meta-biotech-induced recreation of the Hindu and Buddhist cycles of death and rebirth, sure.

There are reasons to dislike the Na'vi that don't require you to adopt a might-makes-right philosophy or a human supremacist viewpoint. After all, in the movie the Na'vi won. Wouldn't that make them obviously superior to a might-makes-right philosopher? Is not their exploiting the emotional weakness of the humans to acheave their goals a testiment to the Na'vi's superiority over the pathetic humans who were too weak to order the death of any member of a species they see?

I don't know. Zulus, Somalis, Viet Cong, they all sent technologically superior forces running. Yet you don't see Henry Kissinger go on about how Ho Chi Minh was a great warrior chieftain who bested him in might-righting.

Might-makes-right philosophers or human supremacists don't have to be entirely rational, and their philosophies and the stuff they espouse may just be nonsense to help them cope with their own prejudices and sleep soundly at night.

The problem is that the imperialists weren't acting particularly imperialistic. They were acting restrained and diplomatic for some reason, which significantly muddies the waters.

Dude, that's probably only if you somehow conflate Selfridge's "it's worth a lot of cash" statement with "the fate of earth is at stake" and somehow thought the tear gassing mere seconds before the firebombing was an act of gentlemanly ladylike graciousness.

Ah yes, the masacre that they never mention again anywhere in the movie but was in the deleted scene they re-added for the special addition.

Honestly, I only knew about that when Necron Lord mentioned it in this thread. My original idea was that the Na'vi were fuckoff pissed when the humans couldn't accept "don't bulldoze our homes", cause you know, if you go "don't destroy my house/nation/country/land" and some guys tell you to fuck off and leave, you'd also get pissed. So, yeah, the whole children being massacred actually makes it even worse.

Your Grace Augustine whispering evil to the Na'vi is even loopier than the whole Selfridge's money statement = fate of humanity whatevers.

[Stark]

Why is one group full of 'closed minds' 'arrogantly' 'uninterested' in 'others' and the other group isn't? What we learn is the profit motive is a far, far greater thing than we might think.

I love the idea that if a group doesn't play by THE RULES they deserve to be ruthlessly machoized in the name of freedom. They can only continue to exist if they offer us a series of staged concessions regardless of our belligerent attitude, awful bargaining position, constant posturing, and obvious disregard for anything but money.

AND EVEN THEN MAYBE NOT.

[Shroom Man 777]

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.

You mean vandalizing unmanned vehicles that for all we know were wrecking Na'vi territory? Quarritch also implied that they killed some Na'vi too. So maybe the humans were killing Na'vi for a very long time with no consequences some people also getting killed in return, and vehicles being vandalized.

At least thanks to Necron 99 Lord, now we know the RDA were the ones massacring children.

[Stark]

Castle doctrine.

Then again if the RDA guys tripped over badly maintained topiary, they would be able to sue, so the Na'vi should be careful.

[Cesario]

Why is one group full of 'closed minds' 'arrogantly' 'uninterested' in 'others' and the other group isn't? What we learn is the profit motive is a far, far greater thing than we might think.

I love the idea that if a group doesn't play by THE RULES they deserve to be ruthlessly machoized in the name of freedom. They can only continue to exist if they offer us a series of staged concessions regardless of our belligerent attitude, awful bargaining position, constant posturing, and obvious disregard for anything but money.

AND EVEN THEN MAYBE NOT.

It amuses me that I can't tell which group you're talking about where in this rant.

Castle doctrine.

Then again if the RDA guys tripped over badly maintained topiary, they would be able to sue, so the Na'vi should be careful.

That'll be a real problem for the Na'vi given the nature of their planet's biosphere.

[Shroom Man 777]

That Ryan Thunder bit of "not industrialized = different = inferior!" bit really got me thinking though, about how certain subset of science fiction and science fiction fans no longer have an appreciation for the inexplicable and the magnificent and the beautiful, and how if it doesn't fit into their axiom of industrialization and cold steel and hard technology and all that brute aesthetics that come with the whole modern militaristic take of science fiction - which as we know comes with obsessives going on about the weapons yields of their military technology - if it is not with these, then it is somehow against this or inferior to this, and thus reviled or belittled for its difference and for its alternative ways.

I think it's imperialism. Not of nations imperializing each other. But more like imperialism of the mind. Abstract, different, alien thoughts and concepts are derided for being unorthodox and unusual. Conformity is enforced. You can see it around you, how some - many - no longer relish in the wondrous and miraculous and prefer to bottle it and dissect it with cold calculations. The amazement of seeing strange new things and the curiosity and desire to be amazed has given way to something darker, something ugly, the desire for conflict and the adoration of instruments used to bring about and carry out conflict and violence.

It's a trend you see in science fiction in general too. Gene Rodenberry's vision of the future, of explorating the stars and encountering wonders and miracles, gone and replaced by transpositioned Marines and soldiers in space gunning down and killing crude facsimiles of America's past, present or future enemies likewise transplanted into the science fiction setting. Fantasy and the fantastic gone and replaced with ritual celebratory depictions of violence, as the byproduct of a violent culture.

Star Wars wasn't about just nations warring against each other. It was a war of ideals, of natures, of Luke Skywalker as he's thrust into a Campbellian odyssey, the hero's journey, encountering monsters and bandits, laser sword duels in death fortresses in space, World War 2 dogfights, and most importantly - the central theme of Star Wars itself - a war between one's inner natures, dark and light, good and evil, the shades of passion that can bring both good and evil, and even the redemption of what was once thought to be lost and corrupted by a force greater than all the weapons in the universe, strong enough to cast away an invincible warlock emperor: the power of love.

And look at what it has become now. Gigatons and kilojoules. Mandalorians. Karen Travvisties. Meesa meesas. An Engorged Universe filled with dour repetitive tripe. It has been twisted and deformed by an environment, a cultural growth medium, that thinks nothing of declaring war on not just persons or places or nations, but even abstract concepts. So, no wonder today so few can capture the essence of the original Star Wars, because they're no longer thinking of that kind of metaphysical or metaphorical war as envisioned by Lucas who conjured facets of his tale by consulting mysticism, because they are thinking of an entirely different kind of war - a far more mundane, dour, and trivial one, which their society likes to indulge in.

This imperialism of the mind confines the different and the unorthodox into concentration camps of thought. To reinforce sameness, to castigate foreign concepts that somehow threaten the security of the dour boring numerical conformists who've built an ivory tower heightening themselves through the self-congratulation of militarism and destructive prowess. It's built on a culture that encourages such, that breeds violence and defensiveness against strange things from the "outside". We can't blame those who conform to this powerful environmental force. But still, it is a sad and poor state of affairs.

In one of the most celebrated science fiction epics, 2OO1: Space Odyssey, made by the visionaries Clarke and Kubrick, the tale begins were mere tribalistic apes shrieking and fighting and beating things with sticks. It then progresses to a vision of the future. The moon, the Earth, space travel in cold sterile machines envisioned at the time of the film's making to be the technology of the future - depicted so accurately that today it is still regarded so highly - this is the industrialization we speak of. This is the epitome of humanity's ascension, its journey beyond the limits of Earth and the nature that is limited to the world's confines.

Yet despite this, how does the movie end? The betrayal of a homicidal machine that, ironically, displays more emotion than the human who decommissions it, a man who himself has become as cold and sterile and antiseptic as the starship he rides. But there is more. Eventually, all this rationality, all this logic, all this quantified and scientifically accurate depictions of the future are cast aside - by what? By incomprehensible vistas of surreality, going beyond outer space and into the inner mind. The man's communion with a divine... thing. A cosmic object far greater than he is, far greater than anything that can be quantified, something magical, mystical, fantastic. Majestic. Terrific. And it does not deride him. It does not ridicule him for his primitive ways. It embraces him. Insinuates into his very essence. Makes him transcends his rational limitations and conceptions and allows him to become something in-conceivable.

The tale ends with the Star Child - which cannot be quantified, which cannot be calculated, which is not industrialized, which makes utterly no sense at all - coming down from the heavens on an eightfold path through the endless expanse of the nine vectors, from Jupiter and the Infinite, reaching back to touch Earth.

I think those who encounter something different and yet magnificent, but end up deriding or dismissing it for its differences, are akin to those who cannot perceive color being made to see a rainbow of dead monochrome hues. It is like men who cannot perceive scent made to waft fine precious cologne. They have been stifled. Perhaps their ability to appreciate the great and the beautiful have been amputated by the thought-imperialists, in their concentration camps of the mind. It is a shame. It is a travesty.

I am so sorry.

[Simon_Jester]

So only industrialized people can be superior? What the fuck? If a hypothetical society had an infant mortality rate of 0, a long and healthy life expectancy, zero crime, no unemployment and other utopian stuff, and could kick any other society's ass it meets, it wouldn't be superior because it isn't industrialized? I'm not going to claim the Na'vi have such a hypothetical society but your stance is weird dude.

EDIT: Note that whether or not such a society is possible is not the point!

It is very much the point. If that alternative is impossible, then they cannot create that society and the superior alternative is industrialized.

Which means that Pezook and Shroom, while we love them both, are just grasping at straws because they're angry at milwankers. I don't see why turning humanity into fucking Na'vi and Earth into Pandora II makes a point any more than simply calling the milwankers douchebags for demanding that we bomb them or otherwise catastrophically damage the Pandoran ecosystem instead of putting in the effort to civilize it.

Yes, the RDA are a bunch of dicks. No, I don't think they should have dropped asteroids on the Na'vi. I don't see any reason why they couldn't have, but that's an equally depressing story and I don't think its one that should make it to film.

Ryan, you're missing the point, which is directed at someone else. Which is that for the nuke-Pandora crowd, turnabout should be fair play. If someone stronger than us, who is happy and successful with their own technological base, however it may work, wants to tell us what to do and enforces their power over us... well, what should we think of it?

If you say "we should resist, because they do not have the right to tell us what to do," then you must further apply this to the Na'vi. They are basically content, and show no signs of being disease-stricken or miserable with labor. Indeed, their environment seems unusually well suited for them, and they may not be working very hard to survive there even compared to the usual run of hunter-gatherers on Earth.

If you say "the Na'vi should not resist, because we are the superior race and our more advanced civilization gives us the right to dictate terms to them," then you must turn around and apply the same logic to anyone who encounters us while being more powerful, advanced, and content with the power of their technology than we are.

The latter would sit very poorly with the 'nuke Pandora' crowd.

Castle doctrine.
Then again if the RDA guys tripped over badly maintained topiary, they would be able to sue, so the Na'vi should be careful.

That'll be a real problem for the Na'vi given the nature of their planet's biosphere.

Remember the jurisdiction. The suit would be heard in a Na'vi civil claims court, and I suspect the Na'vi law about tripping over plants is that if you're a clumsy dumbass who can't walk through a forest without tripping and falling on your face, you deserve to get your face fallen on.

TORT REFORM!

That Ryan Thunder bit of "not industrialized = different = inferior!" bit really got me thinking though, about how certain subset of science fiction and science fiction fans no longer have an appreciation for the inexplicable and the magnificent and the beautiful, and how if it doesn't fit into their axiom of industrialization and cold steel and hard technology and all that brute aesthetics that come with the whole modern militaristic take of science fiction - which as we know comes with obsessives going on about the weapons yields of their military technology - if it is not with these, then it is somehow against this or inferior to this, and thus reviled or belittled for its difference and for its alternative ways.

A fair point- although, flip side of that, see what I wrote in the thread about Tyranids.