Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Natasha Tori Maru]

@How to be wise

Do we not know about groupies? Clout chasers? People love to get near someone famous. Sex opens that door. For men and women. It says nothing about the moral character or methods the 'famous' person engages in.

Edited February 21 by Natasha Tori Maru

[CARDOZZO]

46 minutes ago, LambdaDelta said:

The new server specs are actually quite modest compared to what I assumed is required to smoothly run a website like this. Guess efficient code and other optimizations make a significant difference. People really do get complacent with their code as hardware advances since it's reasoned that it'll eat all the overhead anyway. I love watching breakdowns of how creative developers of the past had to get to make an entire game with its assets fit & run on an NES or some other shitbox, or land a mission on the moon for that matter. That's art.

 

 

Check this out https://8bitworkshop.com/

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Are the Jedi good or evil?

Need to somehow work a video with Darth Maul makeup. The Darth Maul vs Obi Wan/Qui-Gon Jinn sabre fight scenes were SICK compared to the slow ass, turd choreography Disney vomit from the latest movies.

The Jedi vs Sith perspective has always fascinated me. It is a great post highlighting how we can twist and perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify behavior. The Jedi love to taut 'Only a Sith speaks in absolutes' yet there are many instances the Jedi speak in the exact same absolute manner. The difference is their alignment with the integrity of unity/oneness/infinity.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

@LambdaDelta Limitation is the biggest creative facilitator for me

 

[LambdaDelta]

29 minutes ago, CARDOZZO said:

Check this out https://8bitworkshop.com/

Thanks!

16 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

@LambdaDelta Limitation is the biggest creative facilitator for me

 

Right-o, artificial constraint is an awesome technique

 

 

[LambdaDelta]

@Leo Gura

I don't see how perfectly Good Jedi could be written without making for a boring story or them getting quickly destroyed by the Sith. This standard of integrity is unrealistic within the established cosmology of SW, as well as our world. Without additional nuance this reads as though a proper Jedi would be a doormat following deontological ethics that allows whatever to take its course. But a Jedi wouldn't stand by and watch as the Nazis genocide the Jews. You said as much in the Balance video and elsewhere. Is there a difference between defeating Hitler through physical force and mind-tricking him into surrender? Perhaps. 

Luke himself in ROTJ pulled the mind-trick at least twice, and in the end he defeated evil through faith in goodness and selflessness. Obi-Wan also used the trick to convince a death stick dealer that he no longer wanted to sell drugs. Sure, he infringed on the dealer's sovereignty of mind and robbed him of a potential personal realization of his corruption and thus a beginning of redemption. But realistically, given the survival conditions on low levels of Coruscant and the dude's entire life story & worldview, could something like that even be expected? Obviously not. Taking all that into account, Obi-Wan does an evil thing in service of a greater good from a utilitarian perspective. Which is how the universe as a whole operates.

Couldn't a good person hurt others while realizing and accepting that they may and likely will get hurt in return? That would be coherent/consistent. 

Trying to achieve perfect integrity in the relative domain is itself not integrous, by definition. Squaring a circle only works on the absolute. Knowing this to be a metaphysical limitation of its own creation, God forgives all evil. Striving to be good and truthful is paramount to be sure, but in practice it's more appropriate to frame in terms of a mathematical limit to infinity that gets infinitely close, yet never quite reaches. Consciousness of God is then the dissolution of the asymptote unifying the diverging curves into a perfect continuity. 

After all, even Stage Red phrases like "might makes right" have their origin in God. God is right because it is the highest might, and vice versa. 

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, LambdaDelta said:

Obi-Wan does an evil thing in service of a greater good from a utilitarian perspective. Which is how the universe as a whole operates.

That makes him no better than common folk. It lowers his skill and integrity.

Scamming Watto was totally uncalled for. A Jedi should look for another way, rather than taking the easy path.

Boring? Not at all. This makes life much harder for Jedi and more interesting to watch them deal with harder survival options. There are so many better ways to solve the problem than scamming a poor junk dealer. The scam didn't even work on Watto.

Why mind-trick stormtroppers when you could just fight them? Or perhaps some kind of Force power like a smoke cloud.

The Jedi are supposed to be the examplars of Goodness. Not utilitarians mercenaries.

Jedi don't have to be perfectly good, but they should at least understand what is good and what is corruption. Jedi should be depicted doing everything in their power to avoid the corrupt option. He should have tried to avoid scamming Watto. Instead he had zero qualms about it. And if Jedi do corrupt things the film should depict a cost in terms of loss of connection with the Force. Jedi can act badly but then lose Force powers for it. That is far more interesting from a story perspective.

For example, Qui-Gon Jin scams Watto and then gets his hand cut off in his next saber battle because he losses connection to the Force. That would be so much cooler.

Edited February 21 by Leo Gura

[LambdaDelta]

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That makes him no better than common folk. It lowers his skill and integrity.

But the common folk do evil stuff to benefit themselves, without a care for the greater good; at best they delude themselves into thinking they care. Nor are they conscious that whatever they do will be directed towards the greater good regardless of intention (and they shouldn't know that as it would be the easiest thing to abuse).

 

17 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Boring? Not at all. This makes life much harder for Jedi and more interesting to watch them deal with harder survival options. There are so many better ways to solve the problem than scamming a poor junk dealer. The scam didn't even work on Watto.

They're already in a very tricky situation, stuck on a shithole planet without money while protecting an important political figure. There could be better ways to solve the problem, but not within the runtime of a typical movie. Maybe a montage or some such would take care of this, but it's both more technically involved and harder to grasp for the common folk that are the majority of intended audience. Watto didn't even seem that poor, he had a whole shop and at least 2 slaves. Plus considering his level of development a dice gamble is something he himself proposed and would honor to maintain his reputation. 

 

36 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Why mind-trick stormtroppers when you could just fight them? Or perhaps some kind of Force power like a smoke cloud.

Why fight some guys just doing a routine patrol job that probably have families to go back to, risking hurting them or yourself and attract unnecessary attention? Even a smoke cloud will cause some ruckus. It's like that story you told about cutting queues to Vegas nightclubs, you bribe the bouncer instead of fighting him or using a smoke grenade to sneak inside. 

 

44 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The Jedi are supposed to be the examplars of Goodness. Not utilitarians mercenaries.

Jedi don't have to be perfectly good, but they should at least understand what is good and what is corruption. Jedi should be depicted doing everything in their power to avoid the corrupt option.

Yes, their order as a whole was very problematic and they ultimately got dragged into the war as pawns of the devil, but that was more of a structural and long-standing issue with their code and other dogma, not specific actions they took in those instances. By the time of Phantom Menace the order has already probably been corrupt for centuries. 

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, LambdaDelta said:

Why fight some guys just doing a routine patrol job that probably have families to go back to, risking hurting them or yourself and attract unnecessary attention? Even a smoke cloud will cause some ruckus. It's like that story you told about cutting queues to Vegas nightclubs, you bribe the bouncer instead of fighting him or using a smoke grenade to sneak inside. 

Because the point is to teach the audience what Good is and what corruption is.

It's supposed to be a genuine spiritual lesson, not just Hollywood action slop.

You want a story that has spiritual realism. People at large don't know the value of truth. The Jedi are supposed to embody that value or fail to do so and show the consequences.

You wanna teach your children that scamming others is good as long as its for a princess??

Edited February 21 by Leo Gura

[LambdaDelta]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

Because the point is to teach the audience what Good is and whar corruption is.

It's supposed to be a genuine spiritual lesson, not just Hollywood action slop.

95% of your own audience doesn't understand half of it even with 1000+ hours of clearly laid out and structured teachings containing a mountain of nuanced examples. What hope does a fictional movie franchise have?

[Joseph Maynor]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

The Jedi are supposed to be the examplars of Goodness. Not utilitarians mercenaries.

I hope so. 

[LoneWonderer]

6 minutes ago, LambdaDelta said:

95% of your own audience doesn't understand half of it even with 1000+ hours of clearly laid out and structured teachings containing a mountain of nuanced examples. What hope does a fictional movie franchise have?

We are living in the dark ages.

[Leo Gura]

11 minutes ago, LambdaDelta said:

95% of your own audience doesn't understand half of it even with 1000+ hours of clearly laid out and structured teachings containing a mountain of nuanced examples. What hope does a fictional movie franchise have?

A film like Star Wars can teach the lesson much more potently than a 100-hour lecture from me.

Moral stories are classic. I'm just pointing out a few tweaks to make it better. Lucas did an 85% good job of it.

[LambdaDelta]

13 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You want a story that has spiritual realism. People at large don't know the value of truth. The Jedi are supposed to embody that value or fail to do so and show the consequences.

The consequences come crashing down hard on them in Revenge of the Sith and well beyond it. 

 

14 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You wanna teach your children that scamming others is good as long as its for a princess??

Provided they understand it's not about the princess as a person or some authority, but about the role the figure of a princess plays in the governance and well-being of her planet's population, what undermining that particular planet means for the state of affairs across the galaxy in the current context, and so on. 

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, LambdaDelta said:

Provided they understand it's not about the princess as a person or some authority, but about the role the figure of a princess plays in the governance and well-being of her planet's population, what undermining that particular planet means for the state of affairs across the galaxy in the current context, and so on. 

That's a corrupt lesson.

[LambdaDelta]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That's a corrupt lesson.

Rather it's incomplete without also having consciousness of God. Incompleteness is a form of corruption, which makes all lessons corrupt by themselves.

[AtmanIsBrahman]

@Leo Gura What happened to good/bad being relative? It sounds like you’re saying that it’s absolute now, which is kind of shocking. 

If reality is a dream, why does it matter if you lie to one of the dream characters? You’re dreaming yourself lying too, so it’s all a dream within a dream. There’s no actual morality in a dream.

Honestly, Star Wars is very stage blue in terms of morality, very us vs them (Jedi vs Sith). I’m surprised that you’re holding it in such high regard.

[aurum]

There's a deep irony when you look at the dark side vs light side IRL.

Superficially, they both reject external authority. 

But the dark replaces external authority with complete self-bias. While the light side replaces external authority with truth.

The light side also integrates the dark side, while the dark side cannot integrate the light side.

[Basman]

I remember watching a video essay about the Jedi order of the prequels essentially being corrupt, complacent and detached (relatively speaking) after years of stagnation and getting too attached to political affairs as an institution. Their methodology inadvertently got influenced by the pragmatic survival needs of state power, such as mediating conflict and enforcement. The corruption of the senate was a bad influence, and Obi wan arguably reflects that as he is from the same order.

 

Edited February 21 by Basman

[gettoefl]

6 hours ago, AtmanIsBrahman said:

@Leo Gura What happened to good/bad being relative? It sounds like you’re saying that it’s absolute now, which is kind of shocking. 

If reality is a dream, why does it matter if you lie to one of the dream characters? You’re dreaming yourself lying too, so it’s all a dream within a dream. There’s no actual morality in a dream.

Honestly, Star Wars is very stage blue in terms of morality, very us vs them (Jedi vs Sith). I’m surprised that you’re holding it in such high regard.

You dream for one reason. To wake up refreshed with all junk processed to live exuberantly. When you dream you suffer. Do you notice? And you make your reflections suffer too. Dreaming is but a glorified suffering asylum for yourselves. Why subject yourselves for a moment longer then absolutely necessary. The only morality is opening your eyes.