Since we are starting to lose the living memory of Communism..

It's important that these experiences are recorded and shared:

https://ombreolivier.liberty.me/communism/?fbclid=IwAR3a6OsiEko5BV5WnJp7U6oVAqLy1icAsR5k-Fp7Pm_DsjhzvQQaPcRRs7A

Going to be looking at this YouTube channel

This video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4ryYokLzU

seems to condense a lot of experience into a short but compelling package.  I've watched a couple of other videos he's mad, and I'm going to put this guy's channel on my short list of things to pay attention to.

Some miscellaneous predictions

I believe in the importance of making specific and testable predictions about things.  Making specific predictions is a way of preserving intellectual honesty:  it's too easy to cultivate and spread opinions at will, and only think about or talk about those opinions that turn out to be justified by events but to ignore those predictions that fail.

So making predictions in a public way, and returning to those predictions in order to grade yourself afterwards is a great way to set up an intellectual feedback loop.

So here are some New Years predictions, to be graded next year:

Political

1. Impeachment.  Pelosi eventually gets the impeachment papers over to the Senate, having accomplished her goal of framing the Senate trial as somehow illegitimate. The Republican controlled Senate mirrors the actions of the house and uses the trial as much as possible to get political points by highlighting whatever Democrat malfeasance they can.  The President is not actually convicted, and the whole affair is a slight net political plus for Trump.
2. Election.  Biden is the Democrat's candidate, and he looses narrowly to Trump, who proclaims his victory the greatest thing ever.

World

1. Hong Kong.  No freaking idea.  My only prediction is that this will not simply fizzle out quietly.
2. Iran and the US.  The aggressive US stance towards Iran will provoke crazy revenge talk (not actually a prediction since it has actually happened) and possibly some carrying through on said talk.  There could be some real violence.  This will force the rest of the civilized world to essentially back US aggressive actions, despite their originally unilateral nature  Once Iran realizes it won't be able to play Europe against the US here, it will back down and resume attempts at diplomacy.  Alternatively, the "crazy" phase of Iran's response could get out of hand too quickly and we could have a full-blown "Desert Storm" style war, which Iran (of course) will loose badly.  But it's against my rules to hedge my bets with an alternative, so I'm going with option 1: "Brief fury and no war" as the prediction.

The Church

(Ugh.  Don't feel like trying to read the tea leaves here. OK, here are two very general predictions:)

1. Aside from some steps taken by some few individual bishops, little to no substantial actions will be taken to fix sexual abuse problems.  Most everyone in power will try to pretend nothing happened.
2. In general, Church "conservatives" will continue to be unhappy with Vatican leadership.  Pope Francis will say at least six wildly inappropriate things this year that will get us riled up.

Science and Technology

1. It's going to be a fairly uneventful year for science, in terms of big public announcements.
2. Some very cool medical tech research will be announced but will be still too far from actual release to be useful yet and will barely register on the public consciousness.
3. We'll get at least two new "this will be the best thing ever" battery hype announcements that will go pretty much nowhere.
4. Status quo for global warming theory in general and for the politicization of it as well.

Economics

1. Hydrocarbons from the US will remain plentiful for at least this year.
2. I'll go out on a limb and predict an economic crisis for China happening this year.  I feel like it has to happen at some point, so let's guess it's going to happen in 2020.  This will create economic shocks around the world that I'm not even going to try to predict.

Culture

1. Media piracy will increase dramatically.  No one will really care.
2. It's going to be a "meh" year for major motion pictures.  Major blockbusters are going to feel more formulaic than usual and the "small movies" slots at theaters are going to be clogged with lefty "message" movies of dubious value.
3. Everyone will proclaim this to the be year that streaming services take over all the creative content in the world.  Some really interesting stuff will be produced, but we'll end the year disappointed with the overall quality of streaming offerings.

OK, those are my predictions!  See everyone in 2021 for a grading.

Spoiler-filled thoughts on "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"

Positives

I want to start with some positives here.  I definitely enjoyed the movie; let me try to pick out some things I specifically liked:

1. Some awesome visuals.  My favorite was the drowned death star, which is now possibly my favorite location they've put together in all of the movies.  The Sith planet (Exigon?) had some great visuals as well (though was I the only one getting flashbacks to Star Fox on the SNES?).

2. The scene where Rey jump-cuts Kylo's ship is awesome *even* though most of it was spoiled in the trailer.  The sound design for that sequence was brilliant.

3. I continued to enjoy the main characters as personalities.  I think they maybe never got the character development they deserved, but I still fundamentally like the Rey / Finn / Poe group dynamic.  I liked Kylo Renn as well, and fundamentally enjoyed his bizarre relationship with Rey, and I liked him in his brief stint as good Ben Solo.  (They should have had him "shoot the Emperor first", though.  Think about it: the revenge of Han through his son!  Adam Driver could have done the Harrison Ford lip curl and everything; it would have been awesome.)

4. Having Rey be Palpatine's granddaughter was, I think, a satisfying way of resolving the mystery of her improbably good Force powers.

Negatives

At the end, I left the theater feeling only somewhat satisfied by the movie, and by the sequel trilogy as a whole.  I don't think I'll ever have the desire to re-watch any of these new movies, whereas I'll probably get the urge to watch the originals again at some point, even though I've already watched them numerous times.  I've been trying to understand why this is; why these movies have left me so lukewarm (no pun intended), and I've come up with a few reasons that make sense to me:

Lack of world-context 

In the end, I felt a vague sensation of disorientation and confusion about the central protagonists of the movie, both political/military and supernatural.  I knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, but I felt it was very vague and unspecified *what* exactly they were supposed to be in relationship to each other and to the whole universe.

To illustrate the problem here, I would like to contrast the new movies with the original trilogy.  Specifically, I'd like to point to what turns out--in retrospect--to be the single most important bit of dialog in all of the Star Wars movies:

[Setting: Death Star council table in Episode IV]

[Some guy at the table] "The rebellion will continue to gain support in the Imperial Senate . . ."

[Governor Tarkin, coming in and interrupting] "The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us.  I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently.  The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."

[Guy] "That's impossible!  How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?"

[Governor Tarkin] "Regional governors now have direct control over their territories.  *Fear* will keep the local systems in line.  Fear of this battlestation."

This was an amazingly efficient bit of dialog.  In 32 seconds, the relative positions of the Empire and the Rebellion are clearly established, and you are given all the geo-political information you need in order to understand the big-picture stakes for *the next 6 movies* (everything in the prequels not having to do directly with Anakin can be seen as just fleshing out these lines, really).  By these lines is established the following:

1. The Emperor (whoever that is; it's unknown at this point) has been playing a dangerous game of politics in his ascent to power.  He has been wearing a mantle of political legitimacy, but clearly that mask is starting to slip and many people are ready to challenge it.
2. The Rebellion is associated with some old way: an older form of political legitimacy (later connected with the Jedi).  Given the opportunity, they could represent not just a military, but a politicaly symbolic threat.
3. At the start of Episode IV, the Emperor feels his position is established enough where he can stop playing the political game and rule with raw power *provided* the Death Star can act as his crucial threat.  The importance of the Death Star is therefore not *just* as a military weapon, but also as the key linchpin of the Emperor's political power.  Blowing up the Death Star is therefore established as a massive *tactical* victory in the overall war: it is a crucial victory at a crucial moment.  It is entirely plausible on this basis that the Rebellion could go from its victory at Endor after Return of the Jedi to total political victory afterwards.

There was never any corresponding bit of dialog in the new trilogy that established the same sort of relative positioning of the First Order and the Resistance.  Did the First Order have any sort of perceived galactic political legitimacy, and how did they get it?  How did the Rebellion squander its massive political advantage from the end of Return of the Jedi and dwindle down to a scrappy little Resistance with little to no political support?  How, if at all, was the First Order related to the Emperor's final bid for galactic power?  What is the significance of the defeat that the First Order suffered at Exigon?  Does their defeat in the final movie mean the Resistance has finally won, or has a good chance of finally winning?

I didn't need or want a political treatise to answer these questions; all I needed was another 32 seconds of dialog to show us that *someone* had thought through these things.  I wanted some small touchstone to allow me to position the players on some meaningful mental chessboard, and I never got that.  So in the end, the heroes "win"--but *what* do they win?  It felt unclear to me.  (Oh, and did the Resistance even really beat the First Order, or did the First Order just become irrelevant?  I know the First Order was *at* the final battle, but I'm not even sure what part it played there.  Confusing.)

One specific moment where this really hurt the movie was in the arrival of all the "just people" to help with the final battle.  It was a cool moment, but in the absence of more world-establishing setup, it felt really "deus ex machina".

Similarly, the supernatural threat of the movie, the threat of the resurgence of the Sith, was never properly contextualized.  Here we can blame the "Last Jedi"--it had all the time in the world with Rey hanging out with Luke and talking about the Force.  It *could* have set up some ominous threat of dire galactic consequences should the Sith rise again.  To be fair maybe it was making some weak movements in that direction?  But *I* certainly didn't feel I properly feared the return of the Sith in the form of the Emperor (or maybe Empress Rey).  Sure, it was obviously a *bad* thing, especially in the context of that particular fight because of Sith anti-aircraft lightning--but I did not feel prepared enough to understand what the total implications of this potential resurrection were.  It was a threat that came out of nowhere and which had unclear implications.

In retrospect, I think it is clear that this threat should have been explicitly set up in Episode VII.  Probably that movie should have ended with the surprise cliffhanger of a resurrected Palpatine, after Luke and Yoda having explained how bad such a thing would be, so that the final movie could have begun with a well-established sense of desperation in the face of known potential consequences, rather than having to try to manufacture it at the last moment.

Pacing

OK, time to blame Episode VII again.  Episode VIII hit the ground running, hard.  And I was expecting this and was in a very forgiving mood towards this (intentionally), since I had realized ahead of time that Episode VII hadn't done nearly the amount of setup work for a series finale that it should have done.  But gash darn! did this movie suffer from needing to stuff too much in at the last minute.

I think nowhere was this more painful than Leia's relationship with Ben.  Here's what the movie had to convey: "OK, so Leia was actually a fully trained Jedi, see, and she predicted once upon a time that her son would go bad, but need to be brought back.  So she knows he must still have goodness inside him and also that she has the ability to Force-touch him emotionally at a critical time if she tries really hard, but it will kill her.  So she senses the right time when it happens and she sacrifices herself for him and maybe wakes up Han's memories inside him and it ends up fully converting him back to the Light side and then she dies and its tragic."  How long did the movie have to introduce, explicate and finish this whole mini-story arc?  Maybe five minutes of total screen time?  It's absurd how little time was given to such a crucial aspect of the story, and how rushed it ended up feeling.

Aside from major plot points being rushed (and I think Ben's conversion was the single worst instance but not the only one), the overall action of the film also lost impact on me from being so frenetic. Compare all of the various "mini-missions" in Episode IX with how long Episode IV took with the "let's blow up the Death Star" mission, or how long Episode VI took with the "we need to get the shields down" mission: the original movies took loads of time to build up tension and expectation for a finale, and they earned their climaxes.  Episode IX, on the other hand, left me feeling vaguely dizzy rather than elated or fulfilled.

Nostalgia

OK, this is the big one for me.  This whole trilogy has been strangled by nostalgia, and I believe this to be its single biggest problem.  I believe a much better choice would have been to decide from the start, "These are new movies; new stories in the same universe.  We can have a few cool cameos, but no more than a few minutes per movie on the old stuff."  In the end, I think we all would have been much, much happier with this decision.

I take as symbolic for this Finn's "I never told you--!" moment.  Obviously, Finn had romantic feelings toward Rey.  Why was this never developed?  At all?  Well, clearly because the movies didn't have space for that.  We needed to find out about Han and Leia's relationship post-Endor, and Han's mid-life crisis and Luke's mid-life crisis, and Leia's force journey, and Han and Leia's parental woes.  And we needed five or six nostalgia Chewie shots, and a few Luke's light-sabre glamor shots and a few Lando Calrissian nostalgia scenes and about a dozen Millenium Falcon glamor shots and about five dozen clever callbacks.  And R2-D2 needed a hero moment, and C3PO needed to have his standard comic relief lines and *also* needed a big hero moment with heapings of explicit nostalgia--so much nostalgia that it became impossible to actually sustain the heroic sacrifice and it *needed* to be reversed in a few minutes of screen time because we *can't* erase C3PO (sniff)!  So, yeah, too much fan service to do--no time to develop the *central freaking characters of the story* beyond the absolute essentials to move the action forward.

Not just the characters, but the plots also of these movies have been handcuffed by nostalgia.  When Episode VII turned out to have a plot that was mostly a carbon copy of Episode IV with heaping loads of nostalgia piled on top, I thought, "OK, we needed a bridge from the original trilogy, I guess.  Now that we've go that out of the way, we have these cool new characters and a few intriguing  new concepts, and these movies can take off and become their own things."  Nope!  In the end, the essential plot of Episode IX is just a carbon copy of Episode VI: will the rebels do the thing that allows them to destroy the planet-destroying threat?  Turns out, yes, with some unexpected help!  Will the Emperor succeed in tempting the young protagonist into the Dark Side by anger, and thus become all powerful?  Turns out, no, with the last-minute help of his evil side-kick who still had good inside him!

The new Star War trilogy therefore end up as half-movies, or maybe less than that.  They are barely enjoyable as stories in their own right.  They are at least halfway mere tribute films, or really high budget fan-fic.

One moment in Episode IX that really underscored this for me was the Dominic Monaghan cameo.  There were a lot of cameos, obviously, but his really stood out to me.  Because for some reason, even while I was watching the movie, it was perfectly clear to me that Dominic Monaghan wasn't actually playing a character in the movie.  No, he was there *as a fan*.  See, he knew J.J. from the Lost days, and so he was able to score the very coolest ticket to the movies: not just a backstage pass, but an *onstage* pass.  He gets to be part of the legend!  So cool!

This realization took me *right* out of the movie, and it brought home to me subconsciously while I was watching that these new movies are at least half about the giddiness of the actors and directors to be "part of the Star Wars legacy".  It's an extended theme park experience, not a story.  Well, I don't like theme parks and I wanted a new story.  So ultimately, I'm disappointed.

Conclusion

So, the negatives ended up taking a lot more space in this review than the positives.  I don't think this is because the movie is bad, per se.  I think this is because the negatives are harder to understand than the positive; I needed to think through why the movie left me unsatisfied, even though it had so many cool movie elements to it.  In the end, I come back to my judgment of, the movie is OK.  It's enjoyable spectacle and it's got a lot of cool moments, especially if you try really hard to enjoy them *just* as moments and not worry too much about how well they exist in relationship to a whole story.

Ultimately, though, I'm disappointed.  Partly because of the flaws in the new movies make them less worth watching, but more so because of the wasted opportunity.  I think there was a much better set of stories available here, if only different choices had been made, and you can sort of glimpse that story here and there peaking around the edges of those bad choices.  Alas, it was apparently not meant to be.