And IIRC it was after they had made a bunch of practical effects, so it’s not like it was saving them money or anything. The execs literally just said “re-do these parts but worse”.

Maybe your body is digested over a thousand years because the Sarlaac doesn’t catch very much prey so it has evolved a hyper-efficient digestive system and sits dormant most of the time, but also once you’re in Luke’s right and you’ll actually die of crushing or acid burning or dehydration.

But they also call it “The Almighty Sarlaac”, which to me implies that this is all folk knowledge. So maybe “be digested over a thousand years” is just what Tatooinians believe will happen to anyone who falls in.

Even if Luke’s right, it’s not like being held down by tentacles while stomach acid slowly burns every part of your body until you finally die of dehydration doesn’t sound pretty painful.

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My first thought was “this is a much easier way for a Vampire to eat than stealing from a blood bank.”

They defeated the Nazis by throwing conscripts into a meat grinder regardless of whether they even had a weapon, and by threatening to shoot them if they tried to retreat.

Enemy at the Gates is not a documentary, it’s a propaganda film. In true fact while the Soviets did have a large number of conscripts and did suffer supply issues early in the war, at no point were they sending under-equipped battalions into the front line to die for no reason, and the thing about shooting those who retreated only applied to officers who ordered a retreat without proper cause (you’ll find that every other army in World War 2 had a similar protocol).

Gulag in Siberia

Except during the years of World War 2, the Gulags had a better quality of life and lower risk of mortality than contemporary prisons in many much wealthier and more developed countries. Despite the enduring cultural legacy of the fiction novel Gulag Archipelago, the truth of the matter is that after the revolution the Communists reformed the Tsarist work camps into what were at the time the most progressive rehabilitation regimes in the world.

China is the most democratic country on Earth, it has done nearly all of the poverty elimination that has occurred on this planet in the last fifty years, it has proven its ability time and time again to solve problems that vex capitalist regimes in humane and effective ways, it has proven to be resilient if not totally immune to the cyclical market shocks that every capitalist regime on the planet is regularly victim to, it has closed the technological gap and is now pulling ahead of the capitalist world in nearly every sector, its citizens are happier than the citizens of any other country and have the highest faith in their government institutions out of any other country…

I could go on. But please tell me about TiAnAnMeN sQuArE and the UyGhUr GeNoCiDe like I haven’t heard those weak ass-arguments a million times.

It’s such an apt metaphor. A horrifying tentacled mass called “capitalism” is puppeteering every society on the planet. Read a bit of leftist thought and you’ll start seeing it everywhere - read a bit more and you’ll perceive precisely how its tentacles are manipulating you. Try not to go mad as your perception broadens with every theory you imbibe.

A few societies are aware of the being. They know its tentacles are upon them, and they’ve declared their intentions to throw off the beast and finally slay it. But whether their plots and schemes for defeating the monster will bear fruit or not, for the time being they can only overcome its influence in fits and starts.

Blow a fat cloud on someone else’s desk so their name pops up, bonus points if your teachers suck and blindly punish anyone whose name gets triggered.

we hope this will reduce vaping through social pressure

The social pressure of all of your friends knowing that you’re cool and break the rules?

I got a GPS tracker for my dog’s collar after her third escape - but she never even attempted a fourth escape. Or perhaps she learned to wait for me to go to bed…

The same principle applies - public housing would reduce the number of unhoused, meaning that you wouldn’t run into them at parks, and I advocate for it even though I personally have never had a problem with them.

How does this metaphor work? I’m advocating for public housing, ie making things easier for people even though I don’t strictly need it myself.

i used to live near a park with a lot of homeless, walked my dog there every evening, but I had to move to the sticks because I couldn’t afford the rent anymore. oh and we still get homeless traffic here, there’s just no way in hell my libertarian-as-fuck “representatives” will ever do anything about it.

unfortunately my current city is all Republican, but when I lived in a blue city I did join protests and petitions to that effect.

and I mean, there are fits and starts of good policies you can find around the country, it just falls far short of what’s needed to combat the problem.

Providing public housing would be better overall for 90% of people, but it would undercut landlords and real estate companies, and those groups have political power that homeless and low income people don’t.

the primordial essence of Evil

See, I hate that this exists at all. I would much prefer alignments be tied to outlooks on life or even political philosophies than just baking deterministic morality into the setting.

Well, if the government is accountable to the people, then pressures from below should shape its policies. But in America as-is I suppose you’re right that there would be no reason to think that that would happen, only a proletarian democracy can truly ensure that a government is responsive to the needs and desires of the people.

The Soviets had an “apartment swap” system for people who wanted to move around filled-to-capacity neighborhoods. You would get on the list with where you currently lived and put in where you wanted to move and would get informed when there was a match. Sometimes matches would be arranged in triangles or other more complex shapes, but since everybody involved needed to get on the same page this was rare. The wait to move depended on how lucky you were - sometimes you’d get a match right away, sometimes you’d forget about it until ten years later when you would get a letter asking if you were still interested.

This was all in the 60s and 70s when things were generally more chill.