The Mandalorian

They didn't really have an opportunity to kill her off, though. She had to survive because they were planning to spin her off into a new series.

She probably wouldn't have been very cooperative if they'd reached out and told her, "We're cancelling your show and firing you. Please come into the studio; we need to shoot a death scene before you can fuck off properly."

Yeah, chances are, from the way she acts in public, that she wasn't...great behind the scenes. I'm guessing that she was fine while they were shooting season 1 because she had a pretty minor social media presence and she didn't start getting bad after it finished airing.

If they got to filming the second season and she was getting worse behind the scenes while getting more overt in public, it'd make the previously pitched spinoff increasingly less attractive, at least with her in the lead. Because if she was getting this bad in public with the fame boost from playing a supporting character...what would she be like as a show lead?

I just find it inherently funny that people are crying discrimination and censorship when the whole situation is pure cut-and-dry capitalism. Disney deemed Carano's brand to not be worth re-hiring her and effectively exercised free speech to cut her dry.

In other words, those complaining about Carano's firing are both anti-free market and anti-free speech which is... just delightful.

How can you call this discrimination when *she* was the one being transphobic? I agree though, the reasons for this are just capitalism, as cynical as that is

Because she's being discriminated for being conservative.

Never mind the fact that is, you know. A choice, not an inherent quality. And the problem wasn't being conservative, but being exceedingly public about it. And not just being public with being conservative so much as "spouting far-right lies in a public space."^note There's a reason no one gave a shit when she was being a run-of-the-mill conservative but when she's questioning masks and supporting people who tried to, you know, pull a coup they notice.

... yeah. Persecution complex.

First Amendment wonks are not, and have never been, operating in good faith. The right's go-to defense is always to appropriate left-wing language and apply it to conservatism.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 22nd 2021 at 12:50:06 PM

Someone I knew used to subscribe to a conservative media magazine, and each month had some pull quote about how "Republicans are the new gay, Republicans are the new women, Republicans are the new Jews", etc. They completely recognize that such peoples are oppressed (often by campaigns they themselves supported at the time), but only when they can weaponize it for themselves. Maybe in a few years we'll be hearing "Republicans are the new trans".

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 22nd 2021 at 1:06:33 AM

It's a general sense of "you can say this, so we should be able to say it too!" that pervades a lot of the rhetoric, treats social criticism as a game and exposes how little they understand why those things are said in the first place.

Hell, it's where the whole "you can compare the things we say and do to oppressive times in history, so we should be able to do it too" thing comes from, hence why you get ridiculous things like Carano claiming that Republicans being criticized is the same as the Holocaust in the first place.

I once came up with a term called "Referee Fallacy" where you hyper-focus on a group's tactics rather than their goals. It's more important that good wins, than that it plays fair necessarily.

People who over-emphasize free speech as a principle often commit this sort of fallacy.

I mean, part of the issue is that in the minds of people similar to Carano, calling their foes Nazis is playing fair. "The left compare their enemies to Nazis, so I should be able to do that too" is clearly the mindset behind the tweet that got her fired. It just didn't acknowledge the context that, uh, the left is literally opposing Neo-Nazis right now.

... which is messed up in of itself. But particularly weird for an actress at this point best known for portraying someone fighting space Nazis.

As a note (I will probably post the same thing if Carano discussion is in other threads), although the thing that got her fired was the comparison of herself to a Holocaust victim (which was framed in a way that was kind of subtly denialist), she also tweeted this image that essentially shows the "Elders of Zion" oppressing the world.

You can see it in this article.

What's kind of darkly funny is that a version of the latter image was part of a controversy involving Jeremy Corbyn's antisemitism.

So essentially, people who (rightly) excoriated Corbyn were defending Carano for the same (and I'd image somewhat vice versa as well).

Yes, they do. On purpose, which is a place where a lot of people stumble.

They aren't being naive or ignorant. They're being deliberately obtuse. Attacking tactics is the go-to method for tearing down someone for whom you cannot attack their goals. Their goals are popularly accepted. If you attack the goals, you will lose.

But you can always attack process. Process is ostensibly neutral. Process doesn't take a position on the key arguments being presented. "It's not what they're saying; it's how they're saying it." This allows you to tear down anyone you want without suffering the blowback from being against them.

This is a key part of how conservatism rolls; they operate within a veil of propriety from which there is a "correct" way to pursue a liberal agenda - and whatever liberals are doing right now isn't it.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 22nd 2021 at 10:18:05 AM

And they keep moving the goalposts on that, too. Every single time black people try and protest something they ignore it or criticize it harshly, then when rioting breaks out they ask "Why can't they protest peacefully?"

THEY DO. YOU JUST DON'T LISTEN.

Seriously, Colin Kaepernick has essentially been blacklisted by the NFL because he's essentially a sports version of Box Office Poison even though he was being as respectful as possible in his protesting.

He got the idea from a soldier. He couldn't possibly have tried any harder to be respectful. It's insane.

A Mandalorian walks into a bar, and accidentally dooms the whole galaxy.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 23rd 2021 at 5:46:06 AM

Good thing that Mando wasn't as famous during the Age of the Empire. Actually, if he was on Tatooine at the time, he would have already known about Boba Fett.

"Warm it is." That's pretty good. That's not bad.

Now I'm wondering how old he was around Yavin.

Din was about five or six during the Clone Wars, so give or take 20-ish years and he'd be in his mid-twenties by A New Hope, likely thirties by the time of The Mandalorian.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 24th 2021 at 2:16:22 AM

That holds up. If the official timeline is still 4 years from ANH to ROTJ, mid-to-late thirties is about right. Pedro Pascal is 45, for what that's worth.

Well, now Ted Cruz has decided to weigh in on Carano. Claimed that because Cara Dune was a strong, independent, rough and tumble woman that Disney fired her because they only want submissive, "emotionally-traumatized" princesses, taking shots at Fisher and Ridley.

And to further illustrate why I like her, Daisy didn't take that lying down.

Say what you will about Palpatine, at least he didn't abandon his people and blame his offspring.

"Strong, independent woman" is literally why the far-right hated Carano's character before she got fired.

I'm always for dunking on them, but that is not true, she was their hero from the beginning due to her dumb tweets.

I'm talking about before the tweets. Chuds were screaming their heads off about Cara Dune for the usual reasons.

It's only when the actress let her mask slip that they did another 180 because suddenly they could claim a woman for their side again.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 24th 2021 at 12:58:53 PM