[Commenting on the new Star Wars]

This Is What Cultural Conquest Looks Like
I wrote the following at Empire Must Fall just over two years ago:

"Anciently, when a conqueror completes a conquest one of the things done to cement control and establish dominance is to change the mythology of the conquered nation. Their heroes get degraded, their deeds defiled, and the conqueror's heroes supercede them in all ways- often with ease. To the generation surviving the conquest, this is insult added to injury, but left unchecked the generations that follow will accept this degenerate mythology as normal- and if the conqueror is wise, they leave an out for the subjects to go all the way and buy into their control. It's the mythological equivalent of killing a man, taking his wife for oneself, and slaughtering his children by her before seeding your own to both remove loose ends and make her accept the conquest as inescapable."

It has come to pass.

And it's come in a manner that's too familiar to the historically literate: a weak and decadent regime allows traitors to take over, whose own actions either actively ally with the barbarians at the gates to let them in or doubles-down on the decadence that results in the incompetence that lets them through. The Pop Cult, betrayed by the Death Cult, is angry and fights back the only way they know how: rejecting the Death Cult leaders while doubling-down on the core object of Pop Cult worship.

(As for the whole Pop Cult angle? Sunday, at that blog aforementioned.)

I'd call it a farce, but no one's laughing- not even Corporate.