I do know that NAFTA is gone. Trump got rid of that one during his first term

There was a replacement deal that Trump has now renegged on.

He called it a great deal at the time… I’ll let actual experts way in on the truth of that.

Okay, lets walk through the timeline here.

The February Revolution kicks off, and the people win, one of the main demands is a democratically elected council who will write the new Russian constitution.

A few months later, Lenin rolls into town fresh from his 17 year long exile and does everything he can to undermine both the Provisional Government, but also the Petrograd Soviets.

The whole Duel Power thing was tenuous, and Lenin wanted more power, so he overthrew the provisional government. But he did allow the November elections of the Russian Constituent Assembly. The first and last free and open elections in Russia.

But the Bolsheviks lost the election, threw a hissy fit, and banned the other political parties, disbanded the Assembly, and set themselves up as totalitarian rules of Russia, kicking off a civil war.

Everything after that doesn’t fucking matter because it’s mostly lies. Lenin shutdown a democratically elected body because he lost. Then he set himself up as a dictator and banned any other political party.

My idea for the prequels is this.

Expand the clone wars into an actual thing. Not that they were fighting with Clone armies. That’s sort of stupid.

No, the clones were of actual people, and the Jedi were the main way to tell if someone was a clone or not. I’m talking full on pod people situation here.

So, Episode 1 can be the initial discovery of the clones, and Jedi starting to hunt them. Introduce Obiwan who is a newly minted Jedi master. He finds Anakin who is a slave, but not a child. A young adult.

Obiwan then starts training Anakin.

Episode 2 would find that Anakin had been cloned. Obiwan or Padame or someone convinces people to accept the clone, and Obiwan ends up training them both. The original and the clone. Maybe the surviving clones are somewhat accepted into society, after the factory and controllers are destroyed.

Episode 3 is Anakin’s fall. He grows resentful that of his clone. The Jedi masters sense this and pass him over for some honor or advancement and Anakin starts to think that it’s because he was a slave which fuels the resentment. Padame and the clone grow close, which makes Anakin even more resentful.

At the height of the movie, the surviving clones are ordered to kill anyone near them in a mass suicide attack. Anakin’s clone, who has connected with the Force, does not kill.

Anakin murders his clone, thinking that Padame is dead, and then goes on to kill the jedi, thinking they’re to blame. Obiwan finds Anakin’s lightsaber, (he and the clone switched mid fight) and assumes the clone was activated and that Anakin is dead.

And then stuff wraps up so that Luke is born and placed on Tatoine.

Wow, the alternate reality you live in must not be littered with millions of bodies of the people Lenin and Stalin murdered.

They were both monsters and, by every single definition, totalitarian dictators. But you keep on worshiping them

Keep telling yourself that.

But no, the truth is single party “communism” is just a new form of nobility and peasants. How many millions did Stalin and Mao kill? All because they had totalitarian control.

If Leninism worked, the Soviet Union wouldn’t have fallen. But no, Leninism led directly to Stalinism. There were no guardrails, no protections, because Lenin had already banned opposition, Which is dictator 101.

Of course, we’re ignoring the European Social democracies, many of which are well on their way to true communism.

It’s a slow process, but they’re doing the work to get there. But they don’t count? for reasons?

Seriously. The blueprint of how to get to communism from democracy is right there in the European Social Democracies.

Universal healthcare and efforts to make food and housing basic rights. That’s like 90% of what you need.

Lenin was a monster. He just had slightly better PR after his death because Stalin was so much worse.

Because one party bullshit dictatorships are not the proletariat.

They are the new feudal lords, who then need the guillotine.

The Bolsheviks were a minority party overall, if they hadn’t been they would have won Russia’s only free and fair election. But they lost and launched a coup.

Then the tankies come in and pretend the new lords are still part of the people.

That’s an interesting reading of history… I’m sure.

But the truth is that Lenin lost the 1917 election, threw a hissy fit and demanded that the newly elected assembly cede all power to him, or else.

The Bolsheviks seized power and banned all opposition parties, and then Lenin justified his coup by claiming that “Vanguard Parties” are part of communism, when all they actually are is a dictatorship.

Stalin wasn’t the first Soviet Dictator. He was just more honest about being a monster. Well, to himself, anyway.

That village that talks out their problems and thus needs no government is A, a fiction, and B, a form of extreme democracy. Every decision is discussed and agreed upon by the group. That’s extreme democracy.

And if you push for more democracy, you can get it. But you have to resist the revolutionaries and the fascists. All while prepping to be a revolutionary if required.

Work within the system as much as possible, because when it’s gone, when that fragile peace is broken, nothing good can come out. As you said, the revolution is inevitably betrayed.

Now if we could actually teach people what a Tariff is. Fuckers voting for Trump wanting to bring prices down, when that’s exactly the opposite of what happens with a Tariff. And Democrats abandoning their base to chase a mythical center that just does not exist…

I understand the push for revolution. I just know that in order for things to get better, the transition to communism needs to happen slowly and democratically.

Well, first of all, Lenin betrayed the revolution and implemented a new form of Feudalism, not communism. His party lost the 1917 election, and he threw a hissy fit that launched a civil war.

All because he thought that his way was best, so he created a totalitarian dictatorship. And then handed it over to Stalin, who made everything worse.

Marx himself said that communism needed to rise out of capitalist democracy. It cannot rise out of a dictatorship, because dictators never voluntarily give up power.

That’s Leninist “Communism”.

As a reminder, Lenin lost the 1917 election and then seized power to make himself a dictator, then wrote about how dictators are essential to communism.

The Truth is that Dictators are anathema to communism. A dictator who seizes the means of production is called a king, and the people are then called serfs. It’s a full step backwards in the pursuit of the communist dream.

The main issue with the Force is that no one ever defined how it and the Dark Side work.

Not that midichlorian bullshit, but an explanation of why the Dark Side is powerful.

There are sort of fan theories as to how it works, but as you pointed out, those are undercut by the lack of consistency.

The original trilogy sort of hints at a workable mechanism.

First is the Light Side. You are borrowing power from the universe to do things. It’s not fast, but it is powerful.

Then the Dark Side, you are not asking. You’re demanding. You’re pulling more power faster than the universe can support. This is why hatred and fear lead to the Dark, because if your emotions are heightened you’re less likely to ask.

The Dark Side should also be corrosive to your own body.

Vader’s line that he was more machine than man. It should not have been a single injury on a lava planet, but a slow decay as he literally pulled the life out of his own body to fuel his power.

Palpatine should have been slowly decaying. Not one fight with reflected lightning.

But that’s the prequel problem. People can’t leave shit alone and have to explain every little detail, even if years are meant to go by between the prequel and the original.

I like vector pinball as well.

Yeah, while there are dozens or possibly hundreds of flavors of “wicca”. The first tenent is almost always some variation on “do no harm”. Normally phrased something like “as it harms none, do as thou will”… Which is odd phrasing for something written in the last century.

The main exception is those who follow Crowley. His whole deal was “do what thou will shall be the whole of the law”.

Crowley was mostly in it for the shock value.

And again, Crowley’s “ancient wisdom” is newer than the invention of photography. We even have recordings of him speaking.