![]() It’s pretty clear at this point the Emperor can do pretty much whatever he wants. There is a political angle here, of course – the Emperor doesn’t want to share power, so he abolishes the Senate. TARKIN: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. ![]() TAGGE: That’s impossible! How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy? The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. TARKIN: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. Consider the discussion between General Tagge and Grand Moff Tarkin: I always assumed the Death Star was primarily designed as a cost-cutting measure. And yet if the Emperor can show that he’s committed to vaporizing an entire planet, that makes open revolt a very frightening proposition. The loss of an entire planet hurts the Rebellion, but it probably hurts the Empire too. The Death Star is clearly that kind of negotiating threat. “I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they’re not much bigger than two meters.” And yet, if the Doomsday machine can’t be turned off, the U.S. The loss of the entire world hurts the Russians much more than the loss of Stalingrad would hurt them. The Russians have built a Doomsday machine that will blanket the world with radiation if a nuclear weapon goes off at certain Russian targets. The more famous pop culture example is Dr. This would cost both the buyer (him) and the seller (the other party) lots of money! That’s crazy! But if everyone believes that this one guy will jettison an entire deal just because one detail doesn’t please him, then people start paying attention to him. An example is the purchase manager who’s willing to walk away from a 6 month negotiation process if one measly line item in the contract isn’t changed. One of the more effective negotiation tactics, from a game theory perspective, is to convince your opponent that you’re crazy enough to do something stupid. The strategic calculus of the Death Star, on the other hand, may be more rewarding. It may produce them at a higher cost than would justify the operation of the factory, but at least at the end of the day there’s some shirts. Even the shittiest factory in the world at least produces crappy T-shirts. Thousands of lives are lost and millions of man-hours are spent producing things that will break, explode or be exploded. War in general makes poor economic sense. That would require long-term occupations in several places, and even in this long-ago, far-away place, Halliburton’s prices are steep. The loss of Alderaan hurts, but is better than letting the rebellion spread to other planets. Based on the number if representatives in the senate we see in the prequels, there are hundreds of planets in the empire. You need an unaccountable monarch to make the ruthless decisions required to hold disparate cultures together.Īs for the economics, it really depends on the number of planets in the empire. This dichotomy is why I don’t think you can have a democratic empire. Why else would the rebels set up shop in such an inhospitable place? There’s not a planet with Cancun-like weather anywhere in the Empire? He nukes Alderaan and so all the habitable planets have turned the rebels away – too afraid of the Empire’s new weapon. Like Truman and Hiroshima, he need to prove to everybody that he was willing to use it. Palpatine, the absolute monarch, had a new apocalyptic technology. To my mind, this is why the rebels are on Hoth in the second film. Of course, the American people wouldn’t have accepted that course of action and the Afghans and Pakistanis knew it. Pakistan would be a lot more hesitant to shelter them. ![]() Imagine if we’d just nuked every town in Afghanistan in 2001. One key part of our strategy, preventing the Taliban from sheltering inside Pakistan, has failed completely because so many Pakistanis welcome the Taliban. Did these stormtroopers have problems with blaster fire accuracy?Īs America has learned in recent years, chasing down rebels is hard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |