Star Wars Minutiae

Class Act Dynamo writes "CNN does a story on some of the finer points of making the Star Wars flicks. I like the part where Mark Hamill discusses the theoretical logistics of employing janitorial staff for the entire Death Star. Enjoy."

Comments

and in self-referential news...

[jpellino]

it's 'minutiae' not 'minutae'

Re:The logistics of building the Death Star

[Jugalator]

Actually, Attack of the Clones pretty much says this too.
The geonosians were the funny-speaking bugs right? :)

They show Count Dooku the blueprints they've made, which I suppose later gets leaked to R2-D2. :)

Re:The logistics of building the Death Star

[Twirlip of the Mists]

One person's "terrorist" is another's "freedom fighter".

No, that's precisely where you're wrong. Some folks love to quote that old cliche, but it's simply not true. The difference between a terrorist and a non-terrorist is in the methodology. The minute a freedom fighter --or whatever term you want to apply to a non-terrorist --attacks civilians in a way that's intended to inspire widespread terror, that person becomes a terrorist.

E.G., the Mujahadin were "Afghani Freedom Fighters" when they were fighting the "Evil Soviet Empire". Now they're "terrorists" or "illegal combatants".

You do see the difference, do you not? When the Afghan mujahedeen were fighting Soviet troops who had invaded their country, they were not terrorists. The "mujahedeen" in Iraq, as they sometimes call themselves, are trying to fight the same basic fight, but they're using terrorist tactics to do it. Instead of attacking Coalition troops, they're publicly executing civilian hostages and detonating bombs outside police stations. That's not a war of resistance. It's not a war at all. It's terrorism, and it's unacceptable. No set of circumstances can justify, excuse or mitigate terrorism. It's off limits to civilized human conduct.

See the difference?

Had I spent my life in Northern Ireland, the Basque region, or the Gaza strip such distinctions might prove to be naive at best.

I reject the idea of situational morality. I think that the civilized world as a whole does as well.

The whole concept of "terrorism" is being used now a magical incantation invoked against convenient targets.

I really don't know where you get that idea. It's simply not true. I quote from the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report:

The term terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.

The term international terrorism means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country.

The term terrorist group means any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.

The US Government has employed this definition of terrorism for statistical and analytical purposes since 1983.

Emphasis mine. The definition of terrorism didn't change between 1983 and 2002. In 2002, for obvious reasons, the president in his National Security Strategy directive expanded the definition slightly to include any individual, group or nation that provides financial or material support or safe harbor to terrorists. This is not the legal definition nor the one that State uses though; it's just the definition that the executive branch uses to set national security policy with respect to nations or groups that sponsor or willfully turn a blind eye to terrorism.