Ok, I'm jumping in here with a couple of points. Mainly, I'm just wanting to get some facts out here rather than make a personal comment.

First, I can understand why Hasbro has stopped the production of Cara Dune figures for the Black Series and Vintage Collection. Lucasfilm may want to recast the character and would rather have figures of the new actress playing Cara Dune on shelves. Even if they don't recast the character, all Star Wars figures celebrate the actors and actresses involved just as much as they celebrate the characters they played. Why celebrate an actress that was recently fired?


Second, her firing wasn't about her personal politics or beliefs. She was fired because she created controversy on 4 (FOUR) separate occasions which fell on Disney and Lucasfilm's respective doorsteps. Every time her tweets made the news, Disney, Star Wars, and/or The Mandalorian was mentioned in connection with her.

John Campea talked about her getting fired on his show a couple of days ago and went into this in more detail but here's a quick summary:
In November Gina tweeted about:
- the election being rigged
- the pandemic being a hoax
- mocking the transgender community

With the first two tweets, Disney reached out to her agency reps and asked her to stop. After the third tweet, they had a meeting with her and told her directly that she was causing trouble for them and that she had to stop. Her recent tweet that got her fired is simply the straw that broke the camel's back.


As for Chris Pratt, there's no reason for him to be fired since he doesn't create any controversy for Disney or Marvel. His twitter feed is primarily filled with posts that promote charities and movies that he's involved with. The few personal tweets he puts out are harmless.

Silencing one side only makes it stronger. And yes, I believe The Jedi were the good guys. But we both have our opinions, neither one is correct. I enjoyed your responses and well though speech very much. And you gave me a few things to think on, so thank you. Things I couldn’t think on if we stopped speaking.

Beyond bright minds. The thought and feelings in to these writings are beautiful. Sometime the written word comes off bad. I know some of my stuff I reread can take on a few meanings. I’d love a zoom call with some of you. Beyond interesting and heartfelt group this is indeed.

I just want to add, I have always found most toy collectors to be very open minded, pleasant and easy-going....yes we can be passionate. But most toy forums I’m on are always mostly welcoming and most toy collectors I meet in stores are chatty, friendly souls.( except pop collectors....as we know they have no souls) lol.

https://news.yahoo.com/brother-actor...192912797.html

True on Pratt, but that’s not stopping the media hounds from finding something. It started a few months back with that Twitter poll. Only a matter of time IMO.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-...ert-downey-jr/

What conservatives are experiencing now is purely self-inflicted alienation, and it's pretty fricking heinous to equate that with the experiences of Holocaust victims. It's not just insensitive, it's a lesser charge of Holocaust denial.

Now you may be saying to yourself, "What's so bad about denying the Holocaust, Thor Laserpunch?" This is the end of side one of this record...

You’re intentionally not listening, but I appreciate your opinion. She was tone deaf in using the analogy’s certainty.

I'm listening, I just can not shrug off her comments as harmless. We're past the point where people in her position are just stating their opinion, words like hers are stoking a very dangerous fire and doing so with incendiary underlying racist meaning. I can't view that as a run of the mill foot in mouth mistake.

They're as soulless as those creepy little Troll/ Cabbage Patch Kids offspring they collect :D It's always been a pleasure to hear your thoughts and perspective though! :)

We're already living in the dystopian timeline if you ask me, and are not even close to the Hollywood happy ending. But the historical context you provide I think is so on point about where we are now and why it's important to treat bad ideologies as the disease they are. Shit's gonna get scary from here on in imho because of our hubris, because we always said U-S-A is #1 and were too complacent about The Big Lie, the whole damn thing's now gone off the rails in a way that is quite terrifyingly unpredictable.

Exactly. People keep talking about censorship and freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means the government can't persecute you for what you say, not that your boss has no right to fire you for bringing them bad publicity.

If I'm working at McDonald's and stand up one day and start screaming at the customers about how Jews secretly control the planet and Disney is turning our kids gay, me getting canned is not a freedom of speech issue.

If you want to live an unexamined life, walking around in a 3 Percenter hat is a big no-no. Is it plausible he could just be a well-meaning doofus who doesn't mean any harm by being involved with a vitriolic fundamentalist hate church and an armed "sovereign citizen" organization? I guess he could be that simple-minded and/or oblivious maybe. I mean, not saddling people with undeserved negative labels is a nice thought and all, but the muhfuh is wearing a hat with a pretty specific symbol and to me that is pretty damning.

Lmao because I never saw that before and now I'm ready for Chris Pratt to get fired.

You're really vanilla ice aren’t ya? Haha.
https://media1.tenor.com/images/9080...itemid=7563372

My street name is Lil Skeevy.

In what way? I'll concede that it contributes to a sense of martyrdom on the part of those silenced, but I don't see any evidence that it makes anyone stronger. As a counterpoint, the rise in hate crimes and boldness of the overtly racist elements in American society in recent years directly correlates to the rise in means of relatively anonymous communication, and then spikes even further with the election of a man who was (at best) cavalierly willing to entertain hateful positions. That's not a coincidence. In any event, nobody's talking about silencing anyone. They're talking about using social pressure to demonstrably denounce bigotry. People can spew all the hate they want, but giving them a platform to do so is reckless, and makes us all complicit. Facebook and Twitter even seem to be finally coming to terms with this.

All the Jedi know is that their guts say 'maybe'.

Seriously, I know they're awful movies, but go back and watch the prequels. They're all about how the Jedi were so committed to the preservation of order that they couldn't detect a great evil operating right under their noses. The Sith are pretty unapologetic about using the "dark side" and doing evil, but the Jedi just want to bring "balance" to the force, not use the "light side" to do good. This is, incidentally, why Luke failed as a Jedi. He didn't want to bring balance to the force. He wanted to defeat evil.

Hell, even going back to Yoda's assertion that only Sith deal in absolutes. Is that not an absolute? Is it not an absolute to claim that no speech is completely indefensible? I assert that some speech is absolutely wrong, and you assert that there's absolutely no circumstance under which speech should be silenced. Where's our force lightning?

Likewise, man, I don't disagree that people should listen to each other more often. I just disagree with your interpretation of what that implies. It seems like you think firing Carano for using her platform to spew ignorance equates to not listening, but the opposite is true. She is espousing beliefs that show she's not willing to consider others' viewpoints. Those are the seeds of all bigotry. I'm not saying all bigots are too far gone to be educated, but I am saying that people who can't start from a position of "bigotry is a poison" are. Listening to them isn't productive, because there's no premise on which to build common ground. Tolerating their rhetoric in the name of 'listening' tells others there might be validity to their viewpoint, and there isn't.

To be clear, I don't think Carano would disagree that bigotry is a poisn, but she has been seduced by the dark side, and letting her spread that poison is irresponsible.

Damn you Benn. My family an I just took 3 weeks to get through the hobbit, now we are watching lord of the rings.....now I’m sitting here wanting to watch the damn Star Wars saga.

Totally true on the Jedi though, their hubris brought the easy in for Palpitine

I'm right there with you. I just finished re-watching the Infinity Saga, and was about to launch into re-watching the sequel Star Wars movies next week.

Also, to patch up my somewhat rushed response above, what I was trying to say at the end there was that I hope Carano's friends and family try to talk with her about what went wrong. It sounds like Pedro Pascal did back when she pulled her "beep/boop/bop" maneuver, but for the rest of us, the best we can hope for is her de-platforming. We don't have any realistic hope to engage with her. We can just put pressure on companies like Disney to give her a wake-up call.

To view a person as below human should be reserved for the pedophiles, murderers and abusers, not a person of differing political opinions.

This quote is an insult to the work of Daryl Davis. Instead of working to silence the opposition, he worked to educate them. It a very dangerous road to tune out any voice that doesn’t agree with your own views.

A very dangerous road is giving a platform to radical extremists pushing hot garbage on malleable minds.

The conspiracies being promulgated aren't delusions, they are purposeful manipulations designed to take advantage of the gullible and misinformed. Dictators, cult leaders, televangelists, and conmen share a perverse reverse EQ (emotional quotient; emotional intelligence) in that they know exactly which buttons to push to supplant their followers ability to think objectively for themselves. Abusive personalities use all kinds of exploits from feigning regard/connection, to lying/gaslighting to exploit the emotions of their targets in an effort to prevent them from realizing they're little more than marks or rubes to these sociopathic puppet masters. In a society that breeds sociopaths, there is a surplus of Ebony Maws out there.

And you shouldn't shrug her comments off as harmless because they were deliberate and contemplated. I don't know her well enough to give her the benefit of the doubt of merely being stupid. The facts are, after tweeting a racist conspiratorial image, designed to propel an anti-Semitic message, she doubled down and used Jewish persecution as a prop in an absurd false equivalency argument. That's just too much "dumb" on display for me to suspend my sense of disbelief. With the wisdom that Maya imparted - when someone shows you who they are... yeah, I believed her the first time.

Can she change or improve as a person? I'd like to hope so, but my experience, unfortunately, is that people don't change much.

Sadly, I agree with your assessment of where we are as a nation. As a country, we have spent so much time avoiding a serious national dialogue about racism and bigotry that the issue has metastasized into a stage 3 cancer. We are so very close to being terminal. The pernicious sickness that is bigotry is systemic, institutionalized, and spiritual in nature. The denial and avoidance of putting this age old malady behind us has created a context in which our nation's enemies - both from without and from within - know just how powerful a tool it is to divide and destroy us all.

The experiment is nearly over... not so fun times.

Oh I dunno.....if aliens invade i think there could be a lotta fun. I mean of course I’m gonna be one of the first human collaborators. ;)

^He knows about the lizard people conspiracy! Our cover's blown! Blast him with the ray guns George Soros bought us, boys!

Please expound on this. What solutions do you want to see that will save this nation, from your perspective.

The only facts are that Trump incited a terrorist attack. He proclaimed violence on black people last Summer. And then he tried to undo the results of our election. Not to mention he allowed thousands of people to die under his watch by Covid while he played golf and toyed with people's lives. How many more facts do you need? The oompa loompa wishes he was Hitler.

If nazis wanted human rights they shouldn't have lost WWII.

On a serious note, I'm surprised this topic hasn't been locked yet. lol

I’m sure you’re well on your way to getting it locked.