Based unfortunately, on experience.

[roseembolism]

There really needs to be a variant on the Goodwin's Law that states "As an internet Star Wars discussion grows longer, the probability of a debate as to whether the Empire is evil approaches one."

At that point we can conclude that just like in the threads described by the original Goodwin's Law, the Star Wars thread will continue, but the actual information content will be zero.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

Given all the Nazi imagery they used for the Empire, it’s really more of a corollary to Godwin’s Law.

[seawasp]

I don't think I've ever seen that particular discussion, at least not as described. The Empire *as run by Palpatine* is clearly evil. If the Empire survives after RotJ, it may become much less nasty, or worse because it's now fighting for its life and has lost its huge advantage.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Lady Fate favors you. I've run into far too many of these arguments, usually running along the lines of "The Alliance was evil because of the contractors on the Death Star / Alderaan was a military target / The Republic had slavery while the Empire banned it" and so on. The nonsense seems similar enough that I have to wonder if it all comes from the same source.

[silverstreak.livejournal.com]

The Empire is evil. And...?

[mithriltabby]

You could also make the case that the Old Republic (at the time of the Clone Wars) was also evil, since they were cranking out clones to fight and die for them while having very few citizens risk their lives. And the Jedi were evil for being complicit in that (along with being generally decadent and incompetent). I expect the Death Stars qualify as military targets, so you have to go into the Expanded Universe to note that the Rebels sponsored privateers to really show that the Rebellion was evil. So the real challenge in the Star Wars universe is finding a faction of true good guys!

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

The droids obviously.

Of course it's kind of unfair to judge a polity by it's condition when it's collapsing, especially when things such as the clone soldiers are a plot by the big bad of the setting.

[mithriltabby]

There wasn’t really a droid faction, though; they were just the slaves of the organics. If the Old Republic had still had a grip on morality, they would have had a problem with creating clones to fight and die for them, but they had apparently become so lazy they relied entirely on the Jedi for peacekeeping and didn’t even have a standing military at the time. (The Old Republic at, say, the era of the Knights of the Old Republic games and comics is much less decadent, and I would argue that they were good guys at that time.)

[ghilledhu.livejournal.com]

Does it count if the argument is whether the Jedi were more evil than the Sith?