We see what acting on his emotions does to Anakin ...
More precisely, do you mean we see what he does while acting on his emotions after growing up in an emotionally unnatural and unhealthy environment in which he was -- by the most generous and least damaging interpretation -- encouraged to hide his emotions, inevitably leading to them becoming isolated in a single fixation?
If so, I agree. But that's really the only somewhat kind way we can describe it.
Maybe things would still have happened similarly under other conditions, but we can see how they not-maybe-definitely went this way, and identify how these conditions actually contributed to the outcome.
... even when Padme is gone, he is free from the Jedi Order and Palpatine has lost all leverage over him, he still finds himself unable or unwilling to act against him. Same with Count Dooku, all the concerns he brings up with Obi-Wan have plenty merit, by the time he was face to face with the source of the corruption in the Senate he no longer cared enough to act against it. Same with Kylo, he was angry and afraid of Luke and ran away, now he has probably more blood on his hands then Palpatine. The path that the Jedis try to prevent forceusers going down does exist and takes hold of you very quickly.
It's also plenty interesting where these three great Dark Side Force-wielders began their studies, isn't it?
To be clear, I'm not at all suggesting that beginning as a Jedi means you're going to become a Dark Side menace, because that's obviously not true. I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying that the Jedi path didn't offer Dooku or Anakin any constructive way to deal with either a sense of societal injustice or isolation and personal loss. Their way was inadequate for addressing these feelings.
Luke's misstep with Ben should probably be categorized as a different matter from these, but I had to take the opportunity to make that dig above.
Tarkin in the new Canon was given command of the entire Outer Rim to leverage them for resources to make the Death Star, which is nothing compared to the resources required to create immense Starkiller Base. The manpower and network or resources that tells us they had command og is an interstellar empire unto itself in my mind, if not quite galactic one anymore. Construction started long before Snoke or Kylo Ren were in the picture and it was always made with the intent of conquering back their lost territory, in light of that whatever treaties were you claim were signed don't seem that indicative that the war was ended successfully in my mind.
That's why I said it's too semantic for us to arrive at an unqualified conclusion. To some people, the notion that a 30-year-gap is only a lull in the fighting of the same war would be absurd, particularly when one party openly slunk into the shadows to rebuild. Even your own wording (i.e. about whether the war was ended successfully) speaks to the sort of unavoidable qualifying inherent in describing the matter.
To my own mind, it's more simple to refer to the periods of conflict depicted in the Skywalker Saga as the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, and ... the Reylo Wars maybe?
Those people didn't go "You, you, you sand you: Burn this planet/fleet, go to this region, make this thing, wait until it's completion in 30 years." Then 30 years later we hear it's voice again. In the years following the destruction of the second Death Star, Palpatine was still micromanaging on a scale of which individual ship captains sends their ship to destroy, to hide, make truces or go on suicide missions. Dead or not, that's a pretty direct level of command if you ask me.
I mean, has it been established that Palpatine told anyone to build Starkiller Base or to wait 30 years or any of the rest of what happened after the Contingency went into effect? My understanding is that the First Order developed the Starkiller weapon as a show of itself being more intimidating than its Imperial predecessor.
It's not a matter of who is better, it's that Star Wars, at least the prequel trilogy and sequel trilogy agrees that democracy isn't and can't be perfect. Free will means allowing people the free will to not help you do this and that as well.
How does any of that speak to rationalizing human slavery as comparable to arachnids who eat their unhealthy young?
For things that happen on Tatioone to be illegal, you need to have laws agreed upon by the majority and when the elected representative of the majority tells you another thing you shouldn't do right now, you are expected to listen. That's the price. Doesn't mean the Jedi or Leia should turn their backs on the whole restoring the rule of law to the galaxy rather then the Emperor's tyrannical Empire idea. But 10,000 Jedi who no one elected to start wars for them should not be deciding when this or that planet is going to be brought into the Republic against the Republic and that planet's population's will.
...
And as Luke says, that was the Jedi at the height of their power. Their headquarters, their starfighters, their resources were provided by the Republic and those 10000 jedi themselves were born in the Republic and were brought to Jedi as Qui-Gon describes because they have that legal presence within the Republic. There's no version of the Jedi where they have nothing to do with Republic, yet have grown to a size where they have any kind of ability to do anything to help enforce peace and justice on a galactic scale. In over a thousand generations that did never happened.
Does it count for nothing that the Senate was known to be rife with corruption?
For the sake of perspective, in the EU/Legends that was supposedly so much more deferent towards the Old Republic and Jedi Order than new canon, Dooku's disillusionment with them came as a partial result of discovering that strike orders from the Jedi Council he and 19 Jedi under his command carried out -- resulting in the deaths of 11 of those Jedi, as well as many innocent people -- were the manipulations of a corrupt Republic official using them for his own purposes. An official who went unpunished at that.
When another mission resulted in heavy Jedi losses, including the apparent death of Dooku's own former apprentice, he appealed to the Jedi Council to stop allowing their order's lives to be wasted on the political machinations of corrupt officials. He went ignored.
So is that broken, manipulated system -- broken in old canon, broken in new canon -- what should have been allowed to decide where and what qualified as legality-stamped justice? And if so, is legality-stamped justice all that should be enforced?
You don't have to answer this one. I know my own answer.
Rey was explicitly 'sold', and he pays people in food. What choices do those people have? Trade for Unkar's food, or walk into the desert and die of thirst? Rey has the option of stealing a starship, but not everyone knows how to do that. Finn walked in from the countryside, and was so desperately dehydrated in less than a day that he stole from that animal trough.
Rey was sold to an asshole, yes, but an asshole who at least didn't put a transmitter chip in her; who did let her live and work by herself; and who instructed his goons to make sure no one else bothered her. Maybe we were supposed to think "slave" there? I'm not sure that we were, but I guess it's implicit to some degree in the whole being sold thing.
At any rate, Jakku barely has any native populace to speak of, and Niima Outpost even less. As with most residents of the planet, people there typically chose the life of a scavenger, are trying to hide (from debts or bounties), or just wanted to get away from the rest of the galaxy to be left alone.
To more directly answer your question, though, Jakku is a pretty small planet: 6,400 km in diameter. If someone remaining on Jakku doesn't want to work with Plutt, there's a mining operation somewhere north of the settlement and an agricultural town about 400 kilometers away in a different direction.
There's also the village occupied by the Church of the Force -- though due to the opening scene of TFA, I can't in good conscience recommend it.
If they're not slaves, what's the actual difference?
The ability to leave, for a notable one.
Jakku shouldn't be nowhere. It's the scene of the final defeat of the Galactic Empire, it's 'nowhere' the same way El Alamein or Midway Atoll are. The NR should be paying attention to it, for historical reasons if nothing else. Leia has heard of it, and has to know something about it if she's sending Poe there.
I don't know what to tell you. It's nowhere. Rey describes it as such and Luke agrees. Another resident described it as a place people end up, not come from, like a waste receptacle for space. Another described it as "the farthest-flung nowhere rock I could find on a star map."
It is also described as the last stop out of fully charted space for former Imperials heading into the Unknown Regions.
So? Back in the Galactic Empire days she was flying mercy missions against the will of the rulership, why should she let politics stop her now?
Doesn't she need ships and funding to wage battles?
If they're afraid the Jedi could come for them next, they could easily do a few as a 'don't even think about it', and Tattooine is only one of the many Hutt worlds.
Calling attention to themselves and outright challenging the Jedi hardly seems like a good plan when their strategy up to that point had been based in courting the Republic's favor with war funding and counting on their "lesser crimes" being overlooked.
The Hutts knew they had no chance against the Jedi. There's a reason they were desperate, even in the midst of the Republic already being at war, to prevent them from learning the full extent of the Hutt Council's criminal activities in the TCW episodes "Evil Plans," "Hostage Crisis," and "Hunt for Ziro" -- activities that came to include an association with Darth Maul of all people.
If the Jedi decide to conquer Tattooine, and put someone in place as the head, no one will actually believe he/she has any power, because it's wholly beholden to the Jedi. If he does something the Jedi don't like, they'll just depose them and put in someone else. And if the Jedi ever leave, the new ruler won't have the power to maintain himself, and the regime will fall.
This makes it sound like it isn't possible for anything but colonies to exist.
It's very firmly established that they're not equivalent to an army, and can't fight wars alone. Part of that peace would have been discussions, dispute resolution, bodyguarding people, rescuing prisoners, protecting people from bandits, etc.
And what did they do when discussions didn't work? More to the point, when discussions did work,
why did they work? If the Republic had no arm capable of applying force (perhaps sometimes with a capital "F"), why cooperate with them? Or fear them, as with the Hutts?
They're very firm on the idea that the Jedi are not enough in a large scale conflict, and this assessment is proven correct over and over, as we see Jedi get overwhelmed without support.
I hope this is in reference to more than Order 66, when they were ambushed by their own troops on the battlefield.
The comparisons to the PT keep happening because I brought up my disappointment towards the at best absence and at worst outright disdain (the Jar Jar joke) towards it in the ST's production, and you felt the themes were being paid off, and we're in dispute over that.
That doesn't really explain or excuse all the "[blank] did it too" stuff. That's how politicians in Congress defend behavioral failures, not how one makes the case for virtue.
I could still be proven wrong, but so far, if they try to address the failures of the previous generation, it will look something like this.
Rey: You all were so blind, letting yourselves be distracted by Palpatine's Separatist sock puppet and not seeing the true threat he posed.
Palpatine: Hello there. Since you were distracted by my First Order sock puppet, you didn't see the true threat I posed. Actually, it was much easier this time.
I would hope plainly bad dialogue would bother you more than all else in such a ludicrous scenario.
That aside, why would such a thing even find its way into the diegetic rather than the structure of the narrative? Who would Rey even be speaking to? How would Rey know all this? Why would she be setting up herself or others in the present in contrast this way?
Okay I'll rephrase. We are faced with similar situations in the ST and PT, where slavery exists in certain spots in the galaxy, and those in authority have done little to stop it. For the Jedi, you're inclined to assume that their inaction is based on 'indifference' and 'myopia', but for Leia and the Resistance, you're willing to assume inability is the reason for it. We need some reason for making one assumption over the other in those cases.
Hearing what they've had to say (and not say) about the subject goes a long way towards arriving at an assessment of reasons ... especially when reasons are literally stated.
So then those are not assumptions at all.
Lots of people have been feeling that the Resistance bombers in TLJ are worthless and too easy to explode to ever be effective in combat. If you go back and look at the scene, though, they actually just got really unlucky, the TIE fighter happened to crash into the bomber bay in the brief moment between when the bombs were armed and when they were launched. The million to one shot went against the rebels for once, which is a quite cool touch actually. Lots of people continue to feel those bombers are worthless, but that doesn't make it correct.
I wasn't making an appeal to numbers, majority or otherwise. I was pointing out that there have been those of us calling the Jedi Order on their crap since long, long before a new EU or Sequel Trilogy existed to brainwash us -- or whatever is being claimed with this "look worse by comparison" fixation.
