I was gonna say. His entire fucking cabinet was his handlers. Shrub couldn’t have successfully managed a baseball team if he hadn’t been surrounded by more competent people.

Maybe you just gotta piston pound your balls for yourself, comrade.

The even larger issue, one that underpins a lot of laws of warfare, is that you want people to have every good reason to surrender. If POWs have to be treated according to specific laws, then everyone knows approximately how bad it can be, and they all know that at the worst, they can surrender. If you can set POWs to work clearing minefields or commit any other given atrocities against them, then armies have every reason to fight to the death rather than surrender when backed into a corner, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remberer Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

My criticism is more aimed at whoever would point at BB8 rolling on sand and say “That wouldn’t work!” Maybe it wouldn’t work with our current technology, but clearly they figured out a workaround. Figuring out the in-universe explanation is way more fun.

At first I thought it was FHQWHGADS.

Oh, I’m fully on board for there being a more or less self-consistent in-universe explanation for these things. “It’s scifi/fantasy bro, just relax” is no fun at all. I would assume that BB-8 has some kind of tractor beam / particle shield technology that temporarily compresses sand and other unstable materials into a solid surface so that he can roll along at high speed no matter the consistency.

You’re talking to a proud owner of the Star Trek Technical Manual, among several other books of nothing but elaborate in-universe technical explanations of fictional technology. I love those things. Saying that a technology you see in SF-F wouldn’t work is boring. What’s fun is finding a fictional explanation for how it would work!

This is a universe with flying cars and artificial gravity as casually-deployed technology. They clearly shatter the laws of known physics with normal everyday devices. This is like complaining that flying on the magic carpet from the middle east to China in one night would burn Aladdin and Jasmine’s faces off; the prerequisites for the imaginary technology to exist in the first place preclude the objection.