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Whatever your gender, you can be a Star Wars fan. Of course I knew it from life before, but the core of enthusiastic female fans is a testimony to the non-gendered nature of the audience.
Cass Sunstein -
The 'cash for clunkers' program was a big success in part because it gave people the sense that the economy was moving.
Cass Sunstein
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How do things, whether they are movies, or plays, Hamilton, or people, ideas - how do they become transformative or iconic? That is in some ways what the actual Star Wars saga gets at, with the tale of the rise and the fall of the empire and the rise and the fall of Republics.
Cass Sunstein -
I talked to George Lucas once, not about Star Wars. Everyone wants to talk to him about Star Wars, and I didn't want to be one of those people. In person - at least on this occasion - he wasn't effervescent and giddy, as the Star Wars movies are. He's more focused.
Cass Sunstein -
Wikipedia works because those who know the truth are usually more numerous and committed than those who believe in a falsehood.
Cass Sunstein -
The opening scene in A New Hope, when you see the huge ship, it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on... that is like a joke of awesomeness.
Cass Sunstein -
A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.
Cass Sunstein -
A well-functioning democracy has a culture of free speech, not simply legal protection of free speech. It encourages independence of mind. It imparts a willingness to challenge prevailing opinion through both words and deeds. Equally important, it encourages a certain set of attitudes in listeners, one that gives a respectful hearing to those who do not embrace the conventional wisdom. In a culture of free speech, the attitude of listeners is no less important than that of speakers.
Cass Sunstein
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Even though Star Wars is easily read as feminist for its time - and even for now, with Princess Leia's role - people wouldn't make a movie like that in 2016, where the guys are mostly the tough ones, and the women aren't in positions of authority.
Cass Sunstein -
There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him.
Cass Sunstein -
The fear of loss is an engine of horrors, but also a source of the greatest forms of heroism. There's not a lot of art that puts that in bold letters. It's psychologically very interesting and acute, I think. That's not the central reading, I think, of the New Testament.
Cass Sunstein -
There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day.
Cass Sunstein -
It is even possible that desirable redistribution is more likely to occur through climate change policy than otherwise, or to be accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid.
Cass Sunstein -
Great works - and I think Star Wars is a great work - are easily susceptible to multiple plausible interpretations. Some of them are pretty nutty, but the idea that we should see it as profoundly feminist, or as a deeply Christian tale, or as a Freudian exercise... I think all of those have some truth.
Cass Sunstein
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The middle class is not doing well, and trade policy might have something to do with that, and so someone who is going to be fixated on those things, who has a business background, has some appeal.
Cass Sunstein -
I strongly believe that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to possess and use guns for purposes of both hunting and self-defense.
Cass Sunstein -
We might have new issues involving information technology for example, or new questions arising out of the war on terror, or new issues arising from natural disasters that can't be anticipated.
Cass Sunstein -
Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.
Cass Sunstein -
It's fair to say that there's something retrograde about putting the leader of Star Wars rebellion in the position of "slave in a bikini." There's no question that that's a fair point. But, it is true, and it's kind of remarkable, that at this point in our history, the slave girl, for a time in the bikini, is the one who chokes her captor with her bare hands and using the chain with which he bound her. That's powerful stuff. That's more retributive feminism than I think teenaged boys had ever seen.
Cass Sunstein -
Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations.
Cass Sunstein
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If Star Wars had been released in the late '60s, or late '80s, or late '90s, adjusting for technology, it fits spectacularly well.
Cass Sunstein -
I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.
Cass Sunstein -
I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.
Cass Sunstein -
I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.
Cass Sunstein