This is the lesson I learned watching the new Star Wars movie last night. "You're either with me, or you're my enemy." "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." George's Sith Lord Master must be Darth Cheney.

I agree with those who've said this last movie was better than the previous two. It finally gives us what we've been expecting all along from these three prequels - it shows how and why Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader, it shows where Luke and Leia come from and how they end up where they are at the start of the original Star Wars (part IV), and it shows the origin of the Empire. Mostly what made this one more enjoyable than the previous two was that throughout it you are reminded of events and situations from the original trilogy.

The previous two movies only laid the groundwork for this movie, and probably could have been compressed into 30 minutes of this one.

Of course the dialogue and romantic chemistry is poor, as usual.

As for Anakin's conversion, I get the feeling we're supposed to buy this a logical thing. He's basically got three reasons for going Dark, one being his arrogant, impatient petulance, the second being a personal fear that he hopes to defeat, the third being a desire to do what's best for the galaxy.

The third one is hard to swallow. The logic the bad guy gives to convince Anakin that going against the Jedi is a good thing doesn't really work. I'm trying not to spoil the plot, but basically Anakin is led to believe the Jedi are doing something bad, to convince him to help the bad guy do the exact same bad thing. Maybe his annoyance with the Jedi is what leads him to it, but once it was all over, most of his reasons for going with the bad guy are pretty obviously invalid. I guess the Dark Force actively corrupts someone's mind once they give in, and makes them stupid.

The site ToryScum has some great photos of billboards for the UK Conservative Party that have been, uh, "modified". These billboards are just begging to be hacked. They feature a large handwritten message that emphasizes some fear-mongering aspect of the Conservative platform, for example "It's not racist to limit immigration", with the tagline "Are you thinking what we're thinking?", and plenty of whitespace.

There are some amusing modifications on that site, but what I'd like to see is thought bubbles coming out of the "Are you thinking what we're thinking", with suggestions of what Conservatives might be trying to imply without coming right out and saying it. The Economist has a good article on this "dog whistle politics", and a long piece which (for subscribers only, unfortunately) explores the facts of the immigration issue.

Of course, as a "bloody foreigner" I can't vote - not that I'm complaining, in spite of the substantial chunk of my paycheck that Tony and Gordon swallow every month. The "Who you should vote for" survey suggests the Lib Dems or the Greens match my views most closely (although I really don't give a toss about fox hunting, and the survey doesn't ask any questions about the environment). For those outside the UK, the Liberal Democrats are the official centrist party, but the political pigeonholes are a bit out of whack these days. Thanks to Tony Blair, the most business-friendly party in national politics is the one called "Labour" (which is a classic example of dry British "humour").

I would be sorely tempted to vote Lib Dem if I could, but they haven't got much of a shot, although they do much better than all of the third parties in the US combined. So I would be afraid the Tories would get in, and I learned my lesson about refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils on principle in 2000. In any case, Blair is supposed to step down in favor of Brown sometime in the next term, so in theory a vote for Labour is a vote for Brown, maybe, eventually, if they ever really do pry Tony's fingers off the controls.