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On the other hand, if you were looking for a truncheon across the spine your best strategy might be to sit down in the street and start singing “Oh Canada”; our brave Boys in Blue didn’t seem to have any trouble at all rushing those troublemakers from behind.
How do you handle the dissonance of becoming a local hero through the indiscriminate slaughter of rabid zombies, only to have your son come back from Afghanistan partially-deceased with a face full of staples?
Two, three occasions when all was lost and plugs were pulled and the fucker just kept living.
One day he passed out and collapsed onto a water heater, burning a swath of his skin to a crisp: but the resulting adrenaline shock kick-started his heart and kept him alive long enough for the doctors to get to him.
Here in North America the USA will have run out of fresh water long before then. (I expect they’ll have decided in the meantime that Canada has WMDs, and that they have to “liberate” us in the name of freedom and democracy. I expect this to happen around the time they finish sucking the Great Lakes dry.)
Why aren’t they laying traps, implementing countermeasures, fighting back? They know how to do it; hell, they don’t know how to do anything else.
Don’t misunderstand me. The fact that our destiny is in the hands of evil right-wing billionaires doesn’t make me any happier than it makes the rest of you. I just don’t see the ongoing automation of that process as anything more than another step along the same grim road we’ve been trudging down for decades. Back in 2008 and 2012 I don’t remember anyone howling with outrage over Obama’s then-cutting-edge voter-profiling database. I do remember a lot of admiring commentary on his campaign’s ability to “get out the vote”.
And if most people can’t be bothered—if all that clickbait, all those emojis and upward-pointing thumbs are just too much of a temptation—well, we do get the government we deserve. Just don’t complain when, after wading naked through the alligator pool, something bites your legs off.
“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Pedophiles feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as altar boys1
Predators are puppets, not robots. Their pilots may be sipping coffee in some air-conditioned office in Arizona, running their vehicles by remote control, but at least the decision to turn kids into collateral is made by people.
They didn’t actually get God’s footprints on an MRI. They got them on one of those lo-tech EEGs that traces squiggly lines across a display, then they photoshopped the relevant spikes onto an archival MRI image for display purposes.)
