The Total Perspective Vortex

Located on Frogstar World B, the machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula’s grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong.

“In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

• Casualties (reported) from the Boston Marathon Bombing- 3 dead, including an 8 year old boy from Ashmont, and 130 injured, some critically.
• Casualties in the Sandy Hook Shootings– 26 dead, most between 6 and 7 including 6 Adults.
• Deaths by gun violence in the U.S. since Sandy Hook (122 days)- 3,474.
• Deaths at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 2,726.
• U.S. and Coalition Uniformed Combat Personnel Deaths in Iraq (4804) and Afghanistan (3281)- 8085.

Brief Comments on the Boston Bombing

by Ian Welsh

2013 April 16

I will note that the response to this, as the quote indicates, will be to increase the police state.  In context, your lords and masters (and they consider themselves both, and by your actions and lack of them you confirm they are right) believe that new technologies have made the police state cheaper, and thus affordable.  The alternative to a police state is to take care of people: widespread affluence and liberty.  But the lessons of the late 19th and early 20th century, that technology makes individuals and small groups deadly, and that in modern life  you cannot remove the precursor chemicals from everyone’s hands, have been forgotten, because those who lived through that period are dead, and their children are past their years in power.

And so we walk the road again.  Rather than take care of everyone, we will surveil everyone, and use every attack as an excuse to crack down further.

And the elites are wrong about the cost of the police state, this time, too, because the real cost is in societal stasis, in loss of creativity and actual productive change.  Police states become stagnant, and eventually they crack, because no one believes in them.