Ah, the lib dream. A “great pod.” This is from the 2014 movie Automata.

The “great pod” in this film is a shitty, tiny apartment with some tech where they eat food that looks like it all came from cans and was extruded from moldy peas. Which, you know, is how it’d really be. The “great pod” wasn’t a naïve line.

Also, I must point out besides the outright lying of Charlie’s below, that’s not fucking how the probability there works! Not even remotely close.

You know people told me all my life I was terrible at math, and I definitely am at the operational side, but my intuition is so vastly, vastly better than most people’s.

I’m trying to watch a movie, enjoy myself tonight, so am not going to write out a whole post explaining why that probability calculation is all kinds of wrong but what he does is like figuring out how much flour to put in a cake not by looking at a recipe, but having your dog bark at a similar cake and determining the amount from how many barks occur.

I mean, writers are not supposed to be mathematicians or statisticians, but the outright lying combined with the utter innumeracy just makes me fucking rage.

The pandemic has taught and re-taught me much about the frailty of human psychology, and that most people are eager to go full Nazi if they can find an excuse to head that way that matches their ideology. For the conservatives, it’s the specter of The Other, the detestable foreigner. For liberals, though, it’s the idea of equitable justice and “protection from harm.” Most people want to go Nazi, to feel that camaraderie, to have a goal that feels noble to them but is in fact a zealot’s quest to enforce their fanaticism on the rest of the world. You don’t have to coerce or convince most to join the Party. No, they absolutely yearn to join.

And both sides, of course, if they can find an excuse to so will put you in the damn camps. Or in the case of the liberals, hiding inside your house or in your prison country in perpetuity (followed by the pods).

This makes me trust people far less now than I ever did. If they can find an excuse, they will have you locked away and disappeared — the reasons just differ.

The u-turns start here.Its literally a week since the gov said domestic vax passports weren't needed. Bring on the rollback of Freedom Day insanity.https://t.co/IHCVwKRhEf

— Lilian Edwards (@lilianedwards) July 10, 2021

These people really do have no other plan, no other ideas, than to just keep people hiding inside perpetually. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the best they have. No matter the harm, no matter how much that it isn’t really a plan, it’s just a retreat.

That’s what they have. But we should let them hide inside, fine. Let them have their infinite prison countries. They can do that. Just don’t make anyone else.

Glad it’s less insane in the US.

I have a close friend who did perhaps the best rhetorical drop-kick of me that I have ever experienced. We had been chatting for a while on the phone that day about weird occurrences in my home state. Then I said something about not all people in Florida are crazy.

She said, “Oh, I know. There’s this guy I know in Florida. He’s really smart, and kind and has a nice body because he works out all the time. He’s just the best.”

And I said, “Oh?

“Yeah,” she said. “One day, I’ll introduce you to him.”

Talk about killing it. She laid the trap and she sprung it with panache. I couldn’t have nailed it any better myself. That’s how you do it, folks. I still laugh every time I think about it.

Stumbled on this pic.twitter.com/QkTbAXsTm5

— Emanuel Derman. (@EmanuelDerman) July 6, 2021

Most choose servitude and desire it. Just look at the lockdown lifers.