Oct 24 2003
Orange alert, my ass.
I have two things I want to post about. One is about being a graduate student (general life), the second (ish) is to follow up on a previous post about programming languages.
But I was inspired to rant by a recent post on Tom Hoffman’s weblog:
| I think that younger people are more worried about terrorism because older folks like me still remember somewhere deep down in our lizard brain if not consciously (and I’m amazed at how many people have blocked this out) that for most of our lives we were minutes away from a nuclear holocaust that would make 9/11 look like a mosquito bite. So really, despite everyone’s protestations that “We suddenly realized we aren’t safe,” we all know deep down that terrorism is small potatoes compared to living in the world of The Day After or Ark II . |
Fear is a powerful tool, and a tool of the weak.
Fear has long been the tool of tyrants and despots. It is a powerful mechanism for control, but any population made to live in fear will eventually wake up and realize that the thing they have been conditioned to fear has long since died, or that the fear has been stoked and fed by the very agents who are supposed to dispel that fear, and make their world a better place.
Orange alert, my ass. I can only hope that votes are not cast in fear come election day.
2 Responses to “Orange alert, my ass.”
“Switch to Brown Alert!”
“But Captain, we don’t have a brown alert.”
“We will soon”
-Allegedly from Farscape, though I’ve never seen it.
Dunno about “Farscape”, but in “Red Dwarf” there was an exchange in the cockpit that went something like this:
Kryten: “Suggest we step up from blue alert to red alert, sir.”
Cat: “Forget red! Let’s go all the way up to brown alert!”
Kryten: “There’s no such thing as brown alert, sir.”
Cat: “You won’t be saying that in a minute. And don’t say I didn’t alert you!”