TNP LIVE EP108 Automated Apartheid w/ Natureboy: Monologue
If you walk into a store near you these days you still might be able to find old signage from the pandemic. Feet on the floor to tell you where to stand, maybe a fancy plastic divider or two, and the leftover people wearing masks at the end of 2023. One thing that you might pick up on from the stickers on the front door or the counter is that safety is the #1 priority.
I wouldn't argue that safety isn't important, but that safety is subjective, and therefore can never be attained. But if you ignore that and continue to pursue it with every resource, you can see it's effects on the bankrupt stores and the intellectually bankrupt people who bought into it with their lives...breathe deep Gimpy, that brain's gonna need it!
Those places and that mindset was once a majority. Safety being a matter of opinion, was the opinion on everyone's mind a few years ago, and for the 1st time in my life as a white guy from the suburbs I felt what it was like to be truly discriminated against in what I was told was “my country”. Well, if it were mine, none of that shit would have ever happened and anyone that suggested it would have been laughed out of the room.
But fear, another subjective thing is a powerful tool to achieve safety. At least for those in power. Fear can be used to make you think of the starvation of you and your family if they didn't obey authority. Such threats will even break said families apart. Divide them and pit them against one another. I felt that threat, on more than one occasion these past several years, and I'm not going to forget it.
The memory of the threat against me to become an experiment or starve, one aimed at me by the government of “my country”, my job, and certain friends and family is what gives me imaginations of being locked out of the grocery store when I walk in one sometimes.
When I see people still wearing masks I sometimes let out a verbal “Bring out the Gimp!” but they probably think I'm talking to someone in my earbuds, or that it's Pride Month. Check the bakery for the rainbow thumbprint cookies...you hope that was a thumb).
One thing that will stick longer than a vaccination is required to enter sticker is the automated checkout. Now, I don't wanna seem lazy, I'll bag some groceries, but can I at least get something for my work instead of the facial recognition camera looking at me like an Incel at cleavage?
You know what, I retract that, looking at me how pretty much everyone looks at cleavage!
On that point, what you and I would do to scope some great cleavage, the self checkout doesn't have the drive to do. At least if its not programmed that way. Could you imagine if your big grocery chain offered a discount for cleavage, but needed to be verified by Cleavage Recognition Software?
How long until skinny women who have to fold them together, some overweight men and former juice monkeys, and Trans people start complaining?
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the differences that I pointed out there, but there ARE differences, and that becomes a problem. Because when you want to protect everyone by verifying something about them, you are inherently going to create different groups. Those that make it in, and those that don't.
Dividing people by their characteristics is a human trait. It's an unavoidable problem for authority that yearns for simple solutions, just one boot to the neck, not a thousand boots and millions of necks. It seeks the quickest and easiest way to show a benefit to it's public. Anything to keep the mob at bay and to sail on the sea of government cheese another day.
An authoritarian and technological reaction to the cleavage sale outrage would be to allow anyone to display cleavage for a discount. Making us all the same. Allowing men, women, and children too. Now it's gross, isn't it?
I want things to be simple sometimes too, but they're not. I want authority figures in western culture, which is the only one that I can barely understand, to have simple solutions that solve problems. But what I ask for in a joke is another man's fantasy...to control who gets in and who's left out of the group.
Instead of some asshole with a clip board moving a velvet rope, if the technocratic authoritarian global elite wanted us out of this rat's maze, we would be. They have to teach the new robot dogs how to coral us first though.
The road to tyranny is soft on the feet.