Thursday, April 24. 2008
This one was pretty much set off by Shadow's soppy little rant down there, I also have an increasingly sore throat and my head isn't exactly feeling brilliant so this rant may well follow the path set by many of my other ones and trail off into nothingness well before my point has actually been made...
Regardless of all this, Shadow did something very impressive yesterday and actually made a valid point. Once I had recovered from the jaw dropping amazment this inspired I thought it would make a good subject for discussion. It was the point about everyone else on this site respecting the others right to believe whatever the hell they want. Around the time I was reading this it suddenly hit me, THIS is the reason the entire world is falling apart. We can't decide what stance to take.
Read on to find out more.
I know, for a fact, that my point of view is easily the most valid one in the entire world. I know that if everyone were forcibly compelled to follow my explicit orders upon how to live their lives (the day is coming...) then the world would be a much better place indeed. This is partially because when I am in a dictatorial frame of mind I see no particular reason for this thing we call emotion but mainly because I am ridiculously attentive to things which spark my interest.
Also because a select group of people would be executed, immediately.
In my world there would not be any crime, because there would be no chance for crime. Every square inch of public ground would be kept under constant surveillance, the moment any kind of crime was committed a small cage would erupt from the ground around the perpetrator. Where are we gonna get the materials for this kind of thing? Mars, venus, the moon and mercury. The mining on mars would be rigidly controlled because of it's significance as a possible place of habitation but since the effort involved in bringing the other planets to something even close to habitable levels would be horrendous they would essentially be treated as floating balls of resource. 30+ space elevators would be set up to allow easy launch from the planet. Meanwhile work would begin immediately on massive space-arks the size of continents, designed to allow easy spreading across the galaxy. The entire inside systems would be self-contained and recycled. Enabling a community inside to florish for over 1,000,000 years before needing to be re-stocked.
Back to earth itself. One of the first things I would have done would be to eradicate money and reduce or indeed raise everyone to exactly the same level of accomodation. That means everyone in the family gets a room, there is a ratio of 1 toilet to every 2 people, the same for showers, one bath, hot and cold (and clean) water always available, a weekly food ration, a television and radio and a family room filled with their choice of furniture. No jobs would be lost, and wages would be replaced with Leisure Slips. These are like money, but their use is strictly controlled. You can use it to buy extra food or eat out, you can buy extra furniture or game-stations, you can buy a better car (sorry, everybody over 17 gets a car, a cheap but efficient model, and the option to take lessons, these cost nothing, the instructors are paid in leisure slips but not by the students, and the chance to gain both a car and license is always open regardless of age) and etc.
What you can't do with the leisure slips is pay anyone to do anything for you. You petition me or one of my subordinates for a workforce and if we think there is no reason not to go ahead (reasons for this include : impinging upon the liberty of fellow human beings, trying to gain more than you deserve and inspiring a feeling of dislike) then we will supply a workforce which will get the job done in record time because they themselves will be paid a set amount of leisure slips, with the amount decreasing every hour the work remains unfinished.
On the matter of crime. When someone is caught committing one the aforementioned cage will swiftly stop them from doing so any longer. They will then be subject to a long and painfully detailed scrutiny to find out why the tried to commit it. If they have a genuine psychological problem, or have somehow lost the ability to get by without stealing then severe steps will be taken to put the whole situation to rights. If there is no proper reason, if the crime occured because of general malevolence or racial hatred or sexual perversion...if it was any of those then punishment will be swiftly administered. If no one was seriously hurt then it may be as simple as 20 days worth of unpaid and extremily hard labour, with the punishment increasing exponentially for second offenders. If you attempted murder, rape, child molestation or anything else along those lines? Then you will be executed via arctic, sun or venus. In the former you will be dumped, naked, at the north pole, in the second you will be fired - fully conscious - in a small pod designed to head straight into the sun, in the latter you will land - safely - on venus, at which point the whole pod will seal itself shut and allow you to sweat and panic for anything up to a week before blowing itself apart and exposing you to the atmosphere.
If you somehow survive any of these punishments then you will be...employed elsewhere, always with a death penalty hanging over you and nothing but the basics required for survival to keep you alive. Suffer through 20 years of that, and you'll be carefully reviewed by experts who will suffer the same fate as you should you harm anyone else upon release BUT (to prevent them simply never releasing anyone) who also gain priviliges for successful diagnosis.
All this goes out the window if you tried to hurt a kid though. The moment your guilt in that is assured you will be decapitated, and the piece of filth that was your body will be dumped into the ocean.
For the matter of privacy, whatever you do in your own rooms will not be observed. Hang yourself, drink, take drugs, smoke...whatever, all fine. But if you step outdoors with a high blood alcohol content, or drugs in your system, then the cage will rise. And if you try to take another person into the room? Everybody will be microchipped, these chips will be deactivated normally, only activating when the person they are in is in a great deal of pain or fear, dead, or in the dwelling of a person they have not registered as a friend or family. The moment any one of these chips activates every single escape route will be completly sealed off with 30ft high walls of steel from the ground, and local police forces (who will be trained to be at the peak of physical condition) will swoop in and solve the problem. If this was nothing more than a faulty chip then apologies all round will be offered and the victims of the accident will be compensated.
With vehicles, they will operate as normal, different models which cause low to no pollution will be used, but every single one will be able to drive itself to a set destination or be driven manually. A license is required to start one of the cars - via being held up against a sensor. And it must be your license as a retinal scan will testify. Controls inside all cars will allow police forces to shut them down or indeed take control, examples would be the "clear the road" program, to be used in emergency situations such as a fire. This program would track the position of all cars along the route a rescue vehicle needs to take, work out the most efficient way to clear the roads and then position the cars appropriately exactly 2 minutes before the rescue vehicle was due to pass by. The moment it has gone the cars will return to their original positions and continue with their journey.
For the matter of natural habitats, they will be conserved. Unessesscery buildings will be demolished and allowed to be reclaimed by nature, people will be able to enter these areas freely, but their chips will immediately activate to prevent them committing any kind of crime. And anything that happens to them in there will not inspire assisstance - provided it is not caused by the actions of a fellow human. Certain people, such as african tribes, may petition to have their lands back (by which i mean that I or someone I trust will go see them and ask very politely exactly what vicious overpopulation and industrialisation have stolen from them over the years. Once their stories are confirmed their original territory will be returned, along with their old way of life. They will not be required to be microchipped. Yes this does mean that if enough (say...over a thousand) native americans request it, they will be able to have the entire united states expelled. They will however then have to suffer the consequences of being completly abandoned by my government.
How to deal with all these people made homeless by my actions? I started building the space elevators/arks almost 20 years before I took any of these measures you know. By now we have thriving mining communities on the majority of inner planets, and are making steps towards harvesting ice from neptune, uranus and pluto (which will have been reinstated as a bloody planet). So yeh, they go on to the arks, or if the arks are not finished, onto the ring of space-elevators until they are.
But the most important step I'd take? No guns. Oh we'd keep a well stocked bunker full of them somewhere on the moon but anything not there is a walking death sentence. Yes I do mean it, if you are caught carrying a gun, and the moment any part of it is exposed to the outside air you will be taken down with lethal force, no questions asked. Every single death-machine on the planet will be eradicated and used to make something more useful. Even buying a simple knife requires a week long assessment.
Anyways...that went on far longer than it should have done. I know it's never going to happen, and I also know that I don't really have it in me to be that ruthless. I have a feeling that if anyone ever did attempt to do that to the world the population would rise to overthrow them.
But this is just it, what I was getting at before. Nobody knows what they really want to do. In order for world peace to become a reality a single belief will have to be impressed upon the world, but the act of doing so would require actions that go horrifically against the principle of world peace...and nobody can dig their way out of this moral hole that we've dug for ourselves.
I must rest now...this rant did have a point, I'm sure it did...g'night.
Mataspore
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