Motto : “We wish you a Merry Christmas… and a lot of dead people next year, preferably killed by our products. Thanks for choosing us…”
DMB : Haha frick that’s terrifying.i Looks like a bit of a jerky ride. Do you think it’d be able to sense a baby sitting in it’s path?
PGD : I honestly hope not. If there’s anything that robo-reindeer can offer humanity it’s help with our over-population problem.ii
DMB : …by running around and swiftly kicking our most fertile males in the cahones?
PGD : As Mr. Adams points out,iii not only do you not want to piss off the very fertile men (and there’s never been one more fertile than Genghis Khan), but pissing off men in the first place is fairly bad policy unless you’re looking for a fight. A saner policy would be to more rigorously weed out the dud children from the general population, be it via infectious disease, starvation, child labour, war, or any of the other normal population culls that humanity is still so accustomed to facing in 65% of the world today, just as it has for 99% of its entire history.
Not that children aren’t cute and innocent and the entire make-up of their mothers’ conscious universes from conception onwards, sure they are, it’s just that you can most definitely have too much of a good thing, be it christmas sweets or infantilised little ones.
Whereas mothers want to protect their little ones and create a “safe” and “secure” space for them, fathers want to push their children to grow up or get out, thus the stereotype of “get a haircut and get a job,” which could only have come from the father (and only at a time when you could actually discern a mother from a father – you’ll note that this is an increasingly tenuous proposition).
Anyways, robo-reindeer could play the role that invading armies used to play,iv back before the Internet relegated geography to cave-dwelling understudy.
Unless, that is, you’re man enough to do the job yourself.
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- As with anything else bought and paid for by the US Government, that’s the entirety of the point : it looks terrifying, but in the field of combat it’s about as effective as a pack of cooked pasta. Oh you think drones and swat teams are scary too ? The drones are only necessary because the “gender fair” military has been rendered too pussified to fight door-to-door, and the the swat team is only so over-actively trigger-happy because they’ve never actually had anyone fight back. Do you think they’d be so bold if half of their crew were killed in the line of duty the last time they took the field ? ↩
- Quoth MP :
the necessary cognate of “a world without violence” (such as you know, periodic wars and general “mindless” killing) is a world with overpopulation. There’s no squirming out of this, either the herd is culled periodically, in which case it produces both genders balancedly in its offspring, or else the herd is forever at carrying capacity of the land, and it produces females of both sexes. […] It all just simply and directly, unerringly and unavoidable flows from your strange notion that “life, unqualified, is the highest value there is” and its companion that “you just want to”, which is to say “wanting to use what the gods gave you” – not on occasion, not on every occasion where it’s practicable, but always.
Your life isn’t worth infinity, it’s worth a hard penny.↩
- From Adams’ The Private Life of Genghis Khan :
Slowly, with the grace of a beautiful woman stepping into a bath, a long slim silver craft lowered itself gently to the ground. Soft light streamed from it. From its opening doorway stepped a tall elegant creature with a curiously fine grey green complexion. It walked slowly towards them.
In its path lay the dark figure of a peasant who had been crying quietly to himself since he had watched his liver being eaten by Ogdai’s dog and had known that no way was he going to get it back, and wondered how on Earth his poor wife was going to cope now. He chose this moment finally to pass on to better things.
The tall alien stepped over him with distaste and, though you would have had to read his face very closely to realise this, a little envy. He nodded briefly to each of the gathered Mongol leaders in turn, and pulled a small clipboard out from under his heavy metallic robe.
“Good evening,” it said in a small weaselly voice, “my name is Wowbagger, also called the Infinitely Prolonged, I shall not trouble you with the reasons why. Greetings.”
He turned and addressed the completely pop-eyed mighty Khan.
“You are Genghis Khan? Genghis Temüjin Khan, son of Yesügei?”
The diary scrolls slipped from Khan’s hands to the ground. The pale luminesence from Wowbagger’s ship suffused his wondering ravaged, careworn yellow features. As in a dream the mighty Emperor stepped forward in acknowledgment.
“Can I just check the spelling?” said the alien, showing him the clipboard, “I would hate to get it wrong at this stage and then have to start all over again, I really would.”
Khan nodded faintly.
“Right number of aitches, then?” said the alien.
Again, the transfigured Emperor slightly inclined his face, while his eyes still boggled.
“Good,” said Wowbagger, and made a little tick on his clipboard. He looked up. “Genghis Khan,” he said, “you are a wanker; you are a tosspot; you are a very tiny piece of turd. Thank you.” With that he retreated into his ship and flew off.
The was a nasty kind of silence.
Later that year Genghis Khan stormed into Europe in such a rage that he almost forgot to burn down Asia before he left.
- Robo-reindeer could be mankind’s blood-soaked salvation in the way that autonomous cars could safely and quickly whisk you to work and back. Doesn’t mean that either is anywhere on the practical horizon, nor really at home outside of comic books.↩
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