Yes, I'm still slowly plugging away at this Insertion Burn animated adventure. When last we left our hero James, he was captured by mooners deep beneath the surface of Enceladus as he searched for this mysterious (and apparently very valuable) tetrahedron shaped artifact. And now he awaits his fate…
AUTHOR'S NOTES
Some of you may recall that, in a bout of what seemed like exceptionally gratuitous sadism, when our cuddly zombie bot captured Ula it tested out some sort of flesh-eating acid on her face. I mentioned at the time that I wanted to show that it had acid in its fangs. This is why.
Sure, I guess I could have shown it melt its way through some metal instead, but (A) that wouldn't have been nearly as dramatic, and (B) just because an acid destroys metal doesn't necessarily mean it will melt flesh. At least I don't think so. I'm not an acid scientist. Is there a fancy word for 'acid scientist?' 'Acidologist,' maybe? Just a minute, let me check Google… Hmm. Not very helpful, Google! Bunch of stuff about LSD. Okay, 'acidologist' it is, and screw you, SpellCheck!
It's election day here in the United States and no, I won't be voting today… because I already did the early voting thing. I've never been all that big on voting, though, largely because elections have always just felt like you're choosing what flavor of interchangeable bureaucrat you want fecklessly spending your money for the next two years. This year I actually felt like I could see a substantial difference between the direction our two parties want to take the country, so I figured “what the hell,” and slid out of my subterranean lair just long enough to cast a ballot and disappear back into the darkness.
This did inspire me though to take a look at something I've seen brought up in science fiction universes which kind of bothers me. It's the idea, popular with some more utopian-minded creators, that the ideal method of governance is direct democracy. I'm highly skeptical about that. There are different rationales offered, be it that cybernetic enhancements make voting as easy as blinking your eyes, or technology makes information so readily available that now everyone's informed, to wishful thinking that In The Future we've “evolved” past primitive oppressive schemes which took control out of the hands of The People. But is pure democracy really ideal?
Personally, I don't think there's anything particularly sophisticated about democracy. It's the embodiment of violence. It's me saying “I have more people on my side, so we get what we want.” It's brute force without all the messy stabbing. And yeah, I know, in a pure democracy, at least everyone's equally culpable for whatever dumb decision gets made… except not really. Saying everyone's responsible is basically the same thing as saying no one is responsible.
What's good about a representative system is that it's more insulated from making rash hysteria-based decisions. It forces deliberation and compromise, and representatives have to answer to their constituents at the end of their term. No, your representative is not a rubber stamp for every policy position you personally support, but at the end of his or her term if you don't think they've done a good job, you can vote them out. This in theory forces representatives both to think beyond what's immediately popular but to also keep the desires of their constituents in mind. I did say “in theory.” Systemically, at least, it seems to be a much more robust system of governance than pure democracy. But that's just my opinion.
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