the purity of the vision is not in question. i'm just flummoxed by the myopia and selective valuation of human life (or death in this case). nice point operator. scoreboard for officially sanctioned murder. there's not another game in town. but they're all mostly brown, yellow and other colors so they don't officially count. the double standard is the foundation of all prohibition.
so examine our hierarchical imperial government. what do you think of selective enforcement of laws? of selective prosecution? of business monopolies? of media monopolies? of sanctioned lying? of the private skim of ostensibly public money? do these things not have an effect on the public spirit? and yet somehow this is the same establishment to which people are ready to cede authority to attempt (granting it's not a con from the get-go) to bring about some utopian aspect of no ability to hurt one another phantasmagorically. as if, in this one case, something so thoroughly evil will come correct on this one.
of millions of people a tiny percent will go postal (although the incidents go emotionally and viscerally viral) so the response is to indict the 99% with the 1%. if they assert that the 1% (or even one) is worth it (don't make me laugh, apply your standards to the whole empire), aside from being statistically impossible to eliminate, it is the proverbial killing of a gnat with a sledgehammer. it is the pollyana desire for the non-existence of a widely disbursed centuries old technology.
so, supposing it gets enacted, i assume their conscience would be assuaged in spite of having actually achieved nothing.
but, while an intensely salient point, i don't think this is the main one. we all seem to agree that an outright ban or confiscation is unlikely, leaving aside the FACT that the agents of empire are accelerating their death making capacity. the real damage. the ongoing damage as a result of not being able to address the real cause of our neuroses is the schism in society itself. one can see it already. we are reaching the point where the use of a metaphor to illustrate one's position is now cited as evidence of malicious intent. pre-crime. the kind of thing that gets people convicted in the kangaroo court of public opinion. can the empire's courts be far behind? is it not obvious that's what they're angling for? have you not considered how you would feel if fellow citizens (from the 99%) who had committed no violence were convicted on these grounds? even if this can be taken as exaggeration, have you not thought about the pall of fear you are calling down on YOUR society at the behest of the empire? cui bono?
