Mark Of The...Blockchain?

And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:14-18

I saw this earlier. 

I sort of imagine a conversation going like this:

God: Don't take the Mark of the Beast and pledge yourself to the World's false system, people.

Conservative Tech Bros: Yes sir, we'll be hyper-vigilant about that, you betcha. Hey, what about those vaccines? Could that be it?

God: ...

[Satan walks in.]

Conservative Tech Bros: Is that who I...? Why yes, I think it IS. Get away from us, dude. [Exaggerated Religious Fuckery Ensues.]

God: [Facepalms/]

Satan: Hey bros, I'm not here to try and take your soul or anything. I'd just like to talk to you about this new, exciting business opportunity...

Conservative Tech Bros: He's tempting us, just like Jesus. Guys, we're JUST LIKE JESUS!

God: Oh for fuck's sake... [Lightning bolt appears in His hand]

Satan: I'm a cut to the chase here, bros. There's a Blockchain. You could have the Blockchain *Underneath Your Skin* and literally be a living, breathing part of a revolutionary new financial...

Conservative Tech Bros: Dude, I mean, DUDE! Where do we sign up?

God: [Storms out, lightning bolts in hand with a look that says whoever came up with this Crypto shit and Libertarianism is going to get it, and a cell phone appears in His other hand.] Gabriel, yeah, it's me. I want Hayek and Rand in my office by the time I get back...

Communism.

It's all you hear about from "Conservatives" these days, Communism this, Communism that, everything they don't like is Communism...and with Trump out of power there isn't much these days that they like.

So everything is Communism. Hell, these people talk about Communism more than they talked about Trump, and sure as hell more than they ever talked about Jesus.

And Communism hasn't even been a thing since 1989. Oh, sure, there's a few notionally Communist governments still around. China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam. Hell, there's even active Communist parties with actual elected officials in a few places. But Communism as a world-system functionally no longer exists. Certainly, aside from North Korea...which has moved away from Communism in its own way...nobody really practices Communism on an economic level anymore.

But it's all American conservatives want to talk about these days, and the further-Right you go, the worse it gets.

Hell, some of these fucking people are so hell bent on getting rid of "Communism" by which they mean "Anything we don't like" (and so plain-ass fucking dumb) that they want to abolish corporations and private property and massively expand the power of the State.

In other words these people wouldn't know Communism if it sky-wrote the entire Communist Manifesto with a wing of Tu-22M Backfire bombers over their heads with the Soviet national anthem playing on loudspeaker.

Hence you get shit like some dumb fuck Tech Bro wanting to implement a "Social Credit Score" system on the fucking blockchain to regulate the fuck out of his fellow Crypto-Bros.

Yesterday I wrote:

And I'm here to tell you, if these fucking people ever take over a country or succeed in breaking off part of this one, guess what?

They're going to become all about the Chinese-style surveillance society, and I'll bet you money the "Mark Of The Beast" very quickly isn't the Mark Of The Beast anymore...especially when they see that something like this could mean vast convenience and technological privilege for the wealthy and whatever upper classes there are, and maybe the upper middle gets a slice too...but for everybody else (and really, for them too) it could also mean a total lack of bodily autonomy or privacy with the State literally under your skin.

I don't like it when I'm right about this stuff normally.  I like it a lot less when the results come back this fast.

It's not just that these people are stupid, or for that matter historically (and often socially) ignorant or even ideologically hyper-fixated..

It's that you scratch their ears a little and tell them what they want to hear and they're on that shit like the Zombies eating the horse in the first episode of The Walking Dead.

These are the people who...often without even knowing or understanding what it is...embrace fascism. They look at stuff like Cthulu, Cyberpunk, Neuromancer or the Warhammer 40K games and grunt and hoot about how cool that is...without ever so much as understanding in the least what the stories are even about.

If anything like an actual Antichrist or the Beast of Revelations ever arises...if these kind of people are still around, we're fucked.

But they will be the ones who get eaten first.

Because they're stupid.

Learn the right words, understand what their triggers are, then put up an Antichrist candidate who they "identify" with and you can get these people to march right into hell and call it heaven.

The Bible and this, that and the other thing that they said they believed in before, be damned.

Well at least then maybe they won't bother the rest of us with this shit in the afterlife?

We can take small comfort in that, I guess.

If we ever want the world to get better, we're going to have to do something about the sheer amount of free-range stupidity.

Think about that, for a second.

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