I was excited about this show and MJ, who loves the same kinds of stuff as I do absolutely LOVED it. It was going to take forever for Netflix to send it to me…
I think I’m the only person left in America who still gets DVDs in the mail. It’s not even called “Netflix” anymore, the envelopes are now marked DVD dot COM, a Netflix company. But I’m not interested in streaming. Not with the crappy internet connection we’ve got. I have a smart blue ray player on the porch but evidently our internet is so weak out there that every time I’ve tried to stream a show, it gets me twenty minutes in, then reverts to buffering mode forever. No thank you.
Anyway, I was waffling on just buying it when two things happened: my Amazon points totaled up to half the price of the show and for twice as much. So I ordered it and I’m still $20 ahead.
I binge watched it this week.
It didn’t take that long, there are only 11 episodes.
If you like well written weirdness with a fascinating central character, Mr. Robot is for you.
SPOILER ALERT
I suspected Christian Slater’s character was not what he seemed. I’ve been watching too much of this sort of story for too long to miss some of the clues that were dropped. So while I was mildly surprised to discover who he was, I had long figured out what he was. Didn’t spoil the fun for me one iota.
And I was completely taken by surprise by Darlene! Although the answer popped into my head the second she recoiled from Elliot, two seconds before she told him. Then, in retrospect, so much about her made perfect sense! And looking at the two actors seated side by side, I was struck by the perfect casting.
I was disappointed by the final episode. So much was left up in the air and so much didn’t make sense that I never realized I had reached the end. Then I realized “Dang. Cliff hanger.”
Some thoughts; these hackers, fsociety, don’t seem to have the ability to ponder what comes next. Sure, its nice to think of your debt being erased but there are enormous consequences to the universal erasure of debt. Fsociety didn’t just forgive the debt and put the money back in the pockets of the people who had spent it (which would amount to theft), they erased it. They caused it to cease to exist. They crashed all the banks.
No more retirement accounts.
No more slush funds.
No more investment capital.
No more working capital.
No more credit.
Think about that for a minute, will you? How are modern industries supposed to work without credit? If this ever happened, within days, panic would set in and infrastructure would start to fail. Energy creation would become impossible and forget everything else, food production and distribution would become impossible.
Not one member of Fsociety has the survival skills necessary to last more than a few months in the world they would have created.
You want to read a scary as hell story based on a different cause but the same result? Read One Second After by William Forstchen.
Yes, it makes for a riveting, weird TV show but don’t get any ideas.
Along the same lines, my warrior brother called me the other day. He’s spent the last six or seven years over in Afghanistan and Iraq, helping our military fight those who would kill us and destroy our civilization. He was perturbed.
What happened was a Bernie Sanders event here in town. Joe was listening to the radio and the report was that most of Bernie’s supporters were between the ages of 20-30.
“Socialism hasn’t worked anywhere in the world where its been tried.” He said to me. “It can’t work. Why don’t these kids know that?”
I’m sure he was disturbed to think that for years he’s been missing his family, traveling to the worst places on the planet and risking life and limb to protect what a large chunk of his kids’ generation wants to toss aside like a candy wrapper.
I reminded him that a large part of our establishment, be it political, academic or what we so loosely call the news, has been dedicated to falsely representing economics to our kids for decades.
Most of those Bernie fans graduated from college after the economic melt down of ’08. They started school assuming that they’d graduate with great jobs already secured. Instead, they’re still waitressing at the same crappy little places they worked at in school and living in their parent’s basements because all their money is going to pay off student loans, except for the smart ones, who have defaulted. They’re pissed.
And their very expensive educations didn’t equip them to figure out what happened. If they were capable of research, they’d know that the housing market failed in large part because the government (in the name of fairness and with the best possible intentions) forced banks to abandon best lending practices and give mortgages to anyone who wanted one.
Turns out, when you pretend everyone can afford to buy a house, you artificially inflate the market, which artificially drives up prices, which leads people to believe their assets are worth more than they really are, which leads folks to borrow against what they don’t know is false equity, which leads to massive debt they don’t even know they’re accruing which is an unsustainable economy which when it crashes, lands all over everyone which keeps those who may have retired in their jobs, leaves businesses that may have wanted to expand to contract, just to keep their bottom lines intact, which leaves freshly minted college grads without a pot to piss in.
Sorry, kids.
So sure, to these kids, the dream of socialism, which is sold to them as ‘let’s all just share’ sounds good. Because in addition to not doing their research, they also don’t have any imagination.
Let’s imagine for a moment that all the wealth that exists in the world today were somehow redistributed evenly among all the people. Is there any doubt in your mind that in one year’s time, the most ruthless, greedy, single minded among us would once again have most of it? There’s no system designed by humans that has ever been able to prevent those who only care about money from clawing their way to the top of the economic ladder.
The beauty of Capitalism is that while yes, it doesn’t prevent the greedy bastards from getting to the top (nothing does), it sets up a system that allows the rest of us to live pretty damn well, too.
The problem with everyone being economically equal is that we don’t all want the same things. Some of us will never be happy unless we have the biggest, newest, shiniest and most stuff. Look at Donald Trump. Some of us will never be happy unless we can leave big, deep footprints all over the world. Look at Hillary Clinton.
But plenty of us are more than content just to be able to live where we want, how we want and with the people we love. The vast majority of us just want to be able to pay our bills and have enough left over for some fun. We have neither the talents, skills, desire nor character to be giants astride the world. To most of us, that just sounds like too much work. Too many of us are content to sit around all day, happy to be supported at a barely subsistence level by our neighbors.
The truth is, we are currently enjoying the greatest standard of living ever experienced by humans on earth.
And we have taught ourselves to be dissatisfied by this just because we know there are some out there with a lot more.
There’s a reason “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods” is the tenth commandment.
That’s all socialism really is: Government sponsored covetousness.
Capitalism doesn’t claim to cure the greedy and the Devil can certainly use it to his advantage but when you get right down to it, Lucifer is certainly a Socialist. He must love a system that is based on envy, corrupts the very idea of compassion, keeps everyone poor and rots their souls at the same time.
The lead character in Mr. Robot is a morphine addict but I think the drug is just symbolic of socialism.