#they shot the president and machine gunned congress. okay

[gorillaxyz]

suddenly a book abt a dystopian version of america has become so much more interesting to me. i can not imagine Why.

[silver-and-ivory]

So I got to the part where The Protagonist relates the story of how suddenly America became a dictatorship and soldiers and women couldn’t have jobs and so on.

And it doesn’t hold up. At all.

Context: I actually kind of panicked and still feel horribly terrified of Everything, so this is my attempt to explain why actually it’s still a deeply unlikely scenario.

So first of all we have my initial skepticism that it would ever work out. I fairly strongly predicted that this dystopia would never come to pass. It’s important to keep that in mind, as the beginning point.

So the book starts off saying-

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency.

Holy shit, look at all those ands. There are too many ands!

they shot the president

Fairly unlikely; out of like 40 presidents only around 5 have been shot, and most of those were before modern security and hiring systems (after the shooting of one of the Gilded Era presidents they actually instituted a new hiring system based on merits, as opposed to the system where they awarded jobs as rewards for campaign loyalty, kind of like how they still do ambassadorships today). So that means around 12.5% of presidents have been shot.

But okay, it’s happened before.

and machine-gunned the Congress

hold the fuck up what

look, this has literally never happened before. There are ~54,000 days on which Congress has been convened and where they could have been shot up and they weren’t

I have no idea how you would formally calculate the probability but I think it’s safe to say that this is really fucking absurd and unlikely

and the army declared a state of emergency

sure, whatever, contingent on the other two, I guess this seems plausible, why not, but I don’t think it’s too likely

...I remembered something I’d seen and hadn’t noticed, at the time. It wasn’t the army. It was some other army.

WHAT

AMERICA IS A VERY BIG COUNTRY IF THE IMPLICATION HERE IS THAT IT’S A FOREIGN ARMY THEN HOW. DID. THIS. HAPPEN.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN ARMY IT IS A VERY VERY BIG ARMY WHAT DID YOU DO TO IT

The entire government, gone like that. How did they get it, how did it happen?

First of all, THE STATES THE STATES THE STATES THE STATES

Also THE COURTS, DID YOU FORGET THE SUPREME COURT and ALL THE COURTS UNDER IT and the STATE MILITIAS AND THE STATE POLICE AND THE FBI AND THE CIA AND THE DEPARTMENTS OF WHATEVER AND THE PRESIDENTIAL CABINET WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM

Fine, so let’s assume that the Supreme Court was gunned down as well, or otherwise taken captive. Contingent on the other things happening already it makes sense, but also it is extremely extremely unlikely. Like the Supreme Court has never been gunned down, et cetera, et cetera.

That was when they suspended the Constitution... There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets.

nobody objected because that’s Just How the Story Goes. the states don’t exist. aggressive lobbying groups don’t exist. the army definitely wants to just suspend the Constitution for no good reason. for reasons. because that’s Just How the Story Goes.

anyway this is another and and it is a very unlikely and that’s just kind of lowkey stuck in there

[she can’t use her Compucount anymore and is fired from her job]

There were marches, of course, a lot of women and some men. But they were smaller than you might have thought. I guess people were scared...the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped.

first of all, this is not how credit cards work, second of all this is not how credit cards work, third of all, why would the occupiers do this??? “oh I just took over the United States of America, the most powerful country in the world, by gunning down its Congress and its President and its Supreme Court in a literally unprecedented move, and now I’m going to make it so that women can’t have jobs or access their credit card accounts???”

what a dumb thing to do. why. who. what. the fuck?

and no one cares? That’s. Unrealistic.

look, I’m not even going to lay out how many steps this would take and how did you get an army here like that and why aren’t people protesting the violation of their civil liberties and what happened to the states and militias and the rest of the entire military and why would you do such a thing and how you would get any companies which rely on female customers to cooperate and how you would convince female company owners to cooperate and and and and and AND -

- because it’s frankly ridiculous and overexaggerated. it’s a clear ploy to get people panicked and involved in organizing with feminists; to pay attention to current events; to take sides. maybe it was a wake up call that someone needed. but it’s also. not even remotely likely.

I would bet $1,000,000 that this exact sequence of events as laid out above (Congress and president gunned down, something mysterious happening to the army, Constitution suspended, women’s jobs and money taken away) will not happen by, idk, 2020. Hell, I’d bet almost any amount of money on that.

(I mean if I fail it doesn’t matter since I won’t be able to access money anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing.)

In conclusion, this is ridiculous, paranoid, and unrealistic, it has an extremely tiny probability of happening, and we should probably worry about something more likely, like the Evil Matrix Lords unplugging our simulation.