My reply to nutildah is re-arranged in descending order of relevance to things other than a forum argument:


Cameraphones were not around in 1949; nonetheless, they are aptly described as handheld portable “telescreens”.  Allegories in literature ranging from Homeric poems to Shakespearean plays are regularly adapted to problems and scenarios specific to modernity.  Etc...

Moreover, the They Live adaptation was not directed at Covid.  It spoke to the reaction to Covid:  Whole societies throughout the world being essentially put under mass house-arrest, under a barrage of official propaganda.  Surely, concerns about mass coercion and manipulative control existed in 1988—and such things were indeed the essential subject addressed allegorically by the film in question.  This is not about Covid, qua Covid.

For more decades than you have probably been alive, some people have been warning that governments could exploit a crisis for tyrannical purposes.  Most people blew them off as “paranoid conspiracy theorists”.  You are blowing them off as paranoid conspiracy theorists when their erstwhile predictions have actually come true.  It is no longer a matter of arguing over potential future happenings:  It is denial of present reality.

—Unless you want to argue that there is nothing whatsoever tyrannical about mass lockdowns under the rubric of unlimited peremptory rule by “emergency” orders.  In that case, we have nothing whatsoever to discuss.


Translation:  When you cannot argue substance, you argue form—and you try to flip everything on its head so as to make it look like you are taking the high road.  That is also intellectually dishonest.  I do not say that for the purpose of being insulting, but rather, as a concise and accurate description.


That’s nice of you, as to form.  In substance, you completely misinterpreted the post, and tried to link it to your American election—a matter of much less concern to the rest of the world than Americans would like to believe.

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What we need is less arguments with American liberals who are currently whipped into a frenzy over their irrelevant election (which I was not the one to bring up here), and more Bitcoin porn.

By “we”, I mean “I”.

I have comedic licence to rip these cherry-picked misquotes out of context.

So, which is it?  I hear that there is a rising financial starlet who wants to know if you can be swayed to assuage her loneliness by the vast amount of Bitcoin that she makes day-trading.

No, I am not trying to incite any offensive behaviour toward the individual in question.  My sensibilities as a gentleman would not allow such a thing!  Rather, I am trolling sirazimuth, who got upset over a post that SwayStar apparently just ignored.