The problem with dictators

Stickied Introduction:


In order to prepare for a two week trip with my lovely wife to Rome it is necessary for me to write 20 blog posts ahead of time. I don't have a lot of time to do this. I'm not sure I actually have any time to do this. But I have made a sacred charter, somewhere, I think, that says I must post a new blog post everyday. So I wanted to put a stickied explanation of the desperation of my plight at the top of each of my next twenty blog posts.

I am hoping this will explain why my comments might be (checked (X) as appropriate):


__ Brief

__ Incoherent

xx First drafts

__ Silly

__ Unfinished

__ Borderline plagiarized from someone else

__ Borderline plagiarized from myself

__ Petty about the Internet

__ Pandering to the reader

xx Technically illegal in the country of Turkey

__ Ending abruptly

__ Too frank by half

__ Pretty much just the lyrics of some song I like

__ Actually a lot like any of my regular blog posts



This particular post is:


04 maybe of 20?


End of Stickied Introduction


I was roaming about on the Internet, which I can't make fun of here because I forgot to check the "petty about the Internet" box in the stickied introduction above. I shouldn't have been roaming about the Internet because I still have an awful lot of these dash-'em-off-quick blog posts to get written. So far I am finding they take just as long as regular blog posts in the pre production. I'm hoping I'll save time on the editing end. So as a warning you might want to expect more pointless digressions than usual. This is a good example. If I ever read this again I can't imagine I'd normally keep it in.

Where was I. Unwisely on the Internet I saw on Reddit the question posed "What would you buy if it existed?"

And I immediately thought

"A button that when you pressed it killed all the dictators."

But since my idea was roughly inspired by it, I thought of the story, and Twilight Zone episode, "Button, Button". All too briefly in this story a woman is offered a lot of money to push a button that will kill some random person she doesn't know. Eventually she does it. She gets the money. She asks what will happen next, and the button salesman tells her it will go to the next person, and, meaningfully, that person won't know her!

My button would be far more altruistic than that, but I couldn't help it. Wouldn't eventually I become the dictator of the death of dictators. And I would push the button, and die.

On the other hand, the fight against tyranny is always fraught.