I have always thought that humour, clever, sharp, pitiless humour, aimed upwards towards those with power and privilege is an effective weapon, often as effective as violence which tends to beget more of the same.

(Right now though, after hundreds of years of murder and abuse, anger is most certainly justified…as is making jokes at the expense of the oblivious who desperately want to keep the status quo in place).

So I wanted to point people towards this (McSweeny) as an example of humour designed to make you pause.

“By now you’ve probably heard the news that a Terminator has killed another innocent civilian just days after the last innocent civilian was killed by a Terminator. This unfortunate incident has led to renewed calls to divert funding from the Terminator program and reallocate it into other services that would prevent Terminators from being necessary in the first place. But just because a growing number of Terminators have ignored their AI programming and begun slaughtering humans left and right doesn’t mean we should take the dangerous and radical step of defunding the Terminator program.”

Yes. The police should be defunded. The money spent on military grade armaments for a service that is supposed to PROTECT people is obscene, particularly in light of the pitiful amounts spent on mental health crisis services, family support services and the need to ameliorate poverty – all of which would do more to reduce crime than any number of armoured vehicles or grenade launchers (W.T.F?!)

Training people to kill, training them to protect themselves at all costs, proving over and over again that they will not face any consequences no matter how heinous their actions – those things will always result in the deaths of innocent people, there is no way around that.

So it’s time to defund the Terminators.