Molly Noise 🌙 @MollyNoise@shrike.club

staying together for (nurturing mentally illness in) the kids

as I often warn people

I have never been successfully accused of brevity

I thank each and every person who's spoken to me in person for their restraint

.........................This is what im like in person, no , fuck im WORSE

you ask me "do you like Silo" and im talking about the delicate balance of Propaganda and Violence a state has to employ, the Spycops scandal in the UK, the REALLY suspicious numbers of deaths of Fergusson protesters, the probably continued existence in some form of The Heavy Gang in the Garda (irish police force)

wrt Secret Police:

in Good Countries there are Intelligence Officers / Undercover police, these are very different and you should never suggest otherwise, they always do good things, never murder or anything bad, there is a clear and easy to define line between Secret Police and these other things

propaganda just needs to exist enough to remind people "if we fight we will probably all die" and you have your few jackboots to deal with any serious dissenters, ideally in a way thats not totally secret but not too public so anyone maybe considering throwing a Lets Change The System but Politely rally gets scared off

Anyway, the interesting thing w silo is that its functionally a closed system, no-one comes in, no-one goes out and lives, literally no info comes in from the outside

so there's no border anyone is dying to flee over, no foreign vinyl records the Secret Police* need to intercept, no foreign propaganda, no foreign military or spys

there also is the appearance of representative democracy and the state is able to appeal to the maintenance of everyone's life for legitimacy

and obviously, yes, this state kills people, it imprisons them, peaceful protesters are *regularly* assaulted by garda here - that State Violence baybeee

So with Silo , it would have been hack and obvious to make things all "authoritarian"* (maybe it will go that way)

but so far its not

(*what a great word that conflates whole different types of political-economic systems into the same thing and excludes The Good Ones like ""Liberal Democracy"", definitely not loaded at all!)

Irish kids don't get told we are the "greatest nation on earth" (ha) but we get told One Version of the war of independence (while leaves out the Queers and Communists who fought) and civil war (that the pro-treaty forces had an undeniably correct position) on the NI peace process (that it definitely didn't result in a frozen conflict with sectarianism enshrined into its devolved local parliament) etc etc etc

do not read anything into the above , these are examples

the mistakes in the ideas expressed in that quote are -

thinking there is one singular thing called a "democracy"

thinking that a dictatorship exists in one form (a big guy, normally in military dress, having people shot)

thinking what states people commonly call "democracies" aren't VIOLENT AS FUCK to maintain

thinking that propaganda isn't the normal state of affairs in all modern states

like, the whole "dictatorship" really fucking elides the whole colonial relationship stuff, plenty of countries that are/were ostensibly "democracies" (UK, France etc) at a time when they were pretty fucking violent w state repression in their colonies were a lot more restrained at home

I could go on

there's that quote (not direct from chomsky but one expressed in a doc about manufacturing consent feat chomsky)

"propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship"

and like, lol, I get the point *attempting to be made* , its very "babbies first grasps at politics"
but its actually more that explicit violence is only necessary in certain contexts and propaganda is *universal*

the ideological apparatus -

the suppressed rebellion, The Pact etc etc

I appreciate that its weighty to the characters when it comes up , but leaning too much into it , making the silo too militarised and regimented would have been realllly tedious

its a literal closed society, that kind of heavy handed stuff is simply not necessary

I'm just really taken by the set, props and costuming of this show - someone took great efforts to make it feel and look right

in each example, there are contextual reasons why this is the case

something about the brutalist architecture of the Silo itself, the weight of the generator, the straighforwardness of all the tech is just plesant to see

god, imagine living somewhere everything was repairable , what a CONCEPT

(contrary to this, wrt to the silo-makers, you do not in fact have to hand it to them)

(*plastic is sparingly used with the exception of Empire tech + facilities which use it in gross excess, I think, possibly, there is a point being made there)

this is a genuinely charming show

I was worried it was going to be tedious and obvious, moustach twirling overseers and idiot workers and The Heroic Individual who can SAVE THEM ALL

but *so far* its managed to balance things out okay

the Relic stuff and security group don't end up being "what the writers vaguely think the KGB were like"

like Andor* and Crimes of the Future its striking, lovely, how little plastic is ever onscreen

Doom Paw Patrol

#mergetwoseries

once it was established that the outside looks fine but leaving kills you - I considered;

the helmets are doing video processing and making it look good - it would be a terrible "twist" and completely off-base for the rest of the tech level of the show

outside looks great but INCREDIBLE radiation levels - possible, but im p sure that plant life wouldn't be there, camera would be dead already

suits killing them, basic chemical, carbon monoxide even - v simple, v obvious

[updated w a video made in audacity]

If I Can't Be Happy Let Me Be Useful

[preview of track on upcoming album]