--- since Bush v Gore ---
I don't contribute much to this page because the act of sitting down to write about where I think we are and where we are going is too painful.
...and I am a coward - because anyone who pokes their head up to say anything stands a good chance of getting beat down by the 40% who are polarized in the opposite direction of whatever point of view that person might be expressing.
I am coming to believe that most of America is, in some way or other, disenfranchised. Sure, we can go vote. I vote in everything from school board elections on up to presidential elections. We can vote, but on what basis do we decide who to vote for. In January we saw a large group of citizens storm the Capitol in Washington DC chanting "hang Mike Pence". They were looking to save the country from a "stolen election" and to protect out great nation from a communist take over by pederasts who kill babies to extract their adrenochrome... or... something along those lines.... I have a hard time understanding how people can truly BELIEVE these things. I guess this is why America is so great... because if someone has something to sell, there is always someone who will buy it.
It turns out that many of the people who stormed the Capitol, when asked how they voted in the election whose outcome they were so violently protesting, didn't vote... because they already knew that the election was rigged. How did they know this? Because a great sales force was pushing that product out of the bullshit factories by the truckload and people were buying up every scrap of it - and they wanted more. Some bullshit is incredibly addictive you know... and once you start ingesting it and incorporating it in to your being you can never get enough.
Oh! now I can hear a response that comes in the form of what-about-ism or other-side-ism... you know, that play at appearing to say 'let's be fair, you believe some crazy shit too so my crazy shit is therefore just as valid as your crazy shit'.
I am not going to play at that game... why? Because there is no end to it. We are all fighting each other while the ship sinks instead of collectively manning the pumps to save ourselves. The owners of the ship are quietly heading to their environmentally sealed lifeboats on the A deck... they somehow think that they can just float away to live in Galt's Gultch (or Island) while the whole rest of the world goes down the tubes... fine... all of us who can afford a defensible plot of land and enough stores and ammunition to tough it out while civilization falls should go do that... and dream on.
So... here we are. We have a handful of people who "own" an enormous percentage of the wealth on this planet. They would probably all fit quite comfortably in to a high school football stadium... remember we live on a planet with ... as of right now at this moment there are 7,862,129,317 human beings trying to eek out some sort of life here so that stadium works out to be, at most, 0.0002 % of all human beings... and probably far less.
...
Imagine a ship sailing on a great and endless sea, no land in sight, with nearly 7.9 BILLION passengers on it... and the ship is not well maintained... it's leaking... the water purification systems are breaking down... the shareholders, maybe one or two out of every million of those passengers, are up on the A deck having a party while the luxury lifeboats are readied for departure.
I have no idea where they think they will go in those luxury lifeboats... I have no idea if they think about much at all other than just being able to hang out up there on the A deck and isn't it wonderful up here, in the fresh air, on this lovely cruise.
It's not a conspiracy to say that these people profit from all the disagreement over what flavor of bullshit the rest of us are addicted to and our fighting each other over which is the most bestest and truest of all the bullshit ever made. At some point it would be interesting to see if the narcotic effects of this bullshit were to wear off one day, as our low lying housing tracts start flooding with a hundred year flood every other year and our farms all succumb to drought and pestilence, and our water turns sour and toxic... imagine the rush of passengers flowing like great rivers to the upper decks to find and perhaps eat those one in a million... because they will be starved and angry... that would be something to imagine.
there is no Galt's Gulch - there is nowhere for those luxury lifeboats to go - as the ship sinks
17 Feb 2020 - united we stand, divided we fall
it's amazing how the sheer density of flaming bullshit flying at us can bring all thinking and rational consideration to a near dead stop.
i suppose this could be said by anyone on both sides - as if there are only two sides in this circular firing squad we find ourselves in ...but...
let's pull back.
it would be useful to remember that old chestnut "united we stand, divided we fall" - not a new concept and not an obsolete one
in America 'united we stand, divided we fall' goes back to one of my forebears who wrote in July 1768 these lyrics, "Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall!".
we can go back and get biblical to find Mark 3:25 where we can read "And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand"... also Matthew 12:25 and Luke 11:17
we can go back further - I am reading here that Aesop expressed it as follows...
"A Lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell.
Many a time he tried to attack them; but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another, so that whichever way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them.
At last, however, they fell a-quarreling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field.
Then the Lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four."
united we stand, divided we fall
pretty basic
and, who is "we"?
is "we" a political party, or team, or class?
is "we" some group defined by skin color, or ethnicity, or culture, or accent, or religion, or lack thereof, or gender identity, or sexual preference, or fill in the blank with some aspect that makes one of us feel different and apart from an other?
who is "we"
that is the question
we can unite
or we can divide
we can stand
we can fall
the best way to remain standing is to define "we" as all of humanity - and stop looking at what makes us different from each other and focus on what makes us all the same
we who loudly point at they and them and throw down division and blame and recrimination and stoke aggrievement - we all do it - we should shut the fuck up
oh yes and make sure you are registered to vote and then go vote
I recommend that you vote FOR someone and not against someone else - I recommend that you vote for someone who best expresses your ideals, some ideas and goals you can get behind and push for, rather than trying to figure out who can beat someone you are against. If you like things they way they are then go ahead and vote for the people who will keep it that way. If you want some change in some direction then look to someone who wants to go that way... and realize that every day is some sort of election, you get up and elect not to pay attention and not care and not do anything to impreove your lot - or you elect to look around and find one thing, even if it's a little thing, to make some positive difference - for - not against - not so you can tell other people how good you are - but instead just to know how amazing we really are.
like I said - seems a little thing - even if it may be hard to do and inconvenient - make sure you are registered to vote - and then vote
1 May 2019
It's May day - Emmitt wants to make a couple points - over to Emmitt
Hello - first, as an addendum to the 15 Feb post there was a very good editorial in the "Failing New York Times" from Jamelle Bouie called "The Republican War on Democracy" that is worth a read if you can can get beyond the pay wall there. Emmitt points out that all political parties want to do whatever it takes to advantage their own selves - the parties are not the people - they are organizations that were founded in most cases by people who are now dead and were they to come back they would not recognize the party organization they started or the party planks and the 'off-plank' agenda items - however the Republican party is better organized and fighting for survival and their plank vs 'off-plank' agendas are more widely divergent from those of the Democratic party. The Republican party has, right now, a pretty good chance of sliding us in to Orwell's 1984 . . . and let's bring up the quotes this thin little site started with. . .
Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
If you read the book - one of the principle tools used to manipulate the people is to redefine the meaning of words and keep people ignorant and unable to think critically.
One of the words under revision very much so is Socialism, or Democratic Socialism. Let Emmitt be clear - the USSR was not so much socialist, even though socialist was part of the name, and neither was it a republic in the sense that, while the people voted, somehow they always went 90+% to the operating powers. It was more of a dictator driven command economy, and it is true that it did provide a socialist veneer, enough to keep down any new peasant uprisings, but mostly it was a concentrated group of leaders whose goal was to stay in power - and that is pretty much it - there was a blip when the USSR crumbled and today it is now back to the same deal except it is more of a state-run-oligarchy state run because the head oligarch, for the last twenty years, seems to alternate between holding the presidency or the office of prime minister. It will be very interesting when Mr. Putin exits the scene. Emmitt feels that it will not be a smooth transition at all.
Venezuela is not by any stretch a socialist government - it is a corrupt oligarchy. Common theme here is corrupt. We can roll down the list of failed states and find the word socialist or communist associated with their declared parties and governments in power but the name does not describe what they really are - which is mainly corrupt regimes operated by dictators and oligarchs.
Sweden is operating as a socialized democracy, so is Denmark and other European countries - you have Democratic governments with strong social programs that do redistribute wealth downward to a much greater degree than here in the USA. Is life terrible there? no it isn't. People can become wealthy, maybe a little more modestly in the sense that gaining wealth is more of a result of hard work and less of the end goal and leading marque of social status - go there sometime - you may want to move or at least spend more time there.
Here in the states we say we are a democracy - but it's really not that democratic at all. We are living in a plutocratic republic - that is where the very VERY wealthy (Plutocrats) pay for influence by funding political parties and politicians who pledge loyalty to them and by funding propaganda and propagandistic campaigns, think tanks and media networks, through virtually unlimited "free speech".
Of course - here we are - disenfranchised even though we can vote, many don't, or we vote but get such bullshit information to base our decisions on that we all seem to cancel each other out - and those who can't vote because we can't register (ex-felons for example) or can't take off work and get to any place we can register to vote without losing income when we don't make enough to live on in the first place, or we are just so naive to think that by not registering to vote and by not voting we are making some sort of statement
feeling a little bit disenfranchised? We (the Royal we here at disenfranchised.org) are not endorsing a particular candidate or party but this website from Stacey Abrams does point up a few things we should take some action on every state - not just Georgia.
Stacey Abrams' Fair Fight Action
voter suppression is a real problem. in-person voter fraud is not a real problem. suppressing the census "count of all the whole number of persons in each State", that is a count of persons and not just citizens, is a real problem - consider that the census count determines how many congressional representatives a state is allocated, as well as allocation of resources - think about that. alternative facts that confuse people or just cause people not to believe anything at all is a real problem. there are some serious serious problems here. they add up to undermining the majority and keeping a shrinking minority in power who work for a tiny tiny fraction of our population who are concentrating ownership of a greater and greater percentage of the wealth and assets of our country in to their hands - largely by keeping all of us at each other's throats all the time - and as this is going on some much larger problems are not being addressed that need to be addressed right now - let's think climate change - climate change is a real serious problem that is not being addressed effectively by our national political class - actually we are going backwards on climate change right now. the gutting of our educational system is a problem - ignorant people who were never taught how to think critically are much easier to manipulate with the fire-hose like streams of bogus misinformation we are subjected to these days. I have no love of political parties and large political organizations. these parties and organizations may have originated from people with the best of intentions (or not) but over time as power concentrates they become an end to themselves - the original charter is made secondary to simply maintaining power... but we have this thing called voting and on a local level people can get involved with their board of elections and other local functions, local party committees (because, face it, a national third party is not going anywhere in this country - we have to break down and rebuild the ones we are stuck with) - so getting involved, on any level, and collectively pushing the big rock up the hill will make some difference - and if nothing else you'll know what is afoot locally. just giving up and saying it all sucks, so why bother is exactly what those who are in power now want you to do. I love George Carlin and he may be right that our government is largely bought and paid for - but vote anyway and vote in every election cycle - do the local elections the off years - vote for town council members and sheriffs and judges - it's the Mayors and Governors who are addressing climate change and other issues that I will avoid mentioning here (but are freaking obvious) - start local - get on your local school board - go to town planning and zoning meetings - this is where the action is.
15 Feb 2019
emergency! emergency! everyone to get from street!
I saw the news today, oh boy. what the heck are they putting in the water at the white house - or am I tripping - it's me right? I mean - the guy who has the biggest button - what 'is name? Mr. Button? he can't be as delusional as what I think I just saw on tv today right? right? it can't be possible that there are, what - - what is 40 percent or so of the adult population of this country? - ONE HUNDRED MILLION people? - it can't be possible that 100 MILLION people actually just go with whatever Mr. Button says - right? that can't be. it's got to be me. who spiked my drink? what planet am I on? will I wake up from this, or is this where I'm gonna be forever? NOTHING IS REAL ... oh! oh yeah - right - that is the response I am supposed to be having. ah - okay - where is my Valium lick - this will be okay - we will weather this - stay calm - can't fix anything if we are freaking out.
pre 2018 mid-terms
prediction - nobody wins
sure, there will be the illusion of winning somewhere, but in the end none of this is making anything better or greater - short term gains for long term losses - shifting the location of the coming reality-impact crater up the time axis just a little, while we all chase each other, biting ankles and bludgeoning with clubs made of petrified bullshit - the impact will not be far enough away, this time, to avoid by aging out or by running away to start over in any sort of Galt's Gulch - imagine the cast of characters in our world who would inhabit that gulch, with their little pink hands and long hairless tails
Middle-ish 2017
please - make it stop
of course that is exactly what some people want - for us all to say "please please make it stop - just make it go away" - and when it doesn't we will pretend it did and tune out all stuff that contradicts our new found disbelief - we swath ourselves in comfortable lies and judge our progress by how much we infuriate those who stand outside our protective bubble - we are not happy until you are not happy
not exactly a way to make progress
Christmas/Years End 2016
here we have an xmas card (as opposed to a Christmas card) from professor Emmitt Plek
post election (US) November 2016
it
it is not entertainment or reality tee vee
it might be entertaining in some dark and ironic perspect
it certainly is not funny, like "ha ha ha", or is it?
it might be funny, like "oh this is odd" or "what the fuck!"
it could evolve quickly from a wtf event in to a worldwide disaster
it could be a wake up call for those who have been sleeping
it could be a signal to head for the doors
when there are no doors to head to
when there is no dream to wake from
when we are well down that evolutionary path to disaster
when there is nothing odd about this at all
this was predictable
this should be no surprise
we all made this
it's ours
we own it
enjoy
enjoy blaming others
enjoy blaming yourself
enjoy blaming
enjoy the experience
enjoy experiencing
because these are interesting times
and we should all drink it in
go to your personalized reverb chambers
and scream and shout and be happy
or be mad and feel satisfaction at that anger
because you can feel something
rather than nothing
and know this
when everyone alive today turns to ash and dust
there will be those who will look at our present moment
and our immediate future that is rushing up to meet us
and they will see their past
their history
and they will make their own judgments and explanations
will they thank us for our foresight and perspective?
will they author tomes extolling our wise choices?
will they create a fiction
a fantasy
some story
to justify their own
selfish
stupid
short-sighted
self-serving
idiocy
and who really gives a shit
apparently no one
not enough
not enough to change the pattern
the pattern that repeats
and repeats
and repeats
and repeats
and
repeats
a couple quotes from Orwell and Idiocracy - with ref to Large Concepts Super-Collider / LCSC idea
Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
George Orwell -1984 (published 1949)
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"It's got electrolytes."
and
"Ow, my balls!"
Idiocracy (movie 2006)
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