"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell
-- and it's not some dead dude who wore a funny hat. [Kilkenny]
The protagonist from the movie V for Vendetta, known for wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, begs to differ:
[T]ruth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
Is there any ground at all between ineffectual protests against entrenched power and killing the high chancellor, dying, and having your protege blow up parliament? I'm up for a 5th of November beer. (It's a start, right?)
Californians, like always, continue to pave the roads with good intentions:
Simmons, a 67-year-old San Clemente retiree, has invested $200 to file a proposed ballot initiative that would make it a crime for politicians or the mass media to twist the truth to influence an election or affect public employment.
Simmon's initiative proposes a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for members of the public trust who intentionally deceive in providing "material facts" to sway the public.
"If we could just get the people who serve in the public trust to tell us the truth, I think there's enough collective wisdom in the hearts and minds of Americans to do what's right," he said.
This is so absurd that if it did manage to get on the November 2010 ballot I just might vote for it, you know, for kicks. Sure, my standing policy is to vote No on Everything - but just imagine the giant clusterfuck that would ensue if this thing were to pass (which it wouldn't).
California would have its very own Ministry of Truth.
All cable news channels would be outlawed.
The fines collected by the state would solve the budget crisis within three fiscal quarters.
Political discourse would devolve into an endless argument over what is or is not true, leading to the ultimate realization that there is no such thing as objective truth.
The postmodernist in me would love to see this happen. But no, we'll be forced to vote on stupid bond measures while the state continues to sink into the ocean.
NEW YORK (AP) -- The artist who designed the famous Barack Obama
''HOPE'' poster has admitted he didn't use the Associated Press photo
he originally said his work was based on but instead used a picture the
news organization has claimed was his source.
Shepard Fairey,
a Los Angeles-based street artist with a long, often proud history of
breaking rules, said in a statement Friday that he was wrong about
which photo he used and that he tried to hide his error. It was not
immediately clear whether he would drop his lawsuit against the AP over
the use of the photo.
''In an attempt to conceal my mistake, I
submitted false images and deleted other images,'' said Fairey, who has
been involved in countersuits with the AP, which has alleged copyright
infringement. ''I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment, and I
take full responsibility for my actions, which were mine alone.''
It seems like the Election of the Dead gets started earlier and earlier every election cycle.
If dead communists and socialists aren't your thing, there's now the dead occultist, reputed in life as the "wickedest man in the world" Aleister Crowley:
Aleister Crowley is dead, British, and not running for office. No, we don’t want him as President of the United States of America. We’re not trying to win an election here. We’re trying to send a message. [Aleister Crowley 2012]
The good folks behind Aleister Crowley 2012 seem earnest, with the objective "to promulgate [Crowley's] Law of Liberty." The apathetic anarchist in me is all about liberty, but the question is worth asking: can a message be promulgated through a write-in campaign for a dead guy? Because it's like Guy Debord said, "you cannot combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle."
Upon the realization that the electoral process is a sham, voting dies as a means of resistance. Utilizing the process, even if only "to send a message," actually validates the legitimacy of the system being rejected! (Think of the influence, say, "record voter turnout figures," have on the perception of the process. Or a breezy human interest story on the 6:00 news about the festival atmosphere at the polling station where you just wouldn't believe the wacky people you might run into.)
I first advise abstention. Or perhaps the fouling of one's ballot so it cannot be processed, thereby increasing the "undervote" and calling voting mechanisms into question.
The thing is, message promulgation, using means established by The System/The Machine/The Spectacle, (a system fundamentally opposed to the kind of Liberty the Crowley 2012ers propose,) runs the risk of the message being appropriated and reordered to suit the whims of that system.
Nonetheless, (what the hell, right?) In closing, if you simply must vote, why not consider a dead dude? Dead guys aren't superior to your standard political candidates because they're communists, socialists, or occultists. They're superior candidates because they're dead.
And if you simply must vote, for someone alive, consider this guy:
We all agree we're fucked, yes? that progress can only be defined by
capitalism's metrics and that the destruction of our species is
progress's inevitable success, and since that success is inevitable, we
typists are competing only for top Cassandra. Old news.
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