Protest-protesters/politics
Posted on 2004-07-19 by ivo :: /politics :: link
Conservatives
to protest RNC protests ―what?
Their website has more
information. These guys seem to be seriously derailed.
There is nothing wrong with protests to make yourself heard, but
these guys just seem to be protesting just for the heck of it:
“We must admit we get a certain high from
puncturing the moral self-righteousness of leftists.”
The FAQ is filled with specious claims, appealing to the fear of
and uncertainty over other cultures. They seem to assert that
western culture is the only acceptable culture, denying the fact
that morals and standards vary wildly elsewhere:
“When mothers happily send their children
off to bomb buses and schools, this is not based on any rational
grievance. No, this is endemic of a sick, utterly immoral,
anti-life culture that serves only one purpose: to keep tyrants
in power. ”
Time for an anti-anti-protest-protest-protest movement?
Colonialization by the U.S./politics
Posted on 2003-12-05 by ivo :: /politics :: link
“People of the world, unite and defeat the
U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs! People of the world,
be courageous, and dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance
wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the
people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”
Mao Ze Dung, "Statement Supporting the
People of the Congo (L.) Against U.S. Aggression" (November 28,
1964)
Even back then it was the U.S. who was seen as the world's
aggressor, and indeed I feel like I'm living in a country that has
been colonialized by the U.S. mindset. All too often people,
influential people, stare at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,
and try to copy american ideas, while they are completely out of
context, irrelevant and sometimes plain wrong.
A good example of this, and a source of quite a bit of
frustration, is the way the Delft
University of Technology tries to be the MIT
aan de Schie, and tried to copy a considerable amount of
nonsensical concepts; they may make sense when applied to an
american university, but here they don't, at least not in the way
people seem to want to apply them.
The prime minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter
Balkenende, is sometimes seen as not having a clear vision,
and as someone who blindly follows other political leaders. I
would say that this
t-shirt should be created for us living in the Nederlands.
(And some italian I met was wearing a similar
t-shirt about Berlusconi.)
Making fun of world leaders/politics
Posted on 2003-12-04 by ivo :: /politics :: link
(This is still just a lot of loose ends, I'm going to write
followup articles to address some items in this article. Trying
to write down all these thoughts is part of the process of
understanding it, so the articles this section will probably
remain chaotic for a while.)
Try doing a Google search on miserable
failure. The first item you will see in the search results
is the official biography of the American president George Bush.
This is the result of a meme that's apparently been going on for
a while; see this
and this
weblog entry. The key is to get as many sites as possible
to include the following piece of text (note that I'm
contributing to this meme by quoting it here):
“From this day forth, I will refer to
George W. Bush as a Miserable
Failure at least once a day. Why, you ask? Well, someone
came up with this great idea to link George W. Bush and Miserable
Failure in popular search engines. If you have a blog or web
site, help raise the link between George W. Bush and the phrase
‘miserable
failure’ by copying this link and placing somewhere on
your site or blog.”
Thank you very much for your participation.
Satires and parodies on Bush, his behavior, his words, his
administration, and more have been published ever since he got
into the public eye, as documentaries, jokes in popular television
shows, websites, cartoons, blog entries such as the one above.
Even books
are published which make fun of him. To me it seems like the
amount of these satires have been increasing over the past two
years, actually, ever since that tuesday in september 2001.
Lots of websites have arosen during the term of his presidency,
trying to explain to the public how bad his administration is
performing, how much the so called war on terrorism has
cost the U.S. and other countries (a lot), and what is actually
being accomplished in it (not much good).
I won't say that Bush is to blame for all bad things that are
happening, but he's the most visible in the media. It's certainly
not the first american president to be considered incapable; have
a look at an old airings of shows like Saturday Night Live, you'll
see jokes about how the president can't spell, that he's an idiot,
and so on. Besides, the U.S. isn't the only country with an idiot
for president. Idiots have been running this world for a very,
very long time.
Plato's cave
There is a duality in the role of the news media. On one side
they are capable of showing the masses what is going wrong in the
world, on the other side they are obeying the official stream of
information in everyday news broadcasts.
The first kind of news requires a lot of research, most
information will be kept secret. This is usually done in
background articles, documentaries, movies. It requires effort to
get to this information, and only sometimes published as a
truthful, well-formed, readily accessible piece.
The second kind of news is what big news corporations do all day
round, they buy eachother's news items, mingle that into a
low-level broadcast and fire it off into the masses, hoping that
enough people will read/see/hear their version of the story.
This second kind of news is what causes people to be too much
focused on what the media are telling them. It's like Plato's
cave, we can't go out of the cave to see what the outside
world really looks like, instead they are kept inside and
have to rely on the information the media are giving them. The
reality is too hard for us to grasp, too overwhelmingly wrong, too
real. And only every once in a while some background or
in-depth research is provided, but most people only seem to be
interested in what's happening now, not what was
happening twenty
years ago.
With the uprising of the internet, where critical people from all
over the world can comment on the world's major (and minor)
events, this is slowly changing, with alternative
news feeds such as Indymedia, Alternet gaining in
popularity.
This numbness of the general public is also caused by (or maybe
is causing) companies to put ever more effort in trying to sell
products to the public, using increasing noisy, flash, brightly
colored, annoying advertisements. The summit of all this must be
the infomercial...
In the movie Blade
Runner, Ridley Scott portraits a world full of
commercials and advertisements. The big mass have grown so
accustomed to this constant stream of big screaming bright colors
they don't even notice.
Some people even seem to have forgotten there even is an outside
world, and that it is indeed possible to go outside the cave
they're in.
Revolution
All we can hope for now is some kind of revolution. The first
step is to take anything you hear with a grain of salt. Distrust
conventional mass media news broadcasts such as those on CNN. Go
and look on the internet for alternate resources, IndyMedia may be a good
place to start.
“There is no construction without
destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it
means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is
construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you
have construction.”
Mao Ze Dung, "Circular of the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party", May 16, 1966
Let the destruction begin.
