It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels would feel perfectly at home today, as democracy is replaced by legions of jobsworths with control in our best interests as their raison d'être.
Not even Geobbels thought of banning foreign companies with servers in foreign countries from airing speech to foreign citizens. Goebbels would shed a tear in pride.
I don't think they're Marxists, they're managerialists. And they're practically identical on the issues, with conservative parties just going the speed limit to the same destination while leftist parties speed.
Goebbels was right. The problem is only that anti-European forces won the war. Instead of the State of Germany or any Western country supervising the formation of public opinion--which if not supervised by an internal organized minority WILL be subverted by an external one--international finance, through its proxies, dictates public opinion instead, to the detriment of all but itself and its golems of the day.
I don't think you're giving 'The Public' (that is, all of us commoners) enough credit for being able to listen/read, assess, and form our own valid opinions, without too much interference from outside busybodies. A better approach is to have no restrictions at all; let the 'gems of wisdom' fall where they may. Supervision by a government or agency is, or should be, an anathema.
A cursory look at history, both ancient and modern, disabuses us of this idea entirely. All technology and knowledge which is popularly attributed to "gems of wisdom falling where they may" or the "marketplace of ideas" emerged not out of those fictions but out of top-down incentives, often militaristic in nature, for the purpose of managing external and internal threats to the ruling coalition. Any downstream benefit to our personal lives is incidental, and any benefit it would provide at the ruling coalition's expense is suppressed. See the pharmaceutical industry.
Consider that while commoners often are a source of good ideas, without the power and assets jealously guarded by the ruling coalition, they can not be realized. If the idea, or a certain implementation of it, can be of benefit to these power brokers, they invest. If a commoner manages to grow an idea apart from these higher interests, there exist many means by which to quash or commandeer it before even having to label it a threat to 'our' freedom, democracy, human rights, etc.. This is how real wealth always works. Beyond the realm of the inconsequential, real wealth is developed only through a partnership with, and fealty to, authority.
Our problem is not authority, which is a primordial foundation of reality, but that the authority which holds itself over us at this historical interlude is not of the same type as ourselves, which if it were would seek to better itself through bettering us, but of an external civilizational stock, which can only see us as cattle, or obstacles, for its own type. Things do not have to be this way, but so long as we buy in to the anti-authority smokescreen used to obscure the rather predictable deleterious consequences of the existing authority's decisions, nothing will change.
I am not one to ask why you hope to limit your intellectual horizons due to the conditioning of certain avenues of thought as "beyond the pale". Perhaps this conditioning, which you feel to have some reasonable grounding, is in fact emotional manipulation without foundation.
Whether it has foundation or not, if people can't see that it's blatant emotional and psychological manipulation which is designed to elicit Pavlovian responses, then they are beyond help. The same goes for no-no words, the more people get enraged when they are said, the more you know it's juiced up for precisely that purpose
Your mind is trapped in a mirrored cage of pre-fabricated signs and signifiers. It's all boomer regime paradigms. I don't even expect you to understand what I am objecting to, it's all too bewildering for you.
Those of us who made anonymous remailers possible thirty-five years ago and walked over international frontiers with the code to public key cryptography printed on shirts are going to continue building places where free and anonymous speech is possible. We did these things to provide rape survivors places to discuss their experiences without fear of reprisal from their brutalisers and we are not going to ever stop.
We live in an era where many need to be reminded the corporatization of life is a new thing. Somehow before big corporations we did fine. The Internet did especially well since it was popularized by a bunch of oddballs and geeks with no marketing budget.
The history of cryptography in the '90s and of the cypherpunk movement more generally is fascinating and should really be better known by people outside the field.
Fascinating reading. I'm old enough to remember when the only way to read the Internet was by tractor-feed dot matrix printer (Apple ][ days), and microperf paper was an exciting innovation.
A wonderfully apt comparison, in terms of using just the exactly right choice of concise witty wording. He also has elements of Mark Twain, HL Mencken, and currently, similarities to the biting metaphorical wit of M. Taibbi. To any of those who would ignorantly state that Germans lack a sense of humor, I would refer them to one Eugyppius.
Yes. We must prevent people from commenting anonymously so that everyone with an unconforming opinion must run the risk of a screaming mob showing up at his house and threatening him and his family. For democracy.
And we now need to modify the way we let our governments do the business of “promoting the general welfare, and providing for the common defense.”
We also need a mechanism to accommodate citizen proposals for program and infrastructure improvements and maintenance.
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
Nothing short of this is going to ameliorate the situation for the body politic.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs.
He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
Objective reality:
the voting members of the US Congress and the State Legislatures do not have enough time to read, comprehend or debate any of the laws they vote on. They vote 100 times a day, every five minutes, while in session.
Approximate absolute facts:
a. Every day that the Congress and Legislatures are in session 100
new bills are introduced and distributed.
b. The representatives are given two weeks to review the laws before they are brought up for The Vote.
c. Two weeks into the session they begin voting on the Laws that were previously introduced, while newer laws are introduced.
d. Many laws are in excess of two thousand pages.
e. The arithmetic demonstrates that they do not have the time to even read the name of the Law much less the content of it.
f. Since the Representative cannot evaluate 200 thousand pages of law speak per day, they vote the way their advisors tell them to vote.
g. Thus, they have all forfeited their delegated obligation to represent us.
h. Representative government is obsolete. It does not work for us.
And the only way to prevent these over worked and fallible people from making even more tragic mistakes, from which we, and the rest of the world, might never recover is to include ourselves, The Citizens, from whom the authority for government comes in the first place, in the final decision making process.
The Electronic Congress
How it works:
1. Before a new law, tax, or expenditure can be put on the books it must first be Ratified by the Citizens.
2. Existing laws can be Annulled by the same super majority required to Ratify them.
This program can be applied to every level of government and will ultimately solve every problem we have.
To prevent chaos, the basic law, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, would be exempt from review.
Mr. Perot speculated that the Founding Fathers would probably have done the same had the technology been available in their day.
Just imagine:
We, The People, could actually direct the priorities and review the progress of the major agencies like the: CDC and NIH as well as the libraries, school boards and local police departments.
If our government truly is of the people, by the people and for the people then this is the only way forward.
How to implement it:
We talk about it until it is done.
A concerned Citizen could have AI parse a recent law or Supreme Court ruling into its actionable elements, apply the Ratify or Annul Questionnaire, then distribute the links.
Can I make money with this?
Use AI to parse the laws you find most egregious into their component pieces. And then have it build the ballot / questionnaire along with some demographic background to make the game especially interesting. Charge a $1 per voter per law to deliver the results of the poll to the government officials and watch the evolution in real time.
The Electronic Townhall becomes an active Petition for a Redress of Grievances.
Ask the local school board for their agenda items, have AI parse the actionable elements, create a questionnaire, distribute it to the concerned citizens and then evaluate the results.
When Human Beings made in the image of God can see the results of their noblest and most sober thoughts, at such a scale, then there will be the moment where Our Benevolence and Good Will shall
overcome Evil and then we all live happily ever after.
Ross Perot publicly promised that if the People of America would elect him to The Presidency, he would give us The Electronic Townhall.
The Fourth Branch of Government will allow us to go from Chaos to Prosperity and a Life Worth Living until the end of time.
We were created by God and in the image of God; we are human beings, not animals in a pen.
How come you wrote all that and missed the root cause of the problem while also introducing new ways (AI) to exacerbate the problem even further?
100 new bills, every day? Are you kidding me?
The problem is the selection process of what even makes it to the docket in the first place!
Ross Perot failed to identify the problem, and I am glad he didn’t get into office if for the simple fact that his bandaid would have only exponentially accelerated the breakdown of society.
I disagree. The problem is allowing people to have power over us. Thieves, psychopaths, narcissists, sex maniacs, power freaks, child molesters and other model citizens are attracted to power like flies to fecal matter. You can’t keep them out, and they use their power to prevent us from throwing them out. You can fiddle with the settings on the machine all you like; it makes no difference. Look at history. The human factor always finds a way to corrupt the process.
Well then we aren’t actually in disagreement. I gave the example of part of the problem or root cause, and you provided color to it.
The example I gave, borrowed from SoloD, to be precise, is that if indeed we have 100 bills being voted on, every day, then what the heck are these bills that 200+ years of lawmaking hadn’t accounted for? It is time for a sweeping cleanup of not just our representatives but of processes as well. That general spring cleaning should be OUR “great reset.” Clear the clutter off the desk, take inventory of what had brought us to greatness to begin with, prune off every sucker that has zero or negative return on investment across the entirety of the government landscape, and then get the hell out of the way to let everyone thrive and flourish. It’s true evil is drawn to power and always will be, so then what’s lacking is controls and limits on size of government, and some mechanism(s) that inherently prevents political swamp formation, or at least drains it at a low limit threshold.
I share the temptation to to seek a technical solution, but the only solution must begin with a massive reform of society itself. And unfortunately, due to original sin, a virtuous society even if attained is an unstable equilibrium.
But… maybe there is a way, an opportunity for actual virtue to win the day.
For example, isn’t a certain portion of the population that is actively only virtue-signaling actively on a path to self-destruction? They will be outlived due to their complete lack of progeny. In a way, they are handing over the crown probably without even realizing it (!)
I wrote that because I believe that direct democracy is the only realistic way to eliminate the root cause of the problem.
AI is here and it is being used against us. We better figure out how to use it against them.
Yes, 100, two thousand page laws every day. No not kidding. It is at the state level too.
It will require a mass movement to change who gets to select the docket. This just might be the most powerful position on planet earth. Everyone we have had in that position is a fallible person. They have hopes and dreams and weaknesses a plenty. It is possible that most of the people I have met in my life would, for $100 million, vote for nuclear war against an unarmed party, perhaps even a large city in our own country.
Ross Perot identified the solution to the problem.
It is pure speculation on your part to declare that The Electronic Townhall would be detrimental to the Citizens of the country or countries that used it.
Here a little more on the subject:
1. Perpetual referenda on any subject at all could be commonplace. Your vote for the govt, the President, or whatever could be registered and changeable by you at any time so that the shifting allegiances of the people could be monitored and seen by the people in simple line charts, bar charts or whatever right there on their cellphones. That and similar with any topic of the moment.
And all TOTALLY SECURE. Don’t be fooled by the govt voting machine fiasco. Our programmers today can put up code that will run an app that securely takes one vote and one vote only from a proven living, qualified citizen and registers it anonymously. And gives them the ability to change it at any time.
Such apps not only register the will of the people but let the people see it themselves.
What they’re thinking/doing. En masse ! By the hundreds of thousands ! By the millions ! Not by rumour, not by MSM report, not by govt propaganda, not days after but immediately !
2. ALL the machinations of govt could be routinely accessible to us all via modern apps that present the information in attractive and readily digestible form.
Up to now you have to read Hansard or something. Have to search around and consult ‘academic’ type reports, ‘official’ accounts of what’s doing and what’s been done. Today we can have AI and purpose built software directed by ‘purpose built’ open source groups show us quickly and easily what’s doing in a way that enables us to quickly find those things that may interest us. AND then ‘drill down’ to fine detail. When ever in the history of mankind did the masses ever have such an ability?
Of course. ALL the expertise in the world belongs to the people. How else could it be? The people ARE the world. The tiny, tiny, handful of people ‘at the top’ generally speaking know nothing at all, do nothing at all, produce nothing at all. What they have going for them is they can trick us into harming each other. Together we stand, divided we fall.
3. Once this paradigm is running and accepted no government could plead that they couldn’t tell the people or ask the people.
But more – and we need more because they still would plead or claim that thing, being the unashamed consummate liars that they are – we can STOP it.
Monitoring every single activity, every word spoken in their legislatures we would know instantly when anything occurs in the chambers of the government that may presage even that ultimate ‘use’ of the people: declaring they are at war with someone (other people on the planet).
Though typically an executive decision which can be made, truly (surprised?) without reference to the people it would always be presaged by various signs of one sort or other.
In a modern ‘internet app’ democracy there would be/could be instant overwhelming pressure on each and every representative to get up in the chamber and announce his whole constituency is besieging him to have this decision reversed. And, of course, the aforementioned ‘charts’ and graphs apps showing the feelings of the people would indicate immediately how they felt.
4. Despite what the current state of the information space would seem to indicate, truth is not all that hard to find.
Modern apps could pretty quickly come up data/information collators that subject the data/information to various checks, verifications, objective evaluations and present the results to us. We have no such existent at the moment. Only special interest groups each banging its own drum.
Special interest groups will always exist and nothing wrong with that and each will employ some variation of these ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ finder apps to get information for them, an understanding of reality that they can trust where today none of us can trust anything or anyone, by and large.
5. Well it’s all there. Smartphone tracking. Bank account ‘hacking’ to reveal transactions even if (thankfully) not able to influence them. Private details of all kinds. What cars, properties, shares, mortgages you own. Business interests, friends and acquaintances. Habitual movements, places you frequent and what you do there. We are all exposed today. If the hackers want to home in on us we’re an open book. Many people are very paranoid about it and perhaps even write alarmist books about it. The point though is that it is obviously true. It always was true. All our information is available to all our peers all the time. When you get ‘generic’. Any person’s whole life is known by whom/what: by people. Of course. People are sworn to secrecy. People are threatened with prison terms or perhaps even death if they reveal what they know. It has always been like this.
And still is.
And always the technology and the ‘power’ of intrusion, breaking into your privacy, seeing your intimate details, was retained only by the govt. for only they had access to the data and the abilities to manipulate the data.
But today, for the first time in history the people have this power and they can turn it back onto ‘the govt’, whoever that might be. No longer do we need depend upon dubious ‘investigative journalists’. Simple apps can be written that will discover anything we want to know about those who hold the power and use the power.
1. Perpetual referenda on any subject at all could be commonplace. Your vote for the govt, the President, or whatever could be registered and changeable by you at any time so that the shifting allegiances of the people could be monitored and seen by the people in simple line charts, bar charts or whatever right there on their cellphones. That and similar with any topic of the moment. And all TOTALLY SECURE. Don’t be fooled by the govt voting machine bullcrap fiasco. Our programmers today can put up code that will run an app that securely takes one vote and one vote only from a proven living, qualified citizen and registers it anonymously. And gives them the ability to change it at any time.
Such apps not only register the will of the people but let the people see it themselves. En masse ! By the hundreds of thousands ! By the millions !
Not by rumour, not by MSM report, not by govt propaganda, not days after but immediately !
Access may become a problem. Networks go down, sometimes deliberately. Must every citizen have internet access? Who is going to provide network security and how? Do you foresee open source code?
I'm in favor of direct democracy, as the representative form seems to have passed its pull-by date. How in the world can Congress accept this 100 bills a day scenario? Surely they know they cannot serve their constituency properly by voting for or against a bill they personally have not read in its entirety?
It would take a cataclysmic scale EMP event for the Internet to go down long enough that we can't simply delay the introduction of new laws and regulations.
Your congress doesn't accept 100 bills a day, they accept cash.
Perpetual referenda on any subject at all could be commonplace. Your vote for the govt, the President, or the millions nuances in the millions of laws, rules and regulations could be registered and changeable by you at any time. This to accommodate your matured thinking after observing the results of changes.
Considering the length of your response to my comment, and completely missing the point of what I attempted to convey, you leave me with these final words:
If the answer to the question “who is my audience?” is “me, myself and I,” then bless your heart.
How about this. Here’s a fucking idea no one has had. Remove the idea that corporations ore a person. Helllooo? Is there anybody in there. You remove all campaign contributions from any thing that involves more than one person. Problem solved. Overnight. Anyone caught cheating, execute. And remove the elections of senators, as there was a reason for that as well.
I have to agree, Michal. In years where legislators pass fewer laws, they're criticized by the press and special interests for being an ineffective body. Apparently the measure of a "good" congress is the vast quantity of new laws that they pass.
Of course, the question is, do we really need them to pass new legislation for the sake of appearing to be hard workers? More to the point, do our laws need to be so complex that they can't be read, debated, and voted upon by the people charged with doing so?
I recall when Obamacare was passed, congessional member were told by Nancy Pelosi that they must pass it to know what was in it. That should automatically have elicited 100% NO votes from the membership, both sides of the aisle. Instead our elected officials relinquish they're authority and vote how they're told. Our representative government is broken, but need not be scrapped. It needs to be fixed.
Yes Ryan, it would lead to tyranny. As recent history has shown us, most people are easily manipulated into farcical views, as witnessed by the capitulation of the “elite intelligentsia “ during the Covid stupidity. A better solution is to “term limit “ the government to death. In fact, government employees along with anyone receiving taxpayer financial assistance should be barred from voting until their assistance ends.
As sensable as a fourth branch of government appears, I can already imagine the accusations regarding disenfranchising voters. We can't even agree on fair voter laws for major elections; imagine the mess it would be to set up an agreed upon system to enable citizens to constantly be voting. The idea is brilliant but the implementation seems implausible.
Mr. Perot publicly announced his intention to give the fourth branch of government to the people in America if he was elected President.
But this attempt to empower our humanity was so far removed from the business-as-usual-two-party-system that the talking heads and trolls yelled out that Mr. Perot was trying to destroy our Constitution, our government and our way of life.
The ELECTONIC TOWNHALL was denounced as unworkable.
How would the poor participate?
How would fraud be prevented?
What about those who do not know how to read or use a computer?
In a final act of desperation the control freaks claimed that
letting the average citizen to pass judgment on the individual pieces of public law would lead to anarchy.
But we all know the truth: only the concerned will bother to participate.
The media was so intensely negative towards the ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL that Mr. Perot was forced to stop talking about it.
Its now been thirty two years since the proposal.
No other person of national reputation or significant influence has picked up the idea. BUT the big two political parties regularly stage "townhall meetings" where they talk of "reform" and "returning power to the people" and try to link themselves to the empowering part of the idea without adding to its manifestation.
And still we suffer in the hopeless loop of: "candidates with a sense of morality and respect for the Constitution who understand true brotherhood, justice and democracy and who will do the right thing for us each and every time, trust me".
Humanity is now so debased that a sitting USA Supreme Court Justice cannot even give a simple definition for "a woman", the acting President does not know what country he is in, and the congress has borrowed and spent so much money that it can never be printed much less be repaid.
Same crap as here, only difference being here there was no outcry. That such things haven't been implemented already is because the constitutional laws must be canged, which takes time, and there's internal division on the issue in all parties.
The Socialist Democrat were and are terrified of such a law being used against them, so will oppose it whenever they are not in governement: they have been busted several times for using paid trolls, fake accounts bumping shares, views and likes, and the like. They are also deathly afraid for someone to be able to legally map their communication-network and with which other organisations they are in close communication with (organisations fronting Hamas, Hezbollah, AQiM, and others like them f.e.).
OT: Today, three moslems were apprehended and arrested in a random spotcheck. The police suspected them of narcotics-smuggling.
What they were smuggling? Anti-armour grenades. Swedish ones, the kind we've given to Ukraine.
i can’t remember any specific scandals, but it’s plain that establishment politicians in germany also rely on all manner of social media boosting, surely also by bot networks. perhaps voigt is simply too stupid or out-of-the-loop to know that this is why you have to craft all social media regulations as targeting foreign “disinformation” and keep the specifics vague.
We need a test to identify such bot networks, to help people like this politician with his truggle.
A. . . Voigt-Kampf test of some sort.
Tasteless jokes aside, you and me both are of the same general age as many or most politicians in our nations; we and many others, including many elders, seem to understand the internet just fine, including social media, even if we do not understand or know the technical details.
I'm loathe to use stupidity as the explanation, how tempting it may be, because it feels like letting them off the hook in a way. And out-of-the-loop is too attractive.
But what else is there? Have so many of our "leaders" been selected (or have been self-selected by the organism called the party-state) for being stupid and out-of-touch?
Let's start with the voters; the grand majority really care little for who they vote for. Most either vote according to family tradition, or slightly deviate after hearing that a tax that affects them is being slightly lowered or getting virtue signalled to. All while not even looking at how the grand sum of increased taxes will affect them or the actual effects of what's being signalled.
People who are interested in building a future don't tend to be interested in putting time into leading the masses.
Narcissists and loonies love nothing more than to have a mass of people 'unquestioningly' follow their lead.
The vast majorities' unwillingness to learn to read beyond the headline makes it very lucrative for scammers to take part in 'democracy'.
Socialists are very willing to use subterfuge, such as titling their organizations in a virtue signalling fashion, and false flag attacks, such as throwing rocks at their own protests, to achieve their goals. Thus building public support.
Those who value truth, freedom and free will would of course not be willing to use these highly efficient tactics.
...
The setup of a party being 'democratically' chosen to control a vast area of very different sectors is at its core very undemocratic.
> 10 Ekonomisk trygghet vid sjukdom och funktionsnedsättning
> 11 Ekonomisk trygghet vid ålderdom
> 12 Ekonomisk trygghet för familjer och barn
> 13 Integration och jämställdhet
> 14 Arbetsmarknad och arbetsliv
> 15 Studiestöd
> 16 Utbildning och universitetsforskning
> 17 Kultur, medier, trossamfund och fritid
> 18 Samhällsplanering, bostadsförsörjning och byggande samt konsumentpolitik
> 19 Regional utveckling
> 20 Klimat, miljö och natur
> 21 Energi
> 22 Kommunikationer
> 23 Areella näringar, landsbygd och livsmedel
> 24 Näringsliv
> 25 Allmänna bidrag till kommuner
> 26 Statsskuldsräntor m.m.
> 27 Avgiften till Europeiska unionen
There's no way you can convince me that many people could find a singular party which actually aligns with them on even a handful of subpoints of the states major areas of expenses.
...
Even those few small points on their own would be enough to eventually end up with a really bad outcome after some cycles. Now add special interest organisations like the UN, Open Society Foundation, the CCP, and such; and loonies like Gates, Persson, Löven/Lööf/Lövin to that soup and all the ills will exponentiate.
I caught a mole in Germany once. They are protected so I had to catch him and release him in a neighboring park, he was pretty cute, much cuter than this guy. Maybe he is a woodchuck after all...
What is so utterly brilliant about that is that it bypasses the ancient parts of the brain that switch on with aggression and tribalism (as they don't comprehend metaphor) when a human is associated metaphorically with a disease carrying organism, yet allows the newer language comprehension parts of the brain to delight in the comparison.
"....the body of knowledge is shaken and transformed. Conservation becomes transgression.
'The positive assertion in a metaphor, ' writes Jan Zwicky, 'is always an act of overcoming.'"
(I am reading Jeffrey Donaldson, Missing Link: The evolution of metaphor and the metaphor of evolution lol)
More polysyllabic metaphors for these lusus naturae I say!
Voigt writes that, "Ideally, we should agree to... make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence." This would put Germany in the company of Red China.
I would respectfully take issue with your description of the CDU as "centre right". A centre right party leading by some margin ij the polls would be currenrly plotting a right wing coalition. Instead, the CDU is the largest faction of the dark green socialist Block party. Their absence from government is merely a temporary inconvenience to the subjugation of all to the global green socialist order, but their not current coalition partners are doing a sterling back-up job.
For our part: here in the surpassingly free and wonderful United States, we are as you know currently ruled by a dementia-addled child-huffing lunatic. There are now rumors of said lunatic being replaced by current Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer during the Democratic Party’s upcoming national convention (they are also SUPER DEMOCRATIC, as you can tell from the name!) as the anointed Presidential candidate. During the pandemic, Gov Gretchie wielded such democratic strokes as *blocking MI citizens from buying garden seeds and children’s clothing*, because, obviously, gardening and children wearing new clothes were extremely dangerous activities!
She is such a lipsticked atrocity it is true, but she is way too white for the spectacle they are intending. First we will have pride month, which will overlap with perpetual encampments, then the Republicans, then, I'd put money on someone "marginalized", maybe a transwoman who has recently come out, or someone with pronouns and a label from the smorgasboard of types, who will be the big reveal at the DNC. Here there are "gender reveal parties," where people invite a bunch of people over and reveal the chosen gender of their child. One of these, with some kind of lit balloons or lanterns being launched, started a devastating wildfire near San Diego. That's my bet, DNC as a gender reveal party. But the horror of her having any more power anywhere is certainly real. She's paying 500 dollars a month to anyone who brings a "newcomer" into their spare bedroom, including in Dearborn and Hamtramack, where many, despite being non-extremist Muslims, may not be able to discern if they have an illegal extremist sleeper terrorist in their kids' outgrown bunk bed.
Oh, indeed, dear Cynthia, I’m sure many of these predictions will come true!! And I *can’t believe* I forgot to mention: Guv Gretchie even faked her own kidnapping! 🤪
A lipsticked (not to speak of Botoxed 🥴) atrocity, HAHAHAHAHAAHHA!
In the name of democracy, freedom and all things good and pure, I pledge (in the name of Science™) to never again use a pseudonym on the internet. Now please excuse me, I need to go and report some memes as hate crimes.
It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels would feel perfectly at home today, as democracy is replaced by legions of jobsworths with control in our best interests as their raison d'être.
Would it be polite to obtain a sample of Herr Voigt's DNA to ensure that there was no common ancestor?
I hear he's quite a perfectionist when it comes to house decoration.
😂😂
Goebbels would also feel at home in Australia.Does anyone know the exact source of the quote in Goebbels speeches?
Not even Geobbels thought of banning foreign companies with servers in foreign countries from airing speech to foreign citizens. Goebbels would shed a tear in pride.
true..we have a spell class of Marxist bogan leader here.The question is...are they stupid enough to try and block X IP ...
I don't think they're Marxists, they're managerialists. And they're practically identical on the issues, with conservative parties just going the speed limit to the same destination while leftist parties speed.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Our salvation, if there is any at all, will not be found in the political system.
Goebbels was right. The problem is only that anti-European forces won the war. Instead of the State of Germany or any Western country supervising the formation of public opinion--which if not supervised by an internal organized minority WILL be subverted by an external one--international finance, through its proxies, dictates public opinion instead, to the detriment of all but itself and its golems of the day.
I don't think you're giving 'The Public' (that is, all of us commoners) enough credit for being able to listen/read, assess, and form our own valid opinions, without too much interference from outside busybodies. A better approach is to have no restrictions at all; let the 'gems of wisdom' fall where they may. Supervision by a government or agency is, or should be, an anathema.
A cursory look at history, both ancient and modern, disabuses us of this idea entirely. All technology and knowledge which is popularly attributed to "gems of wisdom falling where they may" or the "marketplace of ideas" emerged not out of those fictions but out of top-down incentives, often militaristic in nature, for the purpose of managing external and internal threats to the ruling coalition. Any downstream benefit to our personal lives is incidental, and any benefit it would provide at the ruling coalition's expense is suppressed. See the pharmaceutical industry.
Consider that while commoners often are a source of good ideas, without the power and assets jealously guarded by the ruling coalition, they can not be realized. If the idea, or a certain implementation of it, can be of benefit to these power brokers, they invest. If a commoner manages to grow an idea apart from these higher interests, there exist many means by which to quash or commandeer it before even having to label it a threat to 'our' freedom, democracy, human rights, etc.. This is how real wealth always works. Beyond the realm of the inconsequential, real wealth is developed only through a partnership with, and fealty to, authority.
Our problem is not authority, which is a primordial foundation of reality, but that the authority which holds itself over us at this historical interlude is not of the same type as ourselves, which if it were would seek to better itself through bettering us, but of an external civilizational stock, which can only see us as cattle, or obstacles, for its own type. Things do not have to be this way, but so long as we buy in to the anti-authority smokescreen used to obscure the rather predictable deleterious consequences of the existing authority's decisions, nothing will change.
Who are you referring to when you use the term “international finance “?
I hope you’re not saying that Goebbels was right about that too….
I am not one to ask why you hope to limit your intellectual horizons due to the conditioning of certain avenues of thought as "beyond the pale". Perhaps this conditioning, which you feel to have some reasonable grounding, is in fact emotional manipulation without foundation.
Whether it has foundation or not, if people can't see that it's blatant emotional and psychological manipulation which is designed to elicit Pavlovian responses, then they are beyond help. The same goes for no-no words, the more people get enraged when they are said, the more you know it's juiced up for precisely that purpose
Of course not! Perish the thought
What an excellent and timely quote. Looking up more, I'm struck by how many sound very familiar today. https://www.azquotes.com/author/5626-Joseph_Goebbels/tag/propaganda
The radical Left has learned (and is implementing) far more from the Nazi Party playbook than they will ever admit.
Propaganda, lawfare, and State control of private institutions (either directly or indirectly) were tactics pioneered by National Socialist Germany.
It’s easy to see if you look for it, but you can’t unsee it…..
> Nahhhhtseeeees
> The raaaadical Leffffft
Your mind is trapped in a mirrored cage of pre-fabricated signs and signifiers. It's all boomer regime paradigms. I don't even expect you to understand what I am objecting to, it's all too bewildering for you.
Go smoke another joint….
😂 I don't do drugs. Never have. I'm pretty much a "turbo-nazi" compared to you, you are stuck in boomer narratives.
Looks like they're trying really, really hard to "save democracy!"
It seems to me that a democracy must be extraordinarily weak if it must resort to such measures.
Democracy is fragile and sadly, may be fleeting as well. I think we've taken it for granted, not realizing we may have done so at our peril.
Yes they are really trying hard to save democracy by destroying it.
Those of us who made anonymous remailers possible thirty-five years ago and walked over international frontiers with the code to public key cryptography printed on shirts are going to continue building places where free and anonymous speech is possible. We did these things to provide rape survivors places to discuss their experiences without fear of reprisal from their brutalisers and we are not going to ever stop.
We live in an era where many need to be reminded the corporatization of life is a new thing. Somehow before big corporations we did fine. The Internet did especially well since it was popularized by a bunch of oddballs and geeks with no marketing budget.
The history of cryptography in the '90s and of the cypherpunk movement more generally is fascinating and should really be better known by people outside the field.
Hackers Manifesto fab forgotten gem! <3
https://web.archive.org/web/20140425234400/https://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
Fascinating reading. I'm old enough to remember when the only way to read the Internet was by tractor-feed dot matrix printer (Apple ][ days), and microperf paper was an exciting innovation.
I remember those days as well
Thank you
It always amused me to wear that "RSA in four lines of Perl" shirt on trips to Mexico.
"THIS SHIRT IS A MUNITION"
"he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings."
PG Wodehouse level metaphor!
LOL
I especially enjoyed the image of "a beaver gnawing through saplings."
Then I looked at his picture again...
Me too! 🤣
A wonderfully apt comparison, in terms of using just the exactly right choice of concise witty wording. He also has elements of Mark Twain, HL Mencken, and currently, similarities to the biting metaphorical wit of M. Taibbi. To any of those who would ignorantly state that Germans lack a sense of humor, I would refer them to one Eugyppius.
Yes, the Government would like to know the names of its detractors.
Yes. We must prevent people from commenting anonymously so that everyone with an unconforming opinion must run the risk of a screaming mob showing up at his house and threatening him and his family. For democracy.
“… a screaming mob showing up at his house …”
Or the NKVD, or the Gestapo.
Or whatever cops serve the current regime.
It is obvious to everyone....
Representative democracy has failed.
And we now need to modify the way we let our governments do the business of “promoting the general welfare, and providing for the common defense.”
We also need a mechanism to accommodate citizen proposals for program and infrastructure improvements and maintenance.
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
Nothing short of this is going to ameliorate the situation for the body politic.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs.
He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
Objective reality:
the voting members of the US Congress and the State Legislatures do not have enough time to read, comprehend or debate any of the laws they vote on. They vote 100 times a day, every five minutes, while in session.
Approximate absolute facts:
a. Every day that the Congress and Legislatures are in session 100
new bills are introduced and distributed.
b. The representatives are given two weeks to review the laws before they are brought up for The Vote.
c. Two weeks into the session they begin voting on the Laws that were previously introduced, while newer laws are introduced.
d. Many laws are in excess of two thousand pages.
e. The arithmetic demonstrates that they do not have the time to even read the name of the Law much less the content of it.
f. Since the Representative cannot evaluate 200 thousand pages of law speak per day, they vote the way their advisors tell them to vote.
g. Thus, they have all forfeited their delegated obligation to represent us.
h. Representative government is obsolete. It does not work for us.
And the only way to prevent these over worked and fallible people from making even more tragic mistakes, from which we, and the rest of the world, might never recover is to include ourselves, The Citizens, from whom the authority for government comes in the first place, in the final decision making process.
The Electronic Congress
How it works:
1. Before a new law, tax, or expenditure can be put on the books it must first be Ratified by the Citizens.
2. Existing laws can be Annulled by the same super majority required to Ratify them.
This program can be applied to every level of government and will ultimately solve every problem we have.
To prevent chaos, the basic law, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, would be exempt from review.
Mr. Perot speculated that the Founding Fathers would probably have done the same had the technology been available in their day.
Just imagine:
We, The People, could actually direct the priorities and review the progress of the major agencies like the: CDC and NIH as well as the libraries, school boards and local police departments.
If our government truly is of the people, by the people and for the people then this is the only way forward.
How to implement it:
We talk about it until it is done.
A concerned Citizen could have AI parse a recent law or Supreme Court ruling into its actionable elements, apply the Ratify or Annul Questionnaire, then distribute the links.
Can I make money with this?
Use AI to parse the laws you find most egregious into their component pieces. And then have it build the ballot / questionnaire along with some demographic background to make the game especially interesting. Charge a $1 per voter per law to deliver the results of the poll to the government officials and watch the evolution in real time.
The Electronic Townhall becomes an active Petition for a Redress of Grievances.
Ask the local school board for their agenda items, have AI parse the actionable elements, create a questionnaire, distribute it to the concerned citizens and then evaluate the results.
When Human Beings made in the image of God can see the results of their noblest and most sober thoughts, at such a scale, then there will be the moment where Our Benevolence and Good Will shall
overcome Evil and then we all live happily ever after.
Ross Perot publicly promised that if the People of America would elect him to The Presidency, he would give us The Electronic Townhall.
The Fourth Branch of Government will allow us to go from Chaos to Prosperity and a Life Worth Living until the end of time.
We were created by God and in the image of God; we are human beings, not animals in a pen.
The Electronic Townhall
https://teletownhall.com/products/text-to-online-surveys/
https://publicinput.com/wp/online-town-hall/
https://www.govtech.com/archive/introducing-the-21st-century-city-hall.html
https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/2015/06/06/the-electronic-townhall/
https://abrogard.com/blog/2023/12/25/dont-write-to-congress/
How come you wrote all that and missed the root cause of the problem while also introducing new ways (AI) to exacerbate the problem even further?
100 new bills, every day? Are you kidding me?
The problem is the selection process of what even makes it to the docket in the first place!
Ross Perot failed to identify the problem, and I am glad he didn’t get into office if for the simple fact that his bandaid would have only exponentially accelerated the breakdown of society.
I disagree. The problem is allowing people to have power over us. Thieves, psychopaths, narcissists, sex maniacs, power freaks, child molesters and other model citizens are attracted to power like flies to fecal matter. You can’t keep them out, and they use their power to prevent us from throwing them out. You can fiddle with the settings on the machine all you like; it makes no difference. Look at history. The human factor always finds a way to corrupt the process.
Well then we aren’t actually in disagreement. I gave the example of part of the problem or root cause, and you provided color to it.
The example I gave, borrowed from SoloD, to be precise, is that if indeed we have 100 bills being voted on, every day, then what the heck are these bills that 200+ years of lawmaking hadn’t accounted for? It is time for a sweeping cleanup of not just our representatives but of processes as well. That general spring cleaning should be OUR “great reset.” Clear the clutter off the desk, take inventory of what had brought us to greatness to begin with, prune off every sucker that has zero or negative return on investment across the entirety of the government landscape, and then get the hell out of the way to let everyone thrive and flourish. It’s true evil is drawn to power and always will be, so then what’s lacking is controls and limits on size of government, and some mechanism(s) that inherently prevents political swamp formation, or at least drains it at a low limit threshold.
I share the temptation to to seek a technical solution, but the only solution must begin with a massive reform of society itself. And unfortunately, due to original sin, a virtuous society even if attained is an unstable equilibrium.
Absolutely so.
But… maybe there is a way, an opportunity for actual virtue to win the day.
For example, isn’t a certain portion of the population that is actively only virtue-signaling actively on a path to self-destruction? They will be outlived due to their complete lack of progeny. In a way, they are handing over the crown probably without even realizing it (!)
But the sterile are being replaced 24/7 in unlimited numbers.
Let us hope and pray.
I wrote that because I believe that direct democracy is the only realistic way to eliminate the root cause of the problem.
AI is here and it is being used against us. We better figure out how to use it against them.
Yes, 100, two thousand page laws every day. No not kidding. It is at the state level too.
It will require a mass movement to change who gets to select the docket. This just might be the most powerful position on planet earth. Everyone we have had in that position is a fallible person. They have hopes and dreams and weaknesses a plenty. It is possible that most of the people I have met in my life would, for $100 million, vote for nuclear war against an unarmed party, perhaps even a large city in our own country.
Ross Perot identified the solution to the problem.
It is pure speculation on your part to declare that The Electronic Townhall would be detrimental to the Citizens of the country or countries that used it.
Here a little more on the subject:
1. Perpetual referenda on any subject at all could be commonplace. Your vote for the govt, the President, or whatever could be registered and changeable by you at any time so that the shifting allegiances of the people could be monitored and seen by the people in simple line charts, bar charts or whatever right there on their cellphones. That and similar with any topic of the moment.
And all TOTALLY SECURE. Don’t be fooled by the govt voting machine fiasco. Our programmers today can put up code that will run an app that securely takes one vote and one vote only from a proven living, qualified citizen and registers it anonymously. And gives them the ability to change it at any time.
Such apps not only register the will of the people but let the people see it themselves.
What they’re thinking/doing. En masse ! By the hundreds of thousands ! By the millions ! Not by rumour, not by MSM report, not by govt propaganda, not days after but immediately !
2. ALL the machinations of govt could be routinely accessible to us all via modern apps that present the information in attractive and readily digestible form.
Up to now you have to read Hansard or something. Have to search around and consult ‘academic’ type reports, ‘official’ accounts of what’s doing and what’s been done. Today we can have AI and purpose built software directed by ‘purpose built’ open source groups show us quickly and easily what’s doing in a way that enables us to quickly find those things that may interest us. AND then ‘drill down’ to fine detail. When ever in the history of mankind did the masses ever have such an ability?
Of course. ALL the expertise in the world belongs to the people. How else could it be? The people ARE the world. The tiny, tiny, handful of people ‘at the top’ generally speaking know nothing at all, do nothing at all, produce nothing at all. What they have going for them is they can trick us into harming each other. Together we stand, divided we fall.
3. Once this paradigm is running and accepted no government could plead that they couldn’t tell the people or ask the people.
But more – and we need more because they still would plead or claim that thing, being the unashamed consummate liars that they are – we can STOP it.
Monitoring every single activity, every word spoken in their legislatures we would know instantly when anything occurs in the chambers of the government that may presage even that ultimate ‘use’ of the people: declaring they are at war with someone (other people on the planet).
Though typically an executive decision which can be made, truly (surprised?) without reference to the people it would always be presaged by various signs of one sort or other.
In a modern ‘internet app’ democracy there would be/could be instant overwhelming pressure on each and every representative to get up in the chamber and announce his whole constituency is besieging him to have this decision reversed. And, of course, the aforementioned ‘charts’ and graphs apps showing the feelings of the people would indicate immediately how they felt.
4. Despite what the current state of the information space would seem to indicate, truth is not all that hard to find.
Modern apps could pretty quickly come up data/information collators that subject the data/information to various checks, verifications, objective evaluations and present the results to us. We have no such existent at the moment. Only special interest groups each banging its own drum.
Special interest groups will always exist and nothing wrong with that and each will employ some variation of these ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ finder apps to get information for them, an understanding of reality that they can trust where today none of us can trust anything or anyone, by and large.
5. Well it’s all there. Smartphone tracking. Bank account ‘hacking’ to reveal transactions even if (thankfully) not able to influence them. Private details of all kinds. What cars, properties, shares, mortgages you own. Business interests, friends and acquaintances. Habitual movements, places you frequent and what you do there. We are all exposed today. If the hackers want to home in on us we’re an open book. Many people are very paranoid about it and perhaps even write alarmist books about it. The point though is that it is obviously true. It always was true. All our information is available to all our peers all the time. When you get ‘generic’. Any person’s whole life is known by whom/what: by people. Of course. People are sworn to secrecy. People are threatened with prison terms or perhaps even death if they reveal what they know. It has always been like this.
And still is.
And always the technology and the ‘power’ of intrusion, breaking into your privacy, seeing your intimate details, was retained only by the govt. for only they had access to the data and the abilities to manipulate the data.
But today, for the first time in history the people have this power and they can turn it back onto ‘the govt’, whoever that might be. No longer do we need depend upon dubious ‘investigative journalists’. Simple apps can be written that will discover anything we want to know about those who hold the power and use the power.
Share this…
Agree it’s theoretically possible for direct democracy to exist. Getting there from here is the hard part.
1. Perpetual referenda on any subject at all could be commonplace. Your vote for the govt, the President, or whatever could be registered and changeable by you at any time so that the shifting allegiances of the people could be monitored and seen by the people in simple line charts, bar charts or whatever right there on their cellphones. That and similar with any topic of the moment. And all TOTALLY SECURE. Don’t be fooled by the govt voting machine bullcrap fiasco. Our programmers today can put up code that will run an app that securely takes one vote and one vote only from a proven living, qualified citizen and registers it anonymously. And gives them the ability to change it at any time.
Such apps not only register the will of the people but let the people see it themselves. En masse ! By the hundreds of thousands ! By the millions !
Not by rumour, not by MSM report, not by govt propaganda, not days after but immediately !
You’re overlooking something. If your society is corrupt, no technical gimmick can prevent corrupt politics. If it is not, no gimmicks are necessary.
What you state is true.
Short of the Second Coming, the ETH is the only idea I have.
How do you suggest we go from a corrupt society to an honorable, just and benevolent society?
Access may become a problem. Networks go down, sometimes deliberately. Must every citizen have internet access? Who is going to provide network security and how? Do you foresee open source code?
I'm in favor of direct democracy, as the representative form seems to have passed its pull-by date. How in the world can Congress accept this 100 bills a day scenario? Surely they know they cannot serve their constituency properly by voting for or against a bill they personally have not read in its entirety?
It would take a cataclysmic scale EMP event for the Internet to go down long enough that we can't simply delay the introduction of new laws and regulations.
Your congress doesn't accept 100 bills a day, they accept cash.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep decided what’s for dinner. How could you be so stupid? Why do you think this nation was founded the way it was?
You don't need that much legislation. You need more plebiscites.
Perpetual referenda on any subject at all could be commonplace. Your vote for the govt, the President, or the millions nuances in the millions of laws, rules and regulations could be registered and changeable by you at any time. This to accommodate your matured thinking after observing the results of changes.
Considering the length of your response to my comment, and completely missing the point of what I attempted to convey, you leave me with these final words:
If the answer to the question “who is my audience?” is “me, myself and I,” then bless your heart.
I’m out.
Sir, please tell us what is the root cause of the problem. And how to fix it.
That is the only thing worth talking about.
How about this. Here’s a fucking idea no one has had. Remove the idea that corporations ore a person. Helllooo? Is there anybody in there. You remove all campaign contributions from any thing that involves more than one person. Problem solved. Overnight. Anyone caught cheating, execute. And remove the elections of senators, as there was a reason for that as well.
These are questions for: The Electronic Townhall.
IDEA: Write up both questions with their sub questions and post here.
I have to agree, Michal. In years where legislators pass fewer laws, they're criticized by the press and special interests for being an ineffective body. Apparently the measure of a "good" congress is the vast quantity of new laws that they pass.
Of course, the question is, do we really need them to pass new legislation for the sake of appearing to be hard workers? More to the point, do our laws need to be so complex that they can't be read, debated, and voted upon by the people charged with doing so?
I recall when Obamacare was passed, congessional member were told by Nancy Pelosi that they must pass it to know what was in it. That should automatically have elicited 100% NO votes from the membership, both sides of the aisle. Instead our elected officials relinquish they're authority and vote how they're told. Our representative government is broken, but need not be scrapped. It needs to be fixed.
Don’t you think this could backfire due to "tyranny of the majority "?
Yes Ryan, it would lead to tyranny. As recent history has shown us, most people are easily manipulated into farcical views, as witnessed by the capitulation of the “elite intelligentsia “ during the Covid stupidity. A better solution is to “term limit “ the government to death. In fact, government employees along with anyone receiving taxpayer financial assistance should be barred from voting until their assistance ends.
Thus the saying: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.
And Mr. Sheep says : " Of course you guys know I'm a vegetarian don't you?"
No. The basic constitution and Bill of Rights are exempt from review.
And perhaps those who pay tax will have a plural vote, those who live on welfare will have none.
No. The basic constitution and Bill of Rights are exempt from review.
And perhaps those who pay tax will have a plural vote, those who live on welfare will have none.
As sensable as a fourth branch of government appears, I can already imagine the accusations regarding disenfranchising voters. We can't even agree on fair voter laws for major elections; imagine the mess it would be to set up an agreed upon system to enable citizens to constantly be voting. The idea is brilliant but the implementation seems implausible.
Mr. Perot publicly announced his intention to give the fourth branch of government to the people in America if he was elected President.
But this attempt to empower our humanity was so far removed from the business-as-usual-two-party-system that the talking heads and trolls yelled out that Mr. Perot was trying to destroy our Constitution, our government and our way of life.
The ELECTONIC TOWNHALL was denounced as unworkable.
How would the poor participate?
How would fraud be prevented?
What about those who do not know how to read or use a computer?
In a final act of desperation the control freaks claimed that
letting the average citizen to pass judgment on the individual pieces of public law would lead to anarchy.
But we all know the truth: only the concerned will bother to participate.
The media was so intensely negative towards the ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL that Mr. Perot was forced to stop talking about it.
Its now been thirty two years since the proposal.
No other person of national reputation or significant influence has picked up the idea. BUT the big two political parties regularly stage "townhall meetings" where they talk of "reform" and "returning power to the people" and try to link themselves to the empowering part of the idea without adding to its manifestation.
And still we suffer in the hopeless loop of: "candidates with a sense of morality and respect for the Constitution who understand true brotherhood, justice and democracy and who will do the right thing for us each and every time, trust me".
Humanity is now so debased that a sitting USA Supreme Court Justice cannot even give a simple definition for "a woman", the acting President does not know what country he is in, and the congress has borrowed and spent so much money that it can never be printed much less be repaid.
... and the wars grind on...
The system we have presently is implausible; yet, here it is.
Who should be allowed to "vote" in a jurisdiction?
Same crap as here, only difference being here there was no outcry. That such things haven't been implemented already is because the constitutional laws must be canged, which takes time, and there's internal division on the issue in all parties.
The Socialist Democrat were and are terrified of such a law being used against them, so will oppose it whenever they are not in governement: they have been busted several times for using paid trolls, fake accounts bumping shares, views and likes, and the like. They are also deathly afraid for someone to be able to legally map their communication-network and with which other organisations they are in close communication with (organisations fronting Hamas, Hezbollah, AQiM, and others like them f.e.).
OT: Today, three moslems were apprehended and arrested in a random spotcheck. The police suspected them of narcotics-smuggling.
What they were smuggling? Anti-armour grenades. Swedish ones, the kind we've given to Ukraine.
i can’t remember any specific scandals, but it’s plain that establishment politicians in germany also rely on all manner of social media boosting, surely also by bot networks. perhaps voigt is simply too stupid or out-of-the-loop to know that this is why you have to craft all social media regulations as targeting foreign “disinformation” and keep the specifics vague.
We need a test to identify such bot networks, to help people like this politician with his truggle.
A. . . Voigt-Kampf test of some sort.
Tasteless jokes aside, you and me both are of the same general age as many or most politicians in our nations; we and many others, including many elders, seem to understand the internet just fine, including social media, even if we do not understand or know the technical details.
I'm loathe to use stupidity as the explanation, how tempting it may be, because it feels like letting them off the hook in a way. And out-of-the-loop is too attractive.
But what else is there? Have so many of our "leaders" been selected (or have been self-selected by the organism called the party-state) for being stupid and out-of-touch?
That, is even scarier to me than any conspiracy.
I can think of some reasons:
Let's start with the voters; the grand majority really care little for who they vote for. Most either vote according to family tradition, or slightly deviate after hearing that a tax that affects them is being slightly lowered or getting virtue signalled to. All while not even looking at how the grand sum of increased taxes will affect them or the actual effects of what's being signalled.
People who are interested in building a future don't tend to be interested in putting time into leading the masses.
Narcissists and loonies love nothing more than to have a mass of people 'unquestioningly' follow their lead.
The vast majorities' unwillingness to learn to read beyond the headline makes it very lucrative for scammers to take part in 'democracy'.
Socialists are very willing to use subterfuge, such as titling their organizations in a virtue signalling fashion, and false flag attacks, such as throwing rocks at their own protests, to achieve their goals. Thus building public support.
Those who value truth, freedom and free will would of course not be willing to use these highly efficient tactics.
...
The setup of a party being 'democratically' chosen to control a vast area of very different sectors is at its core very undemocratic.
https://www.regeringen.se/sveriges-regering/finansdepartementet/statens-budget/statens-budget-i-siffror/
> 1 Rikets styrelse
> 2 Samhällsekonomi och finansförvaltning
> 3 Skatt, tull och exekution
> 4 Rättsväsendet
> 5 Internationell samverkan
> 6 Försvar och samhällets krisberedskap
> 7 Internationellt bistånd
> 8 Migration
> 9 Hälsovård, sjukvård och social omsorg
> 10 Ekonomisk trygghet vid sjukdom och funktionsnedsättning
> 11 Ekonomisk trygghet vid ålderdom
> 12 Ekonomisk trygghet för familjer och barn
> 13 Integration och jämställdhet
> 14 Arbetsmarknad och arbetsliv
> 15 Studiestöd
> 16 Utbildning och universitetsforskning
> 17 Kultur, medier, trossamfund och fritid
> 18 Samhällsplanering, bostadsförsörjning och byggande samt konsumentpolitik
> 19 Regional utveckling
> 20 Klimat, miljö och natur
> 21 Energi
> 22 Kommunikationer
> 23 Areella näringar, landsbygd och livsmedel
> 24 Näringsliv
> 25 Allmänna bidrag till kommuner
> 26 Statsskuldsräntor m.m.
> 27 Avgiften till Europeiska unionen
There's no way you can convince me that many people could find a singular party which actually aligns with them on even a handful of subpoints of the states major areas of expenses.
...
Even those few small points on their own would be enough to eventually end up with a really bad outcome after some cycles. Now add special interest organisations like the UN, Open Society Foundation, the CCP, and such; and loonies like Gates, Persson, Löven/Lööf/Lövin to that soup and all the ills will exponentiate.
Yeah, I've been wondering what sorts of things *other* than drugs have come across our southern border with some of those ten million illegal aliens.
and selling ministry placements to imams in exchange for the votes held by their congregations.
“Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect;”
-------------------
I love you so much.
I see the face of a mole (maulwurf). lol
What a wonderful word! It does grieve me though that rodents are so used at terms of malignment. They are charming and intelligent.
I caught a mole in Germany once. They are protected so I had to catch him and release him in a neighboring park, he was pretty cute, much cuter than this guy. Maybe he is a woodchuck after all...
I can wholeheartedly think of him as a waterbug.
What a conundrum for me! "Rodentine" is such a glorious word.
What is so utterly brilliant about that is that it bypasses the ancient parts of the brain that switch on with aggression and tribalism (as they don't comprehend metaphor) when a human is associated metaphorically with a disease carrying organism, yet allows the newer language comprehension parts of the brain to delight in the comparison.
"....the body of knowledge is shaken and transformed. Conservation becomes transgression.
'The positive assertion in a metaphor, ' writes Jan Zwicky, 'is always an act of overcoming.'"
(I am reading Jeffrey Donaldson, Missing Link: The evolution of metaphor and the metaphor of evolution lol)
More polysyllabic metaphors for these lusus naturae I say!
I just love great explainers who say it with savage elegance.
Voigt writes that, "Ideally, we should agree to... make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence." This would put Germany in the company of Red China.
I would respectfully take issue with your description of the CDU as "centre right". A centre right party leading by some margin ij the polls would be currenrly plotting a right wing coalition. Instead, the CDU is the largest faction of the dark green socialist Block party. Their absence from government is merely a temporary inconvenience to the subjugation of all to the global green socialist order, but their not current coalition partners are doing a sterling back-up job.
this is totally correct of course, but this seems to be what 'centre right' means now, and alas not just in Germany.
In Europe Conservative parties are not conservative. They are socialist light.
And not that light. More socialist heavy these days.
The CDU really is a perfect parallel with the Republican party full of warmongering, power hungry politicians who never worked a real job before.
DEAR JESUS. 🤮
For our part: here in the surpassingly free and wonderful United States, we are as you know currently ruled by a dementia-addled child-huffing lunatic. There are now rumors of said lunatic being replaced by current Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer during the Democratic Party’s upcoming national convention (they are also SUPER DEMOCRATIC, as you can tell from the name!) as the anointed Presidential candidate. During the pandemic, Gov Gretchie wielded such democratic strokes as *blocking MI citizens from buying garden seeds and children’s clothing*, because, obviously, gardening and children wearing new clothes were extremely dangerous activities!
She is such a lipsticked atrocity it is true, but she is way too white for the spectacle they are intending. First we will have pride month, which will overlap with perpetual encampments, then the Republicans, then, I'd put money on someone "marginalized", maybe a transwoman who has recently come out, or someone with pronouns and a label from the smorgasboard of types, who will be the big reveal at the DNC. Here there are "gender reveal parties," where people invite a bunch of people over and reveal the chosen gender of their child. One of these, with some kind of lit balloons or lanterns being launched, started a devastating wildfire near San Diego. That's my bet, DNC as a gender reveal party. But the horror of her having any more power anywhere is certainly real. She's paying 500 dollars a month to anyone who brings a "newcomer" into their spare bedroom, including in Dearborn and Hamtramack, where many, despite being non-extremist Muslims, may not be able to discern if they have an illegal extremist sleeper terrorist in their kids' outgrown bunk bed.
Oh, indeed, dear Cynthia, I’m sure many of these predictions will come true!! And I *can’t believe* I forgot to mention: Guv Gretchie even faked her own kidnapping! 🤪
A lipsticked (not to speak of Botoxed 🥴) atrocity, HAHAHAHAHAAHHA!
She reminds me of the lizard leader “Diana” in “V.” If I were in her presence, I’d be tempted to toss a hamster at her, to see if she lunges for it.
I will swap you our bland/asinine socialist/fascist Bot prime minister of Australia with your lunatic..
At some point, there is going to be “a great reconciliation” of these people!
Voigt doesn't look like a fast runner. May need heavier rope and robust lamppost though.
I take solace in the fact that Herr Voigt's post got the epic (over 10:1) ratio it deserved.
these fascists need to be put down
In the name of democracy, freedom and all things good and pure, I pledge (in the name of Science™) to never again use a pseudonym on the internet. Now please excuse me, I need to go and report some memes as hate crimes.
I only ever use my real name. Always have done 😉
Good to see the Real Mario Voigt does not have a room temperature, IQ, unlike the Mario Voigt politician person.
Both sides are left, only barely able to tell any difference at all.
They're the left and right wings of the Socialist Party.
Left and Lefter, actually 😝