Include me out
Merci à R Crumb
I will not be voting.
Murdering one’s neighbours after elections; additional observations
In Britain, elections are rigged, votes are meaningless, there is corruption (often involving arms deals) at the very top, yet the popular consensus is do not grumble, and get on with the business of making money. Voting be stuffed!
When the outcome of the fraudulent election is announced and is as predicted distasteful, or ridiculous, we certainly do not murder our neighbours, or at least not in any number, as has recently been the case in Africa. Why not?
I am not sure the inhibition of kinetic street outcomes is that durable, in a society (our own) where the streets have become meaner and the population of disenfranchised grows larger and angrier.
So it is easy to see civil society spinning out of control. It would start with the immediate neighbors. One has nothing especially against them. They are a decent couple, but they are in the way. They ruin the view.
So why not hack them to death and reduce their bungalow to the ground? I merely ask the question.
Obviously this is the basest and most offensive fantasy but how improbable?
I am not sure that we in the so-called civilised countries are so incapable of violence as our African cousins, even if we have recently been out of the habit. Nor that we are innocent in the African slaughters. Many of the Kenya’s troubles can be laid at Britain’s dorstep, including the corruption of the political class not to forget a sordid colonial history.
Perhaps as the opportunity to prosper becomes reduced, as skills are proletarianised or exported, the defects in our own so-called democracy will provoke murderous expressions by the disenfranchised.
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Updated: I thought Obama would probably sweep all before him even if I reserved the right not to hope for too much. Maybe he might, still – but it was not to be in New Hapshire. His proposition is more positive and attractive than the others. It also seems authentic. Perhaps American democracy is still about to redeem itself. Perhaps that is too much to hope for. For the moment, Obama offers a choice of hope and change versus fear and hate.
***
My hairdresser points out that Obama would not be America’s first black president which has already had two with the post currently occupied by Wayne Palmer, played by the actor DB Woodside, above, on the Fox drama 24. I do not watch this but I am told it is very popular hence Americans are not just ready for a black president they are used to the idea.
***
Fox News has been told to lay off Obama. This instruction can only have come from the wily old fox himself. This means that KRM and his friends realise that Obama might well be the next president. It will be essential for Rupert that he be on the side of the winner. Fox is still its wretched self on everything else. Coverage of the Hormuz straight was directly from the Gulk of Tonkin tradition of craven, loyalist journalism. Fox has however decided (at this stage at least) not to get on the wrong side of the Obama phenomenon.
Recommended ++ : the movie Bamako now available on DVD. Incredible portrait of a courtyard in Mali’s capital where Africa itself is on trial. In French with optional English subtitles.
Don’t Tase me bro’!
The campus police at the University of Florida attack student who asked too many questions.
There are numerous places on the Internet where you can see University of Florida (Gainesville) police officers Tasing/torturing Andrew Meyer, 21, a journalism student who dared to ask John Kerry several highly pertinent questions when he appeared on campus this week.
They comprise a cinema vérité at its purest. The sound is hyper natural. You can hear clearly the victim begging for mercy, the hissing of the Taser and the screams. The Taser is renowned for causing incapacitating physical discomfort, usually short of death, although this is not unknown (Amnesty has documented 245 Taser-related deaths).
Earlier, some students had hooted and yelped in approval as campus police officers moved in to silence Mr Meyer but belatedly as events unfolded one or two in a crowded room indicated they might share the viewer’s horror at these graphic but highly educative events on an American campus. Not all viewers, of course: the imbecilic brigade of the American right is already screaming that this was a set-up. They are the ones who presumably can he heard to hoot with delight when the campus police take out one of their fellow students. And not Kerry, obviously, who increasingly seems to be himself an imbecile.
A very clear version of the incident can be seen here but You Tube has plenty of other examples. It is a frightening and also very powerful scene and one that will do further enormous damage to the international reputation of the United States and to the American campus. And further confirm that Kerry is as useful as a toad in a laundromat.
One reason why America cannot currently win its so-called war on terror is the repeated demonstrations like this one that when it comes to moral leadership, the American cupboard is looking pretty bare.
Free speech is now under physical attack on the campus of the university of Florida, and by agents of the state. Just like the university of Teheran! (This is also the state where not one but possibly the last two presidential elections were stolen by the Republican party apparat, disenfranchising ‘colored’ voters – one of the points being made by the brave Mr Meyer.)
The American campus is already seized by fear with foreign professors harrassed and deported by Homeland Security; arbitrary and capricious border controls applied to visiting scholars, and hysterical Zionist campaigns against anyone who raises their voice against the State of Israel, its historiography, its behaviour, or questions its claims. This has become a new McCarthyism. Joel Kovel’s recent experiences at the University of Michigan show that a university press long thought to be resistant to political pressure will now grovel to blowhards, although to its credit the university has resumed (grudgingly) sales of Kovel’s book, Overcoming Zionism.
This latest incident in Florida is extraordinary because it shows what happens when you put police onto campuses. The gang of police can be seen surrounding Mr Meyer from the very beginning of his questioning of Kerry. Kerry’s own behaviour as Mr Meyer is attacked is bizarre. He apparently sees it as no part of his own duty to interfere in any way. Profile in courage!
There are so many videos taken from so many angles that this is one of those rare events that the revolution has not only seen fit to televise but to do so from every conceivable angle.
The viewer can see the initial assault on the student when the police who had already been intimidating him decided that enough was enough and it was time to bring down this insolent yelp.
The viewer then sees him calling vainly for support from Kerry, anyone, receiving not a single word of support from anyone, followed by shots being wrestled to the ground by numerous officers while he can be heard begging not to be ‘tasered’ – using what is bound to become an immortal phrase: “Don’t Tase me, bro’!” This is a perfectly cromulent use of the infinitive verb to Tase™.
The Taser, normally marketed as a non-lethal alternative to firearms, has never previously been marketed as a method of shutting up those who have inconvenient questions. Doubtless, sales will spike on this new publicity, with big orders from China, possibly. Meyer spent the night in jail on the trumped up charges of disrupting a public meeting and resisting arrest.
The president of the university pronounces himself regretful for the incident. I would have thought he should have sacked the police at the very least, or at least sent them to the countryside for re-education, and begged the student to accept an apology (two of the officers have been suspended on full pay). I do know this is a student I would hire for any newsroom unwise enough to have me in charge (not that I am ever likely to have the opportunity – it is merely an expression of the instant and wholly positive impact this young man has had on me as an almost singular representative of what remains decent in his profession).
There are also hundreds of news reports. Counterpunch asks why Kerry stood there and said nothing. Huffington is very good on the sequence. As always, the journalism that does not appear is as interesting as that which does. Why have journalists on American campuses shown themselves as craven and ineffective as their counterparts at the New York Times and Washington Post? I look in vain for the story in The Michigan Daily. America needs more like Mr Meyer.
Antimedia 
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