Collecting my thoughts
Nov. 6th, 2004 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistI spent a bipolar hour last night trying to make sense out of what exactly is Ralph Nader doing in New Hampshire with the recount. On one hand it sounds completely insane. The request came in one minute before the deadline. The check did not go through. It will have to be appealed. No one knows if it's happening or not. Nader-haters (well, greater Nader-haters than me) are screaming that he is trying to set up Kerry. But shit, if they can make a litmus test out of any state, since Nader has a legal standing to get a recount, I will support Nader (I just nearly choked on those words) in that endeavor. The grassroots organizations working with him on this are going to try for Florida, too.
Incidentally, what prompted this? Lookie here for a detailed statistical analysis done using actual voter totals from the New Hampshire Presidential Elections of 2000 and 2004 from the New Hampshire Secretary of State website.
In the meantime this outlet brings us the following charming visual aid:
The article also links to various grassroots initiatives to process circumstantial evidence of voter fraud and find hard proof.
Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.org
has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for vote records in over 3,000 counties with more to follow.
Greg Palast has been tracking this from the get-go and before.
The word is, The Mirror wants to do a story on voting fraud early next week.
I am not going to waste my time arguing with people who "maturely" tell me to accept it, it's over, if we fight it, we look like sore losers, the voting fraud issue is just a way to shift blame from ourselves, and we should really focus on bringing in more voters in 2008. The near-aneurysm I experience every time I read those arguments responding to my math, statistics, testimonials, evidence, is not worth it. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
boymanead so aptly put it, it's like "you were beaten and robbed and left for dead at the county fair? well, let's just move on and plan next year's. I'm sure it won't happen again, if we use more orchids in the decorations." I will do whatever I can to contribute to the campaigns investigating this embezzled election for as long as they go on. And unlike supporting Kerry, I won't even have to do it with a pinched nose. This stolen election means that unless we do something about it, the same scenario will play itself out in 2008. And as for attracting voters? That popular soundbite that dovetails with Kerry's insipid call to "let the healing begin"? I touched on that in my last entry, but Leonard Pitts puts it so eloquently in The Miami Herald, where he writes about the possibility of the US literally splitting into two or more separate countries, a Humpty Dumpty that won't be put together again:
That disconnect is not about liberalism vs. conservatism. Agree with them or disagree -- I've done both -- there is a certain pragmatism to traditional conservatives. You know where they're coming from: small government; personal responsibility; fiscal restraint. And their arguments are usually grounded in something recognizable as logic.
But social conservatism is another thing entirely, a mutant strain unhindered by critical thought. These are the nominal Christians whose Bibles are so long on judgment yet so short on compassion, the soldiers of the new American theocracy who want to force creation ''science'' on the schools and deportation on the Muslims. They are the super patriots who regard criticism as treason, the pious moralizers who believe single mothers should be barred from teaching in public schools. They are blind guides who see tens of thousands dying in Iraq and think the defining issue of the election is what gay men do in bed. They give God a bad name.
So here is where I am at. To me this Tuesday proved beyond a doubt that the Bush administration has established an indefinite illegal monopoly on the executive branch, with all the obvious reprocussions (the stacking of the Supreme court, the grinding into the ground the already-broken spine of the legistlative branch, etc.) People who are consoling themselves by preemptively cheerleading for 2008, people who will crowd around Hillary and Obama (yeah RIGHT, like our country would ever elect a woman or a black man) are still operating within the "sane" paradigm, the paradigm of The Economist that I wrote about some time back (excuse my citing myself):
I like The Economist. I often don't agree with its political platform, but it has excellent news analysis and international coverage. It's solidly libertarian, and very British. It is very polite and reasonable. And that is its downfall at this juncture in history. The Economist is stuck in a world of the past, when everyone was reasonable, when corruption could only be entertained as a phenomenon within certain reasonable parameters, when conspiracy theory was some kind of paranoid tomfoolery. It's like King Arthur at the Yankee Court. The Economist Does Not Comrephend in the way that your grandma Does Not Comprehend the nature of your dating imbroglios (or at least mine does not). How does a journal too sensible to engage with anything that deviates from the "rational choice model" and furthermore indulges in the colonial nostalgia of the Benevolent Western Influence fare in a world where the PNAC blueprint for actual Global Domination is laid out, in open text (well, open hypertext), making some pretty explicit wishes to the Neoimperialism Fairy for "another Pearl Harbor"?
Or, as Zizek put it, in the article thoughfully brought to my attention byhomburg, “Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by and for the people.” It is not enough to claim that in a democracy the majority’s will and interests (the two do not automatically coincide) determine state decisions. Today, democracy is above all about formal legalism—the unconditional adherence to a set of formal rules that guarantee society’s antagonisms are fully absorbed into the political arena. “Democracy” means that whatever electoral manipulation takes place all politicians will unconditionally respect the results. Simulacrum-democracy, in other words, to use Baudrillard. The signifier claims to stand for a discrete, separate signified, but in reality represents nothing but itself.
I am not one of those people who are, like, "both parties are the same, voting does not matter." That is the metaphoric, hyperbolic, drama-queen take on the "voting: does it matter?" issue. However, with the infrastructure for electoral fraud cleverly in place, voting will not matter literally. Which is why I think the most important thing we can do now is work with the nation-wide efforts to prove electoral fraud. There are still enough "activist" judges on a local, or circuit levels to have hearings, create precedents, and illuminate the corruption. The Achilles heel of the electoral system of the New World Order is that it draws its legitimacy from this broken, perverted illusion of Democracy. This is not a military coup (we might get to that in a few years, but not yet). People are so blinded by the Democratic Electoral Process, reified and fetishized, that they don't see the forest for the trees. So we can weaponize that reification; proof of fraud would be dangerous to this particular incarnation of the wolf, because it still insists on shrouding itself in sheep's clothing. Lambs of God indeed. So for those of you wondering what to do next, this is what I am planning on working next. I invite you to join me in this endeavor.
Incidentally, what prompted this? Lookie here for a detailed statistical analysis done using actual voter totals from the New Hampshire Presidential Elections of 2000 and 2004 from the New Hampshire Secretary of State website.
In the meantime this outlet brings us the following charming visual aid:
The article also links to various grassroots initiatives to process circumstantial evidence of voter fraud and find hard proof.
Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.org
has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for vote records in over 3,000 counties with more to follow.
Greg Palast has been tracking this from the get-go and before.
The word is, The Mirror wants to do a story on voting fraud early next week.
I am not going to waste my time arguing with people who "maturely" tell me to accept it, it's over, if we fight it, we look like sore losers, the voting fraud issue is just a way to shift blame from ourselves, and we should really focus on bringing in more voters in 2008. The near-aneurysm I experience every time I read those arguments responding to my math, statistics, testimonials, evidence, is not worth it. As
boymanead so aptly put it, it's like "you were beaten and robbed and left for dead at the county fair? well, let's just move on and plan next year's. I'm sure it won't happen again, if we use more orchids in the decorations." I will do whatever I can to contribute to the campaigns investigating this embezzled election for as long as they go on. And unlike supporting Kerry, I won't even have to do it with a pinched nose. This stolen election means that unless we do something about it, the same scenario will play itself out in 2008. And as for attracting voters? That popular soundbite that dovetails with Kerry's insipid call to "let the healing begin"? I touched on that in my last entry, but Leonard Pitts puts it so eloquently in The Miami Herald, where he writes about the possibility of the US literally splitting into two or more separate countries, a Humpty Dumpty that won't be put together again:That disconnect is not about liberalism vs. conservatism. Agree with them or disagree -- I've done both -- there is a certain pragmatism to traditional conservatives. You know where they're coming from: small government; personal responsibility; fiscal restraint. And their arguments are usually grounded in something recognizable as logic.
But social conservatism is another thing entirely, a mutant strain unhindered by critical thought. These are the nominal Christians whose Bibles are so long on judgment yet so short on compassion, the soldiers of the new American theocracy who want to force creation ''science'' on the schools and deportation on the Muslims. They are the super patriots who regard criticism as treason, the pious moralizers who believe single mothers should be barred from teaching in public schools. They are blind guides who see tens of thousands dying in Iraq and think the defining issue of the election is what gay men do in bed. They give God a bad name.
So here is where I am at. To me this Tuesday proved beyond a doubt that the Bush administration has established an indefinite illegal monopoly on the executive branch, with all the obvious reprocussions (the stacking of the Supreme court, the grinding into the ground the already-broken spine of the legistlative branch, etc.) People who are consoling themselves by preemptively cheerleading for 2008, people who will crowd around Hillary and Obama (yeah RIGHT, like our country would ever elect a woman or a black man) are still operating within the "sane" paradigm, the paradigm of The Economist that I wrote about some time back (excuse my citing myself):
I like The Economist. I often don't agree with its political platform, but it has excellent news analysis and international coverage. It's solidly libertarian, and very British. It is very polite and reasonable. And that is its downfall at this juncture in history. The Economist is stuck in a world of the past, when everyone was reasonable, when corruption could only be entertained as a phenomenon within certain reasonable parameters, when conspiracy theory was some kind of paranoid tomfoolery. It's like King Arthur at the Yankee Court. The Economist Does Not Comrephend in the way that your grandma Does Not Comprehend the nature of your dating imbroglios (or at least mine does not). How does a journal too sensible to engage with anything that deviates from the "rational choice model" and furthermore indulges in the colonial nostalgia of the Benevolent Western Influence fare in a world where the PNAC blueprint for actual Global Domination is laid out, in open text (well, open hypertext), making some pretty explicit wishes to the Neoimperialism Fairy for "another Pearl Harbor"?
Or, as Zizek put it, in the article thoughfully brought to my attention by
homburg, “Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by and for the people.” It is not enough to claim that in a democracy the majority’s will and interests (the two do not automatically coincide) determine state decisions. Today, democracy is above all about formal legalism—the unconditional adherence to a set of formal rules that guarantee society’s antagonisms are fully absorbed into the political arena. “Democracy” means that whatever electoral manipulation takes place all politicians will unconditionally respect the results. Simulacrum-democracy, in other words, to use Baudrillard. The signifier claims to stand for a discrete, separate signified, but in reality represents nothing but itself.I am not one of those people who are, like, "both parties are the same, voting does not matter." That is the metaphoric, hyperbolic, drama-queen take on the "voting: does it matter?" issue. However, with the infrastructure for electoral fraud cleverly in place, voting will not matter literally. Which is why I think the most important thing we can do now is work with the nation-wide efforts to prove electoral fraud. There are still enough "activist" judges on a local, or circuit levels to have hearings, create precedents, and illuminate the corruption. The Achilles heel of the electoral system of the New World Order is that it draws its legitimacy from this broken, perverted illusion of Democracy. This is not a military coup (we might get to that in a few years, but not yet). People are so blinded by the Democratic Electoral Process, reified and fetishized, that they don't see the forest for the trees. So we can weaponize that reification; proof of fraud would be dangerous to this particular incarnation of the wolf, because it still insists on shrouding itself in sheep's clothing. Lambs of God indeed. So for those of you wondering what to do next, this is what I am planning on working next. I invite you to join me in this endeavor.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 08:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 08:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 08:55 am (UTC)You know, I'm beginning to hate pundits, as a class, more than I ever have before. They are exactly like those bible thumping technocrats, obsessed with interpreting The Text as if The Text was the location of the really real. Grrr. If only I had more toes, I could do them some serious damage.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:00 am (UTC)So, how do you like my plan for What Next?
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:36 am (UTC)The thing is, the Repubs have being sore losers down to an art (even when they win). It's an unattractive quality, but one I am willing to embrace. Two... even if we cannot, in the end, change the outcome, if defending the mechanism of voting isn't necessary to any possibility of future change, I don't know what is.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 05:31 pm (UTC)At first when I started lj (three and a half years ago) nobody read it I didn't care what I posted. Then once people started reading it I was really paranoid for a while and made sure to write in code. And now it's reached some kind of homeostasis where I guess I don't write about anything publically that I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about publically. Like, for a long time I wouldn't use lj from school because I was afraid it would stay in the computer memory, and I was paranoid about someone from the Department coming across it (for no good reason, mind you, on the rare occasions that I write about school it's locked and filtered), but then I just stopped caring. I don't really know why. I wonder if I will become more paranoid when I am looking for a job. Hmmmm.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:12 am (UTC)sadly...
Date: 2004-11-06 09:18 am (UTC)Democrats need to face facts.
Personally, it's hard to accept, but if we want to win in '08, we need to get real.
Re: sadly...
Date: 2004-11-06 09:22 am (UTC)What does "get real" mean to you?
Re: sadly...
Date: 2004-11-06 02:53 pm (UTC)Re: sadly...
Date: 2004-11-06 09:34 pm (UTC)The conservatives have won by building a strong base and playing to it; liberals need to do the same thing. The Democrats will serve themselves AND us better by going after the left instead of the center.
Re: sadly...
Date: 2004-11-08 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:37 am (UTC)Or we can figure out how to make our paths cross in SF, whatever will work best for you. I really appreciate it. And I am so glad you agree with me on the voting disenfranchisement effort.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 10:55 am (UTC)I've been fighting this battle from the same place that prompted you to write this entry all week long. The amount of disbelief I've encountered in the potential for outright voter fraud by this government is staggering. Enough to make me question my own validity. Are people afraid of the actual proof that things are not on the up and up? Will this somehow shake their foundations and actually make them start questioning the world around them? Probably not, as they tend to get really defensive whenever the subject is brought up. My question is this, however. What WILL it take to convince the people who claim to be on 'our side' that the system is mortally flawed? Do we need a parade down Main Street Nebraska sponsored by Fox News? Perhaps Diebold can start manufacturing ATMs, then will it finally matter to them? Again, I can only speculate.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 07:09 pm (UTC)so far, getting the mass media to say or investigate anything hasn't been useful -- they've written their "rough draft" and moved on. but they can be changed.
what is needed is that enough evidence be gathered to make a case for prosecution. so far, the statistical evidence is the equivalent of holmes's "the dog that didn't bark." blackboxvoting.org has started attempting to gather evidence. they need $50,000 for their FOIA requests.
what else can be done to gather more kinds of evidence of this possible crime? (no, that's not a rhetorical question stating that nothing can be done.)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-07 08:18 am (UTC)