The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    ironboltbruce's picture

    If You Vote in Elections or Sign Online Petitions, Are You Making a Difference or Wasting Your Time?

    Political Impotence & Slacktivism

    Q. IF YOU VOTE IN ELECTIONS OR SIGN ONLINE PETITIONS, ARE YOU MAKING A DIFFERENCE OR WASTING YOUR TIME?

    Are you an effective political activist, or an impotent "feel-good" slacktivist?  You may be fighting for the right cause, but are you fighting in the right way?  Have you challenged "The Man", or played right into his hands?   

    A1. CAMPAIGNING AND VOTING IN ELECTIONS

    "The United States government and its NATO puppets have been killing Muslim men, women and children for a decade in the name of bringing them democracy. But is the West itself a democracy?  Skeptics point out that President George W. Bush was put in office by the Supreme Court and that a number of other elections have been decided by electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail. Others note that elected officials represent the special interests that fund their campaigns and not the voters. The bailout of the banks arranged by Bush’s Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson, and Washington’s failure to indict any banksters for the fraud that contributed to the financial crisis, are evidence in support of the view that the US government represents money and not the voters."

    http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/02/14/is-western-democracy-real-or-...

    "It is no coincidence that of the last 14 U.S. Presidents, 7 have been Democrats and 7 have been Republicans.  Mainstream media focuses on America's two-year election cycles as if who wins or loses in the swinging of the pendulum was a matter of life or death, when in fact even at the Presidential level it makes no more difference than the outcomes of Monday Night Football, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, Hillbilly Handfishing, the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor, or the latest Kardashian crisis.  Our elections are staged to give Sheeple the illusion of control so they will (a) vent their frustrations and expend their energy, emotions and resources supporting or attacking the Puppet on the Left hand or the Puppet on the Right, and consequently (b) never recognize and challenge the common omnipotent Puppetmaster.  As long as corporations own the politicians, it's futile to believe we can 'CHANGE' things with our votes."

    http://open.salon.com/blog/watchingfrogsboil/2012/01/04/american_electio...

    "And perhaps there's the real problem. If you believe the US is a democracy, if you believe in the rule of the many and not the rule of the few, then the Citizens United ruling could not be more troubling. But what if this is not a democracy? What if this, as Dionne suggests, is an oligarchy of billionaire capitalists? More horrible to ponder, what if democracy is yet more intellectual cover, another one of those illusions, for the exploitation of American workers?  Then the theory of the ruling class fits perfectly. Citizens United and the United States were made for each other."

    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/2012311123627435712.html

    A2. PROMOTING AND SIGNING ONLINE PETITIONS

    "Slacktivism (sometimes slactivism or slackervism) is a term formed out of the words slacker and activism. The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist. The underlying assumption being promoted by the term is that these low cost efforts substitute for more substantive actions rather than supplementing them, although this assumption has not been borne out by research.  Slacktivist activities include signing Internet petitions..."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

    "The age-old process of collecting signatures on paper petitions is being replaced by the cyber-petition, a device that allows notices addressing social injustices to be read and signed by netizens all over the world in a matter of days. Unfortunately, these petitions often contain misinformation or remain in circulation long after they are outdated, and the mere collection of e-signatures is of dubious value."

    http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/petition.asp

    "One of the largest online petition websites does not list the names of any of the people running it, has no information about the organization or organizations associated with it, if any, and gives no evidence that the petitions they sponsor have been presented to politicians..  Yet hundreds of thousands of people have given this website their personal information including addresses, business information, and email addresses.  If the website was not committed to the petition campaigns, why would it exist? The answer is: MAILING LISTS. Those hundreds of thousands of names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses are a gold mine for marketers who use the lists to send various kinds of solicitations and they can make a fortune renting or selling the names to other businesses.  The online petition sites have been a sensational source of not only new names for mailing lists but names of people who can be identified as having particular interests such as supporting conservative or liberal causes, environmental issues, animals rights, etc."

    http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/p/petitions.htm

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    Psywar: The Real Battlefield is Your Mind
    http://www.openfilm.com/videos/psywar

    Hacking Democracy
    http://www.hulu.com/watch/192687/hacking-democracy

    Peace!
    http://www.hulu.com/watch/177439/peace

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    NO MORE LEFT. NO MORE RIGHT. TIME TO UNITE. STAND AND FIGHT!

    IronBoltBruce via VVV PR ( http://veritasvirtualvengeance.com | @vvvpr )

    Related Image: http://veritasvirtualvengeance.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/political_imp...

    Show Your Support: https://www.wepay.com/donate/ironboltbruce

    Tag: #activism, #activists, #democrats, #republicans, #voting, #elections, #slacktivism, #petitions, #worldwarweb, #anonymous, #occupywallstreet, #occupy, #ows, #vvvpr

    Key: activism, political activism, activists, political activists, democrats, republicans, voting, elections, internet petitions, online petitions, slacktivists, slacktivism, occupy wall street, occupy, ows, vvv pr

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    REGARDING REDDIT

    Reddit r/Politics exists to perpetuate America's Demopublican two-puppet political system:  What you see posted on Reddit r/Politics is NOT what was SUBMITTED but what was APPROVED by their censorship system.  And what Reddit calls "Karma" is actually a measure of - and psyop pressure for - groupthink conformity:

    http://www.reddit.com/user/ironboltbruce

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    Comments

    1. Voting is not a waste of time it is the civic duty of every American citizen.  Citizens have duties, this is one of them.

    2. Using an open salon blog as proof there is something nefarious going on, because the last 14 President have been Democrats and Republicans is weird. We have two major parties in America, which means one person from one of those parties will win.

    2. Reddit is not censoring you, they are not the government. They are under no legal obligation to publish your blogs.


    a nice rational response to an absolutely irrational post.


    Second! 


    THIRD!


    OMG, they've gotten to you too!!  Don't you see?  Believing that your vote doesn't matter is EXACTLY what they want you to think!  The illusion being forced on us is that the U.S. is NOT a democracy and is being run by the elites, when the TRUTH is, they have almost NO control over anything WITHOUT OUR CONSENT!  America IS a democracy but it serves THEIR purposes if you believe it's NOT!  If you and the rest of the citizens ever realized how easily you could take back the government from the hands of these elite bastards, you'd do it! So they HAVE to keep you from knowing the truth at all costs!!  Even if it means making themselves the villains in some absurd scenario in which they wield enormous power and make draconian laws that make you even more subservient.   The illusion is that there are interchangeable puppets! They want you to think that. That way, you'll get discouraged and sit around sulking about being powerless.  You'll go around muttering about "A pox on both their houses." The elites even go so far as to plant articles about slacktivism and create useless polls which are easily exposed as shams by people like you who want to prove that Americans are powerless and we should just go sleep in a hammock on voting day!  But that obscures the fact that there are REAL polls and REAL shams! No wait, forget that last part.  My point is, the truth is, that we ARE real, we DO matter, and we CAN change the world. But ix-nay on all that.  That's not what THEY want.  And we're here to do their bidding aren't we?  We're not??!  Well, in that case,  if the elites who desperately want to continue to rule the world, need our frustration and discouragement in order to remain in power.  Don't fall for it!!  Be neither frustrated nor discouraged!  That'll show 'em!  If they remain in power only because they've convinced enough feeble minded folks that they had no hope and that resistance was futile, then we've got to HAVE hope and RESIST in a way that ISN'T futile!  WE can do it!!  Long live the associated forces of ordinary people and paranoid individualists!  Come on, demonstrate the strength of Democracy! Eagerly vote against the people who want you to be discouraged!  Then SMILE at the true expression of Democracy in action!

     

     

     


    Most elections are pre-determined and your vote matters little.

    99% of the time, the candidate with the most money wins.

    Most US election results are as obvious as Putin's or the US-backed candidate in Iraq.

    Even Obama's 2008 was mostly bankrolled by corporate donors and bundlers, but it had a refreshing large component of small donors, enthusiastic citizens.

    That train left the station. Obama turned down matching funds, shut down his grassroots org, and now post-Citizen's United, he's on the same new gravy train as everyone else.

    In a curious way, the new system has one advantage. In the old system, Santorum & Gingrich would have been gone since they're shit at fundraising, and Romney would have been anointed by February.

    In the new system, they can latch on to a billionaire sugar daddy and keep on keeping on.

    Shame Occupy Wall Street didn't have its shit together to latch onto a rich man, though that's antithetical to message as well.

    In any case, when I go to the polls, it's almost always as a pile-on vote, or a futile gesture of protest that might help a losing candidate's fundraising next time, but won't change the results.

    Crass re-drawing of voting districts, voter disenfranchisement via cynical voter ID laws & "inept" purging of false id'd prison rolls, plus polling machine/electronic voting machines just adds to the injury and the pre-determined outcome.

    IronBoltBruce may be shrill, but so is the lame, tired regurgitation of "civic duty to vote". We have a civic duty to protest attacks on the constitution, which is much more important than simply voting. Lots of people in corrupt countries vote to absolutely no effect, not just ours. Yet still most of us stay in our comfort zone.

    OWS was a nice try, but we need a better one, and then an even more competent one. The results needed won't come from elections - many thought they'd done that in 2008, and the guys running the show made sure even that circus fraud won't happen again soon.

    On-line petitions might be part of it, but it's most likely from coming up with a combination of social media that goes effectively viral combined with a local feet-on-the-street component that makes change in-your-face. (The tea-baggers showing up at town halls seemed to keep them more in candidates' faces than camping in parks, but that's certainly not the only way to skin a cat)

    So thanks, Bruce - I won't even offer the put-down that "you could tone it down a bit". You do things your way, I'll do things mine, others theirs - maybe between us all, someone will find a good combo to effect actual positive change, or at least hold on to a disappearing status quo.


    Why is so much money being spent on political advertisements? It's to convince us how we should vote (and in some cases that we need to vote). Thus, money is a distal cause for deciding elections and voting is the proximate cause. The power is still ultimately in our hands and to cede it to moneyed interests is foolish, and exactly what they're hoping for. How much money is spent per vote? In 2008 (before Citizens United), $5,285,680,883 was spent for 132,645,504 votes, or about $39.85 per vote. This year it will obviously be more. Would you throw away $40? I wouldn't.

    That doesn't mean voting is our only civic duty, but it is an important one.


    There isn't an elite which manipulates us. There are several .Who spend a lot of money trying to defeat one another.

    As you say the elite with the most money often wins. Whatever used to be the case, since the advent of TV the tools available  for would be manipulators seem to be enormously augmented.

     "Seem to be" because TV is its own antidote.Had we only a limited number of channels Murdoch would be able to use Fox to shape opinion as effectively as Berlusconi.Not so that voting wouldn't  matter, but so that he got the votes that matter to him. The techniques which cause Americans to think they  enjoy our tasteless , thin , watery beer, could also cause us to vote for an insubstantial candidate. But with a plethora of channels to zone out in front of we're less easily stampeded than Berlusconi's captives.

    Used to be said the British Empire was a form of out doors relief for their upper middle class. In our case, it is the Entertainment Industry which redistributes  wealth from the Kochs of this world to the current generation of weather forecasters , news readers, and Reality TV performers and watchers.

    And by accident maybe some good candidates get elected. 

     

     


    No more left!  No more right!  Time to Unite! Stand up and... not even bother voting?


    I encourage all who commented to take the time to watch the three videos linked in above, as quite obviously most of you didn't:

    Psywar: The Real Battlefield is Your Mind
    http://www.openfilm.com/videos/psywar

    Hacking Democracy
    http://www.hulu.com/watch/192687/hacking-democracy

    Peace!
    http://www.hulu.com/watch/177439/peace


    It's so cute how when people disagree with you, you always just assume that it's because they didn't read, watch or properly comprehend the content that you link to.  You are so darned sure of yourself!


    I'm not sure what you are suggesting people do Bruce.   It sounds like you are proposing they spend a lot of time online watching videos about how the powers that be are hacking their minds.


    Or kinda like when me mum sends me videos - "could you tell me what it's about first, so I don't ask for that 30 minutes back 2nd?"


    Didn't I warn you what would happen if you went public with all of this?