Moral and spiritual idealisms with all their efforts and disciplines aimed at the future are forms of the very mode of awareness which give us trouble.  For they perceive good and bad, ideal and real, separatively and fail to see that "goodness" is necessarily a "bad" man's ideal, that courage is the goal of cowards, and that peace is sought only by the disturbed.  

- Alan Watts  Nature, Man and Woman, 1958

More vs. Cromwell; Gunpowder plots

A man who refuses to believe in a god or an afterlife can never be trusted, only
because he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself.

~ Thomas More

It is rather obvious: democracy has become a quantitative argument rather a qualitative one.  This is not paradoxical: staying true to the democracy concept would mean setting a qualification on it.  Young and old, male or female, vote by all means,
but only if you pass a rudimentary test.  The setting of such a test in itself would encourage deeper reflections on what the political structure is.  

If you define democracy in quantitative terms, the argument will always 
be at a pittance: more suffrage (for teenagers now) is such a bottom of the barrel, obfuscatory non-debate.  But if you had to prove your interest, have a certain level of understanding, by a qualification test to vote - only then, can a democratic experiment begin.  

It then wouldn't be condoning xfactor-brow level decision making that sways polls on the naive wavelengths which sway fashion herds thereby proving democracy's failure, which, besides it's corporate cloning, is the real cause of the current disillusionment with politics.  


Democracy at a dangerous impasse

There are 4 choices:

1. Universal suffrage, or the quantitative position (current 'enlightened' system: the suggestible masses)

2. Compulsory voting.

3. No voting (Russell Brand's revolt, or the reductio ad absurdum to fascism and          totalitarianism as an answer to the two party conundrum- is: 'whats the point? may    as well give in to the seemingly inevetible' - Cyclops trumps dualism).  What nobody wants to contemplate is a return to feudalism - theres a system - no voting, just squabbling Barons.

4. Qualified voting.

   

Revolution:  few questions

Why are those who have public voice, who are using their platform to idly advocate revolution,
not willing to step out of their comfortable police-protected shoes and start one?

Or don't they know how ?

It is obviously a desperate measure, and poses the question - is revolution

entirely committed by the unconscious ?  And is that what is being advocated in this
call of the collective will ?

Just how are the subjects themselves going to be become rulers?  
(As Hannah Arendt puts it)

Why is it that no one has laid out, measure by measure, what dismantling the system
would entail, or how it would take place?

Or is it supposed to occur spontaneously, entirely unplanned ?

Or is it, by its nature, incontingent ?

If so, are logistics, protocol, and contingency measures which we
should forever seek to do and live without - in the true spirit of revolution ?

Is revolution merely the quest for the organic by the light of complacency through the

eradication of all systems ('constructs') ?

If that is the purpose and spirit of revolution, if that is its definition, then does that explain

the relative failure of its spirit in the past ?

How, after a hypothetical euphoric revolution, would disarmament be enforced on citizens ?

Can the allure of revolution be described as a spirit of irrationality, proven by euphoria?

Has revolution been distinguished from anarchy - and if the revolution is not to be anarchic,

what is it then?

Is it going to lead to more forms or strive to remain anarchic and formless?

Is this ecstasy of revolution merely an emotional sensation which cools ?

The Hypothetical outcome of revolution

1. Starvation
2. Arson

3. Anarchy, then necessary expedient.  An arbitrary tyranny or "reign of fear", explained off
    as a temporary measure by that eloquent summation: To make an omelet, you have to break eggs.

Protesting 

To simply affirm the right to protest by doing so , is not to think the unthinkable, it

is to perform that which is completely sanctioned and to endorse that which is entirely impotent.

It is nothing more than gratuitous luxury, a graceless performance of catharsis regardless of purpose, comprehension, or intent.

To the individual, the protest is a self-right to express their 'views' as individuals, in solidarity with others.   On the contrary,  it re-affirms and upholds the non-society, the non-community ethic of a successful corporate state.  Because there is nothing individual or communal about it.   Of course, they aren't really expressing their view, as it is nothing more than mere social conformity with tagline, thereby rendering this 'conscious' stance idiotic.

Fighting power is not only oxymoronic, it is also worship of power.

Students protests are nothing new as noted by Machiavelli,  they are a sign of a successful rule.  Anarchy has always been solely the luxury of aristocrats, artists and students.

The men who are symbolic heroes for the occupy camp*, and villains of the Stuart regime:

*for entirely the wrong reasons.  Heroes to resistors of imperial might, their pro-active intent inspired IRA atrocities - not something that most Fawkes mask wearers at Occupy would care to know, nor understand.



http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/what-does-revolution-mean-you
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/10/russell-brand-the-jeremy-clarkson-of-the-left/

Bryant Park, NY

"Hell is full of good wishes and desires" -  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux


The myth of progress, rather like the myth of enlightenment -

is that enlightenment could be attained collectively through
collective will, rather than personal will (there's a myth of our epoch).
The American president is "ruler of the planet" (Superman II) Superman is the myth of America's will, the myth of its "enlightenment", that of coke and marlboro.

This isn't merely a naive, innocuous theory, it's a perverse faith which has consequences

that would seek to destroy anything which stands in its way. 
The triumph and the summation of the enlightenment is the nuclear warhead.

With that phallic-mushroom heresy began the slow rollback of the enlightenment fallacy,
and the beginning of the cessation of the American epoch. 

Superman is how America saw itself: forward looking, morally right, generous, magnanimous & the benchmark-keeper of all decency.  Now the Apollonian veil of its
clean promise seems sullied, It is now beginning to see itself as it really is.

Its prime mobile was a vehement opposition to  old Europe - 

backward-looking, too Catholic, too Gothic, too old and full of

charnel-house basilicas to fit its glossy, forward looking ideals.  

It was the attempt to roll back the medieval to a Renaissance-inspired neo-classical ideal.

The war against Islam is interesting in that it is a war with the heretics of enlightenment - who wants to hold back the tide, of the democratic ideal. 
In essence, it seeks to oppose and reject violently the liberality of wall street usury and debt-interest fallacy, that blind mayhem of greed, endless frontier-horizon yellow-bricked roads to neverland, which yields nothing more than the consequent gross commercial idealising of all material.  The consequences, however unintended, of Luther, Calvin, & Locke.

Poet's Revolution

The attachment of the sign of the economic to every spontaneous insurrection under the sun is a commonplace in the Marxist tradition. For Baudrillard, bursts of revolutionary activity governed by the “pleasure principle” and the “radicality of revolt”—such as that witnessed in “the destruction of machines, in pre-Marxist, utopian and libertarian discourse as well as in the ideas sustaining ‘the cursed poets or the sexual revolt”—sought a new and more radical “total symbolic configuration of life.” But under the spell of Marxism, these strands of rebellion are abstracted out of movements in political economy, and, at worst, sacrificed as less important moments of the unfolding of history through the “development of productive forces.” It is this sense of finality from which revolutionary activity must escape, of some end toward which our efforts are driven. The “here and now” of revolution must be reinstated. Against the “imposition” of the meaning of revolutionary finality, Baudrillard instead celebrates “the radicality of desire which, in its non-meaning, cuts through all finality”

Hackney - Hackneyed

~ Taxi cab. Carriage for hire,
~ Worn out (by a constant stream of customers).
Or, in other words, prostitute.
trite (tr t) adj. trit·er, trit·est. 1. Lacking power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition; hackneyed. 2. Archaic Frayed or worn out by use.

Monarchy, Democracy, Corporatism, Socialism, Tyranny

Its odd how nobody seems to see capitalism as democracy.
That is, Democracy as systemic product of corporate industrialism, (rather than the Greek enlightenment) and socialism as another product of democracy (disregarding 'national borders', we are talking primarily about ideas, not culture).
It is generally understood that capitalism had something to as we know it came with the industrial 

revolution, but its rarely understood how, coupled with Enlightenment utopianism,
it brought about democracy after the French revolution.
The masses yearned to be zoomed to the painterly Arcadian idylls of aristocracy

they got the slavery of advertisements instead.  

They received perpetual mayas of Arcadia via the democratised arts 

of advertising design-layout in newspapers and magazines.

All the mooted "Progress" in the last two hundred years has gone hand in 
glove with mass production.

Democracy arises from Monarchy, and Tyranny arises from Democracy.

Monarchy then arises from Tyranny, but it takes a great yawn of time.

We bemoan capitalism, but it is germaine with democracy.
Communists still talk of its decadence.  The early communists, circa 1848,
complacently confused the ancient regime with the new oligarchic
trade class.  They couldn't attack the latter as easily as the former.

The former were not slippery global nouveaus, they were the old landed
establishment.

Upon Weber and Butterfield

Capitalism is an abused semantic.  For it is corporatism, not capitalism which should be the derided concept.  It can be traced back to Martin Luther (although this heresy is as old as man) and his vision of a Theocracy uber-alles.  His idea was to effectively combine the secular and the sacred realms -  monastic and mundane worlds.  

That the mundane world outside of the monastery walls should apply the punctilious values of the holy ones and, the monks freed from their vows.  What followed after Luther married his nun, was that the outside world (almost all of northern Europe) was ultimately subjected to the values of the clock (regular prayers) and its implied industriousness.  

In this clash of worlds, free will was abandoned, as everybody was judged under the same august moral standards (e.g. the work ethic).  It was no longer a choice whether you wanted to be righteous, in extremis, the appellation of reprobate or elect was applied over all.

Democracy is slowly turning to tyranny.  It has already turned to tyranny,

if you look at the USA and almost every post-colonial state.  As soon as Europe
imploded its monarchies, the pattern of revolution, democracy and tyranny
(Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy) ensued.  Now we're all saddled firmly in the sin of usury.  

There is the pervasive idea that tyranny is now absolving itself in consumerist
utopias of capitalist democracy.
But this progressive idea of perfectability, this rejection of original sin,
means blaming nature instead and is only possible by exploiting men,
beasts and nature, ideally elsewhere, out of mind.

                              

                                                                   XX

Josephus:

                                                                                 XX

 


Latest headlines:  "Profit is not dirty elitism", says Cameron at the conservative party conference.
But corporatism, definitively, is.

Next week:  Spengler & how we'll never be happy.

Higgs-Boson don't know, but the little girls understand

In equal proportion to our growing human population and consequential eco-destruction,
there grows the spectre of cannibalism.