The-Not-Voter: May 2010

Saturday, May 29, 2010

The answer discovered by our forebears to the problem posed by Abel and Cain was the Sacred King, a figure who could resolve the most difficult of personal differences by taking upon himself the necessity to justify the death of Abel and free Cain from posttraumatic stress, guilt. The Sacred King did this by declaring himself responsible for the death of Able by claiming to have ordered Cain to be the executioner. The Bible calls the Sacred King “Lord”, who said (to Cain and all those within his hearing): “Whosoever slayeth thee, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold. And I the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” It is only because of the mark on him made by the Sacred King why Cain lived on and was able live with himself.

While the above is a deconstruction of the story in Genesis (4:9-16), the Bible—most likely written in the days of Secular kings (though they still paraded as Popes in their own right)—avoids explaining that the “Lord” (king) frees Cain of blood libel by taking the libel unto himself. This interpretation explains the spirit of the lost civilization of our forebears.

The figure of the Sacred King has been forgotten in our day. It is remembered only by poets, anthropologists, literati interested in mythology, and an occasional proletarian who loses his job. The latter, sometimes feeling that with the loss of the job, goes loss of a dedicated life, may be seized by the spirit of Cain and go on a killing spree. After coming back to his senses, he is as quickly seized by the spirit of the “Lord”—and erases his blood libel by self-sacrificing himself.

Many contemporary philosophers have been so overpoweringly possessed by delusions of the benefits of democracy that they not only not mention the king anymore, but the posttraumatic stress syndrome never enters into and becomes a reality in their philosophy. Full of denial of the Other (Lord, King, God) as real in the space among the stars, they are unable to see the Other within themselves. Thus, our modern “kings” for the most part are known by the name of “president”, whether a Pinochet or X, both in their own distinct way unelected wimps when it comes to comparing them with the Sacred King.

The governments of the civilization that preceded ours proved (at least to themselves and many of their partakers) that to avoid violence does not mean to avoid death either as a subject or in reality. Unfortunately, this civilization disintegrated, because the Sacred King was displaced by the Secular King of out time. With no authority over death except by way of mass slaughter of his own and imagined “other” people, the modern president is the North Pole to the Sun’s son, the Sacred King. In Latvia the President is become the Fisher King, one wounded in the groin and unable to move but to go fish in the River Daugava just outside his residence, the Castle of Riga. Whenever he catches a fish, he remembers that River Daugava’s most ancient name is Yaunava, a virgin girl. Incidentally, it is the partidocratic Saeima through its Speaker who put the chastity belt on him besides.

……………………………………………………..
In the Latvia of 2010, now 800 years into the era that felled the spirit of the Son of the Sun, John (Jahnis), the Fisher King reigns supreme, paradoxically by not being remembered.

This is sufficient reason why this blogger to advocate NOT-VOTING. To vote in our day means to prolong the agony of suffering a Belgian President of the EU preside as the Fisher-Father over Latvia, while his son becomes Latvia’s de facto Vice-president. To quote Georges Bataille from his essay “Jesuve”:

“The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independely of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior.”

On the other hand, if a NOT-VOTE succeeds in Latvia, it will succeed in the rest of Europe. Speaking in political language, this means that the Fisher King’s wound is healing.

Asterisks & Other Readings
* I am using the term in the sense used by Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism".
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stml
Ground Zero for Thought
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146989
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

While the State points out to its foreign guests the calm of Latvian citizens given the nation’s stressful financial and economic situation and the dire—indeed intolerable—consequences of it, a significant element of the nation agrees with the government by leaving Latvia for other nations and try to join the community there. While the Latvian media mention 100,000 to 150,000 Latvians leaving for parts foreign, the actual figure is probably closer to 200,000 (out of 2.3 million total population). Add this to a government that for twenty years invested little in rebuilding the nation’s community and material capital to survive the trauma of the Soviet experience, and the result is that we have a nation with almost no proletariat. What remains consists of the elderly and those who for one reason or other do not have the qualifications or wherewithal to leave.

To return to economic conditions, such as made for a homogenous centre about the city, a time which the Latvians remember as “the 1930s”, today seems impossible. The 1930s was too a time when the heterogenous proletariat felt that it had something, a flower—a job—and hope of upward mobility. The crushing of the hope that stands as a signifier for the nation’s psyche in the 1930s is entirely due to the Pope of the East, the Pope of the West, and the forced change brought by a hyped consumer mentality. Unfortunately, the encouraged spirit of those times, strong enough to survive a half a century of Sovietization and still demand an independent Latvia has been betrayed. In the beginning there was something in the air that brought me to Latvia after fifty-one years abroad. It brought many others as well. The challenges to one’s survival after fifteen years in Latvia, helped along by the collapse of trust in Western finance, engross a pensioner.

Because I was not interested in taking an active part in Latvian politics (I first had to become reacquainted with the country), I spent much of my time in the countryside and came in contact with the Latvian proletarians-populistinians (for lack of a better word) in the countryside round about the regions of Valmiera and Limbazhi.

I have been reeducated, surprised, horrified, and angered by what I found and still see.

Nearly twenty years after emerging from an era under the rule of an impoverished East and making a headlong dive into the era of the “advanced” West, a homogenous (partidocratic) State sits on the neck of a prostrate national community. This community can survive into the future only if it rethinks and remakes itself.

The business of the Latvian Saeima has not been the business of community building except in the narrowest interpretation of the term. To escape drawing attention to its betrayal of the community, the establishment still runs from the East to the West, when the West has already turned East. The role that a nation like Latvia can play in bringing the East and West together and gain for itself economic advantage by doing so is never mentioned.

So, welcome NATO! You are from VIP-land. Our ex-surgeon President welcomes you to our Pils (Castle) and will show you the world’s most expensive bridge, not to mention the very expensive glass house known as the “Castle of Light” on the left bank of the Daugava River. We will fight in your ranks in Afghanistan. We are proud you are having this conference in Latvia, even if we are surprised over the Patriot missiles in Poland. We understand your coming is your way of assuring the East Europeans (proletariat and all) that as bad as poverty is and will yet get, you are here with your expensive missiles and other war machinery to protect us and bring us hope.

However, consider this: while the radicalized proletariat is expressing its radicalization by leaving Latvia, and the remaining heterogenes are hanging on by their fingernails (nails breaking turning into the screams of suicides), what little remains of homogeneity (largely an alliance of partidocracies) is no less a heterogenous minority than the others—except that it has the sadistic means to insist that it is the crown of the Latvian nation.* The other homogenes (the ones who were once part of the homogenous community) feel themselves sucked downward among the populistinians and may well become radicalized, too. The 90 students that graduate from the Latvian University’s Chemistry Department annually have no job offers in Latvia, though they and the pharmaceutical companies on location could help develop and market Johns Grass medications to an increasingly tense world. A long dead Jesus and his untrue story determine that the nation may not explore the feasibility of the idea.

The enemies of NOT-VOTING are many, of course. The dysfunctional system of government is held sacred by many no-brainers. Witness the Chairwoman of the Latvian Trade and Manufacturers Association repeating for the benefit of Latvian voters the well-worn neo-liberalist-positivist phrase: “Everyone is responsible for h/her own life. It is not the banks, or the administrators of credit collection agencies, or anyone else who is at fault, but everyone is responsible for his- and her own life.” In short, vote for the status quo that got Latvians into the present trouble, and be dumb enough to vote for the partidocracy once again. [For the article providing the quote (in Latvian) click here.]

To those who ask: What good will a NOT-VOTE accomplish? here is the answer: NOT MUCH if the system of government is responsible, functions well, and erstwhile candidates stand at election time. But if there is little or no choice among candidates, because all support the same corrupt and dysfunctional system? What does one do when the candidates for election are Ini, Mini, Mani, and Mo? Does one call such elections “democracy”, “democracy”?

Though there is no Ini, Mini, Mani, or Mo standing for the October 2010 elections in Latvia, none of the candidates or the parties standing behind them has a track record that inspires trust. All the candidates wear their left shoes on the right foot; in effect, the candidates speak, walk, stand and give their citizen witnesses the jitters, the “disbelieving belief” syndrome. If one of the candidates unbeknownst to the voters were to be in earnest about returning the nation to hegemony, then h/she could achieve this only by effecting short-term (hopefully) authoritarianism. Else the other parties will soon find ways to render h/her a babbling fool.

Do the Latvians have an alternative to the NOT-VOTE? I do not think so. This is too good a time to miss taking part in another “Singing Revolution”. Meet at the polls to sing, not to NOT-VOTE.

Asterisks & Other Readings
* I am using the term in the sense used by Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism".
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitutionhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stml
Ground Zero for Thought
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146989
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline http://latviansonline.com/forum/ + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com or http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/

Monday, May 24, 2010

I suggest that pro-vote campaigns of Latvian organizations such as the PBLA and ALA, not to mention the current government of Latvia, are political institutions heavily committed to positivist thinking and the status quo, and, thus, attempt to intimidate the public against protesting in any meaningful way against establishmentarian corruption. Better a corrupt Latvia than a changed Latvia. Better loose 200,000 of the population to emigration than permit the people in the countryside raise Johns Grass that would keep Latvians in the countryside, have them raise children, and be able to educate them. Ehrenreich’s goes on to list five propositions of the so-called “Satisfaction with Life Scale” developed by positive psychologists. If I substitute the world “my life” with “Latvian politics”, I arrive at the following:

• In most ways Latvian politics is close to my ideal.
• The conditions of Latvian politics are excellent.
• I am satisfied with Latvian politics.
• So far I have gotten the things I want out of Latvian politics.
• If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing [in Latvian politics].

Positivist psychology supports Latvian politicians and media in their stock answer to criticism from the Latvian public that it tilts toward the NOT-VOTE. The political and media rant goes: You (the public) are to be blamed for who you elect. You deserve what you get, because your leadership comes from your midst, which is no better than the midst of the leadership currently in office. We know no such thing as leadership by example. There is no better state than being happy with the way things are, that is, with the status quo.

There is no denying that the NOT-VOTE campaign is at odds with the peddlers of happiness and status quo. Indeed, the NOT-VOTE campaign arises out of unhappiness and unease with the way politics is in Latvia, especially its anti-populist leadership and media establishment.

The populists (the boundaries of this group not yet identified except by thousands of individual subjectivities) nevertheless find themselves becoming the Latvian Jews of the 21st century. As one email respondent at Politika.lv wrote: “Eiropā monarhijas ir tas pats kas LV Jāņi—tradīciju nesējas.” (My transl.: In Europe monarchies are the same what the Festival of Johns is about in Latvia—a bearer of traditions.) In effect, the vehicle of Latvian traditions, the Children of Johns (now repressed), by a curious inversion of mimesis by oligarchs and their media supporters, find themselves identified as monarchists, the latter often falsely presented as totalitarians.

I have thought of the monarch in Latvian politics in passing (mostly in the context of sacred kings of the past), but the theme may be worth exploring. It may turn out that government with a monarch at its head is still relevant in our day, because while the state (valsts) may be corrupt, the monarch perhaps is not.

The Latvian populace (read populists) finds itself linked by its liberal democratic leadership and media to the disenfranchised Children of Johns (Jahnis). Who are the Johns? The traveling Johns were once the teachers and healers of the proto-Latvian people. The Festival of Johns was (as late as the middle of the 20th century) the Latvian equivalent of Community Day. The festival coincided with the Summer solstice, and John was thought of as a God or Demi-god. As a God, John is related to the Jewish Yahweh, though this parallel is neglected with determination lest it be investigated. But the parallels becomes apparent when we note that the “h” in Yahweh need not be read as “ā” (Yāweh), but may represent the letter “n”, thus Yanwen; just as King Arthur’s right hand man Gawain echoes to Yawain.

If some readers are not aware that the name John is a cognate to the names above and many others, let them draw courage not only from my interpretation, but from a reader at Politika.lv, whose response to the observation that “In Europe monarchies are the same what the Festival of Johns is about in Latvia—bearer of traditions” is even more far reaching: “Vēl vairāk—latvieši ir tie, kuru tradīciju, paradumu un vērtību grozu ilustrē Jāņi visā to modernajā kompozīcijā….” (My transl.: Additionally —the Latvians are the ones whose traditions, habits, and values are illustrated by the Johns Festival in all its modern varieties….)

Interestingly, the forces of secularization (the advertising dependent media) are renaming the Johns Festival as the Midsummer Festival, Solstice Festival, Great Picnic Festival, Family Festival, Lihgo Festival, etc. The mention of John (Jahnis) is being erased. Equally, the Children of Johns [those identified now as “tauta” (folk) by those born outside the traditions of the Children of Johns] are no less discriminated against by positivist psychology (displacing the word religion) than by the crusaders. While voting for a partidocratic democracy is proclaimed by the establishment to be everyone’s civic duty and responsibility, casting a NOT-VOTE on behalf of John (the populist leader) and as an alternative to partidocracy is said to be irresponsible.

Of course, when we think of it, the existent system of voting with no opportunity to cast a NOT-VOTE is a system with no scientific basis. As a positivist psychologists interviewed by Ehrenreich said: “The science of positive psychology has not necessarily caught up with the promise of positive psychology.”

The same unfulfilled promise is reflected in the so-called democratic system of voting. This is why it is not only Latvia, but every country in Europe and beyond, that needs to reform the voting system and include the NOT-VOTE.

Latvians may show the way, because all they have to do is fight their way out from under the paper bag pulled over their heads by a succession of positivist thinkers. Just tear the bag off your head and NOT-VOTE!

Asterisks & Other Readings
* Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided Bright-Sided
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stm
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
Click here

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Friday, May 21, 2010

The Tenth Amendment for the United States is currently dead de facto if not to the nth degree yet, though there are people who still struggle to keep it alive de jure. I support them and even insist that the rights to de jure be always alive to become de facto when the time arrives.

What needs to come to the surface by some kind of mass action that is not-violent—yet at the same time brings terror to government officials—that signals that the days when the suppression of the people’s sovereign right over themselves are over. On the political arena this right may be asserted by building a successful NOT-V0TE campaign that reduces the number of votes on voting day to below 50%, preferably bringing % down to 20% or lower. After years of calling for reform of government and receiving vacuous support from politicians who know that “reform” is an empty word, the time is for the least of direct actions that citizens may perform: NOT-VOTE; yet achieve a revolutionary result. The silence of the media over alternatives to the existing system—for example, one in which the NOT-VOTE is a guaranteed freedom—will find the pinprick that breaks the silence.

The prick is likely to come from the people, the populace, the feared Populismus Tyrannus Rex, which has replaced the once despised Jew in as the enemy of real or would be Oligarchs Club.

While it may be difficult to achieve a NOT-VOTE in the USA with 300 million people, it is easier done in a smaller state with relatively few citizens. Latvia is ideal for becoming the spark that initiates the reawakening of the political systems. Great changes must come to the Great “Civilizaciya”. In Latvia there may be around 700,000 eager NOT-VOTERS. All that needs to be done is to persuade the zeitgeist that the NOT-VOTE is not a cup cake, but a pinprick that hurts all the longer one sits on it. This is why the scream is ready to break out—even if it has been held behind the vocal cords for a few centuries. Once the NOT-VOTE has been successfully tested in Latvia, others will gain courage to do likewise. The time has come to nullify the system captured by democracy dictated by oligarchies. In other words, first is the question, then the NOT-VOTE. The democracy that became a democracy in state of self-denial and pretentiousness ought to go “Puff!”

True, there is no guarantee that the present government (wherever a NOT-V0TE is attempted) may not turn dictatorial. But the risk is commensurable with the reward.

A globalized NOT-VOTE will end the perverse fantasy that creates a system frozen in goodness and positivism. It will become clear or clearer who THE PEOPLE are, when we meet at “The Constitutional Assembly for The Rewriting of The Constitution”.

Asterisks & Other Readings
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stm
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ or to this bloggers main site at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

THE-NOT-VOTER
9 The Informed Not-Voter

It is long overdue that the voter be given the opportunity to exercise hh (his-her) right to vote according to hh political orientation. The so-called democratic voting system today has long been flawed by repressing the full extent of a voter’s voting rights by way of holding voting to within a single political system and forbidding citizens to vote against it.

That is to say, the liberal democratic voting system has distinct parallels with the voting system of former Soviet Union, which, too, restricted the voter’s right to vote to a given set of candidates.

The present so-called “democratic” vote is limited to voting for a previously registered group of parties, which are legitimated if on Election Day they receive a given percentage of the public’s vote . In Latvia this percentage is 5% or more. However, it the voter decides that there are no parties that hh cares for (for whatever reasons of personal choice), hh is not given the opportunity to cast a NOT-VOTE. In other words, the voter is not given the opportunity to cast a vote against the ruling government system per se.

Whatever the merits of the Latvian Constitution (Satversme, a translation of the German word “Verfassung”), its capture by a partidocratic government, that is to say, a government whose inner core has been captured by certain corporate interests, has been compromised. Thus, the Latvian electorate has been manipulated by a government, which, to use the voters’ expression, “has stolen the nation”.

The particular “democratic system” of government in Latvia has been limited to “Parliamentary Democracy” and to the exclusion of a directly elected Democratic government. In short, the Government and not the electors control the Constitution by the method of institutionalized capture. However, democracy—if it is to have more than a cynical meaning—means that the sovereigns of the State and the Constitution are the people, the electors. The government is but the representative of the electors for a limited time, usually, four to five years.

As the system in Latvia stands at the present time, a voter cannot through hh vote bring about a truly changed government, but must, to use another people’s idiom, repeatedly “vote for the same old crabs”. It is time that the voters of Latvia understood that after twenty years of their “freedom” controlled by a captured government, they owe it to themselves to cast a NOT-VOTE. If they fail to do so, they not only vote themselves yet another corrupt government, but declare them selves as less sovereigns, more cowards.

Notwithstanding attempts by the “old crabs” to form a Unity Party (for an “honest” government of course), said coalition is simply another game of musical chairs. While the Unity Party ought to be working to institute the NOT-VOTE, it has manifested no such intentions. Indeed, the Unity may be planning to seize the Constitution in an even tighter grip than heretofore. They may borrow an action form the British government newly in office.
The coalition of Liberal Democrats and Tories in England wish to institute a law that would require that 55% of British MPs must approve any move to dissolve the Parliament. The plan to check a sovereign people’s right to request and dissolve the government (by going to the Queen) is in the name of “strong and stable government”. In the British case, this amounts to a gerrymander of the Constitution, because the dismissal of government would not be possible unless a large number of the ruling government’s deputies rebelled and voted against their own party. As an opposition member to the British government has stated, the institution of a de facto “fixed term parliament” will result in a "zombie government".

That the “stolen government of Latvia”, long in a zombie state all its own, may—by way of a gerrymander of yet another “new” Unity—attempt to seize control of a dysfunctional Latvian Constitution is probable, though no such a move has been announced. Such power-over moves often simply happen. This is why Latvians need to be on their guard and come October 2, 2010 chose to NOT-VOTE, to deny the government authority and force it to call a Constitutional Convention.

Why would Unity wish to capture and hold the dysfunctional Latvian Constitution in an tighter grip than before?

The answer is rather plain. The opposition to Unity happens to be a political party that, given the current political situation, has a potential of becoming a political movement, perhaps has already become such.

What this blogger called “The Tuned Center Party” (see Blog 4), re Saskaņas Centrs, despite my awkward translation, has its origins in an attempt to “atune” the political forces in post-Soviet Latvia. The Soviet Union had its own form of “globalization” of the people under its centralized control. As a result, the Baltic countries, Latvian including, saw an influx of Russians and Russian-speaking people. By some estimates this influx constitutes up to 35% of the current Latvian population. The Atune Party was formed to attempt to bridge the “people’s gap” in the renewed Latvian republic. However, a tight control over the Latvian Constitution checked the attempt, leaving many inhabitants of Latvia (about 250,000 out of a total population of 2.3 million) without Latvian citizenship even if many here are now living three generations.

Whatever the fears of ethnic Latvians of being swallowed by the Russian-speaking part of the public, the Parliamentary system under the control of Latvian was captured and corrupted by their own liberal capitalists. The latter are responsible for a capitalism of such clumsy nature that its “few rich-many poor Latvians” social order put the ethnic population into a death spiral. This fact is of course being ignored by not talking about it.
The failure of the Latvian partidocratic government has not gone unnoticed among the Latvians who indeed never favored Latvia as an apartheid State. In the opinion of the latter, the Atuned Party has an important political role to play. Only through dismissing a government with a dismal, even catastrophic record,, may Latvia recover both its identity and economy. However, the future cannot be more of the same no vision of the past twenty years or the no vision of the newly arrived Unity "reformers". The failed state must be taken down and rebuilt anew, but without peddling fear of Moscow only to have its neck collared by a leash of the West.

Asterisks & Other Readings
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stm

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.
Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/

Friday, May 14, 2010

Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ or to this bloggers main site at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

THE-NOT-VOTER
8 An Eye Popper or
To Whom It May Concern
(a brief interruption on the theme of not-voting)

I wonder if Jānis Domburs comment in his column [Delphi], {re: “… ekonomikas recesijas konsekvences, kas šobrīd būtu jāanalizē iespējami plaši, šobrīd ir "piezemējušās" uz Neo aizturēšanas un Ilze Naglas kratīšanas skandāla radīta "informatīvā spilvena”
[My trans.: …the consequences of the economic recession, which we ought to analyze with great thoroughness, are now interrupted by the arrest of Neo and the scandal that surrounds (the police search of) reporter Ilze Nagla’s apartment.]}

has certain echoes also at LatviansOnline. I was amazed to read a poster who frequently harries my posts, posting the following at another site at LO, re:

Posted: 13 May 2010 10:48 AM I was inside of the MK building when all this happened, had no idea that it was going on. You might recognize someone in the pictures: http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/202971/galery/5/article

Really, no idea and in the building (MK—Ministru Kabinets) at that? Is [Tom] just voicing his personal insecurities by presenting himself as a VIP (Very Important Person) yet once again (he has previously associated himself with unnamed NGOs) at the right place at the right moment (?) or is Tom indeed a VI undercover Person at LO, a hired gun to harass people who have other than conformist views with regard to Latvia, especially its politics and history?

Another poster, who signs himself /P (sometimes also as Peteris Cedrins) has similar traits to that of Tom. /P harasses posters, spends enormous amounts of time On Air, brags of being a speech writer for a Latvian President, tells of having worked for the Chancery, and having been commissioned by Ojārs Kalnins, the Director of the Latvian Information Institute, to write a history pamphlet on Latvia. After being harassed by /P over a blog entry and told at an earlier time that my entries would be “mocked”, I posted the following:

Posted: 22 March 2010 10:08 AM This site leads to Blog 92: http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ For transition from proto-Latvian Kingdom of Jersika to modern state of Latvia [the image of which is currently under the direction (or is it sabotage?) of … the Chicago School of Latvia] see blogs from 58 on. As for Peteris Cedrins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Peteris_Cedrins. I am not sure if he works for the Latvian Institute or only wrote some history “text” for it. However, I clearly remember the director of the institute asking him in a post at LatviansOnline if PC should not be elsewhere at the time he was posting. I found the connection puzzling at the time. Perhaps it is not so puzzling after all if it is all in a day’s work.

Peteris Cendrins responded: Posted: 22 March 2010 10:24 AM I can solve the puzzle for you. I don’t work for anybody anymore, in the sense of direct employment. I do contract work. OK the PR Man was being quite justifiably nasty because I was being intensely unreliable and he was waiting for the history text I contracted with LI for. I was late by a grand stretch. I never claimed to work for LI—nor would I want to; working for the Chancery was quite enough. If you have concrete beefs, please throw some cement. If not—enjoy a song. Vysu lobu, /P

Does calling OK (Ojars Kalnins, Director of the Latvian Institute) a PR Man make /P somehow a man less that 30 whom the readers at LO can trust? (In fact, /P is 46, an age when men who seek a second life-career if the first misfired are likely doomed to do as they did before.) Does “intensely unreliable” dismiss suspicions of /P acting as a government censor—more accurately disruptor of flow of thought—at LatviansOnline? Of course, I have no way of telling what other “contract work” /P does, but I certainly would not take his word for it. Perhaps someone else at LO will recollect Ojars Kalnins post asking whether /P ought not to be harassing posters at LatviansOnline, but ought to be elsewhere. Perhaps similar exchanges exist at other posts. Perhaps other posters at LO remember such posts.

The readers of my posts at LO know that I have posted many blogs there. Some of these I have posted at LO exclusively, some I have posted at my own blogsite, but taken advantage of LO platform to notify its readers of such posts. One obvious reason for not posting at LO exclusively is that the site limits a post to 4000 characters, but my blogs often exceed that number many times over.

Over approximately three years, I have created a rough outline of a different past for the people who once lived in the territory now known as Latvia. One difference is that I interpret the term “pagan” as belonging to a long outdated version of history of proto-Latvians, but a version (a myth really) still being peddled to Latvians at home and abroad by a Latvian government that—as the saying goes—fell out of the wheelbarrow yesterday or certainly has acted as if it did. Mr. /P has been a peddler of the orthodox version of Latvian history (one that on occasion I have referred to as zionationalist) with a fanaticism that only a Latvian by conversion (in this case by way of the Chicago School of Latvianism) can muster. I was exposed to this modern improved interpretation of Latvian history as long as seventy years ago. Still, I found enough holes in the “pagan” myth version to wonder about its accuracy, at least with regard to history that happened before the 16th century.

Since I can trace my paternal history in Latvia to about 1740 (and by way of DNA analysis to Croatia and thereabout in the centuries preceding), I was especially curious why there were dates of birth and death and hints about occupation, but silence regarding specifics. Perhaps the silence is explainable by poor, limited, and lost records. Subsequently, based on a considerable amount of reading of events that occurred round about the 11th to 15th centuries and the voluminous work done by the Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, I worked out a rough sketch for an alternate history, which I call the “Children of Johns” (Jāņu bērni) history of Latvia. The paranoia manifested by “Tom” and “/P” by way of behaviour that interrupts others, suggests that—as in the case of modern Israel—the current government of Latvia can comfortably legitimate itself only by insisting on an orthodox “Christian” past preceded by backward paganism.

I expect that other Latvians may criticize my version of Latvian history, and indeed I may learn from it. On the other hand, the fact that two posters should continue hammering with sometimes abusive and always interruptive posts, makes me wonder if they are under contract to the current Latvian government with which I, for one, have my differences.

Asterisks & Other Readings
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
On Constitutional Outrage in the West
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stm

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter. Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnlin + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/

President Valdis Zatlers of Latvia blames financial failure of Latvia on Latvian children. (in Latvian, alas!) A summary: Apollo news service reports that at an international conference on the subject of “The Education of Latvians in Finance at the Private Level”, the President of Latvia blamed Latvians as a people who are not able to handle money. The Apollo news service gives no hint that the President blamed either the current or previous Latvian governments for Latvia’s financial troubles, but suggested instead that children ought to be taught how to handle money. Link at http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/202975 Further commentary below.

Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ or to this bloggers main site at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

The cherry trees and wild cherry (Ieva or Eva's Bloom) are blooming. And so are the populists, the dandilions.

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

THE-NOT-VOTER
7 Save the Children of Latvia
[On the trail of Why “The-Not-Vote”.]

Sometimes someone writes a wonderful essay, says the right things, but when a reader is done, hh (he-her) would like to rewrite it their way. This happened to me recently after I read an insightful essay by Per Bylund “On the Meaning of Voting”. I give the relevant link below at “Asterisks & Other Readings”. What follows is my reset and some additions to Bylund’s arguments.

If one votes because one feels one has the responsibility to vote because hh is a responsible citizen, but at the same time votes not because hh likes any of the candidates, but because one is “a lesser evil”, this choice may be likened to a choice of either shooting one’s self in the foot or the head. Thus, a vote for a lesser evil means that one will shoot one’s self in the foot. An utterly cynical vote is to shoot one’s self in the head.

There is however a third choice: let the bullet fly at a target, the individual who set up the system, or if the individual has since died to let the bullet fly at the system itself. Let is imagine this third choice as a target and call it THE-NOT-VOTE. A shot at THE-NOT-VOTE and hitting it in the bull’s eye (re, getting the majority of voters to “not-vote”) results in loud bells ringing.

The voting systems the world over are at this time on the system, which we call “eager for the lesser evil system”. Nevertheless, we could also call it the “Vetoless voting system”. The system of voting that serves “liberal democracy” is surely a Vetoless voting system. When you vote at any of the voting events of the world today, you vote for liberal democracy as well. In short, you give the “liberal democracy system” the power to veto any other system. If you would rather not vote for liberal system, there is no choice today. You either become a nonvoter or shoot yourself in the foot. Some would call the latter to be practically the same as shooting one’s self in the head.

So, if you wish to take away from the present system its monopoly over violence, you must NOT-VOTE. You must shoot at the target, try to hit the bull’s eye, and set all the bells ringing. It will wake everyone up, and the system will be angrier than hell, but at least the people will have exercised their sovereign right to NOT-VOTE.

A traditional vote cast for the present system is an offensive act on behalf of the present system (yes, support for corruption including). Your vote for the present system allows the police in black masks to push peaceful demonstrators off the bridges at Bauska, Latvia, and the break-ins of the same at a late night hour into a journalist’s apartment to confiscate a personal computer. It allows for an assortment of intrusive acts with no validity if the system were truly a democracy, i.e., one that provided that the outcome of voting results is one of three, not just two choices.

Interestingly, a voting system that serves liberal democracy, the unisystem that rules the West today and will be ruling over it tomorrow (so it is presumed), has set itself up as an enemy of the people. The argument that one hears on the behalf of this system is that it is capitalist, thus oriented toward a self-regulating market economy, which for all its problems remains as Churchill is alleged to have said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)

Churchill is quoted tirelessly, because his statement seconds the liberal democratic system in its self-regulating ways, and vetoes any defensive action by the people other than a vote for “a lesser evil”. In short, to vote today—whether the vote by on October 2 in Latvia or anywhere else—means, as Per Bylund has it: “…the solicitation of violent services offering as only payment an anonymous statement of support for an unenforceable advertised political program”.
………………………………………………………..
The President of Latvia, Valdis Zatlers, has hit upon a wonderful solution for the financial crisis in Latvia: teach the children how to save money. This is a fine idea, except that President Zatlers is asking the savings from those whose relatives (somewhere around 200,000) have left Latvia to work in other countries and send some of their savings home to support those relatives who have remained in Latvia. Re: Save the Children of Latvia

Asterisks & Other Readings
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
Save the Children of Latvia
http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/202975

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.
Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/

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