A perfect time for protest voting

As I've suggested in a post on Facebook:

"Biden has in fact delegated power to those who can appear competent on a certain level, but Blinken and Sullivan are nicely-dressed schoolyard bullies and Federal-level domestic policy has devolved unto encoding money and handing it to the already-rich. All of the indications are that Harris and Trump would do the same thing. Trump reveals some small amount of competence upon rare occasions; but none of it is likely to be of any consequence. It's the perfect time for protest voting."

As regards domestic policy, let's take a look at the star example for this week: Kamala Harris' "plan" for Black men. Here's Irami Osei-Frimpong with the critical eye:

The "plan" is a joke, as Osei-Frimpong points out, because all Harris has done is to take the wish lists of her supporting billionaires, and add the words "Black men" to each of the items on the lists. Black men and cryptocurrency? You have to admit to being amused by Harris, for the tiny amount of time you can stand to look at her. She displays a prodigious ability to recite from memory, while at the same time showing no original thoughts of her own or ability to participate in genuine dialogue. It is as if the Powers That Be had gone through a vast array of cubicles in an office building, picked a functionary from among them, turned on the assembled cameras of Comcast, and told the mass public: "Here is your next President." It is in this way that the deadly bureaucracy grinds onward.

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Trump is of course an entertainer as defined by his previous output, another in a series of incompetents, a man who takes the job with a typical level of seriousness, which is to say, very little. Here's a politically-revealing entertainment moment:

You'll notice that the billionaires dare not actually risk getting into the ring with Umaga or Bobby Lashley where and when it is revealed to the public whose hair is actually to be cut. The formality at the end appears as a joking representation of, well, torture camps and such. (If this all seems exotic, please consult your local police department.) The general principle is that actual violence is for the little people and for their "wrestler" representatives, to be ignored when its entertainment value is too low.

The glorification of pseudo-violence is one level of normal for America, while real violence is revealed by books such as Another Day in the Death of America and websites such as the Mass Shooting Archive. America manages to "make it so," all of this, at the cost of an increasingly large memory hole, through which the real violence is hidden. Real violence is of course a symptom of something else, which we can't name accurately enough because we've memory-holed it. (I suppose this is what the last chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is about.) So there's plenty enough to protest: glorified violence, America, mass idiocy, elite contempt for the masses, and so on.

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The Democrats would like to persuade you that a protest vote for Jill Stein is dangerous. And let's be clear here -- a vote for Stein will be a protest vote. You would benefit from remembering, here, that our country is already quite dangerous and it's not as if the Dems are "keeping the peace" at this time. The important datum in this regard is the field map for Jill Stein, which reveals that Democratic Party core states such as Illinois and New York have reduced the Stein vote to write-ins. You know, if protest voting were in fact meaningless, why do you think they would try so hard to get rid of it? Here's another politically revealing moment, from eight days ago:

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Comments

Cassiodorus's picture

that this is one of those posts in which the links (in blue) contribute a lot to the message...

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The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.

QMS's picture

.
voting your conscience and making a choice which best
represents your idea of what is good for us is not, in my mind,
a protest vote. It is a vote for who you want to represent us.
People, peace and planet align with my ideals.

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question everything

level but I urge and ask you all to vote AGAINST any congressperson who attended the shameful Natanyahoo road show last summer. Even if the alternative is Porky Pig. Porks can always be voted out again in two years. At the Senate level you might have to be a bit more strategic.

If Harris becomes president and Tester loses, I hope she appoints him Secretary of Agriculture. I am really looking forward to watching Senators fall on their faces trying to explain why a successful organic farmer--and he operates a fairly large farm, this ain't no boutiquey vegetables on a half-acre for high end restaurants delivered by bicycle kind of thingy--is not qualified for the job.

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Mary Bennett