We’ve seen massive problems now with the election of state court judges from special interest groups that want to affect the election…That was the reason why we went to elections in the first place, to get rid of special interests. But now they’ve come back with money, and so we have to re-examine again how we need to fix that.

- Sandra Day O’Connor
1/26/2010 Interview

I have had an idea of a utopian society in which Bentham’s Panopticon is realized with omnipresent surveillance and sousveillance of every citizen which is viewable by every other citizen and a sufficient number of negative votes cast against an individual results in the individual’s execution (i.e. if footage of your actions against another individual are broadcast and rebroadcast on-demand over an extremely tamper-resistant secured video network and more than 90% of the world’s population or 90% of your local population is decided against you, you are removed from society).

It’s really more of a thought exercise: the implementation of such a system would run contrary to so many interests and individual preconceptions of justice and privacy that it would likely never be implemented (maybe that’s a good thing?).

Apparently I am not alone in such thought exercises – the assassination politics organization proposed by Jim Bell resembles something which may actually see implementation though, for obvious reasons, it is far more manipulable than forced surveillance or sousveillance for citizenry and leadership alike: the evening news is so thoroughly polluted with disinformation as to turn the population into the direct assassination sponsor of those who have done nothing wrong (beyond landing in the crosshairs of a lying news organization or disinformation-spewing public relations department).

Still, Bell has some well-reasoned points:

This country has learned, in numerous examples subsequent to many wars, that once the political disputes between leaders has ceased, we (ordinary citizens) are able to get along pretty well with the citizens of other countries. Classic examples are post-WWII Germany, Japan, and Italy, and post-Soviet Russia, the Eastern bloc, Albania, and many others.

Contrary examples are those in which the political dispute remains, such as North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba, Red China, and a few others. In all of these examples, the opposing leadership was NOT defeated, either in war or in an internal power struggle. Clearly, it is not the PEOPLE who maintain the dispute, but the leadership.

Consider how history might have changed if we’d been able to “bump off” Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Khadafi, and various others, along with all of their replacements if necessary, all for a measly few million dollars, rather than the billions of dollars and millions of lives that subsequent wars cost.

- Assassination Politics
by Jim Bell

Perhaps an amalgam of assassination politics and the cyber-Panopticon would be ideal: as a condition of holding public office, those holding office must submit to audio/video surveillance made available to the public live whenever on the job.

… whatever the case, you need to know that Big Brother is watching and, if our society is to avoid the emergence of a power imbalance so immense as to be impervious to revolution, (it is the tendency of those in power to remain in power and actively work to retain their power – whether or not this is a legitimate strategy is irrelevant, it’s just the way of things) our society must deal with the issue of whom-is-watching-whom and to what degree those with any measure of control over the lives of others are responsible for their actions.

Is social justice worth the possibility of a price on your head?

All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don’t affect you. If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.

- The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde, 1890

I love the subtle distortions employed by Wilde’s characters Lord Henry and, later, Dorian Gray – but a small sampling of the power of words over reality and a prescient indictment of such manipulation which, in many ways, seems far ahead of its time…

Politics – Public Relations – Disinformation – News Media

What’s in a name?

That which we call “persuasion”
by any other name has results the same

Falsehoods – Distortions – Manipulations – Prevarications

Neuro-linguistic Programming places great deal of importance on non-verbal communication and body language. However, our language also plays a significant role in effective communication. It embodies not just the vocabulary we use in our dialect, which is around seven percent of the communication, but also the language we use in our brain. Every word we use has an impact on the communication and individual words can carry deep meanings.

- NLP E-Prime Technique

“Reform” is also not aspirational, nor hopeful like “Change”. In the meantime, the opposition has their messaging perfected.

The Republicans know how to keep it simple and stay on message. In this case keeping it simple means Obama’s plan is socialism.

In politics, it matters not that the argument is false, only that it’s believable.

- Why The Health Care Debate Is Sick
by David Burn

Answer: Enough to be dangerous.

Policy makers and forecasters who see a recovery next year are probably lying to boost public confidence, he said. And the crisis will eventually provoke political conflict, albeit not on the scale of a world war, but violent all the same.

… because it [the United States] retains safe-haven status, in a global crisis, investors want to increase their exposure to the U.S. Hence, the dollar rally. Hence 10-year Treasuries down below 3 per cent yields.

It’s almost paradoxical that an American crisis … reinforces the status of the United States as a safe haven.

- There will be blood by Heather Scoffield at The Globe and Mail

No harm in making predictions which are already in the process of fulfillment.

Many people assume that marijuana was made illegal through some kind of process involving scientific, medical, and government hearings; that it was to protect the citizens from what was determined to be a dangerous drug.

The actual story shows a much different picture. Those who voted on the legal fate of this plant never had the facts, but were dependent on information supplied by those who had a specific agenda to deceive lawmakers.

- Why is Marijuana Illegal? by Pete Guither

The topic in question – marijuana legality – takes a backseat to the blow-by-blow account of what happens when corporate interests intersect with legislation. Definitely an article worth reading for those interested in how prohibitions and regulatory leniency come into being.

You will notice that there are some things – corruption, in particular – which will always be referred to as “isolated” in their incidence. This is for your protection. The powers that be have determined that you would take issue (and your head would explode) if you realized what kind of people were running the show.

Another isolated incident.