From:
The Testimonies of an Enumerator …….
Ring a ring of roses
All fall down
One down, two down
All onto our noses.
Theme refrain for Corinth Starr the elder’s
Media campaign
[The random reader is reminded that this episode is part of a 19 part series, leading into 200 part series. It is a faithful interpretation of a series of textual documents discovered by a geological survey party who were prospecting for Olivine on the planet Urdos, in the !Kung region of the multiverse. The text is produced faithfully with comment where appropriate for clarification purposes. The reader is also reminded that information about Urdos is limited, for until the discovery of the “Testimonies of an enumerator” and a number of other associated texts including the book of Koz, it was believed that the planet was dead and that all incarnate beings thereon had vanished or more importantly had never existed.
The reader is also reminded that the Testimonies” which set out a series of “legends of auld Azania” seem to deal with a culminating event known as the Apocalypse, and what happened afterwards. Information, derived mainly from the book of Koz, will be provided to supplement the story where appropriate.]
…………………
Our story continues….
No one knows for certain what took place on that 23/11 moment. The idea of dominoes dominated the thinking of the world up until that point; and so it is widely believed that the suicidal struggle between the forces of unreason that had become uppermost in the polities of both the Grimmderians and the Grabbastanians “ set the bell ringing”. According to a popular song at the time, appropriated (with suitable compensation) by Corinth Starr the elder for her post electoral victory campaign, a campaign aimed at mobilising the entire part of the electorate that supported her, to move at full speed towards achieving the transformational objectives of her mandate, it was.
“Ring a ring of roses, all fall down, one down, two down, all onto our noses´.
What is known is that on 23/11 a culminating set of events took place: an island blew up to the northwest of the main bulge on the Azanian mainland sending powerful waves, the height of small hills, sweeping across the ocean towards the Firmian mainland.
Firmia was at the time experiencing its worst winter on record: snowfall and blizzards had disrupted communications that in those days were still heavily dependent on fragile infrastructures: and those infrastructures had also been neglected over time. When the wave hit the famous city of New York where the 9/11 incidents had taken place they were still higher than 30 peeple standing on each other’s shoulders and what they didn’t level on their way in they dragged out on their way back to their more usual habitat.
Coinciding with this, it seems, the entire western coastline of Firmia or the region south of Firmia fell into the ocean. How this happened is unclear since it was not supposed to be able to happen. It was speculated by peeple, known as ‘experts’, that the ‘ringing of the bell’ had been resounding, since the war between the Grimmdeers and the Grabbastanians and that this had triggered off what was known as “The Jeriko effect”. It is possible that the ringing accelerated a series of natural settling processes as the planet cooled and ebbed.
Therefore within days of the first disaster another struck Firmia.
One of the Firmian powerhouse regions on the western side of Firmia was reduced to nothing. The effect of this was as cataclysmic as the earlier island explosion had been; save that the wave was higher and the distance it travelled was not far enough to bring down that height to any great extent. A so-called 70-metre wave swept across the island of Keiiretsu and devastated the mainland beyond.
According to a headline at that time it was a day that: “the earth stopped”. .
Fortunately for Corinth Starr she had just borrowed an immense sum from the Keiiretsu, to finance the digital infrastructural requirements for the implementation of the Basic Pay system. Even more importantly, due to the extremely complex nature of the software infrastructure, that would be needed, she had imported some two thousand top-level technical specialists. These were specialists in advanced robotics, quantum physics and binary programming, amongst other things, to facilitate at an immense conference, organised to clarify how the program would be constructed and would function and to set up the basic processing structures to enable the whole system to be coordinated into the lives of the citizen..
It was the most complex neurologically structured Binary programmed model that had ever been conceived at that time and had the purpose of facilitating the complete monitoring of all citizens at all times.
“Big Brother looms” ran one major headline of the time.
Because of the threat to civil rights proposed by any monitoring system, this one was designed with multiple failsafe mechanisms built-in. These took the form of legally structured barriers in the form of procedural requirements, to protect at all times the civil rights of all citizens. The purpose of the neural programming was to enable the entire system to be self- managed and regulated with the end purpose being to have no human* intervention at all.
The prophets of unreason proclaimed loudly that her scheme was inspired by those who would enslave peeple and introduce 1000 years of terror into the lives of citizen. They proclamed that the number 666 was going to be stamped on everyone's foreheads and so some enterprising person patented the number conmbination and the prophets of unreason had to pay a fee everytime they used the number. There was huge litigation with many claiming that the number was already copyright protected through being referenced in a fabled book of wisdom. Others countered that the copyright had expired and the number was now open game.
Whatever.In response she ordered that the news media companies reveal the hell that peeple already lived under…”Is this the truth that you would sooner have than the space that comes from mature control”, she demanded. The prophets of unreason proclaimed the world to be in its ‘end days” and mounted increasing pressure against her.
Corinth Starr was close to reaching the end of her tether. She had been in power for two and a half years and her campaign on the rape front had been amazingly successful, especially her use of the Virtuality game. Paranoia about the virtual;ity game was the stuff of urban legend.*[*Urban legend: we do not understand the meaning of this term. we assume it to imply uncertainty about some subject matter. Contributor.]
However civil right activists were hounding her. There was a drawn out legal issue pending at the Constitutional court that sought to forbid the use of the Virtuality game for criminal control. The grounds were that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. As a populist she knew that the people considered tearing rapists apart, limb from limb, may just about constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Compared to that the Virtuality game was an emotional holiday. Her case was ready but she nonetheless sought by every means to deflect it and somehow had managed to keep it at the low end of the Court lists.It was a mandatory political strategy perfected by her predecessors*.[*We have no comprehensive information on her predecessors and Koz refers to such insinuations as being possibly unfounded allegations. Contributor.]
Nonetheless while people were reasonably placated by the arrest of thousands of alleged rapists the fact that they were only allegations, and that the Basic Pay issue was still an unfulfilled promise was putting her under immense pressure. So she had set January 2013 as the day the Basic Pay programme would launch, with intention to encompass every citizen by late 2014 [in time for the next election, which she duly won with an enhanced majority.] .
We shall launch “come hell or high water” she announced, little realising how prophetic those words were.
She had her team in place and was handling the more recalcitrant and, obviously about to be sidelined, existing bureaucrat class, with what a peeple at the time called “Ball ripping malevolence.” [? Contr:]The conference was scheduled for the week before a traditional feast period, which she had decided to forgo in the interests of launching the entire package by her, self-proclaimed, deadline some two weeks later at the start of the New Year*. [ New Year: Refers to an infinitely repetitive, iterative, numerator defining the passage of universe and all its inhabitants. The Multiverse as you would know refers to a multi - time passage.] of The urgency with which her teams were working was unprecedented and there were many who said later that she must have known what was going to happen.
For instance she had imported a similar block of multi-national genius level technicians into Zone One, six months before her election victory, to implement a scheme to run the Virtuality shows. It was her intention to commercialise the Virtuality games in order to preempt the accusation that the game constituted cruel and unusual punishment by making it a popular sport.
This was how she intended to solve the various difficulties associated with the plagues, these were Starr’s answer to the “Feelies” conceptualised by a philosophic writer called Huxley* ages earlier. [* We have no information about this person… Contributor.]
An unprecedented battering of storms and bad weather throughout the northern part of the planet had prevented most of the Outlanders from returning to their respective homes, after the conference ended, and so most were still in Zone One in Southern Azania when the island of Keiiretsu was almost entirely destroyed. One of the survivors was the Keiiretsun Prime Minister and what he did next changed the existing world forever.
The Firmians were bankrupted. That was what happened next. The Prime Minister of Keiiretsu called up his markers and the Firmians who had been debt financing their economy for more than half a lifetime were unable to sustain the run on their currency, especially when the CHI-nans panicked and cashed in their massive bankroll. Their economy collapsed and together with the loss of a major part of their modern infrastructure the country ground to a halt for a number of years. Firmia closed itself off to the world and the world effectively closed down.
It ground to a halt, with massive declines in trade and travel, and huge amounts of resources going into recovery. The world that emerged from that chaos was different to any world that had ever existed before.
Meanwhile Corinth Starr the elder found her debt rescinded by the grateful Keiiretsuns and she was able to focus her total attention on dealing with Southern Azania’s own difficulties. She took the credits she had acquired almost by mischance, converted them to one-century bonds and issued them as low interest investment instruments and trebled the amount of cash she needed to implement her plan. The media made a huge fuss of her coup and it provided a bright moment in an otherwise scary world scenario.
And scary was an understatement. The crisis was immense. Joblessness affected half of all potentially employable citizens. Considerable numbers were affected by the plagues that had become more virulent over the intervening time since the era of the dispossession. There were certain places where violent and lawless behaviour had the upper hand and there were places where it didn’t. As mentioned previously the violent assault upon the bodies of peeple, called rape, which had been at pandemic proportions was still barely under control. The decline of rural life had accelerated, great urban presences in the form of so-called ‘informal dwellings’ congregated alongside the major linking toll roads. All other road connections returned to the primitive and at times were impassable. Poverty and drunkenness were endemic. The collapse in trade rendered workless many more swathes of peeple.
The vast estates of earlier times that had produced huge amounts of food had largely disappeared and been replaced with micro holdings which barely supported the holding itself and an aggravating factor was growing soil exhaustion. Further north in the land of the Rumbabweans attempts were made to reconstitute the former large-scale holdings under the more fragmented ownership patterns prevailing following forcible redistribution of the land at the turn of the century.
Experimental production methods with multiple owners attempting to produce genetically modified foods were not successful and thus the entire region had become chronically food dependant on food from external, mainly of Firmian origin. After the catastrophe of 23/11 this food delivery stopped and many peeple were unable to get food and this accelerated the movement towards urban solutions. Millions died of starvation and the violence associated with desperate poverty.
The most successful solutions were the so-called ‘five towers’ in northwest Zone one, the first of which had been built almost in ridicule by Starr’s construction company in the years prior to her accession to power. The Towers solution gave Zone one an edge and was why Southern Azania held then, and later why Zone one held when the world came close to dying after 10/1.
What were the positives? Knowledge, controlled water resources, the solar towers, a stable state, a soundly based and diversified economy and a policing system that at core became highly effective, even if it creaked badly under the strain of dealing with an excessively unruly society.
When you start some series of actions it is often best to open the way you intend to proceed. Those who would force others to adhere to their views, no matter how arcane may choose to open with violence. Those who seek to lead others with a gentler bit toward to a different grazing place may choose to open with negotiation.
Corinth Starr the elder took the view that the coupling of peeple into the lascivious contorted entanglements necessary often to ensure either congenial mutually satisfying penetration was an inherently threatening circumstance, fraught with the potential for violence
As a pragmatist supreme she acknowledged that this coupling was the basic drive that kept peeple motivated to do the tasks that beset them in their daily lives. It was also the source of the plague.
In the days of her young impressionable studenthood she had read the great novels of her time and had been particularly intrigued by some contrivance invented by the writer Aldous Huxley, called the ‘Feelies’. It seemed that the ‘Feelies’ were places that allowed for the more recreational aspects of the coupling process and separated it from the purely reproductive.
In her later pre-political years working as a construction cost analyst she had facilitated the development of virtual reality building models. She would use these to enable her and her workers to quantify the use of materials more effectively in order to maintain a profitable route to the success of her construction mission. As a result she had created one of Azania’s most formidable rising construction companies and had been responsible for many roads and bridges not to mention sky-scraping buildings of enormous height, such as the ‘five towers’ project.. She had also learned how to rattle her competition and stay one step ahead of the ‘rat pack’ as she called them.
Somewhere along the way she had been raped and had had to suffer the rage and horror of taking brutally primitive anti-plague measures to ward off what she had seen as a terroristic assault on her, and her threatening ability. Plus she had to deal with the rage at the assault itself.
Her experience changed her and sent her plunging into a world of confrontational activism only to find herself the subject of polite condescension and not a little fear. She prepared for the future with care and hired persons to develop virtual reality models that would act as ‘paralysing’ agents; nullifying the overwhelming drive to engage in recreational coupling through provision of a solo experience of such apparent reality that it became better than the real thing could ever be. And then she was going to lock bad people into it for life. This was the genesis of the “Virtuality Game©”.
Dealing with this issue involved charging into the most delicately problematic zone of peeple’s behaviour. Satisfying the urge to couple or treble or engage in larger multiples of interconnectedness was the drive that saturated the entire ethos of those places that were more successful at satisfying the wants and needs of peeple generally.
Those regions of the planet that were controlled by ideological philosophies derived from contrarian attitudes, to the coupling process, had huge problems accepting that ‘such things’ relevant to inter-penetrative behaviour occurred naturally and focused their citizen’s attention on the less salubrious elements of the actions. They placed terrible and almost insurmountable barriers into the imaginations of their subjects against enthusiastic coupling and created mental distortions that were ultimately bad for general societal well being.
It was not a subject that could be discussed politely at all, since any discussion always carried sub-textual implications of either: desire to couple, or rejection of coupling desire, and no one ever knew where they were, with consequent misunderstanding and unhappiness. It was frequently observed that “in the absence of truth, people read between the lines and since no one acknowledged the lines the result was always misunderstanding.”
It was such a misunderstanding that had been the cause of her own rape and she formulated the view that it was the absence of clarity regarding the subtext that was the problem, rather than the act itself, which while violent and abusive had nonetheless caused her body to betray her, by triggering off responses she would normally have felt only under conditions of far greater pleasure. This had compounded her rage.
She had felt violated by her own body, and subsequently by the system with which she had had to deal after the event, and which had at every stage carried with it the implications that she had somehow “asked for it”. She resolved that something about the process of so-called ‘courtship behaviour’ had to change if all citizens were to achieve happiness, That No had to mean No unless expressly revoked. A world in which No could be made to mean anything was intolerable and oppressive.
Now that she had achieved power through the combination of Basic Pay and the Gender Agenda she knew that were she to achieve anything positive she had to move with breathtaking speed and structured terror. There was no other way. The preferred process of negotiation and respect for the ‘process’, as the endless rounds of nugatory ineffectual negotiations was called, caused delays that were proving fatal. The planet was increasingly beset by violence and rage, inflicted by sub-sets of citizens with unmet aspirations and agendas, many of which involved destroying the material basis on which society’s well being rested: mindless acts predicated on the belief that “if I can’t have it no one can”.
Starr’s vision involved the idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number and if that meant cutting a few corners, then she would have to do it she decided. She knew that she had a brief window before the nullifying, numbing batterings of democratic negotiation would set in and compromise her vision until all those vested interests most threatened by her success would bring their inexorable pressure to bear and corrupt her ‘missionaries’ positions.
She had a limited tolerance for the weaknesses of her subordinates, and in her construction company had developed ranges of criteria, against which to evaluate the entire costing processes of her activities, in order to weed out corrupt practices and attempts to use influence to enrich the unworthy.
She figured that she had at best six months, maybe four before the ‘honeymoon’ would be over as it were and the dagger’s she had so brutally experienced before would be out and plunged well into her exposed positions.
So her first move was the Rape Genocide declaration and the acceptance of this measure by unanimous consent…in the words of some commentators: with indulgence, from those who thought her a hormonally imbalanced person. She realised that her will could only be achieved by the supplementary facilitation provided by her proposed Contractual Relations Act.
Then she announced almost, casually, after passage of the successful negotiation of the Rape Genocide decision, that investigations of “rape’ cases would be carried out under the provisions of the Terrorism act, which up until then had been rarely evoked. It now became a wholesale mandate and those who were arrested found themselves plunged underground into a reality that was pure horror in its deprivation and virtual reality pleasure, in its use of technology to nullify the will….
To be continued….
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Polokwane and Blood River
There are a couple of things that have struck me as interesting this past weekend about the ANC presidential struggle in Polokwane*. [*for offshore readers: an obscure provincial capital in the northern part of SA.]
Listening to the chat lines, the newscasts on radio, and observing via many television networks, the following thoughts came to mind.
The first was the almost trivial reality that the entire affair was is and shall be driven by dark skinned people mostly, overwhelmingly in fact, of ethnic origin. With the exception of the odd [so-called] ‘white’ skinned newscaster from the BBC or similar, and a random handful of tokenist honorary black podium persons ‘white’ does not exist in Polokwane.
When someone in New Zealand sent me an SMS to ask me where Polokwane was I had difficulty for a moment remembering what it was once called in an era when a gathering of the momentous level represented by this particular leadership contest would have been exclusively white.
I would hypothesise here that Polokwane represents a watershed in the evolution of the new South Africa. Before Polokwane all defect was blamable on honkys and Apartheid. After Polokwane all defects are self-made and sustaining. Apartheid is dead long live togetherhate.
The transformation is utter and complete. I felt almost as I did when, returning to SA in the early eighties after an absence of 7 or 8 years, I discovered that the American v8 motor car era had vanished, never to be seen in numbers again, the [so-called] “White” professional soccer leagues that had dominated Johannesburg and the country life during my youth had disappeared, along with “my” team Durban City, and the idea today that honkys don’t support soccer was inconceivable at one time. Most staggeringly, Texan cigarettes had been toppled from their pre-eminent place as the cigarette of choice for “main Manne”, nailed by the ubiquitous product line extension… wussy filtered Texan.
More recently we have been witness to the almost complete disappearance of the old style [so called] “Greek café and tea room” and its replacement with the 7/11 type petrol station shop. What was thus, for this bloggist at least, most stark about Polokwane was the absolute absence of any Whiteys from the most significant political discourse since 1994, other than the odd, almost stoogelike character dotted here and there.
And that extends most overtly to the chat lines where most of the usual suspects who routinely phone in to the mandatory daily doses of SAFM talk back radio were in notable absentia and the talk was all [so-called] ‘black’ and it was fascinating stuff. [I exclude 702 because they only seem to have [so-called] ‘White’ listeners and everybody manages to sound like they only read Stephen Mulholland and the Citizen; and anyway I find the abusive/abrasive Mr Robbie almost as offensive as his predecessor: the late? John Berks.]
Which brings me to the second observation.
People with a reasonably objective view of history as a series of unfolding large events could possibly see echoes in the history of SA, in the events presently unfolding in the Limpopo province in SA.
Now I have always seen a certain analogy between the former [often despised] leader of SA, Jan Smuts and the present leader of transformed SA, Thabo Mbeki. Both leaders loved to strut the world stage and were/are regarded as major players by those outside the country punching far above their homeland’s natural weight. Both neglected their home turf, and both consequently aroused antagonism amongst their own supporters; in different ways perhaps, but no less fatally…
In both cases we experience a “whoops… what have we done?” effect. Smuts was humiliated at Standerton where he lost his formerly safe parliamentary seat, when people deserted his party and sent us off on a forty-four year journey into the wilderness of complete futility. As I write this it seems Mbeki may meet his ‘Waterloo’ at Polokwane. His disdain for his own people, coupled with an alienating mechanical style has driven them into the arms of a man who may change everything he has done. We await the unfolding in weekly instalments. [we don't expect them any faster. If an event that has been talked about since forever falters because someone forgot to deliver the ballot papers, when voting was the whole point of the exercise, then why should we expect any urgency in dealing with our potentially catastrophic battery of disintegrating issues.]
[Frankly, if our beloved Thabo should win, it will almost inevitably been seen as a ‘rigged’ victory given the disturbing objections by the Youth League and other parties to an electronic voting system. Thus an Mbeki victory may actually split the party. This has happened before in our history, more than once… enough to say it could be a trend. There is no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. Mbeki would then go down in history as the man who destroyed Africa’s oldest political party… not cool, because I have him tagged as Thabo the Great, as my regular readers would know, for his exemplary and as yet unacknowledged success in turning Gauteng {Zone one} into the Brussels of Africa/ Azania, through snagging Midrand as the home of the African Parliament. So to preserve what is left of his legacy he should quit while he’s ahead.]
Now I had been chugging along happily with this thought [ about Thabo and the late General Smuts] until this past weekend. Then sometime in the stretch of spun time after the first failed ballot bit and the next postponed ballot bit and the late arrival of the ballot papers bit and all the eulogising and "machine gun" bringing bits, I had an epiphany in terms of historical analogy.
This titanic struggle in Polokwane reflects a political turnaround of a kind we haven’t witnessed in this country in about six decades. That is since Smuts’s historical failure to read the market in 1948, which allowed the Apartheid regime to slip into power. Then through subterfuge and chicanery and vote rigging and other dirty tricks the scumbags held sway for decades and ruined the lives of about 98.9% of the population. However: Smuts himself, though a philosopher [of sorts], was not an Ideologue. [Unless one considers ‘Holism’ to be an ideology.]
So I realised that like all analogies seeing a comparison between Jan Smuts and Thabo Mbeki is simplistic. The real comparison was to another giant ideologue in our history.
I realised suddenly in that analogous epiphany that we are exiting the neo-Verwoerdian era of Thabo Mbeki, the cold, distant, analytic man who reintroduced racial profiling and reverse Apartheid [now renamed Togetherhate] into our post- revolutionary society. We are, ironically perhaps, entering the era of John Balthazar Vorster the populist strong man, who was a known “hard man” and party enforcer, just as the man from Quattro, the battle scarred Jacob Zuma, presents himself to us today.
There was a supplementary historical comparison observation in the moment Tokyo Sexwale left the stage. I had seen Sexwale as a Rhodesian figure… the rich man dispensing change from a position of moneyed elegance. Now I saw him, perhaps more ominously, as an analogy with the late Harold Oppenheimer who famously quit the banality of politics in the fifties to concentrate on his empire. I wondered if his leaving was an omen.
I also realised then, in passing, that the whole process matters as much to me, the effectively disenfranchised albeit not yet dispossessed honky, as the transfer of power from Verwoerdt to Vorster mattered to the average disenfranchised, dispossessed darky back then, in the days of evil. That of course is why there were almost no honkys, other than tokenists, who called in to the regular radio chat shows during the Battle of Polokwane, which itself took place over the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River.
Different faces same shit.
Keep on bloggin'
NiK is the blogospherian.
Listening to the chat lines, the newscasts on radio, and observing via many television networks, the following thoughts came to mind.
The first was the almost trivial reality that the entire affair was is and shall be driven by dark skinned people mostly, overwhelmingly in fact, of ethnic origin. With the exception of the odd [so-called] ‘white’ skinned newscaster from the BBC or similar, and a random handful of tokenist honorary black podium persons ‘white’ does not exist in Polokwane.
When someone in New Zealand sent me an SMS to ask me where Polokwane was I had difficulty for a moment remembering what it was once called in an era when a gathering of the momentous level represented by this particular leadership contest would have been exclusively white.
I would hypothesise here that Polokwane represents a watershed in the evolution of the new South Africa. Before Polokwane all defect was blamable on honkys and Apartheid. After Polokwane all defects are self-made and sustaining. Apartheid is dead long live togetherhate.
The transformation is utter and complete. I felt almost as I did when, returning to SA in the early eighties after an absence of 7 or 8 years, I discovered that the American v8 motor car era had vanished, never to be seen in numbers again, the [so-called] “White” professional soccer leagues that had dominated Johannesburg and the country life during my youth had disappeared, along with “my” team Durban City, and the idea today that honkys don’t support soccer was inconceivable at one time. Most staggeringly, Texan cigarettes had been toppled from their pre-eminent place as the cigarette of choice for “main Manne”, nailed by the ubiquitous product line extension… wussy filtered Texan.
More recently we have been witness to the almost complete disappearance of the old style [so called] “Greek café and tea room” and its replacement with the 7/11 type petrol station shop. What was thus, for this bloggist at least, most stark about Polokwane was the absolute absence of any Whiteys from the most significant political discourse since 1994, other than the odd, almost stoogelike character dotted here and there.
And that extends most overtly to the chat lines where most of the usual suspects who routinely phone in to the mandatory daily doses of SAFM talk back radio were in notable absentia and the talk was all [so-called] ‘black’ and it was fascinating stuff. [I exclude 702 because they only seem to have [so-called] ‘White’ listeners and everybody manages to sound like they only read Stephen Mulholland and the Citizen; and anyway I find the abusive/abrasive Mr Robbie almost as offensive as his predecessor: the late? John Berks.]
Which brings me to the second observation.
People with a reasonably objective view of history as a series of unfolding large events could possibly see echoes in the history of SA, in the events presently unfolding in the Limpopo province in SA.
Now I have always seen a certain analogy between the former [often despised] leader of SA, Jan Smuts and the present leader of transformed SA, Thabo Mbeki. Both leaders loved to strut the world stage and were/are regarded as major players by those outside the country punching far above their homeland’s natural weight. Both neglected their home turf, and both consequently aroused antagonism amongst their own supporters; in different ways perhaps, but no less fatally…
In both cases we experience a “whoops… what have we done?” effect. Smuts was humiliated at Standerton where he lost his formerly safe parliamentary seat, when people deserted his party and sent us off on a forty-four year journey into the wilderness of complete futility. As I write this it seems Mbeki may meet his ‘Waterloo’ at Polokwane. His disdain for his own people, coupled with an alienating mechanical style has driven them into the arms of a man who may change everything he has done. We await the unfolding in weekly instalments. [we don't expect them any faster. If an event that has been talked about since forever falters because someone forgot to deliver the ballot papers, when voting was the whole point of the exercise, then why should we expect any urgency in dealing with our potentially catastrophic battery of disintegrating issues.]
[Frankly, if our beloved Thabo should win, it will almost inevitably been seen as a ‘rigged’ victory given the disturbing objections by the Youth League and other parties to an electronic voting system. Thus an Mbeki victory may actually split the party. This has happened before in our history, more than once… enough to say it could be a trend. There is no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. Mbeki would then go down in history as the man who destroyed Africa’s oldest political party… not cool, because I have him tagged as Thabo the Great, as my regular readers would know, for his exemplary and as yet unacknowledged success in turning Gauteng {Zone one} into the Brussels of Africa/ Azania, through snagging Midrand as the home of the African Parliament. So to preserve what is left of his legacy he should quit while he’s ahead.]
Now I had been chugging along happily with this thought [ about Thabo and the late General Smuts] until this past weekend. Then sometime in the stretch of spun time after the first failed ballot bit and the next postponed ballot bit and the late arrival of the ballot papers bit and all the eulogising and "machine gun" bringing bits, I had an epiphany in terms of historical analogy.
This titanic struggle in Polokwane reflects a political turnaround of a kind we haven’t witnessed in this country in about six decades. That is since Smuts’s historical failure to read the market in 1948, which allowed the Apartheid regime to slip into power. Then through subterfuge and chicanery and vote rigging and other dirty tricks the scumbags held sway for decades and ruined the lives of about 98.9% of the population. However: Smuts himself, though a philosopher [of sorts], was not an Ideologue. [Unless one considers ‘Holism’ to be an ideology.]
So I realised that like all analogies seeing a comparison between Jan Smuts and Thabo Mbeki is simplistic. The real comparison was to another giant ideologue in our history.
I realised suddenly in that analogous epiphany that we are exiting the neo-Verwoerdian era of Thabo Mbeki, the cold, distant, analytic man who reintroduced racial profiling and reverse Apartheid [now renamed Togetherhate] into our post- revolutionary society. We are, ironically perhaps, entering the era of John Balthazar Vorster the populist strong man, who was a known “hard man” and party enforcer, just as the man from Quattro, the battle scarred Jacob Zuma, presents himself to us today.
There was a supplementary historical comparison observation in the moment Tokyo Sexwale left the stage. I had seen Sexwale as a Rhodesian figure… the rich man dispensing change from a position of moneyed elegance. Now I saw him, perhaps more ominously, as an analogy with the late Harold Oppenheimer who famously quit the banality of politics in the fifties to concentrate on his empire. I wondered if his leaving was an omen.
I also realised then, in passing, that the whole process matters as much to me, the effectively disenfranchised albeit not yet dispossessed honky, as the transfer of power from Verwoerdt to Vorster mattered to the average disenfranchised, dispossessed darky back then, in the days of evil. That of course is why there were almost no honkys, other than tokenists, who called in to the regular radio chat shows during the Battle of Polokwane, which itself took place over the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River.
Different faces same shit.
Keep on bloggin'
NiK is the blogospherian.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Economics, BEE and Mr Zuma's successor
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate
To men [sic] how little they really know
About what they can design.”
FA Hayek*.
Quoted by the long-established, reactionary newspaperman:
Stephen Mulholland: Citizen Newspaper
5/12/07
[The article generally was one of his predictable rants
against our beloved Thabo. The quote however is from an economist who was/is reviled by the left since forever; but who nonetheless was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, way back before knowledge about him was craftily suppressed in the interests of political correctness. His quote exemplifies why economics was always referred to as the dismal science; alternatively: why things never quite work out the way you, the wannabee change agent, expect them to]
How do we design with hope and grope?
Our particular violation of the iron laws of economics is called BEE.
The previous violation was called Job Reservation.
We know that job reservation failed.
Both had their own particular and rationalised motivations and both set in motion a process of performance substitution that incrementally drove us out of business.
In the 1950’s SA ranked in the world’s top ten for per capita income.
Then as we all know to our regret we
Embarked on a forty year exercise in futility and
We’ve been on a losing curve ever since: masked by lies evasions and general self serving bullshit.
Per capita then was, as now, referring to everyone.
For those readers who want to rush and talk about the oppressed
And dispossessed poor who fully lost their
Place after the fifties.
Today our per capita income puts us in the third division in the
Planetary league [ although under the leadership of the beloved Thabo we have punched way up in the first division even while slowly slipping inexorably down.]
Averaging 4% growth in an economy operating at an official 7.5% inflation rate that many of us down in the lower income levels know to be higher
Means that we are in effect shrinking [as an economy] and the overall pie is becoming less. Naturally those getting the thin end of less which isd most people
Are understandably pissed.
Like most concerned and informed citizens I listen to the uncle fluff balls who have achieved the status
Of official economics gurus
And I hear them all trot out the dreary disingenuous maxim that our inflation is caused by rising oil prices and the competition for food stocks caused by some sudden huge shift to the production of Biofuels…
Consider that we are not unique. Everyone in the world is paying more for these things but with the exception of China which has rapidly rising food inflation issues,
the rest of the world has hardly more inflation than they had a few years ago, places like Japan are still actually deflating [or disinflation if you prefer] and mony is so cheap there that it is being given away for nothing.
Generally though inflation is still well below the rate of economic expansion in almost everywhere Zimbabwe excluded. [The inflation in Zimbabwe for that matter is rooted in a similar albeit more dramatic emphasis on indigenisation as they call their version of BEE.] The fact that it is so low is something of a puzzle to many people.
Therefore to argue that our inflation is mainly due to rising petrol costs and food is disingenuous. The real reason is the usual one: Too much money chasing too few goods in a non-competitive environment where too few [ rapidly transforming ] businesses control far too much of the economy. In a nutshell our rate of productivity growth is failing to keep pace with the generation of roving capital being loosened by the tidal wave of empowerment deals being legislated into compliance.
Our President’s brother raised this concern some years ago when he complained in a controversial newspaper article that the newly emerging business owning class were not entrepreneurial enough to drive additional growth, and his observation is proving valid, as any Hayek driven economist would have noted. BEE is a gamble that can work given draconian impetus as Malaysia has demonstrated.
It worked for Malaysia because it was embarked on in an era when the philosophy that governments commanded the economy was still fashionable in many quarters.
The disintegration of the Malaysian motor industry under the relentless pressure of a more competitive world however underscore that Malaysian affirmative action longevity is in question though.
Our inflation rate
is our signal. When inflation outpaces economic growth then it indicates that we are spending more money than we are earning and that is always problematic.
This is why the left is unhappy. Wealth is being unpacked and handed out to buddies who are having the ball of their lives spending like crazy while it lasts…and …it never lasts. So I’m with them… spend, spend, spend: for there is no tomorrow. However soon or later its payback time… that is Hayek’s uncool but almost unvarying message.
Which brings us to Thabo’s third term [bid].
The vexed question about the choice of leader tonite [Sunday 16, previously known as Dingaan’s Day] is really something of Hobson’s choice, and although I am not one of Desmond Tutu’s fans, I have to concur with his summation that neither man is ideal anymore for the task of leading the country.
Thabo has been good for our country in spite of all the opprobrium he seems to generate. In many ways we have never had it so good, as the saying goes, subject to the caveats noted above. By the same token Putin has been wonderful for restoring Russia to a semblance of Statehood.
As the ad says: ‘Winners know when to quit’. Broadly speaking the available historical evidence indicates that when a leader’s second term in office arrives at its penultimate moment the populace, fearing change will respond positively to the actions of incumbent insiders who seek to extend their personal sell-by dates, and their jobs, by voting to keep the incumbent in.
This has frequently turned out to be a bad move. There are exceptions … they do not disprove the rule. Could you imagine the ghastliness of George ‘Dubya” “Invasion Man” Bush taking on the USA for the rest of his life?
It may well be a bad move for Russia for Putin to sneak back into his job via the back door, as he is allegedly attempting to do. His aggressive strategy will inevitably go a threat too far and he will find that his unwilling targets will slide off elsewhere, and his market could evaporate.
And it may equally be bad for South Africa for the rapidly Zanufying ruling clique to retain their grasp on the levers of power. There has been a growing tendency on the part of the new aristocracy to consider the things of the State to be available for personal use. This, together with the legalised looting of the capital base through the so-called re-distributive strategies called affirmative action, while certainly less destructive than outright theft in the form of nationalisation, is nonetheless a flawed idea, notwithstanding its moral rightness..
This is the curse of economics, as Hayek noted.
Our democracy is sometimes referred to as a one party state, which is obviously absurd since there are plenty of parties barking about. However for all practical purposes and for the foreseeable future the country is effectively a non-punitive form of one party state.
Economics however teaches us that markets, like water, will always find a way and when the natural inclination to competitive opposition and creative change is locked up through some abnormality in the market structure, then like water running down a hill the ideas of others must manifest in different ways.
So it is with one-party states… The absence of pressure from outside the party means that those pressures are referred to the inside of the party. This is an interesting feature of democratic processes… they will out.
In the real tough days gone by, guys like Stalin, Mao and Adolf H would ruthlessly liquidate all opponents: including those in his own team.
So it is time for change.
Which brings us to Mr Zuma.
Should Mr Zuma win the election today, and this is not yet certain, then the country will experience a catharsis that can only be good for it in the short to medium term; and as for the long term… well Lord Keynes famously observed that “in the long term we are all dead”.
The source of this catharsis lies in what may be called creative chaos. There are
Plenty of people, in what the late Robert Kirby called the FOT class, who will be
shouldered aside by newcomers, with the same brutal disregard as though they had
just lost a general election.
Friends of Thabo [FOT] will be replaced by FOJ [Friends of Jacob] or maybe even
FoZZies [friends of Zuma]. Favours will move from a to b and so on and in the chaos that will ensue…. Find your wig.
Those shouldered aside should take their new found wealth and make it work while the newcomers get their shot at the trough.
The very act of changing a leader squeezes out some of the excess baggage from one administration to be replaced by new better-connected newer baggage.
Does this mean that I therefore advocate Mr Z for president? Like the Arch I feel that he is a flawed person. I am a flawed person and would have difficulty standing for office with my battery of impediments; and none of them are a severe as Mr Z’s.
However it wasn’t up to me to nominate him. He has obviously got powerful backing from people who all hope to prosper under his “rule”, and most importantly he seems to have the backing of the masses in the Party who all believe he will be the redeemer.
So he offers us an escape from our present Zanufying cul de sac: assuming the vote isn’t rigged or ….
He will find that Thabo is a hard act to follow for it is doubtful that the economic expansion promoted under the Mbeki era can sustain much beyond 2010: it is already taking strain: the BEE strategy is running low on available person power, which does seem odd. Perhaps the very fact that two such flawed men are the only ones vying for office is a testimony of kinds.
There is also the pending question about a date with the NPA [ National Prosecuting Authority] which may or may not conveniently vanish, like the endlessly postponed start to her prison term for Mrs Madikizela Mandela who was, years ago, convicted on numerous counts of defrauding members of the Women’s League, and is still free awaiting the outcome of an Appeal that never quite seems to be heard. On the other hand maybe she did quick time like Paris Hilton and i missed it.
Since therefore there is a small possibility that Mr Z’s shot at the Ring may be interrupted downline by some spoilsport national prosecutors one hopes the delegates pay careful attention to who is elected to be his deputy.
Keep on bloggin’
*F A Hayek: It has always been a source of amazement to me that I got all the way through an admittedly limited undergraduate course major in economics, monetary theory and banking policy at my old alma mater [Wits] without encountering either Hayek, or his mentor Ludwig von Mises: and their market fundamentalist school of Economics, aka The Vienna School. I always blamed the pleasures of the Sixties and the fact that I was invariably absent from class. I’ve asked other people more recently about this. These being people who have prestigious masters degrees from the same institution and la…they are puzzled at these names for they are unfamiliar to them.
The irony was that the head of the Faculty of Economics at the time I read the subject was also a product of the same Vienna school.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate
To men [sic] how little they really know
About what they can design.”
FA Hayek*.
Quoted by the long-established, reactionary newspaperman:
Stephen Mulholland: Citizen Newspaper
5/12/07
[The article generally was one of his predictable rants
against our beloved Thabo. The quote however is from an economist who was/is reviled by the left since forever; but who nonetheless was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, way back before knowledge about him was craftily suppressed in the interests of political correctness. His quote exemplifies why economics was always referred to as the dismal science; alternatively: why things never quite work out the way you, the wannabee change agent, expect them to]
How do we design with hope and grope?
Our particular violation of the iron laws of economics is called BEE.
The previous violation was called Job Reservation.
We know that job reservation failed.
Both had their own particular and rationalised motivations and both set in motion a process of performance substitution that incrementally drove us out of business.
In the 1950’s SA ranked in the world’s top ten for per capita income.
Then as we all know to our regret we
Embarked on a forty year exercise in futility and
We’ve been on a losing curve ever since: masked by lies evasions and general self serving bullshit.
Per capita then was, as now, referring to everyone.
For those readers who want to rush and talk about the oppressed
And dispossessed poor who fully lost their
Place after the fifties.
Today our per capita income puts us in the third division in the
Planetary league [ although under the leadership of the beloved Thabo we have punched way up in the first division even while slowly slipping inexorably down.]
Averaging 4% growth in an economy operating at an official 7.5% inflation rate that many of us down in the lower income levels know to be higher
Means that we are in effect shrinking [as an economy] and the overall pie is becoming less. Naturally those getting the thin end of less which isd most people
Are understandably pissed.
Like most concerned and informed citizens I listen to the uncle fluff balls who have achieved the status
Of official economics gurus
And I hear them all trot out the dreary disingenuous maxim that our inflation is caused by rising oil prices and the competition for food stocks caused by some sudden huge shift to the production of Biofuels…
Consider that we are not unique. Everyone in the world is paying more for these things but with the exception of China which has rapidly rising food inflation issues,
the rest of the world has hardly more inflation than they had a few years ago, places like Japan are still actually deflating [or disinflation if you prefer] and mony is so cheap there that it is being given away for nothing.
Generally though inflation is still well below the rate of economic expansion in almost everywhere Zimbabwe excluded. [The inflation in Zimbabwe for that matter is rooted in a similar albeit more dramatic emphasis on indigenisation as they call their version of BEE.] The fact that it is so low is something of a puzzle to many people.
Therefore to argue that our inflation is mainly due to rising petrol costs and food is disingenuous. The real reason is the usual one: Too much money chasing too few goods in a non-competitive environment where too few [ rapidly transforming ] businesses control far too much of the economy. In a nutshell our rate of productivity growth is failing to keep pace with the generation of roving capital being loosened by the tidal wave of empowerment deals being legislated into compliance.
Our President’s brother raised this concern some years ago when he complained in a controversial newspaper article that the newly emerging business owning class were not entrepreneurial enough to drive additional growth, and his observation is proving valid, as any Hayek driven economist would have noted. BEE is a gamble that can work given draconian impetus as Malaysia has demonstrated.
It worked for Malaysia because it was embarked on in an era when the philosophy that governments commanded the economy was still fashionable in many quarters.
The disintegration of the Malaysian motor industry under the relentless pressure of a more competitive world however underscore that Malaysian affirmative action longevity is in question though.
Our inflation rate
is our signal. When inflation outpaces economic growth then it indicates that we are spending more money than we are earning and that is always problematic.
This is why the left is unhappy. Wealth is being unpacked and handed out to buddies who are having the ball of their lives spending like crazy while it lasts…and …it never lasts. So I’m with them… spend, spend, spend: for there is no tomorrow. However soon or later its payback time… that is Hayek’s uncool but almost unvarying message.
Which brings us to Thabo’s third term [bid].
The vexed question about the choice of leader tonite [Sunday 16, previously known as Dingaan’s Day] is really something of Hobson’s choice, and although I am not one of Desmond Tutu’s fans, I have to concur with his summation that neither man is ideal anymore for the task of leading the country.
Thabo has been good for our country in spite of all the opprobrium he seems to generate. In many ways we have never had it so good, as the saying goes, subject to the caveats noted above. By the same token Putin has been wonderful for restoring Russia to a semblance of Statehood.
As the ad says: ‘Winners know when to quit’. Broadly speaking the available historical evidence indicates that when a leader’s second term in office arrives at its penultimate moment the populace, fearing change will respond positively to the actions of incumbent insiders who seek to extend their personal sell-by dates, and their jobs, by voting to keep the incumbent in.
This has frequently turned out to be a bad move. There are exceptions … they do not disprove the rule. Could you imagine the ghastliness of George ‘Dubya” “Invasion Man” Bush taking on the USA for the rest of his life?
It may well be a bad move for Russia for Putin to sneak back into his job via the back door, as he is allegedly attempting to do. His aggressive strategy will inevitably go a threat too far and he will find that his unwilling targets will slide off elsewhere, and his market could evaporate.
And it may equally be bad for South Africa for the rapidly Zanufying ruling clique to retain their grasp on the levers of power. There has been a growing tendency on the part of the new aristocracy to consider the things of the State to be available for personal use. This, together with the legalised looting of the capital base through the so-called re-distributive strategies called affirmative action, while certainly less destructive than outright theft in the form of nationalisation, is nonetheless a flawed idea, notwithstanding its moral rightness..
This is the curse of economics, as Hayek noted.
Our democracy is sometimes referred to as a one party state, which is obviously absurd since there are plenty of parties barking about. However for all practical purposes and for the foreseeable future the country is effectively a non-punitive form of one party state.
Economics however teaches us that markets, like water, will always find a way and when the natural inclination to competitive opposition and creative change is locked up through some abnormality in the market structure, then like water running down a hill the ideas of others must manifest in different ways.
So it is with one-party states… The absence of pressure from outside the party means that those pressures are referred to the inside of the party. This is an interesting feature of democratic processes… they will out.
In the real tough days gone by, guys like Stalin, Mao and Adolf H would ruthlessly liquidate all opponents: including those in his own team.
So it is time for change.
Which brings us to Mr Zuma.
Should Mr Zuma win the election today, and this is not yet certain, then the country will experience a catharsis that can only be good for it in the short to medium term; and as for the long term… well Lord Keynes famously observed that “in the long term we are all dead”.
The source of this catharsis lies in what may be called creative chaos. There are
Plenty of people, in what the late Robert Kirby called the FOT class, who will be
shouldered aside by newcomers, with the same brutal disregard as though they had
just lost a general election.
Friends of Thabo [FOT] will be replaced by FOJ [Friends of Jacob] or maybe even
FoZZies [friends of Zuma]. Favours will move from a to b and so on and in the chaos that will ensue…. Find your wig.
Those shouldered aside should take their new found wealth and make it work while the newcomers get their shot at the trough.
The very act of changing a leader squeezes out some of the excess baggage from one administration to be replaced by new better-connected newer baggage.
Does this mean that I therefore advocate Mr Z for president? Like the Arch I feel that he is a flawed person. I am a flawed person and would have difficulty standing for office with my battery of impediments; and none of them are a severe as Mr Z’s.
However it wasn’t up to me to nominate him. He has obviously got powerful backing from people who all hope to prosper under his “rule”, and most importantly he seems to have the backing of the masses in the Party who all believe he will be the redeemer.
So he offers us an escape from our present Zanufying cul de sac: assuming the vote isn’t rigged or ….
He will find that Thabo is a hard act to follow for it is doubtful that the economic expansion promoted under the Mbeki era can sustain much beyond 2010: it is already taking strain: the BEE strategy is running low on available person power, which does seem odd. Perhaps the very fact that two such flawed men are the only ones vying for office is a testimony of kinds.
There is also the pending question about a date with the NPA [ National Prosecuting Authority] which may or may not conveniently vanish, like the endlessly postponed start to her prison term for Mrs Madikizela Mandela who was, years ago, convicted on numerous counts of defrauding members of the Women’s League, and is still free awaiting the outcome of an Appeal that never quite seems to be heard. On the other hand maybe she did quick time like Paris Hilton and i missed it.
Since therefore there is a small possibility that Mr Z’s shot at the Ring may be interrupted downline by some spoilsport national prosecutors one hopes the delegates pay careful attention to who is elected to be his deputy.
Keep on bloggin’
*F A Hayek: It has always been a source of amazement to me that I got all the way through an admittedly limited undergraduate course major in economics, monetary theory and banking policy at my old alma mater [Wits] without encountering either Hayek, or his mentor Ludwig von Mises: and their market fundamentalist school of Economics, aka The Vienna School. I always blamed the pleasures of the Sixties and the fact that I was invariably absent from class. I’ve asked other people more recently about this. These being people who have prestigious masters degrees from the same institution and la…they are puzzled at these names for they are unfamiliar to them.
The irony was that the head of the Faculty of Economics at the time I read the subject was also a product of the same Vienna school.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Legends of auld Azania: episode 7
From: the testimonies of an enumerator: the rise of Corinth Starr the elder.
[The story so far: Corinth Starr the elder sweeps to an upset electoral victory in Southern Azania, powerhouse of the Azanian Konfederacy. Beyond the borders of the Konfederacy events conspired to give Starr the leverage she needs to enact her proposed concept of The Gender agenda…Basic Pay.]
The rise of Corinth Starr in the Azanian Konfederacy:
After nearly half a century of relative peace in the more developed parts of the world a new and insidious threat had become more and more manifest: a combination of criminal behaviour and terrorism. How to control the rising levels of these scourges while yet maintaining the peeple’s rights ethos developed during the latter part of the 20th century was a task which some described as Herculean and others as Sisyphean. These two ancient terms described respectively an almost insurmountable task and one that seemed never to end no matter what was done to deal with it.
The accession to power of the ‘Rules Ffirst’ parties in the developed world during the crisis period of the early century meant that gradually the human rights ethos became subject to a series of overriding control measures of which the Terrorism acts, passed by many governments, were the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ as they used to say although quite what that meant is still uncertain.
We have mentioned the Twin Towers incident as the first major assault by the forces of unreason: an air assault that brought down the largest building in the greatest city of the planet’s greatest empire of the time: … Firmia.
The ‘Rules Ffirsters’ of Firmia struck back, destroying the bases of the forces of unreason while the ‘Irrationals’ struck again and again randomly hoping to wear down the forces of reason through mindless terror. The sensible rationalists cowered in the face of unreason and turned their rage on the Rules Ffirsters whom they blamed for generating extremist reaction through their absurd preoccupation with orderliness and protecting what existed rather than visualising what could be.
And of course one is inevitably bound today by the outcomes of yesterday’s decisions, or, more appropriately, indecisions.
Rape: the genocidal crime.
Starr the elder’s first action on taking up her majority in Parliament was to pass a measure declaring rape to be a genocidal crime and an act of war to be dealt with as an act of war and not as a simple criminal act for which the peeple’s rights provisions of the Constitution applied.
Subsequently she passed the, now long established, “Contractual Relations Act” in support of the measure. Using the detention provisions of the Terrorism Act (passed by the previous administration using their former two thirds majority in Parliament and notwithstanding considerable public disquiet) she was able to bypass the Peeple’s Rights provisions of the Southern Azanian Constitution.
She did this by having persons, who were accused of making un-businesslike, non-professional, uninvited overtures, either overtly or covertly, to othe
[The story so far: Corinth Starr the elder sweeps to an upset electoral victory in Southern Azania, powerhouse of the Azanian Konfederacy. Beyond the borders of the Konfederacy events conspired to give Starr the leverage she needs to enact her proposed concept of The Gender agenda…Basic Pay.]
The rise of Corinth Starr in the Azanian Konfederacy:
After nearly half a century of relative peace in the more developed parts of the world a new and insidious threat had become more and more manifest: a combination of criminal behaviour and terrorism. How to control the rising levels of these scourges while yet maintaining the peeple’s rights ethos developed during the latter part of the 20th century was a task which some described as Herculean and others as Sisyphean. These two ancient terms described respectively an almost insurmountable task and one that seemed never to end no matter what was done to deal with it.
The accession to power of the ‘Rules Ffirst’ parties in the developed world during the crisis period of the early century meant that gradually the human rights ethos became subject to a series of overriding control measures of which the Terrorism acts, passed by many governments, were the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ as they used to say although quite what that meant is still uncertain.
We have mentioned the Twin Towers incident as the first major assault by the forces of unreason: an air assault that brought down the largest building in the greatest city of the planet’s greatest empire of the time: … Firmia.
The ‘Rules Ffirsters’ of Firmia struck back, destroying the bases of the forces of unreason while the ‘Irrationals’ struck again and again randomly hoping to wear down the forces of reason through mindless terror. The sensible rationalists cowered in the face of unreason and turned their rage on the Rules Ffirsters whom they blamed for generating extremist reaction through their absurd preoccupation with orderliness and protecting what existed rather than visualising what could be.
And of course one is inevitably bound today by the outcomes of yesterday’s decisions, or, more appropriately, indecisions.
Rape: the genocidal crime.
Starr the elder’s first action on taking up her majority in Parliament was to pass a measure declaring rape to be a genocidal crime and an act of war to be dealt with as an act of war and not as a simple criminal act for which the peeple’s rights provisions of the Constitution applied.
Subsequently she passed the, now long established, “Contractual Relations Act” in support of the measure. Using the detention provisions of the Terrorism Act (passed by the previous administration using their former two thirds majority in Parliament and notwithstanding considerable public disquiet) she was able to bypass the Peeple’s Rights provisions of the Southern Azanian Constitution.
She did this by having persons, who were accused of making un-businesslike, non-professional, uninvited overtures, either overtly or covertly, to othe
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Legends of auld Azania:Episode 6
from: The Testimonies of an Enumerator:
A digression on a planet
Whatever you do to the web
Of life shall be returned to you twicefold
The book of Shadrach: Navaho section
[Contributors note: In these testimonies recorded by an unknown enumerator we have so far been privy to an unfolding event in a region known as the Azanian Konfederacy. They are reproduced in much the same form as they were found allowing for variances in translation. Where necessary or useful for additional illumination, some ideas are clarified by the Editor or Contributor: i.e.: Ed’: or Contr’:]
The section you are about to read, is a divergence, and contains information relating to an existing range of competing events and entities external to the Azanian Konfederacy.
Some of the statements made would seem based on the unknown enumerator’s familiarity with those things, rather than expertise and so, much of the information is unclarified hearsay.
Unfortunately we have little else to provide validity other than the various monuments to ancient so-called ‘civilizations’, which we now know did exist. Where necessary we have referred to Koz: Legends of Urdos as a form of reference validification.]
*******************
“…Oppression is a degree- by- degree process. It is however prompted by a pre-emptive action, and thereafter the citizen becomes a reactive entity for a time until pacified.” [Corinth Starr the Elder]
It was Starr’s view that the citizen had been reduced to a passive, almost peripheral entity made all the worse for having no obvious range of choice in the marketplace for political ideas than that presented by the existing governing order and not particular presented by any of those who were, it seemed, unwilling to govern, having carved comfortable niches for themselves within the existing status quo as a smug form of opposition..
“The agenda of all government is the greatest happiness of all the citizens…And the Gender agenda is Basic Pay” said Corinth Starr in her closing speech before the election and by election day itself the statement had become a national saying, peeple were humming it in lifts, singing in dense traffic and even in the outlands or auslande as they were more commonly known, goatherds were shouting the slogan at their goats.
It is possible that the governing party completely underestimated the power of the gender vote have taken it for granted for so long. They may well have simply taken the voter for granted there having been no real opposition for at least five to ten years. Where anyone had presented any credible threat that person or group had been ‘bought’, using the floor crossing route, which was so much more efficient a method of subverting the democratic process than the “murder incorporated” strategy followed by the evil oppressive governments of the ‘dispossession’ era. [Notwithstanding this murder of political persons was not uncommon.]
And it had worked. There had been peace and stability for nearly a full generation. The region had shown modest growth and many of those who had been dispossessed in the past came to acquire great wealth and standing in society. The routine deletions of interesting political persons, was almost ingrained: car accidents being the most common form of assassination [as this variation on presence deletion was called.] and the most probable.]
However there were issues that were not being dealt with or, more commonly, were being dealt with but the rate at which they were being dealt with was outpaced by the accelerating rate at which the issues became worse.
For instance, at the physical level, the disintegration of the national road communication system accelerated and the pattern of macadamised road infrastructures, that along with a plentiful supply of dams had been some of the few useful inheritances of the dispossession era, gradually either wore out, disintegrated or worse. In many cases entire road networks were uplifted and removed to isolated areas where they were re-laid as basketball courts and other facilities (or at least this was what people came to believe). In some places roads were dug up because it was believed they were covering valuables: a deadly belief as it turned out eventually.
So gradually the only way to travel was via toll-roads, paying ever rising fees to travel shorter and shorter distances and gradually this reduced the traffic to essential traffic only. Travel by rail, formerly a major means of inter- regional travel had also gradually become more and more problematic as sections of rail were stolen, together with equipment and on occasions entire pick up stations which were appropriated as dwelling materials. Trains were also increasingly vulnerable to ambush and derailment by armed bandits who gradually, insidiously, came to proliferate, as the rural areas were depopulated and the means of policing those areas became less effective..
There had for instance been a time when peeple had travelled great distances during their popular annual festival holiday seasons. At these times peeple stopped working (when there was work) and went far away to enjoy recreation time in relaxed places. Fewer people did this anymore, and travel off main roadways was both unsafe due to the rise in banditry, and hazardous due to the condition of the roads. Life had come to centre much more about peeple’s home territories.
This was not an issue that peeple voted over but was undoubtedly a problem with all the rest: declining health care availability as the system sagged under the strain of the plagues, robberies at isolated pension payout points, and a low-key, informal ‘civil conflict’ had seen the deletion of more than ten thousand agricultural workers over the period since the formal end of the Dispossession struggle. Incidents of Murder [ a particularly aggressive form of unlawful deletion ]of those designated “witches” with allegedly supernormal powers* [*see: The further testimonies: The Yonka Memorandum] had also surged and there were rumours of slaughter being in the thousands. [Slaughter: another form of Deletion activity, usually unlawful,l and on a large scale. Ed: ref Koz.]
Much of this latter violence was due to the ease of robbing isolated places, rather than by design but the effect, as in other parts of Azania was the marginalisation of rural regions, with a consequent effect on income generating opportunities. The masses out there did listen to the radio though, and they voted for Corinth Starr in their hordes, notwithstanding widespread difficulties with voting points and attempts by the ruling party to force their influence… ultimately the scale of defection was too great.
On the powerful side though, the year of Starr’s accession was also the year the first of the great ‘food towers’, as they came to be called, was built in north west zone one [by the Corinth Starr Construction consortium] This perceptive move (there were ultimately five) enabled Zone one to achieve a high measure of food security notwithstanding the growing problems of water supply.
This water supply issue was the most serious long-term problem facing Zone One, and although sensible measures had been followed for decades in respect of conservation of water resources, the demand was constantly outpacing supply. Zone one was the most attractive destination in the whole of Azania and the people flowed there in their multitudes. The era of advanced Water Wars was looming, as was the renewed era of [water forced ] limitation on peeple’s movements. Water access and provision had been so called “privatised” early in the era; a move which had been controversial amongst the masses who felt, rightly in some opinions, that water should be freely available to all as it was critical to survival on Urdos.
The populist ‘good ole’ opposition oligarchs had chosen the theme of: “limiting the influx of aliens into Zone one”, as a primary election platform issue. They were calling for water permits limiting all citizens’ water access rights and providing overnight permits for travellers. Gratuitous migrants of whom there were many would not qualify for water rights after the first five days of their presence in Zone One. The party pulled a remarkable number of votes. The governing party found itself coming third in Zone one, and did little better in the wider country.
In the event the government conceded defeat, rather gracelessly, at twelve o clock on the day following the announcement although they kept hoping for a last minute miracle that would reprieve them from immanent unemployment.
Corinth Starr took fifty two percent of the popular votes making her the biggest single block in the house. It was an upset unequalled in generations. Various natural allies added another six percent to her muscle and suddenly the country was looking at a whole new political outcome. The presence of a lone, maverick, Progressive Market Libertarian Party representative, as one of her coalition allies kept the financial markets from sliding into chaos and the whole place took a deep breath and prepared for some horse trading.
While the mass murder and rape scandal in an Ausland territory provided the spur of rage that catapulted Starr the elder to power, it is doubtful that Corinth Starr would have been any more effective than any of her predecessors were it not for a series of events in the outer world which combined to give her the space and the leverage she needed, to effect her own revolution and so we must digress for a time to identify what happened, in order that her ‘reforms’ can be seen in their own perspective.
The great ‘clash of civilizations’, that had characterised the conflicts on the planet during Starr’s incubation for power had taken an abrupt and violent turn during the opening year of the 21st century, with an infamous military strike called the ‘Twin Towers’ incident. In this attack the great forces of unreason on the planet were launched into an assault on the world of reason. The world of reason retaliated.
This was followed by a period of revenge taking which saw the great Firmian empire, the target of the Towers assault, reaching out to strike at its enemies in ways that reduced their physical capacity for conflict while, theoretically, nourishing their enemies capacity for functional participation in their “system” of global connectedness.
In reality there were more than two civilization systems, which came into conflict at that time.
The prevailing system in much of what was called the “developed” world, was known as the least-path-of-resistance system, whereby the so called ‘Rule of Law’ prevailed, and when it didn’t ‘common sense’, whatever that means, prevailed. These systems were termed democracies and there were competing forms of democracy. Those that proved most durable were, according to Koz: citing its sources; were those “where the citizen had the unfettered right to change those thieves* that governed them on a routine basis when it was felt their thieving had got out of hand.” Common sense [sic] demonstrated that wherever peeple had the unfettered right to change thieves then the populace remained relatively compliant. Where the right did not exist tensions grew, and common sense became spurious and often fatal. [Editor: The word “Thieves” in this instance seems to be a synonym for the more common word “Politician”. There is evidence that the two names were synonymous, although there are some [smaller] numbers of sources that perceive the relationship between the two words as symbolic or metaphoric.]
There were times when common sense did not conflict with what were regarded as the inalienable rights of peeple: that is, the right to pursue happiness and fulfillment, in peace and peeplehood. When it didn’t concur it was often because the peeple were in the grip of some mass delusion that apparently took various forms. [In many of these delusions the particulars of the delusion itself took priority over the rights of peeple and led to great bout of peeple rights abuses: ref Koz: Contributor’s comment.]
Most peeple favoured this ‘common sense’ democracy system: a favourable, if exasperating idea. I.e. it was common sense to steal as little as possible from the Peeple while governing them, so that you could be re-elected. And then, notwithstanding its many flaws, it was arguably the most successful system on the planet for achieving its objective for the largest number of its proponents. These people who adhered to the ideals of a ‘changing-thieves-routinely- democracy’ were known as the ‘Sensibles’.
In contrast to the “Sensibles” were the “Rules Ffirsters”. Rules Ffirsters, who came in a variety of shades, both physically and consciously, worked on the basis that the most important rule of peeple was self-reliance and that no one should be helped in case it made them weak and unable to take part in the game of life. Obviously “Rules Ffirsters” helped those they regarded as “theirs”: their adherents, and were cloying with those they perceived to be convertible. They were invariably rude and offensive to those Sensibles with whom they came into conflict, rude and offensive to the point of murder* [ Editor contribution: murder: unlawful termination of incarnate entity manifestation otherwise called Deletion.]
“Rules Ffirst” was also the dominant philosophy of those people who were also known as Irrationalists. Irrationalists were for the most part people who believed that the concrete world in which all Peeple lived was imaginary and that there was another external world in some mysterious No place called ‘Heaven’ where those who obeyed the right living rules would be allowed to live when they ended their period of time in the so-called ‘reality’: represented in this case by Urdos. Where these delusions were localised to a few individuals those people were often locked away for their own protection [ and that of others ] However some delusions were truly global in scope, with millions of adherents; and therefore these delusions were often accorded honory reality status. This caused huge confusion amongst all classes of Peeple.
These Rules Ffirsters had certain books of “rules” [naturally] to which adherence was mandatory on pain of deletion. After a long period of decline during which sensible rationalism had helped peeple become more prosperous and comfortable than ever before, in the long story of Peepledom, they had made a great leaping comeback on the brink of the changeover from one era to another. Irrationalists were adept at exploiting peeple’s understandable fear of uncertainty and promoted a ‘death or else’, millenarian, or apocalyptic vision. This was a vision of chaos and destruction to all who would not adhere to their varying brands of Irrationalism.
“Irrationalism was an attractive and simplistic idea and helped those termed “the meek” to cope with the living ‘hell’ represented by reality in Urdos: a place in which otherwise ordinary peeple lived lives of desperate convention”* [ Koz: ref Ibid P 867]
Rules Ffirst Irrationalists were also by no means a united group and the many divisions between them were the basis of the so-called: ”Clash of Civilisations” mentioned earlier. Apparently competing groups of Irrationalists presented their own allegedly unique version of the world allegedly populated by irrationalist citizens. This world was subject to the whims of some external, non-evident, dualistic non-physical entity of immense vindictiveness. This entity was referred to by many names, but was most commonly called “God”.
At the same time all the strugglers amongst the peeple had to obey abstract rules of selfhood that were often founded in myth and ceremony and were frequently abstract and interpretable only by a ‘rules’ specialist expert. It was a though the world was all a stage, as someone called William said, and the scene was beset with disparate groups of performers in a trillion arranged settings all wearing funny hats and diverse ceremonial gear. They were dressed for a multitude of pantomimes, playing to a bored audience of prospects; who were all, themselves, locked into material joy. This led to absurdities at times. For instance a citizen in one place could, name something as trivial as a children’s iconic toy known as a 'teddy bear' “Mohammed” without raising an eyebrow; while in another place the same act could result in a crime so heinous that presence deletion was called for. [Contr' note: we do not fully understand the motivation behind this observation. According to Koz the Teddy" part of the teddy bear was originally Theodore. It is presumed that the observation relates to the freedom peeple had to change their names.]
To break that link with comfort and reveal the pain beneath the surface was the goal of the Irrationalists. It was the source of their power. In many places dominant groups of Irrationalists sought to prohibit any competition from competing Irrationalists and even from systems developed by Sensibles. This meant that Sensibles were forced at times into uncomfortable and compromising alliances.
It was certainly true that life beyond the most basic level was an invented game and one that brought great pleasure to even its most minimalist performers.
Early in the 21st century the ‘Rules Ffirsters’ team became the ascendant team in the world with the Firmians coming to be ruled more powerfully than previously by a brand of that philosophy. Meantime the world body charged with maintaining world peace [an oxymoron of course] was still governed by the least-path party derived from Sensibles philosophy; with paralysing interventions from coalitions of the irrational.. Very little positive happened, as each side had a vested interest in the failure of the other, and like or not, themselves. Not all games are played to be won the best are played for as long as the pleasure remains.
Then there were those who argued that both the Rules Ffirsters and the Sensibles were playing an elaborate game in which only one way of perceiving the world was permitted, and it was a game played successfully by sophisticated adherents while the poor suffered and became poorer, because there was no way that the system, as it was then evolving, could ever accommodate them.
For some of these general opponents of the status quo their alternative form of system was based on the belief that there was no system. They (the proponents of unreason) held that the entire purpose of Peeple’s existence was to prepare for an anticipated joyous existence in an alternative quantum dimension. Any significant participation in the systems created by the various material empires of the day, were guaranteed to destroy Peeple’s ability to prosper in that alternative existence.
This so-called alternate existence allegedly followed upon non-presence in this existing ‘apparent’ reality. This was a confusing concept for peeple, which is as it should be, since it was founded on a nonsensical idea that imaginary things were actually more real the real things. It helped the cause that for many in the world of unreason, the main way to reach peeple with their message was by murdering peeple. Randomly murdering peeple in the interests of a so-called ideological issue was guaranteed to prove advantageous to those committing the deed.
The irrationalist purpose being that if they made everyone scared enough then they would generally agree to be guided by the principles of unreason.
According to the Sensible materialist’s position, the philosophy of unreason was based on an illusion. It was though an immensely powerful and attractive illusion and claimed a growing number of adherents …peeple disillusioned by the horror of their present reality longed for the liberation brought by non-presence. They used their own non-presence assaults as a means to force their enemies to negotiate with unreason. They, and many materialist opponents of the existing systems as well, claimed, [reasonably, as it turned out. Ed] that both the “rules” parties on the planet, and the ‘least resistance” parties, were all pursuing unsustainable policies that would end by destroying everyone’s capacity to survive.
And the system was under threat. Global aging, for instance, was apparently a new disease that threatened to bankrupt the developed regions, to destabilise the global economy and overturn the existing geopolitical order. Most of the most established peeple were elderly (had been present for too long). They had achieved a life that no peeple in previous ages had ever achieved (to the best of anyone’s knowledge) and were fearful of it being threatened: and took active steps to protect their positions.
A generation of peacefulness had softened peeple. There was nothing more desirable than peaceful ness…peeple were prepared to give their presence and happiness for a peacefulness moment.
It was into this ambience that the infamous 9/11 assault took place. Peeple simply making their way in life were summarily executed (deleted) at the workplace…Reduced to non-presence without option. The horror changed the world forever. The lands of the Firmians, and the GrÖlanders (another power bloc on the planet): changed forever….
To be continued…
.
A digression on a planet
Whatever you do to the web
Of life shall be returned to you twicefold
The book of Shadrach: Navaho section
[Contributors note: In these testimonies recorded by an unknown enumerator we have so far been privy to an unfolding event in a region known as the Azanian Konfederacy. They are reproduced in much the same form as they were found allowing for variances in translation. Where necessary or useful for additional illumination, some ideas are clarified by the Editor or Contributor: i.e.: Ed’: or Contr’:]
The section you are about to read, is a divergence, and contains information relating to an existing range of competing events and entities external to the Azanian Konfederacy.
Some of the statements made would seem based on the unknown enumerator’s familiarity with those things, rather than expertise and so, much of the information is unclarified hearsay.
Unfortunately we have little else to provide validity other than the various monuments to ancient so-called ‘civilizations’, which we now know did exist. Where necessary we have referred to Koz: Legends of Urdos as a form of reference validification.]
*******************
“…Oppression is a degree- by- degree process. It is however prompted by a pre-emptive action, and thereafter the citizen becomes a reactive entity for a time until pacified.” [Corinth Starr the Elder]
It was Starr’s view that the citizen had been reduced to a passive, almost peripheral entity made all the worse for having no obvious range of choice in the marketplace for political ideas than that presented by the existing governing order and not particular presented by any of those who were, it seemed, unwilling to govern, having carved comfortable niches for themselves within the existing status quo as a smug form of opposition..
“The agenda of all government is the greatest happiness of all the citizens…And the Gender agenda is Basic Pay” said Corinth Starr in her closing speech before the election and by election day itself the statement had become a national saying, peeple were humming it in lifts, singing in dense traffic and even in the outlands or auslande as they were more commonly known, goatherds were shouting the slogan at their goats.
It is possible that the governing party completely underestimated the power of the gender vote have taken it for granted for so long. They may well have simply taken the voter for granted there having been no real opposition for at least five to ten years. Where anyone had presented any credible threat that person or group had been ‘bought’, using the floor crossing route, which was so much more efficient a method of subverting the democratic process than the “murder incorporated” strategy followed by the evil oppressive governments of the ‘dispossession’ era. [Notwithstanding this murder of political persons was not uncommon.]
And it had worked. There had been peace and stability for nearly a full generation. The region had shown modest growth and many of those who had been dispossessed in the past came to acquire great wealth and standing in society. The routine deletions of interesting political persons, was almost ingrained: car accidents being the most common form of assassination [as this variation on presence deletion was called.] and the most probable.]
However there were issues that were not being dealt with or, more commonly, were being dealt with but the rate at which they were being dealt with was outpaced by the accelerating rate at which the issues became worse.
For instance, at the physical level, the disintegration of the national road communication system accelerated and the pattern of macadamised road infrastructures, that along with a plentiful supply of dams had been some of the few useful inheritances of the dispossession era, gradually either wore out, disintegrated or worse. In many cases entire road networks were uplifted and removed to isolated areas where they were re-laid as basketball courts and other facilities (or at least this was what people came to believe). In some places roads were dug up because it was believed they were covering valuables: a deadly belief as it turned out eventually.
So gradually the only way to travel was via toll-roads, paying ever rising fees to travel shorter and shorter distances and gradually this reduced the traffic to essential traffic only. Travel by rail, formerly a major means of inter- regional travel had also gradually become more and more problematic as sections of rail were stolen, together with equipment and on occasions entire pick up stations which were appropriated as dwelling materials. Trains were also increasingly vulnerable to ambush and derailment by armed bandits who gradually, insidiously, came to proliferate, as the rural areas were depopulated and the means of policing those areas became less effective..
There had for instance been a time when peeple had travelled great distances during their popular annual festival holiday seasons. At these times peeple stopped working (when there was work) and went far away to enjoy recreation time in relaxed places. Fewer people did this anymore, and travel off main roadways was both unsafe due to the rise in banditry, and hazardous due to the condition of the roads. Life had come to centre much more about peeple’s home territories.
This was not an issue that peeple voted over but was undoubtedly a problem with all the rest: declining health care availability as the system sagged under the strain of the plagues, robberies at isolated pension payout points, and a low-key, informal ‘civil conflict’ had seen the deletion of more than ten thousand agricultural workers over the period since the formal end of the Dispossession struggle. Incidents of Murder [ a particularly aggressive form of unlawful deletion ]of those designated “witches” with allegedly supernormal powers* [*see: The further testimonies: The Yonka Memorandum] had also surged and there were rumours of slaughter being in the thousands. [Slaughter: another form of Deletion activity, usually unlawful,l and on a large scale. Ed: ref Koz.]
Much of this latter violence was due to the ease of robbing isolated places, rather than by design but the effect, as in other parts of Azania was the marginalisation of rural regions, with a consequent effect on income generating opportunities. The masses out there did listen to the radio though, and they voted for Corinth Starr in their hordes, notwithstanding widespread difficulties with voting points and attempts by the ruling party to force their influence… ultimately the scale of defection was too great.
On the powerful side though, the year of Starr’s accession was also the year the first of the great ‘food towers’, as they came to be called, was built in north west zone one [by the Corinth Starr Construction consortium] This perceptive move (there were ultimately five) enabled Zone one to achieve a high measure of food security notwithstanding the growing problems of water supply.
This water supply issue was the most serious long-term problem facing Zone One, and although sensible measures had been followed for decades in respect of conservation of water resources, the demand was constantly outpacing supply. Zone one was the most attractive destination in the whole of Azania and the people flowed there in their multitudes. The era of advanced Water Wars was looming, as was the renewed era of [water forced ] limitation on peeple’s movements. Water access and provision had been so called “privatised” early in the era; a move which had been controversial amongst the masses who felt, rightly in some opinions, that water should be freely available to all as it was critical to survival on Urdos.
The populist ‘good ole’ opposition oligarchs had chosen the theme of: “limiting the influx of aliens into Zone one”, as a primary election platform issue. They were calling for water permits limiting all citizens’ water access rights and providing overnight permits for travellers. Gratuitous migrants of whom there were many would not qualify for water rights after the first five days of their presence in Zone One. The party pulled a remarkable number of votes. The governing party found itself coming third in Zone one, and did little better in the wider country.
In the event the government conceded defeat, rather gracelessly, at twelve o clock on the day following the announcement although they kept hoping for a last minute miracle that would reprieve them from immanent unemployment.
Corinth Starr took fifty two percent of the popular votes making her the biggest single block in the house. It was an upset unequalled in generations. Various natural allies added another six percent to her muscle and suddenly the country was looking at a whole new political outcome. The presence of a lone, maverick, Progressive Market Libertarian Party representative, as one of her coalition allies kept the financial markets from sliding into chaos and the whole place took a deep breath and prepared for some horse trading.
While the mass murder and rape scandal in an Ausland territory provided the spur of rage that catapulted Starr the elder to power, it is doubtful that Corinth Starr would have been any more effective than any of her predecessors were it not for a series of events in the outer world which combined to give her the space and the leverage she needed, to effect her own revolution and so we must digress for a time to identify what happened, in order that her ‘reforms’ can be seen in their own perspective.
The great ‘clash of civilizations’, that had characterised the conflicts on the planet during Starr’s incubation for power had taken an abrupt and violent turn during the opening year of the 21st century, with an infamous military strike called the ‘Twin Towers’ incident. In this attack the great forces of unreason on the planet were launched into an assault on the world of reason. The world of reason retaliated.
This was followed by a period of revenge taking which saw the great Firmian empire, the target of the Towers assault, reaching out to strike at its enemies in ways that reduced their physical capacity for conflict while, theoretically, nourishing their enemies capacity for functional participation in their “system” of global connectedness.
In reality there were more than two civilization systems, which came into conflict at that time.
The prevailing system in much of what was called the “developed” world, was known as the least-path-of-resistance system, whereby the so called ‘Rule of Law’ prevailed, and when it didn’t ‘common sense’, whatever that means, prevailed. These systems were termed democracies and there were competing forms of democracy. Those that proved most durable were, according to Koz: citing its sources; were those “where the citizen had the unfettered right to change those thieves* that governed them on a routine basis when it was felt their thieving had got out of hand.” Common sense [sic] demonstrated that wherever peeple had the unfettered right to change thieves then the populace remained relatively compliant. Where the right did not exist tensions grew, and common sense became spurious and often fatal. [Editor: The word “Thieves” in this instance seems to be a synonym for the more common word “Politician”. There is evidence that the two names were synonymous, although there are some [smaller] numbers of sources that perceive the relationship between the two words as symbolic or metaphoric.]
There were times when common sense did not conflict with what were regarded as the inalienable rights of peeple: that is, the right to pursue happiness and fulfillment, in peace and peeplehood. When it didn’t concur it was often because the peeple were in the grip of some mass delusion that apparently took various forms. [In many of these delusions the particulars of the delusion itself took priority over the rights of peeple and led to great bout of peeple rights abuses: ref Koz: Contributor’s comment.]
Most peeple favoured this ‘common sense’ democracy system: a favourable, if exasperating idea. I.e. it was common sense to steal as little as possible from the Peeple while governing them, so that you could be re-elected. And then, notwithstanding its many flaws, it was arguably the most successful system on the planet for achieving its objective for the largest number of its proponents. These people who adhered to the ideals of a ‘changing-thieves-routinely- democracy’ were known as the ‘Sensibles’.
In contrast to the “Sensibles” were the “Rules Ffirsters”. Rules Ffirsters, who came in a variety of shades, both physically and consciously, worked on the basis that the most important rule of peeple was self-reliance and that no one should be helped in case it made them weak and unable to take part in the game of life. Obviously “Rules Ffirsters” helped those they regarded as “theirs”: their adherents, and were cloying with those they perceived to be convertible. They were invariably rude and offensive to those Sensibles with whom they came into conflict, rude and offensive to the point of murder* [ Editor contribution: murder: unlawful termination of incarnate entity manifestation otherwise called Deletion.]
“Rules Ffirst” was also the dominant philosophy of those people who were also known as Irrationalists. Irrationalists were for the most part people who believed that the concrete world in which all Peeple lived was imaginary and that there was another external world in some mysterious No place called ‘Heaven’ where those who obeyed the right living rules would be allowed to live when they ended their period of time in the so-called ‘reality’: represented in this case by Urdos. Where these delusions were localised to a few individuals those people were often locked away for their own protection [ and that of others ] However some delusions were truly global in scope, with millions of adherents; and therefore these delusions were often accorded honory reality status. This caused huge confusion amongst all classes of Peeple.
These Rules Ffirsters had certain books of “rules” [naturally] to which adherence was mandatory on pain of deletion. After a long period of decline during which sensible rationalism had helped peeple become more prosperous and comfortable than ever before, in the long story of Peepledom, they had made a great leaping comeback on the brink of the changeover from one era to another. Irrationalists were adept at exploiting peeple’s understandable fear of uncertainty and promoted a ‘death or else’, millenarian, or apocalyptic vision. This was a vision of chaos and destruction to all who would not adhere to their varying brands of Irrationalism.
“Irrationalism was an attractive and simplistic idea and helped those termed “the meek” to cope with the living ‘hell’ represented by reality in Urdos: a place in which otherwise ordinary peeple lived lives of desperate convention”* [ Koz: ref Ibid P 867]
Rules Ffirst Irrationalists were also by no means a united group and the many divisions between them were the basis of the so-called: ”Clash of Civilisations” mentioned earlier. Apparently competing groups of Irrationalists presented their own allegedly unique version of the world allegedly populated by irrationalist citizens. This world was subject to the whims of some external, non-evident, dualistic non-physical entity of immense vindictiveness. This entity was referred to by many names, but was most commonly called “God”.
At the same time all the strugglers amongst the peeple had to obey abstract rules of selfhood that were often founded in myth and ceremony and were frequently abstract and interpretable only by a ‘rules’ specialist expert. It was a though the world was all a stage, as someone called William said, and the scene was beset with disparate groups of performers in a trillion arranged settings all wearing funny hats and diverse ceremonial gear. They were dressed for a multitude of pantomimes, playing to a bored audience of prospects; who were all, themselves, locked into material joy. This led to absurdities at times. For instance a citizen in one place could, name something as trivial as a children’s iconic toy known as a 'teddy bear' “Mohammed” without raising an eyebrow; while in another place the same act could result in a crime so heinous that presence deletion was called for. [Contr' note: we do not fully understand the motivation behind this observation. According to Koz the Teddy" part of the teddy bear was originally Theodore. It is presumed that the observation relates to the freedom peeple had to change their names.]
To break that link with comfort and reveal the pain beneath the surface was the goal of the Irrationalists. It was the source of their power. In many places dominant groups of Irrationalists sought to prohibit any competition from competing Irrationalists and even from systems developed by Sensibles. This meant that Sensibles were forced at times into uncomfortable and compromising alliances.
It was certainly true that life beyond the most basic level was an invented game and one that brought great pleasure to even its most minimalist performers.
Early in the 21st century the ‘Rules Ffirsters’ team became the ascendant team in the world with the Firmians coming to be ruled more powerfully than previously by a brand of that philosophy. Meantime the world body charged with maintaining world peace [an oxymoron of course] was still governed by the least-path party derived from Sensibles philosophy; with paralysing interventions from coalitions of the irrational.. Very little positive happened, as each side had a vested interest in the failure of the other, and like or not, themselves. Not all games are played to be won the best are played for as long as the pleasure remains.
Then there were those who argued that both the Rules Ffirsters and the Sensibles were playing an elaborate game in which only one way of perceiving the world was permitted, and it was a game played successfully by sophisticated adherents while the poor suffered and became poorer, because there was no way that the system, as it was then evolving, could ever accommodate them.
For some of these general opponents of the status quo their alternative form of system was based on the belief that there was no system. They (the proponents of unreason) held that the entire purpose of Peeple’s existence was to prepare for an anticipated joyous existence in an alternative quantum dimension. Any significant participation in the systems created by the various material empires of the day, were guaranteed to destroy Peeple’s ability to prosper in that alternative existence.
This so-called alternate existence allegedly followed upon non-presence in this existing ‘apparent’ reality. This was a confusing concept for peeple, which is as it should be, since it was founded on a nonsensical idea that imaginary things were actually more real the real things. It helped the cause that for many in the world of unreason, the main way to reach peeple with their message was by murdering peeple. Randomly murdering peeple in the interests of a so-called ideological issue was guaranteed to prove advantageous to those committing the deed.
The irrationalist purpose being that if they made everyone scared enough then they would generally agree to be guided by the principles of unreason.
According to the Sensible materialist’s position, the philosophy of unreason was based on an illusion. It was though an immensely powerful and attractive illusion and claimed a growing number of adherents …peeple disillusioned by the horror of their present reality longed for the liberation brought by non-presence. They used their own non-presence assaults as a means to force their enemies to negotiate with unreason. They, and many materialist opponents of the existing systems as well, claimed, [reasonably, as it turned out. Ed] that both the “rules” parties on the planet, and the ‘least resistance” parties, were all pursuing unsustainable policies that would end by destroying everyone’s capacity to survive.
And the system was under threat. Global aging, for instance, was apparently a new disease that threatened to bankrupt the developed regions, to destabilise the global economy and overturn the existing geopolitical order. Most of the most established peeple were elderly (had been present for too long). They had achieved a life that no peeple in previous ages had ever achieved (to the best of anyone’s knowledge) and were fearful of it being threatened: and took active steps to protect their positions.
A generation of peacefulness had softened peeple. There was nothing more desirable than peaceful ness…peeple were prepared to give their presence and happiness for a peacefulness moment.
It was into this ambience that the infamous 9/11 assault took place. Peeple simply making their way in life were summarily executed (deleted) at the workplace…Reduced to non-presence without option. The horror changed the world forever. The lands of the Firmians, and the GrÖlanders (another power bloc on the planet): changed forever….
To be continued…
.
Winds of change: reviewed
It is rapidly becoming obvious that much of the international posturing that presents itself as deal making is emptier than a Zimbabwean widow's cupboard. Gleneagles, Bali, Kyoto and now Lisbon.
This schlep to Portugal discussed in Robert v wee Gordon [see previous blog] did not take place.
wee Gordon did not blink. He has so little credibility anywhere at this moment that he or his advisers couldn't take the extra strain of giving a dictator a [metaphorical] blow job in a public place.
even al Jazeera gave muted coverage, while the euro news channels more or less ignored the event: and locally it was a non-event overshadowed by the rather curious enddgame playing out in our local ruling party. Will Polokwane turn into a non-event as the President's men move their pawns into place to take the King who would rule.
My favorite moment [in the Portugese coverage] was the al Jazeera sneak shot of Sarcozy snuggling with Robert. Shades of the auld enemy [ from wee Gordon's perspective ] sneaking around after the newer enemy and having a little moment.
Could wee Gordon have saved the event and burnished a deal... one doesn't know. There has been a great deal of intense posturing by the Pom's New Labour, centre centre left party position over Africa, and its unstable state of development. We have not forgotten, have we, how conveniently news of the London bombings happened almost exactly as wee Gordon's predecessor, Phony Haire, stepped up to the podium. There he was to deliver the concluding Gleneagles' affirmation to that year of raising awareness over Africa that followed about ten global music festivals.
The long awaited speech did not happen then and it has not happened now.
In fact it happened decades ago when a previous Pom leader spoke in SA's Parliament in Cape Town about the "Winds of Change" and how they were blowing through the continent. Maybe because of the context we all thought it related 'white rule'. Now we are beginning to realise that it didn't.
keep on bloggin'
This schlep to Portugal discussed in Robert v wee Gordon [see previous blog] did not take place.
wee Gordon did not blink. He has so little credibility anywhere at this moment that he or his advisers couldn't take the extra strain of giving a dictator a [metaphorical] blow job in a public place.
even al Jazeera gave muted coverage, while the euro news channels more or less ignored the event: and locally it was a non-event overshadowed by the rather curious enddgame playing out in our local ruling party. Will Polokwane turn into a non-event as the President's men move their pawns into place to take the King who would rule.
My favorite moment [in the Portugese coverage] was the al Jazeera sneak shot of Sarcozy snuggling with Robert. Shades of the auld enemy [ from wee Gordon's perspective ] sneaking around after the newer enemy and having a little moment.
Could wee Gordon have saved the event and burnished a deal... one doesn't know. There has been a great deal of intense posturing by the Pom's New Labour, centre centre left party position over Africa, and its unstable state of development. We have not forgotten, have we, how conveniently news of the London bombings happened almost exactly as wee Gordon's predecessor, Phony Haire, stepped up to the podium. There he was to deliver the concluding Gleneagles' affirmation to that year of raising awareness over Africa that followed about ten global music festivals.
The long awaited speech did not happen then and it has not happened now.
In fact it happened decades ago when a previous Pom leader spoke in SA's Parliament in Cape Town about the "Winds of Change" and how they were blowing through the continent. Maybe because of the context we all thought it related 'white rule'. Now we are beginning to realise that it didn't.
keep on bloggin'
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