Why don’t the debates have a huge screen for live fact-checking behind the “contestants”? Politics would benefit to feel the kick of truth bias.
the world is full of beautiful things: The Fight For Parliament (A Personal Recap of the 9th Dec)
** TRIGGER WARNING: POLICE BRUTALITY **
(UPDATED TUMBLR NOTE: I’m sorry for posting this again. News outlets contacted have refused to publish any part of this report and are continuing to ignore first-hand accounts, occasionally posting bullshit quotes from politicians, union hacks and police chiefs about how great the police were on the day. I want this reblogged and spread to anyone and everyone, I want other people’s stories to come out and spread too (message me if you have any!) - I can’t bear to see this covered up and forgotten. Too many people were hurt.. If you see anything that is possibly incriminating, to me or someone identifiable, shoot me a message)
(TUMBLR NOTE #2: If you care about me, or about the state crushing any small element of explicit dissent, then I’d recommend you read it. Excuse the length, I don’t feel like editing it down for reasons that will become apparent)
As I start writing this down, I am not sure what form it will take. Perhaps a time-line of yesterday’s events, or a brief overview of what I saw going on around me, or something more in-depth with background and details as I remember them. I have been experiencing great difficulty putting the situations I went through into words, so I do hope that this writing process will be able to draw out a coherent picture from this overwhelming jumble of images and emotions in my head.
Yesterday, on the 9th December 2010, I attended a protest in London, UK. This was the day of the parliamentary vote on whether to cut higher education funding by 80% and force a further reorganization of higher education towards marketization and away from the final residues of free and emancipatory learning left in these lumbering corporate institutions. Attendees ranged from secondary school students to university lecturers, from the unemployed to unionised workers, from parents to friends to members of communities so diverse and special that it felt quite ridiculous to even entertain the notion that they could be even partially represented by a handful of upper-class white men arguing over how best to efficiently subjugate that aforementioned community.
Everyone needs to read this.
(via iamnotaflobberworm)
Election day
The Swedish election is today, and I’m not very hopeful. My ream has been trailing in all the polls, and to top it off, the immigration opposing, semi racists, Sverigedemokraterna have been hovering just above the 4% needed to get into parliament.
The chances of watching the election with a couple of friends turning into a gloomy event are high, but you have to at least hope, right?
[…]
Martin was right of course, he’s more realistic and logical in his pre-analysis than I was. Me, I was hopeful — idealistic and perhaps a bit more tunnel-visioned than I’d like to believe. “We as a country can’t do this to people I like any more,” that’s what I told myself. It turned out that yes, we can do it even longer and now with the added uncertainty of bigots. Joy! Pardon me for believing more in treating citizens well than to keep costs down and cattle-prod those that are deemed troublesome. I don’t care that the economic growth is not faltering as much downwards as predicted when sick people are thrown to the wolves and our constitution is shredded. A country is more than it’s business, it’s all the citizens. All of them.
This fucking block system is useless. We need a better system. A way to force both sides to work together, to compromise and not just fuck the other over. Hate, injustice and ignoring other people you don’t agree with are not the solution.
(Except for Beatrice Ask, our ministry of justice. She’s an international economics drop-out without any clue about laws and ethics and, well anything at all really. A vapid waste of flesh. She’s also a scat muncher. I mean clearly, listen to her speak!)
