Crap budget video, great song.
Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside OFFICIAL VIDEO (Protein Exclusive) from Protein® on Vimeo.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Midterms
I for one am quite glad that the US is returning to normalcy and a split house and more equally-divided senate. It will make for less hysterical politics, I hope.
Still, the thing that continually annoys me is how ideologically non-sensical the two parties are. It's become about identity politics, but as such, it's become the worst kind - representing the kinds of hypocrises that usually colour one's outlook, but this time trying to pretend that that identity actually means something. The American voter is confused, and it is largely to do with the fact that the old terms of what is left and what is right are completely redundant. In this sense, I can completely see why the Tea Party is so amorphous and cannot be truly representative of a world-view as such - it is tradition-based in as much as it harks back to a less complicated era where the government couldn't encroach on your life because it was fundamentally your client (and not the other way around as it is now), but also where corporations couldn't act institutionally because their profits were the result of actual hard work and ingenuity that was seemingly tangible and understandable.
Everything has changed though - from morality that needn't be prescribed to morality that should be defended as a bare minimum, to economics that should still be formulated in common sense values. I mean, who cares about human rights when they're overblown to cover someone with an idiotic position; who should care abut aggregate supply and demand when they don't correspond to the reality of a balanced family budget?
From this confusion comes a mix of things that don't make sense - conservatives, posing as libertarians, posing as moralists, telling people that government should keep out of their lives; liberals, posing as socialists, telling people that they'd like to see efficient markets so that the corporations have less sway over their lives.
Seriously, it's at times like these that you do want to just scream: I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more! but then you realise that we're in an age when protest is redundant, when security is all-encompassing and where your rights are a pure function of the morality of others. Back in the das when those slogans were dreamt up, they meant something. Now, ideology has the stench of unknowable dogma and thus all current dogma is interchangeable - "Want more government? Vote for me?/ Want less government? Vote for me two years later!" The stupidity of it all is that no-one is actually going after the things that matter, which you really have to hand it to the Tea Party for noticing, in part.
I mean, Barack Obama is a great President of the United States. He really is, given his circumstances. However, he needs to stop playing the confused game of right and left politics, because neither make sense any more.
Still, the thing that continually annoys me is how ideologically non-sensical the two parties are. It's become about identity politics, but as such, it's become the worst kind - representing the kinds of hypocrises that usually colour one's outlook, but this time trying to pretend that that identity actually means something. The American voter is confused, and it is largely to do with the fact that the old terms of what is left and what is right are completely redundant. In this sense, I can completely see why the Tea Party is so amorphous and cannot be truly representative of a world-view as such - it is tradition-based in as much as it harks back to a less complicated era where the government couldn't encroach on your life because it was fundamentally your client (and not the other way around as it is now), but also where corporations couldn't act institutionally because their profits were the result of actual hard work and ingenuity that was seemingly tangible and understandable.
Everything has changed though - from morality that needn't be prescribed to morality that should be defended as a bare minimum, to economics that should still be formulated in common sense values. I mean, who cares about human rights when they're overblown to cover someone with an idiotic position; who should care abut aggregate supply and demand when they don't correspond to the reality of a balanced family budget?
From this confusion comes a mix of things that don't make sense - conservatives, posing as libertarians, posing as moralists, telling people that government should keep out of their lives; liberals, posing as socialists, telling people that they'd like to see efficient markets so that the corporations have less sway over their lives.
Seriously, it's at times like these that you do want to just scream: I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more! but then you realise that we're in an age when protest is redundant, when security is all-encompassing and where your rights are a pure function of the morality of others. Back in the das when those slogans were dreamt up, they meant something. Now, ideology has the stench of unknowable dogma and thus all current dogma is interchangeable - "Want more government? Vote for me?/ Want less government? Vote for me two years later!" The stupidity of it all is that no-one is actually going after the things that matter, which you really have to hand it to the Tea Party for noticing, in part.
I mean, Barack Obama is a great President of the United States. He really is, given his circumstances. However, he needs to stop playing the confused game of right and left politics, because neither make sense any more.
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