#realdemocracy

[zuzugraphics]

#aoc #alexandriaocasiocortez as #monalisa #realdemocracy #truedemocracy https://www.instagram.com/p/CJPdlUnBUMr/?igshid=1bcuq7414un12

[sparklewithspice]

here's a wall for you. #womensmarch #thefutureisfemale #realdemocracy

[jankpsychedelicism]

If I had to quantify my Sexuality, I’d say that I’m about 95% Heterosexual. That being said, Edward Snowden, is in fact, the Sexiest Man that has ever lived.

Fucked what society/active corrupt government thought and served his country based on the supreme law of the land. A fucking plus. And got away with it. He fucking pissed off the NSA sooooo bad. And fucking just left. That would be the greatest movie ever. And if you were some chick on the run with him all over the planet. Good ass movie. Makes James Bond look hella phony. Again 95%, but the 5% that should theoretically go to 5% of the 8 billion people on earth, all of that goes to him cause damn. I now feel the need to talk about tits and vaginas for a few paragraphs to balance out this equation but I think not because there’s enough of that around and I should say I’m secure enough to do without that. Humanitarianism is sexy not to taint the idea of humanitarianism with the notion of sexiness or to say that what he did was so, but it was definitely to a relative degree and was in my opinion absolutely just. 

[nikspeak]

Intermission

Taking a break from the humdrum existence that I call life, I thought I would share some news that is really newsworthy, yet the "news" doesn't think it's worthy to be talked about.

Yes my friends (and this is where half of you stop reading), I am talking about democracy, or the lack of it as the case happens to be.

I've always been politically minded, but over the past 10 years I've grown tired of the established "democracy" that we have in the UK, it's not actually all that democratic at all.

Here I employ the trusty dictionary to define what Democracy should be:

government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

So in essence, you would think that we have democracy - we vote for MPs, they get elected if enough people vote for them, and they go on to speak for "the people". Let me ask you this, when did you're local MP last ask your opinion? Yep, thought that was the case... never...

So where are the MPs getting their direction from? It is from either a) their affiliated political party, b) their own judgement or c) somewhere else. Not from you and me.  We get a say every 4/5 years to then vote someone else in because we are unhappy with the way everything is going... "down with that sort of thing!".

And this is where my interest really perks up. Right now, all over the globe, people are starting to wake up to the fact that they are not actually living in democracy - as democracy should be. In Hong Kong they have an extreme issue that they have fake democracy in the sense that all the choices they can vote for are from a single party and are all "selected" by the current reigning government.. not very democratic.

In the US 95% of people have been polled as not trusting their form of democracy.

We all remember the Egyptian protests and others that have got some media attention.

But did you know that right now.. and for the last 2 days, there are a bunch of people forming a peaceful protest in Parliament Square, London - right opposite the Houses of Parliament? I bet you didn't, because there has been zero mainstream news coverage of any worth (1 article on the Guardian website with incorrect facts).

The protest is raising the issue that our democracy is broken, and it really is. They have the aim of a peaceful protest for at least the next week, and you would expect that under a democracy, a peaceful protest would be every citizens right - both under law and as a basic human right.... right?

Wrong.

Whilst getting no mainstream media attention I have been following the protest through social media and with the benefit of individuals attending the protest "livestreaming" video so that important events can be both witnessed and preserved. Quite frankly what I've seen has led me to believe that our demoracy does not want challenging, in fact if people are willing to "make a stand" then they are essentially being criminalised for not breaking the law.

As a brief overview of what I have witnessed this weekend, I have seen 60 year old women being 'forcibly' pushed around, I have seen a man get arrested for cutting a piece of string, I have seen all equipment one would associate with a protest (banners, placards etc) confiscated. I have seen a blatant misdirection from those in authority on the scene.

This misdirection is one of the more dangerous things I have witnessed, as it shows a complete absence of written law in practice. There is video of a man being told that he cannot sleep on a used pizza box. So the man asks for the law to be clarified, would sitting on the pizza box be ok, or is that illegal. The response is troubling as the reply basically states "I will use my discretion at the time to decide what is happening" - this worries me if an authority figure cannot explain to someone if they will be breaking a law without it relying on the "discretion of an individual".

A lot has happened in the last 48 hours, and it makes me sad that even when attempting to be peaceful, the authorities (London Heritage Wardens plus police) have done everything possible to both disrupt the protest and incite a negative reaction from the protesters. 

I want to share a video of something that happened late Sunday evening, so you can understand what is going on.. The protesters have been told (by Heritage Wardens and police) that they are allowed to sleep but they are not allowed anything "to aid them sleep".

Let me clarify what has been said to the protesters, you can wrap a sleeping bag round your shoulders for warmth and it is legal, but if you should fall asleep, then it is illegal. So essentially, you can only sleep in inhumane conditions.

So on the first night, in the middle of the night, police turned up in force and seized all forms of sleep helping equipment such as sleeping bags, blankets etc 

The video shows a group of protesters sitting on a sheet of tarpaulin because the ground is wet and muddy... this has been deemed by the authorities as "a structure" and will therefore be removed. The video shows how the police remove a piece of plastic.

 Now I'm not a legal expert, but I am reminded of the Human Rights Act where is says that everyone is entitled to hold an opinion and voice it freely, where it says that everyone has the right to take part in the government individually and that everyone has the right to fair living conditions.

If you are a terrorist that gets caught, you will be given a blanket and a warm cell. If you are a seeker of true democracy you will be given the mud and well, more mud.  It is because of this unbalance in our democracy that I will not be voting at the next election. I refuse to choose the best of the worst. When there is next a real alternative to the democracy we live in I will be a part of that... or maybe I will create that alternative... anyone with me?

#revolution

[solazistyle]

How can I sleep tonight... I really wish I am there with you all to fight :( 請各位加油！#學生無罪 #民主萬歲！long live #democracy #hongkong #occupycentral #佔中 #hk728 #freedom #realdemocracy #學聯 #民主

[internationaleonline]

AN ADVANCE FROM HEAVEN

in remembrance of those who lost their lives during the Gezi Park resistance

In Turkey, the discussion around the concept of democracy and its various manifestations has been transformed entirely by a recent event. Many people who took part in the people’s uprising of summer 2013 that rapidly spread from Gezi Park in the centre of Istanbul across the entire country have since described their experience of, and bond with the resistance in ways that were previously not part of political or sociological vocabulary. Sounding unwittingly mystical, yet in an irrepressibly cheerful tone of voice, “Gezi was like receiving an advance from heaven,” said one protester. Another, a psychiatrist by profession, states that she now measures her level of happiness in the here-and-now by comparing it to those two weeks she spent in or around the park. “It’s good, I say to myself,” she said of her recent mood, “but not that good.”

Lest we forget, Gezi was a public uprising that was sparked by a protest against the demolition of a park in the centre of Istanbul and the construction of a shopping centre in its place, one of many urban transformation projects that have threatened to destroy both the built and natural environment of the city. The initially small protest was met with intense police brutality, backed up by the unconditional support of the government, which developed an extremely aggressive discourse laced with outright lies aiming to discredit the resistance. The mainstream press, under heavy pressure from the government, chose not to report on the protests at all; and the mostly independent journalists who did, were targeted by the police with the same animosity they displayed for protesters. One art journalist/protester stated that she had found at Gezi the tangible expression of everything that she had so far thought and written about, and cherished in her career, yet she also confessed that, until then, she had harboured doubts about the extent to which the whole discourse of the cultural field actually corresponded to actual experience. Those doubts had now met a response of the most unexpected, exhilarating and transformative order. The occupation of the park was ended by a final assault by the police, however forms of action, communication and solidarity either created or popularized during the Gezi resistance live on in many ways; and it would be no exaggeration to say that no political movement in Turkey from now on can afford to ignore the experience of Gezi, and its imprint on the public’s consciousness.

One might claim that Turkey does not have a democracy as ‘developed’ as the ‘West’, or that its ‘tradition’ of ‘public protest’ or ‘civil resistance’ was not as deeply-rooted. This perhaps suggests that there is still a measurable amount of time, or number of stages this country – like many others outside the core of the West - and its democracy must endure until it becomes a proper democracy. Yet I would like to put aside such linear, not to mention patronizing and misleading perspectives on progress aside, and via the example of Gezi develop a perception on a radical form of democracy that might also suggest some preliminary routes out from the impasse that Western democracies today face. This does not mean to say that the forms of resistance that Gezi displayed were entirely unprecedented, yet their genealogy is to be sought not in the official histories of this or any other nation state, but in the still legible codes of the public spaces of cities, and not in the restricted and regulated forms of representation, but in the crooked line formed by sudden eruptions of rebellion to which neither Byzantium nor Anatolia are strangers. Another protester, a writer, ecstatically exclaimed: “Finally Istanbul, the city, has regained its soul.” Long lost under the heavy hand of oppression in this Republic where the state continues to make its paranoid presence felt in the deepest pores of society, the spirit of the city was invoked by people who now risked all to demand their right to it, to public space, and to walk, gather and meet in the way they desired. Their actions in doing so constituted both the most radical demand for, and act of freedom, in turn giving rise to the sense of joy and unity expressed in the accounts cited above.

This unleashing of subterranean forces exposed the manifold layers of restriction the establishment had placed on life itself. The injustice that the resistance objected to was not merely an illegal construction project: It was greed, theft and the suppression of the truth. “We are so right, I’m finding it hard to believe,” read one banner. Aspects of identity so rigidly imposed from above – based on the warped, official account of history, on pseudoscientific and oppressive interpretations of gender, family, ethnicity, origin… - were dissolved and discarded to be replaced by identity as defined by collective action: We want to protect the park. And the people came in their hundreds, and then thousands. We want to meet each other and enjoy our time together where we want to, when we want to. And the people met in the park, and then in parks everywhere across the country, and they protect their parks, and their trees despite police brutality (as I am about to post this text on the morning of September 18, villagers in Soma continue to collectively guard an olive orchard where bulldozers entered at midnight and uprooted 20 trees for a planned thermal power plant project -16,000 [sixteen-thousand] is the number of olive trees the company wants to destroy) The park was there to be shared, and it was there for sharing, so money was abolished, and there was abundance. Its medium was the collectivity, and thus its message became instantly recognizable across the globe.

‘Real’ democracy, therefore, could be understood as a continuing process in which a front, or alliance - local and grassroots, and also transnational and global in nature - is nurtured on those values that quickly drew activists from Greece, Spain and all across Europe to Gezi Park, that the uprising in Brazil immediately recognized, that later drove those who took part in Gezi to swiftly declare their support to Ferguson, and led ultras across Europe to unfurl banners in solidarity with Çarşı, the supporters group, days after it was absurdly put on trial in Turkey for plotting to overthrow the government during the Gezi resistance.

An initial proposal, then, would be to expand critical action originating in ‘Western’ or European nations so that alliances are sought, fostered and developed across the globe, regardless of established notions of geopolitics, or the dictates of the foreign policies of governments, yet with a commitment to radical democracy. The state mechanism exposed by Gezi was perhaps more brutal and less flexible than those in the West, yet once governments gather behind doors to decide upon our future, such judgments bear little significance. Politicians may remain weary observers of resistance movements that form bonds between unexpected localities, yet we have already shown that we possess both the symbolic and concrete tools to mobilize a radical movement of freedom, so now new forms of discourse and action shall dare to flourish.