Voter Apathy: Our only hope

One of the things that has amazed me about responses to my not voting in this election is that some people have chosen to be offended. There is a moral outrage. Quite a few people have said they think it should be illegal not to vote. In effect they are saying I deserve to be fined and if I don't pay I should be locked up. My crime would be refusing to comply with a system which is:

1. Unjust.
2. Creates political apathy
3. Creates losers.
4. Disenfranchises the majority.
5. Allows people to abdicate responsibility for the decision made in their communities.
6. Selects people to fund and organise violence against me and people in distant countries.

1. Unjust.
This system is unjust most obviously because it is a 'first past the post' system. But if that doesn't rig it enough, the boundaries mean that there are huge disparities in numerical representation. The New Economics Forum have published an index of an adults notional vote. The theory is flawed in that it relies on some fairly circular arguments: If 75% of people want a party then your vote doesn't count because it's a safe seat? One could argue that it has counted, you wanted that party. Nonetheless they make a good general point that voter power is a real postcode lottery.

2. Political Apathy
People talk about voter apathy as though it's a bad thing. Yet the only reason the three biggest parties began this election talk about reform is they fear voter apathy. You can protest the government; you can kick them out; but if you really want to scare them: ignore them. The angst in this unjust system is evident all around, people worry about far right parties that would get in if the model was more fair: all this tells us is that people are using voting as a short cut to deal with racists and fascists. So rather than challenging bigotry and violence where we find it in everyday life we vote once every five years and pretend the evil doesn't exist because it has been smothered by the first past the most: the seeming moral majority. If refusing to vote is 'voter apathy' then voting may often lead to 'political apathy'. I feel certain that the suffragettes did not simply fight for democracy so that we could make do with something so absurdly symbolic as 'the vote'. The story is not over.

3. Losers
Christians are to love one another. Not only one another: Christians are to even love the enemy. How unChristian then to vote against the wishes of other people. To put all this energy into trying to silence the views of a fellow citizen. The aim of a general election is not to find out the will of the people but rather to set up a competition with a stolen mandate as the prize. Voting creates losers and I can't believe that the Jesus-community is called to create losers.

4. Disenfranchises the majority
More than half of all votes will count for nothing in parliament. They will be, in effect, rejected. MORE THAN HALF. Not only that, but a fifth of the voters hold the balance of power in their marginal constituencies: and within those constituencies more than half the votes are thrown away. That suggests that less than ten percent of votes really matter in our current system. Even if this was not the case: the system locks us into a combative mode of government where party-politicians seek to disenfranchise one another.

5. Abdicating responsibility
Decision making, consensus building, and community organising are hard work. We vote because we choose not to do this work. This may be because we're too busy but we're often busy earning the money that pays the people who have taken our decision-making ability away from us. Meanwhile the richest keep their money and buy power at a fraction of the price because they don't have to vote. The majority get a free vote once every five years. Well, you get what you pay for. The minority spend hundreds of thousands on buying the MPs that we leave to get on with it on our behalf. 80% of Conservative MPs are members of a Zionist lobby - their biggest backer - and the Labour party aren't far behind. Refusing to vote can have a powerful psychological effect: it causes one to ask how else one might get power and what better world might be possible where this crazy machine stops being oiled by the ballots. Emma Goldman famously said, "If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal." So why isn't those who abstain who are having criminalisation waved at them?

6. Violence
This is a simple dilemma for the Christian who thinks voting might be moral. The Matthew tradition tells us that Jesus taught his followers not to resist violence by force/violence (Matt. 5) 'antistenai' if you're interested in the Greek. Some translators have it as 'don't resist evil' but this is too weak a translation. But either way - violence is out. Governments use our taxes to fund wars, and not only wars - all three big parties (yes, including the liberal democrats) advocate some form of nuclear deterrent - weapons that are deliberately aimed at civilians, that harm generations of innocents, that destroy all biological life in a given area. If I vote I am consenting to this violence being done on my behalf. If I vote I am saying I want my rights preferred to those of others because they live within different abstract borders. And I want my nation's rights to be defended with violence against the rights of any other nation. No wonder the politicians fear voter apathy but voter apathy is the only real hope of real change we really have.

A feminist issue

We are doing well and going swell, being accused of all the things right-minded people dislike (great, this double meaning).
But I have to confess: I lied. I did see porn once. The films were billed at the student café as "A night of dirty pictures" which might have been an ambiguous announcement. But those present were quickly cured of any illusion.

Seen one, seen them all, I suppose. There is nothing exciting about it, it is extremely boring. There is an empty space, perhaps a bed or some cushions. Then a man and a woman run to centre stage, quickly put out their clothes and just do it. Variation: two women, one man. The other one, variation: "lesbian", two or three women. Obviously not intended for "real" lesbian use, or maybe it was, who cares?
Theatrically speaking it is one of the most boring acts you can offer, on stage or on screen. The story is stripped (another double entendre) of anything which makes the interaction between two (or more) people interesting - for themselves, and for others if the story is well told.

Some bloke summed up the general feeling very honestly: this is enough to make you impotent for at least a week. "Make it two weeks," I added. No-one disagreed. At least the males present. Apart from some laughs (nervous?) I cannot remember any female reaction to the presentation.

"Extremely boring", I say it as an unsuspecting one-time spectator. Because of the boredom and irritation it is difficult to ask the question: how about the people performing on the screen? The Pink Cross and Rebecca Mott tell the story from the "production" side. And it is ugly, it is shameful. And extremely violent, which was not expressed in the films I saw that evening. You cannot even say it is shameful because you are watching it, but lack of knowledge is no excuse for being responsible for violent abuse - because as a viewer you are guilty too.

For quite a while I was irritated even by the idea of porn being a feminist issue. I was wrong.
And now, brothers and sisters, I command you to God.

Ceterum censeo institutam ecclesiam delendam esse.
(In case I make a habit of this one; it means "Furthermore  I gather the church as an institution should be destroyed.")
And free Marcia Powell!.

Sequel and finish

"You are way too pretty to be a left-winger," he lisped, offering me what he called "the strongest beer in the world". (It is not, but it took me quite a while to drink it again).
"Yet I am," I replied, relieved.
"But you should do something about that belly, I don't like it."
"My girlfriend does. She likes its softness." True words which should have scared him off.
They did not.

But do not be too alarmed, dear readers, in the end my lefty friends dragged him off me and made me escape. Embarrassed, scared, and yes, pretty drunk - we lefties were innocently boozing as usual after a meeting which yet again did not result in the Great Revolution anyway. Did I write "innocently", Leo?

Running away I sprained my ankle, which I did not notice at the time. The pain came in the days after the event. My usual g.p. was not there. I thought it necessary to explain under which circumstances I sprained my ankle. "I would like to ask you a frank question," the unknown g.p. replied. "Are you sure you did not like what he was doing? Are you sure you are not gay?"

Are women still asked "what they were wearing"? If not, probably the question is still on the mind of the police officer or g.p. or whomever has to be told the story. If it is ever told.

And why the g.p. was completely at ease with my answer that I was going steady with a girl -  I don't know. [Added later: I perfectly know why. But it was meant to be a rhetorical turn. You as a reader do not have an inherent right to know everything about me]. The end of the story was that there was nothing to be done about the sprained ankle. It would heal eventually. Treatment would be more painful than the condition itself.


You can say that again.


This is a sequel to my personal remark in this posting. Never would have thought I would write about it for the first time in a foreign language. But life is unpredictable - fortunately perhaps.

Was Tolstoy right with his Kreutzer sonata?

This is a cover anyone who knows the book should have least expected. It is the first hit in the search engine: Leo Tolstoy's Kreutzer sonata. It was one of the first novels I read by the Russian count at the time I was discovering Christian anarchism and I thought it wildly eccentric, or rather: unacceptable. From the first biography I read in the same days I understood Tolstoy was practicing what he preaches in the book and his wife "had to accept it". Since the author of the biography was a prominent female religious anarchist from NL herself I thought this way over the top and offensive to Tolstoy's wife.
You can read the Kreutzer sonata online if you wish, here.

There we have it: Count Leo had a life of hunting, of shooting as an army officer, of sleeping around, also with prostitutes, behind him and suddenly he saw the Light and his wife had to comply. All sexuality is violence, that is what the Kreutzer sonata comes down to. Is it? Even though the authoritarian way in which the patriarch of Christian anarchism decreed it may be reprehensible and I still tend not to agree with him I have been growing more understanding about his point of view.

I once followed a reading tip from our friends at The Christian Radical to be confronted with the message

Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist,

Oh, don't they? Well, I probably am not "a guy" (don't like the word anyway and I should be too old to be called by that name). But I never watched pornography, just as I never went to a prostitute either. And I refuse to accept this qualifies me as not being "normal". As far as I am concerned it is still the other way around.

I realize I have angrily and impulsively written about having experienced assault by a man. There was an offensive prerson around this area who sang praises of gay porn which this guy presented as liberatory and all loveydovey, as a comment to the story of our sister Rebecca Mott who was called a heterosexist, whatever that may be. After the attack on Mott he withdrew his comment. Living in a country where the official gay movement is advocating the xenophobic proto-nazis who are making NL infamous these days I see no reason to agree with stories about the inherent liberatory character of being gay. Even if I thought the "actors" in gay porn are "acting" completely voluntarily, which is simply incredible. Gays are not naturally saints. They are human males, socialised with the idea of domination.

Men get raped too. Most often, they are raped by other men. However, there have been numerous recorded incidents where a man has been raped by a woman.
Because of the socialization of what it means to be “a man,” men raped by men
are reluctant to disclose having been raped for fear of being labeled homosexual.
Men raped by women fear being treated as less than a real man for allowing
themselves to be overpowered by a woman. One survey found that 7 percent
of men have experienced at least one episode of forced sexual contact. Among
college students, the incidence of sexual assaults of men by acquaintances is
much higher.

(from the cache of the New York Institute of Technology site)

It is mainly a male problem. As is the idea of violence. I think. But perhaps what Tolstoy has to say calls for more thought or scrutiny than I thought when I first came across it.

A way to become an anarchist

For the night I made a list of pieces for the radio programming, starting with an interview with a poet.
Instructions - for reasons that completely escape me - at the computer were in Polish and my Polish does not go beyond tak and nie and a few phrases like that.
So after I left I noticed the programme that started was repeated on and on for hours on end.
But that was not the worst part.

The worst part was that the colleague who presented the repeating hour, an amiable divorced father of two children, casually mentioned that "of course" there was a period in his life when he went to prostitutes. The poet at the other side of the glass concurred. "Of course".

As far as  I can see there is nothing "of-course-like" about this. I take the liberty of making myself THE norm for this. For me, there is no other way to look at it. If I do not do it, why should I consider your behaviour as "normal" or "natural"?

And as if it had to happen, on the same day through the blogroll of A Pinch Of Salt I came at this place, whence I reached this place. From which this quote:

And all men who used me look the same.
One way I remember is through the staring of men before, during and after they used me.
It was a look where I could not believe in hope. In that stare, I lose that I was human.
I became a sex object.
I feel that look send fear into me. I feel it turning me into an obedient sex toy.
That stare has enter my nightmares.
I want to to see beyond that stare.
I know I was raped by rich African students. Men who were expecting to be rulers.
Sometimes when I view governments from all countries and cultures, I think of the tortures those men put me through.
Men like that made me an anarchist.

The weblog of the woman who wrote these words and yet another one.

I cannot think of anything more to say about this now.