POLITICS
Owls Over The Stock Exchange 🦉
Painting of mine from a dream had during one of the past financial crash cycles. Signed prints (below) and products on Society6 now available.
Watercolour on Paper, 297 x 420 mm.
There were owls hunting down the tiny money people as the bubble burst.
Part of the Postcards from the Other Side of Sleep series.
NOTEPAD-2017-WEEKS-30-33
We’ve been away and I have been keeping of the internet to a degree (it always catches up with you though) so I have drawings and things all backed up and out of sequence.
This still works thought, the assembly is automatic from my bookmarking and music listening so it just takes a bit of finessing and it’s ready to go.
This is working for me now in a way that Tumblr used to.
The image is of the railway line at Collumpton Services where we stopped on the way back from Cornwall.
Be warned there’s a lot of politics this time but it’s been difficult to avoid.
Some things have to be said.
Use your Vote 2017
I made a very short video to encourage people to vote in the General Election tomorrow.
There is a lot at stake and this time it can really make a difference.
I can’t post video directly here, but I have so far posted it to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (all embedded below), so please share on your favourite platform, if you know someone who you think might need some encouragement.
“What did you do?”
18th November 2016
Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.
Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.
Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.
Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.
And Still I Rise
The 14 Features of Eternal Fascism by Umberto Eco
“These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.:”
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
via Kottke
Paul Greer 