Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

I am not apathetic because…”it doesn’t matter who I vote for. Control stays with the people who are in control today, there is no democracy, the capitalist system ensures that those with money have the balance of power. And they remain in power by ensuring that the only voices that get heard are those of people who have money.”


Categories: Memories.

/ 11 Comments

11 comments

  1. incy

    but if you never try you will never know. In fact it can be argued those with money wrote that statement to dissuade people form even bothering thus making sure they keep control…

    mind you Ken Livingstone once said if voting changed anything they would ablosih it.

    Reply
    • neilh

      “…truth is the sword of us all”

      No, the point is that whichever of the politicians ‘get in’ the people actually in control don’t change, they just have different puppets to deal with, it doesn’t make any actual difference.

      However, if there was somebody like, say, Johnny Rotten, standing in the local area, someone who was noisy, obnoxious and didn’t really care about whips then I’d probably vote for them, just ‘cos they’d be loud and on the telly all the time. Nothing would change, of course, except that there’d be a chance of embarrassing those really in power.

      I found ‘Yes Minister’ quite educational…

      Reply
  3. pjc50

    Absolutely. Naked cynicism about the political process annoys me no end. Politics is the way we resolve differences of opinion and turn them into necessary action.

    (While I’m with you on the uselessness of the war, the mining industry was dying anyway as plenty of the pits cost more to produce coal than it could be sold for…)

    Reply
    • neilh

      Its true that listening to economists has probably made me consider the situation rather more dismal that it really is.

      Show me a politician I can trust and I’ll vote for him.

      Reply
  4. neilh

    Figureheads. Stand back far enough to see what causes war, more importantly who benefits from war (which side(s) are they on?). Another interesting thing to note is that the people who have both the inclination and resources to make successful politicians are those who are somewhat questionable of morals, in the same way as those who filter up to the higher echelons of business tend to be those who can play the political games within the corporate world. The way to success is to have no scruples about manouvering that way – that cuts both ways, to be a successful businessperson you need to behave that way, and those who behave that way tend to run successful businesses, but they’re successful because they have their own interpretations of ethics, not because they are fundamentally ‘good’ businesses.

    Reply
  5. neilh

    The public face is very different to what is actually going on behind the scenes. We vote for different faces to appear on the news, we don’t vote for different actions to be taken. There is something to be said for voting for the most physically attractive (or, perhaps least unattractive) person on the ballot paper.

    Sure, some of the details change, but the overall thrust of how things go doesn’t get altered by who is in Downing Street.

    For instance, iirc oil took over from gold as the standard against which currency was measured sometime in the 1970s. It would have been disasterous for oil if the coal industry of Britain remained a viable energy supplier. Thatcher happened to be a good figurehead for that transition.

    I don’t know much about common market politics, but I’d be suprised if there wasn’t a good chunk of money being made by somebody close to someone influencial in those discussions….

    Reply
    • pjc50

      Ah yes, coal needed to be destroyed as a viable source of energy for cars, and now we see the country dotted with oil-burning power plants.

      There is no conspiracy. There are sometimes small conspiracies, to do particular things; but they are so hard to organise. When they are inevitably exposed they look so odd and paranoid, like Iran-Contra, Matrix Churchill (where the lack of conspiracy within the government caused the scandal to explode).

      Looking for means, motive and opportunity leads you to see conspiracies where none exist. The Iraq war was not about oil, nor was it about diverting money to Bush and cronies (there are far more efficient ways of doing that than having an actual war). It was about ideology and scapegoating. The American fears of terrorism were symbolically heaped on Saddam and he was symbolically destroyed, like the original scapegoat. The rest was incidental to the plan, which was why it was handled so badly.

      Reply
      • neilh

        Those you cite are /illegal/ conspiracies (or, at least, potentially illegal), the majority of the collaborations I’m thinking about are done wholly within the legal system since they have enough control over the legal system to sway it in such a way they aren’t doing illegal things.

        Most of these collaborations are not in any particular sense hidden, either, since there is no illegal activity that requires hiding.

        Reply

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