The Nature Theater of Oklahoma ([info]nuncstans) wrote,
@ 2006-07-09 00:21:00
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Current location:front stoop of ecomansion
Current mood: ate a slice of evil
Entry tags:bush, dow jones, elections, fascism, fox, giuliani, jamz, mexico, neighbors, parades, ticker-tape, voting

Sometimes I realize that my life is not good


nypd
Originally uploaded by nuncstans.


I feel crazy

Remember when Vicente Fox hired Giuliani as a "consultant"? Except, given the fact that 70% of Mexico's population lives in poverty, it made sense that the Giules would be the kind of consultant who gets paid a cool 4.2 million** to say "get those poor people out of the Zocalo" and "arrest anyone selling something without a permit", and then gets a ticker-tape* parade. So anyway, I wonder if he also might have given some advice about elections. We are a model for the world.

Actually, though, that bad-pizza segue is totally unfair. Rudy was never involved in electoral fraud; his popularity was all repressive desublimation and stockholm syndrome. Or little fascists getting out the vote. or whatever.

Coincidentally, another victory for fascists. Just in case you thought mass slaughter was punishable by law in any country in this hemisphere.

*what is ticker tape anyway and does it have to do with the Dow Jones?
**Check out [info]dobrovolets's link in the comments.

EDIT- OK, help. A power-walking neighbor lady (wearing a hot pink golf shirt and resort-themed jamz) just tried to pick one of crazy neighbor lady's huge lilies, failed, pulled a knife out of her pocket and with spastic, aggro movements sawed it off the stem, right under the flower, and power-walked away. Yes, crazy neighbor lady does come over with petititons, written by her, to "leave the undeveloped parking lot alone!" and lawn signage for the upcoming primary and sundry extremely boring democratic party propaganda; and yes her face turns bright pink with excitement whenever she starts low-talking away about the next big candidate; but after all she is my crazy neighbor. This other lady is nothing to me. I feel like I should do something.

EDIT 2- check out Greg Palast's article in The Guardian (thak you, [info]from_ashes!)

(Post a new comment)


[info]alsoname
2006-07-09 06:57 am UTC (link)
The "we are a model" link didn't work for me when I tried clicking.

According to this dude, the election fraud was perpetrated in part by ChoicePoint. I knew I had a reason to detest credit-reporting companies as intensely as I do.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 04:39 pm UTC (link)
Aaaaaaarrrrgghhhhhh!!!!

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 04:52 pm UTC (link)
I don't know why the link isn't working. It's this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5161862.stm

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[info]alsoname
2006-07-09 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Interesting article, but wow, one piece of rhetoric was worthy of the American press.

He said Saturday's rally would be the first of several but vowed all would be peaceful.

I love the use of the word "but" instead of "and," or the inclusion of the qualifier in the first place. It just concedes to those who believe that all protest(ers) are inherently violent. Like you can't disagree with "The Man" without being psycho or irrational.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 07:27 pm UTC (link)
I also liked the NYT headline, Leftists Predict Unrest Without Complete Recount of Mexican Election.

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[info]dobrovolets
2006-07-09 12:10 pm UTC (link)
To be absolutely fair, it wasn't Fox who hired Giuliani, it was AMLO.

That stated, I'm pretty sure AMLO wuz robbed.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 04:46 pm UTC (link)
Especially since the Giuliani solution depends on a certain ratio of police intmidation to dire poverty, and in the D.F., even with one of the most brutal police forces in the world, that wasn't happening. They "cleared out" the zocalo a few times, arresting or dispersing everybody, but more people just kept coming back.

The intersting thing, to me, is why they hired him in the first place. One hand washing the other? Or whatever the expression is?

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[info]dobrovolets
2006-07-09 10:10 pm UTC (link)
AMLO's political strategy while mayor was to do a few token things for the organized sections of the working class (e.g., municipalizing the Pascual factories so the workers could hold onto them as a cooperative), while securing middle-class support through his "war on crime." They still hated him in Polanco, but that would have been the case no matter what. That way he could form a cross-class political alliance of middle-class professional types and the better-off sections of the working class, while treating the poorest, who aren't likely to vote anyway, as scapegoats. And it worked for him in the DF, but he wasn't able to translate that into nationwide political support from the middle class. All Calderón had to do was Chávez-bait him, and they'd scurry back to the PAN. That, combined with old fashioned caudillismo and some selective dirty tricks in ballot-counting, seems to have been enough to keep PAN in at the PRD's expense.

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[info]pomo_drunkard
2006-07-09 10:26 pm UTC (link)
Wow. There wasn't a single noun, pronoun, or acryonym in that entire paragraph that I understood. I guess I've been cloistered for far too long.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 11:37 pm UTC (link)
AMLO=Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, i.e. the other presidential candidate, the one who just "lost" the election a la Al Gore in 2000. He was the mayor of Mexico City who hired the "mayor of the world" to come preach. Although some kind businessmen apparently paid for it. PAN is the National Action Party, some nationalist fuckers, and that's the party whose candidate "won" the election. If that helps.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 11:42 pm UTC (link)
Agreed. But my question is more naive than that. I mean what help could Rudy possibly have been? Except to curry favor with the business elite in a completely transparent, practically useless expenditure. I guess I just answered my own question, or else I just understood your answer. It's amazing how these oligarchs like to throw their own money away, as long as it remains among the extraordinarily wealthy.

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[info]snarkophone
2006-07-09 03:19 pm UTC (link)
ticker-tape is that stuff that looks like adding machine roll stuff.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 04:47 pm UTC (link)
Yay!!!
But does it have something to do with, like, the stock market? Do people throw rolls of stock prices exuberantly down upon returning troops, or isthat just my fantasy?

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[info]pomo_drunkard
2006-07-09 05:57 pm UTC (link)
Ticker tape used to be how stock prices were communicated. You ever see an old movie where there's this weird little device chattering away? It's the stock prices being sent and printed off. It goes in alphabetical order, looping over and over and over again, constantly telling the stock broker asshole whether he needs to jump out of a building or buy a new Latin American country.

Like everything else in this country, it was "invented" by Thomas Edison. Which is to say, he designed some of it, stole the rest of it, and patented it.

I'm not sure why they throw this in parades, though. Maybe it just falls nicely. It's incredibly thin and light and fluffy, like, the width of your little finger, and, presumably, very thin and cheap.

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[info]pomo_drunkard
2006-07-09 06:00 pm UTC (link)
Oh, I should have thought about this more before commenting, but I realized why it was probably used as confetti. Ticker tape is outdated about five minutes after it's printed off. But everyone insists on it running all the time. So they probably just threw it out in parades because they had all this extra confetti-type stuff just sitting around that no one needed to archive or anything. So they tossed it at triumphant soldiers and the like.

Reduce, reuse, recycle!

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[info]pomo_drunkard
2006-07-09 06:29 pm UTC (link)
Or i could have just skipped all that and gone to wikipedia for their article about ticker tape and ticker tape parades.

That probably would have been much easier.

New information from that article that I didn't know? The "ticker" part of "ticker tape" comes from the extremely irritating ticking that the machine made as it prints. Everyone old enough to remember typewriters or dot matrix printers should be able to picture it. Or, ummm, what's the aural equivalent of "picture it"?

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(Anonymous)
2006-07-09 06:34 pm UTC (link)
Aaaaaaaahhhh. Now I know. It's so much more deeply satisfying to be told the answers to questions than to go looking for them.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 07:28 pm UTC (link)
Yes it is.

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[info]astronomick
2006-07-10 06:56 pm UTC (link)
Everyone old enough to remember dot matrix printers

Oh dear.

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[info]lovelikeyeast
2006-07-09 04:17 pm UTC (link)
Dude, stay away from the nypd pizza. That stuff will make anyone feel crazy! I have literally vomited after eating it. There's something very bad in there. Maybe too heavy on the police presence? The grease? Not sure.

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[info]nuncstans
2006-07-09 04:48 pm UTC (link)
Noted.

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