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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Whom To Vote For

 Panopticon Design Prison



I have previously said that were there the possibility of a third term for presidents, I would not vote for Mr. Obama again.

I think that all presidents, however, become enslaved to the prevailing currents in Washington D.C. The atmosphere and the narratives there are like treacherous rip tides in which politicians swim.

The odds of anyone escaping unscathed are very small.....

I always thought we should move the Capital every 10 years or so. Now in the electronic age, there is no reason why we should allow elected men and women to  be imprisoned in the gilded prisons of Panopticon Washington D.C.

Free the elected!
Move the Capital to Morris, Illinois in 2020 !

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notes

Panopticon.... Google it.

It is a concept folded like a 10-dimensional quilt... and has many. many shades of meaning to me. I use it to give an impression of a uniformity of thought and an inescapability; i.e., politicians cannot escape from the influence of lobbyists... they are under 24 hour surveillance, just as are prisoners in maximum security.... just as the Intel state has the rest of us under surveillance.

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/05/02/privacy-freedom-and-the-all-seeing-eye-the-panopticon/
...Foucault saw the Panopticon as indicative of a shift toward unverifiable observation – where the incarcerated were moved out of dungeons and into the possibility of view. Its unverifiable nature was of most importance. By removing the surveyor (in Bentham’s case the Warden) from sight, the subjects were left to guess if they were being watched or not. The effect was one of mass control through minimal input, with subjects learning to curtail their behavior as an outcome of the environment. If you couldn’t verify the existence of surveillance but knew it was possible at any moment, then the presumption was you were under constant observation. In recognizing the impact of surveillance on the body, Foucault (1977) writes:
The classic age discovered the body as an object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces.

It is an old concept little used; therefore, it is brand new to us, and it may mean what we wish it to mean. Let us give it good and powerful meaning.
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