Don’t credit Trump for that feature. 40 Wall Street was built at least 15 years before Trump was born, and hopefully it will be around long after he is forgotten.
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Polish Mother-In-Law said there were similar ballots during the communist rule, where you HAD to go vote, but there was only one name on the ballots.
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Utter madness.
Something I notice about totalitarians is that they are actually really, really terrible at public relations. People do what you want because you’ll have them imprisoned or killed if they don’t, so you get the idea that your absurd schemes are actually fooling people; that a fraudulent vote like that one is worth doing to keep up appearances when in reality absolutely everyone can see how fraudulent it is and you would have been better off not doing it at all.
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Hey, I rode that! Unless there was more than one, it used to be in Panama City Beach.
My first thought was this…
…but, then again, anytime that I see something that remotely makes me think of Herr Drumpf, I think of this.
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That’s the one
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So, that’s how many schools of Italian Fascist architects it took to change a lightbulb?
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I was rocking this album through out the Bush years (along with KMFDM and Ministry — before uncle Al got too deep in the Info Wars koolaid)
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The paper/political equivilant of ‘have you beaten your wife recently’?
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That’s right! Any visit to Torino will convince you of Fascism’s contribution to architecture and design. Or, actually, any Hugo Boss suit. Still and all, I’ll take tie-dye if I have to, to avoid it.
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So what if it’s obviously fraudulent, the entire design of a totalitarian system makes such realizations immaterial. You may see trick, but you can’t do anything about it; and when you can’t do anything about something obvious for a good while, you’re dulled into acceptance or at least indifference. In this way, these faux-democratic performances actually reinforce the system: by taking the means through which the people are meant to keep the government in check (e.g. voting, public protests) and subverting them by placing them fully under state control (single-option ballots, state-organized “spontaneous” demonstrations) they hammer the idea of an inescapable omnipotent system and shrink the space available for actual dissent.
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Dude has one hellava chin.
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I don’t mean anything I’m saying to lessen the plight of people who live in these circumstances.
I was talking about effects of not having to actually win over any hearts/minds in the way that these countries relate with others. China isn’t as totalitarian as it used to be, but the Beijing really showed off some of their lack of PR know-how. Like when they had a little girl lipsynch a song on stage because they thought the little girl who actually had the incredible voice was too ugly and they didn’t want to look bad in front of the international community. It displayed a really dismal knowledge of what would actually make them look good or bad.
If dictator is forcing people to march to the polls and vote for the only option available because they think it will break the spirits of the people, they might or might not be on to something depending on the circumstances. I bet a lot of them are doing it to boost their own egos, largely unaware that a huge swath of people detest them.
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