#informed electorate

Right now, the UK government are trying to run one of the most insidious and disgusting propaganda campaigns. The Department of Health and Social Care were caught creating 128 fake Twitter accounts to defend the Prime Minister, to undermine scientific advice from the WHO, and to deflect from the government’s catastrophic failures in this country.

I am afraid of the English. 

I am afraid of my own people, because they voted for a government condemned by the UN as “callous and cruel” - disabled citizens are dying in Jobcentre queues after being declared fit to work, people are dying at work because the pension age has risen over and above the median life expectancy.

I fear the voters who have become so inured to lies and corruption that they voted for a man who will hide in a fridge rather than engage in political discourse and whose party’s political advertising output was found to be overwhelmingly inaccurate. 

I fear a people who would rather see the NHS dismantled than allow even one foreign national benefit from it. 

I am terrified of an electorate who somehow believe it better to give money to millionaires in the form of tax breaks and offshore tax-dodges and corporate welfare (welfare payments which allow those on poverty salaries to maintain a living wage) than raise the minimum wage.

So....this is awkward. I apologize for the absence, non existent tumblr followers.

I have a crazy and probably overwhelming idea. I, who allegedly loves to write and studied government in college, am going to attempt to combine the two. I do not promise perfection, but I do promise my best effort (of sorts). It will be a sort of organic approach to reporting with side (witty) annotations. I’m tired of feeling doubt about what’s going on with our government. I have never felt so frustrated and confused. I even doubt my news sources. How fucked up is that?

I want to start off by saying that I admit I have biases. I lean left. I’m a self proclaimed feminist. I want immigration reform. I think refugees need help. I’m a child of Mexican immigrants. So you can imagine where I’m coming from. However, I have always tried to be open minded. I’m willing to change, relabel, whatever during this journey of enlightenment. I want to be part of an informed electorate and I think you do too. More than anything I want to aggregate information and post sources so as to best inform our own opinions. I’m not trying to change minds, I’m just trying to make the facts known because as far as I know ‘alternative facts’ is bullshit. That’s not acceptable. 

Apple suggests these handy iOS apps for the last-minute voter

“I’ve been overwhelmed with presidential politics, and am painfully aware of everything there is to know about both candidates. But that’s just the main event,” Mark Sullivan reports for Fast Company.

“If you’re like me, you could use a little help mastering that jungle of people and issues further down on the ballot this year. We’ve got the House and Senate seat races to worry about,…

Unlike access to the "public square" of early America, access to television requires large amounts of money. Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in Philadelphia and find a dozen competing, low-cost print shops within blocks of his home. Today, if he traveled to the nearest TV station, or to the headquarters of nearby Comcast— the dominant television provider in America— and tried to deliver his new ideas to the American people, he would be laughed off the premises. The public square that used to be a commons has been refeudalized, and the gatekeepers charge large rents for the privilege of communicating to the American people over the only medium that really affects their thinking. "Citizens" are now referred to more commonly as "consumers" or "the audience."