Let's just recap here for a bit as the above is very important at election time - much more important than some candidates or critics of this blog seem to think it is. So firstly let's define what we were setting out to do in establishing this blog in the first place. Gonzo journalism is simply reportage written without any claims of objectivity - the main objective is social critique and reporting from the writers perspective of what he or she sees and not reporting exclusively from a position of fact like a newspaper. In essence we aren't here to be objective (although we have tried to be as much as possible) like IOM Newspapers or Manx Radio. We established this blog to try to get to the root of individual candidates personalities and their perceived political agendas and motivations - and to report events as we see them not as they necessarily are.
As Hunter S Thompson once claimed: If I'd written the truth I knew for the last ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle. So whilst this blog sets out to challenge facts and openly discuss the apparent motivations of candidates its really all part of a process of trying to distil information in order to perhaps get closer to the truth - not to report on the truth.
Which nicely brings us to matters that we hoped would not be cyclical but in reality they have been (which wasn't our intention at all). And that's issues to do with perceived hidden agendas and some apparent deficits in candidate transparency. Nothing we've set out to do is personal but politics is the art of controlling your own environment and its clear that there has been an awful lot of environment controlling going on during the 2021 campaign trail which is all we've latterly tried to get under the skin of.
So we're not apologising for the unintended focus on Mr Michael Josem, or Willers, or Peter Karran and Liberal Vannin. We respect them as candidates and at outset we set out with the best intentions to try to bring readers attention to certain questions that we felt needed to be answered. But as yet almost none of those questions have actually been answered. We now also get open requests on Twitter to let things lie when really the gift to close those matters out is not ours to give - its in the hands of some of those we have written about. All matters raised regarding Mr Josem, Mr Willers and Mr Karran (and any others) could be closed out in twenty-four hours through transparent public relations and intelligent campaign management. Through honest public disclosure. But in the main they aren't being closed out and so that perhaps gives more weight to our perspective on things (or maybe just highlights that they are running incredibly poor campaigns). Either way we'd like to know which applies.
For the record we have not said that any of those mentioned are corrupt, or crooked, or guilty of any crimes either. Nor that they are unworthy of your support. All we've suggested is that as candidates some appear to be flawed, or conflicted, or that the way they have chosen to portray themselves in order to attract public votes seems to be at odds with the way that facts seem to present themselves (or have presented themselves in the past). That's it. Like Holden Caulfield we just don't like phonies. We expected to spark debate and prompt others to ask questions but due to a lack of response its being portrayed as one-sided criticism in some quarters. But the reality is that little or no information has come back the other way despite numerous people asking exactly the same questions. Which sort of proves our point. You don't leave it until after election day to realise that maybe you should have tackled genuine concerns or requests for further information head-on and then you'd have got more votes - or that perhaps you missed opportunities to actually get in to Keys by not being as transparent with the public as you could have been. And to close this write-up out we'll leave those questions hanging there for now ..
Politics is the art of controlling your environment. That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world - or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property - or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons - or locked up in Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That's when you will have wished you had voted.
Hunter S Thompson
Pictured: what transparency should look like
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