View this link:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/02/badiou-on-le-petit-nicolas.html

Because it’s (always?) more interesting to read about philosophy when it’s outside of doctrinal/pedagogical consideration (and especially when it has to do with someone has eminent as Alain Badiou):

… As Badiou says, quoting Zizek, those who used to oppose parliamentary democracy to Stalinism missed the point that Stalinism was the future of parliamentary democracy. Indeed, “the technological means for controlling the population are already such that Stalin, with his endless handwritten files, his mass executions, his spies with hats, his gigantic lice-ridden camps and bestial tortures, appears like an amateur from another age”.

And how many times have you heard pundits boasting about the big turnout for a particular election? Boast they must, because it is happening with less and less frequency these days. But what does this say about voting, as an act? What matters, apparently is that people participate, and thus give the system a democratic imprimatur…

More worth checking out over at Lenin’s Tomb.