Out of the mouths of babes & CEOs

If Naomi Klein, say, were to describe the fundamental job of television as ‘selling available human brain time to Coca-Cola’, the snorts of derision at such tedious & passé Dave Spartery would be deafening. Spoken, however, by the CEO of an actual television channel, describing his day-to-day activities, what deafens is the silence. 

Or take Free Speech (it is, after all, a special magic privileged organising principle du jour). It must surely be dirty Red slander that in the US ‘in order to fully participate & have your First Amendment rights, you have to be able to spend money’, glossing recent legal developments as ‘The Supreme Court said that money is speech’. How tiresome. What grotesque & tawdry ingratitude. 

What if, however, these were the precise words of the conservative businessman & unspeakable bastard who brought & won that very case?

Then this - money is speech - would not be left-wing critique but right-wing crowing; not outrage but triumph; not crisis decried but desideratum achieved.

What to call these claims that, voiced by radical partisans for human emancipation, would be denounced as exaggerated, crude, tasteless political kitsch; but that are, in actuality, uncontroversial facts stated by their beneficiaries? Victorverité? Rectofacticity? Quantum Shondes?



rejectamentalist manifesto


China Miéville’s waste books

. . .


‘A principal rule for writers, and especially those who want to describe their own sensations, is not to believe that their doing so indicates they possess a special disposition of nature in this respect. Others can perhaps do it just as well as you can. Only they do not make a business of it, because it seems to them silly to publicize such things.’


                Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

. . .


London’s Overthrow.

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