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?
Voltairian thuggery
Barbarism: Unfree Speech; Unfree Speech; Unfree Speech. (Repeat, mit Sturm und Drang, to fade.)
Civilisation: Free Speech.
‘IMS Health Inc., a provider of market data to drugmakers, persuaded a federal appeals court to throw out Vermont’s law barring the use of information about doctors’ drug-prescribing habits in sales campaigns without their consent … [b]ecause the law seeks to “influence the prescribing conduct of doctors by restricting the speech of others - namely data miners and pharmaceutical manufacturers”’.
First they came for the data miners, & I did not speak out, &c.
I disapprove of your desire to pillage and commodify private medical information against the will of patients & doctors, but I will defend to the death your right to do so.
