by JackRiddler » Tue Aug 18, 2020 6:00 pm
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ON THREATS TO FREEDOMS OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS
After brainstorming, here is a list of major threats to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of political expression emanating from systemic power centers and powerful actors and institutions in the United States, Britain, and other "Western" countries:
- Treatment of Assange, Snowden, and Manning.
- Recent treatment of other government and corporate whistleblowers.
- The many arms of the surveillance state and its recent explosive growth in scope, depth, integration, legal cover, sophistication, and power potentials.
- The corporate-owned surveillance society: corporate collection of comprehensive and finely-grained data about everything everyone does at all times, with its chilling potential on speech; corporate moves toward establishing a more open system of Western-style "social credit ratings" like in China; online sorting of access to platforms, power and services by proprietary systems governed by unpublished algorithms.
- Direct corporate power over speech: the power of the corporate media and social-media cartels to determine whose speech and what views are favored; their power to block out and censor dissenting and outside views; to define what counts as a political issue and what doesn't, and to set the terms of political debates; and to designate what is and is not to be labeled as "propaganda," what qualifies as "conspiracy theory," as "fake," or as a "state propaganda" outlet, always basing these judgments on inconsistently applied criteria related to their own interests and unrelated to valid, coherent definitions of these categories.
- The routinely violent and extreme police response to protest and assembly, especially to those protesting police conduct and law enforcement and carceral policy.
- Actual movement fascists, movement racists, and like-minded persons shooting at protesters, running them over with cars, doxxing and threatening their lives, etc.
- The attempted designation by the government (and various patsies and interest groups) of a loosely-defined political stance against 'fascism as a primary enemy' (a.k.a. 'Antifa') as terrorist, inherently violent, or a powerful conspiracy in its own right. (This is one kind of current Red Scare.)
- The many other direct threats of actions against journalists made by the present administration and other high-ranking political figures.
- The push over several years to defame, block and censor those who do not conform with the general #Russiagate line, and cause them to lose their jobs, contracts, and venues. (Another kind of current Red Scare.)
- The so-far frighteningly successful push to block and censor those who express condemnation of Israeli actions or support for the BDS movement as necessarily "anti-Semitic," and to cause them to lose their jobs, contracts, and venues. (Yet another kind of current Red Scare. This is how the lion's share of the academics who have been terminated for political statements recently actually lost their jobs, but it is not a problem identified by anti-"Cancel Culture" signatories.)
- Recent state laws and federal regulations that make punishable, among other things, the publication of photos taken at factory farms; establish harsh prison sentences for blocking traffic, 'trespassing' on oil pipelines (including on your own land), or interfering with vaguely-defined 'governmental administration'; and give immunity to drivers who run over protesters.
- The hidden icebergs of the espionage-corporate complex: activities of state, state-backed, state-corporate, state or multi-state intel, and corporate-funded think-tanks, fronts, lobbies, PR and marketing outfits, infiltration efforts, cooptation efforts, and private "public service" or "non-governmental" initiatives, who engage in contracted propaganda operations, political manipulations, unannounced "nudges," and other activities in which they do not openly disclose themselves as agents or beneficiaries of their respective sponsors, and do not make clear their actual agendas. This is another potent form by which wealth controls, manipulates, misleads, suppresses, and chills political speech.
- Rigging and fraud in elections, lawmaking, and regulation: The dozens of ways in which regulation, legislation, and elections (the last being ostensibly the most important political expression available to the people) are now more openly and shamelessly rigged than ever by money; more money; yet more money; corporate lobbies; political machines; geostrategy and natsec lobbies; systematic voter suppression on a perpetually larger and ever-bolder scale; control by corporate media and its advertisers of public agendas, spins, and air-time granted to views, spokespersons, and candidates; planned scandal/crisis/distraction operations; strangleholds over primary and general election procedures and abuse thereof by the "major" parties; forced winner-take-all logic and moral shaming favoring the two "major" parties; gerrymandering; the inherently corrupt practice of legislative seniority; disinfo operations and fake scandals, and more. (And, presumably, through the use of proprietary black-box voting machines that are both riggable - from the inside - as well as hackable from the outside.)
- Organized panic campaigns that present any of the above, or other major threats to free speech, not primarily as functions of systemic features and power-groups operating from within the system, but as "attacks" on the system practiced by agents of vaguely defined foreign entities like "Russia" or "China," or by mysterious non-existent cabals of various kinds, or by annoying angry college students.
I hope that lends perspective to the relative importance of 'Cancel Culture.' I'm sure this list is missing one or more items that also, generally, merit far greater concern. I wish it was unnecessary to add that this is not meant as an endorsement of 'Cancel Culture', however exactly we may define the concept. Nor is this a denial that some people have been unjustly treated and harmed by persons practicing what we might accurately call 'Cancel Culture.'
Nevertheless, I submit that if those who decry 'Cancel Culture' do not, with equal or greater vigor, also decry any of the items on the above list, they are exposing themselves:
a) as concernment liberals who do not understand or who wish to obscure the structures and sources of real power in our societies; or,
b) as persons striking faux-courageous stands against easy and relatively safe targets, like angry college students, usually on behalf of a (right-wing) political agenda; or,
c) as professional performers. artists, pundits or others who, for whatever reason, feel more threatened by audience rejection than by structural power and structural violence.
Independently of motive, however, they are
d) willing to function to buttress the established relations of power and violence in the Anglo-American or "Western" societies, by helping to engender a peripheral distraction from real power centers and bigger issues threatening freedom of speech and political expression in general.
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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
TopSecret WallSt. Iraq &
more
In other words, who could really disagree? So, what seems to be the problem?
