Our Absurd Legal And Media Ideology And Its Promotion Of Triviality Over Life's Necessities

THE INFLUENCE OF MODERN SHOW-BIZ on the thinking of the English Speaking Peoples and, unfortunately, humanity in general, has some terribly disastrous consequences.   I got into a little tussle online this week because I left some comments in places saying that while I hope Hasan Piker wins a lot of money from Scott Jennings and, I hope in time, from the media corporations that sponsor Jennings lying, including CNN, I was critical of Piker for his shock jockery.   And shock jockery is an important issue in this as well as the general level of superficiality and promotion of sensation to get eyeballs in the media.   

I doubt that if Hasan Piker spoke in reasonable, measured terms about important issues he'd get the following he does but the use that the Republican-fascists have made of his language and rhetoric (calling it that elevates it above where that kind of commercial babblage really exists) shows that as lucrative as it is for the shock jock, it is damaging to the politics he attaches it to.   

While the fascist media, and these days I would pretty much include all of the corporate media as either inarguably in that category or arguably adjacent to it,  can be depended on to lie and invent in the financial interest of its owners, highly paid staff and their major financial backers,  there's no advantage for those on the left, real or show-biz left, in helping that effort along.   

My criticism of Hasan Piker has been that he has made himself the news, something which is no help to defeating the fascists.   He isn't the only one that does that and if his name was Harry instead of Hasan,  it's quite possible that the racist Republicans wouldn't have made as much out of him as they have. 

We have no idea today if their use of Piker to defeat Democrats in some key races will override the advantage that the Trump era Republicans have given Democrats with the pain and hardship they have given to poor and middle class Americans but we've seen the Republican-enabling media turn less than him  into the margin of victory in delivering low-information voters' votes to the candidates who will continue to damage them. 

Piker has a right to tell the truth about that, he may even have a right to say it in stupid ways that give Republicans and their "free press" ammunition to do what I just described in the last paragraph, WHAT GAVE US TRUMP TO START WITH.    But we have the right to judge that right for its usefulness, helpfulness, and wisdom AND RESULTS and with that the character of the person who exercises that right.    

I say the idea that the extent to which rights are responsibly exercised in an informed way, benefiting the common good or at least not harming it,  is a key to determining their legitimacy as rights or, phrasing it another way, the validity of defending the "right" of the person exercising it.   Irresponsibly and harmfully exercised "rights" are no better than the wrongs they produce.   That result is the only reason that such rights talk matters at all.  If a "right" produces harm it is wrong to that extent no matter what Madison or Thomas Paine or the ACLU said.  

In the end, the political, social and legal status of "rights" depends entirely on the extent to which large numbers of us are benefitted and not harmed by the exercise of those rights.  Eventually that will even over-ride the "constitutionality" of an enumerated "right."   That is once the exercise of it has gone too far.  I would favor the reform of the status of the Supreme Court on that basis as they have sided with the mass-gun murderers and others against We The People.   That institution of government has forfeited the expectation of respect as much as the Blanche Department of "justice" has the expectation of regularity in the courts.   We have no obligation to allow that to continue. 

The idea that all rights are equal is one of the stupidest consequences of our superficial consideration of the matter of rights and one which has had real and bad results for equality and so legitimate democratic governance.  

The right of shock jocks to build a profitable media career out of offending People with sarcasm and insults is not the same thing as the right of someone to offend People by the plain telling of truths which a lot of People don't like.   The offense is secondary to telling the truth in the latter example, not the substance of a shock jock's shtick. 

Nor, despite what those in show-biz with a financial interest in pretending that the show-biz business of making a career, getting famous and an audience by appealing to a range of puerile character flaws - that is the fuel of that kind of media career - a boon for egalitarian democracy.   It is destructive to the real life consequences of having an egalitarian democracy over the worse forms of governance.  Those worse forms of governance rage from unequal liberal democracy (and liberal democracy is inherently anti-egalitarian, in the end) to oligarchy of some degree (what the American government has been in reality) and onward into the fascism which we are in danger of seeing come if Democrats don't decisively win next week and wisely use their majority to destroy Trumpian, Republican-fascism throughout the government, MOST OF ALL IN THE SUPREME COURT AND THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY.   AND IN THE MEDIA WHICH CREATED TRUMP AND THE DANGER TO EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY. 

I deny that we have any obligation to permit the media to destroy equality and democracy and the possibility of a decent life for everyone, the extent to which that is possible.  There is no moral obligation for us to permit that destruction of egalitarian democracy on the basis of assertions of rights.  Not now that we can see in real life what allowing that to flourish has cost us. 

Apart from show biz and media biz, the other area of commerce that promotes all of this is the lawyers, especially the media lawyers who pose as civil libertarians while never forgetting which side their brioche is buttered on.   But that would get me into the consequences of us allowing the legal profession to have normalized lying and the absurd idea that lies can achieve the status of an ethical professional virtue.  Which I'm sure you'll hear me saying more on very soon as I have been for years, now.   I will confess,  I have come to hate that profession. 

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Some of the most controversial things I've said here were refutations of show-biz myth, much of that in regard to the mythical status of the victims of the 1940s-60s red scare as Hollywood - the very entity that victimized them - has profited off of that over and over again while covering up and blurring the real nature of so much of it.   

The martyrdom of the Hollywood 10 is emblematic of both the villainy of their persecutors and the fact that lots of those victims were far from heroes or deserving of admiration.   I think a lot of the anti-Ukraine lying on the English speaking left is a hangover habit from the romanticism of that now moribund communism.  There have been a few of them in the past decade who I have suspected might have been blackmailed by Putin.  Especially one late Sovietologist with ties to the lefty media.  

I will, if forced to, go into the actual facts that anyone who belonged to the Communist Part in the United States during the 1930s, 40s and 50s were actually supporting one of the worst mass murderers in human history,  Stalin, and an ideology that is as anti-democratic and, in reality, anti-egalitarian as fascism and Nazism.    The only difference between the Communists of that era and the supporters of Italian and German fascism and Nazism was that unlike fascism - which already had a considerable power base in American white supremacy and our oligarchs AND THE "FREE PRESS"  - Communism had absolutely no possibility of gaining power in the United States and ending what democracy we had.   That the anti-communists were, in their majority, part of American fascism is relevant to the entire picture but no more than both the total idiocy of the Communists in promoting an equally anti-democratic ideology which not only had absolutely no prospect of adoption by large numbers of Americans but which was, through their attachment to the democratic left of the United States, a propaganda tool for America's indigenous fascists,  doing real and consequential damage to the struggle to establish egalitarian democracy.  

I'm going into this ancient history  to raise a problem which all of that history, the anti-anti-communist lore as told in plays, movies, TV shows and pulp novels and the unconsidered, un-nuanced thinking about that for the real democratic left going forward.   

We are going to need to address the part played by the Republican-fascist, oligarchic, billionaire financed war against equality and democracy WHICH HAS PROVEN TO BE THE REAL DANGER TO US THAT THE OLD-LINE COMMIES NEVER WERE.    And that is going to have to be done in the Congress.   And as soon as that effort is undertaken the fascists AND THEIR "FREE PRESS" ARE GOING TO HOLLAR "MCCARTHYISM!  HUAC! and every other thing that was rightly condemned about the red scare even though in this case, it will be an investigation of real and potent and powerful anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, BILLIONAIRE FUNDED AND FINANCED ATTACKS ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY WHICH HAVE PROVEN THEY CAN ACTUALLY DO WHAT THE IDIOT DUPES OF STALIN NEVER COULD HAVE DONE.  

And I have every confidence that the media and the "civil liberties" industry will join in the kneecapping of that effort to expose and destroy the real and potent enemies of equality and, so, democracy.    Americans have been trained to have that knee jerk reaction by show-biz, by the media, by the superficial and unnuanced consideration of that history and by the lawyer babble of the "civil libertarians" who have been, for the most part, the whores of Hollywood and the media and the oligarchs.  

We are going to have to crush those who gave Trump II its blueprint for destroying democracy here,  an effort which the big law firms, the universities, show-biz and the "free press" have been everything from actively involved with to complicit in to an impotent and ineffective counter to.   There are, of course, exceptions to that but I have no doubt that once the slogans of anti-anti-communism are voiced,  they will largely chicken out of doing what will be needed to establish egalitarian democracy.   

I would bet you that you can name those who will piously and self-righteously proclaim that the emergency effort to rescue democracy is guilty of "McCarthyism" and will cite the litany of Hollywood-Broadway red-scare slogans.   George Clooney, for one, the guy who bugged out to France comes to mind for me.  That was after he sandbagged Joe Biden in the New York Times.  And, I will add, before he hypocritically recycled his semi-red-scare show on Broadway.  He deserves to be the example of such official show-biz duplicity in such matters.  Or stupidity.  It could have been that like most actors, he's just not that bright or able to deal with complex realities that don't fit into the narrative of a show.  Having to wrap it up the show in about two hours leads to that kind of superficiality. 

Enabling the second empowerment of Trump determines the morality of whatever someone in the media did to bring that about.   To hell with whether or not they had a right to do it,  It's my right to point out the consequences of it. 

Update:  George Clooney and the New York Times did more to harm American democracy than the entire structure of that old red scare ever did.  Especially the NYT with its initial publishing of lies about Hillary Clinton right before the 2016 election and its sandbagging of Joe Biden in 2024.   The consequences of the red-scare were a side show compared to the attack on democracy by Trump and the Republican-fascists.   Anyone who did that can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.   If I hate the legal profession,  I hate the corporate media even more and ever more.   Including "entertainment" which has more influence because more low-info voters watch shows.