WHEN I FINALLY ABANDONED my effort to make Dispatches
a weekly news site and decided instead to retain its title but post
only when events and (dwindling) creative impulses so demanded, my
notion was I'd normally write maybe one post per month -- unless of
course some breaking story required the 21st Century online equivalent
of an Extra.
(Yes
I am old enough to remember when newsboys -- and very occasionally
newsgirls -- hawked papers on the street: "Extra, Extra, read all about
it...")
(No, not "just like in the movies"; "exactly as in what used to be real life" instead.)
But then the net neutrality story took a new and damnably revealing turn that underscores my most recent anti-censorship essay and again demonstrates how the Left destroys its own credibility not only with censorship per se
but with malicious disinformation -- in other words by behaving exactly
as the ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and fascists routinely behave --
and thereby, like our enemies, serving our Overlords by further
spreading chaos and confusion amongst us all, we the people of the
ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent, we who are ever-more-undeniably
the planet's [only] remaining human beings.
Quoth the website Demand Progress in a 1 October 2019 email (bf as in original):
A
federal court just threw out a key part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net
neutrality—a game-changer in the fight for net neutrality...But while we
didn't get the complete win we wanted, allowing states to enact their
own strong net neutrality protections is a huge deal. And we can still
win at the federal level by pressing the Senate and presidential
candidates to act.
This grotesquely misleading pitch for an "emergency donation" then jumps to somewhat-less-deceptive, light-faced huckstering inside:
A
federal court has just thrown out part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net
neutrality. This ruling also means the 2020 presidential candidates need
to step up and pledge to restore net neutrality — and we’re working
hard to push them to do so. But we can’t act without your help, and time
is of the essence.
All of which illustrates the knife-edged relevance of Chris Hedges' 2015 essay, "Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse" -- an essay every (allegedly) Leftist U.S. website save the notably courageous Popular Resistance
has long ago maliciously suppressed as contrary to the mandatory USian
cult of (tyranny-preserving) clinically delusional optimism:
The
naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies
technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples
our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of
security...
But
to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that things are getting
worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of the circle of
magical thinking that defines American and much of Western culture. The
left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a
mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and
the ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all...
The 19th century theorist, Louis-Auguste Blanqui,
unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief, central
to Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality
and greater morality...
"Its
regressive march," (Blanqui asserted) "goes back through every stage of
privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.”
And
again it is the eloquently truthful Mr. Hedges who tells us why not
only revolution but even the most minimal humanitarian reforms are
impossible at present and will undoubtedly remain so for as long as the
USian ethos of compulsory delusion paralyzes the Occidental mind,
exactly as our diabolically Machiavellian masters intend:
Only
those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a
ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying
security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to
carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.
Meanwhile
Credo -- a self-proclaimed "progressive" marketeer that implicitly
promotes the notion Capitalism is humanitarianism -- a vivid example
indeed of what George Orwell aptly labeled "doublethink" -- has
nevertheless (to its credit) reported the partial truth about net neutrality's extermination.
Quoth Credo:
Yesterday, a federal appeals court affirmed that the Federal Communications Commission's murder of the internet was lawful.
(To read the rest, go here.)
