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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 4/1/23

Rupert the Transgender Terrorist

Message Peter Barus
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Rupert Murdoch 2015.
Rupert Murdoch 2015.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Hudson Institute)
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It has always been so, that life is uncontrollable. That for any heinous act there is always a form no law can ever reach. It's the perfect crime. Right under your nose.

Nobody is suppressing the speech of a talking head paid handsomely for being publicly despicable on the world stage, quite possibly at the cost of innocent lives.

In this Attention Age, where such a voice, with such a platform and such an echo-chamber, reaches orders of magnitude beyond a mere "crowded theater," that legal rule-of-thumb must be given a much broader application. Spewing "Transgender Terrorism" onto the global media networks in prime time surely qualifies as a cry of "fire!" in a theater packed to the rafters and soaked in accelerants.

As to the content of that speech, its meaning as a terroristic action can only be measured by its impacts, which were amplified beyond all reason or necessity; and the fear it aroused was pervasive in moments. Any physical harm will be almost impossible to attribute.

"Free Speech!" some will cry.

The freedom to speak is absolute: by definition, it cannot be suppressed in any way. If it is, it isn't.

But such speech is not "free." Uttered by the proverbial person-on-the-street, where its impact may insult a few passersby, or even a crowd within earshot, it's free. And of course, whatever consequences ensue may befall the speaker as well as their targets.

But this speaker is remote from such consideration, and may even be mouthing somebody else's words. And their pronouncement took an investment of millions of dollars (also "protected" speech since the infamous Supreme Court folly) and required the costly infrastructure of a corporate system designed by and for "shareholder value" and explicitly not for the common good. Explicitly protected from the common good.

The business mechanism that so amplified that message relies financially on the amount of attention generated, with return-on-investment obscenely enhanced if followed by serious harm to people, families, communities: the nation. And all for "shareholder value." The nation sold out to the highest bidders, even if they are citizens of another country. Australia maybe.

The distance between this artificial structure and democracy cannot be traversed: the two cannot coexist. And this is the actual polarization that we continue to misidentify as political, endlessly squabbling over irrelevancies, to the enormous profit of a few feudal oligarchs, and to our great and terrible loss.

Sadly, and this is awfully sad, the madness is not confined to one popular psychopath: it's endemic. It is the toxic byproduct of an industry driven exclusively by investor confidence, and nothing, absolutely nothing else. It is not "capitalism," or any other "ism, " it's deeper than that, it's now a sociopathy embedded in our culture.

And by "culture" I mean our collective way of being that sees oxymoronic terms like "culture wars" and "cancel culture" and "transgender terrorism" as having some actual meaning, and has focused the financial machinery on profit like a heat-seeking missile.

Too bad for you if you're in the blast zone. And now that's all of us.

In this Attention Age, all the way out to the edge of the empire, momentary mass attention is the source of power. Nothing else matters anymore, and infamy generates the most heat, and the least light. The suppurating necrosis at the core of our culture is beginning to stink.

In a diversified, egalitarian, all-inclusive competition for the eyes of the world, from hellbent presidential pretenders to the latest miserable mass killer of schoolchildren, it's down to how many eyes and for how long. On this momentary continuum a former president holds the high score (Putin a close second), and somebody in Nashville just hit the now-daily jackpot. That one got a whole lot of attention for a few moments, leaving this life worse than they found it; the other one isn't through wrecking the joint yet. Not by a long shot. But all contenders are forgotten after they have taken their shots and spun off into the oblivion of history, leaving our collective trajectory unswayed and targeted inexorably on ending all life. Life itself.

It's been said that we win the games we're really playing.

And these pathetic talking heads? Are they watching the needle right now, like one of those old applause-o-meters on some quiz show, to see how their career is going as they fling grenades around at the next identifiable demographic that looks vulnerable?

And which way will the ratings go in the aftermath? That won't be their ratings: that will be our ratings.

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I'm an old Pogo fan. For some unknown reason I persist in outrage at Feudalism, as if human beings can do much better than this. Our old ways of life are obsolete and are killing us. Will the human race wake up in time? Stay (more...)
 

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