Wednesday 10 January 2018

Why are right-wing grievance-merchants having such temper tantrums over the Virgin/Daily Mail non-story?


Twitter is suddenly full of hard-right polemicists filling their nappies over the story about the Virgin West Coast rail franchise deciding to stop selling copies of the Daily Mail on their trains.


Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson, Daniel Hannan, Michael Ashcroft, and a wave of assorted Tories, Ukippers, Biffers, and Brextremists have all posted hysterical comments about this so called "ban".

The main problem with this whole pathetic story is that the fuss is so grotesquely disproportionate to what's actually happened.

Nobody is banning people from taking copies of the Daily Mail onto the train, and nobody is banning anyone from using the on board WiFi to access the Daily Mail website. 

In reality the private train company has decided to stop selling issues of the paper on board the trains, mainly because they were only selling 70 copies per day!

The incredible amount of froth and noise over this ludicrous non-story is quite remarkable from a bunch of people who never seem to stop yelling "snowflake!" and "social justice warrior!" at anyone to the left of Joseph Goebbels who takes offence at anything or calls for any kind of social change.

It's almost as if they're a bunch of total hypocrites isn't it?
How is it possible to explain all of this hypocritical right-wing hysteria over a newspaper market that's worth a paltry £45.50 per day (70 x 65p a copy).

The reason the hard-right have decided to have such nappy-filling tantrums over this story is because they know that facts are almost entirely irrelevant to their target audience.

They know that a story like this is perfect material for the victim complex mentality they work tirelessly to foster amongst the cognitively lazy.

The fact that this decision actually involves such a trivial number of newspapers (just 0.004% of the Daily Mail's circulation) is completely irrelevant because the person this kind of trope is aimed at will already be too consumed with the desired feelings of rage, hate, and self-pity over the story to ever consider checking the facts for themselves.

The reason the hard-right foster the sense of self-pity with this kind of hyperbolic grievance-mongering is that they know that once people have had their victim complexes inflated to the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of air to get them all mindlessly floating in the desired political direction.

Then there's very real examples of public transport censorship. Regular readers of this page will know that access to Another Angry Voice is blocked by the onboard WiFi of multiple public transport companies, including Arriva.

Are the hard-right up in arms about the fact that the private profiteers who operate swathes of our public transport system have chosen to censor a political blog that openly calls for the renationalisation of public transport?

Are the hard-right calling for public transport providers to stop blocking access to political sites on their onboard WiFi?

Of course they're not. And the reason is obvious. They don't really give a damn about freedom of speech at all.

All they really care about is creating simplistic political tropes to feed to the easily led about how the hard-right are the perpetual victims. They do this because grievance-mongering is an absolutely essential lubricant for the kind of socially and economically ruinous hard-right dogma these fanaticists are actually pushing behind the scenes.

Part of this ruinous hard-right dogma is the rail privatisation agenda which has seen the UK rail network carved up into franchises with the primary function of generating huge profits for their owners (be they private companies like Virgin, or foreign state rail operators). 

One of the side-effects of this right-wing privatisation agenda is that the private companies that run the trains get to decide which newspapers they sell on board.

If the right-wing grievance-mongers had any wits about them at all, they'd be able to see their own culpability in the situation they're whipping themselves up into a frenzy about.

For all of the right-wing temper tantrums and soiled nappies over this pathetic non-story, one person is talking sense about the whole thing. Jeremy Corbyn has announced that there will be no newspaper "bans" once the railways are brought back into public ownership.

The irony of course is that if the right-wingers who have been filling their nappies over this non-story really want to be able to buy a copy of the Daily Mail on the train, they should vote for Jeremy Corbyn at the next election. And if they vote Tory they should accept that they're voting for the continuation of private profiteers leeching profits out of our rail network and deciding which newspapers they want to sell on board the trains.

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