Selling your soul

"Do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call, every word you say is suspect, you're a corporate whore and eh, end of story." Bill Hicks.

Davina McCall, can you hear me? You know that hair colourant which you do the commercial for? Where you talk with your 'Mum' about how great the hair colour you've achieved is? And you're not in character... you're just Davina? And you say 'love you' to your 'Mum'? And how much did they pay you to say that? Hopefully it was a lot of money. I imagine it would be. You wouldn't sell your feelings for your 'Mum' for just a few grand. Those feelings must be worth a lot of money. I hope they paid you every penny. So now, when you say 'love you' to your 'Mum' you can think of the money you were paid for the time you said that. LOVE YOU.

There is something inherently wrong with selling your emotions to a company who will use them in order to market a product. There is something immoral about writing a song for someone and then selling it to a company who will then use it to market a product. When you make the decision to put a price tag on your emotions, you say 'you can buy me for this'. All this ought to be obvious. Indeed, there are many songwriters and artists who do not sell their emotions like that.

But what about beliefs? Is it right to sell your beliefs to people? Example: if I am a socialist, is it right for me to CAPITALISE on my beliefs by selling them to other people? Case in point: badrash.com (no, not this website! I'm talking about the usurpers, badrash.com).

The guys next door. They are self proclaimed lefties. Gay rights, veganism, not being a Republican: nothing is too extreme or alternative for them. They are literally subverting normality with their radical ideology. Their motto/catchphrase if you will is "Anarchy to vegan. In and out. And all ends except right". Clever huh? I bet you feel utterly subverted having read that. Do you see what they've done? They've managed to say that they represent every possible position in the political spectrum. Except the right wing. Genius. That's what you've gotta love about these guys. Their hearts are in the right place. Not the "Right" place like Hitler or Bush, no: I mean the correct place. IE we are totally down with the kids. Buy our stuff.

And just to prove how utterly committed to socialism and all anti-capitalist movements (yes, every single one), they are selling LEFT-WING BRANDED MERCHANDISE on their website.

Way to go, boys. Like Tony Blair, you've found a reliable way to CASH IN on left wing sentiments and MAKE MONEY out of them. So you and your fellow pseudo-socialists can all go in uniform, branded identically like good little soldiers of capitalism.

Salient points:
(1) we are not all united on the left. Indeed, 'the left' itself is something of a myth created by those with more reactionary and conservative opinions. In fact, the spectrum of ideologies represented in the left wing make it logically impossible that you could support all at the same time. It is people like this who have no coherent beliefs and a simple "CONTRA" attitude who give socialism a bad name. Grow up.

(2) it is not cool to be a profiteer. No one likes a man who turns up at the barricade with t-shirts for sale. You cannot be on both sides at once. Make up your minds.

(3) it is illegal under equal opportunities law (which was introduced across the world on the back of decent trade union members campaigning for equality for all - a truly noble cause) to design your website in a way that it is not accessible to disabled people. Particularly in the cases of businesses, but also for all other websites, it is illegal and immoral to deny access to people unable to read text-images. Any website - particularly one pretending to be down with the kids, and not a profiteering shop - would be well advised to at least provide a text based version of the site available for those who need to use a special browser to view html pages. Or do you just hate disabled people?

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