Showing posts with label thought police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thought police. Show all posts

Sunday, 5 April 2020

A Police State?

 
        In this wee posting I don't intend to say anything, just post three wee videos and let you ponder them and come to you own conclusions. Note police gathering in close proximity with no thought to distancing and no masks?





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Monday, 27 January 2020

Newspeak.

 
       I have always thought that George Orwell was much underestimated and not read by enough people. His words have predicted where we are now, and what the future holds if we don't stand up and protect our individual freedoms. As he points out in all his works, truth is truth no matter the ideological line handed out by the powers that be. A freethinker is the enemy of ideology and dogma, and is the road we should always try to walk.
     The following is a short extract from an article in Acorn on George Orwell, it is well worth reading the complete article HERE:

 
       Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense… If both the past and external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” (24)
      Winston Smith’s struggle to keep a grip on objective reality, to know that two plus two makes four whatever the ideological demands of the Party, is a central theme of Orwell’s novel.
      The character tells himself: “Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre”. (25)
      The Big Brother system has invented a new language which controls people’s minds by making heretical ideas impossible to even formulate.
       One of the Party members developing Newspeak tells Smith: “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day”. (26)
        He explains: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it… By 2050 – earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed”. (27)
      In the face of this truth-denying dogmatism, Orwell insisted that any authentic radical should always remain free to reject the dominant official ideology: “He should never turn back from a train of thought because it may lead to a heresy, and he should not mind very much if his unorthodoxy is smelt out, as it probably will be”.
      While co-operating with others to some extent, a free-thinking radical had to fight the capitalist system “as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerilla on the flank of a regular army”. (28)
      In Woodcock’s words, Orwell was “a good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive”. (29)
Read the complete article HERE: 
      
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Tuesday, 23 February 2016

Don't Get Angry, You May Be Investigated.

      Angry with your government? Careful, you could be seen as a threat by the security services. This article refers to America, but what crazy idea flies over there, has a habit of landing over here.
      The Pentagon, in its usual dimwitted yet dangerous way, is mining social media to determine if citizens are angry at the state and thus, presumably, a threat. Let’s unpack this foolishness, shall we? NSA has been trying to do the same thing for years, slurping down every conceivable piece of data on us in hopes it can be used on a real-time basis to identity threats. So far they have failed miserably and have admitted that all their operations has not produced any actionable information that stopped terrorists. However, the genuinely dangerous thing here for citizens is the Pentagon assumes if you are angry at the government that you are a potential threat and must be investigated further. No matter if your anger may be justifiable, no, just being angry at the government means you are guilty of pre-crime, which means what Big Brother in the Pentagon wants it to mean. The real problem is such intrusive techniques, spying on the citizenry constantly, is useless for catching terrorists. But it keeps people in the Pentagon employed and defense contractors happy with big contracts, even as it essentially is security theater.
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