Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Tuesday, July 24. 2007

QQQ

I despise you for trashing the good names of words such as 'diversity', 'tolerance', 'respect', 'progress', 'charity' and 'community'. Words and concepts that have made this country such a magnet for others have now become little more than Orwellian IngSoc. '1984' was written as a warning, not a fucking instruction manual.

From a Grade A rant at Australia's A Western Heart, via Synthstuff

Posted by Bird Dog in Quotidian Quotable Quote (QQQ) at 06:08 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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"'1984' was written as a warning, not a fucking instruction manual."

Man, he's got that right.

Idiots.
#1 Jephnol (Link) on 2007-07-24 08:14 (Reply)
Sounds like Pommy would fit in quite well here at Maggie's Farm. Apparently things are bad all over the world. Its either repressive Islamo Facism or PC progressivism. I guess I shouldn't leave out the commies. They're not dead yet. I just reread 1984 and all through it I kept picturing President Hilary. Clintonspeak.
#2 sean on 2007-07-24 10:37 (Reply)
uh, there's no cars in 1984.

I have been thinking lately that a lot of people see it as an instruction manual, Al Gore included.

The main lesson to take from the book is that if you can keep your empire, or movement, going long enough people will know no other reality than what you have created for them.

We lament the loss of language, or the CCTV nightmare of Britain, or the chips for our kids, gun control - all these issues mean nothing to our kids kids. To them it will be just how things are.

Like my kids and modern technology, to them tape is sticky and holds stuff together.
#3 phil on 2007-07-24 11:21 (Reply)
Orwell becomes more and more the prophet of our times, as we fight this gigantic clash between government and the individual.
#4 buddy larsen on 2007-07-24 11:23 (Reply)
The tendancy is not just limited to the Left and there are members of the Right that are more than willing to toss out accepted meanings of terms, phrases and words and replace them with something else. By redefining the meaning but looking to keep the emotional impact to the traditional meaning, the disengenuous re-definition is an attempt at authoritarian thought control via emotions, not honest discussion about the state of affairs.

From both 'sides' of the political 'spectrum' we have had the redefinition of 'Civil War' from accepted meanings of two organizations in a Nation that have formed up governments, systems of laws, and have fielded forces for Nation State control, to this strange idea that terrorist stirred sectarian violence by non-natives who are looking to put no government immediately forth and defend people by that new system of governance as 'Civil War'. That has degraded the concept of 'Civil War' until it now means 'Office Politics', which is sheerly a factional fight within one office or section of an organization and does not have any of the old backing of 'Civil War'. Anyone holding the same depth and intensity of emotions for these non-traditional meanings has a hard and fast mental problem discriminating between scale and magnitude of events around them.

Even worse is the drift of terminology from those that have hard definitions to them, to those that no longer have such definitions and are 'malleable' for political context. From the Left we see such things as 'Equality' now becoming 'Fairness' and the Right has moved to replace 'Citizen' with 'Consumer'. When individuals replace these concepts with the other, they move from the original conception of ideals to newer ones that have less meaning as the context for them has changed. When one starts asking for 'fairness', it is asking for a bias based on some preconceived view of actions and events, while 'equality' is looking for equal treatment across all events.

As Orwell pointed out this is 'Newspeak'.

And soon it becomes 'Duckspeak'.

Longer article by me: http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2006/12/if-it-sounds-like-duck.html
#5 ajacksonian (Link) on 2007-07-24 14:43 (Reply)
Yep, Clinton, on the spot that day in court, really did let slip a single crashing truth: That the meaning of "is" is up for grabs.

"Is" being quite a word, if you think about it.

Meaning itself "is" or "isn't".
#6 buddy larsen on 2007-07-24 15:45 (Reply)
I can see how both sides can use the book Ninteen Eighty Four for their own puposes, but I can't see how you can morally equivocate the left and the rights sins in reference to the damages the left is causing by replicating the policies and tenets of the book. Manipulation of the media, ownership of the press, control of educational system and attempts to shut down opposing thought ( Fairness Doctrine ). One would have to believe the left to think that the NSA is spying on all our private conversations and not intercepting calls from terrorists, although I would have problems with that program in the hands of a Dem president ( remember the FBI files of Republican politicians the Dems got hold of- " we didn't read them " ). Lets be fair, not blind. The Dems sins are mortal and the Repub are venial.
#7 sean on 2007-07-24 20:28 (Reply)
Sean, I think it follows Pareto's Principle, AKA the 80-20 rule. 80% of the destructive garbage comes from the left, 20% from the right. 80% of lefties are not of good faith, 20% of righties likewise. And so on.
#8 buddy larsen on 2007-07-24 23:03 (Reply)
Sounds about right buddy. I hate to be put in the position of defending some of those moron Republicans.
#9 sean on 2007-07-24 23:29 (Reply)

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