Posts Tagged ‘orwellian nightmare’
George Orwell once said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
To laugh this off from your comfortable chair or imagine somehow that this is not a distinct possibility for any group of people anywhere is to admit total ignorance to the recorded history of humankind, where war and slavery have been the rule far more often than the exception.
If we can agree then that a freedom-crushing future is never a distant possibility for any society, then we must be vigilant, but what of what exactly should we be vigilant? Who is the potential wearer of that boot eternally stamping on the human face?
If you’re easily impressionable and a fan of the movies, you just might visualize some evil, multinational corporation filling those boots, after all, every fourth or fifth movie coming out of Hollywood has some greedy corporation playing the villain, but ask yourself this – did Apple, the richest corporation on the planet, ever put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to buy their iPhones? Did Starbucks ever threaten a jail cell for anyone who dared not stop in for a daily fix of their multinational corporate coffee?
Outside of the Hollywood world of make-believe, the true oppressors of people in the real world are those people’s very own governments, who, in just one abominable example, can go so far as to force each and every citizen to purchase a product or a service as we saw just recently with the Obamacare mandate. The reality in the real world is, governments seem to have, by their own inherent nature, a perpetual need to turn citizens into subjects of the state.
The filthy rich capitalist pigs in Hollywood with their bizarre and contradictory Communist sympathies may reflexively cast corporations as the bad guy in everything from courtroom dramas like Runaway Jury, to David versus Goliath stories like Promised Land, to sci fi offerings like Terminator and zombie horror flicks like Resident Evil, but far more real and diabolical than those fantasies and gross caricatures are the threats to humanity as portrayed in books like 1984, Brave New World and Atlas Shrugged.
If you have any doubt as to where the real threat is, ask yourself, was it greedy corporations or was it totalitarian governments which slaughtered over a quarter-billion people in the 20th century? There may be twenty times more movies about big, bad corporations than there are movies about the governments which perpetuate all the wars and slavery in the world, but the real threat to humanity is the farthest thing from most Hollywood scripts.
If we’re not perpetually vigilant in keeping the government in check, then there’s nothing that will stop a government from following its natural compulsion to write more laws and expand the tax code with every passing year, to perpetually feed an ever-increasing appetite for power, to constantly grow in size and scope at the expense of the freedoms of every citizen in every way imaginable.
So who are the Americans who can prevent America from sliding into an Orwellian totalitarian nightmare?
They’re people like Joshua Boston, who wrote to a member of the senatorial elite, a woman who has admitted to carrying a gun herself in the past, but who also admitted, if it were up to her, she would force Mr. and Mrs. America to turn ‘em all in. Here’s what Mr. Boston wrote:
Senator Dianne Feinstein,
I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government’s right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma’am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.
I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America. I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.
I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.
We, the people, deserve better than you.
Respectfully Submitted,
Joshua Boston
Cpl, United States Marine Corps
2004-2012
source: Fox News Insider
Imagine that, a citizen who sees his government about to embark in an egregious overstepping of its Constitutional bounds, and he comes out and says it in no uncertain terms – I will not comply with your attempt at logging every law-abiding gun owner in a national database. I will not comply because I know exactly what happens next after the government has a list like that. I will not comply and I will tell you that right up front.
Remember when liberals used to be cool like that? Remember when liberals used to believe in civil disobedience and questioning authority? Far from being the mindless, MSNBC-brainwashed partisan zombies that most liberals have become today, there was a time when liberals would burn their draft cards right in front of rolling cameras, never giving a partisan thought to the fact that it was a Democrat president who was plunging us into the quagmire of Vietnam.
Nowadays, for the liberals who screamed bloody murder just a few years ago at the Bush administration over prisoners of war being held without trial in Guantanomo, these very same liberals don’t even make so much as a peep over Obama acting as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating American citizens from the skies with predator drones. That whole PATRIOT Act which had the Bush hatin’ libs apoplectic with rage? For most libs, it’s suddenly not even an issue worth mentioning anymore, even as the government’s powers of surveillance are being grossly expanded under Obama.
Outside of a few principled and outspoken critics like Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich who remain true to their beliefs no matter which party holds the White House, the partisan capitulation of most liberals under Obama is so ridiculous it’s nearly impossible to remember there was a time when the liberal instinct to fight the power and stick it to the man overrode any allegiance they might have held to a political party.
Now when liberals try to tap into their rebellious predilictions, what we end up seeing is something as worthless and pathetic as the Occupy movement, blaming all that is bad in America on the greed of the “one-percenters”, totally oblivious to the fact that it’s those very same Capitalists who made America the richest nation in human history. Despite the best efforts of their cheerleaders in the media, for the average American watching at home, there was nothing that could hide the true nature of the Occupiers as an ignorant, unwashed and disorganized horde of drug addicts, vandals, rapists and murderers with no coherent message whatsoever.
These are the rioters of society, people who imagine they are making a difference by smashing windows, defecating on police cars and burning down their own neighborhoods. The only real threat they pose is to their fellow neighbors in the forms of disease, property damage, relocated businesses and lost jobs. For all their delusions of grandeur and the collective pride they took in posting arrest counts of over 7,700 in just over a year, these rioters pose no threat to the ruling elite and at most, represent nothing more than punchlines to jokes about “useful idiots”.
Those are the rioters.
Then there are the revolutionaries. These are the people who hold a heartfelt belief and understanding that the colonists most improbable bid for independence and the crafting of our Constitution represent the birthpoints of the greatest hope for freedom in all human history. In two years of Tea Party rallies, millions showed up to demand a return to the principles of The Constitution and a limited form of government, and through it all, there was not a single documented arrest made. No arrests at all, but it would be folly for our current leaders to mistake these well-behaved idealists for idle dreamers and not people capable of action when left no other choice. These are people who believe, with every fiber of their being, statements such as these:
The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. – Thomas Jefferson
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. – George Washington
To disarm the people is the most effectual way to enslave them. – George Mason
Occasionally the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. – Thomas Jefferson
I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country. – Nathan Hale’s final words before being hanged as a revolutionary.
Read again the words of Mr. Boston, a man whose family name comes most appropriately from the city where the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired. Heed the words of Alex Jones, as he rightfully calls the British foreigner working to undermine our Constitution a “redcoat” and warns Piers Morgan that “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms.”
While the ruling elite has been quite successful in draining us of our liberties in a slow, steady drip, our self-imagined overlords would be wise to avoid a real confrontation over the Second Amendment, lest they find out firsthand the stark difference between rioters and revolutionaries.
A student who admitted posting racially offensive comments on Twitter about footballer Fabrice Muamba has been jailed for 56 days.
Swansea University student Liam Stacey, 21, from Pontypridd, admitted inciting racial hatred over remarks about the Bolton Wanderers player, who collapsed during a FA Cup tie at Tottenham.
A district judge in Swansea called the comments “vile and abhorrent”.
Muamba, 23, who suffered a cardiac arrest, is still in intensive care.
source: BBC
Okay, so the guy drops an n-bomb, which is totally unacceptable in polite society (unless of course, you’re a black rapper and then you can say it 60 times in a 3 minute song and no one will bat an eye) and the guy is laughing at a player who collapsed, hoping the guy’s dead, wishing AIDS on people, suggesting people should have sex with dogs, etc., no doubt about it the tweets are vile and you’ll notice even he realizes that he’s crossed the line as he starts claiming his account got hacked in the video of his timeline below . . .
But truthfully?
I see far worse from @REALBROTHER0003 on a daily basis with his hateful rants and slurs against white people, but as far as Liam Stacey goes, that’s pretty embarrasing to see someone tweeting that kind of garbage, but how the hell is that a crime? If there were laws against saying stupid things, half our politicians would be in jail right now.
You want to qualify it as breaking the law by engaging in hate speech? How about letting this idiot make his racist rant and subjecting him to the best sort of justice of all, the ridicule of the 90% of the world who find his tweets ridiculous and completely inappropriate.
You start putting people in prison for 56 days over what they tweeted, no matter how insensitive or racist it might be, and we are well on our way into the Orwellian nightmare.
Free speech is dead. Next stop? Thoughtcrime.
If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, at the turn of the last century, when businesses were left to their own devices, the state of the meat packing industry was absolutely horrific. In the wake of the public outcry over the conditions portrayed in Mr. Sinclair’s book, the government regulation that ensued was well needed, so you won’t get any argument from me that there’s never a time when the government needs to be involved in certain industries to ensure that cutting costs and maximizing profits doesn’t result in endangering the public.
When we’re speaking of government regulation, however, there’s a gargantuan difference between government regulation of something as cut and dried as, “is the food safe?” or “is the building safe?” and putting the Internet as we know it under government control. The FCC now seems poised to do just that in appointing themselves as the Overlords of the Internet.
When it comes to this impending government control of the Internet, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, why do people feel compelled for the government to come in and control the Internet when there’s nothing broken that needs to be fixed in the first place? Why this left-wing compulsion towards placing the government in charge of everything?
When speaking of business and government, many liberals will always see business as the greater of two evils or perhaps the one and only evil out of the two, but for my liberal friends with so much distrust for business and so much faith in government, do you not remember your left-wing pride in protesting an American government at war in Southeast Asia, holding the Nixon White House to account for the abuses of Watergate, or calling for an even more recent administration to stand charges for war crimes? This is the same government you would allow to place itself in charge of the Internet?
If you judge it from the perspective of history, it makes no sense at all to always place all your faith in governments over business. All you have to do is look at the last hundred years to see that for every food safety horror and BP oil spill in this world you can find horrors a million times greater, and I mean that literally – horrors a million times greater – that have been perpetrated by governments on humanity.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Overlord of the Internet
It’s kind of scary to think that every single totalitarian government in the world has taken control of their people’s access to the Internet, and now our government plans to do the same. Even scarier to see our own government using the exact same rationale as the totalitarian governments, arguing that government control of the Internet is in “the public’s best interest”. Do you seriously doubt we could end up on the slippery slope to Chinese-style control of the Internet, simply becuase it’s OUR government? That OUR government is nothing like the government of the Chinese and how dare anyone question the noble motives of OUR benevolent leaders?
Perhaps it’s best we remind ourselves that this great nation of ours, this shining city upon a hill whose beacon of light guides freedom-loving people everywhere is also the very same country where our second president, John Adams, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws which were used to impose fines and jail time on people critical of the Adams Administration. Completley unconstitutional and yet it was the law of the land until it expired at the end of Adam’s term.
Perhaps we should also remember that this is the same America where our most beloved president of all presidents, Abraham Licoln, closed newspapers and jailed editors who sympathized with the South.
We’d be well served to also recall that this is also the same America that was home to the authoritarian rule of President Woodrow Wilson and his Sedition Act of 1918 which forbade the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government. With a definition like that, you can nail pretty much anyone you want, can’t you?
Or for more recent history, simply look back on the 2008 campaign where we saw an American news media that was “90% in the tank for Barack Obama.” Those aren’t my words, by the way, those are the words of the former Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, Terry McAullife. The media was so head over heels in love that “the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing. It was an embarrassment.” Again, those aren’t my words, those are the words of former Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, one of the greatest stalwarts of the entire Democrat party. So with 90% of the media in their back pocket, surely you’d think the Obama Administration would be nothing but thankful. Far from it – if you look at all the sniping, griping and complaining the Obama Administration has aimed at Fox News, you’ll see that for this administration, even one questioning voice is one voice too many.
So don’t ever imagine that things would be completely different here with OUR government in control of Internet vs. the reality of every other country where the government controls the Internet. Don’t think it’s laughable to suggest we could end up like China, that it couldn’t happen simply because… well, we’re Americans!
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the governments of countries like Venezuela, Iran and China putting the clamps on their people’s use of the Internet is something totally different and that government control of the Internet could never end up like that in OUR country, because we’ve already seen the kind of authoritarian intolerance for public dissent from our own government many times in 230 short years of history.
Why even put our government in a position where it can be seduced by its own authoritarian temptations in the first place? It’s like driving a crack addict all around the neighborhood where he used to score and then dropping him off at the corner. Net Neutrality is a recipe for an Orwellian Nightmare, pure and simple, and we, as citizens, should do everything humanly possible to keep this great government of ours far, far away from the seductive idea of putting itself in control of the Internet.