Thought Crime

From iGeek
Revision as of 11:04, 8 March 2019 by Ari (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search
1984Arrival.jpg

In 1949, George Orwell wrote his cautionary book titled Nineteen Eighty-Four[1], positing what a world would look like by the year 1984. After all, he’d seen what the trends of Socialism had done to the world around him (in England and the U.S., USSR, Germany, China, and so on). And I'm not talking about just the economic devastation, but the broader cultural intolerance, purges, revisionism and demanding conformity that is a prerequisite to enable Social ownership (and the resulting loss of individual liberty). So he just imagined and documented where the current cultural trajectory would most likely lead, if unimpeded.

In Orwell's book, IngSoc (English Socialism) would spread and the U.S and England would merge into a tyrannical single-party dystopia, epitomized by Big Brother. Following Socialism’s normal mode of operation, the state would spy on everyone, demand conformance, and use their politically-correct invented language, called Newspeak[2], as a litmus test to validate conformity and capitulation (there was no freedom of thought or expression going on). Any variances from proper uses of the continually shifting terminology (or re-invented histories and word-meanings) was classified as "thoughtcrime"[3]; which meant those perpetrators were worthy of torture and re-education.

Since the shifting history, language and truths were impossible to keep coherent, there would be contradictions between them — but acknowledging those contradiction was akin to blasphemy, so the people were taught to accept them as doublethink[4]: that two conflicting party-truths could both be correct at the same time (even if logic dictated that one must be wrong). This is taken to a climax when the antagonist party-man (O’Brien) is forcing our protagonist (Winston), under torture, to admit that 2+2=5[5], because anyone who is free to admit the truth (that 2+2=4), is not yet a worthy subject to the state. Truth is what the party tells you it is.

While the non-fictional 1984 wasn't nearly as bad as all that, for most people, the parody still had too much truth to it. I’m not as concerned about the loss of privacy (though that has happened in spades). Nor of the unification of Europe under one super-national empire. I’m more concerned with the loss of intellectual thought, and the freedom to question things without safe spaces or people trying to imprison or un-employ you for what you said or think.

In the real-world 1984, I was a liberal kid attending college part time (while working), who wanted to be active in politics. But the more they tried to convince me of "the truth", the more I researched and questioned the mistakes in their alternate reality. The more I resisted the newspeak and doublethink (and offered my research and facts back), the madder the politically-correct got. I refused their fictions, and they hated the truths. That forced me to make a choice between accepting their reality or just accepting reality — thus I was force to evolve from being a youthful “liberal” (which to them meant an intolerant, unenlightened, conformist, conservative-hating enforcer of the party-dogma du jour), to becoming a classical liberal (a free thinking, libertarian’esque, high-tolerance, anti-progressive -or- a radical centrist as I started calling myself). Even the term liberal had succumbed to newspeak and now meant the opposite of what it had meant before. A true liberal could no longer be part of their club: no soup for me.

My childhood was defined by a family that had a malleable relationship with the truth: early on I defined myself by NOT compromising truth for familial affection, better grades, or to stop the beatings, thus the milder comfort of peer pressure conformity (belonging to the clique), or scorn for defending the truth, held no power over me.


Now I’m humble enough to realize I’m probably wrong on at least a few things I believe, but I’m smart enough to know when someone else is bullshitting: dodging, distracting or attacking to bluff their way out of admitting something they don’t like. I also know that it’s highly unlikely that I’m completely wrong in ALL of my knowledge at once. So the easiest way to figure out which side is brainwashed, is to offer nuggets of information and see who can correct it, and who changes the topic, uses fallacies, or attacks me for daring to say it. How they react to data that’s new or they don’t like (or the messengers), is a reflection on who they are. That doesn’t mean they have to agree, but how they disagree is what poker players call, “a tell”[6].

Below is a small sampling of just a few of the various topics where you have a choice of believing the popular opinion that 2+2=5 (Newspeak), or you can go with 2+2=4 (Reality). And the tell is how people respond to your disagreeing with the newspeak, or pointing out the reality — if either generates venom, distraction, pedantic attacks on the spelling or irrelevancies, or anything other than contemplation (and reluctant acknowledgement) of the bigger point, then you know you’re dealing with someone that’s go something going on: more ego than honesty, more party/ideology loyalty than to the truth, or they just prefer their world to the one the rest of us have chosen to live in.

NOTES: (a) This is a living document (unlike the constitution), thus if there’s anything I haven’t thought of: offer suggestions. (b) I know there are examples that cut the other way (against far right ideology), and I might do an article on that smaller subset someday, but this is about the tidal-wave of thoughtcrimes that are enforced by the cry-bullies in social media and in our university safe-spaces (c) I realize some of these are not the most moderate beliefs, but the point is "how do they respond", and what does someone see in the Rorschach inkblot? Do the defend the radical revisionism and newspeak, or an un-moderate form of the truth? Can they accept that the tidal-wave of excrement coming from “progressives” might be agitating the resistance that the media sensationalizes? Or is all the other sides fault for wanting to be left alone, and daring to defend reality over their caricature of it?



You can decide which is real or false, but a warming, if you question others on which is which, you might discover how “tolerant” some folks really are.

Social Justice Warriors:

  • Newspeak: we are in an age of unprecedented injustice: racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia are everywhere! As demonstrated by college rape culture, the war on women, rampant police abuse of minorities, poverty and various inequalities that we need the SJW’s to guide government and protect us from.
  • Reality: we are one of (if not the) freest and least discriminatory countries in the world and our government and laws are a reflection of that, not the cause of it. The exceptions are blown out of proportion and sensationalized to get clicks/views in the news-cycle, and to dupe the gullible to trade their liberties (and money) for protection. But people's wants can never all be met, yet we're in one of the wealthiest times and places in all of history, with incredible opportunities; but if we acknowledge that truth, then the SJW's have lost, so they live in an alternate reality where the exception is the norm, and the norm is the exception.

Inequality:

  • Wage-war on Women
    • Newspeak: Women make only $0.77 for each $1.00 that men make, because of the misogynistic, women-hating, he-man-club, where sexist pigs run the matriarchy
    • Reality: When Women are fresh from school they earn as much or more than men, once you adjust for things like occupational choices, experience, employment gaps, hours worked, the gap evaporates. You can't repeat this myth and be an honest person who knows that they're talking about.
  • War on Women’s choices
    • Newspeak: Evil Republicans are out to take away Women’s Birth-Control, right to choose (abortion), and want women to have to be subjected to rape before getting an abortion
    • Reality: Everyone is fine with Women paying for their own birth control — just not making others pay for it. And Texas, even with every law that the left lost their minds over, is more liberal in its abortion laws than most of Europe, especially those Scandinavian countries that progressives love, does that mean they’re all anti-Women over there?
  • What is an 'ism?
    • Newspeak: You said or supported something that touched race, gender, sexual preference, and I disagree with that, so you must be a racist/sexist/bigot: kneel and beg for forgiveness
    • Reality: Ism’s are judging entire groups superior/inferior, not personal attacks on individuals or disagreements on policies that favor those groups
  • The system is institutionally racist against poor brown people
    • Newspeak: Racism is everywhere just look at OJ Simpson, Rodney King, Henry Louis Gates, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and so on
    • Reality: The system is far from perfect, but all of those are lousy examples of injustice and ignorance, most have been discredited as Whites, Asians, Arabs or Latinos in the same situations, would have likely gotten the same results
  • The Cops are killing black men for no reason
    • Newspeak: Look at Anton Sterling or Philando Castile, two innocent guys, one murdered by the cops for selling CD's, and the other killed for a broken tail light. These are the atrocities that happen to innocent black men every day. We need the federal government to stop this!
    • Reality: A Bloods gang member was shot after brandishing a weapon, resisting arrest, and then going for that gun during a struggle (as had happened on prior occasions). And a Cripps member (or at least follower) and armed robbery suspect was shot for not following directions (and reaching for his gun) during an arrest. And the media and left tried to make this into a case of two saints getting shot for no reason. And the BLM (Black Lives Matter) meme of white men being mowed down, is complete drive: whites are killed far more often by cops in America than blacks or latinos, and a black man is 172 more likely to be murdered by another black man, than by a cop.
  • Rape Culture
    • Newspeak: We have a rape culture, with 1 in 5 women raped in college, then the system rapes the victim again! Women deserve to always be believed. To see the insensitivity look at cases like Brock Turner, Duke Lacrosse, and so on
    • Reality: One rape is too many, but the actual number of all sexual assaults in the general population (or rape in college) is about 0.14% (or 1/150th as large as claimed). About 2-10% of all rapes are later classified as false accusations. The media loves to sensationalize these salacious stories, and colleges have a guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude, as evidenced Duke Lacrosse cases.
  • Gay-Phobia
    • Newspeak: Everyone that opposes gay-marriage are homophobes that’s worthy of ridicule and scorn, because everyone knows that marriage is a civil-right, this was just like anti-miscegenation laws, and Prop-8 in California was all because of Mormon’s running adds to inflame the other bigots.
    • Reality : While I support it, most people I met or knew who opposed gay-marriage, supported civil unions or deregulating marriage completely, they had no history of problems with gays (often were supportive of gay friends/family), the term marriage just had special religious meaning to them. Marriage was not a federal issue, and certainly not a civil right (for those who know what the words mean), and the reason Prop 8 passed in California was high minority turn-out, where Blacks, Latino’s and Asians all opposed gay-marriage in higher numbers than whites.
  • Trans-Phobia and Restrooms
    • Newspeak: With no trans-people ever causing a problem, North Carolina is such a bunch of rednecked-bigots, that they invented a law to ban trans-people from using the restroom, they need to be more tolerant towards LGBT culture like San Francisco
    • Reality: After multiple abuses by creeps exploiting trans-friendly laws in places like Seattle, Charlotte trans-activists ignoring warnings against passed a law saying anyone (including creepy guys) could use Women’s bathroom (for any reason). The State overrode that dumb local ordinance by saying trans-people had to change their gender on their drivers-license/birth certificate first (as an anti-creep effort) — but private companies could do what they wanted. Oral-sex is illegal in LGBT-friendly San Francisco
  • VoterID and Voter Fraud
    • Newspeak: There's no problem with voter fraud, there are no convictions, so it must never happen. And demanding ID at a voting booth is just a way to oppress minorities and poor people who can't afford ID.
    • Reality: I've seen voter fraud swing elections in my district (look up Bon Dornan/Loretta Sanchez) or when you see union party busses, driving voting booth to voting booth so the guys can pile out and vote in each area, or they do audits and find out how dead people voted, you know it happens. India and many 3rd world countries require ID to vote, and you need ID for so many other things in this nation, it's absurd to imply this is a hardship. Democrats support corrupting out election process because it usually is done in their favor, and the rubes that parrot the propaganda are tools.

Liberty / Constitution

  • Citizens United - 1st Amendment
    • Newspeak: The Citizens United case invented the concept of Corporate Personhood (that corporations are people), and that's allowed the buying of our elections by corporate interests. We must limit the first amendment for there to be fair expression (individuals to be able to out-shout the corporate interests).
    • Reality: The concept that individuals don't lose their rights by belonging to a group (corporation) goes back to Persian law, and has always existed in American law. This ruling only said that Unions, Government, Churches, marriages and other "corporations", would all be treated the same (instead of allowing politicians to decide which get free speech or not). Before and after CU, Unions and special interests continued to outspend corporations on political donations.
  • Gun control - 2nd Amendment
    • Newspeak: This was about the militia, applied to muskets, and not allowing "reasonable" gun controls is the cause of our higher murder/crime rates, especially assault rifles, and it's all the NRA and gun-fanatics fault
    • Reality: The militia was all men, they had fully automatic weapons in the 1700's, and it was never about muskets, we have over 55,000 gun control laws that annoy legal owners and do little to stop crime (lots to increase it), our murder/crime rates are better than most of the world, assault rifle is an invented term by people that don't understand guns, and the problem is there's no way to reason with someone who has a phobia of clowns, or their neighbor having the liberty to own a gun. Both are irrational.
  • Government will save us from ourselves
    • Newspeak: We need government to protect us from ourselves. But Republicans/Conservatives are the party of fear: they try to control their constituents with fear of immigrants, Iran getting the bomb, criminals so they need guns, and trust in government. They need to be more reasonable, like us.
    • Reality: All the scares of the left have proven false: over-population, lack of food production, peak oil, destroying the planet (see many more in the anti-science category). People solved most of those on their own, or they were never problems -- sometimes they use government to help, often not. Democrats try to use fear to control the weak-minded as often (if not more) than Republicans -- for example: why would you need gun-control, if you didn't distrust your neighbors having guns?
  • Global Warming
    • Newspeak: CO2 is causing the climate to warm, we’re near a tipping point: 97% of scientists say so. And the earth is doomed if we don’t accept carbon taxes, green energy and stop using fossil fuels immediately. They're so sure of their agenda, that many argue that free speech shouldn't apply to Climate change deniers, with efforts to arrest those scientists and pundits that disagree with the newspeak.
    • Reality: The climate is changing because it’s always changing, the models are inconclusive. Science isn’t consensus and the studies that claim consensus are junk-science. Since the climate models are undeniably broken, and CO2 has been proven not to be as much of a forcing factor as expected, we’re near an all time low in global temperature, and warming has historically been good for humanity, we need to study more before overreacting: and fossil fuels have done more to decrease pollution than to harm us. And many famous scientists think this stuff is overblown. You don't win scientific arguments through suppression of facts/arguments you don't like.
  • Tolerance
    • Newspeak: I’m a broadminded metropolitan liberal, that’s enlightened, tolerant and open to new ideas, and loves freedom.
    • Reality: They’re narrow-minded, provincial, progressive. They avoid rural areas, red-states, Christians, conservatives, republicans and “rednecks". If you don’t agree with them, you must be a “FoxNews watcher”, a partisan, or a fool. They demand conformity of not only act, but thought. They pass laws and regulations to stop people from doing anything they think is “bad”, which is every choice they disagree with. And if you disagree, you’re guilty of thougthcrime.

Alternate-History

  • Fascism
    • Newspeak: Fascism is a right-wing ideology, and the Republicans are fascists
    • Reality: The National Socialists were a branch of crony-socialism and unionism called Syndicalism, they were anti-banking, believed in big-central government, high regulation and taxation, collectivism, central planning, social programs, and were for gun-control. Except for the anti-semitism, you’d have a hard time telling one of their speeches from Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (the candidates most aligned with their issues).
  • McCarthy and McCarthyism
    • Newspeak: a mean-guy who started an evil witch-hunt to bully and ruin the lives of innocent people (based on scant evidence), by preying on the gullibility of red-scare paranoia. The whole thing was made up, and all blew over once people realized McCarthy was a fraud.
    • Reality: Communists had infiltrated the incompetent FDR and Truman administrations, and got us to help in the fall of China, helped Soviet Imperialism and then get the secrets of the Bomb, and had undermined our national interests. We'd known for years, but the administrations were complicit in obstruction of justice and cover-up because they didn't want the embarrassment of the truth coming out. And when the whistle-blower McCarthy started showing how bad it was, he had to be destroyed, and history needed to be rewritten.
  • Dropping the bombs (Hiroshima, Nagasaki)
    • Newspeak: Japan was about to surrender, and all of Truman’s cabinet warned him not to drop the bomb, but he did it anyways to intimidate the Russians
    • Reality: Japan wanted to negotiate a conditional surrender since before the war started, but even after two Nuclear Bombs and the threat of more coming, they still had 3 attempted Coups’ (kidnappings of the Emperor) to try to prevent him from surrendering because they wanted to fight on
  • Military industrial complex
    • Newspeak: Ike (Eisenhower) warned us about the military industrial complex, and that the military was spending all our money. If it wasn't for the war-hawks, we'd be able to spend enough on social programs to make this a utopia: that's where all of our money has gone!
    • Reality: Ike warned about an iron-triangle, where politicians colluded to dupe taxpayers out of their liberty. Today the poverty industrial complex (Social programs) are over twice as much spending as the military at the federal level (that bigger when you add state and local), and military spending as a fraction of our budget has come way down since Ike. Most of our money is being wasted on poorly administered wealth redistribution failures, that not only didn't achieve their goals, but made the problems they touched worse.
  • Anti-Science
    • Newspeak: It's so hard for the superior liberals to have an intellectual discussion with the other side, because conservatives, religion and Republicans are so illogical and anti-science that they can't be reasoned with.
    • Reality: Both sides can be irrational, but having many views that irk both sides, I can mention a few cases where the left/Democrats are far more anti-science, including: 9/11 truthers, Hillary started the Obama birther movement, Hollywood anti-vaxxers, GMO’s, Organic Food, vegans, anti-Nuclear energy, green energy, economics (minimum wage, keynesianism, gender pay gap), "free” anything (healthcare, education, etc), Global Warming, Fluoride, Bees (Colony Collapse Disorder), fracking, exaggerated scares about obesity or second hand smoke or DDT, gluten, bottled water, alar, salt or fat or sugar or artificial sweetener or butter or food coloring in your deit, diet soda, Electromagnetic Fields (EMF), Bird Flu, SARS, or topics where twice as many democrats as republicans believe in astrology, UFO’s, Ghosts, reincarnation or fortune telling, Bermuda Triangle, spiritual energy, the population bomb, peak oil theory, Ozone hole, gun control works, citizens united conferred corporate personhood and many other topics mentioned on this page. Except for those, and many other topics that I forgot to mention, the liberals are far more enlightened and tolerant.
  • Slavery
    • Newspeak: White privilege is because whites held the black man down for so long, that we need to end racism by blaming everyone who is not-black and forcing them to pay everyone who is black, to make up for past wrongs that had nothing to do with them. We also have to have a censor symbols and history that we don't like, like the Confederate Flag,
    • Reality: American whites died fighting a war to end the slavery that Europe had given to us (and the country inherited before it was created). Their sacrifice deserves reparations. Slavery couldn't have existed without the many blacks colluding with it, and is certainly not the fault of the majority of whites, asians and latinos who never had slaves or supported it, or came to America generations later. And while doctoring history is popular among the left, how can we learn from the past, if we criminalize discussing parts of it, or doctor the record?
  • Christian Nations
    • Newspeak: The Separation of Church and State in the Constitution is absolute: we must stop prayer in school, any references to God (on our money, pledges, national anthem's and so on). Anything religious is bad, unless it's Islamic, or is making fun of religion.
    • Reality: Like it or not, the history of the nation was build on Christian values. Separation of Church and State was an opinion of Jefferson, and the first amendment allowed the free practice of all religions in school and government buildings. We allowed States to have official religions when the constitution was created -- it just wasn't the feds power/responsibility to create a national religion. Perverting the first amendment to disallow the free practice of religion is a late 20th century invention by historical revisionists.

People

  • Hillary Rodham Clinton
    • Newspeak: Hillary was a noble lawyer, accomplished Woman that everyone is charmed by, but the vast right-wing conspiracy keeps inventing conspiracies about her to try to make her look bad
    • Reality: She is the crookedest person to ever get the Presidential nomination. She was kicked off watergate, attacked a rape victim, had a dozen scandals of her own making like cattlegate, whitewater, bimbo-squad hitman, troopergate, IRS abuse, filegate, giftgate, lootergate, vandalism, pardongate, chinagate, Clinton Foundation, emailgate, Benghazi, and many that had worked with her admitted she was a repeated liar and not a nice person to work for. Until she won as Jr. Senator of NY (for being married to Bill Clinton), she had few good accomplishments on her Resume.
  • Bernie Sanders
    • Newspeak: He's a nice democratic socialist, which just means he wants us to be more like Socialist Scandinavia, but he's honest, moderate, and successful.
    • Reality: He was a radical socialist failure, that has accomplished little but figuring out how to mooch off a hippie state by telling them he was their man to get the free stuff (take stuff from others). Scandinavia is far from utopia, and they are not socialist, and he’s a bit two-faced, like he plays anti-war, except for his support of the wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Kosovo, and for the F-35 or any military program in his state.
  • Michelle Obama
    • Newspeak: "every single day … I wake up in a house that was built by slaves" (the White House)
    • Reality: It was not built exclusively, or mostly, by slaves. The few slaves that worked on the project (at the end) were paid labor. It was the House from whence mostly white folks fought and died to end slavery, and we all have to pay for her to live in that house (so we’re more slave to her, than she is to us).
  • Sarah Palin
    • Newspeak: She’s so dumb, she said, “you can see Russia from my house"
    • Reality: That was Tina Fey. When asked in an interview about foreign policy experience and the proximity of Russia to Alaska, Palin replied, “they’re our next-door neighbors, and you can see Russia from an island in Alaska”. (Which is true). She went on to explain that she had just negotiated the largest ever Native American, Alaskan and Canadian oil treaties, which gave her far more successful foreign policy experience than Obama or Joe Biden had.
  • Donald Trump
    • Newspeak: He’s a racist/bigot/homophobe that hates immigrants and encourages violence in his rally’s
    • Reality: He’s married, sponsored and hired many more immigrants than Hillary or Sanders. He's anti-ILLEGAL immigration, and has said things that are culturally insensitive, but that’s not the same as racist. And the worst he encouraged at his rally’s was that if a disruptive protestor tried to assault him (throw tomatoes or punch someone like had happened a few times), that he’d pay their legal bills of anyone that punched that person back. In the law aggression and response are treated differently for reasons (they are not the same thing).
  • Abraham Lincoln
    • Newspeak: Honest Abe, great progressive President and statesman, who fought for equal rights for blacks, freed the slaves, and did nothing wrong.
    • Reality: Started a war over a punitive tax policy that got 600K Americans killed, tore the nation apart, shat on the Constitution in executing the war, an abolitionist white-supremacist, who didn't think of blacks as equal but more like the ASPCA thinks of animals: an inferior species need to be protected by superior one.
  • Progressives
    • Newspeak: Progressives are morally superior, just look at Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Martin Luther King, and so on.
    • Reality: There's no moral high ground in taking other people's property, keeping a cut, and giving a percentage to your cronies or constituents. Teddy was a blowhard war-monger. Wilson was a racist pawn of corporate interests. FDR was one of more corrupt Presidents and nasty human being. MLK was a philander and a hypocrite. And so on. The world is a lot more nuanced, and people a lot more complex than the caricatures painted by “liberal" historians.

Technology

  • Origins of the Internet
    • Newspeak: Al Gore and DARPA created the Internet
    • Reality: Most of the technologies and features we know and use on the Internet were created, improved and adopted by our private sector decades before the Internet. The reason it was created in the U.S., and not one of the socialist countries, is because of our private sector, otherwise everyone would be on France’s Minitel.
  • Origins of business
    • Newspeak: You didn’t create that, you built it on the backs of government
    • Reality: Government built itself on the backs of individuals and the private sector. Without government, we’d still have innovated and created things (including government). But without private innovations and big government, we’d all look like North Korea or Cuba or USSR: drab, grey cinderblock row houses, filled with wage slaves to the state.
  • iPhone
    • Newspeak: Government created the iPhone, not Steve Jobs or Apple, proven by GPS
    • Reality: GPS (Global Positioning Satellites) augment one small feature of smartphones (positioning), they were created when Government asked the private sector to create it for them, and then the private sector commercialized it, miniaturized it, and made it valuable. (Just like they did with Aircraft and VOR, or ships and Loran). Without government, we’d still have created the solutions. Without a healthy private sector, the economy would be massively smaller, and thus there wouldn’t be as much government to innovate anything.

Economics

  • Financial crisis of 2007-2008
    • Newspeak: we were under-regulated by removing Glass-Steagall (which couldn’t have prevented the crash), and it was the greed of Wall Street that inflated the bubble, and under-regulation made the banks “too big to fail”, so the taxpayers “bailed them out” and gave them money for fat bonuses and sheltered them from any consequences.
    • Reality: We have more regulations now than ever in history, and the crisis was created by bad regulations like CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) and community organizers inflating a real-estate bubble of high-risk toxic loans, when that bubble-popped, other regulations (banking equity laws and FAS-157) magnified the resulting credit crunch and froze financial markets. We LOANED the banks money to get their liquidity up enough (short term) to unfreeze equity markets, and once everything stabilized, they paid all the money back (there was no net loss to taxpayers).
  • Minimum wage
    • Newspeak: Minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation, and we can just raise the minimum wage to give a “living wage” to the millions of working poor, with no negative consequences, it’s only been the heartless and greedy conservatives that refuse to allow this (because the less the poor have, the more they have), and if it wasn’t for them, Republicans would make everyone wage slaves
    • Reality: Minimum wage did keep up with inflation, most minimum wage workers are teens and elderly or part-time supplemental jobs, and there’s no one wage that would be equally fair in NYC and rural Idaho at the same time. Economists know that raising the minimum wage is the same as increasing discrimination against the least skilled or experienced: increasing costs to hire, will reduce hiring (increase automation, offshoring, etc) and increase the cost of goods. The people championing minimum wage are failing to point out that if you un-employ many, to help a few, and drive up those few costs of goods and services by more than you helped, then no one is really coming out ahead.
  • Vanishing middle class
    • Newspeak: Because of lowering tax rates on the top few percent, the poor and middle class has suffered, wages have stagnated while the rich got richer, and income inequality has grown so everyone earns less than they did 40 or 60 years ago, except the top few percent.
    • Reality: Through accounting tricks, the charlatans leave out non-accounted for benefits to prove their fraud. So they don’t count social programs, adjust for family size decreases, non income benefits, deferred income (retirement, lifestyle and free-time improvements, purchasing power increases, technological advances IRS collection compliance/changes, income mobility, quality of life, and so on. If you omit all those things, then the poor have still gotten richer, just by not as much as the rich have. The problem is our far better lifestyles cost more money than the more modest one of yesteryear.
  • Socialism
    • Newspeak: Socialism is great, just look at Nordic countries
    • Reality: Nordic countries aren't socialist, they are having major problems, and if you look at all the Socialist countries around the globe (North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba), and throughout history (Cambodia, Vietnam, China, USSR, etc), most suck. Cherry picking is great for pies, but lousy for learning from life.

Newspeak

In George Orwell's 1984 Newspeak is using the sanctioned language that meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc). The idea is that if the progressive democratic socialists control the language, they can control the thoughts behind the language. So the purpose is to restrict free thought (and prevent thoughtcrime), by restricting free speech down to defining the language and defining out the improper history and facts that are not allowed. This ever shrinking vocabulary of acceptable words, is so asinine that the only people who will accept it are those participants are fully programmed until they can accept Doublethink (simultaneous opposing contradictions) like 2+2=5. If that's what the state tells you, then you speak it, because the alternative to denying their political correctness is gruesome torture.

  • 2018 - In February 2018, the Association of Library Services to Children (ALSC), renamed the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children's Literature Legacy Award[7], because they didn't like that a series of book written in 1932, about things that happened in 1868, might include some views of Slaves or Native Americans that wasn't as enlightened as today. Rather than trusting people to use that as a teaching opportunity about History, they decided to rename the award and pretend it never happened. After all, if people get used to understanding or researching history, they might learn the truth about progressives place in it.

GeekPirate.small.png

📚 References

More Links

Imagery

2016.06.10