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Archive of posts published in the tag: George Orwell

Controlled by Pleasure

“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

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The New Ministry of Culture

“But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America. “

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Our Exaggerated Demise

While we should not ignore the problems we do have, we should also not ignore the means that have given us the exponential improvements we have enjoyed.  Jonah Goldberg in The Suicide of the West emphasizes that human progress is neither natural or inevitable.

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Belief in the Untrue

from Scientific American, The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism- The roots of the current campus madness, by Michael Shermer: In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things

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Enlightened Tyranny

from the FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, Be Wary of the Orwellian “Enlightened” Classby Robin Koerner Scientism is science stripped of its epistemological core, which is the knowledge that we don’t know. Those who practice it think they are “being scientific”

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quotes for today 2017 06 05

political conversations led me to these: “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts

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Righteous Orthodoxy

from the FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, Be Wary of the Orwellian “Enlightened” Class by Robin Koerner He understood that the morality of a political ideology in practice cannot be determined from its theoretical exposition – but only from the actual experiences of

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The Language of the Deplorables

from The City Journal, Trump and the American Divide by Victor Davis Hanson: Language is also different in the countryside. Rural speech serves, by its very brevity and directness, as an enhancement to action. Verbosity and rhetoric, associated with urbanites, were always

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Lying to Us for Our Own Good

excerpts from  Why Is Hillary Never Held Accountable for Her Lies, by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review: In fact, “truth” for a postmodernist is supposedly what those who control us say it is, largely in efforts to perpetuate their

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Power and Blockchain

from Richard Fernandez at PJ Media, The End of the Memory Hole But just to illustrate how things have changed for the State we now know that Orwell was wrong.  The mathematically dominant method for recording transactions, whether they involve the transfer of financial assets, intellectual

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Random Thoughts 2013 08 05

What does it say about Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State that Russia provides asylums for a major U.S. criminal over our clear objections (reset button anyone) and we close most embassies in the Middle East due to the threat

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George Orwell Quotes

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. We have now sunk to a depth

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Political Subversion of Language

Charles Cooke writes When Words lose their Meaning in National Review Online, 12/13/12: Excerpts: The two key taxonomical terms that we use in American political life are largely meaningless. Whether it is a case of thought corrupting language or language

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The Truth Has Become a Revolutionary Act

Sarah Hoyt writes in her blog According to Hoyt, We’ve Come to the End of Cake, 11/5/12. Excerpts: Collectively we forgot that our wealth was finite and that everything we did meant something else didn’t get done.  We empowered tremendous

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Intellect, Intelligence and Wisdom

“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that

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