What Orwell Was Really Afraid of.

Not one of these things was on Orwell's list.
Read the book or even watch the movie!

Not exactly what Orwell was afraid of. Actually, not one of these "nightmares" is in 1984. What Orwell was concerned about was:

1. The alteration of history to suit the narrative of the party.  (See University history departments)

2. The redefining of speech (political correctness) to suit the agenda of the party.

 

3. The media becoming a social engineering tool of the party.

4. The criminalization of heterosexuality.

5. The destruction of the family as the primary societal unit.

6. The attempt to mass engineer the gene pool by eliminating births among certain undesirable groups.

7. The enslavement of the proletariat to the elites of the party. In other words, treating most people as a homogeneous "mass" instead of individuals.

8. Phony wars on straw man targets to keep the proletariat afraid and supporting the party. For example, fighting against the war on women, the war on drugs and the supposed war on LGBTQ et a. Then there's the war they are waging against Conservatives, Christians and Republicans who are portrayed in the same way Big Brother portrayed East Asians, Eur-Asians and the followers of the imaginary "Goldman".  (Note the anti-Semitism, a strong feature of leftist thought these days.)

9. Big brother style surveillance - everywhere you go some camera is following you. You are forced to use public transportation so you can be tracked with your transit pass. You voluntarily participate in an electronic data collection system in which you provide all your personal information to digital databases that the party can access.

10. Encouragement of expressions of public hatred for party-selected public enemies and publicly sanctioned fear-based outrage toward enemies of the collectivist state. Exercising acceptable forms of hate through protests, suppression of conservative voices and banning of free speech by certain groups and individuals.

11. Suppression of wealth-generating activities. Wealthy, comfortable, independent people think unacceptable thoughts and say unacceptable things that are often critical of the state. Successful people give the masses the dangerous idea that they too might rise above their station through hard work and diligence.

12. Mass roundups and elimination of undesirable elements from the proletariat through state-sponsored law enforcement and government domestic military forces. See the harassment and sometimes prosecution of filmmakers, commentators and writers such as D'nesh D'Souza, and conservative groups by judges and federal agencies like the FBI and the IRS.

Orwell wasn't talking about Republicans. He wasn't talking about Christians. He wasn't talking about conservatives, doctors or pharmacists. He was talking about socialism in all its ultimately virulent political forms. And every one of those ideas, I've heard in conversation with my "progressive" friends. And they were serious. These are powers they wish to give to the government so long as it is a "progressive" and socialist government. These are tactics they advocate as a path to the human-created utopia.

It's like they long for the days of the rack and pinion, terrorist knights in armor, the guillotine, and the divine right of kings and nobles. Sounds more regressive than progressive to me.

© 2019 by Tom King

Feminist Logic: Women Can't Be Toxic

So toxic masculinity is real but there's no such thing as toxic femininity? Now, that hardly seems like it's fair to women. I think its downright discriminatory to say that women can't be as toxic as men, but that seems to be the narrative from feminists lately. I hesitated to post that link because the article is packed with unsourced "statistics", hyperbole and straw man logic fallacies, but it's the feminist narrative. Men bad, women good!

What balderdash! Sin is sin. In a fight men just happen to be bigger and more likely to win. And if a man does hold back from fighting with a women and gets himself clouted with a skillet for his trouble, he doesn't report it to the statistics police. If a man suffers abuse at the hands of his spouse and refuses to hit her back, that goes unreported. So on paper, women seem to be taking all the abuse. As it turns out those lopsided statistics are just that - lopsided.

It's not a masculinity problem, it's a sin problem and the feminist movement has set a trap for men by redefining what sin is. They told men traditional sexual values were out the window and that women want sex in the same way men do - setting off a sexual revolution that ignored thousands of years of human history altogether and cast off the protections women had won over millennia of civilization building. In the process of embracing sexual freedom, feminists have inadvertently given men permission to be pigs. The idea that women want "it" in the same way men do has created a mythos that has further encouraged the growth of a massive pornography industry; an industry that teaches generations of impressionable kids that abusing women is what women secretly want men to do to them. And if someone goes after the porn industry to shut it down, they're shouted down by the same forces of political correctness that claim women can't be toxic.

There's an old expression, "Hoist by his (or her) own petard." It means blown up by the bomb you were building. I think it's an appropriate expression here. It's the same leftist baloney that says people of color can't be racist and progressives can't exploit the masses.

Why?

Well...........because we say so!

© 2018 by Tom King

"Victims" Who Bully

If you watch this it looks more like wincing than smirking.

Some poor kid, as yet unidentified, (but don't worry the left will take care of that oversight soon), is in deep trouble. This unfortunate Catholic schoolboy went to a pro-life rally and stood in place while a "native American" approached from a nearby pro-left rally banged a drum in his face for two or three minutes and now he faces possible suspension, national shaming and who knows what other "punishments". He kept his hands behind him the entire time as the native American elder fronted they young man. The boy did not speak. He didn't behave aggressively. He simply refused to retreat as the "native American elder" swung a mallet and banged a drum just inches from his face. 

His biggest crime?  He wore a "Make America Great Again" hat while doing it. His second "crime" was he didn't frown, didn't back away and wore (gasp) a smirky teenaged kid smile. Better yet, Nathan Phillips, the Native America Vietnam Veteran and former director of the Native Youth Alliance who banged the drum in the Catholic schoolboy's face gave a nice interview in which he lamented the idea of a border wall; said that Native Americans had never needed a wall and shed one of those single tears like that fake Indian in the anti-littering TV commercial back in the 60s.

The poor boy was the perfect target. The only thing the gang of thugs who backed up Mr. Phillips were there to do was to egg things on. The fact that you can hear on the tape several of the boys saying, "I don't understand what's going on."  Obviously the kids didn't realize that they were being set up for a video taped incident.

As someone who worked for years with boys, I probably view this video from a rather different perspective from that of communist, lesbian, feminist, Democrat, journalist, social justice warriors. As such, I will likely draw some ire from that class of folk. Also, I have probably have ruined any chance I might have to serve on the Supreme court simply by writing this weblog.

The most troubling thing about things like this is the inexorable slide the culture is taking toward a kind of mob rule/tribalism it represents. Such a culture, such a government tends to use bullying, lies, intimidation, shaming and punishment to enforce it's collective will on anyone who is not a member of the perceived majority. It is antithetical to the American way of life as it has been preserved for more than a quarter of a millennium. The US Constitution was brilliantly designed to push us to be better than we were then and in the future to be better than we are now.  It forced an end to slavery, the emancipation of women and acceptance of the minority populations who came to join us and the embracing of our differences.

We are going backwards. Political correctness, media control, public shaming and the slide toward collectivism takes us back to a medieval feudal style culture with an elite ruling class and a homogeneous proletariat who all think alike, act the same way and dare not believe differently from the herd.

Almost time to go home.

© 2019 by Tom King