Thou Shall Not...

Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel (one of the most thorough and measured thinkers in the blog world) has a post up about the "forever war" that our elected scumbags are working hard to craft OUTSIDE of review re: extending and enhancing the current AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force). I mean, AUMF? That means war, right?

Now, seriously, who among you has NOT read 1984? Why not? You'd better get your hands on a copy from a used bookstore...just in case a new copy is a little bit different: soon enough I expect a revision of 1984 that changes it's dystopia into a utopia. Winston and Julia live happily ever after when they realize not only is Big Brother a loving overseer but that their chocolate rations have gone up to 20 grams! All copies to be collected and replaced...probably not that hard to do. I think Amazon removed it from Readers not that long ago (in error, so they say).

I have no fear of Al Qaeda (curious that the gmail dictionary wants me to replace that with Qaddafi): fear of internal terror is real though.

And really, did you notice--building bases and using drones...how is this not sending off all sorts of warning lights in your head?

Power ELITES are Authoritarian and there is no such thing as a Democrat or Republican in America. If you BELIEVE them...and that's what you need, belief (and that's why, sorry to say it dear lovers of divinities, religion and the totalitarian go hand in hand) then you are simply consigning your future to the memory hole of Minitrue. Folks, that means ALL of THEM...you Rand Paul Libertarians, he's a part of it too.

You are manipulated daily once you turn on your tv or read the newspaper.



Glen Beck is perfect for this world--he rants and raves and rends his garments against the lies of Goldstien and you scream with him. You know Goldstein's first name? Emmanuel. You know what that means: the child whose birth was foretold by Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14) and who in Christian tradition is identified with Jesus. Brilliant--Orwell creates as an object of hate the conflation of the Jew (the Christ-killer and The Elder of Zion), with the "left", soft, Jesus. (Heck, you know those nice East Coast boys and girls that went down South to fight for Civil Rights and got beat and disappeared.)

Yes, yes, Brave New World is "true"--this is the world of Soma; but our soma is laced with hate because we have an angry god running our giant world destroying country. Jesus might give us SOMA; but Yahweh is out to destroy--please actually read the Ten Commandments! This is Big Brother: "Thou shall have no other gods before me..." (not even Jesus!) in thunder! And that's just the warm-up.

Newspeak 2.0

I recently read a review of The Social Network by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books. In this same piece she uses, rather than reviews, the thoughts and ideas from Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto to bolster much of her misgivings about becoming, via software engagement, Person 2.0.

Now, you can likely already see where I'm headed with this (of course, that's why I titled the blog post--as a clue!): there is so much to think about in the piece that I have to narrow to one point in particular that I think has serious consequences for us all: Person 2.0 is now speaking an entirely new language and this language is reductionist in the extreme. Due to this Person 2.0 will be unable to think outside of marketable tweets in the very near future. Your "leaders" and CEO's, your Big Brother, will of course continue to use actual words and read actual text and so be able to continue to use their minds for more than blips beeps and tweets about the next great program on gadgets and pawn shops.

Smith points this out specifically in what is only a footnote in the article (#4) about cell phone texting...she still texts with friends in complete sentences. Her development as a thinker and communicator happened prior to texting. However, kids are now growing up using text language as a primary tool of social communication--and the only communicating they're doing is about their social lives. There will be no great thinker to arise out of this milieu...only greater despots.

Orwell was right (about way too many things) about the controlling ability of limiting language. However, instead of what many of us think of Newspeak as black representing white and vice versa (Minipax is really the Ministry of War, etc.) it is rather the winnowing of terms to represent no variations and gradations--to create no connotations--Newspeak is only denotation--a word can only mean one thing one way and emotions and thoughts can be narrowed, or rather "shallowed", to only reflect that simple concept. There is no "bad"--only "ungood". It's not evil, it's "double plus ungood".

Person 2.0 will lol their way to being controlled in this manner.