1984?

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words!

Samuel Adams

Post-modern Ideology

To Postmodernists there is no human nature. There is only and ever-evolving, highly sexual social animal with multiple subjective interests crying out for recognition and acceptance.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.163

Universal Health Care?

People who believe in “universal health care” show remarkably little interest—usually none—in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada

For one thing, “universal health care” in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days. In these and other countries, it means having only a fraction as many MRIs and other high-tech medical devices available per person as in the United States.

In Sweden, it means not only having bureaucrats deciding what medicines the government will and will not pay for, but even preventing you from buying the more expensive medicine for yourself with your own money. That would violate the “equality” that is the magic mantra.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.57

The Need for “Profiling”

We have become so obsessed with political correctness that both common sense and self-preservation have to take a back seat. We don’t dare “profile” anybody going through security checks because that’s not politically correct. Far better to be blown to smithereens than to be politically incorrect.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.47

Racial Disparity Is Not Necessarily Racist

 

Study History

One of the painful consequences of studying history is that it makes you realize how long people have been doing the same foolish things with the same disastrous results.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.44

Are You a Right Wing Extremist?

According to an official document of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, right wing extremists include “groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” It also includes those “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.26

Don't Be Silent!

 

About Israel

Since everybody seems to be criticizing Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired  into their country from the Gaza Strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten peace, so they should take back the land.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.14

One Must Pay Consequences of Decisions

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed “change,” the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.

Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions— namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.25

Government Control of Income?

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”

The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But if we stop and think about it—which politicians don’t expect us to—what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced— and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.12-13

Watch the Distractions

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.

Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.

Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.

The most politically effective totalitarian systems have gotten people to give up their freedom in order to vent their resentment or hatred at other people— under Communism, the capitalists; under Nazis, the Jews.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.11

Do You Recognize Our Culture?

Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” 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.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

LEFTISTS and LGBTQXYZ

Every leftist movement wishes to challenge and ultimately destroy the society they feel has “oppressed” them. The LGBT movement is no different. It wants to completely annihilate anything resembling traditional sexual or romantic norms, and “Pride Month” serves as the bridgehead for pushing the societal envelope even further, until eventually it breaks down altogether.

Above all, rainbow activists crave opportunities to push their sexual fetishes on normal Americans and innocent children and receive a “thank you” in return from a thoroughly browbeaten and brainwashed populace. Judging by those loud cheers in the videos above, they’ve convinced a large section of the population to applaud the annihilation of foundational cultural mores and revere the vanguard of this degenerate revolution.

Hayden Daniel, ‘Pride’ Parades Are Nothing But Massive Humiliation Rituals

What LEFTISM Is About

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

P.J. O’Rourke

What Is Wisdom?

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Charles Spurgeon

Racial Crime

In the post-George Floyd era, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. Blacks between the ages of ten and 24 are killed in drive by shootings at nearly 25 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are just 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. Who is killing these black victims? Not the police, not whites, but other blacks.

As for interracial violence, blacks are a greater threat to whites than whites are to blacks. Blacks commit 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites. A black person is 35 times more likely to commit an act of non-lethal violence against a white person than vice versa. Yet the national narrative insists on the opposite idea—and too many dutifully play along.

These crime disparities mean that the police cannot restore law and order in neighborhoods where innocent people are most being victimized without having a disparate impact on black criminals. So the political establishment has decided not to restore law and order at all.

Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.

Beware of Secularists

Secularists can be viewed in their natural habitat at nearly any of America’s more than three thousand colleges and universities. Here Secularists have found success, capturing impressionable young adults as they are released into the wild. Many Secularists see themselves as liberators, lifting students out of religious superstition and other nonsense holding back society’s progress.

Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 81.

Equal Rights?

 

Morals vs Ethics

Religion is concerned with morals, Philosophy with ethics: the difference between the two being essentially this, that morals have to do with man’s relationship to God and ethics with man’s relationship to man.  Morals are absolute, ethics are relative. If we may substitute meta-nature for metaphysics we may say that the subject matter of Philosophy is meta-nature (as the subject of Science is Nature) but the subject matter of Religion is super-nature. In Religion, miracle is in one sense and essential adjunct, but in Philosophy miracle is simply of no concern. The end object of all Religion is to find God, but the end object of Philosophy is to find truth. This does not mean that Religion does not have the discovery of truth as and object, but only that it is a secondary one.

Arthur C. Constance, The Doorway Papers: Shem, Ham, and Japheth in World History, pg.18