Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

I don't find the internet a satisfactory information source. Yes, it is quick. Yes, it is helpful when one needs a definition or an identification. However, in terms of anything scholarly, the internet is a failure. Many times, it leads to more frustration than information.

blatham, just a hint to help you in your quest for knowledge, if you are looking for "authoritarian personalities," you need to look at the socialist, communist, marxist types, not the people that believe in individual rights and responsibilities. You might want to examine the liberal poster boy, Fidel Castro, and the guy in Venezuela. You might want to take a look at the leftist in Mexico that lost the election, but now wants to shut the country down if he doesn't get what he wants. You might want to take a look at the beloved Cynthia McKinney, upon losing the election, accuses the polls of being corrupt, and threatens an armed revolution. Cynthia is truly a good example of a mindset you may wish to examine.

It's not the word elevate that struck me here, but the notion that a law is an "aspiration." Aspiration to what? We generally call statements of aspiration declarations or manifestos, not laws.

Another suggestion, blatham, if you are looking for what produces authoritarian personalities, go review the information posted on the thread: "What produces RUTHLESS DICTATORS?"

He denies his previous identities. He has bragged about having several email accounts and his ability to disguise his presence, an ability he underestimates, largely because he is totally unable to change his style. I wish he were less boring.

We need more messegattos, Bernards, or whatever name he chooses. At least he posts meaningful arguments and information. Why ban one of the better members here? But then again, why did the Democrats throw one of their best under the bus in Connecticut? Is there a parallel here? Do we have the same Orweillian mindset doing this?

[quote="okie
blatham, just a hint to help you in your quest for knowledge, if you are looking for "authoritarian personalities," you need to look at the socialist, communist, marxist types, not the people that believe in individual rights and responsibilities. [/quote]

Well, it is the right, the extreme right, the Christian right and the neo-Conservatives who stand in total opposition to both individual rights and responsibilities. Those above-mentioned groups in the US are all descendants of Calvin. We know Calvin believed in a kind of pre-determinism.

He once wrote that he speaks for you, along with Gungasnake and Ticomayo and the rest of your fellow travelers. I thought that funny! Those guys are such shrinking violets, afraid to speak for themselves!

I am a conservative and I've never sought to deny anybody any rights, including shutting up Bernard, so whats your point plainoldme? You have no evidence besides your own disillusioned imaginations. As I said, go take a look at Cynthia McKinney as a good study of an authoritarian mindset.

Conservatism is nothing but the denial of individual rights. You simply aren't smart enough to use words like,"disullsioned," so don't.

plainoldme with more really enlightened opinions here! This, the woman that says corporations force us to buy junk, that if she were in charge, she would outlaw pringles simply because they are "crap." In her opinion of course, which is all she cares about, evidently, as it doesn't matter if anyone else wishes to eat pringles. Yes, plainoldme is the champion of individual rights and choices. plainoldme, why don't you just go to Cuba where you could be happy, where conservatives won't control your life anymore.

Ah, Thomas. So who cared but them whose vanguard they were? They were still the cozy ones. But the money was so much better on the Right than the Left, and the beds much more comfortable. And they need not worry about the masses any longer. The masses had capitalism to comfort them.

All the neo-con principals like Irving Kristol in particular were associated with the Schactmanites. And akin to these, espoused a position held by these Trotskyists who believed Stalinist nations to be worse than Western capitalism. As such they often sided with the U.S. government in international conflicts against Stalinist groups, Vietnam and Cuba, Stalinist to their core, come to mind.

They aligned with Scoop Jackson's rightwing Democrats with deep ties to the Military-Industrial complex in the early 70's. Angry about the counterculture which offended their puritanical moralistic streak, angry about the US defeat in Vietnam because of their nationalism, angry about the situation in Palestine and very strongly attached to a militant Israel, because many were Jewish, they grew from there.

Many are of these are crackpot Jewish ethnic activists who have embraced some weird Left neo-conservatism. And though we are not supposed to say this stuff, you can't understand them until you figure this out. You should not be amazed at their support for Bush at all.

They are hawkish on foreign affairs and were, as Schactmanites (but no longer are) moderately progressive on domestic issues.

The vision the ex-Troksyites, now neocons (actually right-wing Bolsheviks and why I refer to them as Busheviks) has mutated. To provide for the common good is no longer through collective action but is found through the application of the allegedly invisible hand of the "free" market and most important, without government regulation.

But such is a bastardization and misreading of the free market theories of Adam Smith who recognized that the state had a place in the regulation of the economy for the public welfare. They dismiss the flaws of their argument as "that's just the way it is," and disregard the real misery such a laisse faire philosophy brings, because of their belief that in the long run doing such will eventually make things better. That is a classical 19th century Liberal attitude mixed with their Utopian belief; "the Free Market cures all ills." Their basic philosophy is dehumanized and negligibly different in attitude than Stalin's with the depropertization and deportation of the Kulaks or Mao's resettlement campaign of large masses of Chinese to increase efficiency.

The well-spring of socialism is based upon a recognition of humanity and its needs. It posits that full, unencumbered free market capitalism is the least likely way to bring that about. Those post-Schactmanite neo-cons are no different that the Stalins and Maos who corrupted the ideals of socialism by neglecting the real cost in human misery to bring about change.

A Marxist would say that the misery brought upon a person living a life of hopeless abject poverty and violence in East St. Louis is caused by the exploitation of the working class by the owners of capital. The neo-cons, that one living in squalor in a small village in China is a result of exploitation by those in control of bureaucratic collectivism. In each instance the controlling forces of society disregard the misery and offers it up as a sacrifice to the greater good...and like Squealer and Napoleon in Animal Farm, those in control get fat while others endure hunger.

Where once at least the pre-neo-cons paid lip service to the basic decencies of what drove socialism, now they disregard even that. Once they promoted social and political revolution in bourgeois democracies in hopes of alleviating misery, now they call on "democracy" to do it in the Middle East and Third World, all the while ignoring the vagaries of Western style capitalism that also cause misery. The result of the former was revolutionary Marxism, the result of the latter is a Right Wing-Schactmanism, albeit, without a human face.

But, I am not a classic Marxist-Leninist and like many Schactmanites, I openly admit that the bourgeois democracies with government regulated capitalism were and are better for people then the ex-degenerated Soviet Union, the deformed workers states of former East block countries, and China, North Korea and Vietnam. Where I get off the bus with neo-cons (Right Wing Schactmanites) is that they are still willing to use force to export (as in Iraq and Iran) their revolutionary ideas, now that American-styled democracy and capitalism cures all ills (which is akin to the attitude of wild-eyed Bolsheviks with exporting Marxism and the Collective) and are more than willing to ignore the problems of capitalism and I am not willing to do either.

In this way, I am not a dispassionate revolutionary overlooking human misery as they are, I am actually compassionately conservative in reference to the centuries-old principles the Social Contract of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Finally back to Irving Kristol, that buggerer of the truth......."If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship."
Irving Kristol

Some liberal there in that remark, and in fact it is a classical reaction from a puritanical, closed, conservative mind. (see F.A. Hayek's, "Why I am not a Conservative")

http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/fah1.html

Also, having Kristol speak highly of his participation with the Fourth International and his much later close relationship with the intellectual basis for Trotskyite Schactmanism bespeaks not "youthful indiscretion" or fleeting flirting with socialism but wading chin deep in Marxism.
http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html

Language matters, as George Orwell notes. It is peculiar to garden variety autobiographical pruning away of inconvenient facts of personal history and using weasel words, sleight of hand adverbs and adjectives sprinkled about to season with the flavor of sweet mendacity that the masks the bitter truth.

another case of "youthful indiscretions."



From 1965 to 1969, Hyde conducted an extramarital sexual affair with Cherie Snodgrass. At the time, Snodgrass was married to another man with whom she had three children. The Snodgrasses divorced in 1967. The affair ended when Snodgrass' husband confronted Mrs. Hyde. The Hydes reconciled and remained married until Mrs. Hyde's death in 1992. The Snodgrasses remarried in 1969 but re-divorced shortly thereafter. Although Hyde was 41 years old and a married grandfather when the four-year affair began, he dismissed it as one of his "youthful indiscretions."

okie -- You are your own worst enemy. If you do not understand things, why not take an adult education course? I say this with great compassion.

That's because you are a liberal and thus full of compassion. You would never stoop to slinging ad hominems, which only evil conservatives do.

I think this is misleading in at least two ways. (1) While Adam Smith does consider the arguments for and against government intervention, he ends up recommending government action for little more than military defense, police, law-making, building canals and roads, operating trade posts, and subsidizing the schooling of poor people's children. (He considers public schools, but ends up suspecting that the government would do that job poorly.) There are people who basically still hold his views today, and they are conventionally judged to fall squarely into the "laissez faire" category. (2) While it is true that some popularizers of classical economics sounded somewhat utopian, neither the Mills, nor Bentham, nor Herbert Spencer believed that "the free market cures all ills". Rather, they believed that government intervention into the free market causes more ills than it cures. I agree with this view.

Lovely catch! I missed that entirely.

Thank you, blatham.

plainoldme, you have to be one of funniest posters here. Your answers often go off into disconnected statements. You do not address the debate, but simply come up with the above. I am perfectly happy with my understanding things. Perhaps my understanding does not agree with yours is your problem. Why not say that?

Basically, I have found you to have some very strange ideas, so I am going to remind you of them, such as your "pringles statement." It would be funny, but the problem is you weren't trying to be funny. You were serious. And now you are apparently seriously trying to convince people that conservatives are Orwellian, is that it?

okie asked

Nope, that's not it. There is nothing necessarily Orwellian nor authoritarian in conservatism, defined broadly or historically.

kuvasz, blatham, etc, -------No conservative I know believes the "free market cures all ills." Nor is there some kind of "Utopian belief" here. Utopian beliefs belong to leftists, communists, Marxists, and the like. I cannot speak for all conservatives, but I believe this is the belief of most, that this world is flawed, human nature is flawed, and there is a limit as to what government can do. Therefore, it is best to simply accept reality, let people have their own personal freedom and responsibility in a free market to provide for themselves. The poor will always be with us, and it is best that private citizens help each other privately and through charities. Government programs can also be employed, but the problems will not and cannot be totally eliminated. So conservatives and free marketers are not utopian minded people, they are simply realistic in terms of knowing what the best possible system is to help most people be free to live better than they would under some government system.

The alternative is a forced government dictatorship, whereby some communist believes he can wipe out all human suffering by making everybody suffer under their rules. This has been repeatedly disproven, but amazingly many people still hold onto this belief, and continue to revise their vision of how their government system will work and by revising the terminology. Same old worthless worn out ideas given new spin.