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I wouldn't call it a modern invention by any means. Orwell wrote a fairly well known essay about fascism in 1944 where he concluded the word was almost useless since he had seen it applied to just about any group of people across the political and economic spectrum.

All that people can really agree on is that fascists are bad and that it's probably a good idea to call your opponents fascist or insinuate that they have fascist tendencies. It seems like no one adopts the name as part of their political party, and the only group that springs to mind that touches it is Antifa (being short for anti-fascist) who are regarded by some as being quite fascist in nature themselves.

For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people - certainly no political party or organized body of any kind - which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term 'Fascist'. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words 'Fascist in sympathy', or 'of Fascist tendency', or just plain 'Fascist', applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:

Click here to continue. Note the author. Calling people fascists was bullshit back then and it's just as bullshit today.

It's the managerial class, helping itself at our expense. See this writeup by George Orwell.

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of âmanagersâ(TM). These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.

I believe that Orwell's essay on fascism is still as apt as ever. Essentially it's just a way to describe a political (or more generally, any ideological) opponent you don't like and historically been flung at just about everyone from communists to Catholics. It's a fancier way of saying "bad guy" in most cases.

No, but they're not sciences in the way that, say, particle physics is. As Lubos Motls pointed out the number of sigma required to verify a hypothesis is very different

https://motls.blogspot.com/201...

Some disciplines of science try to be as hard and reliable as particle physics so they adopted the same 5-sigma (1 in 3 million) standard for discovery; most other disciplines, especially soft sciences such as medical research, climate science, psychology, and others, are often satisfied with 3-sigma (1 in 300) or even 2-sigma (1 in 20) evidence.

That's assuming there's enough data for this sort of thing, which there most likely isn't for history where you're relying on a couple of second hand sources.

That doesn't mean history is junk, it just means you can't be as certain of it as you can with physics. And in fact new discoveries turn up all the time and change the consensus view of historical events. Similarly the consensus on economics can change pretty drastically - e.g. Keynesianism took a major beating in the 80's due to stagflation. Arguably post Keynesian economics did post 2008, though that may be coming to an end.

Social sciences have fuzzy data and the interpretation of the data is influenced by politics - that's especially true of climate change and economics. They're not at all like particle physics with its spectacular 5 sigma near certainty. You could probably find examples of present day politics influencing linguistics too.

Incidentally literature isn't science and it definitely isn't junk. And good literature isn't influenced by politics, except in the extreme Orwellian case where a worst case totalitarian regime ends literature.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/e...

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or 'fellow-traveler' has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about 'the horrors of Nazism' and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word 'Nazi', at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write

It seems more feudal to be honest. Then again fascism has become a rather meaningless word. In fact Orwell pointed that out that was the case even in 1944

http://orwell.ru/library/artic...

If you're arguing on the Internet whether you're living in the world of Orwell's 1984 you're not living in the world of Orwell's 1984.

The whole point of 1984 is that truth has been abolished and people are unable to even explain what has happened. So if you're arguing about living in that world, you're not living in that world.

E.g.

http://orwell.ru/library/essay...

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail - but these were child's play compared with the Continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point - the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their' legionaries'. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable - even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a

Orwell mused about producing books by machinery as a way for a totalitarian state to have fiction without having any actual authors who might develop heretical political opinions.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/e...

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination - even consciousness, so far as possible - would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

And in 1984 the Prolefeed is produced by machines - he was writing before computers were widely known so they use 'a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section-Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak-engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.

Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'

http://orwell.ru/library/essay...

The British Empire had the accounting theory, financial metrics and economic understanding necessary to become a starfaring species before they had an Empire? Seems like a bit of a stretch, given that we haven't figured out that stuff in the US, even after sending men to the moon and probes beyond the solar system.

Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.

Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'

http://orwell.ru/library/essay...

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways - the breaking-up of families, for instance - the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

It seems like you have an irrational faith that intelligent aliens would be benign and rational, whereas I've come up with plenty of examples of human civilisations that could master science and technology but weren't benign or rational. As Orwell puts it 'in our mystical way we[people living in a liberal democracy] feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse'.

It's like I always suspected of Sagan - he was an atheist and his faith that hyper advanced aliens would be benign and would come to save us had given him something to believe in which was the Christian omniscient, omnipotent and benign God in all but name. Well I suppose aliens aren't omnipresent either, otherwise they'd have come to technorapture us already.

Of course as a real atheist I suppose I'm much more comfortable with the notion that aliens, no matter how advanced, are just animals like us. They fought their way to the top of the evolutionary tree on their planet by being smarter and probably more ruthless than the competition - humans may well have wiped out their hominid competitors like Neanderthals. And just like us they may produce rational individuals who can work in STEM or accounting. but as a society they're prey to all sorts of irrational notions like the glory of empire, personality cults or the need to spread the One True Faith at the point of a sword. Or a laser pistol.

And people in STEM are just as prey to irrational ideas outside work as anyone else in my experience. They mode switch from thinking rationally at work to thinking irrationally about everything outside.

Look at Wernher von Braun building the predecessors to US space launch rockets at Peenemunde with slave labour whipped into action by SS guards. Or Albert Speer who was similarly rational at economics but equally culpable in turning a blind eye to slavery and genocide by the regime he was trying desperately to save.

Now I'm sure you'll say 'well the Nazis lost'. They did, but there's no physical law that says nasty regimes must lose. As Orwell pointed out, every regime was nasty for most of hum

It's the Carl Sagan "all sufficiently advanced civilisations must also be benign" view.

Oddly enough Mars Attacks lampoons this very effectively. E.g.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.

Which is basically a bit of equivocation - technological prowess and being civilised aren't the same thing. As Orwell observed

http://orwell.ru/library/revie...

The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.

I.e. technological advancement doesn't necessarily make a society less barbaric - the Nazis and Commies used then modern technology to exterminate groups their leaders had decided to scapegoat and invade neighbouring countries in order to incorporate them into their horrid system.

And of course Rome was technologically or at least logistically advanced but would seem far from civilised if you were one of the 'barbarian' tribes in conquered.

The Conquistadors were much more technologically advanced than the indigenous population of the Americas but they were far from benign.

The aliens in 'Mars Attacks' aren't benign and Kessler ends up with a nasty fate. In fact the aliens are actually 'alien' in the original sense of the word - what they do seems highly malicious but it's very hard from a human point of view why they went to so much trouble to do it. Just like from an indigenous American point of view it would be hard to see why Cortes was willing to travel and unimaginable distance to collect gold and force people to follow Catholicism a religion they'd probably be completely unable to understand.

I.e. the notion that technological advancement makes a civilisation benign or rational is naive.

You seem to be using Orwell's definition of Fascism. What say we do some minimal word replacement in your rant and see if we can find a version that is coherent and sensible.

Look dude, you may have missed this in history class, but 900ish, 750ish, 500ish and 300ish years ago the world got together and waged outright war on islamists. Like, million man armies, naval armadas to stop the islamists. Why? Because islamism is them or us. There is no live and let live with islamists, unless you happen to be a Muslim.

Also, LOL, you went full retard at the end. Never go full retard, no matter what your professors tell you.

...unless you happen to be a Christian Aryan male.

Orwell had a pretty good commentary on the definition of fascism. It's kind of a worthless label in that as Orwell points out it's been applied to just about every different political group and doesn't have much of a shared definition in common use.

From George Orwell's "What is Science?" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien

Science is generally taken as meaning either (a) the exact sciences, such as chemistry, physics, etc., or (b) a method of thought which obtains verifiable results by reasoning logically from observed fact.

If you ask any scientist, or indeed almost any educated person, ‘What is science?’ you are likely to get an answer approximating to (b). In everyday life, however, both in speaking and in writing, when people say ‘science’ they mean (a). Science means something that happens in a laboratory: the very word calls up a picture of graphs, test-tubes, balances, Bunsen burners, microscopes. A biologist, and astronomer, perhaps a psychologist or a mathematician is described as a ‘man of science’: no one would think of applying this term to a statesman, a poet, a journalist or even a philosopher. And those who tell us that the young must be scientifically educated mean, almost invariably, that they should be taught more about radioactivity, or the stars, or the physiology or their own bodies, rather than that they should be taught to think more exactly.

. . .

Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind. It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets — and not simply piling up a lot of facts. Put it in those words, and the apologist of scientific education will usually agree. Press him further, ask him to particularize, and somehow it always turns out that scientific education means more attention to the sciences, in other words — more facts. The idea that science means a way of looking at the world, and not simply a body of knowledge, is in practice strongly resisted. I think sheer professional jealousy is part of the reason for this. For if science is simply a method or an attitude, so that anyone whose thought-processes are sufficiently rational can in some sense be described as a scientist — what then becomes of the enormous prestige now enjoyed by the chemist, the physicist, etc. and his claim to be somehow wiser than the rest of us?

Almost everybody approves of "education", but that is only because the definition of "education" has been stretched to cover a variety of perspectives, some of which are directly opposed. STEM is the latest iteration of this problem. "Everyone" agrees that STEM is important, but how many because STEM studies are a superior forum for developing intellectual and academic rigor (which is highly debatable), how many because they believe that throwing more people at these fields will drive innovation, how many because it is viewed as a path to a high paying career, and how many because funneling more people into those careers will solve the "high paying" part?

Education as an exercise in personal and intellectual development is in peril. Or maybe, its rapid expansion was never meant to include these core concepts. Perhaps the goal was always to herd people through a highly costly system of earning credentials required to acquire even the hope of subsistence. A scam.

(Somehow, my reply disappeared. So, I'll do it again.)

#3 In "very high altitude airplane", at the very (heh) least "very" is redundant, in fact you could just go with "airplane"

Planes can be on the ground. I want a really long fall. Like from a revived Concorde at 60,000 feet.

#4 "should be tossed" is passive voice

Point taken.

#6 wait, weren't they Orwell's Five Rules?

Not according to http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/.

Sometimes, committing those 'follies', (and others), actually leads to more effective writing.

Unless you have evidence that she is, in fact, a master wordsmith, I present the following for your edification:

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” -- Pablo Picasso

“Learn the rules before you break them.” -- Steven Taylor Goldsberry, The Writer's Book of Wisdom: 101 Rules for Mastering Your Craft

"It is known that, when we learn or train in something, we pass through the stages of shu, ha, and ri. These stages are explained as follows. In shu, we repeat the forms and discipline ourselves so that our bodies absorb the forms that our forebearers created. We remain faithful to the forms with no deviation. Next, in the stage of ha, once we have disciplined ourselves to acquire the forms and movements, we make innovations. In this process the forms may be broken and discarded. Finally, in ri, we completely depart from the forms, open the door to creative technique, and arrive in a place where we act in accordance with what our heart/mind desires, unhindered while not overstepping laws." -- Principles of Shu-ha-ri

"there are no right or wrong answers...'Good English' is whatever educated people talk;.." -- C.S. Lewis

“Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.” —Robert Graves

"Photographers must study and know the rules of good visual composition like writers study and learn the rules of good writing composition. Once you understand the rules, your ability to break them helps you have better impact with your photos." -- Stanley Leary

George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language": http://www.orwell.ru/library/e...

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

No. The definition of censorship is not limited to government interference. Anytime someone forcibly shuts somebody else up, that's censorship.

"Editorial decisions" are about what someone chooses they themselves will or will not say.

If I choose not to post racist rants on my blog, that's a wise editorial decision on my part. If I choose to delete your racist comments from my blog, I've censored you.

And justifiably so. You have no expectation that you can say whatever you want on my blog. But I've still censored you.

So I dislike this whole "no no it's not censorship!" dodge. That's just twisting language so things sound more palatable. I'm reminded of Orwell's Politics and the English Language. "No no, it's not torture! These are 'enhanced interrogation techniques!'" "No no, this isn't censorship! It's 'editorial discretion!'" Call it what it is and deal with it.

"Swift's greatest contribution to political thought in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State’, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralize popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria." ref

So just because the USSR tried to manipulate the peace movement therefore delegitimizes the entire peace movement?

No, not entire — there were sincere pacifists even during WW2 — and not automatically. We need to painfully examine, to what extent the peace movement was compromised by involvement of both USSR and domestic terrorists. You may suspect me of overestimating the enemy's impact, but you are certainly underestimating it.

You're not overestimating the enemy's impact, you're accusing your ideological opponents of being stooges. I'm certain you're not nearly as concerned by the propaganda put out by those who agree with you.

When the US was about to resume shooting in Iraq in 2003, the whole world erupted in the biggest coordinated protest in history — and not by Iraqis, but by outraged Westerners expressing their sympathy.. Where were these peace-loving legions, when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014? What few protests there were, they were largely by Ukrainian expats with very few sympathetic locals in evidence. Why?

Because:
a) People expect a lot more of the US than Russia
b) The US sets international standards, and by invading Iraq it helps legitimize things like Ukraine
c) The US is a Western country, it makes a lot of sense for Westerners to protest it because they have a chance of influencing the politicians. What the hell does Russia care if a bunch of Americans or Canadians come out in protest? And what should Canadians and Americans even protest for, we don't have a lot of leverage.

Because Putin's propaganda machine worked — on the entire spectrum of Western politics, not just the Left as the USSR used to. Rightist Jews in the US were accusing Ukraine's new "junta" of being "nazis", while actual American Nazis called the new government "Jews". Without arguing with each other, but both helped Putin. Most likely, they didn't realize it — but there is no doubt, a there is a group of analysts at FSB attached to each Western opinion-maker. US is a pathetic noob at this.

Wake up and smell "people's power" — and the power of propagandists to manipulate it.

It didn't do squat. Yes there's a few fringe folks who are influenced, but they're pretty insubstantial.

In the EU it might be different, Greece in particular might have a legitimate problem, but in the English speaking West Russian propaganda is a joke.

So just because the USSR tried to manipulate the peace movement therefore delegitimizes the entire peace movement?

No, not entire — there were sincere pacifists even during WW2 — and not automatically. We need to painfully examine, to what extent the peace movement was compromised by involvement of both USSR and domestic terrorists. You may suspect me of overestimating the enemy's impact, but you are certainly underestimating it.

I'm just raising awareness — so that the healing can begin.

When the US was about to resume shooting in Iraq in 2003, the whole world erupted in the biggest coordinated protest in history — and not by Iraqis, but by outraged Westerners expressing their sympathy.. Where were these peace-loving legions, when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014? What few protests there were, they were largely by Ukrainian expats with very few sympathetic locals in evidence. Why?

Because Putin's propaganda machine worked — on the entire spectrum of Western politics, not just the Left as the USSR used to. Rightist Jews in the US were accusing Ukraine's new "junta" of being "nazis", while actual American Nazis called the new government "Jews". Without arguing with each other, but both helped Putin. Most likely, they didn't realize it — but there is no doubt, a there is a group of analysts at FSB attached to each Western opinion-maker. US is a pathetic noob at this.

Wake up and smell "people's power" — and the power of propagandists to manipulate it.

The modern media is no longer about communicating the news. Its is committed to instituting ideology. If you control the vocabulary of the debate, you control the outcome of the debate.

From Orwell's 1984

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Orwell wrote an essay about this mangling of language, Politics and the English Language.

Quoth,

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

1984 was written as a mirror for Orwell's times, so yeah, '84 as opposed to '48 when he was writing.

People keep thinking he was writing about Russia. But he wasn't. He was writing about Britain. Having worked in the propaganda dept. during WW2, he new all about propaganda from the state. He wasn't writing about Russia at all, what would be the point? There were plenty of others who would write about that part of the world. No, he was writing about his own country. He was writing against fascism, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism in his own country.

He would recognize the shit happening from the NSA, and he would nod, and say "I warned you". That book was written because he knew too well how "liberal, democratic" countries could turn bad.

I suggest everyone go and read Why I Write: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

Nuclear weapons had a stabilizing and centralizing tendency for governments

Ah, crap, there goes the 10th amendment.... (I kid!)

Nuclear weapons had a stabilizing and centralizing tendency for governments, due to the great expense involved and the infrastructure needed to create them. As drone are developed and become more effective, governments like that in the U.S. may find their monopoly on force undermined.

I would have careful restrictions placed on drone use, equal or exceeding those already on other technologies (aircraft, etc.). A great risk remains that they'll be used to expand government power. But occasionally I wonder whether the drone might not represent revolutionary potential like the flintlock musket once did.

Yes. Language no longer has meaning. It is Orwell's Politics and the English Language come to life.

In Oldspeak, "we're not listening to your phone calls" meant "we're not listening to your phone calls." (excepting warrants, etc etc)

Today it means "No one is physically sitting at a desk with earphones that convert the mouth noises you make into variations in air pressure, but every phone call you make is being tracked, recorded, stored forever, parsed over by AI, converted into text to speech and should you utter the wrong syllables (for some value of 'wrong') the transcript will be read by everyone in the office and your permanent record will get a '+1 suspicious' tally." But fear not, Citizen! No one is "listening" to your phone calls!

Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because robots are committing violence on their behalf. -- George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism"

Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty

Maybe, these two should not have been in the same category? Only one of them is anti-social and encourages the player to break laws and norms. In the other the player's "duty" is to defeat his country's enemies... Remember: "Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."

If the study really treated the two games the same (RTFA? What RTFA?) — based purely on the "violence", the negative effects of one game may have been canceled by the positive effects of the other...

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

George Orwell, "You and the Atomic Bomb"

probably not as bad as every single war you have lost since.

I don't know who you think 'you' is, since a moment's reading of my comment history would tell you I'm not an American.

Still one think the UK and US have in common is that they have not been occupied for hundreds of years. Part of the reason for that is that historically they have been willing to kill people in huge numbers to keep that from happening.

Talking is nice and all but they only way to get rid of scourges like National Socialism is carpet bombing, not talking. If we'd have kept talking we would have ended up getting picked off like Norway did.

Another part of the reason is that the US and UK intervene all around the world to try to sabotage totalitarian movements whose existence they feel is not in their national interests. At its best that strategy brought down another totalitarian movement, Communism without actually needing to fry their cities with nukes. Because that, not talking, was the alternative.

A predatory and occasionally just plain murderous foreign policy on the part of the US and UK is one of the reasons that Scandinavia didn't fold like a house of cards in the face of the Russians the way most of it did with the Nazis.

Read your Orwell - a world dominated by interchangeable tyrannies would be a world in a dark age. That justifies all the Dresdens and aid to the nasty anti Communist forces that made sure that both National Socialism and USSR and Warsaw Pact are now things we only read about in the history books.

Think I'm misquoting Orwell? Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. He defended Dresden and disdained international agreements and pacifists like the irritating Vera Brittain - who I'm sure Scandinavians would have loved.

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_01

Miss Vera Brittain's pamphlet, Seed of Chaos, is an eloquent attack on indiscriminate or 'obliteration' bombing. 'Owing to the R.A.F. raids,' she says, 'thousands of helpless and innocent people in German, Italian and German-occupied cities are being subjected to agonizing forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages.' Various well-known opponents of bombing, such as General Franco and Major-General Fuller, are brought out in support of this. Miss Brittain is not, however, taking the pacifist standpoint. She is willing and anxious to win the war, apparently. She merely wishes us to stick to 'legitimate' methods of war and abandon civilian bombing, which she fears will blacken our reputation in the eyes of posterity. Her pamphlet is issued by the Bombing Restriction Committee, which has issued others with similar titles.

Now, no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. On the other hand, no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of 'limiting' or 'humanizing' war N is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords.

The catchwords used in this connexion are 'killing civilians', 'massacre of women and children' and 'destruction of our cultural heritage'. It is tacitly assumed that air bombing does more of this kind of thing than ground warfare.

When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers

Soon, with the whole periodic table available in one giant print cartridge, people will be able to 3D print nuclear weapons. If someone manages to download plans for the Tsar Bomba, we're cooked.

But the Feed is closely monitored for exactly this kind of thing. By the time your matter compiler is half way through you'd be splattered. Its when someone figures out how to make the Seed that we are all in deep shit.

Or maybe not...
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb

"Of course, you're going to have to take my word for it that this communication is not a fabrication, because I'm not handing over my gmail password."

Even if you supplied your gmail password, and I checked your account, a message could still be faked if you had a friend at Google or did funky things with email routing. :-) I'm not saying that message is fake -- it sounds completely like something an assistant of Gatto might say. (He even offered to help resolve a particular point or two.)

I'm just suggesting that a citation may not really "prove" anything if one is hardnosed about it. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Or George Orwell:
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose
"There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Even science as a human endeavor is rife with fraud, group think, conflict-of-interest, learned helplessness, and so on; see this collection of quotes I put together:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

What has happened in the USA is that ideas like compulsory schooling (and a variety of other things, like linking the right to consume to having a job) is starting to bump up again the solid reality of 21st century high technology and the 21st century and ideas spreading across the planet. Bullying growing as a problem in schools and so kids hiding their talents is just one example of many. I wrote my own essay on that a few years back:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Anyway, just because one, or even several, of an author's points can't be substantiated, or are even completely wrong, does not necessarily invalidate a broader message. It depends on how central the specific points are to the overall argument. How many citations do you see in the essays of Mark Twain or the poems of Maya Angelou?

It's depressing, sure, but I've read it twice and didn't find it particularly hard going either time

Well, it is written in fairly straightforward English, and it is always clear what happens, etc. I just constantly kept wondering why I should put up with all the awfulness. It is not as if it is an ingenious dissecting of the subtleties of something. Instead, I found it rather blunt all around, almost as if it were written in all caps. At some point I decided that I could as well just read something else.

I like his writings, but I somehow didn't see how I would benefit from reading 1984, except being able to get all the references.

The hidden communist holocaust murdered about 100 million people in less than 100 years.

Not only does communism not work, but in an effort to make it work they have to murder off the "imperfect" or "those who don't contribute" or "those who are different" or "those who don't worship the state secular religion called communism" because too many people means social programs cost too much. So if they just off the "surplus population" they can hope to make the economics work even if they don't follow logic or reason or any sense at all.

George Orwell warned us about communism and socialism via Animal Farm where the farmer is capitalism and the animals establish a socialist/communist government. In the end they find out the socialists/communists are just as corrupt as the farmer and many animals lose their rights and freedoms and some end up dead.

The Black Book of Communism was written in France and is a picture book, it outlines the camps and the murders, the torture, the stealing, the crimes against humanity and other things that socialism/communism has done.

As an alternative try welfare capitalism or compassionate capitalism where social programs are insurance based, and based on logic, reason, and reality. The person gets out of it what they paid into it via taxes. Which was what FDR and others in the USA used to avoid socialism/communism and the evils that follow them.

Socialism is diet communism, would you like diet fascism or diet Nazism as a viable form of government? They don't work in practice either and are just as evil. Too much to the right is bad, and too much to the left is just as bad, people should really be in the middle.

Foreign policy of any country has more to do with game theory than good versus evil.

Hmm, that's odd. Normally Swedes lecture me how evil the US and the UK are, but carefully avoid mentioning the much more serious evil of their opponents. It reminds me a bit of this Orwell comment -

Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

Mind you Sweden as a country clearly considers itself above taking any side whatsoever, just in case the bad guys win and (being bad guys) will want revenge. Still that only works so long as the Nazis, Commies and so one get defeated by someone else. It's hard to imagine Sweden surviving in a Europe totally dominated by Hitler and/or Stalin for example. As you say, Sweden has a lot of resources and a good location. It would was also very rich post World War II, and would have been a tempting target for both dictators.

Once you understand there is a game and it's not good (to say the least) to lose, you are on the way to enlightenment. Well maybe not, but it certainly makes it clearer who your allies are.

Only in the USA I think. It's public domain in many countries:

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/1984.htm

http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

Over here are the Russian's versions of George Orwell's works translated into English and as far as I know the Russians licensed the texts from various estates in 2004 and set up this web site.

The books can be download in RTF, HTML, and Text formats, no PDFs that I know of.

In Russia the copyrights are different because it is a different set of laws. This is the web page on the copyright etc and this page says for educational and non-commercial use only. So I guess you cannot republish the works, but you can read them from the web site as long as it is educational and for non-commercial use only.

Over here are the Russian's versions of George Orwell's works translated into English and as far as I know the Russians licensed the texts from various estates in 2004 and set up this web site.

The books can be download in RTF, HTML, and Text formats, no PDFs that I know of.

In Russia the copyrights are different because it is a different set of laws. This is the web page on the copyright etc and this page says for educational and non-commercial use only. So I guess you cannot republish the works, but you can read them from the web site as long as it is educational and for non-commercial use only.

Over here are the Russian's versions of George Orwell's works translated into English and as far as I know the Russians licensed the texts from various estates in 2004 and set up this web site.

The books can be download in RTF, HTML, and Text formats, no PDFs that I know of.

In Russia the copyrights are different because it is a different set of laws. This is the web page on the copyright etc and this page says for educational and non-commercial use only. So I guess you cannot republish the works, but you can read them from the web site as long as it is educational and for non-commercial use only.

Yeah, so how are north Korea, Rwanda, and Darfur these days? How about that Taliban? We don't seem to care that much about 'other' people.

N. Korea, Rwanda and Darfur are all excellent examples of where we either didn't get involved or didn't finish the job. And yeah, they all suck. As for the Taliban, they are the guys that repressed the masses and harbored the guy that attacked us. So, the worse off the Taliban is, the better for us, and the better for the people of Afghanistan (most of them, anyway).

So how about examples of countries where the US/UN intervened and saw the job through to completion? Japan and Germany are the first two that come to mind. The people of Iraq seem to be doing better, but that job is not finished yet. The Italians seem to enjoy their freedom. The Kuwaitis love us!

Thanx for the examples of what happens when we don't finish the job.

Oh, and I love your sig:

Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

--Orwell

(Read the whole thing. It's brilliant!)

I think the AC you were responding to should have said:

What the Dixie Chicks experienced came from country and western fans, not the Bush administration. Big difference.

Most didn't have a problem with the Dixie Chick's stance towards the President. The problem was that they bashed the President of the United States in a foreign country during a time of war. My problem was with what they said. Maines said something along the lines of, "we are ashamed that the President is from Texas." I'm from Texas and very few Texans felt that way. I'm a little pissed that this EX-Texan is in Britain trying to speak for me.

Also, much of what the Bush administration said that you have a problem with was actually plagiarized.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that 'according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British".' But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious 'freedom' station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

--Orwell

(granted, he's talking about the Germans and Japanese of WWII, but the argument is the same.)

There has been an abundance of McCain articles. Use the search function up top.

Now can someone tell me what reason is there to back him? I'm not crazy about Obama either, but fucking McCain? This guy gives the Daily Show and Colbert Report so much material to work with it isn't even funny(seriously he's Bush III except worse, if that's even possible).

Every time I see a McCain supporter, I think back to Orwell's notes on nationalism and sigh.

This is something a lot of slashdotters really need to read

Why?

Maybe this one will help explain it better:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that 'according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British".' But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious 'freedom' station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Now, apply that to today. If you haven't figured it out yet replace "fascist" with "terrorist", "Germany and Japan" with "Al Qaeda and Iran" and "freedom station" with "ANSWER", "MoveOn.org", "Code Pink" or "CAIR". Also, pay close attention to "he that is not with me is against me". Where have I heard that before? (and don't say 'Revenge of the Sith"!)

You can read some of them here

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/index_en

This is something a lot of slashdotters really need to read
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

(v) Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

You can read some of them here

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/index_en

This is something a lot of slashdotters really need to read
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

(v) Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

It's odd to know your classical education has taught you that tyranny doesn't do any harm to a society's cultural output. Especially as most of the classical Roman writers I read said the exact opposite.

You remind me of George Orwell's acid comment along the lines of "you have to be an educated man to believe something as daft as this. No ordinary man would be that stupid". Oddly enough he was talking about apologists for another slave state, Soviet Russia.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Mind you I think it's quaint that there are still apologists for Imperial Rome. I guess you prefer Sparta to Athens and the Confederate States to the Union too. All of which assumes that you'd be in the tiny privileged minority in those states, but that's unlikely.

Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.

What about granting rights that people don't currently have? They're necessarily two sides of the same coin: if I take away your right to walk down the street punching people in the nose, I give the people down the street the right not to be punched in the nose. Conversely, if I take away your right to not be punched in the nose, I give others the right to punch you in the nose. If I take away your right to circumcise your kids, I give your kids the right not to be circumcised. Likewise, if circumcision was illegal, you'd be the one stripping people (infant boys) of a right they already had in order to give their parents more rights. Your analysis of the situation fails.

The rights of parents to control their children are already restricted by law, particularly when certain actions would cause permanent damage. The most basic argument against circumcision, which I endorse, is that the removal of the foreskin itself is permanent damage. It's also an easily identifiable practice for which physical evidence is always present, making enforceability easy--always important legal considerations. Politically, outlawing circumcision is currently untenable, but making legal reforms for moral reasons is always a long-term process.

As for the term "fascist", the word was overloaded to the point of meaninglessness before the movement itself even died out. In 1944, Orwell wrote:

Two years later, Orwell noted:

I think in your situation, a more precise word would be "authoritarian". I make this suggestion presuming, in good faith, that you're more interested in precise and honest discourse than with heaping scorn upon your perceived enemies.

What about granting rights that people don't currently have? They're necessarily two sides of the same coin: if I take away your right to walk down the street punching people in the nose, I give the people down the street the right not to be punched in the nose. Conversely, if I take away your right to not be punched in the nose, I give others the right to punch you in the nose. If I take away your right to circumcise your kids, I give your kids the right not to be circumcised. Likewise, if circumcision was illegal, you'd be the one stripping people (infant boys) of a right they already had in order to give their parents more rights. Your analysis of the situation fails.

The rights of parents to control their children are already restricted by law, particularly when certain actions would cause permanent damage. The most basic argument against circumcision, which I endorse, is that the removal of the foreskin itself is permanent damage. It's also an easily identifiable practice for which physical evidence is always present, making enforceability easy--always important legal considerations. Politically, outlawing circumcision is currently untenable, but making legal reforms for moral reasons is always a long-term process.

As for the term "fascist", the word was overloaded to the point of meaninglessness before the movement itself even died out. In 1944, Orwell wrote:

Two years later, Orwell noted:

I think in your situation, a more precise word would be "authoritarian". I make this suggestion presuming, in good faith, that you're more interested in precise and honest discourse than with heaping scorn upon your perceived enemies.

Translating existing rules into the IO context produces extensive uncertainty, risking unintentional escalations of conflict where forces have differing interpretations of what is permissible.

Translation: "Not knowing what we're doing could fuck things up." Orwell would like to have a word with you...