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Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?
gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?
Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"
I don't think you can claim that the store told you that four peaches was a "restricted item" without at least explaining the situation a little bit further.
:)
Maybe they were underage?
It's really nothing to worry about until you wake up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney.
Please strip to your underwear and sit with your hands folded behind your head in preparation for a courtesy visit from your friends and fellow Class 1 citizens from Homeland Security's Produce Control Division.
And stop thinking about goats when you play with yourself.
Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the WalMart front. In honor of the massive overfulfillment of the ninth three-year plan... it's been announced that the NASCAR T-Shirt ration is to be increased to 3 per month!
DoublePlusYeeHaw!
VOTE!
Peach seeds: ~40 ppm cyanide. Apricot seeds: ~500 ppm. Lucky you didn't buy apricots, or you'd be in Guantanamo by now.