In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don’t. In the case of Iraq, the many instruments Orwell felt would be needed to keep people passive and uninformed — the nonstop propaganda messages, the memory holes, the rewriting of history, Room 101 — have proved unnecessary. The public has become its own collective Ministry of Truth — a reality that, in many ways, is even more chilling than the one Orwell envisioned.
— From
We are the Thought Police, an essay from Michael Massing on public perception of the iraq war published on salon.com past November (found via
azspot)
The irony is with the gas prices what they are, we should be expanding rail service.
One of the real problems with technology is what it has done is bring things indoors (…) What has the Internet done? Indoors! People are sitting indoors and watching screens that are the parameters of their world. I don’t watch that shit! I want to go out there and make eye contact, go out from here to there, trap people, I don’t mean trap them. I mean see them, grab them, look at their faces.
