Posts Tagged george orwell

To-Do List For Liberty

From Zero Hedge:

hedgeless_horseman’s Revolutionary Call to Arms:

1.  Read, Propaganda, by Edward Bernays.
2.  Read, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
3.  Get rid of your television.  Preferably, take it to the dump and destroy it in an extreme and violent fashion.
4.  Read, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
5.  Make a commitment to not use mind-altering substances for 90 days.  If you fail, go to an AA meeting and restart the 90 days.
6.  Read, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve – 5th Edition, by G. Edward Griffin.
7.  Visit a coin dealer and buy some gold or silver Canadian Maple Leafs.
8.  Read, 1984, by George Orwell.
9.  Make your very own set of Fallacy Flash Cards from the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
10.  Hold three fallacious posters accountable on www.zerohedge.com by citing their fallacy.
11.  Read, The Law, by Frédéric Bastiat.
12.  Make a list of your natural rights.
13.  Read, The Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights.
14.  Read, Animal Farm, by George Orwell.
15.  Research your two senators and one congressman at https://www.opensecrets.org/ Make a list of their 10 biggest donors, and send the list to your “representative” in an email or letter.
16.  Read, War is a Racket!, by Major General Smedley D. Butler.
17.  Read, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
18.  Watch the online video of the TED Talk, A radical experiment in empathy, by Sam Richards.
19.  Read, Anatomy of the State, by Murray Rothbard.
20.  Be a volunteer judge at a high school debate.

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Two Minutes Hate

Author Jason Reynolds compares the current culture with the culture of INGSOC in the novel 1984:

The Hate celebrates Ingsoc’s slogans—WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH—and helps stamp out thoughtcrime, i.e. the right to hold personal, unorthodox beliefs and value privacy, the very thing Winston secretly lives for. He’s actually a big fan of Goldstein. But even this devout intellectual heretic feels powerless to the overwhelming wave of emotion that ripples though the crowd and makes otherwise reserved and terse people start “leaping up and down…and shouting at the tops of their voices.”  Take a look at a cinematic interpretation of this.

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“That rifle on the wall of the laborer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” – George Orwell

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Penn Jillette, Not Having the Courage to Confront Islam is Bullsh*t

Illustration by Bosch Fawstin

by David Swindle

It’s always a sad day when someone you admire tremendously, who has entertained and challenged you for years lets you down and reveals themselves to really stand up only for themselves instead of the ideas of freedom they claim to support.

Reason Magazine highlights some deeply discouraging remarks from Penn Jillette, the libertarian co-host of the extraordinarily great Showtime show “Penn and Teller’s Bullsh*t”:

Reason Magazine: Are there any groups you won’t go after?

Penn: We haven’t tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn’t want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I’m not sure. And we haven’t tackled Islam because we have families.

Reason Magazine: Meaning, you won’t attack Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back …

Penn: Right, and I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific.

Y’know there are a whole lot of prominent people — who do have families — who have had the courage to tell the truth about Islam. Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Mark Steyn, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Geert Wilders… It’s actually a fairly long list with people who would be much more prominent targets than Penn and Teller.

When Jillette says things like he has here it accomplishes one thing: it empowers the enemy. It tells them to keep making threats and to keep killing people because ultimately it works because we in the West are too complacent, comfortable, and selfish to care.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who would be willing to put their lives on the line to hide and protect Jews in Nazi Germany, and those who looked the other way and lived comfortably as the Holocaust happened. The situation is pretty much the same in our age.”

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/06/26/penn-jillette-not-having-the-courage-to-confront-islam-is-bullsht/

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -George Orwell

“He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”
-Thomas Paine

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
–Albert Einstein

‘To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.’
– Ayn Rand

“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” Winston Churchill on Islam

Don't get your hopes up. They only play brave people on TV.

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