god is dead, religion is empty… the force of the state will help nailing the coffin closed…
new god is needed, big brother will provide…
oh the poor… who will help the poor? big brother to the rescue…
oh the evil rich, we have to tax and destroy the evil rich… (there are no rich, but all information is tightly controlled by big brother) two minutes hate…
coming soon, the mccain-kennedy-internet-regulation-and-tax law…
too much freedom on the net… do you really want your children seeing porn? hell no! but big brother can monitor the internet and make sure that any reference to porn (or anything else we feel is undesirable for our dictatorship) is immediately erased (and the individuals who dare try to post that garbage are erased as well)…
language will be eliminated, freedom of thought controlled and destroyed… newspeak? political correctness… same fucking thing… it’s all double plus good.
willing slaves to the government…
orwell pegged it 50 years ago.
-Imp
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Aye, but Orwell had an impoverished society controlled under the umbrella of a continuous (?and ficticious?) war effort against a largely undefined foe.
I would guess a resource war in the future would be real.
In England, big brother serves somewhat to fulfil the omniscient role of God - provider of justice. And at the moment, with an aging majority of voters, mistrusting of the violent yoof-culture, there are votes in big-brotherness.
The underlying causes of big-brother-itus are factionation and fear within the populace, of the populace, not so much a vehicle entirely of government making.
The civil divisions are fast becoming not ones of skin colour or religion, but of age, and ownership. The old just won’t fucking lie down and die.
Hum, seems to me a better understanding of our democracy would help a lot, but this can not happen unless together we make it happen.
The Spirit of America is morale, that high spirited feeling that comes from believing we are doing the right thing, and that means being moral, and only highly moral can have liberty and avoid the police state. To be moral we must have good manners and an understanding of The Law that is a higher law then national laws.
But just saying we’re fucked is not good enough. You have to come up with an unlikely solution. Like that mousetrap ™ game, with the guy in the old-man trunks nose-diving into the tub.
But why does this occur…? Is it a symptom of population density…? Strained infrastructure, or do you think all democracies collapse into behind the scenes dictatorships…?
Despite what we all like to think, this is not rocket science. It’s not even all that complex - I say to my 5 year old - “Hey, you got too many fish in that small tank - they all die.” and he says “Okay Dad, let’s take some out.”
Duh.
Chuck Norris, had he been elected president of the Earth, would have solved our problems long ago.
What Imp is really whining about is the end point of the tyranny of the weak and the slack, which ensures that the tower will fall, and the empire disintergrate.
I don’t know about that, but I do know that the principles of game theory dictate that any large, successful society, to have become one, must have been largely adherring to a forgiving co-operative strategy, which beyond a certain threshold in number, becomes increasingly vulnerable to invasion by recidivist defaulters. Becoming a shell, then a wreck.
A company or a country, large masses of people who don’t know eachother very well, with no clear and trusted unifying force, begin to faulter and fall into fear. This fear makes a society weak, and easily exploitable by those who would wish to.
But social fear is like a hunger, or an addiction - the more effort that is put in into asauging it, only heightens it: A society of individuals isolated from eachother by mutual distrust, given only the illusion of security or equality by blanket measures, increasingly strict and sometimes visabliy fallable, moves ever further away from eachother.
Huddled away like mice in the eaves, moaning and pressing the button that says ‘yes’ to more guns ‘yes’ to more surveillance ‘yes’ to forced levelling just to get a jolt of peace of mind.
For a company, that means the dreaded process of ‘quality control’, for a country, the death of privacy. In a healthy society, people are willing to believe others are generally good and leave it at that, in a sick society people want proof, and are willing to sacrifice everything for it, forgetting - as in quantum theory - the tangible presence of a constant observer changes everything. God may be able to get away with unobtrusive omniscience, but we cannot.
The term “big brother” always reminds me of the relationship one might see between a boy and his big brother.
Big brother says he’s coming to the rescue every time, and will smack you around when you do bad. All because big brother only wants the best for you.
And then little brother grows up and thinks about big brother messing with his life. And maybe big brother isn’t this happy teddy bear that wants all the best. Little brother stands up and gets in some pretty nasty fights with big brother. Oh yeah, there’s definetely blood. In the end, it seems that little brother did after all gain a valuable improvement on life because of big brother. But not because big brother was so protective and disciplinarian. Instead, because little brother learned how to teach big brother not to fuck with him. And from there he could exercise the same methods on anyone else.
Really? I was wondering how you might build a nuclear bomb in your basement undetected and how you might declare your terms as you threaten to implement terrorist attacks, with motivation to completely obliterate any capacity for WTO. I think Joker wondered the same thing. Maybe we can work out the details. Does the anarchist cookbook tell us anything practical?
