Free Republic

What's in a word? Why does it matter whether we call someone who breaks the law to enter the country an "illegal alien" or an "undocumented immigrant"? What's the difference between a Christmas tree and a "holiday tree"? It's just semantics, right? Yes...and no. It is just semantics. But "semantics" means the meaning of words. Words exist so that we might differentiate one thing from another. Without words we have chaos. And it starts with the first words; a baby says ‘Mama’ to distinguish Mommy from Daddy. Words shape how we think; they color how we view the world. And...

Trump White House accuses China of 'Orwellian nonsense' Beijing seeks to change US airline references to disputed territories Harsh statement released as US trade delegation returns The White House on Saturday condemned Chinese efforts to control how US airlines refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao as “Orwellian nonsense”. The harshly worded statement came as a high-level trade delegation led by the Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin returned from negotiations in China. The carriers were told to remove references on their websites or in other material that suggests Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are part of countries independent from China, US...

By Noah Shachtman It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program! The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable. What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing? The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone...

Users of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are victims of discrimination and should no longer be called druggies or junkies, an international drug legalisation pressure group declared yesterday. It called for an end to negative language for drug users and their habits in order to ensure their human rights are respected. As part of the drive to persuade people to think differently about drugs, the words addict and even drug user must be thrown out, a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy said. It urged newspapers and broadcasters to encourage more positive attitudes by calling a drug user a...

H.G. Wells vs. George Orwell: Their debate on whether science is humanity’s best hope continues today. CONTRIBUTOR: Richard Gunderman In the midst of contemporary science’s stunning discoveries and innovations – for example, 2017 alone brought the editing of a human embryo’s genes, the location of an eighth continent under the ocean and the ability to reuse a spacecraft’s rocket boosters – it’s easy to forget that there’s an ongoing debate over science’s capacity to save humankind. Seventy-five years ago, two of the best-known literary figures of the 20th century, H.G. Wells and George Orwell, carried on a lively exchange over...

Unbelievable Orwellian technology being used against the Chinese, could spread worldwide. You just have to watch it. Video at link.

"if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. Big Brother, a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive...

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group. The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate. But it will re-open its investigation should it receive...

Bizarre misreading: @HillaryClinton thinks the lesson of Orwell's 1984 is that you should trust experts, leaders and the press

A bill that passed the California state senate and is now moving through the Assembly could threaten jail time for anyone who refuses to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun. The law is currently limited in its effects to nursing homes and intermediate-care facilities, but if passed, those who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse “to use a transgender resident’s preferred name or pronouns” could be slapped with a $1,000 fine and up to one year in prison, according to the California Heath and Safety code. The state senate passed the bill 26-12 at the end of May. Since then, the Assembly...

George Orwell’s dictum, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," is often quoted, and for good reason. But it is usually quoted out of context. The passage begins: "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. " Then comes the aphorism, and Orwell continues: "And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. All that was needed was...

Like so many of my fellow freepers, I have real intellectual problems with Google and the way it operates, but I've tended to stick with them because their news search function was extremely helpful. But they've changed things and their news search is much less helpful now.

Orwell had an oft-repeated statement: "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act"But we've gone beyond Orwell. Now conservatives are attacked for stating something backed up with months of video evidence - that AntiFa is violent and provokes most of the conflict at protests/counterprotests. So Orwell needs to be rewritten:"In a time of liberal deceit, stating the obvious is a revolutionary act."

In the new Civil War, I’m with George — as in George Washington. It’s one thing to start dismantling monuments of Civil War generals. It would be another to go after the most famous founding father. Washington’s name was raised Tuesday by President Trump. He wheeled on reporters and tried — yet again — to suggest an equivalence between the alt-right and alt-left at Charlottesville. Trump was getting his head handed to him when he noted that there were people there “to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue.” The president was referring to Robert...

LOVE DRUG: WESTERNERS ARE KINDER TO MIGRANTS WHEN GIVEN THE ‘LOVE HORMONE’ OXYTOCIN AND PUT UNDER PEER PRESSURE, SCIENTISTS FIND ACADEMICS NOTE THAT PEOPLE TEND TO BE MORE ‘ALTRUISTIC TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS THAN TO PERFECT STRANGERS’ – BUT THINK THEY KNOW HOW TO CHANGE THIS. Researchers from the University of Bonn said that humans tend to be generally kinder to friends and family than strangers. “Given the right circumstances, oxytocin may help promote the acceptance and integration of migrants into Western cultures.” The suggestion that Westerners should be given drugs to make them more welcoming to foreigners is likely...

How the AP Stylebook censors ‘pro-life’ and other conservative words | TheHill http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/341210-how-the-ap-stylebook-censors-pro-life-and-other-conservative-words July 09, 2017 - 04:20 PM EDT How the AP Stylebook censors ‘pro-life’ and other conservative words AssociatedPress By Rachel Alexander, opinion contributor A journalism stylebook is supposed to provide universal guidelines for writers when it comes to stylistic things like punctuation, capitalization and so on. This includes choosing certain words over others. The original intent of word preference was to use words that are more neutral than others. But in recent years, that concept has changed. More often than not, style writers have been more interested...

Leftists tolerate differences in race, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status but are extremely intolerant of differences of opinion George Orwell introduced the language of doublespeak in his dystopian novel “1984” published in 1949. Doublespeak is the language of opposites. Up is down and down is up. The word doublespeak derives from two Orwellian words “doublethink” and “newspeak.” Doublethink is when a person accepts two mutually contradictory thoughts as correct without being aware or troubled by the glaring contradiction between them. Doublethink statements like “war is peace” “freedom is slavery” “ignorance is strength” are made without discomfort. Newspeak is a method...

Olivia Wilde, Tom Sturridge and Reed Birney star in the bold staging of George Orwell’s dystopian novel. The play 1984 is not for the average theatergoer. Adapting George Orwell’s dystopian novel — set in a future when critical thought is suppressed by a totalitarian regime, ostensibly overseen by a party leader known as Big Brother — the new Broadway staging includes special effects like strobe lights and jackhammer sound effects, in addition to the plot’s extreme torture scenes. Throughout the London transfer’s previews, attendees have fainted, thrown up and screamed at the actors from their seats. After one performance, some...

A parade of giant gold pigs could be flying by Trump Tower in Chicago some time this summer, obscuring the 20-foot-high "TRUMP" letters on the side of the building facing the Chicago River. Chicago-based architecture design group New World Projects came up with the idea for "Flying Pigs on Parade" as a response to Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election. The floating art installation would send four giant gold pig ballons attached to a barge down the Chicago River for a day this summer, on a Saturday or Sunday in August, CBS Chicago reports. New World Projects still has...