JimRob's Vanity Post on Vanity Posts, Duplicate Posts, Trash Posts, Commie Propaganda, etc., Vol V,

And, whatever else you do, please DO NOT post from DEMOCRATS UNDERGROUND (or any other such trashy un-American socialist hangout). Free Republic was intended to be a socialist free zone. We've gone to a heck of a lot of trouble to make it that way. Why in the world would you think we would be interested in having their trash posted here?

And QUIT trashing each other. You know who you are. Knock it off! Way too many flamewars and feuds going on. And, while I'm thinking about it, QUIT trashing our conservative candidates. If you want to criticize someone's position on some policy, have at it. But do not trash or smear the man. That would include Browne, Buchanan, Bush, Keyes, et al, or whomever else may be your favorite trashee (examples listed in alphabetical sequence). The idea is to get more conservatives elected, not to trash the ones you don't like. If you want to trash someone, make it a Democrat. Thank you.

And QUIT dredging up old communist propaganda to smear our conservatives. Sheesh! Whatever else you may think about our guys, they did not hijack airliners full of people and crash them into buildings. No, my friends, not even the dreaded CIA. Anyone who would believe (or even suspect) that crap is no FReeper. I've been pulling this crap whenever I see it and several people have been banned for continuing to post it. I do not want it on Free Republic. Any current FR poster who believes this leftist propaganda, please logoff immediately, send me your resignation via email, and I will delete your account.

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord. He wrote:

GOD IS POWER

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of selfdeception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except!

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

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