If you are reading this, I want you to do something not only for me, but for you.

I want you to buy a copy of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four. And I want you to read it through, then I want you to spend a month or two reading up on the surveillance state that is the UK - I will post a very good list of links for you if you request it, from news sources, etc. - and then read the book again.

Why?

Because today I gave up. I gave up trying to fight the surveillance state. I gave up trying to debate the merits of the surveillance state, the morals of it, the nature of freedom, the stripping away of privacy and freedom of speech. I gave it all up because of duckspeak and reality-control - voluntary stupidity, as Orwell put it.

I quote myself from elsewhere;

"George Orwell, in his book Nineteen Eighty Four, talking of a few concepts I did not understand. First, was "duckspeak," noted as being a compliment to your friends and an insult to your enemies - relentless quacking of propaganda.

Another was reality-control - deliberate, voluntary stupidity.

Today, I saw both in action.

I am trying, on another forum, to have a debate about mass surveillance in the UK, as well as the threat of totalitarianism. Do you know what I got?

Post after post of, "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear," and spurious insults at me, saying I was "delusional," that I was a "self-absorbed dreamer," that I "must have something to hide" to question the government line on terrorism, or the threat of serious crime (I argued that what is in the media is not strictly true).

I saw it - duckspeak. The same propaganda lines which allow people to sink into placid ignorance and allow anything to be justified in the name of "security."
They would not even abide my comments that freedoms and privacy are rights, not privilages, and that law-abiding people deserve these freedoms more than anyone. Nope - I was either mad or a criminal.

Another said I obviously had too much time on my hands to think about all this - implying that "normal" people don't think about it - and certainly never question it. There - voluntary stupidity.

I had a moment of pure existential angst. I can't win - I can't beat propaganda rot of the mind, or voluntary, blissful stupidity, or paranoid ignorance. And this is all without even mentioning the actual surveillance state that is the UK.

Orwellian totalitarianism might just have arrived, and I am totally depressed. Someone please confirm that I am not Winston Smith - that I have some kind of "Brotherhood?""

I cannot beat it - I will not join it. All I can do is blog - write by myself, posting my thoughts, my beliefs, like Winston Smith's Diary but online for anyone to view. Not try to debate it - do as they do, which is state my beliefs and allow no debate. I can delete comments I do not like as I please, like the very Thought Police of that novel. But I will not, not if the comments are constructive, and not threatening, vindictive, ignorant or swallowed up in self-absorbed backslapping pride at being so well-behaved that the poster happily allows their freedoms to be pulled from under them to counter people like ME - non-conformists, who are by nature, suspicious characters.

Soon, this very type of blogging will be disallowed. A new Treason Law will be enacted eventually, which will completely outlaw all forms of public questioning of the entire establishment, I am sure.