Sunday, November 12, 2006
Orwell warned us
George Orwell and Noam Chomsky have warned us about a thought control device that's so obvious we don't notice it. The bad guys take a word that's useful for discussing some social problem that they don't want us discussing, and they start using it to mean something else. After a while, the original meaning can't compete with the new non-meaning.
The right wing publicity complex (I call it hate radio), along with misguided civil libertarians like Hugh Hefner, attached a new meaning to feminism, nearly opposite to what feminists mean by the term. The resource extraction industries have so diluted recycle that it hardly means anything today. Hate radio is destroying the specific term Fascism these days. Grassroots resistance to occupation in majority Muslim nations is a lot of things, but it's not Fascist nor even fascist. I'm sure you can think of a dozen more words under attack.
The advertising industry has been worrying for a long time about the decline of print media, especially postal mail. They're being told electronic mail is replacing paper, and they're the lobby that's shot down any sensible spam bills in the US Congress. They want to be allowed to send "legitimate" spam. If they can't have that, they'll settle for destroying the public email system to prevent it from obsoleting postal mail.
The advertising industry is exactly what George Orwell warned us it would be, a propaganda system so sophisticated it accomplishes thought control to a degree Hitler and Stalin and Mao could have only wished for. These days, they're encouraging misuse of the word spam, to make it more difficult for us to intelligently discuss the problem of unsolicited broadcast email. Watch for it. The next time you see someone referring to an off-topic message in a mailing list as spam, notice it. That's the bad guys, succeeding.
The right wing publicity complex (I call it hate radio), along with misguided civil libertarians like Hugh Hefner, attached a new meaning to feminism, nearly opposite to what feminists mean by the term. The resource extraction industries have so diluted recycle that it hardly means anything today. Hate radio is destroying the specific term Fascism these days. Grassroots resistance to occupation in majority Muslim nations is a lot of things, but it's not Fascist nor even fascist. I'm sure you can think of a dozen more words under attack.
The advertising industry has been worrying for a long time about the decline of print media, especially postal mail. They're being told electronic mail is replacing paper, and they're the lobby that's shot down any sensible spam bills in the US Congress. They want to be allowed to send "legitimate" spam. If they can't have that, they'll settle for destroying the public email system to prevent it from obsoleting postal mail.
The advertising industry is exactly what George Orwell warned us it would be, a propaganda system so sophisticated it accomplishes thought control to a degree Hitler and Stalin and Mao could have only wished for. These days, they're encouraging misuse of the word spam, to make it more difficult for us to intelligently discuss the problem of unsolicited broadcast email. Watch for it. The next time you see someone referring to an off-topic message in a mailing list as spam, notice it. That's the bad guys, succeeding.
