You had better see five lights...

...or it's a trip to Room 101 for you.

California legislature ponders jail sentence for persistent refusal to use "correct" pronoun.

"Room 101" reference here.

"Five lights" reference here.

Videos

Hold on! You mean I could get ...
...paid for this?

George Orwell on the pathetic life of the professional book reviewer:

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore
the great majority of books and to give very long reviews--1,000 words is
a bare minimum--to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or
two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review
of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely
wants to write it. Normally he doesn't want to write it, and the week-in,
week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed figure in
a dressing-gown whom I described at the beginning of this article.
However, everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down
on, and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book
reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work
at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with
one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass
of inferior sherry.

Touchy subject.

I've been in a long debate with pro-abortion atheists, secularists  and humanists and one very liberal Catholic about miscarriages and infanticide on Unbelievable?.

What it seems like is that they define any death or murder of a newborn as a "miscarriage."  In other words, they conflate miscarriage and infanticide.

So I posted this on a recent story that seems to hit the Orwellian use of language directly.

By now you've likely heard about the woman caught with a dead baby in her bag while shopping at a Victoria's Secret in Manhattan.

Despite revelations that Tiona Rodriguez suffocated her child shortly after its birth, the Associated Press refuses to call it a baby (emphasis added):

An autopsy of a fetus found in a teenage girl's shopping bag at a New York City lingerie store was inconclusive, and more tests will be needed to determine how the fetus died, the city medical examiner's office says. [...]

Preliminary reports from detectives suggest the fetus was born alive and possibly had been asphyxiated, but chief New York Police Department spokesman John McCarthy said that the case was still being investigated and that police were awaiting the medical examiners' determination of the cause of death. [...]

The case began Thursday when a security guard stopped two 17-year-old girls to examine their bags at a Victoria's Secret store in midtown Manhattan. The guard found the dead fetus in one of the bags.

The girl who had been carrying the bag containing the fetus told detectives she had delivered a day earlier and didn't know what to do, authorities said.

So, despite the preliminary reports that the baby was "born alive and possibly had been asphyxiated," the AP four times referred to it as a fetus.

So, here's another "miscarriage" that the "miscarriage police" are persecuting women over.

It's great what you can do with language.

If this "miscarriage" was born alive and the "mother" killed it by intentional action or reckless indifference, then I assume that we would all agree that that would be "murder" (all other things being equal such as defenses based on psychosis or mental capacity.)

But perhaps I'm wrong in making that assumption.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/10/19/ap-just-cant-bring-itself-call-dead-baby-found-bag-victorias-secret-b

Rutgers' student accused of "invasion of privacy allegedly causing suicide" gets a 30 day sentence...

...and a $10,000 fine...

...which seems trivial given the media attention to the story.

According to this article:

A former Rutgers University student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate was sentenced Monday to just 30 days in jail — a punishment that disappointed some activists but came as a relief to others who feared he would be made a scapegoat for his fellow freshman's suicide.

Dharun Ravi, 20, could have gotten 10 years behind bars for his part in a case that burst onto front pages when Tyler Clementi threw himself to his death off the George Washington Bridge.

Instead, Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman gave Ravi a month in jail, placed him on three years' probation and ordered him to get counseling and pay $10,000 toward a program to help victims of hate crimes.

"Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance," Berman said.

Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said he will appeal the sentence, calling it insufficient.

Several points.

First, it sounds like the original media narrative was jammed into the homophobe narrative from the beginning and, in a word, was largely B.S. The "revisionist" position - there was no broadcast, the gay student wasn't "outed"; he was already "out" - seems to have been vindicated.

Chalk this up as a reason to take anything the media tells you with a grain of salt.

Second, there really is a problem with privacy protection. It's too easy to have one's conduct observed, permanently recorded and broadly disseminated. I'm not sure what the defendant really did in that regard, or the extent of his culpability, but that is a problem and deserves legal sanction, whether a person is a politically favored minority or not.

Third, what's with the judge's comment that ""Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance"?

What happened to "the right of one man to his own opinion"? Or the right to swing one's arm ends at another person's nose?

Does our society really have a right to expect that every member will entertain no "intolerant" thoughts? Or is it that our society has a right to expect that no one will engage in actions that injure another person for malicious reasons, whether the motive is intolerance, personal gain or sheer immature meanness?

I thought it was always the latter. If Dahrun Ravi injured Clementi out of malice, then 30 days would seem not to be enough, given the fact that Clementi killed himself. On the other hand, if Ravi is being punished for his thoughts or attitudes, then 30 days is way too much.

Finally, what struck me most about the story was the ugliness of all involved. Clementi kicked Ravi out of his room for his gay trysts. How is that respectful of Ravi's right to use his room. Ravi intercepts Clementi's sexual activities and then broadcasts the fact about what was going on like a fishwife gossip. How does that respect Clementi's privacy? There seems to be a whole lot of selfishness and narcissism defining these privileged students at a top-ranked university.

A window into Dante's Hell.

The Jersey Conservative mines the narrative of the gay bullying case, where a Rutgers student committed suicide shortly after his roommate broadcast his dorm room trysts to the world, for some interesting insights into the complexity of being a "millenial."

Update:

Well, except that apparently there was no broadcasting:

Ravi and Clementi agreed to become roommates their freshman year after finding one another online. Ravi quickly discovered that Clementi was gay, since his prospective roommate was posting on a gay website. (Clementi came out to his parents shortly before leaving for school.) Ravi and a friend engaged in juvenile banter, making fun of Clementi for being gay, “poor,” and uncool. It’s painful to read, but no different than what high-school students say about one another all the time.

Clementi and Ravi barely talked when they lived together. One night, Clementi asked Ravi to leave him alone with a nonstudent in his mid-20s for what turned out to be an assignation. From a friend’s room across the hall, Ravi briefly turned on his webcam and saw the two in an embrace. He derisively tweeted that he saw his roommate “making out with a dude.”

Clementi later saw Ravi’s tweet and agonized about what to do. In the meantime, he asked for the room again for another tryst, and this time Ravi tweeted that people should tap into his webcam for a show. But Clementi turned off Ravi’s computer, and the viewing never happened. Clementi requested a change of roommates. With that, and disciplinary action against Ravi, it should have ended.

Well, that's not the version of the story I heard two years ago.

Further update:

Then, there's this:

What did Dharun Ravi do? Well, he was a freshman roommate at Rutgers University with a chap named Tyler Clementi. Clementi was homosexual, and not a closeted one — he didn’t make much of a secret of it. Why would he? Our young people are taught from kindergarten on that “gay is just as good as straight,” that Heather has two mommies, that homosexuals should be “proud,” and so on. My local high school has a club for homosexual students. Anyone who’s embarrassed or ashamed about being homosexual hasn’t been paying attention for about thirty years. And in fact, Clementi wasn’t ashamed: in those first three weeks of his freshman year, he attended at least one meeting of the Rutgers students Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance.

Well, a year last September, Dharun Ravi and another freshman, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi kissing a young man Clementi had picked up. After watching the video, Ravi gossiped about it on Twitter, quote: “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Three days after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge. Whether this had any connection at all to the webcam incident, is not known. That Dharun Ravi thought his prank might drive Clementi to suicide is preposterous; that he intended that result is preposterosity squared.

So, he wasn't even "outed"?

What the...hey?!?!??!?

Right idea; wrong remedy.

Michael Coren points out that the French are about to make denial of the Armenian Genocide a criminal offense:

Oh, I just love this. The French intend to make public denial of the Armenian genocide a criminal offence. I don’t agree with this precise approach to the scandal, but I do applaud France for having long defended the Armenian people, and having not allowed the Turkish bullies to promote the vile lie that there was no genocide, and that the Armenians simply died under war conditions. There certainly was an attempted genocide, the Turks certainly did try to wipe out the Armenians, the event certainly did partly inspire Hitler, and for almost a century Turkey has been in organized denial, and various other nations have followed suit. What defies credulity now is that the Turks have accused the French of clamping down on free speech! This from a country that has more journalists in prison than any other on the face of the earth, and that has for generations assassinated writers, politicians, and activists who speak up for the Armenians. There are all sorts of reasons for Paris pursuing this latest project, and it has much to do with foreign policy as well as moral absolutes, but there cannot be a more hypocritical country than Turkey. While invading Kurdistan and killing thousands, they condemn Israel for defending its people. They occupy Cyprus, destroy Christian churches and holy places, kill male and female clergy, arrest military and political opponents on trumped up charges, and now lecture the civilized French on how to behave. Shame on them.

Yes, the Turks are jerks, but to criminalize the denial of a historical opinion is nothing less than Orwellian.

A better answer would be "more speech." If it's such a problem, the French government - or better still, a private foundation - should run commercials on public television educating the French about the Armenian Genocide.

Something Orwell probably never said, but he should have - 

According to this site:

"In a time/state of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” is a statement often attributed to author George Orwell (1903-1950). The saying doesn’t appear in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), or any other of Orwell’s writings. The saying has been cited in print since at least 1984 (when it was attributed to George Orwell).


A similar saying was used by author and presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2008—“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”

"Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell.

Book review up at Amazon.

George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is a 20th Century classic. It captures a snapshot of the mindset of the Left at a particular point in time when the world seemed poised between a Fascist future and a Communist future, and although ultimately, even for Orwell, it was hard to tell the difference in practice between the two, the allure of Marxism never dimmed.


Orwell's autobiographical story opens with his decision to abandon the neutrality of the journalistic sidelines and enter into a struggle that his class and cohort considered to be a titanic and defining moment of history. Orwell makes the leap by joining the militia of the P.O.U.M ("POUM") in Barcelona in December of 1936 not long after the Nationalist's coup had been suppressed by a coalition of leftist militias. POUM was the militia fielded by a Marxist-but-not-Communist political party/worker's movement. In the Barcelona of 1936, all of the leftist political movements, including the anarchists and the Communists had their own militias. POUM and the Anarchists of was to the "left" of the Communists among the parties supporting the Spanish Republic.

Orwell is enchanted by the Barcelona of December, 1936, which he fancies to be the one place on Earth where the working class is in control. He is charmed by the fact that everyone is wearing working class clothes and the traditional religious based greetings have been replaced by sturdy revolutionary slogans.

Orwell is soon on his way to the "front," which turns out to be a short stretch of trenches near Zaragoza. From that point, Orwell's account describes the mundane reality of static warfare, with long stretches of inactivity broken by the rare activity of desultory conflict. These accounts are fascinating in describing the unromantic nature of military action generally and of the period between the World Wars, particularly. Orwell's active involvement in front line warfare ended in early 1937 when he was struck in the throat by a bullet, which threatened to leave him mute for the rest of his life, although he did recover. Orwell was then subjected to the coarse ministrations of the Spanish medical service and returned to Barcelona in time for the suppression of the POUM by the Communists.

Orwell has two sections of his book where he describes the internecine conflict between the leftist parties. Orwell is frankly apologetic for these sections, which he describes as being distasteful and undoubtedly not of great interest to his reader. In this he is entirely wrong because they make up the most interesting and insightful parts of his book. Orwell describes the influence of the Russian NKVD over the Republic, and explains the Communist parties' crackdown on the leftist elements of the left as being to serve the interest of Russia, which did not want France distracted by a radical Spain at its back when Russia was interested in seeing a strong France focused on Germany. Orwell then describes the crackdown by the Communists and Republic that resulted in the rounding up of POUM officers and soldiers and their internment in Communist irregular jails. Orwell found himself having to sleep in the streets to avoid arrest and internment, a fate that many international volunteers found themselves in and from which they never emerged.

One of the most chilling things about these sections is Orwell's seeming acceptance of these actions by the Communists. Orwell clearly thinks that the liquidation of the POUM was a waste of effort and cruel, but he doesn't seem outraged by it in the same way that he feels outraged by the Fascists who were doing nothing essentially different. It is as if right thinking Leftists understood that totalitarianism was inevitable and so long as it had a "worker's" flavor, it was acceptable on some level. Orwell seems to have been more outraged by the Communist's reactionary policy that favored the bourgeoisie than by the fact that the Communists were totalitarian thugs. Obviously, Orwell's Catalonian experience eventually made him distrustful of Communists and condemnatory of the totalitarian mindset, as can be seen in his later works.

Orwell's descriptions of Spain and his off-hand description of the anti-Catholicism of the Leftist is also interesting. Orwell constantly belittles the Spanish for their "manana" attitude and their disorganization. He also notes how every Catholic church he sees in Republican territory has been burned, vandalized and/or turned into a latrine. This last observation seems to leave him with no concerns for the civil rights of Catholics, but, rather, it seems that his latent British prejudice against Catholicism and Spain combine to make the desecration of churches appear almost appropriate.

Orwell's description of his military service at times seems to be a cliché from either World War II military movies showing Brits keeping a "stiff upper lip" or Monty Python. He describes ducking from a bullet in his first action and the experience of being shot in such a way that he seems amazed that he was human - imagine ducking from a bullet! How unBritish! This effect was heightened by the audiobook version I was listening to, where the narrator's voice seemed perfect to play the "British twit" role in a Monty Python skit. The reading, however, was clear and interesting.

"Homage to Catalonia" is a fascinating window into a slice of the Spanish Civil War and the mindset of people on the Left prior to the World War II.

Orwell v. God.

A pretty interesting essay on George Orwell's conflicted relationship with religion.

Reading the essay, you get a sense that Christopher Hitchens - the discount Orwellian wannabe - has modeled a lot of his attitudes on Orwell.

It was 1948 and a 45 year old man named Eric Blair was writing a book...

...while dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Scotland. Blair would be die in 1950, after the book, a caustic condemnation of Communism was published under his pen name, George Orwell, with the title "1984."

I didn't realize that Orwell was so young when he died.