It Was a Bright Cold Day in April, and the Clocks Were Striking Patriarchy

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

‘As you lie there,’ said O’Brien, ‘you have often wondered you have even asked me — why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, “I understand how: I do not understand why“? It was when you thought about “why” that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Hayek’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?’

‘You have read it?’ said Winston.

‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.’

‘Is it true, what it says?’ Something about the idea that O’Brien had written it did not ring true, but Winston had no proof it had existed before the Utopia.

‘It was thought to be true once, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The individual by himself, no compensation to historically oppressed groups, no debasing of privilege.  Everyone knows the only way to run a society is to keep the forces of oppression and compensation in balance, to right historical wrongs.  The way to sanity is to always be aware of your evil thoughts, your tendency to abuse your privilege.  And everyone has privilege, except the priests of balancing, the enlightened, those who know how to keep society running.

The peons can’t be trusted with such delicate balancing of forces.  Left to themselves,s the lumpen proletariat will embrace greed and money making and the society created will be unequal, and wrong, and chaotic.  Like Somalia.”

“What’s Somalia?” Winston asked.  And for a moment he saw a shadow of confusion cross O’Brien’s eyes.  “It’s not important.  That’s how to answer the idea of individual freedom.  It’s like Somalia.  And Somalia is not Utopia. Utopia is perfect and it’s forever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.’

The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O’Brien’s face. He knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the enlightened ones did not seek power for their own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the enlightened ones was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it.

You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the enlightened ones kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly. ‘You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore –‘

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should know better than to say a thing like that.’

He pulled the lever back and continued:

‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. Only the enlightened ones can punish humanity as it deserves to be punished.  Humanity is a cancer upon the Earth, the only species capable of rendering others extinct, the only species that will destroy the planet left to its own devices.

But killing everyone would be wrong, because then someone might get the idea they could kill us and we don’t want to die.  And the instinct to reproduce is so strong, that merely outlawing reproduction wouldn’t work.

Setting a barrier between men and women? Convincing women men are the oppressors?  Convincing women that they are simultaneously fragile and powerful, till they’re crazy?  That works.  Convincing people heterosexuality is somehow abnormal, and sex is just for play, and then ultimately that all sex everywhere is about power and wrong?  That works.  The birthrate is falling, Winston, and soon we will have w orld without people.”  Winston stopped, a mad gleam in his eyes.  “A world without people.”

For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.

‘But how can you control all humans?’ he burst out. ‘Don’t you think here and there, a new colony will start and the species will grow anew.”

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘Oh, yes,” he said.  “Humans are like cockroaches.  But if we get in their minds and make them believe us, then we have them. You can make them believe anything. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not make you believe. Invisibility, levitation — anything. That despite biological, obvious differences, and other differences in musculature, in brain formation, despite hormones and how they shape everything about a human before he’s even born, we can make humans believe there are no differences between the sexes.  And alternately we can make them believe all males are natural oppressors and must be punished simply for existing, and all women, no matter how powerful or rich are natural victims and must be appeased.  We can make them believe there are no differences, and at the same time that there are six genders, or ten, or twelve, or a hundred, all of them natural from birth.’

“But that’s mad,” Winston shouted.  “Utterly mad.  You can’t make anyone deny the truth of their own eyes, forever.”

He knew the lever would be pulled.

****

“How many genders does humanity have, Winston?”

“Two!”

The lever was pulled.

“How many?”

“Four.”

The lever was pulled.

“How many?”

“A hundred”

The lever was pulled.

“How many?”

“As many as the enlightened say.”

“That is right, Winston, you are almost well.  And what is PIV.”
“Violation.  Always violation.”

“Can’t a woman consent to sex with a man?”

“There is no true consent, since even in Utopia cis het males are programmed to institute patriarchy.  You must always be vigilant against your own thoughts and your own unconscious privilege, even if you can’t be fully aware of it.  All penetration is violation.  A baby is an invader in a woman’s body.  Utopia is forever and only the enlightened can tell us when we’re wrong. Because the individual is not able to balance the forces of retribution and oppression and greed by himself, or not even within himself. Society is always imbalanced, and there will be oppression till all of humanity is gone, so the enlightened ones must teach us and correct us until that time.”

*********

Winston gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken zeem to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the androgynous, unreadable face. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of zees nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Zee had won the victory over Zeeself. Zee loved Big Gender Indeterminate Sibling.

204 thoughts on “It Was a Bright Cold Day in April, and the Clocks Were Striking Patriarchy”

      1. Of course it has to be a WHITE courtesy phone, otherwise what would have been the point of asking the airport operator to page Mr. Mandela back in the 1970s and early ’80s?

      3. At least O’Brien here was esposing the “all PIV is rape” because he actively didn’t want any children born. That’s comparatively sane. I’ve run into feminazis who use that line because clearly the vagina’s only purpose is for the baby to come out of, and its only because the cismale entitlement patriarchy that thinks they ought to be allowed to put their organs into a hole so obviously for a different purpose.

        There are some kinds of stupid it’s difficult to argue against because it’s clear that whatever universe they’re in, it isn’t this one.

          1. Of course it is. Lucky for us that humanity has and always will have a short direct and extremely violent answer to that wish.
            When they are in power you quickly learn to tell the enlightened whatever they want to hear from you, and you do your best to find ways to serve them to their satisfaction. And when they bask in the assurance that all is right with the world, well then is when you slit their bloody throats.

        3. Oh, we know them. Talks with Plants, as we call one who not only thinks like that, but thinks that some women can actually talk with plants and that men are the bloodthirsty ones while she fantasizes of mass murder.

  7. That is the most painful work of satire I’ve ever read. I had finished that last great paragraph before I realized the work is, in its infrablack way, very funny.

      2. The neat thing is cloth can pretty much any color in visible, but with the right infra-dyes, it can still be black in below-visible-frequency light.

        InfraGoths can now wear pink.

  9. On the first Feminian sandstones we were promised a fuller life,
    Which began with loving thy neighbor and ended with loving his wife
    ‘Till our women had no more children ’till our men lost reason and faith.
    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, “The wages of sin is death.”

    We are many paces past the first steps on that path. Fortunately, the women among us *do* have children, and raise them well. *grin* We’re not like cockroaches, we’re like humans. That’s a far more dangerous thing, it is.

    We build, we grow, we do crazy things, like go to the moon. And someday Mars. And then there’s these insane ideas about freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, hard work, and honesty that just won’t die.

    We’ve a difficult task ahead of us, maintaining our republic and repairing the broken bits as best we can. But it is worth doing, and we *can* do it. Americans have done the “impossible” before. There’s no one better to try but us.

    1. Cantankerous, rambunctious, disagreeable – and disagreeing with each other… but, should someone make the mistake of causing a “magnetization”[1] and getting some alignment… a single mirror reflecting the sun is a nuisance. A few million and… well that problem, whatever it was, is apt to find itself not ‘managed’ but solved. That it might not like (or even survive) the solution won’t matter. Solved it will get.

      [1] This has an astonishingly high, but not infinite, activation energy. And there is almost no warning that that next erg is gonna be the regrettable one.

      1. Millions? Two will do, if they’re quite parallel. The fools are providing the population inversion, with no understanding of what that enables.

          1. Taurus sat at the bar, spinning his glass,
            When he spotted a lady’s very nice ass,
            But he knew zee was trouble,
            ‘Cause he remembered it double,
            He met zer in the PIV class.

                2. There once a man from Nantucket
                  Whose father decided to chuck it
                  So he sighed “Alas
                  that it should come to pass
                  My inheritance should come by a bucket”

                  2. There once was a man from Nantucket
                    Who carried his wife in a bucket
                    When her nagging grew loud
                    Or attracted a crowd
                    He’d often be tempted to duck it.

                3. While in the S. Pacific, I tooka a Creative Writing class through the U of MD extension program. One of my fellow students averred that all dirty limericks rhymed with ‘Nantucket. I endeavoured to prove him wrong:

                  There was a young man from Tibet
                  Who really hated to get wet
                  ‘Til a girl with a glower
                  Gave him a golden shower.
                  Then he took one each chance he could get.

                  And Judge Posner is still a moron.

              6. There once was a man from Nantucket.
                Who realized that rhyming schemes were oppressive tools of the patriarchy.
                And that meter was racist.

          2. …He had reached the mystical state of DGAF^1.618. He had organized, or disorganized, himself to inhabit the golden edge of chaos.

            And then The Last Electron flipped, with far-reaching effect. Everything changed. He developed a magnetic personality. Hordes of would-be lovers tunneled in from neighboring dimensions. His words developed a whimsical affinity for the ears of the ready-to-be-convinced. And So. Much. More.

            Spin glasses are like that.

    2. When, at the end, Picard confesses that he did see four lights… I always interpreted that to mean his interrogator, no doubt under pressure from management to keep his quota for the month, just gave up and brought in two more lights so he could check the boxes on this stupid case and get an easier one in.

  15. I have never so sincerely wanted to be wrong, but this here.. um.. I mean, that old Republic over there.. is over. Pining for the fnords. Deceased. Felix Dzerzhinsky runs the FBI.

    I regularly ask August Personage for miraculous intervention, but I’d understand if He was set on a program of rigorous education at this point. He may for a while allow us to be toys for Moloch, as that seems to be what we want.

    In the end, we win, and the Powers and Principalities lose. But the Belters will not be speaking ‘Murkan.

      1. What she said. yesterday a flyer from Mountain O’Geese arrived in the mail. The Election Day firearms sale catalogue. Nothing tempted me (OK, there was that one Ruger, but otherwise), but that to me suggests that a lot of people are betting on standing up on their hind-legs and saying “Stop.” And that M o G is betting they are willing to part with $$$ in the process.

        1. Synchronicity strikes again! I’ll be at a GM location tomorrow, getting some MN-specific (it’s Baptists and Bootleggers all the way down) CCW training. A longtime niggle about not wanting to be improperly dressed if invited willy-nilly to a polar bear hunt recently came into focus, in Charlotte of all places.

        2. One SJW flatly told me that the guns are being sold only to those with arsenals — that gun ownership in America is going down. I pointed out that what we know is only that the number of people who would admit to having a gun in a survey has gone down. Refused to take it in.

    2. Back in the dark ages, one of my 6th-8th grade teachers would occasionally apply a Board of Education to the sitting muscles of students who ignored standing rules and wouldn’t hear a quiet verbal reminder that their deportment was out of acceptable bounds. I suspect that August Personage, holding ancient-fashioned notions of the psychology of correction, has something similar in mind.
      I do recall that one A. Lincoln suggested that the Late Unpleasantness might possibly have been such an educational opportunity.

      1. It’s been 150 years, some may have forgotten , or nev er learned the lesson. A Kipple a day keeps the Progressive away.

  16. I was just thinking last night at work that sooner or later someone is going to complain about having to insert the PIV card into the computer slot in order to verify identity and sign on…

    Maybe I should do it…

  17. This actually highlights how the enemy has overplayed their hand. Once we break the backs of Big Media, then we’ll show everyone: there are four lights.

  18. As always The Question is “Will the armed forces fire on the People?”.

    I would like believe that if That Day ever came there would be a senior NCO, stooled to the rogue, standing behind each and every zampolit. But those (overwhelmingly) guys are being forcibly retired.

    The analysis of what to do to change The Answer from “no” to “yes” is not that hard. And the project is running.

    1. The question isn’t whether the Armed Forces will fire on “the people”. They will because ultimately one doesn’t shoot for political reasons, one shoots because one doesn’t want to die, or doesn’t want the people to your left or right to die.

      “They” will simply deploy military units (National Guard) in front of one marching society after another and wait. Violence will happen and blood will flow.

      1. I’m not entirely certain of that, but then, the Powers that Be will really have to destroy the American military as we know it. for that to work…

          1. I’m seeing the last two paragraph’s of David Drake’s story about the tank soldiers in Vietnam and the career officer in my mind’s eye . . .

        1. That presumes that they don’t stage manage the first incidents. Consider the showmanship inherent in events like Ferguson and Baltimore.

          1. That presumes that Americans aren’t bright enough to beat seven kind of living shit out of obvious agents provocateurs. AGAIN we were. You didn’t go to tea parties, did you? Such people were very quickly identified and isolated.

            1. Heh. I’m reminded of the time at my first TEA Party rally here. I pulled out a comparatively large camera (OK, it was old, even for the time), and suddenly I realized that the guy five feet away was looking at me like I was going down if that turned out to be anything dangerous.

            2. Didn’t.

              Can’t beat up provocateurs if what the media call tea party white supremacist violent extremists, the initial incidents, are fairly standard anarchocommie rent-a-mobs.

              Suspect anyone trying that could run into all sorts of complications beyond their ability to predict.

                1. My apologies.

                  Fall Weiss. Germans pretending to be Poles staged an attack on a German, IIRC, radio station.

                  With NCA, units could perhaps be staked out as sacrifices to a mob. Possibly this could extend to going into situations that they would need to shoot their way out of.

                  The control over leftist rent-a-mobs, at the same time, might be great enough to pull together one to corner above mentioned military units, and overrun them if they don’t defend themselves.

                  If someone has sufficient control over both, and a captive media who will call the rioters tea party protestors, and the national emotional situation has escalated, it might be possible to get other units shooting at actual protesters before the media smokescreen clears.

                  I have a deja vu feeling, as if I have trotted out a similar scenario here before, and faced a convincing counter-argument that I was full of shit.

                  1. I’m not seeing anybody being able to pull that one off. Leftist mobs tend to be far too undisciplined to pull off anything resembling a false flag operation.
                    Never mind the fact that while the media tends left, that’s the sort of scoop that could make anybody turn coat.

                    1. Yeah, my inner skeptic was starting to wake up enough to call bullshit when I did the last round of comments.

                      If someone tries to involve the military in such a situation, odds are they’d bungle it. This is a situation where a clued in military can derail the plain by dragging their feet, asking for clarification, or getting lost.

                      For the specific case of Hillary, I suspect her age, health, and burnt bridges might make it impossible for her to cause a coup or civil war that comes out in her favor.

                    2. For the specific case of Hillary, I suspect her security detail would discover a tewwibwe accident had happened.

                    3. “Stabbed by your own Praetorians” is up there with “shot in a ditch” and “hung up by your heels” on the list of the common deaths of dictators.
                      Heck, she’s not even making friends with that group of guys with guns.

                    4. Heck, she’s not even making friends with that group of guys with guns.
                      Quite possibly the most obvious understatement ever written.

                2. As in, the ‘provocateurs’ are the people organizing the ‘protest’. Everyone there is actually a leftist, the trick is a media coverup claiming it is on the right.

            3. Yep – I have some joking photographs of some of that, at Tea Party events.
              *pro tip* Always go to a protest with extra blank signs, or signs that are blank on the back, and take a handful of markers with you … so that you can respond suitably.
              My favorites were the ones with arrows, pointing towards “Stooge” or “Agent Provocateur” or something of that ilk.

              Good times, although my daughter would not agree… she was worried about the various dangers involved.

          2. Don’t try that crap in Texas! There’s a reason people say “Don’t Mess with Texas!”

        2. Hey, mobs of Portuguese managed this! Mind you it might require pounding the living shit out of agent provocateurs in the crowd’s midst. It should be done discretely in such a way as to break bones but not kill.

        3. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

          One of my professors at Cal State Fullerton mentioned some protests that occurred on campus while Reagan was governor. Gov. Reagan apparently got upset with the protests, and called in the National Guard. And from what my teacher described, the only reason why CSUF didn’t have a Kent State incident take place was because a bunch of the faculty intentionally stood between the Guard and the protestors during one particular incident.

          Now the protestors didn’t want the Guard to open fire. And the Guard didn’t exactly want to open fire on a bunch of unarmed student protestors. But from what my professor was saying about the incident, *someone* did. There was a apparently an unidentified voice that was “helpfully” narrating the supposed impending student rush of the Guard lines (which, if I remember correctly, was merely the largely clueless student body leaving the university buildings as their classes ended).

          The real problem is when you get two groups of people who don’t actually want to start anything. But both groups are nervous and on edge because they can’t be sure that the other group isn’t going to try and start something. And then you get some agent provocateur who decides to provoke one of the sides into acting first. In this case, it was an unidentified voice. But it could just as easily be a sniper at the top of a nearby landmark that’s conveniently out of the soon-to-exist crossfire.

          1. Given the (largely) suppressed tales of a mysterious shot at Kent State.

            I suspect NG commanders are well aware of the rumour and train to prevent it.

      3. The problem is, the National Guard units are pretty much local, so those guardsmen and guardswomen holding rifles would be in effect pondering orders to shoot their neighbors.

        There’s a reason why during the Katrina aftermath, they had interagency-loaned California Highway Patrol officers working as local enforcement for various “violations” of ordinances that were not actually in Louisiana law, then or now.

        And the NG actually does quite a lot of training on crowd control and riot stuff since they are much more likely to be tasked with such than the 10th Mountain Division. That training is really heavy on not letting the crowd provoke one.

        Plus, the NG junior officers and NCOs who would be receiving said orders from some chain of command that supposedly ended in NCA would be pondering all those interminable classes they had to take on the difference between legal and illegal orders. That would be happening all the way up that chain of command.

        If I were gaming this up, I’d more likely pick some Department of Education or Housing and Urban Development SWAT team, posted to protect their office building somewhere urban, that would get those orders, but even then, those people are not brainwashed – they’d be more likely to lock the lobby doors and fall back than fix bayonets and charge the crowd.

        Its tough to get reliable Tsar’s Imperial Cossacks in our culture.

        1. Yeah, there’s a whole lot of so called “SWAT Teams” that have more to do with real gun LARPing than actual people properly trained to do real SWAT stuff.

      4. The military… I doubt it.

        The police… they’re already at war with us. Officer Friendly passed away some years ago… he’s been replaced by an increasingly-militarized group of, frankly, thugs.

        Those occasional uniformed officers you see? They’re probably 15% or so of “Law Enforcement Officers.” The “LEO” blanket covers everything from the SWAT teams so many Federal agencies have nowadays to (in some jurisdictions) building inspectors and dogcatchers.

        1. However, there’s another factor involved. How many of those LEOs are going to want to eat bullets from a group they can’t profile because they still make up a good majority of the country and aren’t instantly visually distinguishable?

          And unlike BLM, they live in the same neighborhoods, go shopping in the same stores, their kids go to the same schools. Makes it a much tougher defense problem, especially since using major force and frightfulness has an excellent chance of catching them in the collateral damage.

          And all they have to do to avoid that is “go fetal”. “I know nozzink! I see nozzink!” Words to live by.

      1. The Chinese did.

        Though it’s been noted that the army unit that eventually crushed the protests back in ’89 was specifically brought in from a distant part of the country. The leadership in Beijing didn’t think that they could trust the local army units to do the dirty work.

          1. Yep.

            Another point is that the US is closer to having a “single culture” than China is.

            Those Chinese troopers were more likely to think of the protesters as “not my kind” than US troopers would have.

            1. yes. Also there’s a lot of sub-races there that we don’t see, because we don’t live there (it’s not a race thing exactly. People tend to see Portuguese as all the same, but Portuguese from my area of the North are really ethnically Galicians — perfect sense, if you realize that part and Galicia were a Roman province almost as long as Portugal has been a country — and the south have a higher percentage of Moorish blood. So we can — or used to be able to. The Highway is leading to a lot more mixing — tell the difference on sight, but outsiders can’t) which means that the people shooting might not have considered those being shot at as “theirs.”
              Beyond all that, seriously, you’re going to say the PRC army is trained and motivated the same as the US army? Anyone doing that is not serious.

    3. American’s ain’t very good at the whole “Blind Obedience to Orders” thing.
      Now, every good dictator or dictator wannabe knows you must build a cult of personality/personal loyalty between one’s tyrannical self and the people with guns.
      This leaves the Western Leftist in a pickle. Their base demands hatred of military and law enforcement. Once in Constitutionally limited and defined power, the base demands the literal emasculation of those forces. Soldiers and cops with the essential aggressive characteristics are mustered out, leaving a residue of “Modern Major Generals”. They know their Intersectionalist Power Point slides by heart, but tactics, not so much.

      1. In the meantime, those who were purged out are now free agents who still have contacts and networks that could stir up all kinds of trouble for the leftists. Fragging, heel-dragging, “misinterpretation” of orders, passive-aggressive sabotage, etc…

        1. Yeah, but replacing the attitude readjustment therapy levers with buttons would be… problematic.

          Do you know what those look like?

          2. I am reliably advised that no man not a OB/GYN (and possibly not many of them) knows what those buttons look like.

  22. Some years later (a slight touch of waviness)…

    Winston took zis tools from zis toolcase and carefully removed the access panel. Ze really enjoyed his new assignment in systems maintenance – much more satisfying to serve society by keeping things running, and now that ze’d passed zis training exams and probationary period ze was on zis own in the serviceways that ran throughout the entire city.

    Zis gloved hands careful and steady, ze reached in and opened the breaker. Then ze unlatched the safety cover and started to disconnect the failed circuit.

    Unknown to zim, the breaker had failed internally, the circuit was still live, and as zis circuit tester had broken and not been replaced for the past seven months, due to critical needs of the ongoing war, Winston was unknowingly not performing his task to the full mandatory safety standards.

    As ze reached his screwdriver to start disconnecting the feedline, Winston got what was undoubtedly the shock of zis life, even taking into account zis period in Ministry of Love outlook readjustment therapy some years prior with dear old O’Brien.

    The next thing he knew Winston was crumpled against the far side of the service access tube, with a strong smell of ozone in his nose. He gingerly removed his gloves, now a bit charred and still smoking, and examined his hands. He’d got off pretty easy thanks to the gloves – his right hand was burned a bit in a few places, but he was in good shape…

    Winston froze. He was in good shape. He remembered that he should not even think of himself as a he, and all the other “lessons” that O’Brien had so painfully taught him, but he also remembered everything that O’Brien had driven from his conscious mind.

    Winston remembered everything.

    As he picked himself up off the floor, Winston started to ponder how he could truly help others while remaining undiscovered. He had pretty much universal access via the serviceways, and an given how things continued to fall apart, an excuse to be pretty much anywhere.

    Even in the “Public Servants” areas – things that failed there needed to be fixed much more urgently than even in the military sectors. Winston should really look up and pay a visit to dear old O’Brien. He owed O’Brien a lot, and now that his mind was once again clear, he could work on how to repay that debt.

    And when he thought it through, Winston realized he owed Big Gender Indeterminate Sibling quite a bit as well…

  23. I look at our media, social and otherwise, and realize that Orwell was too optimistic: instead of merely a 2 Minute Hate, we can now have a 24/7 Hate.

    2. I tend to call it the “pause for maybe two minutes every once in awhile to catch their breath and then continue seething” or something like that.

      Or yes, I’ve said Orwell was optimistic. Only two minutes?!

      1. In Orwell’s future the conditioning has been domesticated and regulated. We are still untamed proles and need to be taught fear of the lash of Twitter.

  25. Elements of our government are already being used to seek out and punish those who would oppose the anointed ones in power. With the coming election things will only get worse no matter who wins. Such is the path we find ourselves on. And it seems appropriate to yet again offer this small observation from the mists of history.
    “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? […] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!” —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

    1. As noted on Instapundit Thursday:

      IRS Abuses Likely To Continue Under A Hillary Clinton Administration.
      [SNIP]
      [IRS Commissioner John Koskinen] is yet another maximum Democratic donor. Since 1997, Mr. Koskinen has contributed $51,550 to the Democratic National Committee, various Democratic congressional and Senate candidates and the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

      In fact, Mr. Koskinen was an early donor to the Hillary Clinton Senate campaign in 1999 and 2000, and contributed the maximum to Hillary’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.
      [SNIP]
      What harm might arise from having one of Hillary Clinton’s staunchest supporters at the helm of the IRS? … According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Clinton-era IRS, like several before it, audited a wide range of organizations viewed as hostile to the White House agenda. These included leading conservative publications, think tanks and interest groups, among them the American Spectator, Judicial Watch, National Review, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the National Center for Public Policy Research, the American Policy Center, American Cause, Citizens for Honest Government, Citizens Against Government Waste, Progress and Freedom Foundation, and Concerned Women for America. The IRS also audited two Clinton paramours: Gennifer Flowers and Liz Ward Gracen, and sexual assault accusers Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, as well as fired White House Travel Office Director Billy Dale.

      There was never anyone in the IRS held to account for the Clinton administration’s targeting of its perceived “enemies” for IRS audits; there has likewise been no accountability for the oppression and discrimination practiced by Mr. Obama’s IRS via the targeting of those groups who have opposed and criticized the Obama administration.

      1. But according to Ms Kenyon at Liberty Zone, IRS was so punished.

        For people going on about the dangers of gaslighting, there’s sure a huge amount of effort being expended to convince us that that there’s accountability despite what we can see with our own eyes.

        1. Sigh. Nicki has reason to know because of her work, Steve. She’s not saying they were PERFECTLY punished, but they were punished as much as they can be under this administration. Nicki is not gaslighting anyone. She’s a friend and a libertarian. She’s just telling you things you don’t know — and the rest of us aren’t in a position to know. It’s important to hear things that go against our own echo chamber, if the source is trustworthy.

    1. Oh, please. We wouldn’t have this blog in 1984. There are communities, including my colleagues, which have WILLINGLY taken 1984 for an instruction manual, but it’s not universal.

    2. No bloddy kidding – thirty years after it was expected to arrive … Socialism *sigh* Can you depend on it for anything … save the the occasional mass deaths, famine, deprivation, trampling of civil rights ….

    3. Nah, 1984 was yesteryear’s playbook, the current playbook is Half Life 2. The only reason Bioshock 2 isn’t the playbook is because they don’t have access to Adam.

      Naturally, the entire time we are being accused of using Bioshock 1, or Bioshock Infinite as our playbook.

  27. The facts of mammalian biology are sexist. Therefore, human biology must be outlawed. Failing that, how long will it be before telling the truth about human biology and its consequences for social structure becomes hate speech?

    1. What about that woman at a South Africa education seminar declaiming that the scientific method was imperialist. How dare European scientist arrogantly decide that the physical laws for how things work in Europe must apply in Africa!

      1. The superiority of African witchcraft to European scientific method must surely be evident to any well-informed student of modern African history.

        1. Well, indigenous witchcraft certainly isn’t that much more backward and ignorant than First World scientific flavored magical thinking.

          Rape virgins to cure AIDS somehow reminds me of rape economies to cure climate change.

      2. Couldn’t it just as reasonably be argued that the hypothesis that African pain receptors work the same as European pain receptors is Eurocentric and colonialist?

      3. Wasn’t she saying something about throwing lightning bolts or similar?

        Easily proven.

        Now just try it outside of an RPG.

  28. I don’t know if it works this way…modern feminism/SJWism isn’t one big brother stomping you, more like a thousand Little Sisters cutting you from every direction, then burying you in a mudslide.

      1. Maybe Big Husband then? Since women don’t need no man but seem to need the government…

        Looking for that meme the Honey Badgers made, where they compare Obama to a sea lion with his harem…

        2. “Maybe Big Husband then? Since women don’t need no man but seem to need the government…”–Bob

          Big Husband, yes that’s the modern Welfare State. Millions of females all married to the State and expecting the State to provide for them. And you probably thought polygyny was outlawed in America!

          Despite all the femmunist happy talk of so-and-so many households in which the female is the primary breadwinner, females in the USA collectively remain net tax consumers. Females still rely on men as the net tax revenue producer class. And you probably thought the USA had fought a civil war to end slavery!

          And now a word from the sponsor:
          Firesign Theater Says Everything You Know Is Wrong.

          1. Well, if fedgov had not declared that we must have health insurance whether we want it, need , it and can afford it or not, and then said that they would give us money to pay for the insurance that we must have, but cannot afford and do not want…

      2. That’s the point – it was never really big brother either, it was Steel, that all knowing all caring distant infallible overlord that, if he/she/ze had only known, would have saved the Kulaks, stopped all those NKVD pistol shots to the backs of all those heads, and kindly yet infallibly defeated the wreckers and implemented true utopia.

        The improvement in Orwell, and in Sarah’s updating, over certain Soviet Socialist Republics is that there’s no real meatbag-in-charge behind the big-whatever persona to potentially contradict what the various layers of interpreters and enforcers want that will to be.

  30. This post reminds me of the mental dissonance I experienced recently while reading an article at Tor.com (yes, I have nobody to blame but myself.

    http://archive.is/lU99w

    Read the opening paragraphs. Look at the picture of the author. Look at the author’s name. I think the reason SJWs are so obsessed with gaslighting is because they’re so heavily engaged in it themselves.

    3. Wow. Just . . . wow. That’s not quite as much whiplash as I got in Hungary listening to an interview with a, an, um, oh heck if I know. An individual who looks female from the nose up and male from the nose down, and sings countertenor-ish. Reminded me a bit of a grown-up pleasure boy from Afghanistan, and he/whatever has a Middle Eastern name. Anyway, the feeling is similar, just not quite as intense. And no, I don’t think I’ll be reading that novella, although I’m sure it will win the Hugo and Nebula, and a few other awards.

  31. War is Peace*
    Freedom is Slavery
    Ignorance is a Safe Space

    * (unless a Republican is in office)

    1. Yes, then you get a Nobel for continuing the wars you promised to stop, and starting new ones.

      1. Actually, nominations for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize closed less than two weeks after Obama took office, before he had time to actually do anything. Apparently he got the award for the dizzying, hypnotic excellence of his speeches.

        1. It was the columns. Styrofoam columns and dramtic lighting made the Nobel committee feel all gooey inside, and those feelz made the difference.

          Kind of a Triumph of the Feelz.

        3. Apparently he got the award for the dizzying, hypnotic excellence of his speeches.

          The rise of the oceans stopped when the Democrats nominated him. Surely stopping global warming was worth the prize.

          1. Apparently Monica Lewinsky actually stopped the oceans and such, since 1997, when her blue dress was getting it’s unfortunate stain, was the last year when global warming actually warmed.

          2. It appears that the leaders of ISIS heard something entirely different in his speeches than the Nobel Prize Committee did.

          4. The rise of the oceans didn’t stop, it is just that the accumulating mountains of BS create that illusion.

  33. There are three genders. They are masculine, feminine, and neuter and they apply to personal pronouns (and other word types in other languages).

    I am a woman, not a personal pronoun.

    1. So gender fluid is a term for people who can’t be bothered to speak foreign languages correctly? 🙂

      Isn’t that some form of cultural imperialism? XD

      (Okay, okay, the third world mostly doesn’t give a fig for our first world PC nonsense, much less the figtree’s worth of leaves we do.)

      3. Hrmm… “gender fluid” would conform to the shape of whatever vessel in which it is contained. Therefore, if it looks like $THAT, it is $THAT.

        Hey ox. You’re trying to apply logic to the illogical. Again.

    2. Not to dispute the core of your point, but some languages have more than three genders. According to Wikipedia (yes, I know but my information comes from other sources) Swahili has 18 and Shona has 20.

      My understanding is that linguistically, gender has nothing to do with sex and is about noun/verb/adjective agreement.

  34. Babylon 5, episode 418. “Intersections in Real Time”.

    If you haven’t seen it…

    It’s basically the B5 version of Sarah’s adaptation up top, with a genuinely heroic character as the prisoner.

    For all the good it does him.

    If you’ve never seen it, then you need to make a point to do so at least once.

  35. Nice pastiche, but remember the central point of Orwell. The truth is whatever the Party declares it to be at the moment. The purpose of the totalitarian isn’t to achieve a specific end, it is to exercise oppression as an end in itself. Feminism? Homosexuality? Transgenderism? Environmentalism? These are all means to an end and their adherents can become class enemies at the stoke of a pen and sent off to Rom 101 with the rest.

    “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

    That is the sole purpose of these monsters.

      1. Orwell’s totalitarians had just a touch of straw man about them. He could admit everything else about the USSR, but admitting that the problem arose out of the intent to create a planned economy was a bridge too far, being a socialist himself and utterly certain that a planned economy would go swimming. (I’ve read his letters. He’s naive even for a socialist.) So he had to impute it to something else, and used raw power lust.

    2. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
      ― Theodore Dalrymple

      1. Thus the scandalized MSM when South Carolina Congressman spoke truth to power during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union speech by blurting out “You lie!” in response to the (D) president.

        In that same address, Justice Alito scandalized the knicker-knotted when he shook his head no, and mouthed “not true,” in reaction to the (D) president wagging his finger at the Supreme Court for adhering to the Constitution in a manner not to the Left’s liking.

        The props are not supposed to presume the same liberties as are accorded the featured payers.

Comments are closed.