Blue Check meltdowns

[Ninurta]

If you control what people say, you can control how people think.

Exactly! That is the entire premise behind Orwell's "1984" with NewSpeak and the re-writing of history, it's what is behind censorship, and what is behind modern Social Media. Controlling what people can say via the mechanisms of NewSpeak - in our real-world case re-defining words to mean something today that they didn't mean yesterday in order to control a narrative (see Joe Biden and his re-definition of "firearm" to mean any part of a firearm, or even any chunk of metal or plastic that could conceivably be made into a part for a firearm, for a current example) - in tandem with controlling what they can read via the media propaganda outlets, inevitably leads to controlling what they can think - i.e. they "are free to think whatever they like" just as long as what they are thinking is contained within the controlled parameters.

Another example is the current push to re-define "genocide" as no longer meaning the extermination of a race of people by a different race of people, and recreating it to mean just attacking any group of people, whether racial, social, or what have you by any other group of people, even people within the same class or group as the attacked.

A close cognate to the situation in the Ukraine is the American Civil War, where the Confederacy broke away and declared itself independent, and the US invaded the Confederacy and annexed it back to the US by force. Same-same in the Ukraine, yet the very same people who cheer the annexation of the Confederacy somehow think the same thing regarding the Ukraine and Russia is "wrong" now. If it was a "Civil War" here, why is it not a "Civil War" there? If it is a "genocide" there, why was it not a genocide here? Propagandistic media narratives redefining language, that's why.

And it works - just look at all the people clamoring for war in Ukraine simply because they have been told - and conditioned - to want war in Ukraine by social media and traditional media. Somehow, Russians killing Russians is now a "genocide".

Even non-traditional and independent media are often guilty of generating propaganda these days to control thought, but in their case it is to control thought away from the official narrative... still, to my way of thinking, controlled thought is controlled thought, regardless of who is doing the controlling for what purpose. One is just as bad as the other. Everyone is a propagandist these days - Right, Left, and "nonaligned".

Just give people the raw facts, and let them think it through and argue it out for themselves. That is the only way to let the best ideas rise to the top, and the bonehead ideas fall by the wayside.

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