is this true? about tlc?
ok, i read the GTFO stuff.

Had nothing to do with tlc but everything’s true to my knowledge.

very cool.

Well, this might need to be its own article, but what got me ‘searching was the above article.
Suffice to say: QUESTION AUTHORITY!

Comparisons with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article “Why Americans Are Not Taught History”:

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell’s was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley … rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.

9/11 was just what the American government needed to fulfill Orwell’s vision.

is that the des moines river?

Sure is!

that’s gotta be sgc

…i read the story after i accused sgc of channeling on this site…i was at that meeting

I’m sure it’s been sgc on more than one occasion. He was (and very well may still be) the master of inducing head-scratches from fellow travelers while he made slight detours on the voyage.

i can’t wait.

The best part was that she wasn’t EVEN kidding.

in 2 or 3 hours or so, maybe even less, she’s gonna be a teenager. :)
happy trails, mon ami.

I’m crossing my fingers that she’ll be right as rain with only a sarcastic whip at her side.

LOL! it was a really a belly laugh. i look at my friends, peers and acquaintance that have kids and i remember what i was like and i am…lost for words.
i was a real brat but they had it coming. i suspect you are in a whole different game than my dad.
my dad was taking me home from the iowa state training school for boys and he stopped and got a six pack for us to share. he drank and drove. i drank and rode.
i tell that story with strange mix of emotions. i didn’t have the slightest idea what a bad message it was sending until i was about 45 years old or so. many years of therapy, etc.
on the plus side, he didn’t buy tall boys. :)

i remember telling that story to the shrink and he had to “gently” tell me my dad was wrong. i was puzzled. no shit.
my mom and dad were fighting a loozing battle with us boys and the substance/alcohol. they pretty much thought they were winning when we did it at home and weren’t out god knows where doing god knows what with god knows who. keggers and shit were at our house. anytime past 16 y.o. or so.

Ya.. I think my dad gave up fighting the alcohol-apocalypse as well after my parents split. At Christmas time his four kids would descend on his kingdom and take a reprieve from reality in his basement dungeon.

He seemed outwardly okay with it so long as we didn’t leave for more than beer runs. I think Xmas of ‘88 was the last time all us four were all in the same place.

Document. Document. Document. How many times do I have to tell you kooky kids?