Rabu, 28 Juni 2006

Doublethinkiness

While reading my next book for the UCSD summer book program, I started thinking about newspeak and in particular about doublethink and how often I see it online when it comes to conservative talking points. Here's a quick definition of doublethink for those who haven't read 1984 in a while:
"the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and fervently believing both."
Keeping that definition in mind while perusing conservative web forums such as ProtestWarrior, I realized that when correlating threads together large amounts of doubletink arises. The same is probably true for almost any conservative forum or blog that has a user commentary attached. Below are two examples of doublethinkiness I found while browsing the first page (of 1000) of the current events forum.

The first example is the re-ocurring thread topic of not finding WMD in Iraq and the justification of the current war. One of their favorite counter points is massacre of 300,000 innocent people (actually Kurds, who are in fact Muslim) by Saddam and that proves he wouldn't hesitate to do it again, therefore we needed to go to war. If you look at other topics, specifically the ones on Islam they then say that all Muslims are evil, hate America, and should be destroyed. The doublethink is they think it's horrible that all these innocent people were killed and it's our responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen again and at the same time they want to kill all Muslims. Which includes the Kurds. Huh?

The second example is of the recent development of the the 31 billion dollar donation Warren Buffet is giving to charity. A common spout is "it's his money and he can do what he wants with it and thank goodness the government isn't getting their greedy paws on it". If you look a thread below, which is probably about Iraq, they then defend the 291 billion dollar war with only the argument of "stay the course!". The doublethink is they don't want the greedy government to get any extra money and at the same time they want to continue spending massive amounts on an endless war.

There aren't any links to specific threads or comments due to the constant posting of this dribble. Any conservative opinion site at anytime and will yield the same doublethinkiness on any issue they care to comment on.

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