Thursday, March 3, 2011

Capitalism Magazine - Court Endorses "Thought Crime"

It is not for nothing that when the Obama administration proposes taking over the Internet, or when courts uphold the idea of “hate speech” or endorses the regulation of speech in schools and businesses and even in government itself, no one thinks it is Aldous “Huxleyian” or Thomas “Hobbesian.” It is immediately dubbed “Orwellian." In terms of totalitarian methods and ends, Orwell literally wrote the book.

So when I first read of U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler’s recent ruling on Obamacare, in which she states, among other things, that “mental activity” can be treated as “commerce,” even if that activity does not lead to observable, demonstrable action, and that no distinction can be made between the actions of one’s mind and physical actions, I immediately recalled a statement in Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty Four:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.*


Capitalism Magazine - Court Endorses "Thought Crime"