1984 Blog #1

1. The mottoes of the Party were "War is Peace," "Ignorance is Strength," and "Freedom is Slavery."  The mottoes seem really backwards; they seem to refer to people throwing away their compassion, freedom, and peace in order to live in the world that they are living.  Their world seems to embrace war, ignorance, and slavery-they want everyone to be the same and not show who they are.  They want to control everyone.

2. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania.  The purpose of Newspeak is to meet the needs of IngSoc to provide expression for world view and make habits of IngSoc devotees.  It's also to make other thoughts impossible; they want people to act the same and not think for themselves.

3. It's necessary for the Party to get rid of antonyms and synonyms to make it simple.  They are able to use one word to mean what many words meant before.  For example, good can be made into ungood or plusgood to mean terrible, horrible, great, splendid, etc.  Only two words are necessary, not multiple.

4. The Party controls history be getting rid of the people's information when they die.  If they pass by natural causes or hanging or so on, they discard the information that they ever had on the people.  They want the people to live in the present and not know about the past.

5. Emmanuel is the enemy of the people.  He was a traitor to the party.  He is shown to the people through digital pictures that they can see wherever they go.  His face is seen everywhere!

Cloning

As scientifically advanced as it is, I do not believe that we should allow cloning in our country.  I don't believe that it is right to take cells from a person or animal to create a "blob" of cells to make a new person.  Even as great as it may sound, to use cloning to make extra organs isn't right.  Even though the cells aren't big, only 100 or so, those cells were meant to grow into a person or animal.  It's not right; by cloning these things, we are taking away a life.  For animals, I believe that there are plenty of animals in the world that need loving homes already; making a copy of a past animal is almost selfish.  It won't bring the original animal back; it won't know the person like the other one did, and it might not even act like the old one.  Plus, like I said, there are thousands of animals waiting for forever homes; they are already alive, unlike the clone-animals, and need a loving family.  Food cloning seems really weird; isn't there enough food already that can be made? I'm not really opposed to that, if it doesn't have to do with animals.  Fruit, vegetables, those are okay.  Cloning people isn't natural and shouldn't be allowed.  Who knows what could happen to those people, and we already have many people on the earth already.  If there are natural clones, twins, that's great, but I don't think we need to go around making clones of people who are already living.  Cloning is very scientifically advanced and great-sounding, but I don't think we need it in our world.

Soma and Ecstasy

The people of the world state are living a fake life.  They live in an unnaturally happy world; they are living a lie-they don't face the real world.  Their lives are covered up by soma.  Truth is being true to everything-people, life, everything.  It's living in the real world.  Happiness should be natural and in truth; not by a pill.  People should be naturally happy.  Ecstasy and soma are very much the same.  Soma put a false front on the people in the book, and in real life, ecstasy puts a false front on people.  Ecstasy seems to put a false, unreal front on people and makes them people that they are not.  To be happy, outgoing, sensitive, people don't need to take a pill.  It should just come naturally.  Ecstasy gives the people who use it a false sense of confidence, and they rely on it.  Whenever they are faced with a frustrating, stressful situation, they are going to turn to the drug, any drug, and that's not a way to live.  Ecstasy and soma put false, drug-brought happiness into the lives of the users. 

Brave New Babies

This article was absolutely crazy.  I don't believe that people should be able to choose what gender their child is going to be.  A child is supposed to be a gift no matter what, no matter what gender it is or what kind of condition it has.  If people were able to choose what gender of child they wanted, I do think that there would be a differing/unequal ratio.  If the fertilization doesn't go right, and the child isn't the right gender, I'd be worried that people would start aborting their children for these reasons, just like it said 4 people did, in the article.  This isn't right and I believe that many problems would come out of this.  The ratios would be unequal, abortions might go up if the treatment doesn't work, and it just doesn't seem right.  The whole process of expecting a baby should be left up to chance, and I believe, there is a reason for everything that happens; that's why a child is of a certain gender.  Being able to choose a gender for a baby is a very technologically advanced experiment, but I don't believe it is right or necessary in our world.

National Health Care Gone Wrong

In the movie Sicko, nationalized health care seems like it would be great; it's glorified as being the perfect way to solve all of the health care problems.  In reality, national health care isn't everything that it's cracked up to be.  There are two examples from two different articles that I found on the internet that show how wrong nationalized health care is.  The first example has to do with the death of actress/Broadway star Natasha Richardson last month; she was at a ski resort in Quebec, Canada, when she fell and hit her head.  Being as this type of injury can be life-threatening, time was of the essence to get her help.  In the end, it took four hours to get special attention to her injury, and by that time, it was too late.  Because of Canada's nationalized health care, the time it took to respond to her was delayed.  (www.ottawacitizen.com/Star+death+fuels+health+care+debate/1469447/story.html)   Countries with nationalized health care have very long waiting lists and make health care decisions based on how they feel about the condition and treatment.  An example of this was in Britain where the doctors sometimes don't prescribe treatments because they don't think that it is worth it.  For example, older patients are denied treatment because they don't have long to live.  France and Switzerland both have national health care, and their money issues aren't very good.  France has the third highest health care in the world and Switzerland has had to cut back.  They have had to close facilities, reduce medical reimbursement, and they restrict access to surgery.  National health care isn't everything that it's made out to be.  Everything isn't great and cheery with national health care; there are many downsides to it. 

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090406/OPINION01/904060313/1008/OPINION01/Don+t+let+Europe+s+health+failure+drag+U.S.+down

Brave New World #1

This book is really out there as far as concept goes; the people in the book are trying to either make perfect people or people who do the exact same thing, look the same, etc.  This book reminds me of a book that we read last year in Accelerated English 11, and that book was called Fahrenheit 451.  The book was set in a future time where books weren't allowed; the connection between these books is found where they are trying to scare the babies...they don't want them to be able to read or like flowers.  They don't want them to be smarter than the other classes/castes.  The only way that I can think of how this relates to the real world is conformity.  People conform to what other people want them to be and that's how they are.  In the book, the children don't know any better, but they are still being conformed into something in society.  They are told how to look (what color to dress in) and what kind of profession they will do.  The concept of creating people by science is really interesting.  I wonder why someone wanted to write a book with this concept.  It's pretty interesting at any rate.  This book, so far, has been a really quick read, and actually, pretty interesting.  I think that I will enjoy reading the rest of the book; it something different than what I normally read.