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April 22, 2006
Parsing Orwellian Newspeak for the Sheep Cont’d
My girlfriend has a fascination with reality TV shows and so I see them all the time. She especially enjoys Animal Cops, the Surreal Life, The Real World, and Cops. I absolutely hate the latter. That show quickly makes my blood boil after less than ten minutes usually. The typical scenario involves officer pig and his pals busting some hapless goof on a traffic stop or a drug/prostitute sting. (Stuff that shouldn’t even be illegal IMHO, but I have digressed here.)
One such episode that enraged me was when some cop in Texas "detained" a kid who smelled of cannabis but had none on him. Nor drug paraphernalia, nor weapons, or any other item that officer pig could charge or ticket him for. But the kid had no picture ID with him. Officer Pig’s last resort was to hope that the kid had a warrant for his arrest or had lied to him at some point in his "interview" and could then "formally" arrest him (with actual charges). See, in modern cop parlance even though the kid was trussed up with cuffs and stuffed into the back of the police car while the cops rifled through his backpack, he wasn’t actually arrested; the kid was "detained". WTF?
People accept this kind of nonsense too. How Orwellian is that? Very in my humble opinion. My lawyer told me that any time that a person can’t stop talking and just walk away from a cop or other state minion then they are in fact under arrest whether officer pig or whoever says those magic words or not
Anyhow, in order to note the ongoing debasement of our language by the mainstream and very statophilic media I have used a great definition of "detained" that was iterated by Becky Akers in a recent column on the LewRockwell.com website. To wit: "detained" – Amerika’s new euphemism meaning, "arrested for no cause whatsoever".
That little snippet of clear thinking as well as a superb definition needs to be preserved to our lexicon methinks. So I added to it to the LibertyWiki. And it is here if you wanna see it.
And thank you Ms. Akers.
Posted by Ali Massoud at April 22, 2006 11:48 AM
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