Orwell was a Naive Optimist

I had literally forgotten about this blog... I was searching for something else and it weirdly appeared. It's now a kind of time capsule, reflecting what I and my partner John were thinking about ten to fourteen years ago. A lot has happened since then. On November 3, 2008, I wrote:

Today we fear the future and don't want to look at it. We see the future as a place that isn't as good as where we are, or where we just came from. There's a sense that the bright future that earlier generations looked forward to has recently come, and gone. There's lots of evidence that its true.

That was sadly prescient. In the ensuing years since I wrote those words, I've ceased posting anything on the internet and deleted everything I had ever posted before - with the exception of this blog because I had forgotten about it. Today we have aggressive censorship of forbidden ideas across all forms of media. I have also engaged in aggressive self-censorship because I see thoughtful people persecuted and jailed for expressing forbidden ideas and I don't want to suffer their fate. I had written a lot more in this post, but deleted it because I'm afraid for what I see happening to other people for expressing their opinions. I hope that the damage done to the rule of law and our freedom of expression isn't permanent. I don't think it has to be. But here we are in the future and at the moment its looking pretty dark. Update: You know things are pretty weird when the left has lost Noam Chomsky.