from the popular hit series, Please For The Love of All That is Holy Don't Build the Torment Nexus
as a reminder. Zaphod Beeblebrox is meant to be understood to be a villain in Hitchiker's Guide. he's a dumb, drugged out, psuedointellectual who's allowed far too much leeway because he's both rich and famous
Oddly enough, for all the lolz, some deep wisdom from those books stuck with me for life. The lines about how the kind of people who want to and can get themselves elected to such-and-such office, how that capability and desire also makes them de facto the precise kind of person you never want running things. That idea remains honestly one of the most profound things I've ever read, you see it reflected in ~every politician who walks the earth.
In many ways it feels like every other problem we have as humans is downstream from that contradiction (but of course, I'm oversimplifying / overgeneralizing hugely).
Silly books for sure, super silly, but not only silly, def agree.
Hey to be fair they've been hard at work facilitating cyber-psychosis as well, just without the cool implants (talking about ai if anyone was wondering)
Which is exactly why I mentioned having only the shitty corpo netanats and none of the rest of the stuff we might call cool but is just an extension of living in a technodystopic world of wild disparity.
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern "degeneracy") that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn't put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidencesupporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
I don't know if I missed it, but I don't think it's been disproven. I actually think it's true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handle different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some things, like calculus, significantly more difficult. It's much harder to do abstract math when you're mind is trained on concrete shapes.
I'm sure the cold war plays a part, yeah. But the word itself has kind of become an empty signifier for generic "conservative American-ness" divorced from the actual meaning of the word. (See: referring to imperial measures as "Freedom Units")
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it's important to read. It's one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it's about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It's just surveillance state stuff. That's a relatively small part of it though. It's more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that's not just cameras; it's also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
I dropped it about halfway through. I'm sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn't really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don't need real agency.
The lesson it's trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn't let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations' lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
If we're still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that's the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society's structure that aren't really related to just media.
And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can't infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn't feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it's only incentivized to lie when there's a profit motive.
If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn't control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.
Also spoilers ahead here.
I've read it, and i completely agree. The plot is quite sluggish, and after i was finished reading, i wished that i would have dropped it halfway through. The last third, is basically graphic descriptions of torture. And i wouldn't have needed that to get the point of the book. I don't need a happy ending. This isn't what the book is about. But i also don't want 150 pages of literal torture.
I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people.
He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind.
It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)
'Orwells List' is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone
But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things
it was written in 1949
it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin's Russia
the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government
Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist
So I don't think he's immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of 'counter-revolutionary' miss a lot of valuable context
He definitely wasn't just informing on people whom he thought were 'too socialist', even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing
And it's worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt
Interesting, I appreciate you adding additional context. I dont know how or if it changes my perspective on things but having more info to consider is helpful :)
From a google it does seem like the second red scare (I didn't know there were two of them) was right around the late 1940s through the 1950s according to Wikipedia. I described it him that way cause thats how one of the people listed in the Wikipedia article on his list described it reflecting on him and I felt it was apt, but if I'm missing about what happened when something I'd welcome additional info and correction ☺️ I'm honestly really ignorant about history and have been trying to learn more lately.
If you wanna share anything more you know about the subject please feel free (no obligation or anything of course)
He grew up in the British Raj, with his father supporting the opium war in China. He also worked as a radio host for the British government to spread propoganda (insisting that him not doing it would mean someone worse would). This makes his assertion that things like 1984 media influence of opinion a little insane, with him saying it wasn't happening then, but it could happen soon. He was literally a part of it.
A lot of his views seem to come from when he went to Spain to fight in their civil war against the Fascists. He ended up joining the Anarchists (not by choice, but because this was the option available), and the Communist faction treated them poorly, saying they weren't really leftist enough (as usual). This is why he ended up focusing almost all of his energy on anti-USSR/anti-authoritarian stuff, rather than anti-empire or anti-capitalist. He was a leftist, just one with a massive grudge against "the wrong leftists".
You don't need to read 1984 to understand the basic meaning people get out of it. The significant aspects can be summed up as a few bullet points or a few short paragraphs.
Unfortunately because its message is so broad, it is often used in support of all sorts of opposing arguments, small and large, Jacob Geller discussed this topic in detail.
It does explain that, in Goldstein's book. Without destruction of production and privation, you cannot maintain a hierarchical society is the argument it plainly makes.
Was at the library a few weeks ago for the first time and got 1984. Didn't touch it and had to return it. Now when someone asks I can show them that I borrowed it and claim that I reread it recently 👌
To be honest I don't care if the communists are Soviet or Spain. The arms that the USSR was sending didn't reach the anarchists. That was the only claim I was refuting.
Reiterating for the sake of clarity.
That the Communists withheld arms from the Aragon front seems established beyond question, and it can hardly be doubted that the motivation was political. See, for example, D.T. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (1955; reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 110.
The fact that the footnote ends with Orwell's own quote is just a nice tie back to the discussion.
Regarding the rest of the comment I'm not interested in reenacting "anarchist vs ML: spanish civil war" online theater. I just wanted to push back on the claim that the USSR supplied anarchists.
The USSR did supply (provide any weapons to) anarchists in Spain.
However the Communists¹ didn't supply (provide as many weapons as they could have to) anarchists in Spain.
¹: because as you pointed out the fault wasn't just the USSR but Spanish as well.
I was hoping that the context made the distinction clear but clearly that is not the case.
Everything we know about Orwell disagrees, from his review of Mein Kampf to his comments about Jews and Homosexuals. He opposed fighting the literal German Nazis until war actually broke out. The civil was was a few years and a single book, and hardly representative of his entire life.
"I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity."
I think the first sentence was taken a bit out of context. In the second he says he would kill him if got the chance to. I think he's just trying to say that Hitler was charismatic.
Its a bit off topic, but its really amusing in that Isaac Asimov article how he talks about the Spain thing where Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists were at odds. Basically, the left righting amongst themselves.
The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the
television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and
see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and
are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom.
Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'.
This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
Interesting that someone like Asimov has not seen how technology would make this possible, like it’s right now
The idea that every person will only behave as though they are being watched if they are actually being watched, fails to recognize that if people know that they could be watched at any time, but can't actually see if the watcher is watching them, they will behave as though they are being watched all the time.
86 Comments
mycodesucks@lemmy.world · 118 pts · 104d
Just because it's so true people are sick of it doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, 1984.
Also Brave New World, weirdly enough.
Good news - we didn't have to pick a dystopia. We're getting them ALL. At the same time.
exu@feditown.com · 29 pts · 104d
Heavy influence from Fahrenheit 451 as well
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 102d
And The Sheep Look Up.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 102d
Idiocracy.
HumbleBragger@piefed.social · 1 pts · 101d
Yeah, I thought Fahrenheit 451 was missing from the dystopian Trinity too.
Sisyphe@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 104d
LefterShark@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 102d
Damn, guess I no other option but to chop my balls off.
TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 14 pts · 104d
It's literally a cyberpunk dystopia only less cool.
tutter@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 104d
The people with the resources to change things took those stories as guidebooks... "Ooh sick robots!"
TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 103d
and we don't even have those sick robots
tutter@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 103d
They really failed on every front
TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 103d
They only succeeded in building the torment nexus
Quill7513@slrpnk.net · 6 pts · 103d
from the popular hit series, Please For The Love of All That is Holy Don't Build the Torment Nexus
as a reminder. Zaphod Beeblebrox is meant to be understood to be a villain in Hitchiker's Guide. he's a dumb, drugged out, psuedointellectual who's allowed far too much leeway because he's both rich and famous
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 102d
Oddly enough, for all the lolz, some deep wisdom from those books stuck with me for life. The lines about how the kind of people who want to and can get themselves elected to such-and-such office, how that capability and desire also makes them de facto the precise kind of person you never want running things. That idea remains honestly one of the most profound things I've ever read, you see it reflected in ~every politician who walks the earth.
In many ways it feels like every other problem we have as humans is downstream from that contradiction (but of course, I'm oversimplifying / overgeneralizing hugely).
Silly books for sure, super silly, but not only silly, def agree.
tutter@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 103d
Hey to be fair they've been hard at work facilitating cyber-psychosis as well, just without the cool implants (talking about ai if anyone was wondering)
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 102d
And none of the cyberpunk. Just the shitty corpos controlling everything.
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 102d
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 102d
That’s cyberpunk as a niche hobby, not a cultural norm. We’re nowhere near Night City, Blade Runner or even Ready Player One.
Yeah, the shit is pretty cool, but it isn’t cyberpunk as an inescapable culture.
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 102d
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 102d
Which is exactly why I mentioned having only the shitty corpo netanats and none of the rest of the stuff we might call cool but is just an extension of living in a technodystopic world of wild disparity.
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 101d
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 103d
And that one where a bunch of kids get stranded on an island and have to survive.
They become the rulers of the USA apparently.
Randelung@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 103d
Lord of the Flies?
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 102d
Yes, thank you!
zaphod@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 102d
If it's Brave New World please send me to Iceland.
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 104d
i may have read and forgotten both when i was in my teens and mostly incapable of thought or political analysis
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world · 52 pts · 104d
Ok, I’ll take the bait. It’s a good book, and not all that long!
Tiresia@slrpnk.net · 42 pts · 104d
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern "degeneracy") that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn't put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
anise@quokk.au · 37 pts · 104d
I mean saying it isn't as good as anything by LeGuin is hardly an insult. Nearly everyone isn't as good as LeGuin.
adam_y@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 104d
kibiz0r@midwest.social · 13 pts · 104d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
U7826391786239@piefed.zip · 4 pts · 104d
hakase@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 104d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 104d
I don't know if I missed it, but I don't think it's been disproven. I actually think it's true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handle different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some things, like calculus, significantly more difficult. It's much harder to do abstract math when you're mind is trained on concrete shapes.
lvxferre@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 103d
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 101d
Given how confused Americans are about "freedom," even the weak version isn't to be taken lightly
lvxferre@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 101d
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 101d
I'm sure the cold war plays a part, yeah. But the word itself has kind of become an empty signifier for generic "conservative American-ness" divorced from the actual meaning of the word. (See: referring to imperial measures as "Freedom Units")
lvxferre@mander.xyz · 4 pts · 103d
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 104d
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it's important to read. It's one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it's about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It's just surveillance state stuff. That's a relatively small part of it though. It's more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that's not just cameras; it's also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone · 3 pts · 104d
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
toynbee@piefed.social · 11 pts · 104d
It's the one with all the animals, right?
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 104d
I think. Is Star Wars the one with the wizard boy?
four@lemmy.zip · 17 pts · 104d
In a way, yes
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 103d
Star wars is the one with sand.
KombatWombat@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 104d
I dropped it about halfway through. I'm sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn't really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don't need real agency.
The lesson it's trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn't let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations' lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 103d
How do you feel about Bradbury's claim that it was less about a totalitarian state than a condemnation of the effects of mass media?
KombatWombat@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 103d
If we're still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that's the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society's structure that aren't really related to just media.
And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can't infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn't feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it's only incentivized to lie when there's a profit motive.
If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn't control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.
NightmareQueenJune@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 103d
Also spoilers ahead here.
I've read it, and i completely agree. The plot is quite sluggish, and after i was finished reading, i wished that i would have dropped it halfway through. The last third, is basically graphic descriptions of torture. And i wouldn't have needed that to get the point of the book. I don't need a happy ending. This isn't what the book is about. But i also don't want 150 pages of literal torture.
MutantTailThing@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 104d
It insists upon itself.
Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip · 3 pts · 104d
I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people.
He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind.
It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)
Kobibi@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 104d
'Orwells List' is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone
But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things
it was written in 1949
it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin's Russia
the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government
Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist
So I don't think he's immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of 'counter-revolutionary' miss a lot of valuable context
He definitely wasn't just informing on people whom he thought were 'too socialist', even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing
And it's worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt
Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip · 4 pts · 104d
Interesting, I appreciate you adding additional context. I dont know how or if it changes my perspective on things but having more info to consider is helpful :)
From a google it does seem like the second red scare (I didn't know there were two of them) was right around the late 1940s through the 1950s according to Wikipedia. I described it him that way cause thats how one of the people listed in the Wikipedia article on his list described it reflecting on him and I felt it was apt, but if I'm missing about what happened when something I'd welcome additional info and correction ☺️ I'm honestly really ignorant about history and have been trying to learn more lately.
If you wanna share anything more you know about the subject please feel free (no obligation or anything of course)
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 102d
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 104d
He grew up in the British Raj, with his father supporting the opium war in China. He also worked as a radio host for the British government to spread propoganda (insisting that him not doing it would mean someone worse would). This makes his assertion that things like 1984 media influence of opinion a little insane, with him saying it wasn't happening then, but it could happen soon. He was literally a part of it.
A lot of his views seem to come from when he went to Spain to fight in their civil war against the Fascists. He ended up joining the Anarchists (not by choice, but because this was the option available), and the Communist faction treated them poorly, saying they weren't really leftist enough (as usual). This is why he ended up focusing almost all of his energy on anti-USSR/anti-authoritarian stuff, rather than anti-empire or anti-capitalist. He was a leftist, just one with a massive grudge against "the wrong leftists".
Eric@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 104d
https://redsails.org/on-orwell/
exu@feditown.com · 26 pts · 104d
Relevant Jacob Geller Video
rektstarsceosu@lemmy.zip · 23 pts · 104d
jorjorwel??!!!
NoPanko@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 104d
Meesa JorJor, meesa JorJor Well
Whelks_chance@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 103d
France is bacon
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 20 pts · 103d
You don't need to read 1984 to understand the basic meaning people get out of it. The significant aspects can be summed up as a few bullet points or a few short paragraphs.
Unfortunately because its message is so broad, it is often used in support of all sorts of opposing arguments, small and large, Jacob Geller discussed this topic in detail.
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 102d
mattyroses@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 102d
It does explain that, in Goldstein's book. Without destruction of production and privation, you cannot maintain a hierarchical society is the argument it plainly makes.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 102d
1984 is the Rick and Morty of books.
just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -6 pts · 103d
Is he a zionist?
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 19 pts · 104d
I've read 1984, and yeah that's basically it
amphetaminisiert@feddit.nl · 11 pts · 102d
Was at the library a few weeks ago for the first time and got 1984. Didn't touch it and had to return it. Now when someone asks I can show them that I borrowed it and claim that I reread it recently 👌
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 102d
It's a good read
erev@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 102d
the audio book is free on youtube and very good. thats how o experienced it and i recommend it
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 103d
Some recommended reading about George "I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler" Orwell:
one could say the widespread misperception of who he actually was and what he stood for is rather... orwellian 🙄
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 23 pts · 103d
The guy fought Nazi supplied Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. This take is nuts, he almost died for the CNT-FAI. He's not a Nazi sympathizer.
Riverside@reddthat.com · 9 pts · 102d
anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 102d
The USSR didn't supply the anarchists.
TheyThe Communists actively refused to give them arms and worked against them. That was the cause of Orwell's disdain towards them. source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noam-chomsky-on-anarchism#fn70Edit: Correcting sentencing after being corrected in a reply.
Riverside@reddthat.com · 3 pts · 102d
mattyroses@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 102d
The May Days is not some unknown event.
I can walk down the street here see the bullet holes.
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 102d
mattyroses@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 102d
You don't need Orwell to know that the anarchists and Stalinists fell into opposition.
anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 102d
To be honest I don't care if the communists are Soviet or Spain. The arms that the USSR was sending didn't reach the anarchists. That was the only claim I was refuting.
Reiterating for the sake of clarity.
The fact that the footnote ends with Orwell's own quote is just a nice tie back to the discussion.
Regarding the rest of the comment I'm not interested in reenacting "anarchist vs ML: spanish civil war" online theater. I just wanted to push back on the claim that the USSR supplied anarchists.
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 102d
anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 102d
Ok. You wanna dance? Let's dance.
The USSR did supply (provide any weapons to) anarchists in Spain.
However the Communists¹ didn't supply (provide as many weapons as they could have to) anarchists in Spain.
¹: because as you pointed out the fault wasn't just the USSR but Spanish as well.
I was hoping that the context made the distinction clear but clearly that is not the case.
Soulg@ani.social · 3 pts · 102d
Being anti communism is the same as being pro Nazi now?
Riverside@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 102d
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 101d
🙄 MLs are not the only leftists. Pretending they are is flatly dishonest.
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 101d
Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 102d
Everything we know about Orwell disagrees, from his review of Mein Kampf to his comments about Jews and Homosexuals. He opposed fighting the literal German Nazis until war actually broke out. The civil was was a few years and a single book, and hardly representative of his entire life.
_Cid_@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 102d
"I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity."
I think the first sentence was taken a bit out of context. In the second he says he would kill him if got the chance to. I think he's just trying to say that Hitler was charismatic.
RamenJunkie@midwest.social · 10 pts · 103d
Its a bit off topic, but its really amusing in that Isaac Asimov article how he talks about the Spain thing where Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists were at odds. Basically, the left righting amongst themselves.
The more things change...
parentesis@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 102d
Interesting that someone like Asimov has not seen how technology would make this possible, like it’s right now
Juice@midwest.social · 6 pts · 102d
What no Foucault does to a MF.
The idea that every person will only behave as though they are being watched if they are actually being watched, fails to recognize that if people know that they could be watched at any time, but can't actually see if the watcher is watching them, they will behave as though they are being watched all the time.
Panopticon goes brrrr
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 102d
He did. A few paragraphs later he says:
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 102d
Both Orwell and Asimov assumed that The Party would care about false positives.
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 103d
ohh hell nah they made a tanky conservapedia 💀
Jankatarch@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 102d
Didn't he also call Indians "yellow-faced animals?"
morto@piefed.social · 5 pts · 104d
Literally 1984
tomenzgg@midwest.social · 3 pts · 104d
https://sopuli.xyz/post/44655344
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 104d
JuliaSuraez@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 102d
The funniest part is how one obvious bait line instantly turns awkward silence into a whole book club.
QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 101d
I read like half of it but then had to return the book, seemed pretty cool