Post: #26

(05-22-2016 05:40 PM)Germanicus Wrote:  Oh and 1984 as a book? Very good book. Well written and constructed. It pretty much is the example of how to write message fiction properly. I really don't get how anyone here can't like it. Yeah, there are better written novels from that time period so if someone does not like it on technical merit that's something I disagree with but am willing to concede to on matter of personal taste. On the other hand equating its warning against totalitarianism to Orwell being a beta male bitch and attributing the novel to Orwell's alleged narcissism or supposed inability to get laid is ridiculous. Dumbest thing I've heard in awhile.

As far as modern SJWism is concerned go read Orwell's nonfiction. He was denouncing it and the mentality that makes it possible 80 years ago.

Well said, +1 for intelligent literary crit, although I dislike oversimplifying cliches like SJW.

I read everything I could find that was free about Orwell trying to decide if he was a genius or not. I've said here before that one thing that struck me was that before he wrote 1984 he was to the point he could have been one of the swells lounging in London based on his prior works.

But instead he went to live on some freezing island in Great Britain with inadequate heat and his health declined while he cranked out this great masterpiece. He died before it became the world-renowned book it is now.

One of his great essays is from when he was living in Asia and saw an execution-- afterwards he was against capital punishment. I still remember an image from the story. The condemned man was being walked to the gallows, but altered his path to avoid stepping in a puddle. Then I think he and maybe some of the guards laughed about it. I don't think I'll ever forget that image.

His insight before the event the refinement of current advertising and political brainwashing and mind control techniques used by Power are invaluable.

Post: #27

I find it strange when people slate 1984 (especially when comparing it to Brave New World), judging by their own standard that it must have been written as some kind of prophecy. And somehow if everything did not come true in the fashion Orwell described, it must not be worth as much.

It seems clear (to me) that it was written as a psychological exploration of authoritarianism, where the ultimate end is your uncontrollable loving of your oppressor. Though a lifelong socialist, Orwell had the presence of mind to see the brutality of the state, no matter what political spectrum it came from.

It's far more sinister than stockholm syndrome. The final paragraphs of the book, bringing together images that had appeared multiple times in the story, along with the repeated song, and the main character's complete, pathetic acceptance of his defeat is one of the most powerful scenes in all of literature.

Post: #28

(05-22-2016 12:16 PM)Hannibal Wrote:  a book written by a blind pangender transdolphin with hooks for hands is automatically better than one written by a man

This really made me laugh.

I do have a copy of 1984 back in the UK, but I haven't read it yet.

Animal farm is a great read.

Post: #29

I found 1984 to be great, but not as great as the other classic of the genre - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It left a more lasting impression on me.

Post: #30

I really like it, too. Sure, the love story is a little draggy, but come on, the part about the reconstruction of the language aka "Newspeak" is just genius. Think about it, when it was written, linguistics was a pretty new science in Europe and he correctly anticipated how governments would use language in order to shape the conciousness of the people.

Also, Goldstein's book is pretty visionary. I mean he basically is talking about the abolishment of nation states and the creation of the global citizen, something we are actually witnessing today.

What's no to like?

Post: #31

(05-23-2016 02:19 AM)TooFineAPoint Wrote:  I find it strange when people slate 1984 (especially when comparing it to Brave New World), judging by their own standard that it must have been written as some kind of prophecy. And somehow if everything did not come true in the fashion Orwell described, it must not be worth as much.

Of course it's not a prophecy - to me (and I'm in agreement with a few other critics on this) it basically appears to be an angry socialist's beef with Stalinist Russia, which the London of 1984 seems to be a copy of. It's not very good as a science fiction novel either, as Orwell seemed to be obsessed with some kind of "better, nobler" past (that likely never really existed), and has a lot of trouble coming up with any new technologies invented over the following 35 years, other than a two-way videoscreen, to add legitimacy as a story.

It's not a very good psychological commentary on the nature of authoritarianism because, as I mention above, he had no real world experience with it, and so many of the techniques he describes have no bearing to the way that real authoritarian states have historically exercised control.

His ideas about "Newspeak" as a vehicle to limit the expressiveness of concepts seems foolish - the term "bloviation" is often used in reference to political bullshitters because everyone knows that liars almost always use way too many words instead of too few. And even if a population somehow only had 250 words in an "official dictionary" to work with, and would be put to death for ever using one outside of the official corpus, you can guarantee that people would be creating amalgamations out of the words they had available to refer to things and concepts which they had no "official" word for. Because this happens in pretty much all languages...all the time.

Orwell seems to feel that if you threw enough state resources at a population, you could essentially turn them into an entire race of mindless androids with no connection to the past 2 million years of human evolution; that humans are essentially clay that can be molded into any shape one wishes given enough effort. I call bullshit on that idea.

But I can see I'm fighting an uphill battle here.

Post: #32

(05-23-2016 12:54 AM)XPQ22 Wrote:  Orwell's nightmare totalitarian state ruled by a shadowy, powerful elite which maintains absolute power in in perpetuity through scrutinizing the tiniest details of every citizen is a fantasy.

So you've never heard of such organizations as the NSA, the KGB, the Stasi, or MI5/6?

Quote:It's logistically impossible; so is a society where everyone informs on everyone else as you just have a huge mass of conflicting information that's totally useless. In a sense a government that knows everything about its subjects knows nothing - even with computers it's way too much information to ever make any sense out of.

Again, the NSA and other western internal security agencies don't seem to mind collecting that data. Especially now with computers very capable to the task.

Quote:Nearly every real police state vaguely resembling the type Orwell envisioned collapsed, and collapsed rapidly. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China

Nazi Germany wasn't totalitarian, it was authortarian. It also didn't collapse, it was conquered from without. Strike one. Stalinist Russia did not collapse. Strike two. Maoist China also did not collapse. Strike three.

Quote: The leaders forget the true nature of power, which is based on trust - not fear, and finally who they're working for: us. And so they get their throats slit.

So assorted people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Angela Merkel, or Charles Schumer want power because they love their country and want to serve the public good? News to me. Yeah, that Stalin and that Mao-- they trusted the shit out of their countrymen.

Quote:Isaac Asimov pretty much said it best: "The true horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco."

A Jewish socialist failed to see the horror of a world established by Jewish socialists? Yeah, sounds about right.

Quote:Another great criticism made by Asimov is that the novel's focus on history re-writing is absurd. In the real world, it's not even necessary because nobody cares. It's like, tell people "Hey, the US and Russia are friends now" and they'll say "Okay." "But don't you realize that we were enemies just a decade ago?" "Sure, that's fine." You don't even have to expunge history, because in general nobody even cares or bothers to look.

Then why the attempt to whitewash history in our own society? Why do leftists try to discard teaching the classics of Western Civilization? Why is our past now an age of "exploitation and genocide of minorities?" Because it damn sure does have an effect in damn near every aspect of public life. The average person is an ignoramus-- and that's why people in positions of power can get away with altering the historical record.


Listen man, if you're trolling us, masterful job. If you're serious though....

Post: #33

(05-22-2016 04:00 PM)Walker Wrote:  Animal farm is terrible because of the part where a bunch of animals fess up to crimes they didn't commit, and face execution, because of Napoleon egging them on. No one acts anything like that in real life.

At the lower end of the spectrum, people will do it as part of virtue signalling. At the higher end, people will do it either to avoid going against the mob (Jonestown mass suicide), or as others have pointed out, to avoid having their entire families wiped out in return for a mock trial.

(05-22-2016 08:38 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  In a 1969 interview, Kurt Vonnegut said -- " I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever."
...
Finally, it's also true that I've noticed that even the most famous (and popular) (and beloved) writers from the 20th and 21st Century can be abysmally stupid when it comes to politics. This tendency toward idiotic political opinions may be one of the very few ways in which novelists and poets are like movie stars and rock idols.

One is more likely to receive a more common-sense political view and interesting speculation about the future by asking an average citizen on the street than by querying most writers.

I thought the above was very insightful. Writers are easily disgusted by the injustice they see in established society, and often they'll readily abandon it for a community that's antagonistic to establishment society. They swing the pendulum too far the other way, and are often blind to the similarities endemic to all societies.

The wiser ones will eventually recognize that human nature creates the potential for irrationality in every society, so they'll create satire to make things more obvious. The ones who see a reflection of themselves in the satire will feel like they're being attacked, which is why it often has to be dressed up in apolitical allegory (like in Animal Farm). The more perceptive ones will be able to overcome their biases and see the bigger picture.

(05-22-2016 10:06 PM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  I think what happened is that over the years its characters and plot have been referenced and quoted so much that the book lost its power to shock because it's become so familiar.

I see what you're saying, but I'd also suggest that a big reason for it losing it's shock factor is because the concepts are no longer so radical. The society described in 1984 is increasingly becoming a reality.

I also thought Brave New World was pretty uneventful, and I think it's for that reason. The pursuit of hedonism above all other matters, broken families, control through social apathy, etc. It was radical when it came out (1930s) but it gets a yawn today because it's largely become our reality.

(05-22-2016 11:15 PM)Teutatis Wrote:  

(05-22-2016 06:29 PM)el mechanico Wrote:  What's the book about? I was around then but I don't read books.

Either you know perfectly well what the book is about and you're being disingenuous to keep the "ignorant mechanic who has no time nor curiosity for that fancy intellectual non sense" façade (most likely) or you really don't know what's it about and somehow are proud of your ignorance by stating you don't read books (I don't believe it), which one is it?

el mechanico likes to troll threads with non sequitors from time to time. I'd just ignore it.

(05-23-2016 12:54 AM)XPQ22 Wrote:  Orwell's nightmare totalitarian state ruled by a shadowy, powerful elite which maintains absolute power in in perpetuity through scrutinizing the tiniest details of every citizen is a fantasy. It's logistically impossible; In a sense a government that knows everything about its subjects knows nothing - even with computers it's way too much information to ever make any sense out of.

For what purpose is the NSA's massive data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah then? Constant scrutineering of data wouldn't be necessary, just the collection of it to be looked at later. If someone applied for a sensitive job, their past could be dug up for signs of dissent. If someone started pushing for political reform their past could be dug up for blackmail. The scrutineers are not looking for accuracy of information to make sense of it, they're looking for political leverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spit...on_scandal

Quote:so is a society where everyone informs on everyone else as you just have a huge mass of conflicting information that's totally useless.

It happened. They were called stool pigeons. Accuracy of information was not sought, just legitimization of the regime. Communism wasn't working, but it wasn't because communism is a bad system, oh no comrade. It was because there were still Kulaks in our midsts sabotaging our progressive society. Stool pigeons could just implicate others in return for more food and luxuries. If there was conflicting information, just throw the whole lot of them in the gulag.

Quote:Nearly every real police state vaguely resembling the type Orwell envisioned collapsed, and collapsed rapidly. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China (North Korea is a poor example, as it would collapse tomorrow if not for the boatloads of humanitarian aid it gets from more sensible nations, including the US.) The leaders forget the true nature of power, which is based on trust - not fear, and finally who they're working for: us. And so they get their throats slit.

I wouldn't call totalitarian regimes lasting for decades "collapsing rapidly". No matter their lifetime, they've popped up throughout millenia and continue to pop up. It's because human nature hasn't changed much. Leading up to totalitarian regimes there's often a long and predictable descent that precedes them. Books like these are a warning and a useful tool for sober minds to recognize the symptoms and get out in time.

We also currently live in a police state: Mass collection of data, elimination of habeus corpus, indefinite detention, ability to assassinate citizens, international travel controls, passports, wealth confiscation, militarized police forces, etc. But most people don't want to admit it.

Most people had relatively higher standards of living during the early years of Nazi Germany, it doesn't mean it was any less authoritarian.

Quote:Isaac Asimov pretty much said it best: "The true horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco."

He sounds pretty ignorant then if his largest political concern is more soma.

Quote:Another great criticism made by Asimov is that the novel's focus on history re-writing is absurd. In the real world, it's not even necessary because nobody cares. It's like, tell people "Hey, the US and Russia are friends now" and they'll say "Okay." "But don't you realize that we were enemies just a decade ago?" "Sure, that's fine." You don't even have to expunge history, because in general nobody even cares or bothers to look.

I agree that's how it is now, but it wasn't always this way. My Norwegian relatives who lived through WW2 refused to buy German products until they died. Another sign that the methods used in 1984 and Brave New World are increasingly effective.

Post: #34

For me personally, I preferred "Nineteen Eighty Four" to "Animal Farm." Everyone has different tastes. Some things you'll like, and some you will not.

But I don't think anyone can deny that Orwell was a great and influential twentieth century writer. He was a great journalist, a tireless advocate of freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. He's relevant today in a way that most others of his era are not. Not only this, but he acted on his convictions. While his peers were drinking claret in London salons and bemoaning the fate of democracy, he was fighting in the trenches in Spain. So, there you have it.

I've read some of his short stories and they are very good. A friend of mine recommended his book "Burmese Days." I haven't read it, but he says it was his best book. Maybe I will give it a go.

Post: #35

(05-22-2016 05:53 PM)911 Wrote:  Where Orwell was wrong was that he thought the soviet marxist model would come to dominate western societies. He was way off, Huxley's Brave New World is much closer. Huxley predicted that the people would willingly embrace the tools of their cultural destruction, he understood cultural marxism, as part of the Tavistock machine. Here is what Huxley said in 1961:

Quote:There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

and in a follow-up speech at Berkeley the year after:

Quote:. . .we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.

Huxley talks about pharmaceutical means, but I think the internet and related tech is currently the closest drug we have for the masses to love their servitude. In fact, as technology becomes better and better, we have less and less reason to face the harsh trials of life and experience the same end result using technology.

Horny but unable/unwilling to go and find women? Open a browser and watch an endless amount of porn. Porn and porn addiction are, in my opinion, seriously underrated social destabilizers. People tend to ignore porn because it is so normal. A lot of the guys here don't really have this problem because the point of this forum is to learn to go out and fuck real women, but many men have a serious problem with porn. I realized I did too, and have recently hopped on the nofap train. Go read some of the things people write on reddit.com/r/nofap. It is fucking depressing to see what a seemingly harmless, and very easy to access website can do to a man. VR will make this problem worse, and it will keep spiraling down as technology has more direct access to our senses until it can simulate electrical signals to the brain to give you an orgasm at the click of a button.

Lonely and need some social comfort? Hop on one of the infinite internet forums, anonymous chats, social media sites, or online games to meet your base social needs of interacting with people, but leaving your experience dry of any deep connection and real personal interaction. Learn to ignore this emptiness by being given post counts/reputation points/karma/likes.

Bored and need entertainment and stimulation? Why spend hours reading a book or watching a good movie when you can open up reddit/tumblr and look at cat pictures and memes for hours? Or watch reruns of Family Guy and Parks and Recreation on Netflix and get your entertainment in easy to consume, small chunks that ultimately leave you no better than you were before?

Feeling unfulfilled about life, missing that satisfaction that only comes with putting in blood, sweat, and tears into something? Post about it on the internet and receive comfort from those also suffering the same problems, only to go look at cat pictures instead of doing anything about your problem because your brain is now wired to receive instant gratification instead of correlating happiness and fulfillment with effort and perseverance.

I might be overexaggerating a bit here and projecting my experiences onto others since I am a 24 year old who grew up on the internet, spent most of my free time as a child (video games, forums, etc) on the internet, and now work on the internet (programming). I see that the above are problems that have manifested themselves in me, but I can also clearly see that the same problems have manifested themselves in a large amount of people online, as well as a portion of my friends.

I've reached my breaking point and have realized that my goals and ambitions will never be realized until I change my habits, and I am in the process of doing so. It's fucking hard.

The internet and related technology is our generation's Soma.

Post: #36

(05-23-2016 08:37 AM)Germanicus Wrote:  So you've never heard of such organizations as the NSA, the KGB, the Stasi, or MI5/6?

They don't wield absolute power, never did, and organizations of that type have likely existed since the beginning of civilization to secure the state's interests. Even Sun Tzu wrote about it 2000 years ago.

Quote:Again, the NSA and other western internal security agencies don't seem to mind collecting that data. Especially now with computers very capable to the task.

For all the data they collect, it never seems to help them terribly much. European nations likely collect the same type of data and run the same algorithms, and yet terrorist strikes on European capitals by Islamic extremists seem to be an almost daily occurrence. Unless you're one of those folks that believes all of that is intentionally engineered as well...

Quote:Nazi Germany wasn't totalitarian, it was authortarian. It also didn't collapse, it was conquered from without. Strike one. Stalinist Russia did not collapse. Strike two. Maoist China also did not collapse. Strike three.

It was conquered from without as a direct consequence of its nature, so that's really splitting hairs. And I haven't seen a Stalinist or a Maoist around lately. They began collapsing before the head of their cults of personality's corpses were even cold.

Quote:So assorted people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Angela Merkel, or Charles Schumer want power because they love their country and want to serve the public good? News to me. Yeah, that Stalin and that Mao-- they trusted the shit out of their countrymen.

You misunderstand. True power is based on trust the opposite way, i.e. the only reason you have power is because someone somewhere feels it's in their best interest for you to have it. I can't speak to the psychological reasons of the people you mention's desire for power, but the reason they have it at all is because some group of people feels they have something to gain from it. True power can only be given, not taken. Sadly, most feminists don't understand this basic concept either.

Stalin and Mao had exactly the problem you state - they didn't trust anyone. They trusted their countrymen so little, that they finally forgot who they were really working for and figured they were a law unto themselves. History shows that leaders who forget that they're working for get the axe pretty quickly.

Quote: A Jewish socialist failed to see the horror of a world established by Jewish socialists? Yeah, sounds about right.

Orwell was a socialist as well, he was just opposed to a peculiar variety of it. The rest seems like a vague ethnic ad-hominem, more reminiscent of a site like Stormfront than I'm used to seeing on this forum.

I'm a businessman, Orwell certainly wasn't, so that's likely part of the reason I find his book jarring.

Quote:Then why the attempt to whitewash history in our own society? Why do leftists try to discard teaching the classics of Western Civilization? Why is our past now an age of "exploitation and genocide of minorities?" Because it damn sure does have an effect in damn near every aspect of public life.

White European colonists killed a lot of Africans and Native Americans, this is pretty much just a fact. For my part I believe that thinking that the distant descendants of European settlers are somehow responsible for the sins of their fathers is lunacy, but to deny that it occurred in a similar fashion to the way the Japanese rewrite their textbooks to downplay their aggression in East Asia prior to WW2 would be far more of a "memory hole" move than the present situation.

Quote:The average person is an ignoramus-- and that's why people in positions of power can get away with altering the historical record.

It seems like you are longing for some past, noble "Golden Age" of Western civilization which in fact...never actually existed.

Quote:Listen man, if you're trolling us, masterful job. If you're serious though....

It's interesting to get insight into the reasons people think the things they do. Though we disagree here, I appreciate you taking the time to reply.

Post: #37

(05-23-2016 08:43 AM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  For what purpose is the NSA's massive data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah then? Constant scrutineering of data wouldn't be necessary, just the collection of it to be looked at later. If someone applied for a sensitive job, their past could be dug up for signs of dissent. If someone started pushing for political reform their past could be dug up for blackmail. The scrutineers are not looking for accuracy of information to make sense of it, they're looking for political leverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spit...on_scandal

They may score a few wins with the data they have, but the primary reason for facilities like that is likely the simple truth that it's good business; an efficient way to funnel taxpayer money to defense contractors and techno-nerd startups.

Along those lines, all these Orwellian ideas of thought-control and total information awareness seem like way too much effort when at the end of the day you can simply buy people. It doesn't even cost that much in the grand scheme of things; every Colombian cartel is aware of this. For all their sophisticated intelligence gathering it took ten years to finally find Osama, and in the end it wasn't billions of dollars in surveillance hardware that did him in, but a promise of a relatively pitiful amount of hard cash.

Why rule with fear when you can throw them an iPhone and a cheap flat screen television and they'll voluntarily love you forever. People probably aren't at all "hardwired" to be mind-controlled, but I think we're all probably willing, to a greater or lesser degree, to sell out for the right price.

Post: #38

Have you ever heard of the concept of data mining, XPQ?

Post: #39

(05-23-2016 09:19 AM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  For me personally, I preferred "Nineteen Eighty Four" to "Animal Farm." Everyone has different tastes. Some things you'll like, and some you will not.

But I don't think anyone can deny that Orwell was a great and influential twentieth century writer. He was a great journalist, a tireless advocate of freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. He's relevant today in a way that most others of his era are not. Not only this, but he acted on his convictions. While his peers were drinking claret in London salons and bemoaning the fate of democracy, he was fighting in the trenches in Spain. So, there you have it.

I've read some of his short stories and they are very good. A friend of mine recommended his book "Burmese Days." I haven't read it, but he says it was his best book. Maybe I will give it a go.

I agree with you on 1984 and Animal Farm. Both great novels.

Burmese Days is very good, but a different style of novel, much more autobiographical and closer to Down and Out in Paris and London than either of his two more famous novels. 1984 and Animal Farm were written in the mid-late 1940s, years after the bulk of his books were published. Different styles, genres, and in many respects a different author: Orwell turned away from socialism, which you'll be bombarded with if you read Keep the Aspidistra Flying, after his time in Spain and his experiences with the Soviet Union. His perspective writing in 1945 was on another end of the spectrum than in 1935, justifiably so.

I still prefer the raw historical account of Homage to Catalonia to any of his fiction.

Orwell is one of my favorites, I should re-read these

Post: #40

(05-23-2016 09:19 AM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  For me personally, I preferred "Nineteen Eighty Four" to "Animal Farm." Everyone has different tastes. Some things you'll like, and some you will not.

But I don't think anyone can deny that Orwell was a great and influential twentieth century writer. He was a great journalist, a tireless advocate of freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. He's relevant today in a way that most others of his era are not. Not only this, but he acted on his convictions. While his peers were drinking claret in London salons and bemoaning the fate of democracy, he was fighting in the trenches in Spain. So, there you have it.

I've read some of his short stories and they are very good. A friend of mine recommended his book "Burmese Days." I haven't read it, but he says it was his best book. Maybe I will give it a go.

You should give it a go! I dont think its his best book, but I really liked it, especially you should read it if you have visited Burma/Myanmar. Many people igore Orwells time in Burma and how it shaped him as a person. He claimed that there he learned to hate imperialism, which is a big part in his anti-authoritarian development. In Burmese Days you get the feeling that the average brittish expat in SEAsia then isnt much different from now lol.

Orwell might not have lived in a totalitarian stae himself, but that just makes him greater, the fact that he not just could imagine it but also put words on it in a way thats easely descibed for a broad audience. Infact, I think Orwell is the political author thats most liked from all kinds of political orientations, anarchists to fascists quotes him, liberals, socialists, and conservatives. Which makes things stranger since the title of the thread is "1984 is a lousy book", yet there isnt any explenation why the context of the book itself (because thats what I would assume is the relevant part) is lousy. OP just critisize it because of a 'lousy' love-story, and by critisizing Orwell as a person.
Nothing about the easyness of drawing parallels with the situation today, or let say North Korea.

Also, Animal Farm and Huxleys, Brave New World are exellent additions to 1984.

Post: #41

(05-23-2016 01:20 PM)911 Wrote:  Have you ever heard of the concept of data mining, XPQ?

The irony is those machine learning techniques aren't particularly good at helping governments prevent terrorist attacks, but they're great at figuring out what Amazon.com product you might like to buy next.

(05-23-2016 01:48 PM)IDrinkYourMilkShake Wrote:  OP just critisize it because of a 'lousy' love-story, and by critisizing Orwell as a person. Nothing about the easyness of drawing parallels with the situation today, or let say North Korea.

You've selectively ignored enormous amounts of what I've wrote in this thread, so I'm not sure what to tell you. Someone else mentioned that Asimov's critique was invalid due to him being a Jewish socialist, so disassembling things based on personal characteristics seems to be fair game, anyway.

I didn't say that "1984 is a lousy book because Orwell was this and that." I said "Orwell had these experiences, which likely led him to write a lousy book." There is a subtle but distinct difference...I don't believe that Orwell was incapable of the task due to his intrinsic "nature"; he has other works that are better, but for whatever reason it didn't turn out that way.

And as I mention above, North Korea is a joke of a state that only exists due to humanitarian aid and blackmailing its more sensible neighbors, who don't want to deal with the massive humanitarian crisis that would ensue if the state should collapse rapidly. It is in no way self-sufficient (as much as adherents to the Juche ideology might like to pretend otherwise.) It is a Potemkin village of an Orwellian state.

Post: #42

(05-23-2016 08:43 AM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  [quote='Walker' pid='1307572' dateline='1463950810']
Animal farm is terrible because of the part where a bunch of animals fess up to crimes they didn't commit, and face execution, because of Napoleon egging them on. No one acts anything like that in real life.

^ "Dad will you take me fishing this weekend?"

"No, son, but I will take you to be bound and have collars strapped to your neck so you get a taste of how bad white people have been to oppressed races in the past at the monthly white-guilt meet up group."

I feel sorry for that kid. With a POS dad like that, he never had a chance.

Post: #43

(05-22-2016 10:49 AM)XPQ22 Wrote:  1984 is frankly, not a very good book. Every work of art comes form somewhere. So "1984" had to come from somewhere. And so, where did "1984" come from?

Many "SJWs" really like this book.

But did Orwell have much real world experience living under the "systems of oppression" that SJWs harp about? Not really. He worked as a policeman in Burma for a couple of years, probably saw some shit, but probably not much more than anyone else working a similar gig would have seen. And his own life there didn't seem to involve much struggle. He got to hang out in the officer's club, eat well cooked meals three times a day, and basically live like a king in comparison to the rest of the population. After he got tired of that and went through his male "epiphany" phase, he ditched it and zipped back to Europe, where it appears he spent the majority of the middle of his life living with his parents in England or fucking off in Paris.

In the late 1930s, in an act of true white knight stupidity, Orwell decided to go fight for the Communists in Spain. Even Henry Miller told him so:

"Orwell set out for Spain on about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way. The American writer told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War there out of some sense of obligation or guilt was 'sheer stupidity,' and that the Englishman's ideas 'about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney."

Once he got there he seemed surprised that his ideals of righteousness and nobility were in short supply in the reality of violent revolutionary conflict. If Curtis LeMay had been around he would have told him simply "All war is immoral", but the firebombing and incineration of entire Japanese and German cities by fleets of sleek silver bombers, engineered by men who would never in their lives see the front line, was still several years away.

Henry Miller was too right! And Orwell was nearly killed for his pathological idealism.

So all of this gives a little background, but the question remains: where did "1984" really come from? I'll give you my hypothesis:

George Orwell was angry at the world for not being what he wanted it to be. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but he was probably angry for the simple fact that he didn't get laid very often.

Could the explaination be that simple? Who has a thresome with two sweet Parisian girls (and there was probably no place in the world at that time that the women were more DTF than 1920s Paris) and decides they want to write a novel about caged rats that want to gnaw people's faces off? Reading about Orwell's romantic life (what little there is), it seems to be "compliment and cuddle" all the way. He probably got fixated on a girl and asked her to marry him right away and, much like today, she would say "eek no thanks" and head for the hills.

In the "love story" of "1984" anyone can tell that it's much like the "love story" of "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones", i.e. "The Way Shit Ain't Happen."

The real villain of "1984" is not Big Brother, but Winston Smith. A sad, gullible, tortured man, who even though is possessed of a modicum of power which he could have used for good, decides that he's doomed and seeks out his ruin. Perhaps like Orwell, Smith chose never to see the good in the world, but instead decided the world was an evil, fallen place that did not deserve him, and that he must somehow strike out against it. He never made a single person's life better in the world of "1984", and in fact made people's lives worse, including the one woman on the planet who for some reason which remains unclear, loved him. And in the end, they both got exactly what they were asking for. Perhaps Orwell was more self-aware than I realize.

Watch "Brazil." Or "Gandhi." Leave "1984" collecting dust on the shelf.

I like 'Brazil' and most Terry Gilliam, but I maintain '1984' deserves to be read. It's not Orwell's best novel, and most of what makes it good is not Orwell's own invention but stuff drawn from real life news from Russia, but it cuts to the heart of totalitarianism and how it develops. Sure, he never lived in that world himself, but then again, Eric Hoffer lived all his life without ever having first hand knowledge of the movements he wrote about in 'The True Believer'. Insight, not experience, is the hallmark of both books.
There's a lot of what he heard and saw while working for the MOI in the world of '1984', and there's a lot of Orwell in Smith, even more so than any other hero, because Smith is an Orwell who tried to help a revolution, like Orwell really did, but got captured, tortured and renounced his ideals, and could see what had happened to the revolution and to the state, and to himself. Smith is Orwell who had it all happen to him.

And, if it's the case that they do, I would suggest that SJWs really like this book because to anyone who upholds their typical ideals, it's a comedy, not a tragedy. Doublethink, newspeak, historical engineering have really come to the fore in recent years, maybe even coinciding with the emergence of progressivism.

Post: #44

"IDrinkYourMilkShake"....

Great name.

Post: #45

(05-23-2016 01:10 PM)XPQ22 Wrote:  

(05-23-2016 08:37 AM)Germanicus Wrote:  So you've never heard of such organizations as the NSA, the KGB, the Stasi, or MI5/6?

They don't wield absolute power, never did, and organizations of that type have likely existed since the beginning of civilization to secure the state's interests. Even Sun Tzu wrote about it 2000 years ago.

Organizations like the FBI (COINTELPRO operations under Hoover), KGB, Stasi, NSA were extremely effective at creating an environment of fear and paranoia where people were too afraid of dissenting against the state for fear of repercussions and blackmail.

There's also extensive evidence suggesting CIA infiltration and cooperation with media corporations, creating an ability to control and direct political narrative. Think about what Edward Bernays wrote in the 1920s and consider how much they've likely evolved since then.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Quote:For all the data they collect, it never seems to help them terribly much. European nations likely collect the same type of data and run the same algorithms, and yet terrorist strikes on European capitals by Islamic extremists seem to be an almost daily occurrence.

It doesn't help them? Has government gotten bigger or smaller since they've begun mass collection? Has their ability to exert political leverage and blackmail key politicians and military figures gotten more effective or less effective? I'd recommend reading Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State to consider how governments actually operate. Basically, it's all just marketing when they say they care about your freedom and protection. They're main goal is actually power (control) and the ability to aggrandize themselves off the productivity of the host society. A tree is known by its fruit.

Quote:Unless you're one of those folks that believes all of that is intentionally engineered as well...

Of course not, our politicians say they'd never do such a thing, and they're known to be bastions of honesty and integrity. Rather, I choose to ignore the hundreds of examples of false flags throughout history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelling_of_Mainila
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/02/5...tacks.html

They were extremely effective geopolitical tools that've been practiced in almost every society throughout history, but don't worry, I'm sure they no longer do that. We can trust our government. Clapper and Holden will be indicted any day now.

Quote:It was conquered from without as a direct consequence of its nature, so that's really splitting hairs. And I haven't seen a Stalinist or a Maoist around lately. They began collapsing before the head of their cults of personality's corpses were even cold.

Please explain. Are you going to suggest that Nazi Germany was conquered because the allied powers cared deeply about toppling an authoritarian regime and restoring "freedom" in Europe? Wait a minute.. The Soviets were one of the allied powers and they were more totalitarian on almost every measure compared to the Nazis. Why did the other allied powers not invade the USSR? An even better question is why did they finance and arm them?

Quote:You misunderstand. True power is based on trust the opposite way, i.e. the only reason you have power is because someone somewhere feels it's in their best interest for you to have it. I can't speak to the psychological reasons of the people you mention's desire for power, but the reason they have it at all is because some group of people feels they have something to gain from it. True power can only be given, not taken. Sadly, most feminists don't understand this basic concept either.

Fear has nothing to do with power? What about greed? Manipulation? Blackmail? Threats of violence? Ability to control the narrative and what information people have access to (engineering consent)? Your concept of power seems extremely one dimensional and doesn't seem to provide a good model of history.

Quote:Stalin and Mao had exactly the problem you state - they didn't trust anyone. They trusted their countrymen so little, that they finally forgot who they were really working for and figured they were a law unto themselves. History shows that leaders who forget that they're working for get the axe pretty quickly.

And yet they managed to govern until their deaths. Much longer than "democratically elected" leaders. You seem to be confirming the point you're attempting to argue against here. Perhaps it would be useful to entertain the idea that they cared not about their countrymen, but themselves. Perhaps that's one of the reasons people often seek wealth and power.

Quote:They may score a few wins with the data they have, but the primary reason for facilities like that is likely the simple truth that it's good business; an efficient way to funnel taxpayer money to defense contractors and techno-nerd startups.

Highly speculative, and in my opinion, naive if we're to use history as a guide. The NSA's historical analogues were the NKVD, KGB, Gestapo, Stasi, FBI, and they served a far greater purpose then just creating jobs.

Quote:Along those lines, all these Orwellian ideas of thought-control and total information awareness seem like way too much effort when at the end of the day you can simply buy people. It doesn't even cost that much in the grand scheme of things; every Colombian cartel is aware of this. For all their sophisticated intelligence gathering it took ten years to finally find Osama, and in the end it wasn't billions of dollars in surveillance hardware that did him in, but a promise of a relatively pitiful amount of hard cash.

Sounds like a case of extreme normalcy bias. There are outliers and not everyone can be bought. Edward Snowden is a good example of that. Some people actually get insulted by attempted bribes, and certain personality types take honesty and integrity very seriously. Total control and threats of repercussions help to minimize the threat of outliers.

Post: #46

(05-23-2016 02:22 PM)robreke Wrote:  

(05-23-2016 08:43 AM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  [quote='Walker' pid='1307572' dateline='1463950810']
Animal farm is terrible because of the part where a bunch of animals fess up to crimes they didn't commit, and face execution, because of Napoleon egging them on. No one acts anything like that in real life.

^ "Dad will you take me fishing this weekend?"

"No, son, but I will take you to be bound and have collars strapped to your neck so you get a taste of how bad white people have been to oppressed races in the past at the monthly white-guilt meet up group."

I feel sorry for that kid. With a POS dad like that, he never had a chance.

That poor kid and the sick disgusting father. I despise these self hating whites and their rotten sense of self, wish they would just vanish. The blacks on the picture and their white hate could also disappear and the world would be a better place.

Post: #47

(05-23-2016 01:10 PM)XPQ22 Wrote:  They don't wield absolute power, never did, and organizations of that type have likely existed since the beginning of civilization to secure the state's interests. Even Sun Tzu wrote about it 2000 years ago.

Your argument was that such organizations are figments of fantasy, not how much and to what degree of power they wield. Which is funny, you say those organizations are fantasy constructs but then start saying they're not as bad as they seem. So they do exist? As far as the Stasi and KGB were concerned they very much did wield absolute power at their heights. And the NSA, and the British Secret Intelligence agencies both exist and conduct massive surveillance against their own populations and definitely do have at least a limited say in policy. Thank you, but I'm already aware that spies have existed in human society-- Sun Tzu has nothing to do with this. Do you always bring up irrelevant facts to squirm your way out of arguments you're losing?

Quote:For all the data they collect, it never seems to help them terribly much. European nations likely collect the same type of data and run the same algorithms, and yet terrorist strikes on European capitals by Islamic extremists seem to be an almost daily occurrence. Unless you're one of those folks that believes all of that is intentionally engineered as well...

Your argument was that is was impossible to collect and store massive amounts of personal data, how competent the government is when it has it and how it fucks things up are completely separate concerns. So you're saying they do in fact collect and store this data? Also the backhanded way of implying I'm a wacky conspiracy theorist...didn't say a damn thing for or against conspiracy theories. Hmmm, do you always employ lame discrediting tactics against your opponent when you're losing an argument?

Quote:It was conquered from without as a direct consequence of its nature, so that's really splitting hairs. And I haven't seen a Stalinist or a Maoist around lately. They began collapsing before the head of their cults of personality's corpses were even cold.

Nazi Germany lost the war due to poor military strategy and poor mobilization of its economy. Its so-called "totalitarianism" had nothing to do with it. You also said it collapsed, it did no such thing. No, it's not splitting hairs to say it did not collapse, it's splitting hairs to try to make an incorrect argument that it did. That you don't see Stalinists or Maoists around does not mean there was a collapse. That is like talking about the collapse of the Northern States after the Civil War because Abraham Lincoln is now dead and when's the last time you saw a bluecoat walking around lately. You are wrong. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China did not collapse. Did not. Do you always double down on incorrect arguments when you're losing an argument? And for what it's worth the United States (and India and Canada and likely others) has both Stalinist and Maoist political parties operating today. And no, I'm not implying anything by that, so don't make a strawman argument out of it.

Quote:You misunderstand. True power is based on trust the opposite way, i.e. the only reason you have power is because someone somewhere feels it's in their best interest for you to have it.

The only misunderstanding here is on you, man. That is not true in any sense. That is beyond Blue Pill in politics. Go check out Suetonius, Gibbon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Solzhenitsyn, and even Mao himself for starters. Go learn about Marius and Sulla and the last hundred years of the Roman Repbulic. Go read some of these works and let it percolate before you start talking about the nature of power.

Quote:I can't speak to the psychological reasons of the people you mention's desire for power, but the reason they have it at all is because some group of people feels they have something to gain from it. True power can only be given, not taken. Sadly, most feminists don't understand this basic concept either.

Yeah, in the case of the people I named it's because very rich people in charge of powerful organizations fund and promote them to aid in various schemes. That's the reason they have power. Not because people trust them. People (rightly) trusted Ron Paul. Where's he at right now? Millions of people (rightly) don't trust Hillary Clinton-- even people willing to vote for her. Where is she? Perhaps about to become President of the United States.

Quote:Stalin and Mao had exactly the problem you state - they didn't trust anyone. They trusted their countrymen so little, that they finally forgot who they were really working for and figured they were a law unto themselves. History shows that leaders who forget that they're working for get the axe pretty quickly.

What history? A dumb book of history written by a progressive or a neo-con maybe. Yeah, Stalin and Mao...just not truly holding the reins what with the tens of millions of people who died because of their orders. Yeah, but they sure got that axe! Oh, wait....no, they didn't. They both died in bed, completely secure in their power.

Quote:Orwell was a socialist as well, he was just opposed to a peculiar variety of it.

Yeah, so? I didn't say he wasn't and regardless of what he was it has no bearing on my argument. Do you always attack completely immaterial points when you're losing an argument?

Quote:
The rest seems like a vague ethnic ad-hominem, more reminiscent of a site like Stormfront than I'm used to seeing on this forum.

I care not a damn if this upsets your dainty, delicate sensibilities. The point is Asimov, as a Jewish socialist raised in early 20th century Jewish Marxist thought would have an intellectual and emotional blindspot to Marxist totalitarianism seeing as plenty of Jewish intellectuals of the time were fervently Marxist even when Marxist regimes were genocidal and atrocity prone. Also, you say elsewhere that I disqualify Asimov's argument on him being a Jewish socialist. No, I disqualify his argument because he said something stupid.

Also, your attempt to imply I'm a Stormfronter is bullshit. Godwin's law-- here ya go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Quote:I'm a businessman, Orwell certainly wasn't, so that's likely part of the reason I find his book jarring.

So? You run a business. And that has what to do with the argument? That's your subjective mind at work.

Quote:White European colonists killed a lot of Africans and Native Americans, this is pretty much just a fact.

So? Still does not invalidate my argument that distortion of the past has happened and is still happening today. You can't see the point of it. Well, the people in charge of our society do.

Quote:For my part I believe that thinking that the distant descendants of European settlers are somehow responsible for the sins of their fathers is lunacy, but to deny that it occurred in a similar fashion to the way the Japanese rewrite their textbooks to downplay their aggression in East Asia prior to WW2 would be far more of a "memory hole" move than the present situation.

1. That's utter nonsense in itself. Western historians in the past, before it became the accepted thing to grovel and apologize for having the gall for Europeans to even to exist, proudly stated our accomplishments but were also able to admit our warts. History was never memory holed, until recently. 2. Even so, that wasn't my argument. Can you follow an argument, man? I don't think you can. You said there's no point to rewriting the past for political gain. I said there is and it's easy to demonstrate. And then you disagreed, went after another irrelevant (and incorrect) point, and now your response is pretty much a tacit agreement with what I said in the first place...

Quote:It seems like you are longing for some past, noble "Golden Age" of Western civilization which in fact...never actually existed.

I said no such thing. Nowhere. Where you're getting that out of the sentence where I say most people are ignorant and unlearned? You invented that out of thin air. Do you always invent back-handed little attacks on your opponents when you're losing an argument?

Quote:It's interesting to get insight into the reasons people think the things they do. Though we disagree here, I appreciate you taking the time to reply.

I like to argue. You're completely wrong, but this has still been fun. Other than your little back-handed jabs. If you mean that appreciation sincerely then I return it. But straight up man, you're not correct here. Go do some reading about the politics and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries and have a go at some of the Penguin Classics to supplement. And Orwell's nonfiction. You'll see where I'm coming from if you do.

Post: #48

Things are getting a bit heated. Perhaps we should focus the discussion back on the merits of 1984 and it's implications for politics, psychology, and human nature.

Post: #49

Animal Farm is a succinct satire of Communism and 1984 is as close to a dystopian future that someone could imagine in 1948. As someone mentioned earlier, Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron is a prophetic example of what SJW's, feminists, and Bernie Sanders would like to see become reality-Everyone on a perfectly flat, even, playing-field.

Post: #50

(05-22-2016 11:15 PM)Teutatis Wrote:  Orwell was a genius and both 1984 and Animal Farm are fantastic and powerful works and should be mandatory reading for everyone. OP is just trying to stir some controversy.

(05-22-2016 06:29 PM)el mechanico Wrote:  What's the book about? I was around then but I don't read books.

Either you know perfectly well what the book is about and you're being disingenuous to keep the "ignorant mechanic who has no time nor curiosity for that fancy intellectual non sense" façade (most likely) or you really don't know what's it about and somehow are proud of your ignorance by stating you don't read books (I don't believe it), which one is it?

Rude and insulting. I can't call you out because I'll catch a ban.