Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
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Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
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Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#12Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#13[flagged]
> having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient
1984 was published in 1949. It's a bit harsh to expect him to have anticipated computers
Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#14[flagged]
This is beyond silly. The guy who wrote Down and Out… and Road to Wigan Pier, and actually fought fascists in Spain, couldn’t imagine proles as anything but brainless subhumans? Orwell in 1948 didn’t predict computers? Have I been trolled?
Obvious troll. Calling Orwell a rich kid who got his feelings hurt is obscene. I challenge anyone who says that to work as a plongeur for even one week. Or to live on only toast and tea, bumming around the work houses in the UK. He never begged for money from anyone, he only worked during this time, and his book on the topic is remarkable. It's a must read for anyone who's ever worked in the food service industry.
His work house experiences informed 1984. The original poster in this comment thread is just trolling beyond belief, and also, seems to have no grasp of the topics at hand what so ever.
Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#15Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
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Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#16Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
But popcorn sales are through the roof!
Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#17[flagged]
> having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient 1984 was published in 1949. It's a bit harsh to expect him to have anticipated computers
In addition, he was riffing on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a hub-and-spoke style prison design with a single guard at the hub observing the prisoners in each spoke.
1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.
Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#18Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
How so? Orwell's stories dealt with class protectionism, and how the average person unwittingly contributes to systems of oppression and exclusion. Empire is about outsourcing the bottom end of inequality.
Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#19Orwell's work was peak english literary culture, and what they call criticim and theory are really just a way to dissolve meaning and kill culture by preventing it from persisting as coherent meaning in time. It's an unmooring and uprooting, and it does not produce anything anyone actually desires other than a set of shibboleths for a conspiracy to destroy a culture and rule over its ashes.
There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.
In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
Re: Purging George Orwell's books misses what drives the political right
#20[flagged]
> and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers
I think our current world proves that being watched by humans hits people in a way that being monitored by computers doesn't. Remember those "Surveillance Camera Man" videos? You can see countless examples online of people freaking out at a human engaging in public photography because they filmed them or snapped a picture. Often they do it while standing directly under surveillance cameras. It doesn't matter to people if their ring camera is using facial recognition and logging everything within its field of view and secretly forwarding that data to law enforcement agencies, but try standing on the sidewalk in front of their house and recording everyone who comes and goes and see how they react.