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Comcast Discontinues Customers' USENET Service
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has discontinued its provided usenet service, once provided to all its high speed customers. First with the cap put on its customers several years ago on amount of traffic provided as part of the customer high-speed package, as of September 16, the service is no longer provided.
Without fanfare, this bastion of the internet is being removed from the mainstream."
Not "discrepancies", ignorant nonsense. "1984" and "Big Brother" have become catch phrases for entities, especially governments, that spy on and/or micromanage the lives of individuals. That sort of describes one aspect of the book, but there's a lot more to it than that. And many people who obviously only know the book through these catch phrases talk knowingly it as if that were all it were about.
For example, everybody "knows" that the fictional government in 1984 spies on all its citizens and has endless rules for regulating their behavior. In the actual book, Oceania's rulers basically ignores the "proles," who make up 90% of the population, except to make the odd troublemaker or gangster disappear, and to use various cultural influences (including drugs and pornography) to encourage a passive, indifferent attitude.
And there are no repressive laws, because there are no laws at all! (Though the proles are under the impression that the drugs and porn that are used to control them are actually illegal.) Far from being a vast, bureaucratic state, Oceania is a anarchic, barely-governed mess where nobody knows exactly what's going on. Despite the title of the book, even the actual year is uncertain.
And did I mention the government-sponsored riots? Soviet Russia it ain't.
The protaganist, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth where (of course) he makes up lies. Except he himself has no idea of the truth behind the lies he creates. For example, he publishes reports that shoe production has exceeded targets, even though he's seen statistics that show production has fallen far short. Thing is, Smith is convinced that the statistics he's seen are themselves bogus, and nobody actually knows how many shoes are being made.
Now, Smith is under constant surveillance. But that's only because he's part of the "Outer Party" the junior members of INGSOC (usually just called The Party) who run things. They're bossed around by the "Inner Party" who have only slightly more privacy than he does. His behavior is tightly controlled, but though intimidation and "groupthink", not through repressive laws.
Smith is a sort of half-assed dissident who secretly opposes the rule of INGSOC. But not as secretly as he imagines. It turns out that the Inner Party knows all about him. And this is where most people's understanding of the book goes really off the beam. Because it's widely interpreted as a satire of the USSR. But if the Soviets knew about somebody who was working to overthrow him, they'd just haul him in and shoot him, with a show trial if the person was widely known.
That's not what happens to Smith. Oh, he does eventually get his show trial and execution, but not before, he's put through a brutal process designed to "cure" him. What's his condition? Well, his understanding of reality is at odds with the Party's so he's obviously delusional! The process works: the last words in the book are "He loved Big Brother." The Soviets were often accused of "mind control" but they never managed to take it that far!
From what I know of British history, the society described in 1984 is a satire of the the left-wing political theories that were trendy during and shortly after WW II. Orwell took these ideas and carried them to their logical (and absurd) extreme.
One other thing that most people "know" about Orwell was that he was against all things left wing. He was indeed very critical of the Soviets and their sympathizers and apologists. And his scathing description of Communist tactics during the Spanish Civil War are often quoted by the Right. But despite his differences with the Left, Orwell was in fact, a socialist who had strong opinions about the plight of working class Brits.