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George Orwell's '1984' Tops Amazon's Bestseller List (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sales of George Orwell's dystopian drama 1984 have soared after Kellyanne Conway, adviser to the reality-TV-star-turned-president, Donald Trump, used the phrase "alternative facts" in an interview. As of Tuesday, the book was the sixth best-selling book on Amazon. Comparisons were made with the term "newspeak" used in the 1949 novel, which was used to signal a fictional language that aims at eliminating personal thought and also "doublethink." In the book Orwell writes that it "means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." The connection was initially made on CNN's Reliable Sources. "Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase," said Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty. Conway's use of the term was in reference to White House press secretary Sean Spicer's comments about last week's inauguration attracting "the largest audience ever". Her interview was widely criticized and she was sub-tweeted by Merriam-Webster dictionary with a definition of the word fact. In 1984, a superstate wields extreme control over the people and persecutes any form of independent thought. UPDATE 1/24/17 6:56PM PST: Orwell's dystopian novel is now the #1 Best Seller in Books on Amazon.
Ironic really, since the USA is more like Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty Four
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Particularly for the part where people actually start calling dictionaries "political", and the definition of objectivity and facts "liberal"... I think we'll soon see a decree from the Orange one renaming the Mississippi "De-Nial".. No wait, that would make sense. :/
The current discourse is insanity, but it amply proves what happens when you make entertainment of history, no effort is ever made to teach people to think and the common man is treated by nothing but contempt. The great irony is that everyone wakes up now, because we've got an non-establishment monkey in the White House. But if we're honest, it's factually no different from what we've been treated to for years and years by other, established politicians and multinational corporations, the only difference is how obvious the lies are, and how fervently they are defended by the useful idiots. It's sad to see it would take something like this to get the media and people in general to finally take a stand against the shameless lies we're fed every day, but I suppose late shall the sinner awaken.
I can only hope Trump and his lickspittles serves as a general alarm clock for our society, so we all start to demand the truth from those who claim to "represent" us, or "lead" us, and stop accept being told the most outrageous and shameless lies, no matter who it might be who tell them. I'm not optimistic though, but as everyone knows, I've been wrong before. Let us pray I'm wrong this time too.
Signed
AC
I really hope SJWs will realize their fight to purge the language of "bad words" is in fact persecution of thoughtcrime.
If you ban "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from schools "because it uses the 'n' word and that's offensive", you're doing precisely what 1984 warns about.
Did you just use "SJW" and "realize" in the same sentence?
As if someone so certain of his own moral superiority, who walks around touting his "tolerance" while calling anyone who dares disagree "racist", who carries a sign saying "Love Trumps Hate" while tossing molotov cocktails, isn't deep down as dumb as a post and incapable of chewing gum and walking at the same time, much less having any actual realization?
Such idiots do have one use: they're fun to laugh at.
And I apologize. Calling SJWs "dumb as a post" is an insult to every acorn on God's good Earth with dreams of sprouting, growing for decades, getting cut down, shipped to a lumber mill, hewn into a post, shipped to a Home Depot, and stuck in the ground with a gate hung on it.
Or the aforementioned "n-word" in "Uncle Tom's Cabin". It's literally an attempt at eradicating the very thought of the concept from the society, removing any reflection of it, replacing it with an empty, shallow mantra - erasing the memory, erasing the history.
And the effect are the inevitable: who doesn't learn the history, is bound to repeat it. Racism in entirely new forms abounds, but since critical thought and understanding of the reality and nature of racism has been largely eradicated, since the new forms don't contradict the empty mantra, they are no longer recognized - and we get such curiosa as "Blacks can't be racist."
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Why Donald's staff are lying:
By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.
Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.
I've had a SJW coworker call me out on racism for the following conversation while at a restaurant:
Me: Hey, that's the new guy from that other department.
*points to the door of the restaurant*
SJW: Who?
Me: The black German.
SJW: You can't say that!
Me: He's black and he's from Germany, what's the problem?
SJW: You should say "the German person of color."
Me: That's an unwieldingly long and ultimately less-specific description, and saying that a black person is black is just stating fact.
So in my experience most of these people just try to find trivial nonsense to be offended about when the origin of the comment is an observation or fact, and is in no way being used to judge a group of people. And yes, it is (or can be) about banning words and I've had this happen to me on more than one occasion with more than one SJW.
Not entirely true. With all 'experiences' - and certainly with the left - there is always a high degree of subjectivity and emo-ideology there. "What actually happened to them" is not inherently nor objectively what actually happened to them therefor, but rather what they think or feel what has happened to them. This is often besides the truth, and what actually happened to them was something else - but they don't 'experience' it that way. This has to do with how your brain interprets sensory input, and how one reacts (depending on ones' personality) on it. Humans are extremely unriliable in this aspect, which is why scientific tests have proven 'witnesses' to a (perceived) crime, have it wrong to an astonisghingly degree. Eye witnesses are unreliable as hell.
Secondly, even if it IS actually what happned to them, it still has little relevance to the question whether or not it is objectively true, since such an experience can only be called anecdotical. You can derive very little of one anecdote, alas. To say something meaningful of an anecdote - in the sense of distilling an actually objective truth out of it - one would to need to analyse hundreds of them. Statistically, that is.
Now, coming back to your claimed difference, we see actually none. Trump may well have 'experienced' it, as something that actually happened to him, that there were 1,5 million people there (as he has claimed). this, of course, was a subjective experience, but still an experience. You claim he didn't, but you can't know that. and if he - at least at that moment - did, your whole argument goes down. I agree that those millions weren't there but that is mayhaps not how he 'experienced' it.
So yes, they are the same.
> Note that it's not the "bad words" people you call SJWs complain about, it's the actual racism behind them.
I'm afraid to say it's not just racism or bias. I've recently had a discussion with an HR person at a client's workplace because I discussed dealing with my colleague's PMS in terms of scheduling. My colleague, from my own team, has _horrible_ PMS. She suffers horrific cramping and does not normally work on those days, but we had a schedule to meet. I discussed how we'd accomodate her medical needs and she'd work offsite, for only limited hours, on those days, because she was a critical member of our team. I received a formal complaint, which _shocked_ me, and which I had to review with our company's lawyer and our HR personnel, and have my female colleague call the HR person and discuss. The HR person _did not want to speak to my colleague_, which also shocked me. My mention of the issue was, itself, considered sexual harassment.
The HR person was being what is sometimes called a "snowflake". They were actively disrupting their own company by over-reporting, and the engineers I worked with from their teams had quietly asked me and my team if there were openings at our company, or people hiring in the market. I could not, legally, due to basic agreements in our contracts. I can't discuss the details of advice I did provide: but the shift to workplace thought and speech policing is a familiar one as a company grows, and even accidental or completely factual speech can become politicized.
BTW... Who said anything about administration?
For one... There is no such thing as "Trump administration" yet. And clearly, there won't be one for quite some time.
Which is what happens when you hire a lazy, lying, incompetent bum prone to litigation to work for you.
And no one said it was "the administration" that's being a "liar and a sociopath" - it's Trump and the people he is picking who are liars, sociopaths and idiots.
Here, again, for those with reading issues.
They are lying cause their boss, who has handpicked them, is a liar and a sociopath.
A liar and a sociopath who has handpicked people who don't mind being told lies nor do they mind telling lies to reach their goal.
They are lying cause they are liars and sociopaths. Also... idiots who don't mind being lied to.
Also, tu quoque is a fallacy - not an argument.
Particularly when you reply to a "He's a lying sociopath and so are the people he's picking" carpet bombing with a fizzling firecracker like "Well... like the previous administration NEVER lied".
Not only are you neck deep in the fallacy septic tank, you're diving deeper by emphasizing your own attempt at false equivalence.
Which is pathetic, I know, but what CAN you do?
You can't just pick ANY random statement by ANY previous president and say "See? That's a lie." - at least 50% of those won't be lies.
Unlike with Trump, with whom telling truth happens to be more of a statistical error than accident.
Just get over it already. Trump won. Enjoy!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I am getting a little worried. I have never seen so much propaganda and mind fucking before. WTF is going on? Why are people attacking reality so much? What is being hidden? What is to be gained by a populace who can no longer tell up from down?
The more I see of this shit, the more that I am happy that Trump was elected. It means the people who were in power no longer have a stranglehold on that power.
We might actually get the hope and change that the last president promised and thoroughly and completely failed to do.
I think Trump will be a terrible president, but he is not part of the establishment who would be more than happy to send undesirables off to the gas chambers and ovens.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
You were being trolled.
Well, quite possibly not. I've known at least one black person who told me in no uncertain terms that he disliked the term "person of colour". On the one hand, it lumps everyone who isn't white together and secondly, not calling someone black when they are implies there's something wrong with "black" which is kinda offensive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Are you working for Trump? You seem to have picked up all the standard tactics used by his supporters:
- Claim that we misunderstood the statement
- Ad hominem the interviewer
- Blame the Democrats
- Allege conspiracy
- Claim everyone else is just as bad as Trump anyway
- Conflate opinion and fact
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Even if you imagine Benghazi claims by the Obama Administration were a lie, then at least it was a lie that would be very difficult to disprove. Indeed, even Congress has never really been able to solidly hold the Administration to account.
And Trump's claim on the Inauguration wasn't that lots of people saw it, his claim was that the Mall was filled with people and that pictures showing it pretty sparsely attended were faked, which was easily debunked.
So what we arrive at is that Trump is actually a terrible liar. Being a liar is practically a requirement of being a politician, being a terrible liar is the hallmark of a bad politician.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah, Trump has his legion of idiot followers, but frankly some of the worst behaviour I've seen is from his opponents that are butt-sore about the election and shocked to high-hell that suddenly they might have 4 years of not being considered special little snowflakes by the current administration.
I remember a news article once coining the term "crybullies", people who pick on others, shout them down, then shut down any intelligent counter-arguments by claiming "oppression" or highlighting only loony-toon opponents/arguments. I have a guess that the next 4 years probably isn't going to work out so well for these people.
I just think he's an idiot who had damn good polling data and people who knew how to use it. I don't think he's the evilest man in the world, I just think he's emotionally and intellectually incapable of doing the job. Honestly, I think his presidency is going to be Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game; pay no attention to the people in the middle of the frame, pay attention to what's going on in the background. It's people like Pence and Tillerson who are the real administration.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When confronted with the facts, Obama didn't say, "Hey, you have your facts and we have our own alternative facts." Instead he conceded that Benghazi "wasn't just a mob action."
It's important to acknowledge that there is such a thing as the truth. We all share the same reality.
It has been suggested that Donald Trump is not a liar. "He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all."