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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."
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.
> 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
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
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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.