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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.
And Brave New World is now at #33 on the Bestseller list... two titles ahead of Fahrenheit 451. I sense a theme...
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.
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