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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.
First we should make sure it's not the Trump administration buying these. They might be mistaken for operating manuals.
The right has now usurped what was once the sole domain of the left -- Relativism.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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.
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I saw a picture of the crowd from Trump's podium. From there the empty patches were not easily evident. From his angle it looked like there were people covering every patch of concrete if you didn't look carefully enough. And since it looks that way from where he way (literally) standing, the media must be lying - simple logic I guess.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Watch that interview very carefully. There is no way she was talking about "other" facts that weren't being reported. She meant to say exactly what she said. The administration has "alternative facts" that better fit their agenda.
Look, I realize that there is this bitter rivalry in US society between liberals and conservatives. But try to put politics aside, and try to think as a sane human being.
Donald Trump is the guy who insisted Barack Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the US. He is the guy who once claimed he owned the Empire State Building, which is false and was false at the time. He is the guy who said he has been on the Time magazine "more than anybody" which is false. He is the guy who so often claimed that he never said something he just said a few days earlier. His Trump University has been trialed for fraud. One of his advisers is a guy who owns a right-wing conspiracy theory website that is specialized on the spreading of fake news.
Try to think about this rationally.
Donald Trump is either a serial liar or simply delusional. You can look all of his insanity up. If you believe him and his administration more than established, international media networks such as CNN, you have to face the fact that you have decided to stop being a rational thinking person.
As the CNN megapixel graphic showed, the Trump crowd was larger than reported. This seems a silly thing to fight over, since Trump's supporters are less likely to attend an inauguration than a rally anyway.
Really, though, why does this matter at all? Hint: it doesn't. The fuss over this was generated to take some attention away from the rally on the next day. This administration will seek to control journalists by distracting them and diluting their ability to ask the tough questions.
soylentnews.org
Conclussion [kuh n-kluhsh-uh n] noun
Shock caused upon reaching the end of a particularly jarring chain of thought.
Nice to see public awareness of this book in the mainstream! Very nice! An informed public is a public inoculated against tyranny.
...RTFM?
Boy, has this place changed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As the CNN megapixel graphic showed, the Trump crowd was larger than reported. This seems a silly thing to fight over, since Trump's supporters are less likely to attend an inauguration than a rally anyway.
You do know that according to the alt-right everything the mainstream media publishes is lies, lies and more lies, a stack of lies all the way down! So if CNN, a load bearing pillar of the main stream media, published a megapixel picture that seems to prove Trump's inauguration crowd was much larger than reported, by alt-right logic, that claim must be a baldfaced bloody lie. That picture must be a Photoshop manipulation and positive proof that Trump's inauguration crowd must indeed have been tiny. But all sarcasm aside crowd size is indeed a silly thing to fight over, especially after listening to Sean Spicer step onto a podium and tell a room full of reporters:
"Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimise the enormous support that had gathered on the national Mall. Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers, because the national park service, which controls the national mall, does not put any out. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period!
How is it possible to claim Trump's inauguration crowd was the largest in history if nobody had any numbers? The real irony here is that we would not be talking about this if Trump hadn't made such a big deal about it and if the entire right wing spin machine hadn't jumped on board to help him. Somebody should acquaint the White House press secretary and his team with the Streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Certainly! But of course only in the latest edition, the others have been retracted for correction.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's much simpler than that.
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And legalised drugs, sorting people into social classes based on intelligence, procreation entirely through industrial processes, and a purely centrally planned and managed economy. I'm guessing lobiusmoop hasn't actually read Brace New World and just wants to sound literate.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A "Big Brother" that spies on you in secret still fears you. It's when they don't care about secrecy that you have to start worrying.
Legalized drugs: Widespread use of anti-depressants and tranquilizers is a lot like soma.
Sorting people into classes based on intelligence: Socioeconomic pecking order based on which degree you got, which college you went to, your SAT scores, your GPA, etc.
Purely centralized economy: Federal reserve monetary policy, Wall Street, investment banking, transnational corporations, Davos, private equity, regulatory capture. I'll cede that this is a weak comparison, but all of those organizations tend to be incestuous in membership and switching between organizations is common.
Procreation: In-vitro fertilization, genetic screening, scheduled c-sections. We're not yet decanting our offspring, but among the moneyed classes the reproductive process is industrializing.
Perhaps as a whole the real world isn't a literal comparison to BNW, but I think the metaphorical comparisons are striking.
The Obama administration never lied about anything? Or perhaps now it's Trump people are actually checking and reporting it.
And let's not forget that rational, intelligent people can disagree on matters of import, the significance of facts, and so forth without ceasing to be rational.
Are you sure you're not talking about opinions? Isn't the definition of a "fact" that it is a non-debatable, unambiguous truth? Such as the fact that Obama is christian and was born in the United States? If you are trying to soften up facts and put them up to debate, you are already by your knees in that Orwellian universe the White House would like to have us.
Not one iota, not a smidgen of lying in Obama's administration....
Obama: The attack on Benghazi was because of a YouTube video...
Press: Ok, sure, we believe it.
Trump: Lots of people saw my inauguration.
Press: LIAR!!!!
Amazing that people are willing to buy this from Amazon, even the SlashDot crowd seem to have forgotten this incident:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Thankyou Trump and lol SJWs, turns out demonizing the average person isn't a winning strategy.
But look at the bright side. You still have your victimhood and sense of persecution.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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
True (and there's no social mobility in the book, which adds another point that's converging with reality). Actually, I'd say that the biggest differences with the book are that the overwhelming majority of people in Brave New World were happy, contented and fulfilled, there was no unemployment or underemployment, and no poverty or wealth inequality.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
The Obama administration never lied about anything?
Obviously, if anyone can find one false statement from Obama, it excuses an infinite number of deliberate lies from Trump. Right?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
And thank you Trumpites for the public education, as we see Conway and her fellow merry band of sociopaths try to create Newspeak before our very eyes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't really recall them asserting that lies could be recoined as "alternate facts". That politicians and their minions lie is a given, that they would so obstinately declare outright falsehoods and then try to recast the obvious falsehoods as some variant on "facts" is a new one to me, at least in the West. This is indeed more a trick of authoritarians.
And for what exactly? Because the Mall wasn't nearly as filled for Trump's inauguration as for Obama's 2008 inauguration? Why would that matter? Even further, to claim Hillary Clinton's popular vote win was made up of fraudulent votes? Why would that matter? What counts is the Electoral College, not popular votes? It strikes me as completely idiotic, a squandering of what little political capital Trump has actually entered the White House with on moronic side issues that have no bearing on governance whatsoever.
I had begun to believe the claim that Trump's bluster was some sort of clever ploy, a strategic type of hyperbole. Now I'm beginning the man really is a fucking moron. The first rule of lying is don't lie when you can get easily caught, and don't lie when there's no advantage conferred. What the hell was the point of inauguration attendance claim? What is the point of the three million vote fraud claim? These lies are not only stupid and easily debunked, they do nothing to aid Trump's administration.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
That's it? That's all you got? Benghazi.
Trump is mentally ill. He is fcking insane. Lost touch with reality. Major parts of every speech he has given has shown to packed full of lies.
And the best you got is Benghazi?
The audience is not just the people on the ground, but also the people watching at home. And Trump’s inauguration broke live video streaming records.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Most of them would still be struggling to finish it, so I don't see your point.
I missed the part where the Administration or the ACA stripped your doctor away from you.
You can *definitely* make the argument that free-market reaction to market dynamic changes resulting from the ACA resulted in some people losing access to doctors they once had due to rule changes within private insurance entities, but you're saying that Obama saying that is a lie, or a deliberate untruth.
The only untruth I see here, is your attempt to redefine lying to mean being wrong or naive. It would make sense, since actual lying, and attempting to forcefully alter perception of reality, something we're getting a rather sobering taste of at the moment, is a whole different level of fucked up.
No, sir, the liar appears to be you. Next up, shall we tango over Benghazi?
LOL! I knew he seemed familiar. "We are not under invasion. There are no bombs falling here." And you can hear the explosions in the background.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.