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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.
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."
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
Conclussion [kuh n-kluhsh-uh n] noun
Shock caused upon reaching the end of a particularly jarring chain of thought.
Not at all the same thing. When people experience something that actually happened to them that the other person is unaware of or considers inconsequential because stats say it's rare etc. then it's a lived experience.
Trump's inauguration crowd was not bigger in his "lived experience". It was smaller, the extra millions he claims were there simply don't exist. He did not have that experience.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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
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
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?
To be fair to Trump, Hillary Clinton got nailed in a similar way when she claimed she was under fire during a visit to the Balkans in the 1990s. Of course, her response when called on what was a false claim wasn't to insist that she had been under fire, in complete defiance of the facts, but rather to admit that she had been mistaken. That eyewitnesses will often get even rather large details of an experience wrong is not in any way controversial. I took an introductory psychology course last year that had a very good section on how memories, even recent ones, can be faulty; prone to bother intentional and accidental alteration. Stress can often interfere with memory formation, and the way the brain stores memory is in an encoded format, so memories are in fact reconstructed, and not just simply video files, so even during the reconstruction phase, memories can be altered.
Now where Clinton and Trump differ is that when Clinton was called on the clearly false claim that she had come under weapons fire while landing in Bosnia, she apologized and admitted her memory of the event was wrong. Trump, on the other hand, lacks even a false sense of humility, and simply asserts, in defiance of the facts, that his experience was true.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The weird shit is the nature of the many lies he's told. It's one thing to make vague claims to further a political agenda (e.g., WMDs in Iraq, 'Obama was born in Kenya and is muslim,' 'if you like your insurance, you can keep it, etc...). It's another thing entirely to deny you said something last week, when there's video and audio of you saying that thing. It's like these petty, childish lies for no reason other than lying. It's bizarre that so many people were ok with that. If it was your six year-old child, you'd tell them how ridiculous it is to lie about something when the people you're lying to know it's obviously a lie.