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.

Comments

Who's buying?

[TimothyHollins]

First we should make sure it's not the Trump administration buying these. They might be mistaken for operating manuals.

Re:Who's buying?

[Layzej]

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.

Re:Who's buying?

[mwvdlee]

We've heard Trump's inauguration speech with echoes of the villain Bane from the Dark Knight Rises

Oh boy, we've got someone pulling out their fake news. There was a single sentence that had a basic resemblance to Bane's speech. That single sentence: "We're giving power back to the people." That's it.

Then it's not fake news, now is it?
If may be insignificant and not newsworthy, but it is not fake.

Re:Who's buying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nineteen Eighty-Four has always been out of copyright in Oceania.

Re:Who's buying?

[PopeRatzo]

The left have spent the last 10 years changing the meaning of words like "male" and "female"

Here on Slashdot, "male" and "female" refer to types of plugs, not biology.

I really hope...

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:I really hope...

[aevan]

No, they aren't. Otherwise they wouldn't have whined at the military for 'chink in the armour'. Thank you though for demonstrating 'alternative facts' though, your interpretation of the last few years has been noted.

Re:I really hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I really hope...

[Mashiki]

Uh no. This is the bullshit that social justice has created. People are screaming "SJW" because social justice warriors are the ones pushing the bullshit claiming that kimono's are cultural appropriation. Or wearing Halloween costumes are racist/sexist/misogyny or some other bullshit. They're the ones lining up to try and ban people from making speeches, and saying that people who don't follow the group think need to be banned. You know, like Peter Tatchell or Germaine Greer. You are authoritarians, you are engaging in authoritarian behavior. You think you're the good guys and you're not. You're everything you claim to fight.

Re:I really hope...

[Antique Geekmeister]

> 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.

Re:I really hope...

[elrous0]

SJW have never had any actual power

Tell that to all the conservatives on college campuses who are under siege right now from "powerless" SJW's. Tell that to all the conservatives getting banned from social media, getting doxxed, getting fired from their jobs for having the "wrong" ideas, getting physically attacked just for daring to speak at rallies, etc. For a "powerless" lot, SJW's sure seem to wield quite a bit of power these days in the media, on college campuses, in Hollywood--pretty much everywhere save direct politics (where mainstream Americans still thankfully vote them down).

It's gotten pretty bad when an old-school liberal like myself fears Donald Trump and the Republican Party less than what the Democratic Party has become. As a former Democrat, all I can say is that the new left had better wake up and realize that SJW's are a cancer that will ultimately kill the host. They've already chased away the working class, and turned several blue states red. Just keep going down that path and see how many more states turn red in 2020.

Re:Wrong Book?

[Rollgunner]

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

Re:Doublethink? Try watching the interview before

[allcoolnameswheretak]

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.

Re:Uh-oh

[Anonymous Coward]

Conclussion [kuh n-kluhsh-uh n] noun
Shock caused upon reaching the end of a particularly jarring chain of thought.

Re:Not even close.

[swb]

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.

Re:Doublethink? Try watching the interview before

[AmiMoJo]

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