zifnab25

If you aren't doing well in life, just go back to your last save and try again. Then try to play life on multiple difficulty levels, because that's how you get the richest lived experience.

I hate states. I hate militaries.

"Life is like a box of chocolates"

~ Galadriel Gadot, 1st Princess Lieutenant, Israeli Hugs and Kittens Division, shortly before she was murder-killed to death by Hamas rape-bullets

This is in line with watching “Birth of a Nation” as a somehow antiracist film

If your take on 1984 is that its racist against communists... :-|

the readership is Anglo Expats and tourists.

So, Israelis.

Nonsense. They would have won if they hadn't been stabbed in the back by the fifth columnist lefties.

I'm never sure how precise the "Can you find this country on the map?" game is expecting you to be. Like, if you point at Lebanon by mistake, is that disqualifying? Or are people just giving up and saying "Idk"? Are they pointing to Latvia and getting confused?

But if you handed me a world map, I doubt I'd be able to pick out Israel as "a country with multiple internal regions" because the resolution probably isn't going to give me that info.

It’s a work of propaganda directed entirely and exclusively at the Soviet Union.

Since the USSR dissolved 30 years ago, its officially directed at no one. Even beyond that, parallels between 1984 and the Drug War were prominent well before then. And in the modern moment, there are plenty of parallels - up to and including the book being banned in US schools and libraries.

If being referenced in almost every “communism bad rant”, being on every literature curriculum in the country and being a literal synonym for authoritarianism doesn’t make it go-to then I don’t know what would.

It is neither the only "communism bad" book nor exclusively referenced in that capacity.

Orwell’s lack of subtlety made him come off like a redditor ranting about the Soviets.

That's pure hyperbole.

Orwell describes a world where superpowers are literally in a constant direct, non-proxy, peer-to-peer war. Needless to say this has not materialized

It is happening in Ukraine right now.

His point is that the communists and inscrutable orientals need to rely on war to exist.

The book takes place in England.

Yes alliances change and old friendships fade away but you can literally find pictures of old newspapers praising Bin Laden on the internet right now.

You increasingly cannot. Large public central repositories of historical records are being shut down via lawsuit while private vendors are paywalling and purging their own backlogs. Algorithmic manipulation has made certain images and records more difficult to find over time. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, some viral content revisiting Bin Laden's history was loudly criticized by national media as "praise for Bin Laden on TikTok". This concern trolling further polluted the information stream and resulted in another round of flagging and purging of information related to Bin Laden on the grounds of it being "radicalizing" and "disinformation".

Sure, if you ignore the obvious word-for-word USSR stereotype analogy that 1984

Nobody reading the novel today has a USSR to reference as an analog. We barely even teach the Cold War in history classes before college. This, again, goes back to the methodical purging and occluding of the historical record. In a perverse way, 1984's accusations and stereotypes are but a few of the reference points anyone interested in the old USSR history can easily obtain.

We’ll just have to disagree here…

I guess so.

Except Orwell gets media manipulation wrong.

Not at all. Mass surveillance to track and intimidate locals, brutal police tactics used to silence dissidents, and endless waves of misinformation to obliterate the historical record from memory are all tactics modern nation-states use to dominate a fractious public. Orwell was spot on in this regard. The rhetorical inventions of foreign adversaries advancing on our borders while a phantom menace undermines us at home have permeated Western discourse since the American Colonial Era. Hell, they go back to antiquity.

If you really need a “babby’s first media literacy” it should be Parenti’s “Inventing Reality”. Sure, it’s not a complete picture, but it’s concrete examples and criticisms sure as hell beat the vibes-based paranoia of 1984.

By all means, read Parenti. But "Inventing Reality" is a conversation about the thing, it is not the thing itself. Orwell's 1984 is both a discussion of propaganda and a deeply influential work of propaganda.

It’s endured because it is the go-to “communism bad” book

What makes it the "go-to" when the topic has been flogged for over a century?

I reread it recently and it’s a slog to get through. I felt like following Julia’s example and just going to sleep.

Sounds like a skills issue. shrug

Its a light read by any definition. Fairly short, fast paced, and with all the elements of a Hollywood Thriller. I didn't have any more trouble with 1984 than The Good Earth or Of Mice and Men. If anything, Orwell's complete lack of subtlety makes it fly by.

I don’t know of any Orwellian “strategies” or that anyone anywhere has incorporated whatever they may be into their “principles of governance”.

Then I don't know what to tell you. Again, he isn't subtle. Doublespeak as a turn-of-phrase very neatly encompasses how modern media uses terms like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascism" or "freedom". The Israel-Palestine conflict brings this into high relief, with Palestinians Dying while Israelis Are Killed. The description of minorities - particularly Muslims - in Europe relative to China, really highlights how they are simultaneously this existential threat to civilization and this constant victim of state oppression.

And then you have our modern understanding of war. Nations falling into and out of our sphere of influence shift from friends and allies to nefarious foes within a matter of months, if not days. How many Russian Resets have we endured since the collapse of the USSR? Nevermind detente under Nixon and Carter, or the muddled policies dating back to FDR. China is, similarly, described as on the verge of kicking off WW3 one minute and the lynchpin to a global consensus on this or that ecological concern the next. As one specter rises, the other retreats, in the same manner Orwell describes the perennial war between super-states. We're always winning, but never free from the threat of imminent defeat.

Orwell's description of the Two Minute Hate very neatly matches modern Talk Radio and Daytime TV. Whether we're in a Satanic Panic or a War on Christmas or a Trans Invasion, there's always some vaguely defined cohort of Others that we're supposed to instinctively revile. Whipping people up into a lather and marching them off in a fruitless protest until they're burned out is straight out of the CIA counterintelligence field manual

How can you not read 1984 today and see it is a picture of Western living?

Because… it isn’t?

Endless wars, chronic domestic shortages, brutal police violence, a steady erosion of the historical record, and a deliberate inflaming of tensions between races, genders, and religious cohorts are all endemic in modern western life.

Liberals and conservatives are hypocrites, don’t need 1984 to see that.

You need books like 1984 to lay out the methodology, both in the writing and in the utilization of the writing to displace blame. The history of the book tells a story of propaganda as well as the book itself.

Lessons from 1948

I'm old enough to remember Baghdad Bob jokes that would fit perfectly here.

lol, I find it hard to believe that's not an LLM

The real magic of LLMs is not that they sound like people but that so many people already bang out their comments like vending machines.