I love how "From the river to the sea" is just carte blanch branded as Anti-semitism now. I wonder if we'll see some pro athlete or pop star kick off a media firestorm for saying this at a championship game or an awards show.
zifnab25
joined 5 years ago
I think the only thing 1984 should be studied for is it’s history of promotion by spooks.
Eh. That's a very shallow historical reading. The book isn't just some leaflet agitprop, its a time capsule of all the paranoia and hysteria of the 1950s embedded in it. Orwell planted the seeds of modern Libertarianism via the cognitive dissonance of both lusting for and fearing the specter of the Police State. The fact that it was so heavily republished and distributed is itself a topic of discussion. As was the life of a colonial era failson turned spook turned celebrity, as it relates to the paranoia the book espouses.
There are infinitely better ways to study media manipulation.
There are few books that embody both the ideas of modern media manipulation and the actualization of those strategies in practice, as 1984. Maybe you could look to Rand or Heinlein, but their writing is significantly worse and far more difficult to digest. Orwell's pieces are exceptional vectors for the ideologue of the era as evidenced by their successful penetration and endurance.
I don’t get this trend of trying to “fix” Orwell.
I think leftists tend to read Orwell as an anti-communist polemic exclusively. But what he's laid out is at least as influential as Machiavelli's The Prince or Sun Tsu's Art of War, at least in so far as it gets people to read it and incorporate the stated strategies into their plan of governance. His politics is incidental to the strategies he proposes and the degree to which people have eagerly adopted them.
Is it not ok to just leave it as the anticommunist propaganda it so obviously is?
Again, if we were talking Atlas Shrugged or An Excess Male or some rewriting of the Anastasia myth, sure. They're all self-indulgent rants and reactionary hagiographies. But I think 1984 lays out, in a very tangible way, the implications of mass surveillance and media lead hysterics and historical revisionism. Is it for babies? Sure. But everyone's a baby at some point. And put within its historical role, the book practically defines the idea of Double-Speak within itself.
At least within the modern moment, it is a relatable narrative. A middle-class professional bumping up against the walls of an invisible prison of which he is both resident and warden. The perspective of someone whose life is getting marginally worse, day by day, thanks to his nation's endless lust for war. Someone whose position in society is predicated on working towards its destruction, but who is unable to find any way to rebel without provoking the wrath of a ruthless police state.
How can you not read 1984 today and see it is a picture of Western living? And that's long before you get into the gritty politics surrounding the novel, and how it is used reliably by the apparatus of the state to vilify dissidents, justify a larger police state, and sublimate revolutionary tendencies with the next generation? It is an embodiment of its own message. Very hard to simply ignore.
The trick is to be loud, be confident, and be everywhere.
Sprinkle in some truthy jingoism - "China is worse! Plastics for Medical Supplies! Wind Turbines Kill Birds! What about the Jobs, tho!" - and you'll get this nonsense on NPR for all the liberals to ingest from now until the heat death of the planet.
Could be some kind of algorithmic pricing, where some machine decides "We noticed people will pay $14.88 more than any other price in the $10-$20 range" and assigns that value by default. Just a self-reinforcing cycle of stupid consumerism.
What if Twitter but on AM broadcast?
It was such an enjoyable piece of cinema. So nice I saw it twice. Breaks my heart that Zack Snyder will be allowed to continue to make over-hyped flops while these folks are stuck in limbo.
Last of Us definitely has better graphics, more cinematics, and a higher caliber of voice acting.
This story reads straight out of the "Letters to Penthouse" section if you bumped the kid's age up over the legal line. I suspect quite a few people won't see the problem or even be outright envious.
Where is the hope?
Joel's decision not to sacrifice his surrogate daughter to a room full of hack surgeons signals a desire to protect the young at the expense of the old. It is the personification of the Old World Dying and the New World Struggling To Be Born.
His inability to treat Ellie as an actual person with agency leads him to tragedy, that's what the last scene is cementing. That one conversation destroys the relationship they've built over the entire story. His willingness to double down on a lie they both know isn't true.
I think you can see it as Joel stripping Elle of her agency. But I can also see it as Joel liberating Elle from a duty foisted on her by her elders. She's raised to believe that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for the greater good and Joel is tasked with leading her to the slaughter house.
LOU2 has it's problems sure but fuck that's an awful pitch.
LOU1 can get away with being a tragedy that subverts the narrative of traditional survival horror games. But LOU2 just repeating "humans are fallible" line never gets us to a story about how societies form or these strong social ties build thriving communities. At some point, you need to get to the other side of tragedy or its just Shepard Tone: The Video Game.
The Israeli occupation military claims that most of these "friendly fire" incidents occurred during joint combat between armored and infantry forces.
Its their own damned fault for leaving the safety of the inside of an armored vehicle.
Wait... then which Mao is it? I'm having trouble sourcing the original quote.
Wouldn't even be the first time.