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suburban virgin posted:there's a bit where he buys a drink for a really old prole guy to see if the guy remembers anything about the old world or how everything got al hosed up and the guys just like "I miss pints, why don't they serve beer in pints anymore litres are bullshit". the ukip manifesto
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Jan 30, 2017 00:18
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Mycroft Holmes posted:the ukip manifesto Eastasia is a complex metaphor for Poland
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Jan 30, 2017 01:55
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Dreddout posted:Eastasia is a complex metaphor for Poland big brother is going to make oceania great again
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Jan 30, 2017 02:12
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airstrip onxit
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Jan 30, 2017 07:24
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Squizzle posted:airstrip onxit (((goldstein)))
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Jan 30, 2017 09:22
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r/The_TwoMinutes
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Jan 30, 2017 10:42
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*is 13 years old watching trump* THIS IS JUST LIKE NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR *gets kisses from teacher and parents* heck yeah
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Jan 30, 2017 11:41
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I AM THE TOILET posted:*is 13 years old watching trump* THIS IS JUST LIKE NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR *gets kisses from teacher and parents* heck yeah At least our country isn't collapsing to the themes of A Separate Peace. I hated that book so goddamn much.
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Jan 30, 2017 11:47
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To scare people out of apathy by reminding them what people always do with power and that new kinds of power can make the earth in to hell. Also to remind you that if you love your children, don't have any.
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Jan 30, 2017 12:59
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its a v good book OP
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Jan 30, 2017 13:07
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It's pretty good, although it lacks the bleak poetry of Brave New World's final sentence.
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Jan 30, 2017 13:13
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1984 and a good deal of Orwells later work serves as a good barometer to detect fascism and authoritarian regimes.
Dead Cosmonaut has issued a correction as of 13:30 on Jan 31, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 13:16
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I reread it recently and was like drat this book owns. It's more geared towards showing how elements of British intellectual society could transform into being a totalitarian shithole and we should stop being so smug, so I dunno how much of it applies for Americans. The whole thing about how the most important skill for a party member is to be able to forget that you know the gov line isn't true and also to forget that you ever knew it in the first place is still relevant to this day. See: every British journalist or politician.
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Jan 30, 2017 15:07
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1984, like all dystopian fiction, amplifies parts of some real world political/economic systems, to both warn against their use & existence (to encourage people to consider alternatives), and to question whether or not the future must necessarily be better than the past. Or at least that's what I would say, had I not shoved the book down the memory hole.
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Jan 30, 2017 16:20
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1984 shows the critical importance of controlling language. edit: if you don't control language, then the bad guys will.
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Jan 30, 2017 19:19
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Prettz posted:1984 shows the critical importance of controlling language. This is what I've always thought. The Newspeak stuff is the main point of the book but it almost always gets overshadowed by the Big Brother aspect.
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Jan 30, 2017 21:01
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reignonyourparade posted:Yeah for all we know outside of Britain the entire world is just trucking on like normal. This is the way I always saw it. Just like 28 Days Later.
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Jan 30, 2017 21:30
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breaklaw posted:This is what I've always thought. The Newspeak stuff is the main point of the book but it almost always gets overshadowed by the Big Brother aspect. No you idiot it's about Polack's taking our jobs!
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Jan 31, 2017 00:11
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breaklaw posted:This is what I've always thought. The Newspeak stuff is the main point of the book but it almost always gets overshadowed by the Big Brother aspect.
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Jan 31, 2017 00:46
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Another interesting thing is that in the states it was required reading when my parents were growing up, since it showed all the evils inherent in Communism. Then right around the 80's when it was time for megachurches, corporate welfare, union-bashing and indefinite warfare, the book was pulled off the shelves for reasons.
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Jan 31, 2017 03:31
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Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of OBriens face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. OBrien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer. You are thinking, he said, that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails? He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket. We are the priests of power, he said. God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: Freedom is Slavery. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone free the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter external reality, as you would call it is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute. For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully. But how can you control matter? he burst out. You dont even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death OBrien silenced him by a movement of his hand. We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature. But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet. Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world. But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited. Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness. But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of. Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing. But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever. What are the stars? said OBrien indifferently. They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it. Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. OBrien continued as though answering a spoken objection: For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink? Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he KNEW, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of OBriens mouth as he looked down at him. I told you, Winston, he said, that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression, he added in a different tone. The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men. He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston? Winston thought. By making him suffer, he said. Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always do not forget this, Winston always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. OBrien went on: And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.
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Jan 31, 2017 13:09
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The point of 1984 is that only Steve Jobs can save you from the tyranny of the Windows operating system.
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Jan 31, 2017 14:26
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FactsAreUseless posted:‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’
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Jan 31, 2017 18:23
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FactsAreUseless posted:Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? Who's John Galt, though.
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Jan 31, 2017 18:30
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FactsAreUseless posted:Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? tl;dr
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Jan 31, 2017 18:34
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Annual Prophet posted:tl;dr the book is longer
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Jan 31, 2017 18:39
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Lindsey O. Graham posted:the book is longer 
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Jan 31, 2017 18:42
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if you haven't fallen asleep reading 1984, you haven't read 1984
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Jan 31, 2017 22:05
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I thought 1984 was a haunting, truly horrific view inside the mind of a contemptible radical who through overflowing mercy of the party gets reformed and abandons his evil ways. Truly a great manual for governance.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:13
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