Re: The Orwell Thread
Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2017 6:16 pm
haithabu -
btw thanks for the excellent florilegium of Orwell quotations.
btw thanks for the excellent florilegium of Orwell quotations.
Because, “florilegium,” and, haithabu.PetrChelcicky wrote:haithabu -
btw thanks for the excellent florilegium of Orwell quotations.
i ignore twitter, so, thankfully, i miss a lot of rancor.haithabu:
Max, since my posting of Orwell has political implications I think it's only fair that people can discuss its application in detail. As long as we can keep it civil and acknowledge the good points each other makes.
Boot, I share your concerns about Trump's rhetoric. I don't think though that he wants to run a totalitarian state nor does he have the personal capacity to do so.
I do have concerns about the political atmosphere in the US and the rising polarization.
Trump has helped to make it worse with his reckless and sometimes abusive speech and the rude baiting of his opponents.
At the same time, the Left has seemingly gone into a state of permanent hysteria since the election and seems unable to view anything Trump says or does objectively.
Everything is viewed through the lens of their worst fears.
And I don't see Trump as being entirely to blame for it either because people are winding each other up. It's almost as if the internet provides for a virtual mob psychology.
It looks to me that Trump has made some good solid choices in his appointments, I don't mean necessarily solid in terms of conservatism but solid in terms of character.
He is at his worst in terms of speech and getting along with others but so far seems to be okay in terms of what he is actually doing on the executive side. I'm not sure how much he will get done legislatively.
A 2020 Prager OPINION piece:haithabu wrote:Prager is a well known conservative commentator; he doesn't represent himself as a journalist. However that is no reason to disparage his account; he gives a reasoned, circumstantial account of the sequence of events which can easily be checked by the sceptical reader.
I imagine that the issue of an attempted blacklist or disinvitation abetted by subtle slander in the mainstream press may look a little less petty when you yourself are the subject of it.
No. 2:
For four years, the mainstream print and electronic media waged daily, indeed hourly, vicious attacks on Trump as a human being. Rarely did they attack his policies, since they were so beneficial to America (some of the greatest economic figures in memory and the lowest black unemployment rate ever recorded) and to the world (a major weakening of Iran and a major strengthening of Israel and Israel-Arab peace). Worse, the media and the Democratic Party immersed the country in a three-year lie about Trump campaign collusion with Russia.
Yet, 70 million Americans still voted for Trump.
The Democrats lost seats in the House and will probably not gain control of the Senate, despite the larger number of Republican incumbents who were up for reelection.
Americans watched Democratic governors and mayors do nothing as left-wing thugs burned their cities. And then they watched Democratic mayors and city councils defund their police departments. That is one reason Democrats fared so badly.
No. 10:
All over the country, stores in big cities were boarded up solely to protect themselves from left-wing rioters should Trump have won. When Biden was declared the winner, the boards came down.
Because everyone knows that conservatives don’t riot.
No. 11:
If Biden wins, more and more non-left Americans will lose their reputations, their businesses and their freedom to speak.
All of which plausibly renders the Georgia runoffs for U.S. senator the most important elections in American history.
haithabu wrote: ↑Tue Sep 05, 2017 4:53 pm Uniformity within each tribe, yes, but that means nothing as long as people are free to switch tribes and it is understood that both tribes may coexist within the same society. Polarization, dangerous as it is, in itself is not totalitarian nor a precursor to totalitarianism.
But when there is a drive toward the control of discourse outside of the boundaries of the tribe, not just an attempt to expand a tribe's influence through debate but an attempt to gain a monopoly through the shutting down of debate,
to declare debate itself to be off limits - that is where totalitarianism begins.
PetrChelcicky wrote: ↑Sat Dec 09, 2017 6:16 pm haithabu -
btw thanks for the excellent florilegium of Orwell quotations.
Great topic.haithabu wrote: ↑Wed Aug 23, 2017 7:39 pm I think it would be redundant because most here recognize that Trump tends to make things up or make overstatements where it is convenient, especially when he is on the defense.
But doublespeak, no, Trump is too blunt for his own good.
But what Orwell was most concerned about was not ordinary politicians' lies, but totalitarianism pure and simple,
and the systematic debasement of language, truth and reason throughout society to support it.
The tools used were political violence used to intimidate at street level, secret police to disappear enemies,
punishment of politically incorrect speech, control of the media and the curtailment of rights and freedoms.
I do see some of those things in the US, but not in connection with Trump-led totalitarianism.
In fact the opposite.
Trump has a very loose grasp on the government, he has been very slow to get his own people in (at his own cost),
while he likes to rail at the media he has made no attempt to control the media,
there has been no move to curtail American rights and freedoms (unless you consider immigration to be a right).
I think the most significant things George Orwell said in relation to the present situation are things that can apply to either side:
Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religionBut to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country