1984 - George Orwell

[HuckfromScandal]

Quote from 1984

“Every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.....history has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.”

Would quite like a thread of quotes that sum up life in 2020 based on George Orwell’s 1984.

Please add the ones that resonate with you.

I now use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, which doesn't show the same TG-slanted result as Google. It works as well as Google, and doesn't sell my data, so I'd recommend it.

You may well want to investigate the TOR Browser too:

www.torproject.org/

This thread has reminded me of a Ben Elton book I want to re read along with 1984.

Anyone know what it's called?

It's about a future where everything is online and if you don't do this your seen as a heretic.

I think we are living 1984 now tbh, and have been for some times.
Some people believe he had such foresight, others believe politicians read it and thought, this will work.

I would not do the clap

I didn't, and I also would not take the knee.

Fucking hell, I've just searched for Women killed in 2020 & it's all transgender women! How the fuck does that happen? This is shocking & without Mumsnet I wouldn't even know it was a thing

I've been trying to google the increasing U.S influence on journalism in The Guardian but cannot find a thing......no matter how many times I re-phrase it; and even though it is patently true. So many articles are now penned, and imported, directly to a British audience from American university campuses.

*Thursday clapping

'The horrible thing about theTwo Minutes Hatewas not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.'*

YES!!

It was blind faith.

It's about how social media has replaced religion. About government control also.

It's a lot more far fetched than 1984 but it's a good read it makes you think.

Instead, sex is a very selfish, individual, boxed-in thing, where people spend their time establishing hierarchies of kinks, negotiating boundaries (not that you shouldn't have boundaries, but in a normal sexual relationship this is easily established and not fraught nor involving anyone having to train themselves to like something etc), demanding respect for their sexual identity, feeling entitled to sex the way they want it...it seems like a lot of hard work, it never ever seems like anybody actually enjoys it, everyone seems very traumatised afterwards and a lot of bitterness and resentment is brought in along the way. It's like every sexual encounter (of which there do not seem to be many) is the result of protracted power games and talking, and must be accessorised with all manner of clothes and devices.

I suspect that you have been researching some of the networks and activites relevant to my interests.

When unusual, novel enterprises pop up claiming to offer solutions to, for example, the housing crisis, and yet also promote sex toys my anennae go on alert. Not because there is anything wrong with sex toys, obviously, it's the juxtoposition that sets off my alert system.

You may be interested in this, a "co-living" housing organisation with a strange enthusiasm for dildoes. It was the dildoes that were their downfall, at least to some extent. This organisation was on the brink of securing ££££ from some London authorities before the dildoes and some other dubious issues identified by someone, unusually in these times, conducting due dilligence, that generated raised eyebrows to say the least.

(archived link)

archive.is/ea9Ye

Diva Portal PDF promoting the same housing project, The Collective, A Study of New Ways of Alternative Living, has the following text:

"Page 43
43 The Collective, A Study of New Ways of Alternative Living Life style After analysis through many practices from cohousing projects to the squats, the searchfor alternative life qualities has been considered as one of the most key intentions anddriving forces for establishing a community. From organic food consumers, vegetariansand vegan to anarchist or LGBT communities, people with alternative and norm criticalattitudes have found each other and gathered in clusters.
Provocatively, you could callthis alternative life style. Arguably, the form of spatial implication differs due to requirements. The group ofpeople who want to take care of animals and produce their food themselves enjoy beingin a quite neighborhood far from the city and establish a community with architecturetypes that is suitable for their needs and meet fulfill their demands. Alternative life styleincludes living out of the social norms and out of the pre defined daily life outline.People who establish a community with the life style intention mostly seek for morefreedom out of urban life"

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200621075326/www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:634983/FULLTEXT01.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20200621075326/www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:634983/FULLTEXT01.pdf

back in the day activists used to go and live in squats or set up our own little networks. Now business entrepreneurs create the housing "solutions" so that "tribes" of activists can live in tiny rooms but have access to shared wifi and communal spaces provided by the company.

To me this appearsto be an astroturfing of activist causes by a corporate entity.

According to this Forbes article

"In a way, The Collective is a micro-ecosystem that provides a unique cocoon to COVID-19. The global nature of the network Merchant and the team has meant that the virtual events program isn’t your usual yoga at 9 am affair. Instead, members have benefitted from experiences like tantric storytelling, sleep-inducing sound healings, live DJ sets, and philosophical discussions with global leaders and authors."

<a class="break-all" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z2r8u45_j1wJ:www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2020/05/23/co-living-startup-the-collective-is-forging-a-bright-future-during-covid-19/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=safari" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z2r8u45_j1wJ:www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2020/05/23/co-living-startup-the-collective-is-forging-a-bright-future-during-covid-19/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=safari

Readers wishing to educate themselves about how 1984 is manifesting today might do well to spend some time examining this entity and reflecting upon its implications, especially as it is only one corporate entity amongst countless others.

The Collective also run new age retreats in collaboration with a controversial organisation PachaMama in Costarica

source:
archive.is/jOfYr

Pachamama website
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200426101235/www.pachamama.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20200426101235/www.pachamama.com/

critical 1st person accounts of PachaMama and its founder / owner Tyohar (born Moshe Kastiel) can be found easily online.

Tyohar's baground was with the Rajneeshee cult aka Osho.

Pachamama runs retreats featuring yoga (including 3Ho and Yoga Nidra), neo-tantra, "Red Road" (racist appropriations of indigenous spiritual traditions), "breathwork", drumming, chanting, sound healing, gong baths, the usual kool aid themed stuff

Postmodernism, which holds that there are no absolute truths, that anything goes

What we seem to be seeing now is a situation in which different groups, and nations, are fighting to control what passes for truth in any one society. Whichever group controls, or is able to manufacture the facts which determine subsequent truth, controls society.

A lot could be read into the way that churches are forcibly closed, and public worship remains forcibly forbidden, and that many churches (hopefully voluntarily) are flying flags saying "NHS, we thank you"; but again, it feels like the herd mentality: there's a certain pressure to publicly declare allegiance to the NHS. Not so long ago, many people would have considered the church and God as the ultimate refuge from something as terrible as disease. Suppose this pandemic had happened at a time when far more people attended church; would churches have remained open, would the public have rioted if they were forcibly closed, with slogans such as "If we die in church, it's God's will"?

I've seen lots of photos of churches flying NHS flags captioned on the internet "Is this the new religion of England?".

But I'm so glad the slogan is not "Boris, we thank you", or "government, we thank you". Thank would be reminiscent of the first Shrek film, where the face of the dictator Lord Farquaad was seen everywhere, like the face of Big Brother in 1984.

Surely this thread is a goldmine of good T shit and merch concepts?

Just off the top of my head

T shirt even?

I never will get round to proof reading apologies

The original poster is here and in the public domain if anyone else wants to have a go :)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_%2B_2_%3D_5#/media/File:Yakov_Guminer_-Arithmetic_of_a_counter-plan_poster(1931).jpg

This is done in haste and a bit pants but it gets the point across well

if anyone has done this already please accept my apologies

The trouble with using 2 + 2 = 5 is that it is quite easy to 'prove' that it's true.

Draw two squares next to each other. 2

Draw another two squares next to each other. 2

Place the top two squares neatly aligned on top of the second two, to form.... a fifth square. 5

2+2=5

Or how about:

If you round to the nearest integer, 2+2=5.

2.3 rounded to the nearest whole number is 2.
2.3 +2.3 = 2.6
2.6 rounded to the nearest integer is 5
Therefore 2+2=5 for some values of 2.

@nancybotwinbloom

It was blind faith.

It's about how social media has replaced religion. About government control also.

It's a lot more far fetched than 1984 but it's a good read it makes you think.

Increasingly I'm wondering whether it is that much more far fetched. Everyone posts everything about their lives (including videos of their sex lives) to youtube/instagram/etc. Not to do so is seen as weird. The society is also anti science, and anti vaxx is official policy, so much so that to vaccinate your children on the quiet is a capital crime.

What we seem to be seeing now is a situation in which different groups, and nations, are fighting to control what passes for truth in any one society. Whichever group controls, or is able to manufacture the facts which determine subsequent truth, controls society.

I always thought (when I was reluctantly forced to study him) that this was Foucault's central point. It's a kind of inversion of the 16th century Baconian dictum that knowledge gives you power: instead, in Foucault's world, having power enables you to gate-keep what counts as knowledge.

The real world does have a tendency to refuse to cooperate, though. Soviet biology was hampered by an ideological committment to Lysenkoism, for instance. You can argue till you're blue in the face that it would be nice if a socially perfected phenotype could then pass its changes back to the genotype and thence to future generations, but the real world doesn't (and won't) work that way.

Hopefully the science-denialist bits of genderist ideology will eventually go the same way and become nothing more than a historical curiosity. The danger is the damage done to women's rights in the process.

Very clever, hoodathunkit!

You can argue till you're blue in the face that it would be nice if a socially perfected phenotype could then pass its changes back to the genotype and thence to future generations, but the real world doesn't (and won't) work that way.

Although actually - and this is a bit off-topic - isn't there now some evidence for the heritability of acquired characteristics in some (limited) circumstances?

I love an interesting digression, RoyalCorgi. I guess you're thinking about epigenetics (important disclaimer - I work in physical sciences and wouldn't know a piece of recombinant DNA if it got up and bit me) - but a bit of digging revealed this review article:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12449684/

If I'm reading the abstract right, the Lysenkoists did indeed document some interesting phenomena, and modern biology does give a more nuanced explanation, but straight-up Lysenkoism is wrong.

Fucking hell, I've just searched for Women killed in 2020 & it's all transgender women! How the fuck does that happen?

Google 'learns' what you are interested in and feeds back things it thinks you are more likely to want to look at.

My phone has decided I'm French and returns fr.wikipedia.org results for anything I look for over Wikipedia in English, and French news sites over the BBC and UK news sites, because I use my (Android) phone to look up a lot of translations and references in books (in French) I'm reading. Google on my desktop PC doesn't do this because I don't use it to search for translations.

Maybe Google is feeding you info about transgender women because you've trained it to.

The trouble with using 2 + 2 = 5 is that it is quite easy to 'prove' that it's true.

The example that you give here is interesting, but could be easily disputed. As in - if it's true I'll give you £200 and another £200 and you give me £500 and we're all square ;)

2.3 rounded to the nearest whole number is 2.
2.3 +2.3 = 2.6
2.6 rounded to the nearest integer is 5
Therefore 2+2=5 for some values of 2.

hmmm

Is this not how queer theory works?

This is approximately that, that is approximately this and mix it togetgher and we have whatever you like!

Very clever, hoodathunkit!

Thanks RoyalCorgi

I have limited time and am new to image manipulation thus they are technically a bit average. I'm hoping someone whith better skills than I will run with it. I need some new clothes and would love some GC Orwell themed merch

I was inspired by the "how many penises am I holding up Winston?" one, which I would wear as a T Shirt or use as a mug

In computing, they're called "rounding errors" for a reason: the clue is in the name - error.

I'm guessing TheSandman isn't a mathematician. However he/she might identify as one, I suppose.

Google 'learns' what you are interested in and feeds back things it thinks you are more likely to want to look at.

It also feeds it back to any actors who are able to hack into or buy the data.

GC people can be IDd and targeted online via a process called "sifting".

When I say "targeted" I mean that various actors will be able to create a profile of your interests based on what you watch, buy and search for online. They may send you friend requests, petitions or phishing emails.

This in one of the reasons I don't sign online petitions. They can be a front for data harvesting. Same with online quizzes and personality tests.