I'm reading 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell now. Only at chapter 6 but it is more and more uncomfortable as you go on. Also.. It's Freaking recognisable now, Trump is basically Napoleon the pig.
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Bei WDR 5 gibt es #GeorgeOrwell s #FarmDerTiere als #Hörbuch in 8 Teilen, gelesen von Stefan Wigger.
https://www.ardaudiothek.de/sendung/george-orwell-farm-der-tiere/14470181/
One of the most important observations in 1984 is one of the least noted; NewSpeak involves disguising the workings of dictatorial power behind a pantomime of its opposite. The propaganda arm of the regime is called the Ministry of Truth ("Minitrue" in NewSpeak). The military arm is called the Ministry of Peace ("Minipax").
We need to keep this in mind when we see governmental entity called the Ministry of Regulation, or the Department of Government Efficiency.
#1984 #GeorgeOrwell #NewSpeak
Guidelines for writing good prose in English: 1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2) Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4) Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-- George Orwell (Politics and the English Language)
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed -- everything else is public relations.
-- George Orwell
“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”
—George Orwell, 4 February 1944
@bookstodon #georgeorwell #totalitarianism #history #truth #PostTruth
#1984 was profoundly ahead of it's time. It had a passage about the party ( the #government ) looking at what people are doing through their #Windows.
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“If thought corrupts #language, language can also corrupt thought.”
AI is an Orwellian nightmare
I used to be able to search for things using a search engine. It would point me to a source of information, I could decide for myself if the source was good or not. But not anymore. Recently I just wasted a lot of time trying to find something using a search engine only to get lost in an ocean of AI slop.
I finally gave in and asked my question to ChatGPT and it answered my question perfectly, it even showed me where it got it’s sources of information. The places it linked me to were either no longer existent (if ever) or only vaguely related. But it at least created the appearance of citing factual sources of information, in whatever way the statistical models have been trained to give that impression to the humans who use it.
In Orwell’s novel “1984,” we saw how a single government agency took all control over information, how the staff would keep a database of facts but constantly alter these facts to fit the view of reality that their despot “Big Brother” wanted the citizens to believe. The same thing happens now with LLMs presenting a very carefully tuned image of the facts in the database.
AI chat bots are an innovative new method of brainwashing, one which nobody could have ever imagined possible even a few years ago: get everyone to trust a mechanical Big Brother because it chats with you like a friendly fellow human would.
tilde.townRamin Honary: AI is an Orwellian nightmare
In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all languages, their names are used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious, but a butcher’s shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible. A child, when it is past the infantile stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved by horror almost as often as by wonder – horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs’ excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and bulbous noses.
In his endless harping on disease, dirt and deformity, Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out.
George Orwell (1903-1950) English writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1946-09), “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” Polemic, No. 5
Sourcing, notes: wist.info/orwell-george/76157/
#GeorgeOrwell's #1984 starts on 04/04 #OTD
For this occasion, 2 new books on #disinformation & resistance:
Joseph R. Hayden's "A History of Disinformation in the US" & Richard L. Abel's "How Autocrats Seek Power: Resistance to #Trump & #Trumpism"
