BitOneZero

joined 2 years ago
 

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, year 1985

YouTube video introduction :

Back to YouTube video: 8,859 views January 21, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETUGwC9jXCM

Thank you!

 

The Republican Party is full of “sycophantic cowards who would gladly watch Ukrainians get killed if it meant Trump had a higher chance of winning reelection,” according to one American veteran training Ukrainian soldiers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

People didn’t purge their comments to remove this information from the public, but they purged it from reddit making money off limiting the access to this information.

Reddit was always making money off their content. The tragedy is that the common knowledge is destroyed. They didn't bother to copy it to a public place, they just nuked information and context. The loss is for newcomers on any topics. The result is the same old questions being asked over and over, which all social media sites (including Lemmy thrive on FRESH content).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think people who single out hate and dehumanization and violence in one spot have tunnel vision. Hate and violence is all bad. Hate is incredibly popular in drawing a crowd, but overall it is better to criticize all hate like Martin Luther King Jr. did. MLKJr would emphasize not just hate from white to blacks in USA, but all hate in the human brain in general. Too many people want to use hate as an organization tool, weaponize gangs of hate over something or another, and I'm sick of all the crossfire. With social media, it's everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

people joined basically with no terms of service on a lot of Lemmy instances.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Free and open information, like Wikipedia, used to be an ideal. I have used Reddit since 2008 or earlier because it got on search engines and shared information consistently on precise topics. Twitter used to also be this way, but now mostly only puts paid subscribers on search engines.

If you are to organize information around topics, such as a Commodore 64 community, and the protocol openly allows copies to be made via federation, I encourage people to have the attitude that information be treated like Wikipedia content. It sucks now that so much information from 10 years ago has been just entirely lost now that so many deliberately purged their Reddit comments, etc. Tragedy of the commons. And it drags down the entire planet that people squirrel away discussions on topics that are generally public. It's like now everyone wants to monetize even their discussions on Commodore 64 or automotive repair / have behind absolute control or paywalls /etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

While I agree with what you are saying, I think audiences crave the falsehoods strongly, regardless of how the sausage is made. And I know that the technology itself may be regulated for normal consumers, while 'professionals' will use their wealth to get another set of technology that does it better. Much like in the USA prostitution is generally illegal, but filing sex for pornography media is legal. There really are not very many preaching to level the playing fields on media production hardware. And if you look at the energy requirements and cost of a high-end GPU just as run-time, you can start to get the sense of how a $15,000 camera is going to be able to do post-production that a consumer smartphone won't have.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

James Joyce has entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don't enjoy art that divides people with hate. The Bible as art, the Quran as art, the Torah as art - where clergy preaches that "only our book is correct, all other books are false". I find no pleasure in hate, I find no pleasure in war and killing.

I leave the life
I left behind
There's truth that lives
And truth that dies
I don't know which
Never mind
يا سلام على السلام يا سلام
يا سلام يا سلام، يا سلام يا سلام
I could not kill
The way you kill
I could not hate
I tried, I failed
You turned me in
At least you tried
You side with them whom
You despise
This was your heart
This swarm of flies
This was once your mouth
This bowl of lies
You serve them well, I'm not surprised
You're of their kin
You're of their kind

Popular Problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3HbrfV0hJM

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Worse than ever :( over 14 years, and I have an audience of 4 persons, four persons in fourteen years and 2 months :( who can match that artistic record?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I hope too. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Anybody else feel like Lemmy is like 60% Russian trolls lately?

China and Russia both

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

if I need a Chrome based browser

I don't think Chromium has "gone bad"? They make a WIndows and macOS build too, not just Linux: https://chromium.woolyss.com/download/en/

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It isn't funny. It's exactly how Trump got into so much society power in the first place! "Mock mock mockery" behavior!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/31/bbcs_adam_curtis_on_the_contradictory_vaudeville_of_post-modern_politics.html
On The "Contradictory Vaudeville" Of Post-Modern Politics
What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia...

 

NOTHING stops this, because people keep mocking back. And it isn't just one single individual, Donald Trump, but multiple families (Rupert Murdoch, etc) and millions of people who believe QAnon / "Q" without there being any person, just a constant barrage of leadership icons mocking truth, mocking sincerity, mocking the Constitution, it is a media cult of ignorance! NOTHING STOPS IT! 10 years and 10 months of this!

 

Tori Otten
January 24, 2024

Donald Trump celebrated winning the New Hampshire primary in his signature style: a series of deluded ravings. But connoisseurs of the former president’s rants were treated to an unexpected dollop of irony last night, as Trump came out against the losers of elections laying claim to victory.

Trump was the victor Tuesday night, winning the Granite State’s Republican primary with 54.5 percent of the vote. Nikki Haley came second, but her 43.2 percent support was far higher than anyone initially expected—a fact she celebrated as she promised supporters she would keep pushing.

Haley’s resilience immediately infuriated Trump, who turned his victory speech into a Haley roast. “I find in life, you can’t let people get away with bullshit,” he said, flanked by the nightmare blunt rotation of Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, and Eric Trump.

“And when I watched her in the fancy dress—that probably wasn’t so fancy—come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’ And she did the same thing last week,” Trump said, referring to Haley celebrating after coming third in Iowa.

Having failed to fully purge himself of his excess emotions during his speech, Trump then took his grievances to social media, at one point writing on Truth Social, “Could somebody please explain to Nikki Haley that she lost—and lost really badly. She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week.”

It’s pretty rich for Trump to say that people who lose should just accept their loss. After all, he has been indicted twice, once at the federal level and once at the state, for failing to accept a loss so hard that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

(Continues on website)

view more: next ›