Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...
1984 wasn't satire. It was the outline for a better future.
warsmith17 wrote:Looking at your post history, I seriously thought your end goal was something like what Special Olympian posted (which was the most hilarious post I've ever seen on this site.
The one thing that I would assume about a Fascist society is that everyone would probably have a stronger sense of purpose, and society would be more united.
It's so beautiful. How could people look upon Orwell's perfect work and reject it?
Red_Bull wrote:Under a modern Fascist society, citizenship would take on a greater meaning while the state would be perceived as an embodiment of the people's will rather than a nefarious entity. Nationalism would hold greater importance while modern corporations would work with the government rather than against it. A Fascist America for example, would be less concerned with irredentism/war mongering but more so with self-sufficiency. America is totally dependent on foreign markets like the Chinese. That obviously would have to change. I would suspect a Fascist America would be far more isolationist, prioritizing domestic affairs over world affairs. That's just my ideal version in a nut shell.
I suppose though that a number of leftists would deride me as being a social fascist, and conservatives might tar me as being a liberal fascist. But part of a social democratic mixed economy does involve social corporatism. So I suppose that I wouldn't mind so much being termed a red fascist. 
But it's just that I also believe in the principle of the social contract, and/or the mandate of heaven. In other words "lex rex", rather than "rex lex". The head of state would serve as father of the fatherland, and uphold the public good, while still respecting fundamental civil rights of the individual, so far as they do not undermine the well being of society at large.
The legitimacy of fascism is dependent on the support of the big business and smallholders and without that support, fascism will revert to liberalism or socialism becomes a viable alternative.The Immortal Goon wrote:What will fascism be like?
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. They shall squeeze you empty and then they shall fill you with ourselves.
The Party would not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it gets power because men in the masses are frail and cowardly creatures who can not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who are stronger than themselves. The choice for mankind lays between freedom and happiness, but for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. The party is the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.
But the Party also seeks power entirely for its own sake. They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. They will be different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that they will know what they are doing.
They will 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.
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.
Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that an individual 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.
The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. The new fascism will be founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else they shall destroy — everything.
They shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of the Party. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But 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 — forever.*
*with apologies to George Orwell
"Many children playing in the streets and not not on play stations. A great respect for older people."
Salvini’s bizarre remarks sparked a mixture of condemnation and satire on social media on Wednesday. “Salvini’s comments on North Korea prove that anyone who votes [for the Northern League] is a danger to themselves and others,” wrote economist Michele Boldrin on Twitter.
TIG wrote:They will be different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that they will know what they are doing.
AFAIK wrote:Watch Thomas the Tank Engine.
Thomas the Tank Engine Lives in a Totalitarian Dystopia
Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, a story about sentient trains learning about responsibility, friendship and all that noise, might possibly be the most sickeningly wholesome children's show in existence. With that in mind, it'd take some pretty massive balls to accuse said show of, say, promoting totalitarianism, fascism and racism.
Shauna Wilton, a professor of political sciences at the University of Alberta, has just such balls. She argues that the world of Thomas the Tank Engine is in reality a fascist, racist hellhole where dreams go to die and where only "useful" elements are allowed to continue to toil away in pointless misery.
Or maybe ... maybe someone switched Wilton's Thomas DVDs with Schindler's List.
Why It's Not That Crazy:
Here's a totally hypothetical question: What if one of the trains on the show decided that he wanted to do something else with his life, like travel or star on Snakes on a Train 2: Snake Harder? He'd probably get yelled at and told to get back to work.
You see, on the island of Sodor where the show takes place, there is only room for really useful engines. That's not only the show's catch phrase, but also the basic summary of every episode in the series. That is, the engines are either trying to prove themselves or worrying that they aren't working hard enough (see "James and the Coaches," "Thomas, Percy and the Post Train," "Tender Engines" and many more).
This totalitarian obsession with usefulness is instilled in the engines by the iron fist of Sir Topham Hatt, aka the Fat Controller, who swiftly punishes all those deemed as "useless."
In the episode "Break Van," Hatt has two twin engines, Donald and Douglas, compete against each other to determine which one he will send back to Scotland to be destroyed. In "The Sad Story of Henry," when an engine refuses to go out of the tunnel because of the rain, Hatt actually gives orders to brick him alive in the tunnel.
You can't really defend any of this by saying that the trains are Hatt's property. They are obviously sentient beings capable of emotions ... one of which unfortunately happens to be racism. In the show, there is a clear feud going on between the steam engines like Thomas and Percy and the diesel engines, who are depicted as stubborn, lazy and shifty.
In the episode "Daisy," a diesel named Daisy arrives on Sodor and flat out refuses to do chores. In "The Diseasel," a diesel called BoCo is accused of stealing trucks. In "Thomas's Day Off," a new, lazy diesel, Dennis, tricks Thomas into doing his work. Even the closest thing the show has to a villain is a diesel fucking named DIESEL.
But maybe there is some perfectly reasonable, nonracist explanation for why the trains that run on clean white steam dislike the trains powered by dirty, black diesel oil. So, if you can think of one, please tell us, because we're just dying to hear it.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19673_6- ... z3DPR73rTN
Technology wrote:
I've never understood this line.
But the Party also seeks power entirely for its own sake. They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. They will be different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that they will know what they are doing.
They will know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.
1984, Part Three, pg 234, George Orwell wrote:The first thing you must realise 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 into the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.
The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body - but, above all, over the mind.
Rei Murasame wrote:Also, Orwell has another shining moment in 1984 where he touches on a real truth, and that is in this section here:
This was a moment of actual genius, because it is actually true. When the human is atomised, left adrift in a sea of infinite possibility but with no power to act, defeat follows from that. But when people come together for a common agenda, then human beings gain power over everything and can decide everything.
Real power is the ability to get things done, and what I like about you the most Saeko, is that you get it.
[Soundtrack]
I don't think of myself as particularly individualistic or egoistic. I know that I am just a cog in the machine, and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I also don't place any value on the individual in and of himself, nor do I believe that people ought to do what is in their self-interest.
I agree with the part about living without regard to the well-being of humanity as a whole, but unlike Stirner, I don't draw a sharp boundary between myself and everything else.
To illustrate, I care about attaining power as an end in itself, but I don't see it as something that I am uniquely entitled to (even if I would greatly prefer if no one else had any). If say, a Skynet-type machine overlord took over the world tomorrow, and it kills me in the process, then I would be just fine with that, even though I want power for myself, because it would mean that Skynet was better at doing the exact same thing I would be doing if I was it.... this is kind of hard to explain.
Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called "abolition of private property" which took place....meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it sees fit......
.....In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial ages. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted of them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat......
.....The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
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