Aussie SF

[Little Fish]

An interesting article. Govt protecting SF from media.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/w...ist-raids.html

[JJ_BPK]

Scary is the word..

Many of today's governments are slowly sliding their countries into the business model documented in George Orwell novel 1984 (c Ministry of Love).

While Bazillionaires like Zucker, Murdoch, Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos play the roll of SJW's (c Ministry of Truth)

The sad fact is 90% of the World are happy to play the part of the Proles and willfully agree to what they are told.

Ministries of Oceania
Main article: Ministries of Nineteen Eighty-Four

In London, the capital city of Airstrip One, Oceania's four government ministries are in pyramids (300 m high), the façades of which display the Party's three slogans. The ministries' names are the opposite (doublethink) of their true functions: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation." (Part II, Chapter IX – The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism)
Ministry of Peace

The Ministry of Peace supports Oceania's perpetual war against either of the two other superstates:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.

Ministry of Plenty

The Ministry of Plenty rations and controls food, goods, and domestic production; every fiscal quarter, it publishes false claims of having raised the standard of living, when it has, in fact, reduced rations, availability, and production. The Ministry of Truth substantiates the Ministry of Plenty's claims by revising historical records to report numbers supporting the current, "increased rations".

Ministry of Truth

The Ministry of Truth controls information: news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Winston Smith works in the Minitrue RecDep (Records Department), "rectifying" historical records to concord with Big Brother's current pronouncements so that everything the Party says is true.

Ministry of Love

The Ministry of Love identifies, monitors, arrests, and converts real and imagined dissidents. In Winston's experience, the dissident is beaten and tortured, and, when near-broken, he is sent to Room 101 to face "the worst thing in the world"—until love for Big Brother and the Party replaces dissension.

Doublethink

Main article: Doublethink

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
— Part II, Chapter IX – The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

Proles:

The proles live in poverty and are kept sedated with alcohol, pornography and a national lottery whose winnings are never actually paid out; that is obscured by propaganda and the lack of communication within Oceania. At the same time, the proles are freer and less intimidated than the middle-class Outer Party: they are subject to certain levels of monitoring but are not expected to be particularly patriotic.

My $00.000002

[bblhead672]

Originally Posted by JJ_BPK

Scary is the word..

Many of today's governments are slowly sliding their countries into the business model documented in George Orwell novel 1984 (c Ministry of Love).

Today is the 70th anniversary of 1984, published on June 6, 1949. The progressive socialists just can't get over the fact it is fiction not an instruction manual .

[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

Today is the 70th anniversary of 1984, published on June 6, 1949. The progressive socialists just can't get over the fact it is fiction not an instruction manual .

What's really scary is that it was written as a "cautionary tale"; instead progressives seem to have adopted it as a blueprint for their socialist utopia. Amazing how prescient Orwell was with his dystopian vision of a progressive future.