Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)(newworker.org) |
Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)(newworker.org) |
Think where you have seen that before, heard of it. Think what book is famous for tiny wrongnesses sprinkled here and there to create a world of doublespeak and wrongthink.
THINK what the article is about, and why. What the book is about and why it was written - what you know, not what you are being told. It really is that easy to deceive thinking people, if you slip the relevant details carefully into well written texts about apparently irrelevant sources.
The first sentence of 1984 is 'it was a bright, cold day in April, when the clock struck thirteen'. The first line of that book is the most famous example of 'ok cool that's just setting the scene, onto the next... Hang on hang on, is that right? That feels off, but it's too small a detail to analyse why. I can't sanity check every innocuous sentence. It's Orwell, a serious writer, not sci-fi. My spider senses are overreacting...'
And then think why that might be relevant today. Anybody who has read the article and commented here as if the article is straight fact, this is your wake up call.
This is how it will feel to be propoganidised into reading blatant fiction as fact, skipping past all the red flags in the text and honestly not even seeing them. This is how it will feel to read an article that hinges on the premise that 2 + 2 = 5, and agree unquestioningly, because your fact-checking mind has been slowly, subtly exhausted by countless red herring tangents.
The article has some absolutely wild, insane takes like >"To be sure, the Nazis organised mass meetings of delirium [anti-Semitism] that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives"
That is quite literally absolutely contradicted by EVERY reasonable interpretation of history. Not even the most fervent Hitler apologists seriously claimed that anti-Semitism was a fleeting, minor flash in the pan or that Germany surrendered at the first hint of pushback. But people here appear to have taken the statement as fact, or at least, not important enough to question the honest veracity of the rest of the article. How many of you are going to go the rest of your lives with the impression that Orwell was, in fact, an elitist snob who hated the proles, because you read it somewhere (this article) and it just kinda embedded itself in your mind, not important enough to challenge? How many other things do you think or feel, because of ideas planted there even more subtly, more deliberately and pervasively, than a bloody opinion piece on the book about "The Party [convincing] you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command", linked on a site about hacking, with a title that should make any literate westerner begin with a strong sense of 'well something ain't right'?!
And you know what, it still works. The trick, the little lies mixed with the absurd ones, they still confuse you. By the time I'd clicked on the article, I'd forgotten about the 'Isaac Asimov' part enough to believe the rest. I started writing the comment below until it occurred to me that, of all the books to be reviewed with a glaring sense of wrongness and weirdness, 1984 seemed a little too on-the-nose to be accidental. Halfway through writing, I went back and looked more at the article, read about the Nazis being benign and anti-Semitism a momentary lapse of reason, read about Orwell fighting in the Spanish civil war yet unfit to fight in WWII (presented with no further explanation), and a bunch of things that didn't add up.
Then I looked at the rest of the comments on this page, with the sinking feeling that we as a society are failing an open-book test. If we lose, it's war, all over again. The answers are all right there in front of us. In this case, there's an entire book on DO NOT BELIEVE THE SHADOWY AUTHORITIES CHANNELLING YOUR HATRED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT 2+2=5, the book has been opened and put on the table right in front of us, the title and author practically circled in red ink... ... And yet, the first thing I spotted was how silly Americans are. And everyone else appears to be lost in the debate of why we must always be vigilant to the threat of our eternal enemies, Eastasia.
My comment, abandoned when the brain ticking got a bit too loud to ignore
> However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full.
Honestly, this line broke the immersion I didn't realise we need to enjoy non fiction biographical / analytical articles as much as fiction. It was like a scrolling ticker in red letters saying 'this is based on an American cultural transposition of a true story'.
The writing was good, informative, bite-sized without seeming shallow, but after that line it was like ... like reading a well balanced article from a trusted source on a non-controversial topic like the history of coffee, that casually mentions a region in Africa that would later be the birthplace of the US president Obama or something. Not really relevant to the rest of the article, not impossible to understand why an author could make that error. But such a jarring divergence from your culture's values and truths that your brain is slapped into the wobbly existentialism of remembering that 'truth' and 'facts' are entirely subjective and dependent not on honesty or intelligence so much as who is around you and how you were brought up.
Which is pretty unnerving when reading Kafka or deep philosophy (or the news, nowadays), and really not what I was prepared for in the middle of a benign article about a the famous author book I know very well, somehow via a technology forum, which I had only clicked on to see why said famous author had morphed from Eric Blair, to his chosen nom de plume George Orwell, to Isaac Asimov.
Then, when I realised
> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.
We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look at the library purges in conservative states and the push to co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental substrate of free speech.
Trump states obvious lies so blatant ("prices will go down 200%") that anyone who cares could tell they are untruth without needing to look up any paper trail, but it does not matter.
Mike Johnson just quoted St Paul as saying you should respect the authority forgetting that the Romans beheaded him. And it's not like the Bible isn't available widely.
For instance, Alex Pretti’s murder was recorded from several angles and yet the American right still broadly claims that he attacked the agents, that he pulled his gun on them, etc. You don’t need to be an expert in policing or anything else to watch those videos and see that those narratives are plainly false. That’s of course only one example, but there are many others.
The human nature bit is that we are inclined to follow conviction: belief in an idea. And if someone says something with conviction, whether true or not, our first instinct is to believe them, maybe even trust them.
I know HN is USA centric, but bugger me! I didn't expect to see such a narrow viewing of the world stage in the voting on here.
EDIT: And I'm getting drive-by downvotes for pointing this out! Nice.
The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B", and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin, cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.
"1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.
Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on social media now existed with television. Propaganda, misinformation, addiction, emotional manipulation, mind rot, overstimulation, excessive advertising, even moral panics blaming it for violence and deviant behavior.
Television didn't create self-reinforcing bubbles of hyperreality because it represented a corporate model of reality applied to an entire culture. It could only do so much being a one-way means of communication, but bear in mind all most people do with social media now is consume. The more social media becomes like television, the worse it becomes.
Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
It spanned more than 40 years, and was absolutely multi-generational.
Excellent point. Something that refutes another of Asimov's critiques in his review, that tyrannies inevitably end through tyrants' deaths, or at least become milder in their oppression. Admittedly he wrote the review in 1980, back when a) the first Kim was still in power and b) no one in the West saw North Korea as anything other than an "ordinary" Communist state—no awareness of Juche, etc.—but still.
China begs to differ.
Isaac Asimov's Review of “1984” (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390752 - March 2021 (6 comments)
Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164679 - Oct 2018 (8 comments)
> Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.
> Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
> This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
This is funny for me. The most common type of criticize for Asimov's work is that people complain Asimov did not add enough women in his book. The world is changing so quickly.
>In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-free as compared with the decades before it. There have been local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources. That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.
...
>He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.
I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan rhyming with Orwell a bit.
And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.
We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.
Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought that was mostly a leftist problem.
[1]: https://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essa...
The one thing Asimov gives Orwell credit for is predicting that there would be three separate great powers? Like, what? The other nations don't matter at all. We're not even sure they really exist or not. Or how he complains that Orwell used a missile strike, instead of calling it what, a 2X00 Plasma Fueled Missile Strike? It's not about the missile strike. It's about the fear the missile strike incites into people. People afraid are easy to control.
Or about how the warring nations didn't use nukes. Like, there's no way Asimov didn't understand that it was probably not even the other nations that were responsible, but rather the party itself, right? But that's what it sounds like. It reminds me of how in the Foundation series, one of the characters has an "atomic" wristwatch. Like, you can tell that Asimov thought that would be possible in the future and would be cool, and just had to include it. But really, who cares. As if cool gadgets or what people might use in the future is what makes or breaks science fiction. Not to mention how outdated an atomic watch feels now.
Asimov had great ideas, but his actual writing ability doesn't hold a candle to George Orwell's. Orwell was a true literary master. Asimov was a very creative scientist, with a lot of ideas in his head, and he successfully put them to paper.
> He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Asimov refuses to concede that Orwell beat him at his game. The book is not about predicting future gadgets but societal patterns and operating models.
Many jobs ago one of my colleagues was Steve Summit, perhaps best known as the comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer. One Friday afternoon, the rest of us except for Steve met up at our usual haunt for lunch and beer. Orders were placed and served, and the table's discussion turned to DRM and the benefits and drawbacks thereof. Half an hour into lunch, in the midst of this conversation, Steve burst in, sat down, and immediately joined in with "The problem with DRM is one of ownership. Any system with DRM is no longer under your total control, therefore you don't own it. You've ceded control, therefore ownership, to some company somewhere."
Then he paused, pointed to another coworker's plate of half-finished fries and said "Are you gonna eat those?"
You couldn't have gotten a better recreation of that Cereal Killer routine if you had scripted it as an homage. But Steve had never seen Hackers; that's just who he was/is as a person.
I think he had enough of it to foresee it for any authoritarian regime. You can find examples of what he describes today.
"To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother."
Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there was no central dictator, just the system.
Amusingly, when he writes
> Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
I wonder what he’d think of the Stasi, which had a network of informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.
Also, when he wrote
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don’t know when someone is looking was chilling. I’m not sure that would be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.
And, finally:
> George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Science fiction does not forecast. FFS. Even him surely could not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute totalitarian government with just enough technology to be dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on 1984 for not being sciencey enough.
Sound familiar?
... but the latter may greatly benefit from the former
And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.
Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov miss it ? "Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."
" Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. "
Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.
>In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in being.
I don't know what everyone else on this page is talking about, really, or why. I don't even know if they're real. Maybe I'm the weirdo, freaking out because a sci-fi giant presented a skewed version of reality.
But there have been enough people in history who've created touchstone works of art intended to last through the ages to say 'this is what it looks like when ordinary people are hypnotised into bloodlust', and I'm not convinced I'd recognise any further signs in time to get off.
I really, really don't want to get off the world wide web. My life is on it, now. But it's a web, and we must remember that webs were not built for the endless entertainment of the flies who explore it.
This is such a core misunderstanding that Asimov seems to have, and it kind of kills his entire analysis for me.
The assumption is that only some small fraction of a fraction of the people who could be surveilled at any time are being surveilled.
The crux of the thing is that everyone COULD be under surveillance at any time, so in effect everyone must behave as if they are being observed because they do not know they are not.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Remarkable that Asimov could overlook this.
I have respect for both authors, but for sure I’d rather have a drink and share a sausage with Orwell at a party than wall-flower with the collective absorbing Asimovs rants didactic. Pretty sure the gin’d be cheap anyway.
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.
Ok for that last sentence guess we'll have to check if what was true in 1980 still is in 2020's.
>In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.
Based on this quote and others, it seems Asimov didn't believe that Orwell intended the novel as science fiction, although others categorize it that way. I would say he's attacking the interpretation of it as science fiction, but it veers into an attack on Orwell, which is unfortunate.
You write
>Science fiction does not _forecast_.
Not to be overly pedantic but to be fair to Asimov, he didn't exactly say science fiction _necessarily_ does that, but rather it's a knack related to science fiction.
It was(?) de facto the most powerful democracy with most innovation and broad influence over the world, USAID and so on. Every dictator and tsar had to count with values like freedom of information and tolerance and following laws and trading instead of fighting.
Now it's still maybe powerful but those values and influence coming from it are changing very quickly and that is super recent
I just wanted to make a distinction between human nature and the benefits of specialization within an economy. You mentioned being an expert in a single domain, which I interpreted as specialized labor, as in an economy
An economy isn't really related to human nature, directly.
The West is losing its edge on free speech and thought anyway. Criticize Israel in Germany, misgender someone in Canada, say a mean word to someone invading your house in the UK, and see what happens. And it's not going to get better anytime soon.
The main thing is that Asimov was more of a bright person(mensa member and professor) and good at making conjectures about development based on technology and it's impact on humans, rather than a great writer per-se (there's some famous interview from the 70s that makes a fair bit of things that weren't obvious at the time).
Like how he immediately goes to the feasibility of non-human total surveillance when concluding that the total surveillance of a population on the level of 1984 by humans is infeasible.
So this review is to large parts to be taken as an post-fact analysis about 1984 both from a standpoint of the predictions of it's conjectured future and an attempt to see _why_ conjectures failed (much of it, being attributed to Orwells need to expose his hatred for how infighting perverts socialistic causes).
Yeah I know Asimov. I actually really like his writings, which is why I am a bit surprised because this review is short-sighted and mean, and I think, misses the point.
> Like how he immediately goes to the feasibility of non-human total surveillance when concluding that the total surveillance of a population on the level of 1984 by humans is infeasible.
Right, but he still misses the point. As a physicist I can think about a dozen reasons why positronic brains make little sense. I accept this as some of the disbelief I have to suspend to get to the actual substance of the books. It’s no different. Me being a nerd does not mean that I have to be a jerk just because someone writes something I find implausible.
> [the governmnet in 1984] has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
In fact, the human powered system of total state surveillance worked remarkably well, it was one of the few things that did work in most communist countries - because it was paramount for state security and enormous resources were dedicated to it.
In every block of flats, every factory floor, every friend circle there was an informer who wrote down weekly reports about who is making political jokes, who is listening to Radio Free Europe, who is planning to flee abroad or has access to contraband meat and razor blades and so on. These informers were themselves controlled by blackmail and fear, were fanatical supporters or were simply doing the work in exchange for favors or goods. Any individual harboring intentions to overthrow the system was thus isolated, he knew that any such talk would quickly get him sidelined from his job, evicted from his flat, sometimes declared mentally unstable and committed, and finally, if nothing else worked, disappeared.
The entire review reads like a clumsy attempt to soil Orwell's legacy, that was already, by that time, shaping to be far more significant than Asimov's own.
Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very much a price they were willing to pay.
The film Amélie "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain" is not a racist screed. In fact it is a hugely entertaining and charming movie I do not hesitate to recommend to just about anyone. Set in Monmatre, the homogeneity of the heritage of both the characters and extras is jarring because Monmatre is just not like that. If you know Monmatre noticing this will crash right through your suspension of disbelief in the story. You will recover. Still absolutely worth the watch.
Foundation is still worth the read despite the glaring and obvious fault.
Your assertion on whether the work is or is not misogynistic is something you can perhaps discuss with someone else. I am sure there are two schools of thought on the point, but it is not at all relevant to this criticism.
Maybe that helps you understand?
If you like SF you can't go wrong reading all of Asimov IMO. The entire Robots/Empire/Foundation series is fantastic. It doesn't mean you can't also read other, "better" SF either. Asimov's main SF work will take a few months to read at most.
Regardless, stopping at the first book is a good recommendation. Asimov demonstrated he didn't understand what made his own work interesting. Granted mystery boxes are hard, but he took an immediate about-face on psychohistory and retconned any bit of intrigue with rather vanilla stuff. The first book is outstanding.
Even his contempories were better - Bester and Simak run rings around him.
Americans have the right to carry a pistol. But carrying a pistol while heckling police officers and touching a police officer who is performing their duty, sounds deadly to me.
Can we agree that the deceased had a right to carry a pistol? Can we agree that the deceased had been heckling police officers? Can we agree that the deceased had touched a police officer?
Nothing he did warranted death. But he did choose to put himself in an extremely dangerous position, moreso by touching a police officer than by carrying a pistol. But in any case don't carry a pistol when you are out looking for confrontation, especially with police. Even if you're right, you're still dead.
To be clear, those aren’t facts, that’s delusion. Pretti objectively did not interfere at all. He was carrying a gun—that’s a fact—but he didn’t interfere. The federal agents approached him and pushed him back, and he retreated the entire time.
Moreover, a right leaning person wouldn’t delude themselves in this way except that they had previously coded the federal agents as “their side” and Pretti as “the other side”—if Pretti was a J6er and the ICE agent was a Capitol Hill police officer, our hypothetical right-winger would have been outraged at the killing as would everyone else (assuming it was equally as unjustified as the Pretti murder). We don’t even need a hypothetical, because the right was outraged that the J6ers were prosecuted and sentenced, and then jubilant when Trump pardoned them.
I’m also obligated to point out that I’m painting with a broad brush here. A small share of the right have, however reluctantly or timidly, spoken out against the mainstream right-wing claims that Pretti was doing something wrong. For example, Rand Paul gave an interview stating that Pretti was clearly retreating and there was no cause for the killing, and even MTG said that the right would be up in arms (no pun intended) if the roles were reversed. Kudos to those on the right who have the bravery to say obvious truths in times such as these, I guess.
the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry
That’s despite spending more per child than any other country in the world.
As usual, it's not hard to tell who the bad guys are: they're the ones who initiate violence.
What is such an example? I just want to calibrate what you consider a gem that could not have been made in mass culture making system.
There was some math and science content made in that regime, some of it even good - but it mostly got made by publicly-funded television studios with limited airtime, and subject to the inherent constraints of having to make mass-market-friendly content. But when you have internet-based platforms that allow people starting out as hobbyist enthusiasts to broadcast to anyone who can understand English in the entire world, you can do things like actually put real, difficult equations in your videos, and still have that build a sustainable audience.
In general the state of math and science communication on the internet is way better than it was under broadcast television, and this is one of many ways that the world has steadily improved over the past few decades.
TV news/documentary broadcasts have a "fairness doctrine" in most of the democratic world [1], meaning both sides of political discussions must be presented. This is a very good bit of legislation which makes television (and radio) broadcasts much more impartial and open minded than a typical social media bubble.
TV programming might well be "mind rot" to some. But to equate TV news/documentaries with social media is a poor comparison. One is demonstrably worse.
[1] USA excepted. Obviously.
That is the problem. Most discussions have more than two sides. There are lots of shades of opinion and nuances. Showing just two viewpoints might not be quite as bad as the "memes" and straw man arguments that dominate social media, but it is well down the same road.
The first book Orwell wrote is pretty good as well. Down and out in paris and london. It's a good picture of life in the slums at the time, and much more raw than other accounts - Orwell seems to have simply recounted his experiences.
It's a bit low for Asimov to just say Orwell was slumming it like a modern hippie. He was slumming it like in the olden days, and starved for weeks.
Would have been? There were.
Looks like a great recommendation; hadn't come across it before. Thanks!
Lucas and Disney couldn't help but copy even these bad parts of Foundation in the Star Wars prequels and sequels.
I've never understood this. The beauty of recorded media is authors cannot ruin or revoke their work, assuming no actual censorship, of course (copyright can also be a problem). Just ignore the subsequent works if you don't like them. This is the first time I'm hearing about people only reading the first Foundation book but it's definitely worth doing some quick checks before dedicating one's finite time to reading/watching/listening to anything.
Take Dune. After the third book it gets weird. But Herbert was a white man in the 1970s- ofcourse the books become degenerate and druggie.
Meanwhile, it's possible to favor free enterprise, (genuinely) smaller government, low taxes, free trade, and other so-called "right-leaning" perspectives without joining a slack-jawed personality cult that demands that you deny the evidence of your own eyes.
> If you were a cop would you take chances
I wouldn't be a cop if I was afraid that every person with a cell phone might shoot me with a gun, or if I was afraid that every soccer mom in a car might try to run me over. And while American policing is riddled with accountability problems, it's important to emphasize that the crushing majority of American police can manage much riskier circumstances without murdering anyone--it seems to be exclusively the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security that behave like secret police on a regular basis.
Glancing at your user page, this should be an exercise in preaching to the choir. You do understand that the only reason the Republicans in the US support Israel is because embracing fundamentalist Christian eschatology gets them votes they don't have to work for. Right?
How can you say this, out loud, and not immediately hear yourself as the villain? This is such a cartoonishly deluded and paranoid belief, it truly boggles the mind.
To provide some additional context to an often over-(ab)used quote:
I often see it used as a "thought-terminating cliché". Applying it this way would likely meet his definition of intolerant at least half-way:
Popper defines what he means by 'intolerance'. According to his definition, it requires both (A) the refusal to participate in 'rational discourse', and (B) incitement to and use of violence against people with different views.
You will find 'intolerant people' on all sides of the political spectra. (I don't see how dumbing it down to 'left' and 'right' really serves any rational discourse.)
> "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force ; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument ; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945)
https://ia800100.us.archive.org/10/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.5...
(It's well worth to read as a whole, given how often it is used and abused out of its surrounding context in the book.)
> "Conscience could be defined as the intuitive capacity of man to find out the meaning of a situation. Since this meaning is something unique, it does not fall under a general law, and an intuitive capacity such as conscience is the only means to seize hold of meaning Gestalts. […] True conscience has nothing to do with what I would term “superegotistic pseudomorality.” Nor can it be dismissed as a conditioning process. Conscience is a definitely human phenomenon. But we must add that it is also “just” a human phenomenon. It is subject to the human condition in that it is stamped by the finiteness of man. For he is not only guided by conscience in his search for meaning, he is sometimes misled by it as well. Unless he is a perfectionist, he also will accept this fallibility of conscience. It is true, man is free and responsible. But his freedom is finite. Human freedom is not omnipotence. Nor is human wisdom omniscience, and this holds for both cognition and conscience. One never knows whether or not it is the true meaning to which he is committed. And he will not know it even on his deathbed. Ignoramus et ignorabimus—we do not, and shall never know—as Emil Du Bois-Reymond once put it, albeit in a wholly different context of the psychophysical problem. But if man is not to contradict his own humanness, he has to obey his conscience unconditionally, even though he is aware of the possibility of error. I would say that the possibility of error does not dispense him from the necessity of trial. As Gordon W. Allport puts it, “we can be at one and the same time half-sure and whole-hearted. *The possibility that my conscience errs implies the possibility that another one’s conscience is right. This entails humility and modesty. If I am to search for meaning, I have to be certain that there is meaning. If, on the other hand, I cannot be certain that I will also find it, I must be tolerant.* This does not imply by any means any sort of indifferentism. Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. […] Suffering is only one aspect of what I call “the tragic triad” of human existence. This triad is made up of pain, guilt, and death. There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die." (Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning, 1972)
> "For tolerance, rightly understood, has not the slightest thing to do with indifferentism. And if we finally ask ourselves: how can I, being one hundred percent convinced of my own faith, possibly accept another's faith, another's conviction? Do I not, by that very act, become unfaithful to my own faith and my own conviction? We must answer this question in the negative. For I do not respect another's faith because I can share it, but because I must respect the other person himself. Note: Tolerance does not consist in sharing another's view, but only in granting the other the right to be of a different view at all. On the other hand, tolerance is also misunderstood if one goes so far as to grant the other the right to be, for his own part, intolerant." (machine translated from the German original)
The armed and belligerent government agents who killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good certainly meet both criteria, as do the Trump administration personnel who repeatedly and maliciously lied about the events in question. History tells us that societies that tolerate such actions eventually pay a terrible price.
The rest of your wall of text doesn't seem relevant, unless I'm missing something.
I don't think parent commenter is saying that leaning right is sociopathic, but that some people try to pass their sociopathy as a simple act of being right leaning.
Note though, I do not agree with this particular right (that of bearing arms, visibly so, at a protest), but the so called right leaning people are very enamored by this one and were very vocal about it just yesterday. Suddenly those same people seem to be equivocating about it now.
The people who were supportive of bringing assault rifles to contentious public rallies are now falling over themselves to blame Alex Pretti.
Touching a 'police officer' had nothing to do with the killing. Had he touched his own behind the same thing could have transpired. What killed him is the political support for ICE to be beyond accountability and the license for violence.
In this atmosphere anyone killed by ICE is automatically a homegrown terrorist, if by nothing else, by presidential fiat.
I still think, in general, when going out looking for confrontation (whether that be against the police or even just a bar fight) that the firearms should be left at home.
How do you exercise your 2A rights without your firearms? If you leave them at home, then you aren’t exercising the right, and if you show up in public with a firearm staying out of the way of law enforcement with your hands visible the entire time, then you are exercising those rights i.e. “looking for confrontation”.
In general, I think it’s nonsensical that people can exercise their rights but not in a way that a tyrannical regime might persecute them for—by definition, that’s not exercising rights it’s yielding them to the government.
Yes, this is the entire point: the left is saying "the government shouldn't murder citizens for exercising their legal rights", and the right is saying "if you exercise your legal rights, it's your fault if the government murders you" (or at least "that's the risk you run").
If American patriotism has anything at all to do with valuing freedom from tyranny and oppression, then the right-wing mindset ("you might have the 'legal right' to film an officer, but the state might murder you for it") seems aggressively un-American. Specifically, if you have "the right to do X but the government might murder you for doing X" then you don't really have the right to do X by definition.
For what it's worth, I don't even see this specific incident as government persecution. It looks like plain murder. Murder by a government employee, but murder nonetheless.
I think we are disagreed about whether someone can safely assert their rights before a tyrannical regime. If you could do it safely, the regime wouldn’t be tyrannical. If you “assert your rights” but only in a way that is safe from reprisal by a tyrannical regime, then you aren’t asserting your rights, you are letting the government infringe on your rights.
You are demanding that the victim maintain a clear head under stressful conditions, while holding his attackers to no such standard. But you knew that.