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I’m not sure what it is with a British accent that makes a smack-down so much more viscerally satisfying, but whatever it is; it works. This video dismantles the tomfoolery surrounding the end of the world ballyhoo that was making the rounds in late 2012.
Orwell day was January 21st, and of course, I missed it. Media Lens did not miss the boat and has an article up laced with the sort of irony and breathtaking self-deception that Orwell fought against.
“January 21, ‘Orwell Day’, marked the 63rd anniversary of George Orwell’s death, Steven Poole notes in the Guardian. To commemorate 110 years since Orwell was born (June 25), BBC radio will broadcast a series about his life while Penguin will publish a new edition of his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’. This essay, Poole comments, is Orwell’s ‘most famous shorter work, and probably the most wildly overrated of any of his writings’.
Why ‘wildly overrated’?
‘Much of it is the kind of nonsense screed against linguistic pet hates that anyone today might compose in a green-text email to the newspapers.’
The essay’s ‘assault on political euphemism’, it seems, ‘is righteous but limited’, while its more general attacks ‘on what he perceives to be bad style are often outright ridiculous, parading a comically arbitrary collection of intolerances’.
This is strong stuff indeed. Was one of Orwell’s most highly-regarded essays really about venting ‘linguistic pet hates’? The answer is in the essay. Orwell noted that the writing he admired was generally provided by ‘some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style’.
As for the mainstream productions of his day – the ‘pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos’:
‘one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them’.
This typically dramatic and disturbing passage makes clear that Orwell was not focusing on ‘linguistic pet hates’. Rather, he was motivated to resist a process of social dehumanisation facilitated by ‘imitative’ and ‘lifeless’ communication, by a toxic ‘orthodoxy’. He underlined his reasoning:
‘I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.’
If this was a crucial issue in Orwell’s time, it is even more so today.”
[…]
Follow the link and read the rest of the article. If it doesn’t inspire you to triangulate your news reading, I’m not sure what will.
Education has come to a new low. We are now teaching SOCIALISM !!!1!1!! to children via (the devil’s ken) algebra… of all things. From the Raw Story:
“But even worse is the way some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda,” the Fox News host explained, pointing to an algebra worksheet that Scholastic says gives students “[i]nsight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication.”
“Distribute the wealth!” Bolling exclaimed, reading the worksheet. “Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big ole bag of money, handing some money out.”
Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle explained that the algebra worksheet had put her on “high alert” for the liberal agenda in her 6-year-old son’s curriculum.”
Distributive Property we are watching you!!!
“Everybody has anecdotal evidence of this,” co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed. “I think the only way leftism can survive is through indoctrination because its number one adversary is reality. So you got to get them young and it’s perfect for kids. Paul Krugman’s logic is child’s play: Share your stuff… A lot of this comes from the teachers. They get their news from The Huffington Post and their antiperspirant from a health food store. This is the way they live.”
If you have a couple minutes (and want to break your brain) I suggest you go over to Raw Story and watch the video of the Fuax News idiots doing what they do best…
I think Fox News sometimes tries really hard to be of use to the American public, but that urge, once realized, is quickly woven into partisan propaganda. Liberal Viewer brings to light what the ALCU is doing against the unlawful surveillance of its citizenry.
As a Canadian, I realize we are just a couple of months behind the legislative cycle, thus this sort of Big Brother stuff is slated for Canada as well.
Did you want to thank someone today? Thank the youtube user VFXUAS for making this BSG short by hand on home computer.
I think the West Wing television show had such a long and successful run because it gave people a constructed reality about politics that showed what it could be like. I’ve only seen snippets of episodes, but I generally like what I see. This clip for instance is a wonderful tweak on the nose of the political right who actually believe their soundbytes(note how that turned out in 2012).
This is the good part of an article off the Media Lens website –
the piece gets a bit loopy so if you want to read the rest please follow the link provided. The most important idea is one mentioned by Noam Chomsky, his observations give structure to the question “What is the rationale behind the choices our media makes?”
The Mystery of the Missing Clocks – By: David Edwards
The truth peeks out at us from the most unexpected places. It can be seen, for example, in the empty spaces where one might otherwise hope to find a clock in shops. The average retailer doesn’t approve of customers clock-watching – they might realise they have something more important to do and cut short their shopping trips.
Noam Chomsky crafted a small skeleton key to understanding the world:
‘The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.’ (Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Hill and Wang, New York, 1992, p.79)
Chomsky argues, for example, that George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 were embraced as great novels, and standard school texts, not because they were particularly profound, but because they attacked the Soviet Union:
‘Fame, Fortune and Respect await those who reveal the crimes of official enemies; those who undertake the vastly more important task of raising a mirror to their own societies can expect quite different treatment. George Orwell is famous for Animal Farm and 1984, which focus on the official enemy. Had he addressed the more interesting and significant question of thought control in relatively free and democratic societies, it would not have been appreciated, and instead of wide acclaim, he would have faced silent dismissal or obloquy.’ (Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Hill And Wang, 1992, p.372)
Hans von Sponeck raised a mirror to our society in his book A Different Kind Of War – The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq (Bergahn Books, 2006). In meticulous detail, he described how American and British policymakers had knowingly caused mass death through sanctions in Iraq from 1990-2003:
‘At no time during the years of comprehensive economic sanctions were there adequate resources to meet minimum needs for human physical and mental survival either before, or during, the Oil-for-Food Programme.’ (p.144)
The effects were catastrophic:
‘The [US-UK] hard-line approach prevailed, with the result that practically an entire nation was subjected to poverty, death and destruction of its physical and mental foundations.’ (p.161)
This being the key reason why ‘the number of excess deaths of children under five during 1991-8 was between 400,000 and 500,000’. (p.165)
I have interviewed von Sponeck several times. He could hardly be more rational and restrained, hardly better qualified to comment – he ran the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Baghdad from 1998-2000 before resigning in protest at the effects of sanctions. His book, published three years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, could hardly have been more topical. But it has never been reviewed by any UK newspaper. It has been mentioned once, in a single paragraph, in a single mainstream article in the Independent.
Thus we find empty spaces in the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and the Telegraph where detailed, positive reviews and interviews analysing von Sponeck’s ‘clock’ should have been. We need to know the time – shops are there to help, are they not? And we need to know how and why our government caused the deaths of half a million children in Iraq. But there are no clocks to be found – just empty space!
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