> 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.
Dictators are absolutely terrified of the paper trail. This is the entire reason for existence of the Great Firewall. The CCP invests heavily in sanitizing imported literature and curating the information supply to maintain cognitive capture over the populace.
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.
You sure aggressive propaganda and espionage from the west aren't part of the reason for it? What sort of "cognitive capture" is necessary to maintain control of their population right now? The Chinese are often painted as brainwashed ideological drones in the west, and it says more about us that we tend to believe it than it does about them. You can download RedNote and talk to people in Xinjiang. You can travel there and talk to people in person. Mao is arguably deceased.
Exactly. Interesting that both orwell and azimov were wrong in different ways. Also azimov seems unaware of the Fabian link to the title which is surely a factor in the origin.
But Trump and his administration also prove what GP is saying. Few care about the truth.
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.
That’s the interesting bit; Winston’s job turns out to be largely redundant. You don’t need to hide the evidence that the chocolate ration used to be higher; if a sufficiently charismatic person with sufficiently stupid hair says that it has increased, a lot of people will believe that.
People is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.
put another way, they don't care about history because every economic actor in the economy is trying to keep them distracted -- so that they don't learn the history
the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry
Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a different one. We use justifications which make sense to us that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything. Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.
Orwell and Asimov are talking about something entirely different than drawing flawed conclusions due to inexperience—they’re talking about people with access to the facts and choosing not to believe them.
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.
These Minessota videos are classic examples of what Scott Adams used to call "two different movies being played on the same screen", in this case quite literally. From the point of view of a left leaning person, that movie shows a man being assassinated for no reason at all, nothing justify what happened. From the point of view of a right leaning person, Alex Pretti was actively interfering with law enforcement, and he entered a conflict situation while carrying a gun. If a cop is in the act of fighting you, and see a gun, you carry the risk of being shot, it's just reality. The right leaning person, just based on these facts, already reduces the charges from murder to manslaughter, max. Two movies on one screen, and there's NOTHING rational that can be said to change the mind of anyone. Everybody is watching the same damn screen, but the movies are completely different.
These so called right leaning people were, in the recent past, crying themselves hoarse that they have all the right and moral prerogative to carry arms at a protest.
Having the right to do something does not make it safe.
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.
A 'right' in this context by definition means government (agencied) will not persecute you for the activity protected by this right. If that's not the case you don't have the right at all, period.
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.
In this specific case, considering the video evidence, I agree with you 100%. There was no valid no justifiable reason to murder that man.
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.
> 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.
We seem to agree that it’s dangerous to assert your rights to a tyrannical regime, and that in this case the regime murdered the person peacefully asserting his rights.
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 seem to be using the terms "left leaning person" and "right leaning person" when you actually mean "normal people" and "sociopaths." Left and right have nothing to do with it.
List the rational arguments in favor of the so-called "right-leaning" point of view (OP's term, not mine) with respect to the Pretti killing. Spoiler: there are no such arguments, effective or otherwise. To apologists it looks like a Rorschach test; to normal people it looks like a snuff film, brought to us by the same studio that is now distributing child pornography.
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.
In my country, lifting a finger against an officer on duty will land you in big trouble. If you got a gun on you and you resist arrest, like happened in this case, you are absolutely getting shot. I can’t really understand you Americans. What do you think an armed person reacting to arrest is going to do with that gun given the chance? If you were a cop would you take chances?? If you did you wouldn’t be here complaining about anything as you would be dead.
1. In the United States, we have Constitutional rights, including the right to carry a gun with proper permits. Like other rights, the state can't murder you for having a gun on your person, but if they have a credible reason to think that you are an immediate threat, they can shoot you. The legal standard for "immediate threat" does not cover this scenario because (1) Pretti wasn't resisting (2) the police stripped him of his gun before they executed him and (3) the agents approached Pretti for no reason at all; Pretti was clearly peacefully recording with his hands clearly visible.
> 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.
Reflexes. When you're attacked without provocation by several people, you put out your hands involuntarily to fend them off. When you are knocked down, you involuntarily try to get back up. On icy ground you are also trying to maintain your balance.
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.
If the "different values" are whether or not the state should be allowed to execute someone for peacefully exercising their right to film agents in public, then yeah that constitutes sociopathy in my mind. I'm okay with being intolerant of such sociopaths. You may also find my distaste for Nazism to be "intolerant". Guilty as charged, I guess.
Yes. Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR: tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.
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?
No, actually, it seems to me that Americans support Israel because we have the same system of values (democracy, human rights, rule of law), and have the same enemies who wish to destroy both our societies.
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.
Hear myself as a villain? Maybe because I recently had several coworkers and friends murdered, by people who publicly call for the genocide of my people? I can not fathom what you support if you see it any other way.
Depends on what those values are. Epstein had different values than I do.
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.
> The right leaning person, just based on these facts…
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.
That isn't human nature at all, that is a feature of our economy.
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 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.
When people loudly assert there's no difference between the left and right in this era, I don't know how to give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it more generous to assume they're being disingenuous and too smart to actually believe what they're saying? Or vice versa?
There is of course a huge difference between left and right, but the democratic party is actually center-right, so...
Previous poster didn't say there's no difference between left and right, they said both parties are bought and paid for by fascists, which is pretty much true, thanks to Citizens United v FEC which passed the last time democrats had control of Congress and the presidency. Congress could have responded, but didn't.
At this time, democrats had 60 (!) seats in the senate, enough to end a filibuster, and they had to negotiate with MODERATE DEMOCRATS to pass the ACA. Moderate democrats are, on the face of things, the reason the ACA doesn't have a public option.
Don't get me wrong, I still vote democrat any chance I get, and would encourage everyone to do the same, but unfortunately I have to do it despite the fact they're bought and paid by the donor class, which are, by and large, fascists.
Democrats should started Jan 7th by screaming for Trump's arrest and not stopping until he was rotting in jail, but all we got was 4 years of nothing, followed by "too bad, so sad, we did everything we could".
This is one of those times where technically correct isn’t the best kind of correct.
Ok yeah fine there are fascists in both parties. Now that we have that out of the way where are we? Oh, right. The same fucking place. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soft apologetics.
We have a system that moves slowly at a national level by design. One party is hellbent on tearing that down in favor of literal (techno-)fascism. The other wants to maintain the incremental refinement of our democracy. That’s it. One party is literally promising Nazi Germany while the other is offering the potential of the United States of America.
So sure, when someone mentions Alex Preti’s murder or the literal Gestapo or the Epstein Files or unprecedented corruption or the irreparable harm to our international standing or the economic ruin that will take generations to heal or any of the other atrocities just tell them that Anthony Weiner was a creep. You won’t be wrong!
We don’t need incremental refinement now because we are facing an existential threat. The long term promise is a stable democracy. That’s the whole experiment.
We need to hold our noses on the Democrats’ historical performance because the whole party needs to be rebuilt. Instead of fixating on past failures focus on the progressive voices that grow every day.
It's definitely interesting to see what ideas 1984 had that were salient to Asimov writing in 1980 - and also to see which of those ideas still have relevance in 2026, when the world has changed considerably again from when Asimov was writing.
I can see your argument but I'm non american and think you underestimate the impact of USA on global stage.
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
Asimov in 1980 didn't have access to "Orwell, the Lost Writings", published in 1985. That details Eric Blair's ("Orwell" is a pseudonym) jobs during WWII, mostly at the British Ministry of Information. "1984"'s details are partly autobiographical. One of Blair's jobs was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English for broadcast to the colonies, primarily India and Hong Kong. He found that this was a political act. Squeezing news down to a 1000 word vocabulary required removing political ambiguity. It's hard to prevaricate in Basic English, which has a very concrete vocabulary. Hence Newspeak.
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.
I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every mobile phone and 3D printer.
One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.
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.
I would go so far as to say that the criticisms of broadcast television were completely correct; and that for all the problems of modern centralized social media and other internet use, one major good thing that it has done is kill off broadcast television. It is much easier now than it was for much of the 20th century for random ordinary people who weren't members of established mass media organizations to broadcast their ideas to the world, and try to build an audience that cares about their message. And even though this results in a lot of bad content being made (or just content that is uninteresting to you personally), it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.
One salient example is Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math explainer youtube channel and the various other people inspired by him (and often using his open-source software) to make similar math content on youtube. The kinds of math videos he makes are a pretty niche interest when you consider percentage of a regional or national TV market, and so they didn't end up getting made in the 20th century broadcast TV era of mass-culture-making.
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.
gems and turds. The far right consipiracy stuff was filtered out, likewise the neonazi/technocracy stuff (and yes, there is clear historical links between technocracy and nazi idologies, see the history of Joshua Norman Haldeman (1902–1974), the American-born Canadian maternal grandfather of Elon Musk, and why they moved to South Africa)
> I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on social media now existed with television
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.
> TV news/documentary broadcasts have a "fairness doctrine" in most of the democratic world [1], meaning both sides of political discussions must be presented.
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.
His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.
Asimov missed the idea of the panopticon here, whereby control is self-enforced by the fear of being caught because you can be watched at any time, not all the time
Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).
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).
> Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).
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.
About feasibility, did Asimov even read the book properly? I remember quite well that telescreens were not permanently watched, but that wasn't necessary because the consequences of getting caught with "wrongthink" were terrible.
Near the end of the book Winston finds out that he was watched much more thoroughly than he thought. They read his private diary and carefully put the same mote of dust on top of the cover so that Winston wouldn't notice it had been opened.
>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.
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.
And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary social classes which are perhaps closer to “1984” because they are so well established now.
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.
> 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.
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.
Besides that, multiple ways to read this. "Monarchies" could've been a reference to pre modern monarchies of which many made it through at least 3 successions. Or as a correction to the upper comment, saying that the Kim's are more monarchy than plain dictatorship.
The British Crown had to concede some rights centuries ago, or there would have been civil wars and probably no more crown. Dear Leaders are the ones that don't have to concede anything, yet.
Not only have there been multiple civil wars, there has also been “no more crown” after the beheading of King Charles I (1649) until the restoration in 1660.
> 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.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say.
The commentator mannykannot didn't really comment on the politics other than to agree that 1984 is a criticism of Stalism (which... I don't think anyone would argue with?).
Orwell also wrote "Animal Farm" which is a criticism of Fascism, and Asimov leads with this.
Correct. More to the point, when it appeared many on the left attempted to wave this away by claiming that it was, as one put it, a "gentle satire" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Reception> when anyone who has read Animal Farm knows that it is in no way gentle in its satire.
What nl is attempting to do above is the latest iteration of what Animal Farm and 1984 both received from those who could not stand the spotlight of their scrutiny: Claim that the target is something else, and/or that Orwell's attacks are so pedestrianly obvious (since "everyone knows" that Stalinism is bad) as to be pointless.
Well, the only difference between Fascism and Stalinism was more or less that Fascism was anticommunist (communists and fascists were killing each other in Italy when Mussolini, a former socialist, was raising to the power) but Stalinism was communism only because Stalin had to wave that ideological flag to become leader of that country in those times. Both were nationalistic (Stalin de facto killed internationalism), had control of economy, had full control of society. Dictatorships.
> 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.
>Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening
of the feminine stereotype of 1949.
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.
I enjoyed reading "Foundation" recently. The total lack of female characters was jarring to say the least. Worth the read if you haven't. Not much like the AppleTV series.
The point was more that the female characters turn up in books two and three. Three in particular.
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.
Are you referring to the literal planet rather than a woman? That character felt particularly of self insert fantasy (oo a hot 20 year old in love with the aged professor).
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.
I read books because I enjoy them. I enjoy reading about hot 20 year olds and big breasted women in space actually. Women are allowed to have 50 Shades, I'm allowed to enjoy books too.
You are. And I'm allowed to read into the author's psychology when they wear it on their shoulder. And I'm also allowed to critique the author when they misunderstand their work and write rambling, uninspired sequels that ruin the original work.
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.
The trilogy, prequels, and sequels are all "canon" and retcon the most interesting concepts of the original book as ruses, conspiracies, and lies. This is unambiguously a ruining of the original because the author went out of their way to mute the concepts rather than explore them.
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.
I love Asimov for the same reason I love Orwell, namely clear 1940s-style writing (which I've also seen in Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight), so I find it funny and sad that one is criticizing the other.
>Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. 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. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)
>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.
The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats needing to direct the anger of the populace away from themselves. We have this today with government propaganda stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy insecurity from the oil crisis of the 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.
> This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
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.
Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in the first chapter:
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.
The review seems completely consumed by professional bitterness to the point where it becomes laughable. By the 1980s the methods of KGB, Stasi, Securitate etc. were well known in the west; how can he put this on paper and not realize he was being a complete fool:
> [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.
The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.
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.
Fully agree with how it seems Asimov has misunderstood something, or perhaps been myopic about seeing the world of 1984 with commitment .. another thing that killed his analysis for me was that he didn’t seem to understand the immensely dire conditions of 1984, vis a vis low quality razors, etc., nor that the sociological aspects he implies as banal (implying orwells disregard for proles) were as a consequence of years of brutal war. Asimov didn’t seem to want to scratch deeper into 1984 - he was, I believe, more responding to the world of 1980, which was after all an entirely different yet strikingly similar world to the novel, kind of like political parties.
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.
No it's a core misunderstanding of the commenters (and AI ads placement). The quote is biased because it miss the next part of Asimov's essay.
> 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.
"1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" —Cereal Killer, Hackers, whose words ring even more true today even as we watch tech billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god in silico
Right before that, he says, "FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day." Whenever I rewatch that movie, I think 17 is a tiny number compared to today. Probably 17,000+ now.
Indeed. On one of the many occasions I rewatched it with my wife, when it came to that bit I said "17? Those are rookie numbers these days."
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.
if you google your name (or handle, every hacker needs a handle, man...) it goes through double that, if memory serves (i might be off by a factor of 10 either side...)
I loved the Foundation series and Isaac Asimov was definitely my most read science fiction author as a kid, but damn - my estimation of Asimov as a man just fuckin plummeted. He comes across like a whiny nerd. He's upset that 1984 gets such acclaim in "his" area of expertise, science fiction. And how dare this non science fiction guy step foot in his domain. If 1984 weren't set in the future, he wouldn't have any gripes with it, I'm sure.
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.
It's been many years since I read 1984, but this seems wrong:
"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.
” As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use many words
rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to
reduce. Every leader of inadequate education or limited intelligence hides
behind exuberant inebriation of loquacity.”
I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing exactly the same thing right now.
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.
Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.
I think Asimov is right that 1984 was not intended as a forecast but rather a depiction of Stalinism with British characteristics, so to speak.
>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.
> those controlling the government kept themselves in power bybrute force, by distorting the truth, by continually rewriting history, by mesmerising the people generally
Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again. It feels strange - almost as if Asimov hated Orwell. So many personal attacks.
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.
Short version - OP, you've either pulled a terrifying psy-op or proven that the nearly 100-year old one is still in effect.
Either way, I need to be a hell of a lot more discerning what I read online, because if I hadn't known for sure that money has nothing to do with class in the British system, I don't know how many other parts of that article I might have absorbed before I reached the massive clangers like 'the Nazis were pretty benign'.
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.
He makes a lot of great points, but I vaguely feel he missed the point of the book. I guess he "just couldn't like get into it man."
>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.
Guys. Look at the title of this hacker news article. Look at it again.
Then, read the article again. Look for the bits that don't add up, the way the truth shifts from one paragraph to the next. Not outrageous lies, just the little wrongnesses sprinkled here and there.
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.
Even today in the United States people voted for someone who actively tries to dismantle the legal system, pushes for more control in the hands of the executive powers, uses the military against its own citizens, constantly questions election integrity, emphasizes loyalty over free speech, encourages a "Great Leader" cult of personality, attacks political opponents with all possible means, promotes isolationism, militarizes law enforcement, the list goes on. All these are hallmarks of totalitarianism – which is what 1984 is all about.
Many people are shallow thinkers with no intellectual integrity who have never learned much of anything and say the most incredibly foolish, ignorant, and dishonest things.
This is still so relevant now:
> 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.
Because it's timeless, not just "relevant now".
Dictators are absolutely terrified of the paper trail. This is the entire reason for existence of the Great Firewall. The CCP invests heavily in sanitizing imported literature and curating the information supply to maintain cognitive capture over the populace.
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.
You sure aggressive propaganda and espionage from the west aren't part of the reason for it? What sort of "cognitive capture" is necessary to maintain control of their population right now? The Chinese are often painted as brainwashed ideological drones in the west, and it says more about us that we tend to believe it than it does about them. You can download RedNote and talk to people in Xinjiang. You can travel there and talk to people in person. Mao is arguably deceased.
Then why does the Chinese government have a blacklist of topics not allowed to be talked about/recorded?
Exactly. Interesting that both orwell and azimov were wrong in different ways. Also azimov seems unaware of the Fabian link to the title which is surely a factor in the origin.
But Trump and his administration also prove what GP is saying. Few care about the truth.
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.
That’s the interesting bit; Winston’s job turns out to be largely redundant. You don’t need to hide the evidence that the chocolate ration used to be higher; if a sufficiently charismatic person with sufficiently stupid hair says that it has increased, a lot of people will believe that.
How many Americans give a shit about history?
All the smart and informed Americans…
People is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.
No disagreement on this, but we're then talking of Brave New World and distraction, not 1984 and censorship.
put another way, they don't care about history because every economic actor in the economy is trying to keep them distracted -- so that they don't learn the history
the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry
Hence the movement to eliminate the “Department of Education”, which at this point would be better named the “Department of Intentional Ignorance”.
That’s despite spending more per child than any other country in the world.
Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a different one. We use justifications which make sense to us that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything. Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.
Orwell and Asimov are talking about something entirely different than drawing flawed conclusions due to inexperience—they’re talking about people with access to the facts and choosing not to believe them.
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.
These Minessota videos are classic examples of what Scott Adams used to call "two different movies being played on the same screen", in this case quite literally. From the point of view of a left leaning person, that movie shows a man being assassinated for no reason at all, nothing justify what happened. From the point of view of a right leaning person, Alex Pretti was actively interfering with law enforcement, and he entered a conflict situation while carrying a gun. If a cop is in the act of fighting you, and see a gun, you carry the risk of being shot, it's just reality. The right leaning person, just based on these facts, already reduces the charges from murder to manslaughter, max. Two movies on one screen, and there's NOTHING rational that can be said to change the mind of anyone. Everybody is watching the same damn screen, but the movies are completely different.
These so called right leaning people were, in the recent past, crying themselves hoarse that they have all the right and moral prerogative to carry arms at a protest.
Having the right to do something does not make it safe.
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.
A 'right' in this context by definition means government (agencied) will not persecute you for the activity protected by this right. If that's not the case you don't have the right at all, period.
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.
In this specific case, considering the video evidence, I agree with you 100%. There was no valid no justifiable reason to murder that man.
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.
In complete agreement regarding carrying fire arms to an emotionally charged protest.
> 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.
> Even if you're right, you're still dead.
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.
Lots of things that are legal are deadly.
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.
We seem to agree that it’s dangerous to assert your rights to a tyrannical regime, and that in this case the regime murdered the person peacefully asserting his rights.
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're being far too generous by saying the video is a matter of interpretation.
You seem to be using the terms "left leaning person" and "right leaning person" when you actually mean "normal people" and "sociopaths." Left and right have nothing to do with it.
Yep, no rational argument can be used to make you (or me) see the same movie.
The video itself and the facts it supports are objective.
List the rational arguments in favor of the so-called "right-leaning" point of view (OP's term, not mine) with respect to the Pretti killing. Spoiler: there are no such arguments, effective or otherwise. To apologists it looks like a Rorschach test; to normal people it looks like a snuff film, brought to us by the same studio that is now distributing child pornography.
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.
In my country, lifting a finger against an officer on duty will land you in big trouble. If you got a gun on you and you resist arrest, like happened in this case, you are absolutely getting shot. I can’t really understand you Americans. What do you think an armed person reacting to arrest is going to do with that gun given the chance? If you were a cop would you take chances?? If you did you wouldn’t be here complaining about anything as you would be dead.
1. In the United States, we have Constitutional rights, including the right to carry a gun with proper permits. Like other rights, the state can't murder you for having a gun on your person, but if they have a credible reason to think that you are an immediate threat, they can shoot you. The legal standard for "immediate threat" does not cover this scenario because (1) Pretti wasn't resisting (2) the police stripped him of his gun before they executed him and (3) the agents approached Pretti for no reason at all; Pretti was clearly peacefully recording with his hands clearly visible.
> 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.
He clearly resisted otherwise what was the struggle about when he felt on the floor ??
Reflexes. When you're attacked without provocation by several people, you put out your hands involuntarily to fend them off. When you are knocked down, you involuntarily try to get back up. On icy ground you are also trying to maintain your balance.
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.
He was tackled on the ice and was trying to keep his face out of the pavement.
The sociopaths you refer to see themselves as the normal people and you as the sociopath.
(Shrug) Nobody thinks they're the bad guys, including the actual bad guys.
As usual, it's not hard to tell who the bad guys are: they're the ones who initiate violence.
So you consider people with different values then you sociopaths? You sound very intolerant.
If the "different values" are whether or not the state should be allowed to execute someone for peacefully exercising their right to film agents in public, then yeah that constitutes sociopathy in my mind. I'm okay with being intolerant of such sociopaths. You may also find my distaste for Nazism to be "intolerant". Guilty as charged, I guess.
Yes. Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR: tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.
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?
No, actually, it seems to me that Americans support Israel because we have the same system of values (democracy, human rights, rule of law), and have the same enemies who wish to destroy both our societies.
> enemies who wish to destroy both our societies.
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.
The Iranian-sponsored Houthis carry a flag that literally says “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthis
Hear myself as a villain? Maybe because I recently had several coworkers and friends murdered, by people who publicly call for the genocide of my people? I can not fathom what you support if you see it any other way.
He's not wrong, he just stopped going through the "Five Whys" process about four whys too soon.
Depends on what those values are. Epstein had different values than I do.
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.
> The right leaning person, just based on these facts…
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.
That isn't human nature at all, that is a feature of our economy.
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'm often baffled by how people online find a tone of disagreement to agree with people.
Sorry, didn't mean to offend you. My tone is bad.
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.
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If you can’t tell the difference between the Republicans and Democrats on February 5th, 2026 then you are the problem.
When people loudly assert there's no difference between the left and right in this era, I don't know how to give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it more generous to assume they're being disingenuous and too smart to actually believe what they're saying? Or vice versa?
There is of course a huge difference between left and right, but the democratic party is actually center-right, so...
Previous poster didn't say there's no difference between left and right, they said both parties are bought and paid for by fascists, which is pretty much true, thanks to Citizens United v FEC which passed the last time democrats had control of Congress and the presidency. Congress could have responded, but didn't.
At this time, democrats had 60 (!) seats in the senate, enough to end a filibuster, and they had to negotiate with MODERATE DEMOCRATS to pass the ACA. Moderate democrats are, on the face of things, the reason the ACA doesn't have a public option.
Don't get me wrong, I still vote democrat any chance I get, and would encourage everyone to do the same, but unfortunately I have to do it despite the fact they're bought and paid by the donor class, which are, by and large, fascists.
Democrats should started Jan 7th by screaming for Trump's arrest and not stopping until he was rotting in jail, but all we got was 4 years of nothing, followed by "too bad, so sad, we did everything we could".
This is one of those times where technically correct isn’t the best kind of correct.
Ok yeah fine there are fascists in both parties. Now that we have that out of the way where are we? Oh, right. The same fucking place. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soft apologetics.
We have a system that moves slowly at a national level by design. One party is hellbent on tearing that down in favor of literal (techno-)fascism. The other wants to maintain the incremental refinement of our democracy. That’s it. One party is literally promising Nazi Germany while the other is offering the potential of the United States of America.
So sure, when someone mentions Alex Preti’s murder or the literal Gestapo or the Epstein Files or unprecedented corruption or the irreparable harm to our international standing or the economic ruin that will take generations to heal or any of the other atrocities just tell them that Anthony Weiner was a creep. You won’t be wrong!
Did you make it all the way to the end of my post...?
I promise I am just as mad as you are about everything republicans are doing right now.
The problem is that when one party is hellbent on literal fascism, the opposition needs to be a little bit stronger than incremental refinement.
We don’t need incremental refinement now because we are facing an existential threat. The long term promise is a stable democracy. That’s the whole experiment.
We need to hold our noses on the Democrats’ historical performance because the whole party needs to be rebuilt. Instead of fixating on past failures focus on the progressive voices that grow every day.
No more relevant today than it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago tbh
It's definitely interesting to see what ideas 1984 had that were salient to Asimov writing in 1980 - and also to see which of those ideas still have relevance in 2026, when the world has changed considerably again from when Asimov was writing.
Gravity has always been an important factor in our lives, but I'd say it's even more relevant when we're actively being spaghettified by a black hole.
You are being downvoted by those who see the world solely though American eyes and with only recent experience of American politics to draw on.
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.
I can see your argument but I'm non american and think you underestimate the impact of USA on global stage.
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
Asimov in 1980 didn't have access to "Orwell, the Lost Writings", published in 1985. That details Eric Blair's ("Orwell" is a pseudonym) jobs during WWII, mostly at the British Ministry of Information. "1984"'s details are partly autobiographical. One of Blair's jobs was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English for broadcast to the colonies, primarily India and Hong Kong. He found that this was a political act. Squeezing news down to a 1000 word vocabulary required removing political ambiguity. It's hard to prevaricate in Basic English, which has a very concrete vocabulary. Hence Newspeak.
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.
Room 101 is the conference room where he sat through tedious meetings while working for the BBC.
I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every mobile phone and 3D printer.
One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.
Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
The TV was 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.
I would go so far as to say that the criticisms of broadcast television were completely correct; and that for all the problems of modern centralized social media and other internet use, one major good thing that it has done is kill off broadcast television. It is much easier now than it was for much of the 20th century for random ordinary people who weren't members of established mass media organizations to broadcast their ideas to the world, and try to build an audience that cares about their message. And even though this results in a lot of bad content being made (or just content that is uninteresting to you personally), it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.
> it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.
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.
One salient example is Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math explainer youtube channel and the various other people inspired by him (and often using his open-source software) to make similar math content on youtube. The kinds of math videos he makes are a pretty niche interest when you consider percentage of a regional or national TV market, and so they didn't end up getting made in the 20th century broadcast TV era of mass-culture-making.
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.
> Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math explainer YouTube channel
Looks like a great recommendation; hadn't come across it before. Thanks!
gems and turds. The far right consipiracy stuff was filtered out, likewise the neonazi/technocracy stuff (and yes, there is clear historical links between technocracy and nazi idologies, see the history of Joshua Norman Haldeman (1902–1974), the American-born Canadian maternal grandfather of Elon Musk, and why they moved to South Africa)
> I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on social media now existed with television
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.
> TV news/documentary broadcasts have a "fairness doctrine" in most of the democratic world [1], meaning both sides of political discussions must be presented.
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.
I really don't know how to respond to such a naive interpretation of what I have written.
(1958) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Brave_New_Worl...
His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.
Asimov missed the idea of the panopticon here, whereby control is self-enforced by the fear of being caught because you can be watched at any time, not all the time
That’s just gate keeping. How hard does science fiction have to be in order to be considered worthwhile? Why does it matter?
Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).
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).
> Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).
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.
About feasibility, did Asimov even read the book properly? I remember quite well that telescreens were not permanently watched, but that wasn't necessary because the consequences of getting caught with "wrongthink" were terrible.
Near the end of the book Winston finds out that he was watched much more thoroughly than he thought. They read his private diary and carefully put the same mote of dust on top of the cover so that Winston wouldn't notice it had been opened.
He would write a mea culpa. 1984 is a warning. And that warning is playing out in our lives. We are in a post-truth world.
>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.
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.
And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary social classes which are perhaps closer to “1984” because they are so well established now.
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.
> 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.
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.
North Korea is rather exceptional though. Few dictatorships manage even one smooth succession, let alone two.
Monarchies
It depends on one's definition of dictatorship. I personally do not believe, for instance, the British Crown is one such instance.
Besides that, multiple ways to read this. "Monarchies" could've been a reference to pre modern monarchies of which many made it through at least 3 successions. Or as a correction to the upper comment, saying that the Kim's are more monarchy than plain dictatorship.
The British Crown had to concede some rights centuries ago, or there would have been civil wars and probably no more crown. Dear Leaders are the ones that don't have to concede anything, yet.
Not only have there been multiple civil wars, there has also been “no more crown” after the beheading of King Charles I (1649) until the restoration in 1660.
> or there would have been civil wars
Would have been? There were.
A lot of monarchies aren't really stable across two or more successions either.
No. East Germany did not start existing with the Berlin Wall. The system was in place well before that, and so was the Stasi.
It spanned more than 40 years, and was absolutely multi-generational.
In hindsight East Germany took a lot of inspiration from Nazi Germany.
Asimov comes off as incredibly naive.
> 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.
China begs to differ.
This also happened heavily under the Romanian communist regime. My parents were first hand witness to that.
Previously...
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)
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I don't understand what this comment is trying to say.
The commentator mannykannot didn't really comment on the politics other than to agree that 1984 is a criticism of Stalism (which... I don't think anyone would argue with?).
Orwell also wrote "Animal Farm" which is a criticism of Fascism, and Asimov leads with this.
"Animal Farm" is a satire of the Russian Revolution.
Correct. More to the point, when it appeared many on the left attempted to wave this away by claiming that it was, as one put it, a "gentle satire" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Reception> when anyone who has read Animal Farm knows that it is in no way gentle in its satire.
What nl is attempting to do above is the latest iteration of what Animal Farm and 1984 both received from those who could not stand the spotlight of their scrutiny: Claim that the target is something else, and/or that Orwell's attacks are so pedestrianly obvious (since "everyone knows" that Stalinism is bad) as to be pointless.
> What nl is attempting to do above
Um wow talk about bad faith!
Actually it's been about 35 years since I read Animal Farm, so I took what the review said as valid.
Asimov's review says it's a satire of the Russian Revolution, not of fascism.
(Just pointing out the fact, not at all agreeing with the vile accusation against you.)
Huh - yes you are right. I don't know what I was thinking, but it was very wrong.
Well, the only difference between Fascism and Stalinism was more or less that Fascism was anticommunist (communists and fascists were killing each other in Italy when Mussolini, a former socialist, was raising to the power) but Stalinism was communism only because Stalin had to wave that ideological flag to become leader of that country in those times. Both were nationalistic (Stalin de facto killed internationalism), had control of economy, had full control of society. Dictatorships.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Asimov a republican?
As in, in the modern American sense? No; I’m baffled as to what would make you think that.
No. All his life he had the politics of his Brooklyn Jewish background; that is, left-leaning.
Interesting how pedantic he is!
> 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.
I don't think it's pedantic, he's trying to make a broad point about his mentality, using the detail as the defining example
>Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening of the feminine stereotype of 1949.
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.
I enjoyed reading "Foundation" recently. The total lack of female characters was jarring to say the least. Worth the read if you haven't. Not much like the AppleTV series.
You can't just stop with the first book. Keep reading...
Or don't. There's so much more better SF out there.
The point was more that the female characters turn up in books two and three. Three in particular.
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.
Are you referring to the literal planet rather than a woman? That character felt particularly of self insert fantasy (oo a hot 20 year old in love with the aged professor).
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.
I read books because I enjoy them. I enjoy reading about hot 20 year olds and big breasted women in space actually. Women are allowed to have 50 Shades, I'm allowed to enjoy books too.
You are. And I'm allowed to read into the author's psychology when they wear it on their shoulder. And I'm also allowed to critique the author when they misunderstand their work and write rambling, uninspired sequels that ruin the original work.
Lucas and Disney couldn't help but copy even these bad parts of Foundation in the Star Wars prequels and sequels.
> ruin the original work
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.
The trilogy, prequels, and sequels are all "canon" and retcon the most interesting concepts of the original book as ruses, conspiracies, and lies. This is unambiguously a ruining of the original because the author went out of their way to mute the concepts rather than explore them.
Writers are part of the world they live in.
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.
I have read a lot of Asimov. That's why I said there's better stuff out there.
Even his contempories were better - Bester and Simak run rings around him.
Feel free to make more recommendations. I record every single one I get and usually read them eventually.
if you like fantasy Tigana was pretty good.
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.
Try "The End of Eternity" to see how Asimov dealt with female characters when they were there...
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What is the point you are tyring to make?
After reading Asimov's review, I think the book has aged much better to be honest.
I love Asimov for the same reason I love Orwell, namely clear 1940s-style writing (which I've also seen in Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight), so I find it funny and sad that one is criticizing the other.
>Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. 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. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)
>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.
The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats needing to direct the anger of the populace away from themselves. We have this today with government propaganda stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
Isn't Asimov mistaking the Party's self rationalization and use of war (that might not even still be going on) as a statement of Orwell beliefs?
Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy insecurity from the oil crisis of the 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.
Or the wealth could accumulate in the hands of a few
I really loved Pynchon's introduction to 1984[1] in new Penguin edition.
[1]: https://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essa...
> This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
https://theresanaiforthat.com/
You don't even need an AI.
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.
Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in the first chapter:
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.
The review seems completely consumed by professional bitterness to the point where it becomes laughable. By the 1980s the methods of KGB, Stasi, Securitate etc. were well known in the west; how can he put this on paper and not realize he was being a complete fool:
> [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.
The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.
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.
Fully agree with how it seems Asimov has misunderstood something, or perhaps been myopic about seeing the world of 1984 with commitment .. another thing that killed his analysis for me was that he didn’t seem to understand the immensely dire conditions of 1984, vis a vis low quality razors, etc., nor that the sociological aspects he implies as banal (implying orwells disregard for proles) were as a consequence of years of brutal war. Asimov didn’t seem to want to scratch deeper into 1984 - he was, I believe, more responding to the world of 1980, which was after all an entirely different yet strikingly similar world to the novel, kind of like political parties.
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.
No it's a core misunderstanding of the commenters (and AI ads placement). The quote is biased because it miss the next part of Asimov's essay.
> 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.
"1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" —Cereal Killer, Hackers, whose words ring even more true today even as we watch tech billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god in silico
Right before that, he says, "FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day." Whenever I rewatch that movie, I think 17 is a tiny number compared to today. Probably 17,000+ now.
Indeed. On one of the many occasions I rewatched it with my wife, when it came to that bit I said "17? Those are rookie numbers these days."
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.
if you google your name (or handle, every hacker needs a handle, man...) it goes through double that, if memory serves (i might be off by a factor of 10 either side...)
I loved the Foundation series and Isaac Asimov was definitely my most read science fiction author as a kid, but damn - my estimation of Asimov as a man just fuckin plummeted. He comes across like a whiny nerd. He's upset that 1984 gets such acclaim in "his" area of expertise, science fiction. And how dare this non science fiction guy step foot in his domain. If 1984 weren't set in the future, he wouldn't have any gripes with it, I'm sure.
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
I think he had enough of it to foresee it for any authoritarian regime. You can find examples of what he describes today.
It's been many years since I read 1984, but this seems wrong:
"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.
” As a matter of fact, political obfuscation has tended to use many words rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to reduce. Every leader of inadequate education or limited intelligence hides behind exuberant inebriation of loquacity.”
I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing exactly the same thing right now.
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.
Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.
I think Asimov is right that 1984 was not intended as a forecast but rather a depiction of Stalinism with British characteristics, so to speak.
>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.
> those controlling the government kept themselves in power bybrute force, by distorting the truth, by continually rewriting history, by mesmerising the people generally
Sound familiar?
> Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand.
... but the latter may greatly benefit from the former
The editing of the dictionary in that book is more troublesome than the surveillance state and propaganda campaigns.
Very interesting and so actual. Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite writers.
Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again. It feels strange - almost as if Asimov hated Orwell. So many personal attacks.
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.
Short version - OP, you've either pulled a terrifying psy-op or proven that the nearly 100-year old one is still in effect. Either way, I need to be a hell of a lot more discerning what I read online, because if I hadn't known for sure that money has nothing to do with class in the British system, I don't know how many other parts of that article I might have absorbed before I reached the massive clangers like 'the Nazis were pretty benign'.
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.
Well that was fun to read Asimov critiquing a book so harshly
He makes a lot of great points, but I vaguely feel he missed the point of the book. I guess he "just couldn't like get into it man."
>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.
Guys. Look at the title of this hacker news article. Look at it again. Then, read the article again. Look for the bits that don't add up, the way the truth shifts from one paragraph to the next. Not outrageous lies, just the little wrongnesses sprinkled here and there.
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
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Even today in the United States people voted for someone who actively tries to dismantle the legal system, pushes for more control in the hands of the executive powers, uses the military against its own citizens, constantly questions election integrity, emphasizes loyalty over free speech, encourages a "Great Leader" cult of personality, attacks political opponents with all possible means, promotes isolationism, militarizes law enforcement, the list goes on. All these are hallmarks of totalitarianism – which is what 1984 is all about.
1984 is not about communism or nazism. It’s about totalitarianism. Orwell himself was a socialist and his ideas would today be well left of Mamdani’s.
What propaganda? What are you talking about?
He's talking (nonsensically) about New Yorkers voting for Mamdani.
Many people are shallow thinkers with no intellectual integrity who have never learned much of anything and say the most incredibly foolish, ignorant, and dishonest things.