Sensible Erection | An Interview With Orwell

Wednesday, 29 January 2003

quote [ Don't you know that under the Patriot Act, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution have been gone for a year as of October 26, 2002? ]

An imaginary conversation with George. A very nice read, when you're ready to kick back. It appears the question isn't "are we paranoid?" but "are we paranoid enough?"

[by serenitynow@3:10amGMT] [+9 Insightful]

Comments

fitzy said @ 4:20am GMT on 29th Jan
Fantastic.

Darklord Bob said @ 4:51am GMT on 29th Jan
+1 Insightful because there's no +1 scary as hell.

Forsaken_One said @ 6:09am GMT on 29th Jan
Interesting and ceratinly deserving of a +1, if only because it has some good ideas in it that aren't being looked at in today's media. I feel it's rather silly the way he presents it though. An academical style essay would, imo, be much more consice, interesting, ordered, and approachable than a long, drawn out mock interview with parenthesis to show emotions rather than good writing or even, gods forbid, letting the user make of it what they will without telling them how the author wants them to feel. So good link but I fault the author for his presentation.

Torias said @ 6:19am GMT on 29th Jan
I have to agree. the parallels between the current situation and the novel 1984 are blindingly obvious...

a more simple and direct presentation of what was in the novel and what's happening now and let people draw the conclusion themselves.

EPT said @ 7:23am GMT on 29th Jan
I disagree - the intimate distrust the wider population has of 'intellectuals' would heavily constrict the potential audience if this article was written as an academic essay. Preaching to the converted, as it were.

This format is much more open and spaced out - another factor in web essays is that large chunks of unbroken text are generally glossed. I think he did the right thing.

fitzy said @ 8:01am GMT on 29th Jan
I concur your excellency.

Cathy said @ 12:38am GMT on 30th Jan
EPT is so smart its dreamy *aigh* (has stars in my eyes)

zapper said @ 6:51am GMT on 29th Jan
"War is peace" fits very well today. G. W. Bush explains that to obtain peace there has to be war. To me that's a contradiction. But it would be interesting to hear from US people if they think (or realize) they are being manipulated.

Robyn said @ 8:39am GMT on 29th Jan
"I read some books you wrote when I was in high school, 1984 and Animal Farm."

What a horrible sentence! How hard would it have been to have revised it to something like, "I read your books "1984" and "Animal Farm" when I was in high school.

The script is like slash fiction with a political twist.

Ronin.ca said @ 10:20am GMT on 29th Jan
While I agree that some of the sentances are a bit awkward, the style definatly made for a more enjoyable read than a jargon-filled academic style paper. Or mb that is because my graduate program has me thinking about "sequencing" data in different ways and behaviorism vs cognitivism vs construtivism and I am sick to death of reading important ideas being beaten to death by overly written dreck.

Ronin.ca said @ 10:20am GMT on 29th Jan
Oppps, forgot to vote.

RevGreg said @ 6:29pm GMT on 29th Jan
I'd rather let Mr. Orwell speak for himself...and not from his fiction:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other."

"We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil."

"Liberal - a power worshipper without power."

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people that don't even know that fire is hot."

It's also interesting to note that he was a government informer for the British government and compiled lists of names and dossiers on people he met for them. I won't mod this because I don't think any of the catagories really describe it...it is poorly written and based on views VERY tiny subset of Orwell's writings - all of them fiction. Try reading Orwell's actual political writings sometime.