4 ms·

If the only thing that needs to change to enable that world is a policy document, then it's just as bad.

by agd 11y ago

varjag 11y ago
Consider that every time you drive in traffic, your life is at mercy of other people. The only thing preventing the driver of that 8-wheeler from ending your life is his (and other people's) general sanity and good will. It is certainly not the lack of technical ability: you are literally one decision away, no paper even has to be signed. Similarly, as long as society remains healthy at large, not pushing itself to the brink where emergent properties of dictatorship take over, I believe we are safe. In contrast, for a rotten society you don't even need advanced technology to make everyone's life miserable, as been proven many times over in modern history.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Society isn't healthy at large. Wealth is massively concentrated, and has a larger sway in things than democratic routes. The government has been on a 30 year warpath in the Middle East, with no sign of stopping. Torture has been forgiven; gulags for the tortured are accepted and permanent. A huge percentile of the US population is in prison or on parole-- far larger than other countries. Aside from this, the government used a terror attack as an excuse to start removing civil liberties in a slow march.
  - varjag 11y ago
    GULAG was a system of combined labour/death camps. By comparing it to Gitmo you only insult the millions victims postmortem and devalue the rest of your point. There must be a term for it; I can only describe it as reverse Marie Antoniette attitude. The problems of modern Western societies, while numerous and deep, are nowhere near dystopian levels yet. I lived the initial part of my life in USSR, arguably in the period when it gave up doing communism full strength. Still, 1984 ring true in very special way. Not just the basic concepts of oppression, surveillance and lies, that you can argue in any society with a government. By reading it you instantly recognize the behavioral traits of your friends, your parents, teachers and yourself in a shockingly precise and fitting manner. The 1984 is not a stretch of imagination, not a metaphor or a fitting analogy where you supposed to "draw parallels". It's a description of a totalitarian society modeled on totalitarian societies of the time and people subjugated by them. It's an anti-totalitarian, anti-communist text that always caused problems to the Western political left by its uncomfortable, uncanny plausibility. Hence the endless efforts to re-interpret it as we have here.

If the only thing that needs to change to enable that world is a policy document, then it's just as bad.

by agd 11y ago

If the only thing that needs to change to enable that world is a policy document, then it's just as bad.

Consider that every time you drive in traffic, your life is at mercy of other people. The only thing preventing the driver of that 8-wheeler from ending your life is his (and other people's) general sanity and good will. It is certainly not the lack of technical ability: you are literally one decision away, no paper even has to be signed. Similarly, as long as society remains healthy at large, not pushing itself to the brink where emergent properties of dictatorship take over, I believe we are safe. In contrast, for a rotten society you don't even need advanced technology to make everyone's life miserable, as been proven many times over in modern history.

cryoshon 11y ago
Society isn't healthy at large. Wealth is massively concentrated, and has a larger sway in things than democratic routes. The government has been on a 30 year warpath in the Middle East, with no sign of stopping. Torture has been forgiven; gulags for the tortured are accepted and permanent. A huge percentile of the US population is in prison or on parole-- far larger than other countries. Aside from this, the government used a terror attack as an excuse to start removing civil liberties in a slow march.
- varjag 11y ago
  GULAG was a system of combined labour/death camps. By comparing it to Gitmo you only insult the millions victims postmortem and devalue the rest of your point. There must be a term for it; I can only describe it as reverse Marie Antoniette attitude. The problems of modern Western societies, while numerous and deep, are nowhere near dystopian levels yet. I lived the initial part of my life in USSR, arguably in the period when it gave up doing communism full strength. Still, 1984 ring true in very special way. Not just the basic concepts of oppression, surveillance and lies, that you can argue in any society with a government. By reading it you instantly recognize the behavioral traits of your friends, your parents, teachers and yourself in a shockingly precise and fitting manner. The 1984 is not a stretch of imagination, not a metaphor or a fitting analogy where you supposed to "draw parallels". It's a description of a totalitarian society modeled on totalitarian societies of the time and people subjugated by them. It's an anti-totalitarian, anti-communist text that always caused problems to the Western political left by its uncomfortable, uncanny plausibility. Hence the endless efforts to re-interpret it as we have here.