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No, that is indeed not Orwellian - are you familiar with what the term means in the context of language? Calling something 'free', the purchase of which is det

by KaeseEs 14y ago

No, that is indeed not Orwellian - are you familiar with what the term means in the context of language? Calling something 'free', the purchase of which is detrimental to the freedom of many human beings by strengthening those who keep them in fetters, is akin to Newspeak from 1984, wherein words and phrases assumed meanings contradictory to their normal denotation. The situation you seem to see, wherein you assume that people use China as a handy stick with which to beat those they dislike for other reasons, has little or nothing to do with this. Words mean things, and we should all do our part to use them meaningfully - George Orwell would approve. :) Incidentally, I don't know why your recollection of complaints about China's atrocious human rights record skews towards the (rather few) complaints that are on HN about RMS' choice of laptop, or about the Apple/Foxconn dustup (which incidentally caught several other companies to a lesser extent), but it's not really germane to the conversation at hand.

ZeroGravitas 14y ago
I was actually thinking of the Two Minute Hate from the same book, and how the ritualised anger aimed at external enemies was used to distract from the reality of their own existence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate And as I said, I don't understand why China's human rights record is more germane to this particular conversation sub-thread. You could have replied at the top level to rail against China, but you replied instead to the apparently irresistible irony of someone wishing to have a chinese made laptop with Free Software rather than a chinese made laptop without. Which suggests to me at least that people may be struggling to cope with the idea that pretty much everything is made in China and would rather pretend that their non-longsoon CPU device is in some way morally superior.

by KaeseEs 14y ago

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

I was actually thinking of the Two Minute Hate from the same book, and how the ritualised anger aimed at external enemies was used to distract from the reality of their own existence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate And as I said, I don't understand why China's human rights record is more germane to this particular conversation sub-thread. You could have replied at the top level to rail against China, but you replied instead to the apparently irresistible irony of someone wishing to have a chinese made laptop with Free Software rather than a chinese made laptop without. Which suggests to me at least that people may be struggling to cope with the idea that pretty much everything is made in China and would rather pretend that their non-longsoon CPU device is in some way morally superior.