Or, homophobe praising the power of love

  • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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    2 years ago

    So I’ve read 1984. And even from a literary perspective, I think it’s shit. You know how they say when you’re writing a story, you should never info dump and to show don’t tell? He infodumps and tells all. Endless pages of random lore about his strawman setting that are never actually used in the plot, told directly to you as if you were reading a Wikipedia article. It’s so rambly and boring that finishing it, even back when I was a libtrash who agreed with him, was honestly really difficult. Like some books you have force yourself to put down, 1984 I had to force my self to pick up only because it was assigned in English class. Seriously, I’ve read Pokémon fanfiction that had smoother prose.

    (You know what it actually feels like? So most media franchises have an internal world building repository that the writers reference to keep the lore consistent, I’m pretty sure he accidentally sent that to the publisher that instead of his actual story.)

    • I’ve read it too and never have I read something this boring. As you’ve said already, all of that useless lore it contains, I think he just put it here to not make it a short story. I’m surprised people like him that much, all he’s writing is: “wat if ebil Stalin owned the world 😭😭😭”

      • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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        2 years ago

        He was trying way too hard to have his made up country sound as evil as possible but obviously wasn’t skilled enough to organically depict that using the actual plot.

          • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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            2 years ago

            And don’t get me started on that newspeak bullshit. Seriously, when the fuck had any communist ever proposed reducing the expressional function of a language? What the actual fuck was he going on about? Yet another shameless strawman.

            Was he thinking of simplified Chinese maybe? That’s the opposite of newspeak! It was intended specifically to reduce the difficulty in learning one of the most difficult to learn scripts in the world and increase literacy rates, and critically, increase access to the language and therefore access to information written in said language! It absolutely did not delete words or mess with the grammar system, or how the language is spoken. Simplified Chinese only affects how characters are written (and isn’t the first overhaul of the Chinese writing system BTW), and simplified and traditional Chinese characters have a one to one correspondence, and can be converted between each other with a simple lookup table. It’s logically the same as going from cursive to print text in English, not English to Newspeak.

            Again, I’ve read Pokémon fanfiction with more basis in reality.

            • I think George either misunderstood the simplification of the Chinese language, purposefully made it it look like it was the removal of Chinese words or like any modern western journalist, making stuff up to make communism in general look like it’s evil

              • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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                2 years ago

                I mean, I doubt he knew anyone who speaks Chinese or was arsed to do any research. “Simplified Chinese” does sound on the surface level like they just dumbed down the language, so I’m assuming he just ran with that assumption because it’s convenient for his narrative. A more accurate and less ambiguous term would be Simplified Chinese Script.

                By the way, Korea went through the same thing. Korean used to be written out using Chinese script. But the language structure of Korean wasn’t served very well by Chinese characters, because Korean is an agglutinative language while Chinese is an analytical language. So they made their own script that’s specifically designed for the language.

            • lssssj
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              2 years ago

              Fun fact: It was about Esperanto. You can see by his “ungood”, similar to “malbona” for bad.

              • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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                2 years ago

                I mean, is there an actual problem with not having enough words to express yourself in Espranto? I’ve never heard that.

                Also, not doubting that it was about Esperanto just wanted to share: Mandarin does also use ungood: “不好”. 不 is both the the word for “no” and the general negation prefix, and 好 is “good”. We also have plusungood, 很不好, where 很 means “very” (and in colloqual speech, you can tack an extra 很 on there, 很很不好 is basically doubleplusungood). But, this is really common for a lot of languages, so I don’t see the problem. It also absolutely does not limit your expression, like how they were going on about getting rid of synonyms. “差” is also a word for bad, and there are a number of other prefixes that add additional or different gravitas to words like good or bad. Chinese is considered one of the best languages for poetry so it definitely doesn’t limit expression.

                • lssssj
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                  2 years ago

                  No, it really doesn’t, but looks like he knew people who did speak Esperanto at the time.

    • fruityloop@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      I read 1984 of my own will and I just thought it was okay and not very profound but it did appeal to me a bit at the time because of my life circumstances. I was far from being a communist at that time yet I didn’t even know it was anti-communist because the themes matched my very capitalist country lol.

      The one I actively hate is Animal Farm. It was assigned reading and I had to do an essay about it. It’s the most mind-nubming anti-Stalin shit I’ve ever read, not to mention the quality of the writing itself. You could predict the plot points way before you get to that point because it’s just that predictable. I can’t describe how annoyed I was the whole time when the teacher was introducing the premise of the book. They were like “any extreme ideology is bad whether it’s capitalism or communism”, basically average lib talking points. I had to write a very watered down essay because I wasn’t sure if I’d get a good grade by writing my actual opinion.

      • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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        2 years ago

        George, you’re not Aseop, and you’ll never be Aseop. You don’t have his skills of making animal allegories and your attempts are an insult to his writings.

    • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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      2 years ago

      Have you read 1984? He literally thinks this. In the book, big brother arranges marriages specifically between people without any emotional attachment, and has plans to ban sex and exclusively use artificial insemination to breed humans.

      Yeah Orwell, give me one example of any communist thinking the state should do anything remotely like that. Literally the definition of a strawman.

      Actually, you know who actually thought certain types of humans should become baby factories to populate the world? Hitler.

      • xxcvzvcxx@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 years ago

        Actually, you know who actually thought certain types of humans should become baby factories to populate the world?

        uhhh… libs?

        Hitler.

        Close enough.

    • AgreeableLandscape
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      2 years ago

      He looks dead honestly.

      No seriously. I watch true crime documentaries and sometimes they show old black and white police photos of corpses, this totally has that vibe.

    • Ratette (she/her)@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      Tired from running around ratting out communists and queers to the crown.

      Rest in piss Orwell, I hope you’re happy Liz is now in hell with you.

    • AgreeableLandscape☭@lemmygrad.mlM
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      2 years ago

      Honestly, that was my first impression before I actually realized it was about communism. “Damn, this is eerily similar to the NSA shit going on.”

  • JoetheDilo1917@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 years ago

    “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” - Ernesto “Che” Guevara

  • AdvancedAktion@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 years ago

    I was not able to finish 1984, but I praised even without knowing whether I liked it, because it is considered a good book. I did not even notice the incelish writing at first.