It's also worth asking ourselves each time we re-read 1984, are we farther away or closer to the life depicted in the book, than last time we read it?
No?
Then think again. Doubleplus think.
Or (to name a more current example) just say at the NY airport that the security measures are bullshit! ... just as doublethought-enhancer.
Only because you don't have 24/7 surveillance on you. Yet.
"A federal appeals panel has upheld the 20 year sentence of a lolicon found to have received illustrations of underage sex by email, saying that “it is not a required that the minor depicted actually exists”, and so ruling art not to be universally protected free speech."
I think that using a particularly narrow example of restricted permissible expression isn't proof that society is getting closer to the totalitarian nightmare of 1984.
Or, frankly, when a punishment for a crime is increased by its intent (e.g. race related or anti-homosexual) -- it's not only the crime that is punished but the thought behind it as well.
As far as hate-crime goes, the notion behind increased punishment there is that the victims include an entire terrorized community, not just the direct victim. If I throw some trash on some guy's lawn, there's one victim (the guy). If I burn a cross on some guy's lawn, there are multiple victims (the other black families in the neighborhood). It's an important distinction.
For hate crime: yes, you've explained the justification for the designation. But it is thoughtcrime. You've merely said that it's legitimate.
Do you not realize it?
I postulate that artful, metaphorical, or misleading uses of language is both neither misuse nor bending it, and I would like a clearer explanation of what a corrupted language looks like, aside from "being corrupt".
That is corrupting the language.
And I even see it in Germany. Because the basic rights (like free speech) are defined in our constitution and "security" is not among them, our former secretary of the interior said this would be a "super basic right" -- thus also putting security above all basic rights ... and giving our rights in the hands of the NSA.
By this way, they corrupt our language and our thinking. Defining everything that way, how they pleasure and how they can betray us!
It's a clear distortion of language to hide the truth; it has everything to do with language and the use of it, as it deliberately twists meaning in order to limit the thoughts of people who accept this term to describe certain actions. As Wittgenstein put it:
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
> A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
Enemy combatants, Collateral damage, Leader of the free world, National security, War for peace, Premptive strikes, Enhanced interrogation
Some Orwellian concepts: War on abstract nouns (e.g on terror), Pervasive surveillance, Pervasive propaganda, Casual use of torture, Widespread hysteria and hatred over minor threats, Former hated enemies now allies and vice versa, Stark divides between the haves and have nots, A distant and poorly understood enemy necessitates perpetual conflict and sacrifice
It's a really interesting book and I disagree that we are any farther on in these respects than we were in orwell's time. His book is of course a fantasy intended to illustrate our failings by exaggerating them, not a strict prediction of the future, but it still has a lot to teach us.
War has become normalised and part of everyday life, with the implication that as we are at war special rules apply and the enemy, as designated by the government, deserves no mercy because we are engaged in an existential struggle.
Doubleplus ungood, actually.
I live in Poland, a post-communist country. Just yesterday I heard an interview on (public) radio with some (state-sponsored) university professor arguing that life was better under the previous system. No one cares.
There is proper thoughtcrime, like racism, or denying holocaust that can get you in trouble, fired, even arrested. But that is still really mild compared to 1984 or 1984.
It is just a small step from there to be arrested, as we saw before.
Even today, if you have the wrong name you can be disallowed from flying in the "land of the free". Because the government put your name on the list.
Some woman fought against this list, but the government even played tricks, that the trial could not go on. Where is there democracy or freedom?