The freedom to play, the freedom to fuck around and say "What games with language can I use to make 2+2=5 work if I want it to" The Party is absolutely opposed to that The concept of Newspeak is explicitly to make this kind of thing impossible
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
The dickhead conservatives who've adopted Orwell love to say "Newspeak" to mean any jargon they don't like or understand, especially "PC jargon" But Newspeak is the OPPOSITE of that Newspeak is about only using simple words that everyone knows whose intended meaning is obvious
2 replies 10 retweets 89 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
It's designed to make you talk like a little kid "Good" and "ungood" are the only words you can use to judge something All verbs have only one tense ("think" and not "thought") Language is supposed to become easy and automatic, there are no double meanings "Duckspeaking"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Do you not see how, IN PRACTICE, this is much more like you than like me This obsession with the concept of "plain speech", of obvious meanings and simple communication and clearing the culture of any traps and snares laid by complex abstract thought
1 reply 3 retweets 46 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
You know what I'm stuck on is how much Orwell hated CS Lewis' Mere Christianity for exactly this reason CS Lewis' whole job as a Christian apologist, defending a traditional and dominant ideology from challenge, was reassuring people in this way
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
"This is what everyone already thinks and everyone already thinks it because it's logical and true, it's the evidence right in front of your face, 2+2=4, everyone trying to tell you it's more complicated than that is just fucking with you"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And now, after his death, Orwell has been drafted into playing the SAME ROLE They use his work to say the same thing Hell, plenty of Christian conservatives straight up tell you "If you want to understand resistance progressive orthodoxy read Orwell and CS Lewis"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Like holy shit Holy historical irony, Batman
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And yeah, I think that this is honestly Orwell's fault He genuinely had a steady rightward drift during the 1940s, he was becoming a reflexive left-puncher The real threat was always among revolutionaries, the existing conservative authorities were a joke, not worth mentioning
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
1984 has O'Brien talk about the old religions and nations and capitalists as already defeated, dead and buried, ancient history Orwell seriously believed that was what was gonna happen, and happen soon - the old order in its death throes
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Which we now know in hindsight is nonsense - the old oppressors are still there and never lost power It's 36 years after 1984 irl and we very much do still have capitalists, they aren't some ghostly memory of guys in top hats and tuxes
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And that's why all the stuff in 1984 that aged poorly grates so much The paeans to common sense, to the past, to the memory of traditional ways of life People in the past had access to real truth and only the Party has destroyed it
1 reply 2 retweets 23 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
It's execrable stuff honestly Stuff that Orwell, in his earlier writing about people like Lewis (or like Wodehouse and Dickens) didn't believe There was an Orwell who saw how tacky and hollow and exploitable nostalgia is and it's a different guy than the one who wrote 1984
1 reply 1 retweet 28 likes - Show replies
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