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| Just read 1984 for the first time. by Senor Barborito 02/25/2003, 12:11am PST | ||||
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| I read it straight through in one sitting off a website starting at 10AM this morning. It was pretty good. Not quite what I was expecting but still very good.
I understand now why so many people claim that I'm ripping it off despite my having formed all my ideas re: ideal economic system before reading the book. The thing that struck me while reading it was entirely a personal matter - I identified far more strongly with the post-betrayl Winston than the idealist-Winston. In fact, going all the way back to my psychotic episode a few years back I've felt numb precisely like that despite mood shiftings and episodic manic states. I guess my point is that I wonder if that event broke me in some fundamental way - rolling on the floor screaming in abject terror at hallucinations I was powerless to push away anymore than you can push a way a cloud. It wouldn't have to be a prolonged torture - a sudden and significant neurochemical imbalance could render catastrophic changes with little difference in the final resulting grey matter. Enough bullshit, though. Great read, you can find it on the web in full in HTML with just a bit of searching. For those wondering if the Party represents everything I hate about the United States increasingly sliding into a protectionist oligarchy - yes, but it's an ideal that we're as far from as we are from the Nazi party. A very great distance, I am thankful to say. To follow up, though - I don't counter the totalitarian conclusions of the Party presented in this book with mystic bullshit like Winston. It is BECAUSE of mechanistic building upon the framework of pragmatism that I arrive at the traditional Socialist ideals - there is an interesting coincidence between both the ideals of greed and generosity that I've yet to see anybody touch on. A reconciling of median and mean. I've been raiding the Dept of Commerce, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and certain Krugman articles extensively in support of this idea lately, and hopefully I'll have something to write about at some point in the future. --SB |
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