Re: wacky question

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:16 PM, Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday 24 June 2013 01:26:01 Joel Rees wrote:
> !984 and Animal Farm were allegories of the world the authors

author, singular. There was only one George Orwell.

My goodness. You're right.

I suppose it would have helped my memory if 1984 hadn't given me such a headache, and if I had been able to sit still to read Animal Farm when I was a teenager.

Have to admit, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Pohl were easier to read back then. Forty years down the road and I find myself re-visiting the books that were hard back then, and finding them very readable. And much more meaningful. Hadn't gotten back to Animal Farm, I think it may be time.

> lived in, not
> predictions of some dystopian future.

He was not a scientist,

You don't have to be a scientist to predict the future.

and most of the "science" in 1984 did not exist in
1948/9. "1984" was an imaginative projection of what he saw as current
trends into a resulting dystopian future.

It was still an allegory of the world around him. And around us. People who get in government and start thinking they know better than the rest of us have always been around, and they pretty much tend to do the same things. And we tend to get caught up in the wrong battles and find ourselves converted to their world. And conflate the government's stupidities with God's intent for us to learn hard lessons.

"Animal Farm" was indeed allegorical and referred to the past and present, not
the future. But it was also very much dystopian.

Again, people don't change. The adults, well, some of them, in my teenage world were concerned that the US was just taking a longer track down the same path as the Soviet Union, and their concern was well-founded. We are in their future now, and the US is one step over the line on losing our Constitution, and one step away from totalitarianism.

Much though Ralf's assertions that many things have changed for the better over that time are correct.

Unless there isn't a major course correction, there won't be much time left until the erstwhile "minorities" find themselves, along with us white trash, "less equal than the {ruling-class}.

What this has to do with operating systems is that operating systems are one of the battle grounds where the armies are gathering on their way to the big war.

Privacy is not about our personal right to whimsy so much as it is about keeping the governments from inserting their taps into the local control lines and trying to assert non-local control through the social context, to the ends of their own whimsy.

And we users need to become more involved with the development processes, or we will find ourselves ill-prepared for the trench wars.

Lisi

--
Joel Rees, feeling a little embarrassed at the melodramatic tone this rant has taken