Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didn't survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account's cake day, too, so that's cool.)
I don't think I disagree with much of what Asimov is saying here! Aside from the silly bits about left infighting and scifi as forecasting (yawn), and the horrible recount of the Spanish civil war, I've made pretty much the same observations about 1984. It's nihilistic and reactionary, it's profoundly misogynistic and it reeks of contempt for the working class. It's also shockingly naive and paradoxically enthusiastic about the workings and effectiveness of propaganda and censorship. There's certainly nothing prescient about it. It's baffling to me that it's still popular with leftleaning people to this day.
The most generous thing I can say is that the book might have been intended purely as satire, and as such it would at least be coherent. But sadly I don't think this is how people tend to read it.