Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
How so? Orwell's stories dealt with class protectionism, and how the average person unwittingly contributes to systems of oppression and exclusion. Empire is about outsourcing the bottom end of inequality.
The article is about how removing those books - for the very stated reasons you outlines - could, according to the author, contribute to the rise of the right and the destruction of those ends.
(just an example; it really can be framed from pretty much any angle)
Orwell's work was peak english literary culture, and what they call criticim and theory are really just a way to dissolve meaning and kill culture by preventing it from persisting as coherent meaning in time. It's an unmooring and uprooting, and it does not produce anything anyone actually desires other than a set of shibboleths for a conspiracy to destroy a culture and rule over its ashes.
There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.
In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
> it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
This exactly, I hope for opportunities to repeat as much.
> We can see similar patterns today. The European working class can no longer seek status in the colonies, so it is turning to the political right. Deprived of the security and opportunities promised by neoliberalism, the working classes increasingly seek inclusion through the exclusion of others.
I see the same on HN when a topic about H1 B visas is posted.
Going by comments on such posts Immigration seems to be fine as long as it is affecting blue collar work.
The pitchforks are out when it concerns one's own job. Then they talk about quality of programmers, outsourcing companies, the process of H1B not being fair etc.
Makes me think that it's insecurity about finance and status, but not limited to a certain economic class.
> Populist parties frame migration as an economic and cultural threat. They blame migrants for problems ranging from crime to unemployment. And while social democratic parties are campaigning on ideological platforms, many voters still prioritise material security. Voting patterns suggest that class remains central.
This framing of the issue suggests that the issue is not real, while it could be a simple matter of people being worried about their financial well being and safety.
Consider the Pakistani Grooming gangs in UK with estimates suggesting up to 250,000 potential victims nationwide over several decades.
Many of the victims were young working class. Their plight was ignored so as not to antagonize a community.
Dismissive attitudes towards victims: Many of the victims were working-class, vulnerable, or living in state care. Authorities often stigmatized them as "troubled" or "consenting," systematically ignoring their cries for help and failing to implement a child-centered approach.
As per BBC - Institutional paralysis: Police forces and local authorities lacked adequate training and suffered from severe bureaucratic dysfunction. In some instances, agencies viewed the gangs’ ethnic minority status and cultural backgrounds as "no-go" zones, allowing criminal networks to operate hidden behind the shield of "cultural sensitivities"
So to ensure that you are not being 'against migrants' created a situation that was hell for a lot of women.
We don't know if European Working class in other countries are seeing similar issues that happened in UK but were brushed under by the police and the British Media.
Let's not paint the working class as naive and just against migrants as 'seek inclusion through the exclusion of others."
The working class was not against migrants all along. If something changed, we should try to find out what the real issue is.
Sometimes I find myself wondering what "thinking" even means. Someone proposes a frame, and then people who buy into that frame rally around it and work to reinforce it. Is that really thinking?
I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.
On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.
But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.
And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.
Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.
So honestly, I don't really know.
It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.
Purging 1984 sounds like something out of 1984.
Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
Hey, as long as the masses are looking to the left and the right for their enemies, rather than up, that's what's desired.
But popcorn sales are through the roof!
How so? Orwell's stories dealt with class protectionism, and how the average person unwittingly contributes to systems of oppression and exclusion. Empire is about outsourcing the bottom end of inequality.
The article is about how removing those books - for the very stated reasons you outlines - could, according to the author, contribute to the rise of the right and the destruction of those ends.
(just an example; it really can be framed from pretty much any angle)
I suppose he saw also this coming. Ref.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48737387
Reminds me of an observation made when they removed Maus from a library in Tennessee I think it was: "these people want a kinder gentler Holocaust."
It's totally idiotic the state we have reached, with an absolutely equal number of stupid people on the left and the right.
I have come to the same conclusion. Not sure how we pull people towards the center.
Orwell's work was peak english literary culture, and what they call criticim and theory are really just a way to dissolve meaning and kill culture by preventing it from persisting as coherent meaning in time. It's an unmooring and uprooting, and it does not produce anything anyone actually desires other than a set of shibboleths for a conspiracy to destroy a culture and rule over its ashes.
There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.
In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
Very well put.
> it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
This exactly, I hope for opportunities to repeat as much.
> We can see similar patterns today. The European working class can no longer seek status in the colonies, so it is turning to the political right. Deprived of the security and opportunities promised by neoliberalism, the working classes increasingly seek inclusion through the exclusion of others.
I see the same on HN when a topic about H1 B visas is posted. Going by comments on such posts Immigration seems to be fine as long as it is affecting blue collar work. The pitchforks are out when it concerns one's own job. Then they talk about quality of programmers, outsourcing companies, the process of H1B not being fair etc.
Makes me think that it's insecurity about finance and status, but not limited to a certain economic class.
> Populist parties frame migration as an economic and cultural threat. They blame migrants for problems ranging from crime to unemployment. And while social democratic parties are campaigning on ideological platforms, many voters still prioritise material security. Voting patterns suggest that class remains central.
This framing of the issue suggests that the issue is not real, while it could be a simple matter of people being worried about their financial well being and safety.
Consider the Pakistani Grooming gangs in UK with estimates suggesting up to 250,000 potential victims nationwide over several decades.
Many of the victims were young working class. Their plight was ignored so as not to antagonize a community. Dismissive attitudes towards victims: Many of the victims were working-class, vulnerable, or living in state care. Authorities often stigmatized them as "troubled" or "consenting," systematically ignoring their cries for help and failing to implement a child-centered approach.
As per BBC - Institutional paralysis: Police forces and local authorities lacked adequate training and suffered from severe bureaucratic dysfunction. In some instances, agencies viewed the gangs’ ethnic minority status and cultural backgrounds as "no-go" zones, allowing criminal networks to operate hidden behind the shield of "cultural sensitivities"
So to ensure that you are not being 'against migrants' created a situation that was hell for a lot of women.
We don't know if European Working class in other countries are seeing similar issues that happened in UK but were brushed under by the police and the British Media.
Let's not paint the working class as naive and just against migrants as 'seek inclusion through the exclusion of others."
The working class was not against migrants all along. If something changed, we should try to find out what the real issue is.
Sometimes I find myself wondering what "thinking" even means. Someone proposes a frame, and then people who buy into that frame rally around it and work to reinforce it. Is that really thinking?
I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.
On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.
But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.
And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.
Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.
So honestly, I don't really know.
It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.