OT: A description of some of the "designers" here...
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 |
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness." -James Barrie
Anybody who thinks that Charles Murray's contribution in "The Bell Curve" was in any way scientific hasn't read
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and doesn't know much about science.
Kevin D. Williamson may understand identity politics, but he's a bit weak on on science, as you'd expect in somebody with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Texas.
Jim's scientific background is better - but not much. Like John Larkin he went through university learning only the stuff he thought that he could use to make money.
It makes some valid points, though nobody who doesn't have an "ideological interest" believes "The Bell Curve" is anything other than junk science by anyone's standards.
Most New England liberals are ultra-dogmatic, inflexible, and kind of a pain-in-the-ass to be around even compared to lil ol' "communist" me if you can believe it. I don't count many of them as friends.
Basically you get the sense that most of them lack the courage of their convictions - they just "believe" a lot of stuff to be cool and with the "in" crowd. I think many of them actually really want to like Trump and for him to like them, too.
Throw 'em a few crumbs, like if Trump were to say he'd give a stern thumping to Chechnya for its treatment of gays, and they'd be yours forever.
You read Animal Farm yet? Oh, I forgot. You Trendies think reading is so old-fashioned these days. As in all other endeavours in life, you'd rather someone else did it for you. Well here you go:
Ya and "1984", too. I remember "1984" better though.
Basically I don't think it's possible to learn anything really insightful or practical about society from Orwell's work. The fact that _both_ the Left and the Right sort of hold him as a darling and namedrop his stuff all the time (ohmahgawd with Trump it's just like 1984! The Clintons want a world just like Animal Farm!) tell me that his "profound insights" into "human nature" are mostly just astrology wrapped up in a slick package. that aren't even very good just as standalone pieces of fiction, either.
The review at the time it was published by George Soule (quoting from the wiki) said it "puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull. The allegory turned out to be a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been said better directly" which is pretty much on-the-money. "Dude, everyone has heard these ideas framed more clearly by someone else before."
What you can learn a lot about from Orwell's work, and what I think the most important take-away is, is about the psychology of Orwell himself, and it ain't pretty.
The reality is Orwell was basically a himself a leftist dilettante originally, born into a wealthy family with no real problems in life other than the fact girls rejected him a lot when he fell in love with them and asked them to marry him 20 seconds after meeting them (he also hated women a lot.) He had the money to do pretty much what he wanted, though, and spent a lot of time dilettante-ing it up with the other leftists at trendy bars in Paris and lounging around his mom's house.
Anyway one day he decided that the best way to get these high-society commie chicks to like him was to prove what a badass he was, so he went to go try to be the Hero of the Proletariat and singlehandedly turn the tide of the Spanish Civil War. Henry Miller tried to tell him that he was a dumbass but he didn't listen and nearly got his face shot off for the trouble by far-leftists looking to build their own anti-Reich, who thought he was too moderate.
This made him really mad and feel like everything he ever thought about the left was a fraud. Meanwhile everyone else is thinking "So what did you think was gonna happen when you went sticking your dilettante-ass in fights where it didn't belong, exactly?"
But for the most part he never actually lived under the systems of oppression he so vehemently despised and didn't really know much about them at the end of the day. If he had he wouldn't have written books like the ones he did.
Typical rot written by a waster without a fraction of the mastery of the full panoply of human nature exhibited by Orwell.
[insulting twaddle snipped] - He did *not* come from a wealthy family; they were *lower* middle class in income terms and had to make huge sacrifices to send him to Eaton.
I beg your pardon??? Novels like Down & Out in Paris and London and Road to Wigan Pier are depictions of Orwell's direct experience of living under precisely that! Your conspicuous idiocy on show as usual. Stick to electronics, m8.
Except you're not really homeless when you're, as Reagan said, "homeless by choice."
Orwell's mum n dad had a pretty nice place he could run back to any time he wanted when the going actually got tough - which is exactly what he did.
Guess this is a "lower-middle class home", huh? Where did the middle-middle class at the time live...Buckingham Palace?
I know the type, dude. Boston is full of similar bohemian 20-somethings who sing the praises of socialism and like to play homeless on the weekend, begging for change on the street in sneakers that cost more than my entire footwear collection. Then hit up Mom when they inevitably run out of cash.
They'll swing Conservative on a dime the minute some thug pulls a knife on them. Sad, but unfortunately that's the sort of thing that inevitably happens when one tries to roll in a world where you don't belong.
OMG! Can he read any slower! I think they mean 3-days and not 3-hours, and all that manic obsessive over description of trivial crap in some imagined scenery is enough to drive anyone bats!
Orwell didn't know a toss about what "human nature" was or wasn't. What he thought he knew about it was really just framed and warped by his own jaded and bitter nature.
If he had actually been lower-middle class he wouldn't have had time to write a thing, he would've been too busy working a real job.
Cursitor Doom thinks I'm a communist - he knows I'm a socialist, and doesn' t know enough to realise that communists were no more socialist than the Ge rman National Socialists. But Cursitor Doom does have an excuse - he doesn' t seem to have been to any kind of tertiary institution, and reads the Mail , which is not so much low-brow as no-brow.
Cursitor Doom doesn't realise that Geroge Orwell was a socialist who didn't like communists. "Animal Farm" is a satire very specifically directed at R ussian Communism. Russian communism devalued itself into non-existence abou t a quarter of century ago, but Cursitor Doom doesn't know enough to realis e that "Anial Farm" is now only of historical interest.
He was tolerably sincere about documenting lower-class life.
This is a gross over-simplification, and misses out a number of crucial fac ts.
Try reading "Homage to Catalonia"
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He fought with the anarcho-syndicalists from Catalonia, who got shafted by the Russian-dominated communist forces from other areas - Orwell was lucky that he and his wife weren't caught up when the Communists purged Barcelona . He may have come under fire from the communists, but he seems to have wou nded at the front by Francoists.
Not exactly true. He remained socialist, but really didn't like Stalin and Stalinist communism.
Like Robert Noonan - better known as Robert Tressell
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Like Eric Blair/George Orwell, Robert Noonan/Tressell died of tuberculosis. Orwell did have less trouble finding publishers - his higher social status probably helped there.
I think bitrex' command of electronics is at the same level as his command of literature. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that
is the secret of happiness." -James Barrie
I already knew everything before I went to MIT >:-} MIT only gave me the toolkit I needed to dissect what I knew.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that
is the secret of happiness." -James Barrie
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