1984

[Ogilvy]

[Stonewall]

What do these pictures have to do with a Van Halen album?

[Stratoghost]

What do these pictures have to do with the book?

[Ogilvy]

The trolls have EVERYTHING to do with George Orwell's book.

[prole]

YOU HAVE BEEN ACUSSED OF THE FOLLOWING CRIMES!

-thought crime(and don't pretend you didn't know it all along!)
-persuding adolecents to use mind olturing halucenogens in order to influence them against the party.
-molesting both male and female members of oceana.
-spreading anti Big Brother propigands published by Goldstain himself!
-masturbating.

YOU WILL BE PICKED UP AND BROUGHT TO THE MINESTRY OF LOVE IMEDIATLY AS SO WE CAN CLEANSE YOU MIND OF ANTI BIG BROTHER THOUGHTS PROPIGATED BY YOU ACOCIATION WITH EMANUEL GOLDSTIEN. then we will shoot you.

[Ogilvy]

prole said:

YOU HAVE BEEN ACUSSED OF THE FOLLOWING CRIMES!

-thought crime(and don't pretend you didn't know it all along!)
-persuding adolecents to use mind olturing halucenogens in order to influence them against the party.
-molesting both male and female members of oceana.
-spreading anti Big Brother propigands published by Goldstain himself!
-masturbating.

YOU WILL BE PICKED UP AND BROUGHT TO THE MINESTRY OF LOVE IMEDIATLY AS SO WE CAN CLEANSE YOU MIND OF ANTI BIG BROTHER THOUGHTS PROPIGATED BY YOU ACOCIATION WITH EMANUEL GOLDSTIEN. then we will shoot you.

I will be so glad! I will salute the Thought Police even as they drag me away to the Ministry of Love. Oh, yes, I will tell them everything.

[prole]

I love big brother!
also, 2+2=5. Really, do the math.

[Ogilvy]

prole said:

I love big brother!
also, 2+2=5. Really, do the math.

1+1+1+1=1+1+1+1+1

2+2=5

Unless under specific circumstances it needs to equal four, of course. We must also allow for times when it might be necessary for it to equal six, or eight, or even eleven.

[prole]

I see your point as you have provided an explanation to your studys, let me share a story with you of my research into the highly over looked posibilitys of the underground math world:

The year was 1992, operation desert storm was all over the news. Hammer pants were 'in', and 'olivia hukstable' was the fresh new adorble face of the african american's screen actors guild.
I however was stuck in an archaeic underground torcher cell that I have since calculated to be somewhere in the middle americas regions.
My captors had discovered of my research and plans to publish and show the public the common faults of modern day long division. I had been shackled up in a 4x9 foot cell with a standard 8 foot ceiling. For months now they had been trying to break my will through ancient and ruthless methods of torcher, one which involved a dab of peanut butter placed in an oh so un suspecting area of my annatomy and a domesticated mountain goat (un pleasant to say the least). My skin was raw, my lips were parched, and my stumach had not seen my rashans of molded bread and puddle water for what I presume had been days (my senses were slighty off kilter at this time.) The dungeon master had sent for me on this peticular day to continue the 'work', as he called it, he had been doing to try and corect my issues with simple addition. Upon my arrival to the dungeon masters chambers I noticed a new device I had not yet had the liberty of partaking in yet. I with my inquisitive nature asked the fellow of my demise what the day had in store for myself in the order of routine punishment. "oh, no, no, no," replied my robust torchurer. "Today, we dance!" he proclaimed with resounding glee. I was escorted over to this newly fashioned device of mystery and strapped to it, a label on the side read extendo-mator. I was soon straped down and ready to go! My master explained to me the first step would be to go through a warm with a light streching of the limbs. The device was turned on and, " AAAHHRRRRG," god, I had instantly grown to 6,2, of my resent height of 5,11. He began the lesson by explaining to me that today we would make extrordinary leeps towards curing me of my desire to spread anti-foward thinking math propiganda into the public. I was quite confused at first but another crank of the wheel, " AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHH," and my attention was focussed on him.
He started by holding up his left hand, thumb folded in. He asked me " how many fingers do you see?".
"Four," was my first answer.
Then came the right hand held up in th e same fashion.
Still I could not find any other plausible answer than,
"Four,".
This continued for a moment or 10, with a slight extension of the devise I was attached to every so often.
"AARRGGGGGH," I went.
Godamnit, this was really beginning to vex me. You see I wanted to see the right amount of fingers but all I could comprehend was 4. FOUR! FOUR! FOUR! FOUR! Soon the dungeon master had switched to alternate methods of numerical proposal. First chopsticks were held up, then standard playing cards, then toothpicks were layed out on a table for me to take a gander at.
But, still nothing was getting through to me. By this time the extendo-mator had been cranked out to nearly maximum capacity. At this time I passed out from the pain my body had been suffering for the last 45 minute or so.
I fell into a dream like hallucination.
The guards were there, and the dungeon master, even you were there my friend. You see we were partaking in a feast of the ages of roast beef, vegatbles, and all the other goodness that had been prepared for us. I began to eat when lo and behold the dream morphed and no longer were I the one feasting with my comrads, but rather I were the one being feasted upon. The dungeon master kept telling me that all I had to do to make them stop was to truly understand the knowlege of 2 given to another 2 equalling out to be infact not 4 as so many before me had prsumed but infact really understanding that the only answer to the simple addition calculation, was infact 'whatever your caports tell you it is'.
When I awoke the guards had began to extract my finger nales from my bony hands. I cried out "NO, No, you dont have to do that! I understand, I really do."
"What then," replied my portly master of torment.
I shouted with resounding glee, "2+2, does infact have an open ended answer to its calculation, it does infact equal what ever the person pulling your fingernails out of your fingers tells you it equals."
And that day it was 5.

Hopefully this short story can help you further you oviously open ended aquisitions into the world of simple as well as infenetly complex math complexitys.

[Ogilvy]

Oh, yes, we've all gone through that before. It's a natural, healthy part of conditioning. We all get out of line at some point in our lives and that's when the Ministry of Love takes care of us.

[Walter]

Here's an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2004 edition that might help bring this subject back on track (things aren't as gloomy as the nay sayers would like us to all believe):

COMMENTARY

Fragile Guardians of Culture
By Nicholas A. Basbanes

Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of "A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World" (Harper Collins, 2003). He'll discuss it at the Central Library on Jan. 21 at 7 p.m.

January 12, 2004

The phrase most frequently associated with George Orwell's "1984" is the chilling caveat that Big Brother Is Watching You.

However, as a writer concerned with the life cycle of books and the institutions that contain them, I think the most consequential sentence in "1984" is this one trumpeted by the ironically named Ministry of Truth: "Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future."

This suggests why tyrants and ideologues bent on a final solution go beyond physically annihilating their enemies to eradicating the artifacts that document their existence.

The surreal goal of "controlling the past" has been with us throughout recorded time, as the Roman Senate understood when it ordered the legions of Scipio Aemelianus to reduce Carthage to rubble in 146 BC — and to obliterate every standing remnant of its rival's intellectual vitality while they were at it.

The best way to do that? "Biblioclasm," which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the deliberate destruction of books, a cultural offense of the first magnitude.

If there is any constant to biblioclasm, it is that it has no geographical boundaries, no historical limitations, no philosophical or theological restraints.

Was it a Christian mob acting on the orders of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I in the 4th century or Muslim followers of the Caliph Omar in the 7th century who destroyed the great library at Alexandria and all the "pagan" masterpieces from classical antiquity that it contained? Nobody can say for sure, because the likelihood is that both inflicted damage on the collections.

The late 20th century was a banner era for biblioclasm. China's Red Guard wiped out artifacts and books in the takeover of Tibet in the 1960s. Pol Pot did the same in Cambodia in the 1970s. And on Aug. 25, 1992, the Serbs extended "ethnic cleansing" to the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, resulting in 1.5 million books and manuscripts being incinerated in one night.

And the 21st century? Just this month, 150 members of a group called the Sambhaji Brigade ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India, 130 miles from Bombay. The provocation? The institute was used in research for an Oxford University Press book that questioned aspects of the story of the Hindu warrior king, Shivaji. One of the most grievous losses was a clay tablet dating back to the Assyrian period of 600 BC.

There is an upside to all this: Book culture has a way of surviving calamities both natural and deliberate.

Thousands of books made from the bark of trees and bearing the wisdom of Mayan culture went up in smoke on a single day in 1562 in Mexico, the victims of a Spanish friar's zealous attempt to " cleanse" the natives of " devilish" thoughts. Yet four codices were saved from the flames as curiosities, and from them came the key to unlocking the mystery of the Mayan hieroglyphs in the latter years of the 20th century.

Contemporary horrors are also being remedied.

The national collection of Cambodia is being "reseeded" with help from Cornell University's rich collection of Southeast Asian materials; the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center is building an Internet archive of works rescued out of the diaspora, and two curators at Harvard's Fine Arts Library have mobilized a worldwide effort to restore fragments of what was lost in Sarajevo.

Los Angeles has its own example: When an arsonist's match ignited the downtown Central Library on April 30, 1986, about 375,000 books were destroyed outright and another 700,000 were damaged by smoke and water. About 1,500 volunteers joined weary staff in an inspirational effort to save the imperiled volumes, prompting the California librarian, author and all-around bookman Lawrence Clark Powell to write in The Times that although damage to the revered building was lamentable, "saving most of the books matters more." It is, in fact, a happy reality that books multiply, one archive begets more archives, one collection can save another. In that spirit, the poet Archibald MacLeish, librarian of Congress during World War II, observed in 1972: "What is more important in a library than anything else — than everything else — is that it exists."

[Angmar]

The Lord gave man the power to choose whether he would serve Him. Thought police is a paganic mind control. Have fun. By the way, that book was awful. . .

[Ogilvy]

Angmar said:

The Lord gave man the power to choose whether he would serve Him. Thought police is a paganic mind control. Have fun. By the way, that book was awful. . .

What?! 1984 is a 20th-century classic! Oh, sure, a lot of them stink, but 1984! You can't say bad things about George Orwell's masterpiece...you just can't...it simply is not possible!

[Angmar]

It had some good points, but I personally didn't find it enjoyable overall. You're welcome to your opinion.

[Ogilvy]

Angmar said:

It had some good points, but I personally didn't find it enjoyable overall. You're welcome to your opinion.

Well, that's understandable. Orwell is a better essayist, I've heard, than a novelist.