Newsbusters Busted Brain stupidity on Orwell (UK author)

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Is that "Newsbusters" post the dumbest thing you have ever read on the Interwebs?
Yes! 50%  50%  [ 2 ]
Perhaps 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Not quite 25%  25%  [ 1 ]
No 25%  25%  [ 1 ]
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Master_Pedant
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26 Mar 2011, 2:12 am

This post is about the dead British democratic socialist author of 1984 ,NOT the beared Irish-Ohioan, liberal Calvinistic radical centrist.

You know, there's always something hilarious when an organization dedicated to fact-checking "the reckless media" makes gross factual errors. I'm not talking about relatively minor historical errors, like not remembering the name of a Senator from Maine in 1938 or mistaking the beginning of one the periodic 1800s downturns. I'm talking about "busting" someone on being ignorant of a historical figure without reading the intro bio in one of their books, reading an encyclopedia article's first paragraph on the person, or even looking at wikipedia.

The Busted Brains at Newsbusters are stupid enough to do this.

P.J. Gladnick wrote:
Surprise! Surprise! Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has admitted what almost anyone familiar with his reality-challenged rantings already knew: he is a socialist. Hedges explains in Truthdig Why I Am a Socialist (emphasis mine):

Chris Hedges wrote:
The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.


This was just the into. Now fasten your seatbelts as Hedges leaves behind any semblance of sanity:

Chris Hedges wrote:
The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.


An inconvenient truth for Chris Hedges is that the political ideology of the totalitarian state of Oceana in George Orwell's novel 1984 is Ingsoc which is Newspeak for "English Socialism." Got that, Chris? S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M. However, Hedges lack of familiarity with Orwell doesn't keep him from ranting on about the glories of socialism:


http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladni ... z1HgaxaIpt

And now for some reality:

Ian Williams wrote:
According to his own last words on the subject, just before his death, Orwell was a supporter of Socialism and of the British Labour Party which had swept to power in 1945. Before then, for most of his writing career, certainly from The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 onwards, George Orwell was an avowed proponent of socialism, although his conceptions of what that meant certainly changed over the years.

...

... none of his colleagues at Tribune or in the Labour Party and ILP, has ever disagreed with the continuing force of Orwell’s self- assessment, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."[my emphasis added]


http://www.logosjournal.com/orwell-and- ... h-left.php

So, the real question is, if you're going to question someone's sanity, might you want to have you're own checked first? Not that I expect such reflection on the part of Busted Brains, who never seem shy of a rake to step on.

And on another note, when a radical leftist provides a complicated, political economic, institutional analysis of a scenario, which (regardless of its soundness) isn't a visceral or knee-jerk conspiracy theory, why do Con Artists heads explode after a series of incomprehensible jeers?


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Last edited by Master_Pedant on 26 Mar 2011, 2:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

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26 Mar 2011, 2:23 am

Yeah, Orwell was definitely a socialist. If you are familiar with his other writings (such as Politics and the English Language) it should be obvious that he didn't think an organization called IngSoc would actually represent socialism.


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26 Mar 2011, 2:25 am

Orwell wrote:
Yeah, Orwell was definitely a socialist. If you are familiar with his other writings (such as Politics and the English Language) it should be obvious that he didn't think an organization called IngSoc would actually represent socialism.


From what I understand, he wanted to put an introductory essay in 1984 that spoke of the dangers a media owned by a wealth, concentrated, minority of the population possed. Definitely not leftwing and, yes, he thought Soviet Totalitarianism was a perversion of socialism along the same lines as Chomsky does.

I do find it funny that such a flagship of the American Right concerned with exposing media inaccuracy can be so bloody stupid on very easy to obtain facts.


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