is trump 'Big Brother' from 1984?

dank69

Lifer
Oct 6, 2009
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No but the people he surrounds himself with trend that way. See Stephen Miller.
 

Commodus

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 2004
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I don't think he's Big Brother. He is, however, trying to run the country like he runs a business: as much control as possible, mindless loyalty, legal threats if you tell the truth about him... and, of course, running it into the ground with clueless decisions.
 
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Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
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https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/1984-orwell-trump-2019/

just something to think about, like in the book, Big Brother is all about the image, pretty much like trump.
Except in the book, Big Brother is a figure or symbol, but never clearly revealed as an actual person. Also, while we live in a surveillance based society, the intrusive threat from erosion of privacy is being driven more by Silicon Valley than Washington, D.C. Similarly, thought crime and face crime are more facets of the Twitter mobs than Trump.
 
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jman19

Lifer
Nov 3, 2000
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Closer to Big Blubber than Big Brother. Dude needs to get that gut in check.
 

Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
Nov 11, 1999
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Except in the book, Big Brother is a figure or symbol, but never clearly revealed as an actual person. Also, while we live in a surveillance based society, the intrusive threat from erosion of privacy is being driven more by Silicon Valley than Washington, D.C. Similarly, thought crime and face crime are more facets of the Twitter mobs than Trump.

Which is purely diversionary. We're not a "surveillance based society" at all. Silicon Valley can't take your freedom, either. What Trump shares with Big Brother is a total disregard for the truth. Big Brother doesn't need alternative facts because his power is complete. Trump has yet to arrive at that. But he's working on it.

db171227-TrustPOTUS-small.jpg (JPEG Image, 800 × 567 pixels)
 

Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
14,698
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Which is purely diversionary. We're not a "surveillance based society" at all. Silicon Valley can't take your freedom, either. What Trump shares with Big Brother is a total disregard for the truth. Big Brother doesn't need alternative facts because his power is complete. Trump has yet to arrive at that. But he's working on it.

db171227-TrustPOTUS-small.jpg (JPEG Image, 800 × 567 pixels)
It’s a tenuous comparison. Trump’s power is not absolute, nor will it ever be.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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It’s a tenuous comparison. Trump’s power is not absolute, nor will it ever be.

Obviously it isn't. And the OP comparison isn't to be taken seriously. But the same forces and trends that produced Trump are the ones that produced Putin and could one day produce a Big Brother type figure.
 

JSt0rm

Lifer
Sep 5, 2000
27,399
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It’s a tenuous comparison. Trump’s power is not absolute, nor will it ever be.

I thought you needed guns to defend yourself from a oligarch governmental power? Now you say it will never happen? So why do you need guns?
 

Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
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Obviously it isn't. And the OP comparison isn't to be taken seriously. But the same forces and trends that produced Trump are the ones that produced Putin and could one day produce a Big Brother type figure.
The forces and trends currently shaping the world are driven by the billionaire class. A Big Brother style government doesn’t meet their needs. An economic, energy and industrial oligarchy that keeps the lemmings at one another’s throats seems to be working just fine.
 
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Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
Nov 11, 1999
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The forces and trends currently shaping the world are driven by the billionaire class. A Big Brother style government doesn’t meet their needs. An economic, energy and industrial oligarchy that keeps the lemmings at one another’s throats seems to be working just fine.

Think of it as a transitional phase.
 

trenchfoot

Lifer
Aug 5, 2000
14,898
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Which is purely diversionary. We're not a "surveillance based society" at all. Silicon Valley can't take your freedom, either. What Trump shares with Big Brother is a total disregard for the truth. Big Brother doesn't need alternative facts because his power is complete. Trump has yet to arrive at that. But he's working on it.

db171227-TrustPOTUS-small.jpg (JPEG Image, 800 × 567 pixels)


Seeing as if he has the blessing of the party faithful to be the Fibber-in-Chief, the Poseur POTUS as it were, he has been given free license by his supporters and the Senate to do whatever pleases him without penalty with the exception of pissing off the aristocrat class that owns their asses.

A lit stick of dynamite thrown into an ammo dump pales in comparison to what Trump and the party he leads represents to the security of the nation now that they have shamelessly outed themselves as being without morals, ethics or fidelity to the Rule of Law.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,602
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The forces and trends currently shaping the world are driven by the billionaire class. A Big Brother style government doesn’t meet their needs. An economic, energy and industrial oligarchy that keeps the lemmings at one another’s throats seems to be working just fine.

The Czar and the Russian aristocracy didn't _want_ Stalin - he certainly didn't meet their needs. Their actions helped bring him about all the same. The German conservative elites and industrialists didn't really _want_ Nazism, but, again, they helped bring it about.
 

Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
Nov 11, 1999
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The only thing Trump is transitioning to is the life of a private citizen, possibly from the comfort of a prison cell.

He's a clever & ruthless psychopathic con artist who intends otherwise. Barring some incredible turn of events, he has an absolute lock on the 2020 nomination. I expect he & his corrupt friends are already scheming ways to discredit the election & hold power should he lose.
 

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,879
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Orwell describes a mature autocratic, totalitarian society, in which misinformation and disinformation are "news" -- Truth is Falsehood; War is Peace. Orwell had a penetrating vision about how information would be managed in such a society. His primary target and concern at the time he wrote 1984 was Stalin. You would need to research a bit further to see how much time Orwell had spent in Russia.

For this nexus of reasons, 1984 has always been touted as a damning criticism of socialism generally. And there is little doubt that there is a Leninist patina to the world Orwell creates in the book. But the juxtaposition of communist totalitarianism and fascist totalitarianism is much more symmetrical than Righties would have us think. And in fact, if you study Nazism under Hitler and Goebbels, the German manufacture of information for a lemming populace better fits 1984 than Stalinist Russia, or otherwise there is parity.

The Russians, until this decade, had never been too masterful in the art of propaganda and deceit. Their deceits were so obscenely obvious that only a Russian absorbing the state-media-monopoly would fall for it. Their clumsiness derives from a defective laboratory: if the state controls all media to begin with, if there is a black-market set of media-sources, there's very little to experiment with in a pluralistic context.

Goebbels, on the other hand, is considered the Father of modern propaganda and psy-war. Then the CIA tried their hand at it, co-opting German refugee employees of the Goebbels propaganda machine. The company conducted research using these people for 15 years and a $billion per annum. This didn't even cover the cost of actual deployment, but you can read more about Frank Wisner, Sr. and the "Great Wurlitzer", Cord Meyer, Edward Geary Lansdale and others. Under Wisner's Directorate of Clandestine Operations, CIA was vetting manuscripts and published novels to subsidize Hollywood in promising movie productions:

The favorite which I cite often is Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate", although the book is full of snickering satire, while the film noir is a horror movie, and the horror movie is not all that insidious except for the addition of the "propaganda of action" that occurred in 1963 -- like bringing to life Pygmalion's statue of Galatea -- an "Oreo Cookie" of fictional preparation and shock reality. This particular case was the result of a renegade who worked in the lower ranks, with potent resources left in surplus after a plan to use them against Castro.

What the Russians learned more recently, probably absorbed some of that old CIA history. Call it a grain of salt moment, but Congress put the kibosh on CIA's work with Hollywood during the '70s.

In some cases, Walter Bedell Smith's idea that propaganda was a good prophylactic to reduce the cost of defense hardware had a ring of truth. Now, we find that combatting Russian psy-war is also costly.

But Orwell describes a world in which the State controls all media, and so 1984 gives us something to worry about, even as we sound the alarm to the threat from a thousand cable-TV microphones.

The only redeeming thing about Trump is his amateur understanding of techniques once deployed by CIA and certainly underlying concepts behind the Russian initiative. He's f***ing stupid with a capital F. But the longer he's in office, the more he will learn. So a Trump presidency post-2020 would be even greater cause for worry in terms of punishing opposition figures and greater state control of media. So I think the application of an Orwellian myth to the Trump presidency is especially relevant, even if not so accurate for the moment. But the worry we have is the Future.
 
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UglyCasanova

Lifer
Mar 25, 2001
19,275
1,361
126
We are moving more towards an Orwellian society every day, to say it’s the fault of Trump is ignoring decades of movement towards that direct. Snowden and his revelations happened under Obama. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. Keep going back and every president for the last 50 - 60 years has moved us in that direction. And it’s not just the presidents, certainly other politicians from Congressmen down to local politicians do everything they can to strip your freedoms and privacy away. And hell many people seem to be a-ok with that. People were perfectly fine giving away privacy and freedoms in the name of safety after 9/11. People seem perfectly fine giving away freedoms to combat "hate speech" today. Slowly our freedoms and privacy have been eroded little by little, but over time it adds up. Yes Trump is yet another piece of the puzzle, but to lay it all at his feet ignores the larger picture.
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
38,156
18,647
146
We are moving more towards an Orwellian society every day, to say it’s the fault of Trump is ignoring decades of movement towards that direct. Snowden and his revelations happened under Obama. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. Keep going back and every president for the last 50 - 60 years has moved us in that direction. And it’s not just the presidents, certainly other politicians from Congressmen down to local politicians do everything they can to strip your freedoms and privacy away. And hell many people seem to be a-ok with that. People were perfectly fine giving away privacy and freedoms in the name of safety after 9/11. People seem perfectly fine giving away freedoms to combat "hate speech" today. Slowly our freedoms and privacy have been eroded little by little, but over time it adds up. Yes Trump is yet another piece of the puzzle, but to lay it all at his feet ignores the larger picture.

Yea, his piece is attacking free speech and journalists. Pretty big piece of our slide into authoritarian Utopia. But hey, and least those dirty libtards got their feels fucked and wealthy people got piles of money handed to them paid for by the middle class. #worthit
 

HomerJS

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
36,671
28,824
136
Except in the book, Big Brother is a figure or symbol, but never clearly revealed as an actual person. Also, while we live in a surveillance based society, the intrusive threat from erosion of privacy is being driven more by Silicon Valley than Washington, D.C. Similarly, thought crime and face crime are more facets of the Twitter mobs than Trump.
What in Trump's behavior shows he is a real person?