13 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. In 1941, he published "Wells, Hitler and the World State," in which he argued that Germany hewed much closer to a well-run society in which everyone thinks similarly and along scientific lines than England ever has. But it was run by a "criminal lunatic," so that didn't work out quite as Wells thought it would. Orwell also noted that patriotism, which Wells thought of as civilization-destroying, was the primary force inducing Russians and Britons to fight against Hitler.

      first referent "he" is George Orwell

      Example of a time in which patriotism and nationalism may have been beneficial.

  2. Sep 2023
    1. "... I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculair to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written."—George Orwell


      check source and verify text <br /> (8:42)

  3. Jul 2022
  4. Local file Local file
    1. 'I don't think it's anything—I mean, I don't think it was ever put to anyuse. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they'veforgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew howto read it.'

      Walter and Julia are examining a glass paperweight in George Orwell's 1984 without having context of what it is or for what it was used.

      This is the same sort of context collapse caused by distance in time and memory that archaeologists face when examining found objects.

      How does one pull out the meaning from such distant objects in an exegetical way? How can we more reliably rebuild or recreate lost contexts?

      Link to: - Stonehenge is a mnemonic device - mnemonic devices in archaeological contexts (Neolithic carved stone balls


      Some forms of orality-based methods and practices can be viewed as a method of "reading" physical objects.


      Ideograms are an evolution on the spectrum from orality to literacy.


      It seems odd to be pulling these sorts of insight out my prior experiences and reading while reading something so wholly "other". But isn't this just what "myths" in oral cultures actually accomplish? We link particular ideas to pieces of story, song, art, and dance so that they may be remembered. In this case Orwell's glass paperweight has now become a sort of "talking rock" for me. Certainly it isn't done in any sort of sense that Orwell would have expected, presumed, or even intended.

    2. Orwell, George. Nineteen eighty-four. (Mariner, 2008) ISBN 978-0-15-603584-2

  5. Mar 2022
    1. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine sang in their 1999 song "Testify." OK, actually it's a quote from George Orwell's 1984, but hey.
  6. Feb 2022
  7. Sep 2021
    1. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

  8. Oct 2020
  9. learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet02-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet02-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
  10. Apr 2019
    1. Interesting how the events of the time shaped the story of 1984 (e.g. rationing in food and fuel). Also a potent image of Orwell writing while he was so sick. His journal entries suggest the inspiration for and the act of writing never stop.

  11. Feb 2019
    1. who claimed that rhetoric obscured the truth by encouraging the rn,e of ornamented rather than plain, direct language.

      Orwell would agree.

      See "Politics and the English Language"

    1. Though the names glory and grati-tude be the same in every man's mouth through a whole country, yet the complex collective idea which every one thinks on or intends by that name, is apparently very different in men using the same language.

      I'm reminded here of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"--the ways that language is manipulated to evoke feeling or a widespread reaction although it may not be grounded in feeling or reaction. One of Orwell's examples is fascism.

  12. Mar 2017
  13. Mar 2016
    1. when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

      This keys his entire argument.