[ashtonkem]

Spare us your outrage. A literal mob just overran the Capitol. Attempting to talk about “the mob” in opposition to the actual mobs that are continuing to take over Capitol buildings is frankly so tone deaf it’s almost insulting to our intelligence.

[greatgirl]

I'm tired of people who have only read one book in their entire lives (1984) trying to explain to me how banning Trump is going to lead to an angry leftist mob throwing me in jail (because leftists have power right?) for speaking.

[ashtonkem]

Poor Orwell must be rolling in his grave. Maybe we should wrap him in copper for free power?

For the record, Orwell was a leftist. Yes, 1984 was a warning about the USSR, which he hated, but the idea that he was warning about creeping leftism in general turning into authoritarianism is to really misunderstand him.

For the record, he hated the authoritarian right just as hard as he hated the authoritarian left, possibly more so. He participated in the Spanish civil war, following his own advice that everyone pick up a rifle and shoot a fascist. He was wounded in action by a sniper bullet to the throat.

By the terms of his place and time, he considered himself a libertarian (that word later came to be a right wing phenomenon in America, self consciously co-opted from the left). We’d typically call him a democratic socialist; someone who wanted the government to help solve the “social problem” (where the term “socialism” partially comes from) of poverty and what not, but he was also wary about giving too much power of the government to control people.

He was a complex guy with even more complex political opinions. Sadly our Cold War fueled reading of 1984 has flattened out a lot of his nuance from him.