[hleszek]

This is still so relevant now:

> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.

[pcf]

Because it's timeless, not just "relevant now".

[zhoujing204]

Dictators are absolutely terrified of the paper trail. This is the entire reason for existence of the Great Firewall. The CCP invests heavily in sanitizing imported literature and curating the information supply to maintain cognitive capture over the populace.

We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look at the library purges in conservative states and the push to co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental substrate of free speech.

[ted_bunny]

You sure aggressive propaganda and espionage from the west aren't part of the reason for it? What sort of "cognitive capture" is necessary to maintain control of their population right now? The Chinese are often painted as brainwashed ideological drones in the west, and it says more about us that we tend to believe it than it does about them. You can download RedNote and talk to people in Xinjiang. You can travel there and talk to people in person. Mao is arguably deceased.

[conception]

Then why does the Chinese government have a blacklist of topics not allowed to be talked about/recorded?

[ted_bunny]

Yeah, I guess you're right. I play devil's advocate frequently enough that I forget I'm doing it. I just hate to see a dogpile, because the criticisms tend to go to extremes. People talk about a lot of asian cultures like they're brainwashed bugmen and those narratives serve dangerous interests.

The West is losing its edge on free speech and thought anyway. Criticize Israel in Germany, misgender someone in Canada, say a mean word to someone invading your house in the UK, and see what happens. And it's not going to get better anytime soon.

[nobodywillobsrv]

Exactly. Interesting that both orwell and azimov were wrong in different ways. Also azimov seems unaware of the Fabian link to the title which is surely a factor in the origin.

[riffraff]

But Trump and his administration also prove what GP is saying. Few care about the truth.

Trump states obvious lies so blatant ("prices will go down 200%") that anyone who cares could tell they are untruth without needing to look up any paper trail, but it does not matter.

Mike Johnson just quoted St Paul as saying you should respect the authority forgetting that the Romans beheaded him. And it's not like the Bible isn't available widely.

[rsynnott]

That’s the interesting bit; Winston’s job turns out to be largely redundant. You don’t need to hide the evidence that the chocolate ration used to be higher; if a sufficiently charismatic person with sufficiently stupid hair says that it has increased, a lot of people will believe that.

[TitaRusell]

How many Americans give a shit about history?

[Recurecur]

All the smart and informed Americans…

[squarefoot]

People is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.

[red-iron-pine]

put another way, they don't care about history because every economic actor in the economy is trying to keep them distracted -- so that they don't learn the history

the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry

[Recurecur]

Hence the movement to eliminate the “Department of Education”, which at this point would be better named the “Department of Intentional Ignorance”.

That’s despite spending more per child than any other country in the world.

[riffraff]

No disagreement on this, but we're then talking of Brave New World and distraction, not 1984 and censorship.

[riazrizvi]

Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a different one. We use justifications which make sense to us that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything. Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.

[throwaway894345]

Orwell and Asimov are talking about something entirely different than drawing flawed conclusions due to inexperience—they’re talking about people with access to the facts and choosing not to believe them.

For instance, Alex Pretti’s murder was recorded from several angles and yet the American right still broadly claims that he attacked the agents, that he pulled his gun on them, etc. You don’t need to be an expert in policing or anything else to watch those videos and see that those narratives are plainly false. That’s of course only one example, but there are many others.

[kikokikokiko]

These Minessota videos are classic examples of what Scott Adams used to call "two different movies being played on the same screen", in this case quite literally. From the point of view of a left leaning person, that movie shows a man being assassinated for no reason at all, nothing justify what happened. From the point of view of a right leaning person, Alex Pretti was actively interfering with law enforcement, and he entered a conflict situation while carrying a gun. If a cop is in the act of fighting you, and see a gun, you carry the risk of being shot, it's just reality. The right leaning person, just based on these facts, already reduces the charges from murder to manslaughter, max. Two movies on one screen, and there's NOTHING rational that can be said to change the mind of anyone. Everybody is watching the same damn screen, but the movies are completely different.

[srean]

These so called right leaning people were, in the recent past, crying themselves hoarse that they have all the right and moral prerogative to carry arms at a protest.

[dotancohen]

Having the right to do something does not make it safe.

Americans have the right to carry a pistol. But carrying a pistol while heckling police officers and touching a police officer who is performing their duty, sounds deadly to me.

Can we agree that the deceased had a right to carry a pistol? Can we agree that the deceased had been heckling police officers? Can we agree that the deceased had touched a police officer?

Nothing he did warranted death. But he did choose to put himself in an extremely dangerous position, moreso by touching a police officer than by carrying a pistol. But in any case don't carry a pistol when you are out looking for confrontation, especially with police. Even if you're right, you're still dead.

[srean]

A 'right' in this context by definition means government (agencied) will not persecute you for the activity protected by this right. If that's not the case you don't have the right at all, period.

Note though, I do not agree with this particular right (that of bearing arms, visibly so, at a protest), but the so called right leaning people are very enamored by this one and were very vocal about it just yesterday. Suddenly those same people seem to be equivocating about it now.

The people who were supportive of bringing assault rifles to contentious public rallies are now falling over themselves to blame Alex Pretti.

Touching a 'police officer' had nothing to do with the killing. Had he touched his own behind the same thing could have transpired. What killed him is the political support for ICE to be beyond accountability and the license for violence.

In this atmosphere anyone killed by ICE is automatically a homegrown terrorist, if by nothing else, by presidential fiat.

[throwaway894345]

> Even if you're right, you're still dead.

Yes, this is the entire point: the left is saying "the government shouldn't murder citizens for exercising their legal rights", and the right is saying "if you exercise your legal rights, it's your fault if the government murders you" (or at least "that's the risk you run").

If American patriotism has anything at all to do with valuing freedom from tyranny and oppression, then the right-wing mindset ("you might have the 'legal right' to film an officer, but the state might murder you for it") seems aggressively un-American. Specifically, if you have "the right to do X but the government might murder you for doing X" then you don't really have the right to do X by definition.

[JCattheATM]

You're being far too generous by saying the video is a matter of interpretation.

[CamperBob2]

You seem to be using the terms "left leaning person" and "right leaning person" when you actually mean "normal people" and "sociopaths." Left and right have nothing to do with it.

[kikokikokiko]

Yep, no rational argument can be used to make you (or me) see the same movie.

[JCattheATM]

The video itself and the facts it supports are objective.

[CamperBob2]

List the rational arguments in favor of the so-called "right-leaning" point of view (OP's term, not mine) with respect to the Pretti killing. Spoiler: there are no such arguments, effective or otherwise. To apologists it looks like a Rorschach test; to normal people it looks like a snuff film, brought to us by the same studio that is now distributing child pornography.

Meanwhile, it's possible to favor free enterprise, (genuinely) smaller government, low taxes, free trade, and other so-called "right-leaning" perspectives without joining a slack-jawed personality cult that demands that you deny the evidence of your own eyes.

[snayan]

The sociopaths you refer to see themselves as the normal people and you as the sociopath.

[CamperBob2]

(Shrug) Nobody thinks they're the bad guys, including the actual bad guys.

As usual, it's not hard to tell who the bad guys are: they're the ones who initiate violence.

[dotancohen]

So you consider people with different values then you sociopaths? You sound very intolerant.

[throwaway894345]

If the "different values" are whether or not the state should be allowed to execute someone for peacefully exercising their right to film agents in public, then yeah that constitutes sociopathy in my mind. I'm okay with being intolerant of such sociopaths. You may also find my distaste for Nazism to be "intolerant". Guilty as charged, I guess.

[CamperBob2]

Yes. Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR: tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.

Glancing at your user page, this should be an exercise in preaching to the choir. You do understand that the only reason the Republicans in the US support Israel is because embracing fundamentalist Christian eschatology gets them votes they don't have to work for. Right?

[srean]

Depends on what those values are. Epstein had different values than I do.

I don't think parent commenter is saying that leaning right is sociopathic, but that some people try to pass their sociopathy as a simple act of being right leaning.

[throwaway894345]

> The right leaning person, just based on these facts…

To be clear, those aren’t facts, that’s delusion. Pretti objectively did not interfere at all. He was carrying a gun—that’s a fact—but he didn’t interfere. The federal agents approached him and pushed him back, and he retreated the entire time.

Moreover, a right leaning person wouldn’t delude themselves in this way except that they had previously coded the federal agents as “their side” and Pretti as “the other side”—if Pretti was a J6er and the ICE agent was a Capitol Hill police officer, our hypothetical right-winger would have been outraged at the killing as would everyone else (assuming it was equally as unjustified as the Pretti murder). We don’t even need a hypothetical, because the right was outraged that the J6ers were prosecuted and sentenced, and then jubilant when Trump pardoned them.

I’m also obligated to point out that I’m painting with a broad brush here. A small share of the right have, however reluctantly or timidly, spoken out against the mainstream right-wing claims that Pretti was doing something wrong. For example, Rand Paul gave an interview stating that Pretti was clearly retreating and there was no cause for the killing, and even MTG said that the right would be up in arms (no pun intended) if the roles were reversed. Kudos to those on the right who have the bravery to say obvious truths in times such as these, I guess.

[itsalwaysgood]

That isn't human nature at all, that is a feature of our economy.

The human nature bit is that we are inclined to follow conviction: belief in an idea. And if someone says something with conviction, whether true or not, our first instinct is to believe them, maybe even trust them.

[riazrizvi]

I'm often baffled by how people online find a tone of disagreement to agree with people.

[itsalwaysgood]

Sorry, didn't mean to offend you. My tone is bad.

I just wanted to make a distinction between human nature and the benefits of specialization within an economy. You mentioned being an expert in a single domain, which I interpreted as specialized labor, as in an economy

An economy isn't really related to human nature, directly.

[buzzerbetrayed]

No more relevant today than it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago tbh

[JuniperMesos]

It's definitely interesting to see what ideas 1984 had that were salient to Asimov writing in 1980 - and also to see which of those ideas still have relevance in 2026, when the world has changed considerably again from when Asimov was writing.

[virgildotcodes]

Gravity has always been an important factor in our lives, but I'd say it's even more relevant when we're actively being spaghettified by a black hole.

[GJim]

You are being downvoted by those who see the world solely though American eyes and with only recent experience of American politics to draw on.

I know HN is USA centric, but bugger me! I didn't expect to see such a narrow viewing of the world stage in the voting on here.

EDIT: And I'm getting drive-by downvotes for pointing this out! Nice.

[throwaway290]

I can see your argument but I'm non american and think you underestimate the impact of USA on global stage.

It was(?) de facto the most powerful democracy with most innovation and broad influence over the world, USAID and so on. Every dictator and tsar had to count with values like freedom of information and tolerance and following laws and trading instead of fighting.

Now it's still maybe powerful but those values and influence coming from it are changing very quickly and that is super recent