Thursday, July 09, 2020

Orwell as police officer

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

 ― Henry David Thoreau


How Revolutions Happen The Atlantic

Chilli con carnage: the red hot pepperand communism

He who can’t endure chilli is also unable to fight, declared Mao, ensuring the spice’s revolutionary symbolism throughout China



HOW DO YOU SAY ‘CHUTZPAH’ IN MANDARIN? Chinese ambassador says UK ban on Huawei would damage trust.

That’s rich, coming from the ambassador from a country that just abrogated a treaty with Britain in order to impose full Communist rule on a once-free city of 7.5 million people.


THERE’S NO ‘MAY BE’ ABOUT IT: TikTok may be ‘data collection service disguised as social media.’


ORWELL’S 1984: A WARNING FOR THE REST OF US, A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR THE LEFT: Teacher Blames ‘Western Imperialism,’ ‘Colonization’ for Concept of 2+2=4.



“She was a good old stick,” said Orwell, when his first wife died at the age of 39. But Eileen Blair’s story was much more interesting Than That  Orwell  

Amicus can provide you with a new legal identity."....South China Post, February 23,2017

 

Second Passport

Gain your freedom to move again.

 

[ https://www.amicusint.org/ ]


The right and left have long fought over Orwell, who identified as a socialist but authored what many consider the iconic literary critique of socialism, 1984. This is a man who showed us the moral evil of the totalitarian quest for mind control and a culture of denunciation but also compiled a list of untrustworthy leftists for the British Foreign Office; a critic of empire and believer in human equality who persisted in writing and thinking in blatantly racist ways. But his central beef was always with policing, whose tyrannical power he discovered through his own experiences as a colonial police officer.


The art of political writing can therefore take many forms. It can be philosophical, polemical, historical, fictional, journalistic, diaristic. In the philosophical class, I admire Michael Oakeshott’s essay “Rationalism in Politics”, which brilliantly characterises what politics is, and why rationalism (different from rationality) should not be applied to it. In the polemical, I love Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which exposes the cruelty of revolution. Hilary Mantel’s great Thomas Cromwell trilogy is, among many other things, a wonderful portrait of one man dominating a monarchical system and yet trapped, and ultimately killed, by that monarch’s caprice.


A 28-Year-Old With No Degree Becomes a Must-Read on the Economy - Bloomberg: “Nathan Tankus, 28, hasn’t finished his bachelor’s degree at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has, however, mastered enough knowledge of economics and finance to become a widely followed commentator on the Federal Reserve. A newsletter he launched this year has followers at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Department of the Treasury. He’s also followed on Twitter by journalists, economic think-tankers, and Wall Street economists…”


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