Orwell

When comparing the dystopias of Orwell and Huxley, it is commonly observed that Huxley called the future better. However, with 9/11 and the dramatic rise of the security and surveillance state, the stock went up on Orwell's dark vision.

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The vision of the future Aldous Huxley had conjured up in “Brave New World”, of a society rendered passive by a surplus of comforts and distraction, seemed more prescient. In 1985, the cultural critic Neil Postman argued in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us while Huxley feared that what we love would ruin us. In 2002 J.G. Ballard, reviewing a biography of Huxley, said that “Brave New World” was “a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror…‘1984’ has never really arrived, but ‘Brave New World’ is around us everywhere.”

[But then came the surveillance state]

the wake of 9/11. It wasn’t the horror of the two planes going into the twin towers: it was the fear and paranoia that followed. When George Bush first heard about the attacks, he had been reading a story to children in an elementary school in Florida and he went on and finished the task in hand. After that exemplary display of statesmanship, things deteriorated. As the novelist Andrew O’Hagan wrote recently, “9/11 unleashed terrible furies in the minds of America and its allies…it literally drove the security agencies and their leaders mad with the wish to become all-knowing.” With his “war on terror”, Bush made the mistake—which Orwell would have eviscerated him for—of picking a fight with an abstract noun. Then came rendition, Guantánamo, waterboarding and the industrial-scale expansion of homeland security. “In the past”, we’re told in “1984”, “no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.” Now the FBI can activate the camera on a laptop without the light going on to alert the user.

-- Robert Butler, "Orwell's World" in Intelligent Life Magazine

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I have thought about covering up my camera with a piece of tape, but I figured it was punitive enough to have them stare at my face.

A little Better

I have started humping my bedding again this morning. It really must be true that I am feeling appreciably better. I was not sure that I was not just simply willing it more than anything else, simply wanting to be healthier, simply tired of feeling deathly ill, simply desperate to get back to my thing with my books and writing. I certainly was not feeling better when I got out of bed. My sleep was so broken and fractured, catching twenty minutes here and there, maybe forty if I was lucky. Of course, this sleep problem is a pre-existing condition, and it may be to this that I owe much of my sense of feeling rotten this morning. Nonetheless, beyond the masturbatory humping, my appetite has also regained some of its former vitality and range, thank god! I didn't know how much longer I could go on eating cereal. But this cough ... it really came to play and doesn't want to go away. It still has much of its familiar kick and buck, making me wish my innards were better nailed down inside of me, as they threaten to blow out of my mouth along with whatever it is this cough is so energetically trying to expel from my body. It was the cough that started it, and it is going to be the last to leave. At least my life can begin to grope back to its former routine.

Krugman

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Ezra Klein: Do you worry more about wealth inequality or income inequality?

Paul Krugman: Income inequality, but I don't think they're separable issues. We need to worry a lot more about lagging incomes in the bottom half or bottom two-thirds of the income distribution than we worry about soaring incomes at the top. And the people in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution have hardly any wealth. For them, wealth has gone from essentially zero 30 years ago to essentially zero now. So for them, it's income that is crucial.

The wealth inequality measures are useful because they are, in some ways, a more reliable gauge of what's happening at the top. If incomes fluctuate a lot at the top, you can argue, though it's overstated, that it's a changing cast of people. But the top 0.1 percent in wealth is not an ever-shifting cast of characters.

-- Paul Krugman at Vox.com

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Wank Routine

You know life is going back to routine when Pop comes home early from his rounds and I am caught in my room with the laptop, hurriedly shutting off the chikan porn and pushing my hard-on down between my legs. I try to sneak past Pop with the laptop. When I enter the big room, I think about the bed there and wonder why I do not just stay there to take care of my sexual business: just close the blinds and do my wanky thing. I have had this idea before, but it never stuck, never really seemed worth doing. It is an old problem of mine: I am too much a creature of habit. Once I get set in my ways on something, it is very hard to break from that. But I have had enough. I will not be caught out again like this.