Was Orwell or Huxley right?

Yes.

ROFL ---- Good answer

Today?

I'd say Huxley

Orwell.

Three words: Restoring Honor rally.

**** just needs a title these days to be considered true. So today I enjoyed my Glen Beck Has a Wiener-Hole Infection lunch. And now I'm looking forward to my Arizona Secession commute home. After that, it's the Rod Blagojevich Prison Assault Barbecue.

Orwell was more correct because we have become dominated not by our government but by the corporate class which has corrupted the government, and supplying what is loved is more profitable than is supplying what is feared. The fear is supplied only to the extent that it is required to keep the masses docile, supplying what is loved is the main thing.

I can see that but I can also see the passive apathy, but of course I would say that for a government to become Orwellian a people would need to be Huxleyean.

The people sense that this civilization is coming to an end, it is very much like the last days of Rome where it is impossible to say how the end will come, who will overrun the defenses and sack the empire, but it is clear that this is where we are headed. We have lost our faith in our future, and so we fear everything, especially the truth.

Pleasure is a diversion from the pain that we are trying to avoid, and there are great profits to be had by supplying it.

I've read anthropologists and psychologists who go more of a cyberpunk route and blame the Huxlification of the world on "the cyborgification of culture".

there are a bunch of people currently looking into if technology, specifically the internet and 24/7 personal communicators, are changing how our brains are wired. I have not seen any convincing argument yet.

one of the newest studies i heard about, deals with downtime (apart from sleep), your brain needs it, one benefit is the creation of memories, and the constant stimulus from smart phones, ipads, netbooks, etc is interfering with this

here's a NY Times story

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Terry Gross did a show on technology and the brain earlier this week. Tuesday?

I'm suffering from deja vu....
http://able2know.org/topic/140387-1#post-3878954

see what I get for being late to the scene

I think no one has to supply us with pleasure to control us because we are controlled by ignorance and confusion... That does not stop our misery, and the huge part of the population on anti depressants, or self medication is proof that our reality is deeply unsatifying... The end result of being denied information, truth, and knowledge is the denial of control in our lives... Since it does not matter and our lives are meaning less, why not huff to our hearts stop??? The people who are given an over dose of knowledge are the government and security contractors.... We do not have the truth, but they have so much on all of us that they cannot sort the bad people from the good... With every new person they add to the list of domestic spys the sooner they will exhaust their control over the people... Even tyrannies cannot get away with running perpetual defecits... Sooner or later the bills must be paid...

What the **** are you responding to my post for? Did you actually read it? Wanker . . .

I thought I was resonding to the post on orwell or huxley... I guess in your case I should have resonded to: who's a little dink... I vote for Setanta.

Both of 'em; but Huxley's cautions resonate more with me personally.

Why is that Khet?