Message Oblique Speech

PART THREE OF A SERIES.

Copyright J Michael Haynes, 2008

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How do you think he'll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? You don't know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn't use that word.
-Malcolm X, Message to the Grassroots, 1963

The previous essay in this series details why we are sold the neoliberal system. This post describes how we are sold it. The first rule of the system we live in is you do not talk about the system we live in. The second rule is you blame the financial crisis on the previous administration. It's oft repeated that it was Huxley, not Orwell, that correctly predicted the future. Arguably Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is better known than Brave New World, perhaps considering its relevance during the cold war; however, rarely is it considered that they were both right about elements of present society. Huxley's nightmare was not that the people would be deprived of freedom and subjugated by a totalitarian state - it's they would be so distracted by a deluge of entertainment they wouldn't care. How ironic a 'reality television' programme brought that vision to life and used an Orwellian term - Big Brother.

I Thought It Was The UK, Or Just Another Country

PART ONE OF A SERIES.

Na Nož, Jaroslav Věšin, 1913

Britain isn't cool you know, it's really not that great / It's not a proper country, doesn't even have a patron saint / It's just an economic union that's past its sell-by date
-Take Down the Union Jack, Billy Bragg, 2002

At the deepest historical time-depths there is a very basic notion of identity between the self-identified civilised peoples and the barbarians. While the concept of being Greek (Hellenes) didn't yet exist, the city states at the base of the Balkan peninsula saw a commonality between themselves but not with others to the uncharted North or in the later conquered territories of Alexander's empire. The genesis of this fraternity also lies in transmission of culture as the Greek alphabet (save for some regional variations) allowed folk culture to be stored. The established alphabet may also have smoothed over the dialects as it only represents the sounds distinguished within a dialect and not the phonlogical distinctions between the dialects. That would not be unlike the unifying force that Hanzi had on the disparate Chinese languages by representing words and not the component sounds of the languages (which are as wildly different though related as French and Romanian). Indeed, language is one of the most prominent pillars of ethnic identity along with religion (historically Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, etc paganism for pre-modern Europe) and, of course, land.

New Terrain

SimCity (2013), Electronic Arts promotional screenshot

After ten years there's a new SimCity out (Societies doesn't count), but this is not an outright review of that game. At the start of March my internet connection died for several prolonged hours. After repeatedly trying to view several websites out of habit before realising they'd never load, I looked for something else to do. I hadn't played SimCity 3000 in nearly two years so I fired that up. What a good thing it is that always-online DRM hadn't been invented in 1999 because I would have been screwed as the new game even saves your cities in "the cloud". Since I last seriously played it, my city was populated by over a million sims and it had expanded almost to the limits without becoming one of those highly efficient cities designed by a player who has brutally calculated the placement of every building. My ideas about what a large city should look like are still firmly rooted in the skyline of Manhattan, hence I've kept the default building style in SC3K Unlimited. Only recently has London started racing for the clouds.