Latest news with #1984
San Francisco Chronicle
11 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Russian lawmakers pass a bill punishing online searches for information deemed to be 'extremist'
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a bill that punishes online searches for information that is deemed 'extremist,' the latest move by government authorities in their relentless crackdown on dissent. The bill passed by the lower house, the State Duma, moves to its all-but-certain endorsement in the upper house and then goes to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law. The legislation punishes what it describes as 'deliberately searching for and accessing extremist materials' online. First-time offenders face a fine of up to the equivalent of $64. The official definition of extremist activity is extremely broad and includes opposition groups like the Anti-Corruption Foundation, created by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the 'international LGBT movement.' It's not clear how authorities will track down violators. Some observers have suggested the information would likely come from internet providers or social media platforms, and police also could randomly check the search history of cellphones or computers. The new legislation also contained a ban on advertising of virtual private network services, but stopped short of banning their use. It did list the use of a VPN as an 'aggravating circumstance' in case of other violations of the law. The Russian authorities have ramped their multipronged crackdown on dissent after sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments have soared. Multiple independent news outlets and rights groups have been shut down, labeled as 'foreign agents' or outlawed as 'undesirable.' Hundreds of activists and critics of the Kremlin have faced criminal charges. The new legislation has sparked broad public criticism. Liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin, who sought to challenge Putin in last year's presidential election but was denied a spot on the ballot, told reporters outside the State Duma that he opposed the new legislation. Nadezhdin's aide, Dmitry Kisiev, who picketed the parliament building with a poster likening the legislation to the world of George Orwell's dystopian '1984,' was quickly rounded up by police, who also detained several reporters covering the protest. Even some pro-Kremlin figures have criticized the bill, arguing it would make it impossible for them to track down and deflect comments by Kremlin critics. Yekaterina Mizulina, whose group Safe Internet League has frequently reported dissenters to authorities, has strongly condemned the new bill, arguing it would make it impossible for her group to monitor 'extremist communities' on the web.
Winnipeg Free Press
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Russian lawmakers pass a bill punishing online searches for information deemed to be ‘extremist'
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a bill that punishes online searches for information that is deemed 'extremist,' the latest move by government authorities in their relentless crackdown on dissent. The bill passed by the lower house, the State Duma, moves to its all-but-certain endorsement in the upper house and then goes to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law. The legislation punishes what it describes as 'deliberately searching for and accessing extremist materials' online. First-time offenders face a fine of up to the equivalent of $64. The official definition of extremist activity is extremely broad and includes opposition groups like the Anti-Corruption Foundation, created by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the 'international LGBT movement.' It's not clear how authorities will track down violators. Some observers have suggested the information would likely come from internet providers or social media platforms, and police also could randomly check the search history of cellphones or computers. The new legislation also contained a ban on advertising of virtual private network services, but stopped short of banning their use. It did list the use of a VPN as an 'aggravating circumstance' in case of other violations of the law. The Russian authorities have ramped their multipronged crackdown on dissent after sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments have soared. Multiple independent news outlets and rights groups have been shut down, labeled as 'foreign agents' or outlawed as 'undesirable.' Hundreds of activists and critics of the Kremlin have faced criminal charges. The new legislation has sparked broad public criticism. Liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin, who sought to challenge Putin in last year's presidential election but was denied a spot on the ballot, told reporters outside the State Duma that he opposed the new legislation. Nadezhdin's aide, Dmitry Kisiev, who picketed the parliament building with a poster likening the legislation to the world of George Orwell's dystopian '1984,' was quickly rounded up by police, who also detained several reporters covering the protest. Even some pro-Kremlin figures have criticized the bill, arguing it would make it impossible for them to track down and deflect comments by Kremlin critics. Yekaterina Mizulina, whose group Safe Internet League has frequently reported dissenters to authorities, has strongly condemned the new bill, arguing it would make it impossible for her group to monitor 'extremist communities' on the web.
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
The Orwellian nightmare in Gaza
A string of recent developments forced me to pull out my daughter's copy of 1984 from her bookshelf. I had first read the Bihar-born George Orwell's classic as a teenager some 50 years ago and wanted to revisit some of his prescient vocabulary: Big Brother is Watching; War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Two Minutes Hate; Doublethink; Newspeak; Unperson; Thoughtcrime; Thought Police, and so much more. The trigger was a statement made by Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz about plans to set up a 'Humanitarian City' on the ruins of the bombed-out town of Rafah, located near the border with Egypt on the southern extremity of the Gaza Strip. Without the slightest tinge of irony, he proposed to 'concentrate' 6,00,000 Palestinians in an area in which access would be strictly controlled, and residents would not be permitted to leave. He also reiterated his ambition to encourage the 'voluntary migration' of Palestinians to other countries. In Orwellian Newspeak, forced expulsion is being called voluntary migration and a planned concentration camp is being described as a humanitarian city. The 'encouragement', of course, comes in the form of mass starvation, destruction of water, electricity supplies and over 90 per cent of all housing units, and the continued targeting of medical infrastructure. Another classic Newspeak is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), set up and funded by unknown or dubious entities to replace the UNRWA that was established by the UN in 1949 to provide support to Palestinian refugees. But Israel banned the UNRWA, choked essential food and medical supplies, and then responded to the growing global outrage by establishing a sham organisation whose aid-distribution centres have been described as a killing field. Between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the armed contractors of GHF, some 880 Palestinians have been killed and over 5,000 wounded since the GHF started its operations in late May 2025. Meanwhile, formula milk for babies remains scarce and six children have been killed earlier this week while trying to get drinking water. In a rare admission, the Israeli government attributed this one attack to a 'technical error' in the missile that it fired into the crowd. Doublethink — that act of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs — comes through the daily assertions of the IDF being 'the most moral army in the world'. Even after they have killed over 58,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, the respected Lancet journal thinks that this figure represents an underestimation of around 41 per cent. CNN and The New York Times have estimated Palestinian fatalities to be significantly higher than the official count. And Israel, 'the only democracy in the Middle East,' not only prohibits international media from entering Gaza, but has killed at least 186 mostly Palestinian journalists, according to the Committee for Protection of Journalists. And there is the BBC which commissioned and then refused to screen a film titled Gaza: Doctors under Attack because it made a persuasive case that the IDF had deliberately and repeatedly targeted each one of Gaza's 32 hospitals. It also reveals that a completely disproportionate number of doctors and medical personnel have been killed and arrested since October 7, allegedly because the hospitals were built on Hamas tunnels. It was left to Channel 4 to muster the courage to show the horrors of Gaza. Israel's advanced satellite and drone capabilities make sure that Big Brother is Always Watching. IDF has made extensive use of Lavender, an AI-based system developed with technology from US-based Palantir, to process large amounts of data including geospatial and signal intelligence, human sources and open-source information, to develop a list of some 40,000 suspects. The system produces target recommendations and the IDF's armed drones use face recognition systems to lock on these targets and fire. Gazans are being used as guinea pigs to refine this platform and when civilian casualties occur, who is to blame? The lines between ethics, law and accountability have been virtually erased. No wonder Palantir chairman Peter Thiel was distinctly evasive when these questions were posed to him in an interview, mumbling, 'I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel.' Meanwhile, legal scholars, foreign policy experts and even a handful of Israeli politicians have now started to ask the forbidden question. Do Israeli actions in Gaza constitute ethnic cleansing, war crimes or even genocide? Read this and form your own view: Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948 says that 'genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting living conditions calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part…' Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert now acknowledge that the actions of the Benjamin Netanyahu government in Gaza constitute war crime. Leading Jewish historians like Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg and Lee Mordechai have described it as a genocide. A group of 10 Holocaust survivors have issued a signed letter condemning Israeli actions as genocide. The Jewish Voice for Peace issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day to call for an end to 'the Israeli government's genocide against the Palestinian people'. But the students of Harvard and Columbia or the musicians at Glastonbury are not allowed to say this. Criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza is now equated with blood libel if you are a Jew and with antisemitism if you are not. Either way, it attracts the wrath of the ever-vigilant Thought Police. And what is more Orwellian than the bizarre spectacle of PM Netanyahu — designated as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court — proposing Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize while the US President sanctions senior ICC and UN staff for doing their job. Or, the intellectual gymnastics of the president of the European Commission, tying herself in knots as she tries to balance her angst over Ukraine with her nonchalance on Gaza. Truly, as Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' The writer is a former ambassador to Egypt and UAE
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sheryl Crow Protests ‘The New Normal' in Song About Trump, Robots and Algorithms
Sheryl Crow has released a song about the current political climate under the guidance of President Donald J. Trump, referring to him as the 'leader of the free world,' and comparing reality to George Orwell's dystopian '1984' novel. The acclaimed singer-songwriter debuted the single — performed alongside her touring band the Real Lowdown — on Friday. In an Instagram caption, Crow wrote, 'What's happening all around us is so unbelievably bizarre, that my fear is we will truly begin to feel like this is normal. And that's what terrifies me.' More from Variety Dolly Parton and Sheryl Crow to Be Featured at Stand Up to Cancer Fundraiser At Variety's 'Power of Women: Nashville,' Kelsea Ballerini, Sheryl Crow, Mickey Guyton and Reba McEntire Talk About Making a Difference, Mental Health and Mutual Standom Sheryl Crow on Settling Down but Still Fighting the Power in Nashville: 'I Call My Representatives Every Single Morning' The upbeat pop-rock track has Crow questioning: 'Is it science fiction or prediction wrapped in George Orwell?/If the news is fake and fear is hate and nothing's immoral/ To the leader of the free world, then welcome to the new normal.' In 'The New Normal,' Crow also comments on artificial intelligence, singing, 'You're gonna wake up someday/To a robot that's in your place/Like all the predictions say.' In her social posts, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee also took the time to acknowledge her band of 15 years — comprised of Fred Eltringham (drums, percussion), Audley Freed (electric guitar), Jen Gunderman (keyboards), Robert Kearns (bass), and Peter Stroud (electric guitar). She additionally teased new music with the band. 'I am so blessed to have the band that I have,' she wrote. 'For years, we have jammed up such cool stuff during sound checks that we decided we go in and start recording as a band. Can't wait for everyone to hear the new stuff we are doing.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? Final Emmy Predictions: Talk Series and Scripted Variety - New Blood Looks to Tackle Late Night Staples
Observer
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Observer
How literature lost its mojo
I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of bestselling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and JD Salinger. Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I'm not saying novels are worse now. I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanising effect on our culture. There used to be a sense that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, 'The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.' Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the Internet. It has destroyed everybody's attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. The decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the Internet was dominant. People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell's '1984' (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books and Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' has sold over 20 million. People still have the attention span to read a few contemporary writers — Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, for example — and a sprinkling of reliably left-wing literary novels: Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' and Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead.' It's just that interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed. I would tell a different story about the decline of literary fiction, and it is a story about social pressure and conformity. What qualities mark nearly every great cultural moment? Confidence and audacity. Look at Renaissance art or Russian or Victorian novels. I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years. In the 1970s, artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things. In literature there was Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye,' Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' and Saul Bellow's 'Humboldt's Gift.' In movies there was 'The Godfather' — I and II — and 'Apocalypse Now.' Rock stars were writing long ambitious anthems: 'Stairway to Heaven,' 'Free Bird' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Even the most influential journalists were audacious: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Everything feels commercialised, bureaucratised and less freewheeling today. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.) Conformity is fine in some professions, like being a congressional aide. You're not being paid to have your own opinions. But it is not fine in the writing business. The whole point is to be an independent thinker, in the social theorist Irving Howe's words, to stand 'firm and alone.' Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage. If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you're going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them. If you write in fear of social exile, your villains will suck. You'll assign them a few one-dimensional malevolences, but you won't make them compelling and, in their dark way, seductive. You won't want to be seen as endorsing views or characters that might get you cancelled. Most important, if you don't have raw social courage, you're not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what's going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America. We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith. I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side. Literature and drama have a unique ability to communicate what makes other people tick. Even a great TV series doesn't give you access to the interior life of another human being the way literature does. Novels can capture the ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist of an era with a richness that screens and visual media can't match. It strikes me as highly improbable that after nearly 600 years the power of printed words on a page is going to go away. I would put my money on literature's comeback, and that will be a great blow to the forces of dehumanisation all around us. — The New York Times
