Last week.1984 Turned 75, and Reason Why It STill Matters.

 The Publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four turned 75 years old.

A reminder that there will always be someone wanting Big Brother - The hollow malevolence of Jefferson Davis.

You can put him on a pedestal, like Abraham Lincoln, but the marble will have a lot more life and warmth than Davis ever did.

And the arcs of their lives are much different. Lincoln rose out of poverty — one of our few presidents to do so — and showed a capacity to grow and change throughout his life. His writing carries profound reflections on faith and democracy in a style that at its best echoes Shakespeare and John Bunyan. He could laugh at stories, and himself.

That was beneath the dignity of Davis, a replacement-level oligarch. His older brother set him up on a plantation and loaned him money to purchase enslaved human beings. He ended up holding hundreds of men, women and children against their will and was happy to murder his fellow countrymen to keep them there. He made deeply racist statements, often rooted in religion, to justify this oppression.

All of this, plus leading a white supremacist state, is enough to consign Davis to villainy. But don’t forget that Davis was bad at his job. He was hypersensitive to slights; showed no aptitude for finance and promoted generals who did not deserve the honors. (Davis made Braxton Bragg — maybe the worst general of the Civil War and certainly the most unpleasant — his military adviser.)

From one bleak vision for humanity to another: The Most Irreducible of Human Materials: On Debbie Urbanski’s “After World”.

The flamboyantly intrusive metafictionality is easily explained by the novel’s unique premise. After World is narrated by an artificial intelligence program documenting the life and death of Sen, the last woman on earth following the worldwide machine-engineered extinction of the human race. With that combination of punctiliousness and clumsiness typical of AI programs, the narrator sets out to imitate, mimic, and comment on the generic conventions of its chosen medium. The “Author’s Note on Sources” opening the novel informs us that the program consulted “3.27TB of personal data” in order to draft Sen’s story; “[a]dditionally, 64,213 novels were read to learn the craft of human documentation.” This parodic take on a typical acknowledgments paragraph is echoed by the many asides, interruptions, and breaks where the AI program reflects on its assigned task, receives directives from Emly (a more senior program in this nightmarish editorial hierarchy), and considers its evolving attitudes (or evolving feelings?) toward its subject.

And out of Europe from yesterday: EU elections: populist right makes gains but pro-European centre holds 

Out of fear, people move towards the cliff of fascism led by people who will feed those fears for their own gain.

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