by DontForgetMe | 2026-02-08 13:42:15+00:00
Guys. Look at the title of this hacker news article. Look at it again.
Then, read the article again. Look for the bits that don't add up, the way the truth shifts from one paragraph to the next. Not outrageous lies, just the little wrongnesses sprinkled here and there.

Think where you have seen that before, heard of it. Think what book is famous for tiny wrongnesses sprinkled here and there to create a world of doublespeak and wrongthink.

THINK what the article is about, and why. What the book is about and why it was written - what you know, not what you are being told. It really is that easy to deceive thinking people, if you slip the relevant details carefully into well written texts about apparently irrelevant sources.

The first sentence of 1984 is 'it was a bright, cold day in April, when the clock struck thirteen'.
The first line of that book is the most famous example of 'ok cool that's just setting the scene, onto the next... Hang on hang on, is that right? That feels off, but it's too small a detail to analyse why. I can't sanity check every innocuous sentence. It's Orwell, a serious writer, not sci-fi. My spider senses are overreacting...'

And then think why that might be relevant today.
Anybody who has read the article and commented here as if the article is straight fact, this is your wake up call.

This is how it will feel to be propoganidised into reading blatant fiction as fact, skipping past all the red flags in the text and honestly not even seeing them. This is how it will feel to read an article that hinges on the premise that 2 + 2 = 5, and agree unquestioningly, because your fact-checking mind has been slowly, subtly exhausted by countless red herring tangents.

The article has some absolutely wild, insane takes like
>"To be sure, the Nazis organised mass
meetings of delirium [anti-Semitism] that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no
permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans
surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives"

That is quite literally absolutely contradicted by EVERY reasonable interpretation of history. Not even the most fervent Hitler apologists seriously claimed that anti-Semitism was a fleeting, minor flash in the pan or that Germany surrendered at the first hint of pushback.
But people here appear to have taken the statement as fact, or at least, not important enough to question the honest veracity of the rest of the article.
How many of you are going to go the rest of your lives with the impression that Orwell was, in fact, an elitist snob who hated the proles, because you read it somewhere (this article) and it just kinda embedded itself in your mind, not important enough to challenge?
How many other things do you think or feel, because of ideas planted there even more subtly, more deliberately and pervasively, than a bloody opinion piece on the book about "The Party [convincing] you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command", linked on a site about hacking, with a title that should make any literate westerner begin with a strong sense of 'well something ain't right'?!

And you know what, it still works. The trick, the little lies mixed with the absurd ones, they still confuse you. By the time I'd clicked on the article, I'd forgotten about the 'Isaac Asimov' part enough to believe the rest.
I started writing the comment below until it occurred to me that, of all the books to be reviewed with a glaring sense of wrongness and weirdness, 1984 seemed a little too on-the-nose to be accidental. Halfway through writing, I went back and looked more at the article, read about the Nazis being benign and anti-Semitism a momentary lapse of reason, read about Orwell fighting in the Spanish civil war yet unfit to fight in WWII (presented with no further explanation), and a bunch of things that didn't add up.

Then I looked at the rest of the comments on this page, with the sinking feeling that we as a society are failing an open-book test. If we lose, it's war, all over again. The answers are all right there in front of us. In this case, there's an entire book on DO NOT BELIEVE THE SHADOWY AUTHORITIES CHANNELLING YOUR HATRED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT 2+2=5, the book has been opened and put on the table right in front of us, the title and author practically circled in red ink...
... And yet, the first thing I spotted was how silly Americans are. And everyone else appears to be lost in the debate of why we must always be vigilant to the threat of our eternal enemies, Eastasia.

My comment, abandoned when the brain ticking got a bit too loud to ignore

> However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full.

Honestly, this line broke the immersion I didn't realise we need to enjoy non fiction biographical / analytical articles as much as fiction.
It was like a scrolling ticker in red letters saying 'this is based on an American cultural transposition of a true story'.

The writing was good, informative, bite-sized without seeming shallow, but after that line it was like ... like reading a well balanced article from a trusted source on a non-controversial topic like the history of coffee, that casually mentions a region in Africa that would later be the birthplace of the US president Obama or something. Not really relevant to the rest of the article, not impossible to understand why an author could make that error. But such a jarring divergence from your culture's values and truths that your brain is slapped into the wobbly existentialism of remembering that 'truth' and 'facts' are entirely subjective and dependent not on honesty or intelligence so much as who is around you and how you were brought up.

Which is pretty unnerving when reading Kafka or deep philosophy (or the news, nowadays), and really not what I was prepared for in the middle of a benign article about a the famous author book I know very well, somehow via a technology forum, which I had only clicked on to see why said famous author had morphed from Eric Blair, to his chosen nom de plume George Orwell, to Isaac Asimov.

Then, when I realised