h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Please.....

it was written long before the 1980s, by a fellow named george orwell - who happens to be the same fellow who wrote animal farm. it's about a very, very bleak future where everybody's movements are carefully monitored by this system called 'big brother' for the slightest sign of unfaithfulness to their country, where the development of language is backwards - words are actually *eliminated* from the dictionary, with the reasoning that if there are no words for a certain 'crime', then you can't commit it - and where even *thinking* of committing a crime is counted as a crime, and children have been brainwashed to love the party and are thus the greatest threat to their parents. weird book. i like it. maybe i'll lend you the book one of these days...

Yes, please do. I like to read it someday....Thanks

Hi!
I just finished that book last night. It took a while, because I kept reading other books instead and needing to return it to the library, but only a few months after I originally set out to read it I remembered to check it out again and I finally finished.
I was talking to my friend about it today and we couldn't quite think of the word but my reaction to it was almost that it's kinda good but also it's . There are a lot of similarities between it and one of his other books, Animal Farm, which was written a few years earlier (both in the 1940s I think). I finished Animal Farm last night too, as an assignment for English. My teacher says that once you've looked at the whole book (and also a little bit the whole parallel to Stalinist Russia thing) she would be very afraid if you said it was your favorite. No one could say that they loved it, but no one thought it was a bad book. I think maybe it's just that they're both a little peculiar.

i've never actually *read* animal farm, but i know what it's about and how it ends. but i've read 1984 i don't know how many times - i got it about three years ago, and i didn't have many books with me so i read it over and over again. well... actually, i borrowed it from the library, read it, liked it immensely, went out and got it, and read it again. and again. so does that behaviour qualify as disturbing?

i think that, regardless of what some people say about orwell being a paranoid freak and a pessimist, his vision of big brother is slowly coming true today. i mean, when you have all that spyware on the internet, and government agencies having these 'hot words' watch (you know, if you have one of the words on their list in your site they come over and have a look to make sure you're not a terrorist...)... doesn't that sort of creepily remind you of big brother? spooky....

I'm not really sure about all of that. It's true, but I don't feel that Big Brother is coming around any time soon. In America, at least, I think there will be a big uproar if security/spy-type stuff gets any more intense or in a sense "stricter" I mean, you saw what we did when we didn't want war.
To me Big Brother is really the extreme that Orwell has developed, with the constant watching, like through the telescreen, but it doesn't seem quite as harsh (not really the right word I'm afraid, but the only thing I can think of) if you are not explicitly aware that you are being watched.
Does this make any sense?

well, yesh... big brother *is* a composite of all the nastly little things in life, and is not likely to 'happen' in this age... well, at least i hope i'll be long dead before it ever does. more than anything, i guess it is meant to epitomise our worst and deepest fears of having our privacy breached. of course, i'm not entirely sure if it's better to not to know if you're being watched or to know. it's like that question - if you had huntington's, would you want to know in advance that you carried the gene?

I think the saying "what you don't know can't hurt you" is all the more true in this particular situation. (I don't think it applies to everything in life though) It's just that if you don't know you're being watched you can't do anything about it and you won't care. YOu also won't act any differently because of it, since you won't know it's happening. If someone knows that they're being observed they will change their behavior. I think the constant watching and the knowledge that they're being watched it what caused the horribleness of 1984's society.

I dislike the use of genetic testing to know things like possibility of different cancers or other diseases (including Huntington's). I imagine I might feel differently at some point, particularly since I have a family history of some cancers, but for now I view the whole procedure as a tad fatalistic. We're all going to die someday, but I don't want to know HOW. THen I would live in constant fear of every time something happened that was similar to the way I would die, for example if death by drowning I'd be afraid every time I went swimming, or in a boat. That would take a lot of life out of life.

Although I'm also young and by default view myself as invincible. So, although I think it's unlikely, there is the chance that these view would change over time.

genetic testing - now that's a *very* sensitive issue. there are those that argue that the discovery of dna was the greatest thing in the 20th century, especially since it led to genetic engineering, which led to better crops and revolutionized both industry and medicine (heck, if we still had to *extract* insulin from animals, a lot of diabetics would probably have died). on the other hand... well, i went for the launch of the who report of genetics and world health, and there was a heated debate on this... it's all too easy to exploit this technology so that only the very rich and very powerful prosper. at present, insurance schemes are already rigged to protect the insurance companies as much as possible (look at all the things you can't claim insurance for, and all those things that disqualify you from even being considered as an applicant). what's to stop them from insisting that people be tested for genetic diseases like huntington, that don't manifest until people reach middle age, and then disqualifying everybody who has the markers? i'm sure this reeks of big brother...

(speaking of genetics, i'm also rather severely nonplussed that foreign scientists are coming to this part of the world to investigate traditional medicines, then bringing the plants back with them, extracting their active compounds and then *patenting* these chemicals. i mean - geez! so these traditional healers never got proper scientific training, but they're the ones who have been handed the tradition of processing these plants and using the extracts to cure people - i'm sure that at least gives them some right over the medicine, and not some hick scientists from half a world away. i mean, these scientists would probably never even have discovered the medicinal properties of these plants if not for the healers... - shakes head in dismay at what the world is becoming -)

Sorry it's been a while. I haven't had enough online time to do any serious thinking in the past few days.
Anyways, back to the reply.
I'm not sure of my stance on genetic engineering. It can be good, for medicine and also gene therapy, but I'm not so sure about GMO foods. I only buy tofu made with nonGMO soybeans (well, they don't sell GMO tofu), if that gives you an idea on my feelings about eating the stuff. I think my main concern is cross-contamination. There is no way to guarentee the purity of these foods when pollen is so easily spread, and then you could have franken-vegetables that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. I think that's a rather fatalist view, that GMO foods are all bad, though. There have been some developments that I still (skeptically) support fully, like "golden rice", which is enriched with vitamin A and used in developing countries where there is widespread vitamin A deficency. But i cannot endorse this if the countries manufacturing this rice seed/sprouts (whatever the heck you grow rice from) is exhorting the people they are selling it to.

I disagree with having insurance companies being allowed to do genetics testing on applicants. They already dodge enough things that they should be covering. My friend and her younger brother are both deaf, which is quite unusal unless both parents have recessive genes to cause it. (as far as I know, congenital deafness is not always caused by genetics, but can be) I would hate to see insurance companies require testing of thier clients after Caren was born deaf. I can easily see that grow into something bad, maybe increased rates or refusal of coverage. They already won't cover cochlear implants and sometimes hearing aids. So yes, I agree that big brother is present here.

Now that you mention it I also agree with the bit about the traditionaly medicines. It's not something that I've thought about a lot. (seeing as we came in and killed off all the healers in the u.s. and have probably already exploited this knowledge, so it's no longer news around here) I do think that if the biotech companies are able to artificially recreate the chemicals they maybe should have limited patenting rights, but until they can do that there should not be that sort of claim over things that occur naturally (did you ever see the Disney movie Pochahantas, with her belief that you can't "own" the land? reminds me of that)

have you read the salmon of doubt? insurance companies have discovered time travel - how else to explain the fact that they never seem to cover whatever you're trying to claim...

yes, I have read it. It was good, but also a little unfulfilling/disapointing. Made me realize that there really is an end.

we couldn't help but speculate what it would've been about had dna re-written it as hhg book 6, seeing as arthur dent and co had been dispersed as free electrons at the end of mostly harmless... unless of course, the explosion blew them into an alternate universe or something - which is entirely likely, seeing as it's dna.