Animal Farm and 1984 are two of my all-time favorite books. I have both on audiobook and try to listen to Animal Farm at least once a year. I think it’s a book you could even read to kids, despite the fact that some animals do get killed. Then again, if kids are forced to go through the trauma of every parental figure in a Disney movie dying (Bambi’s mom, Nemo’s mom, Simba’s dad, etc), I think they can handle Animal Farm.

Jonathan Schwartz found a great passage from 1984 that he thought sounded applicable to today. Try this: replace “A Party member” with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Fox "News" viewer, Melanie Morgan, any troll, Ann Coulter, any neocon, Bush, Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, the republican party, or the name of almost any conservative you know or have heard of. Replace “the Two Minutes Hate” with “O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo”, a Bush press conference, or “whenever (conservative/republican’s name) speaks”. Then read this:

A Party member…is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline…called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

h/t Crooks&Liars