Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Cruelty plays a fundamental role in the vegetarian’s argument inasmuch as the principal reason the vegetarian does not want to eat meat is that she does not want to kill animals or cause them to suffer. The vegetarian sees cruelty in purely negative terms; she believes that its complete eradication is a realistic goal that…
““Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are effectively developing rich countries — and they have been since the late 15th century,” argues Hickel…In the book it is laid bare for all to see that underdevelopment in the Global South is not a natural condition, but a consequence of the way Western powers have…
“Thus [in Keynesian economics] there is no need for any change in the mode of production for profit; just take control of the money machine to ensure an infinite flow of money and all will be well […] Well, capitalism is a monetary economy but it is not a money economy (alone). Money cannot make…
“Self-oriented perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an unrealistically high standard, while other-oriented perfectionism means having unrealistic expectations of others. But “socially prescribed perfectionism is the most debilitating of the three dimensions of perfectionism,” Curran and Hall contend. It describes the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent — and not…
I watched a really funny movie on Netflix over the weekend called The Polka King. (**SPOILERS AHEAD!!**) Beside the fact that the movie takes place in the town where I went to high school (Hazleton, Pennsylvania) and the fact that it has lots of polka music (which I fondly remember my grandmother listening to…
“The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” –Karl Marx I just listened to a couple episodes of a podcast (episode i, episode ii) that I recently discovered, which is distributed by the Christian…
“There is a condition called hemiagnosia, whose sufferers cannot perceive one half of their bodies. A large class of libertarian-leaning thinkers and politicians, with considerable public following, resemble patients with this condition: They cannot perceive half of the economy — the half that takes place beyond the market, after the employment contract is accepted, where…
“In Paul Ryan’s formulation, society is divided between the “makers” and the “takers.” The “takers” are those who benefit from public social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, college-tuition assistance, and so on. In Ryan’s world, these people are a drag on the “makers” who are taxed to pay for the programs. Our…
“It is only in the past few decades that scholars have come to grips with how slavery and capitalism intertwined. But for the 18th-century French thinkers who laid the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, it made perfect sense to associate the slave trade with free enterprise. Their writings, which inspired the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth…
“Right-wing ideologies are deliberate and conscious efforts that seek to “defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.”” As much as I try to avoid them, occasionally a video or article comes across my radar that makes me shake my head in disgust. The latest one is a video clip of Joe Rogan’s…