In one year, Philip Morris spent $60 million on charitable programs and then another $108 million advertising the fact that they had done so.
– Life Inc : Douglas Rushkoff
Tag: Community
Quote of the week
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, this heightening it meaning. The city is like poetry it compress all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
– E.B. White on NYC
Quote of the week – Education
And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.3)
– Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Paris Review – The London Library, Orlando Whitfield
The library is a place of safety for the bibliophile, and a cooling refuge for the city-heated mind.
Source : Paris review
Quote of the week
Human life confronts itself in its entirety through books and culture. In the the short term, the loss in quality is evident, yet this cannot be remedied by restoring the narrow humanism of the classical period. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Quote of the week : Sharing the wealth
Sharing the wealth is not a matter of Sustainable South Bronx franchising patented techniques to other cities—there’s enough work for them to do in the South Bronx, and they don’t need to extract value from other cities in order to achieve sustainability for themselves.
– Life Inc: Douglas Rushkoff
How do we re-moralize society
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is far better off under the present arrangement than under the old slave system; it can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital, and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly pointed out.
by Friedrich Engels
The Comparing Trap – Thomas J. DeLong
#20 Collected Reading – 5 View points on the London Riots
Quote of the week
“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force,” the 1945 conference declared, “then Africans as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.” The demand for freedom came alongside the demand for socialism: “We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for profit alone.”
-The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World – by Vijay Prashad
1.Everywhere is a target, everywhere is symbolic
“the riots and its crowd-logics that recalls the frenzy that characterises financial markets today. Indeed it’s a strange though not necessarily ironic coincidence that the Blackberry through its private messaging network, BBM, was it is claimed, the method of organising London’s riots allowing people to group and regroup with mystifying speed. Not so long ago, the Blackberry was the singular device that symbolised the world of modern business.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Networks
Source :Domus
2. Teens are left to their own devices as council axes all youth services
“It’s just the boredom,” she says. “Boredom causes trouble.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Economics
Source : The Guardian
3. Handmade hashtag. Impromptu bulletin board gives positive voice to riot-struck Londoners
“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Community
Source :Eye Magazine
4. The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us
“The irony of all this is that outside Britain, Europe and the US, the great story of 2011 has been the Arab spring, as the people of Syria, Yemen and beyond have taken to the streets. It seems that just as those nations demand the tools of democracy, we are finding them rusting and blunt in our hands.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Democracy
Source : The Guardian
5. Thinking Allowed BBC Radio 4 – Liverpool Riots
“30 years ago riots broke out in Liverpool which lead to 160 arrests and 258 police officers needing hospital treatment. The four days of street battles, arson and looting lead to violent disturbances in many other British cities and have changed community relations and disorder policing in the country forever.”
Riots, Liverpool, Politics, Culture
Source : BBC Thinking Allowed
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
Collected Reading 