When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: “Don’t think, don’t politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
by Slavoj Zizek
Tag: Culture
Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education
There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone—an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.
by John Dewey
23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism
You may think I am too extreme. However, this is what we do all the time with other products – drugs, cars, electrical products, and many others. When a company invents a new drug, for example, it cannot be sold immediately. The effects of a drug, and the human body’s reaction to it, are complex. So the drug needs to be tested rigorously before we can be sure that it has enough beneficial effects that clearly overwhelm the side-effects and allow it to be sold.
by Ha-Joon Chang
Quote of the week
“It seems that religiously conservative fathers were more likely to send their daughters to school after the revolution than before. With higher female enrollment and literacy came later marriages and a steep reduction in desired family size. It is ironic that the Bush administration’s attitudes toward family planning are in many ways more fundamentalist than Iran’s.”- Common Wealth (Jeffrey D. Sachs)
The Comparing Trap – Thomas J. DeLong
‘Virginity tests’ on Egypt protesters are illegal, says judge
Egyptian academic and columnist Amira Nowaira gave a cautious welcome to the ruling. Speaking from Alexandria she said: “Nobody had heard of the virginity tests before so it is good a court has said they cannot be used. People should be prosecuted but it’s going to be hard, even assigning blame will be difficult. Who is ultimately responsible?”
Source : The Guardian
The Book of Jobs
But it was not until government spending soared in preparation for global war that America started to emerge from the Depression. It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery. The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending.
Source : Vanity Fair
Quote of the week
“The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development”
– Oscar Wilde
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Facebook creating a web under class
“We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak”
Source : The Guardian
Collected Reading 