July 2011
0 posts
June 2011
22 posts
Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse... →
Distance and time
I like to think a lot of things that aren’t true, but this one is my current favorite.
—— I like to think that I have damaged you in a way that is imperceptible, and yet irreparable for that very reason.
I like to think that I have rendered you incomplete, that I have stolen a vestigial part of you that will forever escape notice from everyone except the thief himself. I like...
“Anti-corruption, accountability and governance constitute the basic building...”
– Poverty Matters (blog on The Guardian), Mark Tran: The uncomfortable reality of development [June 29, 2011]
And we all know that corruption, poor accountability, and poor governance are each mutually exclusive with democracy.
(via silverbowl)
“You ain’t my bitch, nigga! Buy your own damn fries!”
– Barack Obama
According to one report, there were 280,000... →
There are many causes for the increased restiveness. In general, modernizing societies are almost always unstable, especially after periods of sustained prosperity. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, the French Revolution followed an unprecedented economic advance and discontent was most evident in those parts of France that had seen the most improvement. Unfortunately for China’s Communist...
Our Band Could Be Your Life
In elementary school:
“Things will be better in middle school. I’m gonna join the basketball team and have tons of friends and everything’s gonna be awesome.”
In middle school:
“Things will be better in high school. I’m gonna join the debate team and have tons of friends and everything’s gonna be awesome.”
In high school:
“Things will be...
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will...”
– Henry David Thoreau (via fledglingsoul)
May 2011
3 posts
Extra, Extra: This website reeks of unoriginal... →
thetoytul:
Am I the only one smelling that? It’s pungent too. Does it not seem odd the way one can find fame on this site without so much as an ounce of imagination? This is how it goes down all too often: Someone watches a popular TV show or movie and sees a scene they find to be especially well written. At this point the first thing they do is create a captioned GIF of the exact words from the...
April 2011
5 posts
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
I’m not trying to be profound, just literate.
Sure, sometimes I reach too far, overcompensate, go where I’m not wanted, bite off more than I can spit out. But if I’m destined to fail no matter what I do, which doesn’t seem to be so far-fetched these days, I might as well fail spectacularly.
When my tree falls, I want everyone to hear it.
“Let us imagine a child and a grown-up in Heaven who both died in the True Faith,...”
– Al-Ghazali
The American postsecondary system is more and more... →
Half of the annual enrollments are now concentrated in what the Barron’s rankings call the “competitive four-year colleges” and the other half of annual enrollments are concentrated in community colleges and other sub-baccalaureate institutions at the bottom of the selectivity tiers.
Ultimately, this leads to diminished access, and some students are left out of the system...
Heidegger, man. Fucking Heidegger. →
Where then lies our starting point for the initial grasping of the purpose of Being and Time? A clue is offered by the definition of philosophy presented in the beginning of the book and quoted at its end:
Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all...
“It’s amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not...”
– César Chávez
March 2011
89 posts
The Virtue of Selfishness
Everything in its own collective majesty, a callous wind swept clean across a captive highway plain, I am not responsible; I was not there. All of my friends are on fire, yet being so vital to the continuation of events to come, in fact it is not so important; I am not there. The hero’s gloves hide vanguard knuckles, a valley girl born in a Shanghai sewer has something...
This Arab display of street power puts Turkish... →
Post-Mubarak Egypt poses a particular challenge to Turkey and the testing of how far its commitment to change in the region goes. Erdoğan was one of the first leaders to openly call on Mubarak to resign in unambiguous terms in a speech that was broadcast on Arab TV and aired in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. His speech represented a break with his foreign policy based on what his foreign minister...
The feeling I get when I unfollow someone whose...
Is certainly a good one.
“Did you know that is how Americans learn geography? We wait until we bomb a...”
– Jon Stewart, The Daily Show March 28th (via caraobrien)
