An Import of my Tumblr Blog
But the problem is that, for the great majority of people on our planet, historical films “based on fact” are becoming our history books. Whether it be Mel Gibson or Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln, or Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, taken together they substitute tedious print with a patchwork of spellbinding tales and dramatic images—a beguiling but often distorted or completely false vision of ourselves and our past.
In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. His work, his consumption, and his leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Skinner calls “positive reinforcements.” The individuals loses his active, responsible role in the social process; he becomes completely “adjusted” and learns that any behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme puts him at a severe disadvantage; in fact he is what he is supposed to be…What has happened in modern industrial society is that traditions, and common values, and genuine social personal ties with others have largely disappeared. The modern mass man is isolated and lonely, even though he is part of a crowd; he has no convictions which he could share with others, only slogans and ideologies he gets from the communications media.
Most people on food stamps work full time. They work full time but they don’t have enough money to pay for food for their kids. So really, in some ways, food stamps are about a business subsidy because it allows low wage business workers to… feed their families and continue working. But we call it charity, or the Republicans call it charity. They want to cut food stamps so badly that every church, synagogue, mosque, house of worship in the United States—every single one—[would] have to raise an additional $50,000 every year for ten years to replace what he wants to cut. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna work.
Sister Simone Campbell [x]
I like how she articulates the simple financial impossibility of religious organizations being able to replace government aid. I’d like to add that, of course, there are so many people who have trouble receiving aid from religious institutions because they’re LGBT and/or non-religious or have a fraught relationship to religion… aid is a human right—and, as she points out, a business subsidy as well as a subsidy to food companies—which people should be able to receive in a secular setting.
(via mswyrr)
Sister Simone Campbell for Pope.
(via stfuconservatives)
Seconded.
(via cognitivedissonance)
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too… . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.
Please know there are much better things in life than being lonely or liked or bitter or mean or self-conscious.
We are all full of shit.
Go love someone just because, I know your heart may be badly bruised, or even the victim of numerous knifings, but it will always heal, even if you don’t want it to; it keeps going.
There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there,
I promise.
It is up to you to find them.
With no significant political forces opposing the conversion of our world into a universal marketplace, the conflict of our time is the struggle to retain one’s humanity in an increasingly artificial world. That is the only battle that retains any genuine significance from a traditional perspective.
J. Evola, from “The Metaphysics of War”
(via ice-and-sunfire)
What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved — what then?
Writing is an outlet, but it’s not an outlet of escape. People keep a journal when they want to escape. I write to rub my face in it.
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.