humblefumblebeementallyexperimente'

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Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:55:45 -0700

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Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:52:02 -0700

"I sit before flowers hoping they will train me in the art of opening up"

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:09:16 -0700

“I sit before flowers
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up”

- The Student, Shane Koyczan (via sulkingsouls)

carpethedamndiem: standing slow clap Whoever you are, may you...

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:31:43 -0700

carpethedamndiem:

*standing slow clap* Whoever you are, may you never lose this ability to cut through Belief Systems and connect authentically with your Self, despite mass consciousness. And please give your parents a high five from me - well done, all around.

vjeranski: “Wire elephant”, 1928 Alexander Calder

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:14:39 -0700

vjeranski:

“Wire elephant”, 1928

Alexander Calder

khaosomaeros: My Wet Deams - Scampi (Covering Soko) Because I...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:52:42 -0700

khaosomaeros:

My Wet Deams - Scampi (Covering Soko)

Because I love this.

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a..."

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 19:17:01 -0800

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

- Jim Morrison

androphilia: Europe is haunted by the myth of the lazy mob |...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 22:42:28 -0800

androphilia:

Europe is haunted by the myth of the lazy mob | The Guardian

It suits the wealthy to turn the debate about poverty into a morality tale, but the reality is that inequality is structural

By Ha-Joon Chang

The Guardian

January 29, 2013

“A spectre is haunting Europe.” Thus began the famous opening passages of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Today, once again, Europe is haunted by a spectre. But, unlike back in 1848 when Marx and Engels wrote those passages, it is not communism, but laziness.

Gone are the days when the upper classes were terrified of the angry mob wanting to smash their skulls and confiscate their properties. Now their biggest enemy is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy.

In Britain, the coalition government constantly slags off those welfare slobs in the working class suburbs, sleeping off their hard night’s slog with Sky Sports and online casino. It is their shameless demand for “something for nothing”, pandered to by the previous Labour government, we are told, that has created the huge deficits that the country is struggling to get rid of.

In the eurozone, many believe that its fiscal crisis can be ultimately traced back to those lazy Mediterranean types in Greece and Spain, who had lived off hard-working Germans and Dutch, spending their time sipping espresso and playing card games. Unless those people start working hard, it is said, the eurozone’s problems cannot be fixed.

The problem with this story is that it is, well, just a story.

First of all, it is important to reiterate that the fiscal deficits in the European countries, including Britain, are largely due to the fall in tax revenues following the finance-induced recession, rather than to the rise in welfare spending. So, attacking the poor and eviscerating the welfare state is not going to cure the underlying cause of the deficits.

Moreover, on the whole, poorer people typically work harder. They usually work in jobs with longer hours and tougher working conditions. Except for a tiny minority, they are poor despite the welfare state, not because of it.

The point comes into a sharper relief, if we compare nations. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, people in Greece, that famous nation of skivers, worked on average 2,032 hours in 2011 – only a shade less than the supposedly workaholic South Koreans (2,090 hours). In the same year, the Germans worked only 70% as long (1,413 hours), while the Netherlands was officially the “laziest” nation in the world, with only 1,379 hours of work per year. These numbers tell us that, whatever else is wrong with Greece, it is not the laziness of their people.

Now, if the laziness story has such flimsy bases in reality, why is it so widely believed? It is because, in the past three decades of dominance by free-market ideology, many of us have come to believe in the myth of the individual fully in charge of his/her destiny.

Starting from Disney animations we watch as young children telling us that “if you believed in yourself, you can achieve anything”, we are bombarded with the message that individuals, and they alone, are responsible for what they get in their lives. This is what I call the L’Oreal principle – if some people are paid tens of millions of pounds a year, it must be because they’re “worth it”; if others are poor, it must be because they are either not good enough or not trying hard enough.

Now, it is politically difficult to criticise the poor for their incompetence, so the attack is focused on the mythical lazy slob, who has no moral leg to stand on. But then the end result is the dismantling of a whole set of policies and institutions that help all poor people in the name of punishing the lazy.

The beauty of this worldview – for those who disproportionately benefit from the current system – is that, by reducing everything down to individuals, it draws people’s attention away from the structural causes of poverty and inequality.

It is well known that poor childhood nutrition, lack of learning stimulus at deprived homes, and sub-par schools restrict capability developments of poor children, diminishing their future prospects. When they grow up, they have to contend with all sorts of prejudices that constantly discourage and deflate them, especially if they have the wrong gender or the wrong skin colour.

With these sandbags on their legs, the poor find it difficult to win the race even in the fairest market. Markets are frequently rigged in favour of the rich, as we have seen from a series of recent scandals surrounding deliberate mis-selling of financial products, lies told to the regulators, to the rigging of the Libor rate.

More importantly, money gives the super-rich the power even to rewrite the basic rules of the game by – let’s not mince our words – buying up politicians and political offices (think of all those former banker-turned-US treasury secretaries). Many deregulations of the financial and the labour market, as well as tax cuts for the rich, in the last three decades are results of such money politics.

By turning the debate into a morality tale of laziness, the rich and powerful can divert people’s attention away from all of these structural problems that create more poverty and inequality than is necessary.

All of this is not to say that individual talents and efforts should not be rewarded. Attempts to completely suppress them can create societies that are ostensibly equal but fundamentally unfair, as in the former socialist countries.

However, it is vital to recognise that poverty and inequality also have structural causes and start a real debate on how to change those things. Ridding the debate of the pernicious and baseless myth of the lazy mob is an important first step in that direction.

Copyright © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited.

[Photograph © Justin Lane/EPA]

"Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more..."

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:34:31 -0800

““Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.””

- Suetonius, from “The Twelve Caesars” (via vandrare)

"The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a..."

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 22:45:44 -0800

““The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.””

- Tom Robbins,

Skinny Legs and All

(via brainfeather)

"You must realize first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:34:06 -0800

“You must realize first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can prove your existence, because his existence must be confirmed by you first. Your being and knowing you owe nobody. Remember, you are entirely on your own. You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere. You are timeless being and awareness.”

- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

"Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music is just imagined. What you..."

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:52:10 -0800

“Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music is just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.”

- Thelonious Monk (via sevenoftheother)

deeeeeeeeeeeespookyaaaaaaaaaaaan: dooooooooooooooooctor: that-1...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:50:20 -0800

deeeeeeeeeeeespookyaaaaaaaaaaaan:

dooooooooooooooooctor:

that-1one-guy:

psych-facts:

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive— which is a lot to expect of a rat.

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy— and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

Source: http://0c6cada9.linkbucks.com

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Sun, 13 Jan 2013 11:34:31 -0800

"I strive only to know my nothingness."

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 16:07:13 -0800

“I strive only to know my nothingness.”

- Blaise Pascal, Pensees (via fuckyeahexistentialism)

"Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is..."

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:23:33 -0800

“Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.”

- Erich Fromm (via sol-psych)

"Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them."

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 13:40:39 -0800

“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.”

- Annette Messager

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Sat, 12 Jan 2013 08:33:44 -0800

"Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske took brain scans of heterosexual men while they looked..."

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:23:12 -0800

““Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske took brain scans of heterosexual men while they looked at sexualised images of women wearing bikinis. She found that the part of their brains that became activated was pre-motor - areas that usually light up when people anticipate using tools. The men were reacting to the images as if the women were objects they were going to act on. Particularly shocking was the discovery that the participants who scored highest on tests of hostile sexism were those most likely to deactivate the part of the brain that considers other people’s intentions (the medial prefrontal cortex) while looking at the pictures. These men were responding to images of the women as if they were non-human.””

- The Equality Illusion (via thoughtfulcynic)

"O Allâh, place light in my heart, light in my tongue, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light..."

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 08:31:26 -0800

“O Allâh, place light in my heart, light in my tongue, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light behind me, light in front of me, light on my right, light on my left, light above me and light below me; place light in my sinew, in my flesh, in my blood, in my hair and in my skin; place light in my soul and make light abundant for me; make me light and grant me light.”

- Hussein Rashid has posted several lovely prayers for the new year: two from the Prophet Muhammad and one by the author himself. The one above is especially lovely during the depths of winter here in North America. (via trentgilliss)

humblefumblebeementallyexperimente'

Photo

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"I sit before flowers hoping they will train me in the art of opening up"

carpethedamndiem: *standing slow clap* Whoever you are, may you...

vjeranski: “Wire elephant”, 1928 Alexander Calder

khaosomaeros: My Wet Deams - Scampi (Covering Soko) Because I...

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a..."

androphilia: Europe is haunted by the myth of the lazy mob |...

"Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more..."

"The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a..."

"You must realize first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can..."

"Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music is just imagined. What you..."

deeeeeeeeeeeespookyaaaaaaaaaaaan: dooooooooooooooooctor: that-1...

Photo

"I strive only to know my nothingness."

"Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is..."

"Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them."

Photo

"Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske took brain scans of heterosexual men while they looked..."

"O Allâh, place light in my heart, light in my tongue, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light..."

carpethedamndiem: standing slow clap Whoever you are, may you...