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 4 Mar 2006 @ 07:17
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 20 Feb 2006 @ 08:21
Of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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 4 Feb 2006 @ 04:45
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 22 Feb 2005 @ 23:06
So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come
as you are, but pay as you go. Pay as you go.
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 5 Dec 2004 @ 02:04
“Saturn devouring one of his children” (1821-23), Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain)
Hannah Arendt, in her ground breaking book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, discovered what she least expected and least wanted to face. During multiple interviews with Eichmann, the German Jewish author discovered that he was not a monster. He was not even an anti-Semitic maniac or twisted, distorted demon of a man. Eichmann, she said was a man who simply wanted to get ahead, to succeed in life, to please his superiors, to be respected by his peers, to do his job well, to be patriotic, devoted, and responsible.
Since the ovens of the concentration camps and the mushrooms clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mankind seems nowadays to have managed to industrialized evil to the point where total madness and collective evil can now be perpetrated with no intention at all.
Are we increasingly becoming participants in a system which progressively has been turning ordinary citizens into “willing but intentionless death dealers”?
So asks Joan Chittister in a timely article published in the December 2004 issue of Spirituality & Health:
"Today, the breadth and depth of human complicity in mass murder knows no end. We have assemblyline systems that crank out sheet steel for bombs in one state and warheads for bombs in another, fins for missiles in a third state, and delivery systems of trains and ships and packing crates in the next. The profits of this system, reaped on Wall Street, leave us all innocent, all intentionless, and all guilty at the same time." More >
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 10 Nov 2004 @ 03:22
Photo: Laura Bush (Republican Convention, 2004). "Even as her husband courted social conservatives, Laura Bush lulled moderate voters into believing that the White House is not really in the clutches of the extreme right. The First Lady, as well as the women appointed to the inner circle of the President's Cabinet and sub-Cabinet, provide an alternative facade. They are cast as harmless, moderate, irrelevant or benign, and their well-spun image taps into familiar stereotypes."
Right wing political ideologies, including some of the most extreme or unfamous ones, like Mussolini's Italy or Franco’s Spain, have all always been keen on including "family values," (the gentle face of fascism) in their political programs. More >
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 18 Oct 2004 @ 21:58
Theocracy is the name given to political regimes that claim to represent the Divine on earth. Most governments throughout history and across cultures have claimed to be following their gods' designs or to be legitimated by a divine mandate.
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 10 Oct 2004 @ 05:39
"The demagogic propagandist must . . . be consistently dogmatic. All his statements are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white... The propagandist should adopt 'a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with.' He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked or shouted down…”
---Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958
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 23 Aug 2004 @ 01:24
"If plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, 'Why are we here?' Plastic...asshole."
---George Carlin, The Planet is Fine More >
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 23 Aug 2004 @ 01:20
Painting | Meeting, 1997-2001, Mary Frank
"Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are forgotten and the images of television replace history..."
"Do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?" More >
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 8 Aug 2004 @ 21:43
BOB ROBERTS
Time has rendered the movie eerily prescient in its foreshadowing of contemporary American politics and the rise of "image" over issues. The movie seems closer to reality now than it did in 1992 and of greater interest because of the current political context. The essence of Bob Roberts' strategy (casting himself as a "conservative rebel") is close to home and chillingly reminiscent of George W. Bush's campaign which won him his following in 2000, not to mention the zombie like devotion of the religious right. More >
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 20 Jul 2004 @ 00:59
Photo: Jacob Holdt, Poor whites in Mississippi
"Poor whites I always found the hardest to photograph - at least in the USA where they have deeply internalized the prevailing American philosophy—that you are yourself to be blamed for your own misery. Thus they are also robbed of the dignity and pride characterizing the poor in other countries."
——Jacob Holdt, American Pictures
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