Learning.
What makes this comic is the haunted look in the father’s eyes. He knows how things work, but it doesn’t mean he likes it.
"If men could get pregnant, humanity would have become extinct millenia ago." - Marx Dudek
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Wealth is Virtue; the more money you have, the more moral and virtuous you are; conversely those with little or none are the foulest of immoral vermin, and should be punished cruelly, until they repent.
Capitalist society
If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.
– Nelson Mandela
Remembering the unvarnished truth of Mandela’s words means refusing to let anybody sanitize his legacy. As the United States attempts to piggyback on Mandela’s revolutionary spirit, never forget that it was the CIA who helped jail him for 28 years. His sentiments toward our imperialist government reflect what our government remorselessly tries to keep we citizens from seeing, that indeed ”…the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like“ regardless of who we harm in the process.
Here are a few more quotes we are unlikely to see in the mainstream press:
“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
"A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy. The press must be free from state interference. It must have the economic strength to stand up to the blandishments of government officials. It must have sufficient independence from vested interests to be bold and inquiring without fear or favor. It must enjoy the protection of the constitution, so that it can protect our rights as citizens.”
It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
“No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.”
“If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don’t ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers.”
The United States, technically, isn’t designed for people. It’s designed for things: corporations, for one; money, for another. Human beings are just an occasionally useful stage or ingredient for supporting these things, as opposed to the proper, other way around.
Or, Honesty in Fantasy Titles.
Personally I read all four of David Eddings' The Blue McGuffin series, and I enjoyed the Pern books up to All the Weyrs of Pern, which was a natural ending to the series.
After a while though, I began to notice much of fantasy and sf can’t escape the Comedy Troupe Take the McGuffin on a Road Trip format.
[A] human economy cannot prescribe the terms of its own success. In a time when we wish to believe that humans are the sole authors of truth, that truth is relative, and that all value judgments are subjective, it is hard to say that a human economy can be wrong, and yet we have good, sound, practical reasons for saying so. It is indeed possible for a human economy to be wrong—not relatively wrong, in the sense of being “out of adjustment,” or unfair according to some definition of fairness—but wrong absolutely and according to practical measures. Of course, if we see the human economy as the only economy, we will see its errors as political failures, and we will continue to talk about “recovery.” It is only when we think of the little human economy in relation to the Great Economy that we begin to understand our errors for what they are and to see the qualitative meanings of our quantitative measures. If we see the industrial economy in terms of the Great Economy, then we begin to see industrial wastes and losses, not as “trade-offs” or “necessary risks” but as costs that, like all costs, are chargeable to somebody, sometime.
Wendell Berry (via azspot)
The fact most people use “You have no right” as another way of saying, “It makes me grumpy” or “Give me what I want” makes me think most people don’t know what the fuck a right is.
Neither ‘pure’ socialism, nor 'pure’ libertarianism, can scale up to the nation-state level.
i hate that feeling when you actually really do want to be involved with all the fun stuff people are doing but you’re too utterly terrified to ask anyone if you can join in because you dont want to to impose or seem pushy
I have a nephew.
Two weeks ago, while my brother and I drove him to the zoo singing country music at the top of our lungs, my nephew stopped us mid-lyric. “What’s free? You said free?” Strapped into a car seat, wearing swim goggles, covered in chocolate, peanut shells, cheddar bunnies, and matchbox cars, my nephew had asked a question so fundamental to all of our daily lives that we often forget it’s a question at all.
I pulled the “I’m-just-the-aunt” card, and turned to my brother to articulate one of the ideals our nation was founded upon, one of the dreams we are all supposed to hold together. Somehow, with no time to prepare, he boiled down freedom to the perfect level for his son’s current cerebral development. “It’s being able to make choices in your life,” he explained. My nephew processed, nodded, and resumed racing his sticky cars around his sticky seat.
My brother didn’t say that freedom meant being able to do absolutely anything you want. He didn’t say that freedom meant having no commitment or responsibility. He defined it as the ability to make choices, and I like that my nephew’s first encounter with this enormous word gave it the weight it deserves.
The latest ListServe mail. Let’s render this down:
Q: What is freedom?
A: Freedom is being able to make choices in your life.
Q: Is freedom being able to do absolutely anything you want?
A: No.
Q: Is freedom having no commitment or responsibility?
A: No.
This is something I should meditate on for a bit…
When a theory is transformed into an ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge. Originally born of feeling, it pretends to float above and around feeling. Above sensation. It organizes experience according to itself, without touching experience. By virtue of being itself, it is supposed to know. To invoke the name of this ideology is to confer truthfulness. No one can tell it anything new. Experience ceases to surprise it, inform it, transform it. It is annoyed by any detail which does not fit into its world view. Begun as a cry against the denial of truth, now it denies any truth which does not fit into its scheme. Begun as a way to restore one’s sense of reality, now it attempts to discipline real people, to remake natural beings after its own image. All that it fails to explain it records as its enemy. Begun as a theory of liberation, it is threatened by new theories of liberation; it builds a prison for the mind.
Susan Griffin, “The Way of All Ideology” (via averymvinson)