social justice
Empathy Marketing 101
Not infrequently, the most convincing testimony to the veracity and potential power of new scientific discoveries is when they're embraced--for profit-driven motives--by corporate America.
Video Volunteers for Social Change: A Conversation with Jessica Mayberry
"If the media is made by just one elite percent of the global population, how much of the world's reality must we be missing? We need to change this."
NEUROSCIENCE AND MORAL POLITICS: Chomsky’s Intellectual Progeny
Exposure to certain new truths about empathy—hard evidence about our innate moral nature—poses a direct threat to elite interests. There's no ghost in the machine, but the capitalist machine attempts to keep people in line with an ideological ghost, the notion of a self constructed on market values.
Big Government and the Big Easy
New Orleans languishes today in a state of economic disrepair. With disruptions to the normal balance of life so complete, the traditional paths to economic recovery—aid, grants, job programs, private charities—cannot take hold. The self-healing, virtuous circle has been severed: no jobs, no people, no people, no jobs. When economic activity comes to a dead stop, what or whom steps in as the Prime Mover?
The British Camp
Excerpt from The Prince of Marshes: "On the three-hour drive north from Basra to take up my post in Maysan, I passed through the territory the Prince of the Marshes claimed to control. I saw the canal Saddam had dug: some reeds, a few fishermen in tin boats and some water birds. Long parallel lines stretched for miles across the drab earth. There were very few people to be seen: most Marsh Arabs now lived in slums on the edge of cities."
The New Civil Service
Excerpt from The Places in Between: "The week I had known Yuzufi comprised half his career in the Foreign Ministry. A fortnight earlier he had been in Pakistan. The day before he had given me tea and a boiled sweet, told me he admired my journey, laughed at a photograph of my father in a kilt, and discussed Persian poetry. This time he did not greet me but instead sat in a chair facing me and asked, 'What has happened?'"
"I'm Still Alive": Some Thoughts on Memorial Day
Perhaps the reason that people are so inclined to kill lesser beings and even human beings is that the mysteries and complications of life are too oppressive to them.
Nothing But an Unfinished Song; The Battle for Social Security
In Nothing But an Unfinished Song, Denis O'Hearn details the courage and dignity of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands as he matured into a man willing to die for his freedom; Nancy J. Altman's The Battle for Social Security tackles the daunting implications of the Social Security program.
The War Prayer
Mark Twain's classic riff on warfare.
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