“Videri quam esse” (“To seem to be, rather than to be”)
I'm strange but i like to be a good strange, My name is Clarence, born in 1988, Pisces and I'm a student of Sociology and the child of the internet. I usually feel like my life has no meaning and i want to die but sometimes it seems like life is worth living for and i love everything in it. If it seems odd to read think what it might be like living it. I like reading philosophy, fiction and tech news.
This Blog is where i collect all the the weird and interesting links from around the net, its not meant to be that serious and just fun. If you stop by here you can enjoy comics, tech, current events, sociology, a little pornography (or erotica if you prefer to call it that) and more weird stuff. Please feel free to tell he what you like and dislike about the site and more of what you want to see.
Please feel free to talk to me by letter in my ask or by following me on other social networks but please just throw me a message WHO YOU ARE.
By the By it goes without saying you should make sure children don't read most of this.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
David Foster Wallace’s legendary This Is Water 2005 commencement address. (via hoticecream)
And this is the true measure of how far we’ve come as a nation: in like five years, the prime talking point from Republicans about people who support gay marriage has gone from ‘It will destroy society via turtle-fucking’ to ‘Oh, of COURSE you’re for it! You’ll say anything popular to get re-elected!’
JON STEWART, on criticism by Republicans that President Obama announced his support for marriage equality simply because he wants another term in office, on The Daily Show (via inothernews)
In recent years when young white males, especially those who have class privilege, violently act out, even killing, psychological issues are explored as possible explanations. Yet when black males act out the message mass media send is that they are “inherently” evil, flawed beyond repair.
If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (via hss6749)
We pretend that “almost everyone has food and can scrape by, and anyone who can’t is just a shiftless waster, anyway” is good enough, and we pretend that the government and upper classes in wealthy countries aren’t constantly conspiring to wage a civil war of economics and access against people living lives of quiet desperation who are accused of being irrational and crazy and savage and uncivilized by their oppressors if they have the temerity to object to their oppression, and we pretend that a sustained campaign of marginalization and denial and subjugation doesn’t amount to a lifetime of abuse committed against vulnerable people by their own government. And we pretend that a government in service to an ideal that ostracizes many citizens by virtue of poverty and others by virtue of indifference to its ostensible rewards is a functional government and not simply a tool of privileged elites. Those pretenses are going up in smoke across the UK.
And in 45 years of me being on this earth, that was the very first time that I ever heard my father where he was pleading and begging for his life, someone who I looked at as being extremely strong, to hear him beg for his life, to say that this was his sworn testimony on the audio, which the police did not know that was being recorded. He said, “My name is Kenneth Chamberlain. This is my sworn testimony. White Plains police are going to come in here and kill me.
- Kenneth Chamberlain Jr. speaking to Democracy Now on Thursday. His father, Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr., a 68-year-old African-American Marine veteran, was fatally shot in November by White Plains, NY police who responded to a false alarm from his medical alert pendant. The officers broke down Chamberlain’s door, tasered him, and then shot him dead. Audio of the entire incident was recorded by the medical alert device in Chamberlain’s apartment and has not been released. The police have still not been charged. (via squintyoureyes)
This is INsane. And what’s insane is how often this happens. Clearly, nobody (brown) is safe. Serving the US military machine will not shield you from the vicious murderous appetite of the police, once they come a’knockin on your door—no matter if you called them or not! It’s to the point where it would not be irrational to posit that a (brown or black) person would be safer just blasting through your door from the inside-out once they begin banging. Boom boom boom. You’re gonna die anyway, right? Maybe it would slow down these aggro freaks if that started happening. Sheesh. We live in a land where Stand Your Ground laws let a man chase after and gun down an innocent person…but they don’t protect you from being murdered by the State in your own house?
Law, hunh! What is it good for?
(via nezua)
Here’s an article discussing the incident and a transcribe of the interview with Kenneth Chamberlain, Jr. I cannot fathom the scope of racial injustice in America, a trench which seems to have no end. This cannot continue.
(Source: kilsoquah)
Monogamy is a social construct having more to do with economics than with human nature. There is no evidence of monogamy among human beings before about 10,000 years ago, which is when our species turned to agriculture and animal domestication. Before this time (and among today’s pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers) there was no reason to place importance on paternity or to equate sex with pregnancy. Paternity was unimportant because children were raised by the group—as opposed to just two parents—and nomadic foragers have little property they care about passing down to their children. Yes, we’ve been brainwashed to believe monogamy is ‘normal’ for our species, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, ranging from our sexual anatomy to studies of hunter-gatherers, to those primates closest to us. There is simply no solid scientific evidence that Homo sapiens is naturally a monogamous species.
Christopher Ryan (via sociologique)
Our joys can never be pure; there is always some pain mixed with them; for we cannot simultaneously satisfy the two beings that are within us. It is this disagreement, this perpetual division against ourselves, that produces both our grandeur and our misery; our misery because we are thus condemned to live in suffering; and our grandeur because it is this division that distinguishes us from all other beings.
Emile Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions” (via equiinox)
Almost any evening on television I can watch in my own home a celebrity performing in a skit which is the television version of a movie (made from a novel), to the accompaniment of dubbed-in laughter and applause - the whole performance sponsered by a steel manufacturer or an oil company, by a manufacturer of cosmetics to cure imaginary ailments, or by a brewer or cigarette manufacturer of products indistinguishable from those of his competitor - all put in order to create a more favorable corporate image.
Daniel J Boorstin (1961)
(Source: tabathist)
A 21 year old woman and her mother drove three hours to come to their appointment for an abortion. They were surprised to find the clinic a ‘nice’ place with friendly, personable staff. While going over contraceptive options, they shared that they were Pro-Life and disagreed with abortion, but that the patient could not afford to raise a child right now. Also, she wouldn’t need contraception since she wasn’t going to have sex until she got married, because of her religious beliefs. Rather than argue with them, I saw this as an opportunity for dialogue, and in the end, my hope was that I had planted a ‘healing seed’ to help resolve the conflict between their beliefs and their realities.
Physician, Washington State from “The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion”
Oh goodness. There’s a lot of “WTF” moments in this article. A ton.
(via maidofastolat)
This is a very important article to read, I highly recommend it.
(via prochoicegeneration)
Important thing to remember: “pro-life” people get abortions too. Happens all the time.
(via rubyvroom)(Source: mypage.direct.ca)
People talk about sexual assault like it’s a bad habit that men have.
Jon Stewart (via deathofadollmaker)
How different would our daily routines look if we didn’t see the world as something we have to abide to, but as our canvas, composed by every little thing we do? What would be the things we would then have to be aware of, instead of how good our nails look during a job interview?
Talita Soares, “Post-education: Empowering the Children of the Revolution” (via rethinkcapitalism)
When you complain about political correctness, we hear “Man, if only we were still back in the good ol’ days, when I could stomp all over other people with impunity!” That’s what you really mean, so why not just come right out and say it? Own your selfishness and sadism. And when people hurt you back, or take legal action against you, or call you selfish or a bully or any number of other names, own that too, because you’ve earned it. Have the courage of your convictions. Don’t downplay them, rationalize them, or pretend that you’re the aggrieved party — because no matter how you try to paint yourself as a brave crusader against the thought police, or the innocent victim of the anti-bigotry hordes, nobody’s buying it, except maybe your fellow whiners. Everybody else just thinks you’re stupid and a coward, on top of being selfish and sadistic.
N.K. Jemisin (via ribbonspooncat)