“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
Much of life, however, is characterized by what the sociologist Robert Merton called the Matthew Effect, named after a sentence from the book of Matthew in the Bible, which laments “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Matthew was referring specifically to wealth (hence the phrase “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”), but Merton argued that the same rule applied to success more generally. Success early on in an individual’s career, that is, confers on them certain structural advantages that make subsequent successes much more likely, regardless of their intrinsic aptitude.
[…]
Merton was writing about scientific careers, but as the sociologist Daniel Rigney argues in his recent book The Matthew Effect, the same forces apply to most other careers as well. Success leads to prominence and recognition, which leads in turn to more opportunities to succeed, more resources with which to achieve success, and more likelihood of your subsequent successes being noticed and attributed to you.
Isolating the effects of this accumulated advantage from differences in innate talent or hard work is difficult, but a number of studies have found that no matter how carefully one tries to select a pool of people with similar potential, their fortunes will diverge wildly over time, consistent with Merton’s theory. For example, it is known that college students who graduate during a weak economy earn less, on average, than students who graduate in a strong economy. On its own, that doesn’t sound too surprising, but the kicker is that this difference applies not just to the years of the recession itself, but continues to accumulate over decades. Because the timing of one’s graduation obviously has nothing to do with one’s innate talent, the persistence of these effects is strong evidence that the Matthew Effect is present everywhere.
Everything Is Obvious by Duncan J. Watts (via sociolab)
How much can we ‘safely’ pollute our environment? How many fossil fuels can we burn? How much of a poisonous substance does not threaten our health? That our knowledge has limitations does not mean we shouldn’t exaggerate the ecological threat. On the contrary, we should be even more careful about it, given that the situation is extremely unpredictable.
Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher/ sociologist/ cultural critic/ psychoanalyst (via rethinkcapitalism)
It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Wilde, Oscar (1997-08-01). The Soul of Man under Socialism (pp. 10-11). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition. (via patzini14)
OH THANK YOU FOR THIS MESSAGE. I legit hate that book and the movie just for this. There even a part in the movie where he talks some nonsense about being a “renegade economist” or something to that effect and I’m just can help but think no you’re a sociologist, that’s a thing, you didn’t invent it, you’re just doing sociology with a different name. I mean shenanigans, it feels like that Milhouse meme “make joke no one laughs, someone else repeats it louder and everyone laughs” He just tried to steal an entire academic discipline.
seriously, it vexes me. you have no idea how validated i feel right now.
The dominant perspective is simply an attribute of power. Power is the ability to define or name phenomena. Whites have more power than blacks; therefore it is their prerogative to universalize their perspective as truth, not just truth for themselves but truth for all “Americans.” I still remember skin-colored Band-Aids: they were pink, which contrasted sharply with my own brown skin. Pink, flesh-colored Band-Aids were an expression of a defining other. That defining other, as the flesh-colored Band-Aid story illustrates, is obviously white. The dominant perspective as revealed by the skin-colored Band-Aid phenomenon has an Alice in Wonderland–like quality. It transports us to the other side of a looking glass that separates the realm of fact and myth, reality and social construct, and does so imperceptibly. It functions also to disguise the world it constructs as the only possible world.
D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion: The Myth of the Black Male [Download] (via feministsociologist)
(Source: feministsociology)
The point is that women routinely get our ideas dismissed by attacks on our personal appearance. The point is that many men value women solely or primarily for our value as ornaments, sexual playthings, and/or babymakers — and these men think that, if they can undercut our value in these areas, it’s the same as undercutting anything we say or do. The point is that this attitude is widely prevalent in our culture, and has been for centuries… and the only way to stop it is to point it out when it happens, and laugh, and talk about how stupid and repulsive and fucked-up it is.
The point isn’t that I’m not ugly. The point is that it should not fucking well matter.
Greta Christina (via honeyandsun)
(Source: beyond-dimensions)
Banksy. Media at War.
Holy shit Tina… Holy shit.
tina fey good at words
Tina Fey brings the truth with a side of honest
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important — as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform — Finland’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
Recently I appeared on a television talk show opposite three ‘angry white males’ who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination. The show’s title was ‘A Black Woman Took My Job’. In my comments to these men, I invited them to consider what the word ‘my’ meant in that title: that they felt the jobs were originally ‘theirs’. But by what right is that ‘his’ job? Only by his sense of entitlement, which he now perceives as threatened by the movement toward workplace gender equality.
Michael Kimmel (via wretchedoftheearth)
Here is a Georgia State Trooper in riot gear at a KKK protest in a north Georgia city back in the 80s. The Trooper is black. Standing in front of him and touching his shield is a curious little boy dressed in a Klan hood and robe. I have stared at this picture and wondered what must have been going through that Trooper’s mind. Before the Trooper is an innocent child who is being taught to hate him because of the color of his skin. The child doesn’t understand what he is being taught, and at this point he doesn’t seem to care. Like any other child his curiosity takes hold and he wants to explore this new thing that this man is holding probably because he can see his reflection in it and that’s a neat thing and he wants to check it out. In this picture I see innocence mixed with hate, the irony of a black man protecting the right of white people to assemble in protest against him, temperance in the face of ignorance, and hope that racism can be broken because this young boy may remember that a black man smiled at him once and he didn’t seem so bad after all.
there is never a reason not to post this picture
In the 1940s, there were no life coaches; in 2010, there were 30,000. The last time I Googled “dating coach,” 1,200,000 entries popped up. “Wedding planner” had over 25 million entries. The newest entry, Rent-a-Friend, has 190,000 entries.
And, in a world that undermines community, disparages government and marginalizes nonprofit organizations as ways of meeting growing needs of working families, these are likely to proliferate. As will the corresponding cultural belief in the superiority of what’s for sale.