(via wannablessedbe)
Being white doesn’t make you racist (we’re all a little bit racist, though). Saying and doing racist things makes you racist. Now who’s playing the “race card?”
I would argue that being white and being male does, actually, make you racist and sexist with the larger point that being alive makes you racist and sexist. Being white and/or male simply means you’re far less likely to examine your racial and/or gender based assumptions because you’re not confronted with other people’s racial and/or gender based assumptions 24/7. The goal is to recognize and ameliorate the fucked up brain society gives you.
Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.
Seen at Sputnik Observatory
In an ongoing effort to make its digital educational, historical and cultural resources available to web users across a broad spectrum of platforms, the Library of Congress today launched “The Library of Congress on iTunes U.”
At its inception, the Library’s iTunes U site includes historical videos from the Library’s moving-image collections such as original Edison films and a series of 1904 films from the Westinghouse Works and original videos such as author presentations from the National Book Festival, the “Books and Beyond” series, lectures from the Kluge Center, and the “Journeys and Crossings” series of discussions with curators.
It also includes audio podcasts, including series such as “Music and the Brain,” slave narratives from the American Folklife Center, and interviews with noted authors from the National Book Festival; and classroom and educational materials, including 14 courses from the Catalogers’ Learning Workshop.
Seen at The Library of Congress
via Paul Kedrosky: “It’s always fun when one popular idea popularizer goes after another popular idea popularizer. This time we have Malcolm “Tipping Point” Gladwell writing critically about Chris “Free” Anderson in the current New Yorker. Read the whole thing, but let’s just summarize to say that Malcolm doesn’t really think that Chris is on to anything, in particular assuming him of “technological utopianism”…”
We were volunteering at a local homeless shelter. Obviously a front for ACORN or some other brain-washing organization. I wouldn’t have taken the time off of work, but I’d freed up some hours by going Galt.
I was ladling soup into bowls, and talking to the vagrants.
“How come you’re homeless? Obama?”
They seemed to mostly get angry when I mentioned Hussein, with good reason. I gave a wink, acknowledging the feelings we definitely shared, but couldn’t voice in this liberal stronghold.
I must not have been as subtle as I thought, or maybe the scent of a True American was just too strong. Either way, one of my fellow volunteers (footsoldiers?) came over and started asking questions.
“Could you take a mop over to the corner? Someone’s thrown up all over the linoleum.”
More like someone’s thrown up all over the country.
“Sure thing, bud. Quick question — where’s the birth certificate?”
“What?”
Oh no. I’d been found out.
“SOCIALISM.”