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"The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates. Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world’s largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?"
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
(via azspot)
"Nobody much these days is really a progressive, believing that our future will be all about bigger and better government. The Democrats have become, in a way, the conservatives, defending the government benefits we now have and warning of imminent “voucherization.” And they have become so conservative that our president was viciously attacked from the Democratic left when he proposed a minor reduction in the rate of growth in Social Security. But it’s not like that left is seriously proposing an increase in Social Security. When the president proposes a tax increase, it’s pretty much to pay for what we now have. And we really sort of know that his strategy is to delay the inevitable."
Capitalism Has Won! And Conservatives Are Confused (via azspot)
(via azspot)
Inspired by Candy Crush and so many other mobile games
"Mental rotation is a skill that men typically perform better than women (for a review, see Valian, 1999). However, when researchers described a mental rotation task as predictive of success in interior design, women actually performed better than men. Men outscored women only when the task ostensibly predicted success in aviation engineering….Because men typically outscore women on mental rotation, the reversed effect in the feminine condition testifies to the power of gender conformity to release the motivational brakes (for women) and to apply them (for men). It also signals the extent to which people inhibit themselves to avoid crossing gender bounds."
Laurie A. Rudman and Peter Glick, The Social Psychology of Gender (via brute-reason)
(via didyoudrinkmygingerale)
Architectural Density in Hong Kong
With seven million people, Hong Kong is the 4th most densely populated places in the world. However, plain numbers never tell the full story. In his ‘Architecture of Density’ photo series, German photographer Michael Wolf explores the jaw-dropping urban landscapes of Hong Kong. He rids his photographs of any context, removing any sky or horizon line from the frame and flattening the space until it becomes a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer’s eye. Infinite and haunting.
guh.
(via simcities)
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I have had conversations with very well-educated people who, with a straight face, have told me that there are Black Confederates. If you ask a very well educated person how the GI Bill exacerbated the wealth gap, or how New Deal housing policy helped create the ghetto they very likely will not know. And they do not know, not because they are ignorant, stupid, or immoral, they do not know because they are part of country that has decided that “not knowing” is in its interest. There’s no room for any sort of serious conversation when the basic facts of history are not accessible. It would be like me demanding a conversation on Vichy France—en Français.
So we retreat to mushy, moist talk about who “feelings,” “intentions,” “good people” and “loving fathers.” The great Jay Smooth once said that we need to move from a “what you are” conversation (“you are a racist”) to a “what you are doing” conversation. Unfortunately this presumes a groundwork of honesty and good faith. No such good faith exists because we are ignorant, and deep down inside, we know it and are ashamed of it.
""People think the idea of a big company owning your digital identity is better than the government, but actually it’s just the opposite: it’s much more market friendly to have the government cover those basics, because it creates continuity and lessens the dependency. There has to be a government function for some of the basics in digital identity. I don’t see any way around that."
Jaron Lanier (via azspot)
(via azspot)
