Pheurton Skeurto
More tea, Wesley?
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We have to stop CONSUMING our culture. We have to CREATE culture. DON’T watch TV, DON’T read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your OWN roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are — NOW — is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowering YOURSELF. You’re giving it all away to ICONS - Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y… This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral — get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player… But you don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.Terence Mckenna (via thephysicsoffalling)
(Source: 6kinky6kitty6)
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It is the cult of self that is killing the United States…it is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth.
Chris Hedges (via lunaddict)
Everything is turning into lip service and editable profiles. Our individualistic (and violent) culture fosters competition not cooperation, which is so vital to actually fixing our problems. No one wants to fix anything as long as they don’t suffer.
(Source: planetarypilgrimage)
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I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.Kurt Vonnegut
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We have become what we painstakingly have been shaped to become. Although willing participants in our social destiny, we are heirs of a culture that preceded our arrival on the social scene.James M. Henslin
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You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror? If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.Junot Diaz
(Source: oddballsdontbounce)
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This enemy of ours is not just Wall Street, it’s the whole culture. It’s a way of looking at us and valuing ourselves in each other. And how you are going to move beyond challenging Wall Street … how you’re going to move to become part of the solution…
You begin with a demonstration. You begin with a protest. But you have to move on from there, and that’s what I see happening now with [the Metamovement]. The people are rightfully, righteously protesting the corporations and the domination of the culture by the corporations and the suffering that that is inducing. But out of the protests they have to move to another stage.
You have to begin doing something that doesn’t depend on exposing the “enemy”. You have to begin becoming the solution yourself instead of just protesting and challenging the enemy. We need people to be reinventing the institutions in our society: Reinventing work, so that we don’t think that having a job and being able to pay the bills is what being a human being is all about. And reinventing education, so that our young people are able to see themselves as part of the rebuilding of our society.
So many of the institutions of our society need reinventing, need re-thinking, and you [the Metamovement] need to do that. You cannot be satisfied with rebelling. You have to be aware that we are at one of the turning points in history where we need revolution, and revolution means reinventing culture.
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People will often cry gross over-intellectualisation when popular culture is critically addressed, as if it is somehow exempt from serious consideration because it is itself ‘non-serious’, just a bit of fun that doesn’t require or deserve dissection. I disagree; every expression of art is a product of its environment and as such will reflect the concerns, preoccupations and neuroses of the time. Mainstream entertainment particularly, by its very nature, has to reflect the dominant modes of thinking in order to qualify as mainstream, and in that respect, mass entertainment is even more fun to pick apart.Simon Pegg, ‘Nerd Do Well’ (via ninestories)
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In a development typical of Arizona, the students who walked out on Thursday, protesting the elimination of the district’s Mexican American studies program, have – without a hearing – been directed to perform janitorial duties this Saturday: an amazing message, right out of Newt Gingrich’s playbook (he has been campaigning in the GOP presidential nomination race, proposing the idea that students should be hired as janitors to teach them a work ethic). Apparently, TUSD administrators are paying attention.
The further message of this punishment, then, appears to be that the state and the district do not want students to study Mexican American studies, but they do want them to clean toilets. Perhaps, Gingrich should consider relocating to Arizona, where his message is being fully embraced.Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, Arizona’s ‘banned’ Mexican American books
This is what racism looks like.
(via mohandasgandhi)
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We think that it is human nature to be the way our culture has made us
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Culture matters
Sometimes I hear people say that racism/sexism/etc in culture isn’t important or worth criticizing. ”Oh it’s just a book,” they say. ”It’s just a crappy TV show.” ”It’s just a commercial.”
This argument always baffles me. It’s like if you put poison into a fish-tank and then say “Oh well I didn’t poison the fish, I just poisoned the water.” The fish lives in the water, dumbass; it’s completely submerged in and surrounded by the water. I’m pretty sure that poisoned water is going to affect the fish.
Similarly, we all live constantly immersed in this miasma of information that we call “culture.” People are not born prejudiced. We don’t emerge from the womb knowing that all black men are scary thugs, that all Latinas are spicy sexpots, that all Indians are violent savages, that all women are weepy and frail, that all gay men are depraved pedophiles, and that all people in wheelchairs are objects of pity. We learn these things, usually starting at a very young age, and we often learn them from our culture — the books we read, the movies we watch, and the constant barrage of advertising that we don’t really pay attention to but which still manages to seep into our brains, and which shapes the way we think about the world, for better or for worse.
If you want to save the fish, you need to purify the water.
