March 27th, 2013 at 9:13PM

Portugal successfully decriminalized drugs AND implemented a guaranteed minimum income program?! 12 YEARS AGO?!??

Faith in humanity restored.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2012/12/10/portuguese-drug-policy-alex-stevens/

http://ideas.repec.org/p/ise/isegwp/wp92004.html#author

2 notes #politics#portugal#drugs#decriminalization#economics#society#guaranteed minimum income#socialism#social programs#social welfare
October 20th, 2012 at 4:55PM
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. — Alan Watts (via cultureofresistance)

(via billhicks)
810 notes Source: ikenbot #quote#alan watts#society#determinism#free will#personality#humans
September 29th, 2012 at 12:13PM
Fight ClubChuck Palahniuk The movie was fantastic, and the book was even better.  Fuck society, basically. There’s a lot of philosophy and societal critique in the book. A lot of Zen. I like it. And Chuck Palahniuk has got such syntax. He’s short. He’s blunt. He’s sporadic, dark, and extreme in his writing and it is engaging at a minimum.

Fight Club
Chuck Palahniuk

The movie was fantastic, and the book was even better. 

Fuck society, basically.

There’s a lot of philosophy and societal critique in the book. A lot of Zen. I like it. And Chuck Palahniuk has got such syntax. He’s short. He’s blunt. He’s sporadic, dark, and extreme in his writing and it is engaging at a minimum.

5 notes #fight club#chuck palahniuk#bookaweek#reading#violence#society#criticism#societal critique#civilization#irony
September 27th, 2012 at 11:41AM
OutliersMalcolm Gladwell I finally got around to reading Outliers, and it was at least as good as the hype says it is. Gladwell draws from anecdotes and statistics to make the claim that people are less responsible for their own success than the unique opportunities they accessed over the course of their lives. Examples include Bill Gates, who had unlimited access to a computer where he could tinker and program in the sixties(!), and The Beatles, who played Hamburg for eight (sometimes more than ten!) hours a day for hundreds of days before going big. Also, Outliers is where the famed 10,000 hours theory comes from, and it is powerful. Simply put, it’s the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of diligent practice — that is, doing something with the single focus of getting better — to master it. That is what separates the good from the great, and the great from the legends.  The message that Gladwell reiterates over and over again throughout the book is that we need to acknowledge our roots — our culture, our family, our childhood environment, etc. — to discover what unique opportunities successful people had access to. And then we need to look at our own lives and identify what unique opportunities we have access to, and leverage that shit.

Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell

I finally got around to reading Outliers, and it was at least as good as the hype says it is. Gladwell draws from anecdotes and statistics to make the claim that people are less responsible for their own success than the unique opportunities they accessed over the course of their lives. Examples include Bill Gates, who had unlimited access to a computer where he could tinker and program in the sixties(!), and The Beatles, who played Hamburg for eight (sometimes more than ten!) hours a day for hundreds of days before going big.

Also, Outliers is where the famed 10,000 hours theory comes from, and it is powerful. Simply put, it’s the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of diligent practice — that is, doing something with the single focus of getting better — to master it. That is what separates the good from the great, and the great from the legends. 

The message that Gladwell reiterates over and over again throughout the book is that we need to acknowledge our roots — our culture, our family, our childhood environment, etc. — to discover what unique opportunities successful people had access to. And then we need to look at our own lives and identify what unique opportunities we have access to, and leverage that shit.

5 notes #outliers#malcolm gladwell#bookaweek#statistics#probability#success#achievement#resources#opportunity#responsibility#individualism#collective#society#education#economics#decisions#reading#learning#books
June 21st, 2012 at 11:44PM
Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction, it is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. — Kaczynski (via hellabay)

(via thegrazing)
208 notes Source: noneofthismatters #quote#kaczynski#society#drugs#antidepressants#science fiction#reality
August 21st, 2011 at 6:44PM
reaction1: “The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit. The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you, it’s yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.” - Banksy

reaction1:

“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit. The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you, it’s yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.” - Banksy

(via randomactsofchaos)

6,218 notes Source: reaction1 #Society#vandalism#graffiti#stensil#quote