A little collection of a few things that caught my eye… Between the Flags: A great little Tropfest video that shows the humanity beyond the mob mentality, a throwback to 2005 and the Cronulla riots…
I honestly wish I had thought of this when I was in first year…I always wanted to do a massive practical joke but couldn’t think of anything exciting enough! Kudos to these cats.
I work in a male dominated field for sure…But I have never considered what it would be like to work as another one: a taxi driver? "What's a girl doing here?" from Narratively on Vimeo.
An interesting essay On the Joy of Giving
"For a lot of us, what really defines us in the world is having so much money. We're exceptionally wealthy compared to the average," he says in the precise, logical voice of the studious, overgrown schoolboy he resembles. "Once you get used to the idea, I think you realise, wow, this is a really nice position to be in, to be able to help people."
He suggests giving away 10% of your income might, like vegetarianism, one day become a social norm. And he suggests philosophers should pay more attention: "Quite a few people think obviously it's good to donate to charity, so we're not going to talk about it. I think that's a mistake, because you can go further and say, do we have an obligation to do it? Is it not merely something that's nice, but something we really have to do? And I think the answer is yes."
An oldie but a goldie…a little cynical perhaps, but a fair bit of truth there:
Gas is the next big thing in energy, and a few interesting articles in the Australian on this issue caught my eye. It is quite a contentious area, especially here in Queensland where many of the gas wells are on prime farmland. However, in today’s society, money talks, and when push comes to shove, will people be willing to reduce their energy consumption or be willing to pay more for their electricity? In my typical fashion I am not one to side either way just yet, but more play the devil’s advocate…
Randomly, the first massive internet hoax…from the Museum of Hoaxes, an interesting and trivia filled way to spend an afternoon *cough*
This is a useful little infographic… How to make the most of Google!
If the producers of Q&A were serious about their adventures in democracy, they should seek to include such experts in all of their discussions. This would make the show more productive and could bring it into its fuller potential as a place of critical, enjoyable, and serious political debate for Australia.
Until then, it will just be the contrived gabfest we tweet at each week.
The touchiness of Muslims about assaults on the Prophet Muhammad is in part rooted in centuries of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism during which their religion was routinely denounced as barbaric by the people ruling and lording it over them. That is, defending the Prophet and defending the post-colonial nation are for the most part indistinguishable, and being touchy over slights to national identity (and yes, Muslimness is a kind of national identity in today’s world) is hardly confined to Muslims.
In India, dozens of Christians have sometimes been killed by rioting Hindus angry over allegations of missionary work. Killing people because you think they tried to convert members of your religion to another religion? Isn’t it because such a conversion is an insult to your gods?
In Myanmar, angry Buddhists have attacked the hapless Muslim minority, sometimes alleging they were avenging an instance of the rape of a Buddhist girl (i.e. these are like lynchings in the Jim Crow South).
Or then there have been Sri Lanka Buddhist attacks on Tamil Christians. In fact, Sri Lanka Buddhists have erected a nasty police state and shown a propensity for violence against the Tamil minority, some elements of which have had revolutionary or separatist aspirations (not everybody in the group deserves to be punished for that).
And, militant Israeli Jews have set fire to Muslim mosques in Palestine and recently tried to “lynch” three Palestinians in Jerusalem. If Maher thinks only Muslims are thin-skinned, he should try publicly criticizing Israeli policy in America and see what happens to him.
Since Iraq didn’t have ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and wasn’t connected to 9/11, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that 300 million Americans brutally attacked and militarily occupied that country for 8 1/2 years, resulting in the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the wounding of millions, and the displacement of millions more, mainly because Iraq’s leader had talked dirty about America. Now that is touchy.
To wrap it up…France in the year 2000… from the early 1900’s. Super interesting!
Have a great day!