Cosby Baby

Idiots with Wings

One cold Sunday morning in 1965, when I was a theological student in Leeds and preaching 30 miles north of my college, my fiancee and I were travelling on my Honda 90.

We were inadequately attired for a particularly cold morning. Somewhere up the A1 the bike ran out of petrol.

We stood at the side of road shaking with cold and not sure what to do.

Suddenly a passing car stopped just past us. The driver got out, popped his boot, took out a gallon can of petrol and poured it in my tank without saying a single word. He put the tank back in his boot and drove off.

We stood there open-mouthed and stunned with gratitude.

To this day we're tempted to think it was an angel.

I get it - it's hyperbole. And I get that you were already a paid-up subscriber. But angels?

30 Greatest Drug Scenes of All Time

22. Dinner Part-Turned-Coke Party
"Jack Goes Boating" (2010)
Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman

A dinner party goes wrong in hilarious, disastrous, drug-fueled ways at the climax of "Jack Goes Boating," after the shy Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also made his directorial debut with the film) has been spending weeks learning to cook and perfecting a series of dishes for a long-awaited date with Connie (Amy Ryan) at the apartment of the friends who introduced them, Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Clyde (John Ortiz). The pair are falling apart just as Connie and Jack are getting together, but are trying to put on a brave face for the possible couple. "Don't get drunk! Don't get weird!" Lucy admonishes her husband, who insists he'll behave. But as things go off the rails, hash is smoked, dishes burn and tensions rise, Clyde disappears and comes back with cocaine, which he and Lucy, seemingly helpless to resist, proceed to hoover off the coffee table. After that, the gloves are off and the volume has been turned way up. The film, adapted from a play, can frequently seem claustrophobic in ways that get in the way of the viewing experience, but never in that party scene, where the addition of coke is like an accelerant on a fire, heightening the sense that the walls are closing in.

Source

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) was established in 1995 by a group of Palestinian lawyers and human rights activists in order to:

· Protect human rights and promote the rule of law in accordance with international standards.

· Create and develop democratic institutions and an active civil society, while promoting democratic culture within the Palestinian society.

· Support all the efforts aimed at enabling the Palestinian people to exercise its inalienable rights in regard to self-determination and independence in accordance with international Law and UN resolutions.

http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/#

few of us are altogether innocent

However, if giving up revenge and resentment were sufficient to yield forgiveness, then one could forgive simply by forgetting, or through counseling, or by taking the latest version of the nepenthepill.  But none of those really seems to qualify as forgiveness properly speaking, however valuable they may be in their own right as a means of getting over anger.  The reason is that forgiveness is neither just a therapeutic technique nor simply self-regarding in its motivation; it is fundamentally a moral relation between self and other.

 

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/on-forgiveness/

Flickr Flow Widget

Yo sabia de esto: http://hint.fm/projects/flickr/



Pero no de esto: http://flickrflow.com/ (aunque no funciona en mi maquina, o desde aqui, o algo)

The Problem of Slavoj - or, All Roads Lead to Roma?

1. The talk - at Backdoor Broadcasting Company

 

2. The controversy:

 

a) "I don't claim that Zizek is a fascist, or a "proto-fascist", for all that he seems anxious to provoke such reactions [...] But in the UK [...] the argument from the xenophobes and far right is almost identical to Zizek's: if the liberal elite love the gypsies and Muslims and immigrants so much, let them live with them. Similarly, his anecdotal demagogic style of discussing the issue of Roma is absolutely typical of the far right in Britain ... In a sense, Zizek, the radical firebrand contrarian, is a bourgeois, conformist, national liberal at heart." (Source)

 

b) [Zizek asserts] that certain modes of politically correct tolerance of the Other is grounded upon the belief that certain groups can be judged differently [...]. This ends up being monoculturalism based upon a rather stereotypical ideal of how the Other should act – the point being that the bourgeois liberal, for Zizek, is deluding himself by thinking he is a mutliculturalist, since it is almost a colonial understanding of the foreign Other who he is identifying. [...]

 

The confusion here lies in who we identify as this bourgeois liberal, naïve apologist? For many people who subscribe to multiculturalism this simply doesn't resonate. For me, Zizek's analysis is less a critique of multiculturalism, and more a critique of naïve, neo-colonial monoculturalism [..]. But maybe the word multiculturalism lends itself too easily to the idea that cultural relativism is appropriate– since we're immediately in a struggle to identify what we can call culture. [...]

 

When most people support multiculturalism, what they mean is that a country ought not to have a dominant national character immigrants are obliged to adopt as a guarantee of their debt to their new homeland. Instead a country should allow all to practice what they wish, as they wish, provided that it doesn't harm anyone. Perhaps I'll adopt the term socialist universalism? (Source)