Girando

anticapitalist:

This is a well written piece critiquing Obama’s ‘plans’ for Latin America. Read the whole thing.

Obama stated at the summit, “I, personally, and my administration’s position is that legalization is not the answer.” Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told me that, despite Obama’s predictable line, this summit showed “the transformation of the regional and global dialogue around drug policy. … This is the first you’ve had a president saying that we’re willing to look at the possibility that U.S. drug policies are doing more harm than good in some parts of the world.” He credits the growing consensus across the political spectrum in Latin America, from key former presidents like Vicente Fox of Mexico, who supports legalization of drugs, to current leaders like Mexico’s Felipe Calderon, who cited the rapacious demand for drugs in the U.S. as the core of the problem.

Nadelmann went on: “You have the funny situation of Evo Morales, the leftist leader of Bolivia, former head of the coca growers’ union, lecturing the United States about—essentially, sounding like Milton Friedman—that ‘How can you expect us to reduce the supply when there is a demand?’ So there’s the beginning of a change here. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to put this genie back in the bottle.”

To quote from TheNation’s article “End the ‘war on drugs’”

the Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report declaring unreservedly: “The global war on drugs has failed.” This strong criticism of the status quo was endorsed by the three former Latin American presidents who organized the commission — Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico — along with 16 other prominent world leaders, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former head of NATOJavier Solana, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.

Meanwhile, in the US, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of police officers, judges and related professionals, held a well-attended DC rally this past Tuesday, citing its own report criticizing the Obama Administration for doing precious little to reframe drug abuse as a matter of public health rather than one of criminal justice. The report calculates that the war on drugs has brought us 40 million arrests at a cost of one trillion dollars without making even a tiny dent in drug use.

Obama is also wrong about economic policy (surprise!)

Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos also announced that the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement would take full force May 15. Colombian and U.S. labor leaders decried the move, since Colombia is the worst country on Earth for trade unionists. Labor organizers are regularly murdered in Colombia, with at least 34 killed in the past year and a half. When Obama was first running for president, he promised to oppose the Colombia FTA, “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.” That year, 54 Colombian trade unionists were killed. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the announcement “is deeply disappointing and troubling.” Republicans, on the other hand, are offering grudging praise to Obama for pushing the FTA.

The free trade agreement is more than just a bad economic decision. It’s a bad human rights decision.

Human rights, labor, environmental and faith-basedgroups agree: this FTA is a bad deal for human rights in Colombia.

Here’s why we care so much about it:

First, the slaughter of trade unionists in Colombia is far from over. More trade unionists were killed last year in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined — see this chart, if the words alone do not resonate.

Twenty two trade unionists have been murdered this year to date. One was hung by barbed wire and tortured; another was shot by men on motorcycles as he left a union meeting; one was killed walking home with her mother; one was shot in the head as he celebrated his 46th birthday. Some ninety-four percent of the 2,900 murders since 1986 remain in impunity.

Something is deeply wrong when a country leads the world in murders of people who exercise their freedom to organize.

tl;dr Obama is an imperialist.

8m57w6:

a-futuredub:

sheepishh:

ricehero:

Jamie is made of salads, puppies, and lightning. With a dash of karaoke.

Natalie is made of fire, bread, and Technology. With a dash of Billy Joel.

Lizzie is made of hammers, wood, and sunlight. With a dash of video games.

Kim is made of crepes, brain, and leadership. With a dash of old school.

Massiel is made of Rock, cherries, and leadership. With a dash of Holmes.

amandaonwriting:

10.  Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Famous Quote: “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

The United States’ most famous poet’s most famous poem is a timeless ode to the American ideals of “individuality” and “forging your own path.”  It’s one of those poems that’s so famous, even people who hate poetry can quote it.  These are the reasons it appears on The Academy of American Poets’ list of top poems for college graduation.

Except aside from that last part, everything we just said isn’t true.  Frost is actually using an old technique known as the “unreliable narrator,” and he isn’t even being all that subtle about it: in spite of the famous quote’s insistence that one road is “less traveled by,” the second stanza of the poem clarifies that both roads are “worn… really about the same.”  Oh, and also, Frost himself admitted that he was actually mocking the idea that single decisions would change your life, and specifically making fun of a friend of his who had a tendency to over-think things that really weren’t that big a deal.

So what you thought was life-affirming was really just another poet/hipster condescendingly saying “you think you’re an individual, when really you’re just a cog in the machine, man!”

9.  William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

Famous Quote: “Star-Crossed Lovers”

Aww, Romeo & Juliet: two teenagers in the throes of what could possibly be the most pure love in literary history.  This is why when a magazine wants to comment on, say, Justin Bieber’s love life or the relationship between a little boy and his horse, they’re likely to reference the sonnet that opens Shakespeare’s most famous play by calling them “Star-Crossed Lovers.”

And sure, this is totally appropriate, if you’re expecting these people to die.  ”Star-Crossed” doesn’t mean “brought together by fate,” it means “fated to die,” because the stars (fate) have “crossed” you.  Shakespeare is intentionally reminding everyone at the beginning of his play that this is a frickin’ tragedy, you guys, and you’re in for a miserable ride.

8.  Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

Famous Quote: “Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love that makes the world go round.”

This is an amazingly misunderstood line from an amazingly misunderstood writer.  Pretty much everything about the life of Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) is shrouded in confusion and slander; rather than being about drugs, Alice in Wonderland is most likely a criticism of then-new forms of mathematics that were becoming popular at Dodgson’s own Oxford College.  In addition, though he was commonly accused of pedophilia, The Annotated Alice and The Carroll Myth makes the argument that Dodgson was actually asexual, and preferred the company of children because he was extremely uncomfortable with courting and any form of sexual innuendo.

Finally, and perhaps fittingly, his most famous quote is the one here about love making the world go ’round, and it is directly contrary to all of his pessimistic and strictly logical real-world values.  In context, this quote is said by The Duchess, a character who is introduced as a potential child murderer.  Hardly the kind of character a writer would want to speak the moral of his story.

Finally, need we remind you that Dodgson was a mathematician?  Almost every detail of his biography — as well as the actual context of this story — show that this idea of love as a geo-revolutionary repellant is supposed to be scoffed at, not adored.

So it’s true that you might believe this to be true, but if that’s the case then it’s also true that one of history’s greatest writers is making fun of you.

7.  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Famous Quote: “This above all: to thine own self be true.”

No, this is not the last time Shakespeare is appearing on this list.  You can probably guess why this line has become popular: it’s a simple platitude, and it’s attractive because it deals with individuality (just like the Frost example).  However, if you look at who’s saying it and really analyze the content of the play, it becomes quickly obvious that Willy Shakes is making fun of this whole concept.

As anyone who’s read Shakespeare knows, the English language has evolved quite a bit since these plays were first performed, and what now seems like new-agey self-acceptance actually meant something quite different in Elizabethan times: Polonius is telling his son to work for himself, and only for himself, and to put everyone else he encounters second.  He’s not encouraging individuality, he’s encouraging selfishness.

Furthermore, Polonius spends the whole play being a complete nitwit, and even Wikipedia’s basic description of him includes pointing out that he is “wrong in all the judgments that he makes during the play.”  In most versions, Laertes (Polonius’s son,and the character he’s talking to) isn’t even listening — lots of stage directors will have the character roll his eyes and scamper off quickly to avoid the avalanche of clichés his father is dumping on him.

So what sounds like the kind of cutesy nonsense you’d roll your eyes at is really just bad advice given by a dumb character to someone who isn’t even listening.

6.  John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

Famous Quote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Of all the examples on this list, this is probably the most likely to be misunderstood.  After all, whether or not Keats was being serious when he said that, beauty = truth is basically the Kirk v Picard of classic English Literature.  Unlike that controversy, there has actually emerged a begrudging consensus, and that is “that Keats did not, in fact, believe that beauty is truth.”

The controversy boils down to whether Keats thought art was a) supposed to represent the real world, or b) was better than the real world, with most scholars eventually deciding that Keats believed the latter.  Not only does this cast a strange shadow over the rest of Keats’ work, which is described here as being “way over on the idealistic side of the sliding scale of idealism versus cynicism,” but it’s also just kinda fun and quirky that the most stereotypically pretentious comment in English Literary History was actually a sarcastic quip.

5.  William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

Famous Quote: “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

“Wherefore” means “why,” as in, “why is your name Romeo?”  The central conflict of the play is that R & J can’t be together because they are members of feuding families.

Juliet isn’t asking where Romeo is — that’d be stupid.  He’s standing right in front of her.

Also, we told you Shakespeare would show up on this list again.

4.  Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West

Famous Quote: “Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

It’s usually just the last couple lines here that are quoted, usually to describe two things that, you know, won’t ever meet.  Memorable instances are from Raising Arizona (“There’s what’s right and there’s what’s right and never the twain shall meet,”) and the first episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, if anyone cares at all about that.

The problem is that Kipling isn’t just being sarcastic here — it’s blatantly obvious that within the context of the poem this is just a straw man argument, and only stated at all so he can immediately point out why that statement doesn’t apply.

“Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”

In addition to having some confusions about how capitalization works (silly nineteenth century, amirite?), Kipling is taking the blatant stance that colonialism pretty much rules and East and West are going to meet pretty hard despite all that physics stuff.

3.  Robert Frost, The Mending Wall

Famous Quote: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Hey Robby Frost, good to see you on this list again.  Privacy is the theme this time, and while the phrase “good fences make good neighbors” is not quite so famous as some others (though you’ve certainly heard it), The Mending Wall gets launched up to number 3 on this list for one simple reason: it’s misunderstood by federal law.

“Separation of powers, a distinctively American political doctrine, profits from the advice authored by a distinctively American poet: Good fences make good neighbors.”

That’s United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, literally creating hard law from thin air, and not understanding the thing he’s talking about.

The Mending Wall does include the line “good fences make good neighbors,” but it also paints the character speaking that line as a bit of a twit.  ”Something there is that doesn’t love a wall… (nature) sends the frozen groundswell under it.”  The poem tells a story of two neighbors with a wall between them, but every winter the wall falls apart, so the neighbors have to meet and mend the wall, spending more time together than they otherwise would have and growing increasingly frustrated with the each other.

Remember that the Supreme Court has nine justices, and at least one (Stephen Breyer) actually pointed out the error in his concurring opinion, but Scalia decided to leave the mistake in anyway.

2.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Famous Quote: …at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory…”

We’re not going to put the whole quote up there because Nietzsche was a philosopher and therefore pretty longwinded, but we’ve highlighted the important parts.  Or rather, we’ve highlighted the parts that the Nazis thought were important, when they were all Nazi-ing around and committing the first ever industrialized genocide, trying to live up to the standards that Nietzsche, apparently, set for them.

The problem is that’s not what Nietzsche meant at all.  The original quote ends like this: “the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings — they all shared this need.”  Everyone’s a blond beast because blond beasts are a metaphor for lions.

So if you’re going to use a philosopher as the backbone of your political movement, you might want to make sure you finish reading his sentence before you get the war machine up and running.  Also, the fact that you thought he was advocating genocide was probably a pretty good hint that you shouldn’t have been listening to him anyway.

You stupid Nazis.

1.  William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

Famous Quote: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

This is definitely the most quoted line in all of English literature, so much so that you’ve probably seen it as a parody more often that you’ve seen it written out straight — for example, “Shall I compare thee to a bale of hay.”  It’s one of the few poems that is just so cliché that, if a guy recited it to his girlfriend on a date, even the most love-sick of recipients would roll their eyes in disgust.

But when Shakespeare’s talking about “love,” he’s not talking about romantic love or feminine beauty– the first 126 sonnets in Shakespeare’s work are generally understood to be addressed towards a man, and many of the surrounding pieces are actually encouraging procreation.  Shakespeare isn’t wooing a beautiful woman; he’s telling a wealthy young ponz exactly what he wants to hear: that he’s just so damn sexy that it’d be pretty much the worst thing in the world if he didn’t have kids.

So if you’re a lady reading this, if any guy offers to compare you to a summer’s day, say “no, ’cause I’m not a dude.”  If you’re a guy, don’t offer to compare your lady to a summer’s day.  If you’re a man whose wife is trying to convince you that it’s time to have kids then…uh, that’s actually fine.  Nicely done.

Written By JF Sargent

turnnright:

My first language is arabic and his tattoo says “Be true to wa who you are”.. There’s an unwanted wa in the sentence..

it says “بي ترو تو و هو يو ار”

instead of “بي ترو تو هو يو ار”

Both ways it doesn’t even make sense that he used an english sentence and wrote it in…