With the scenes that really become cinema, when I’m editing the filmed footage, I feel a chill of excitement. It would be ideal to make a film in which every scene has risen to that level.”
Malcolm X was born on May 19, 1925. Malcolm would have turned 90 today.
Here are some of my favorite Malcolm X quotes to celebrate his birthday:
“I just don’t believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.”
“My Alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
“Stumbling is not falling.”
“Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.”
“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”
Happy 90th Malcolm.
Aid workers need to be tough, resilient folks with a high capacity for hardship. But should they remain unaffected after years of sitting across from people like the young Congolese man who told me through choked tears in 2010 how rebels forced him at gunpoint to watch them gang rape and then kill his mother? If such a person exists, is that really who we want doing humanitarian work?
Rosalie Hughes
There are so many tangible issues to be worried about in these situations that the abstract issues get lost. It can even be hard to measure the impact of the work people are doing when they’re working in aid, let alone measuring how it’s effecting them or their team.
The Matrix is like the Bible of the post-information age.
I compared it like, when the hundred guys come at Neo, those are opinions, that’s perception, that’s tradition. Attacking people from every which angle possible. If you have a focus wide and master senseis like Laurence Fishburne and you have a squad behind you, you literally can put the world in slow motion.
Kanye
This begins in a pretty typical place, but goes somewhere fun and new. Just like Kanye. Keep being you Kanye.
There will not be a Singularity. I think that artificial intelligence is a bad metaphor. It is not the right way to talk about what is happening. So, I like to use the terms “cognition” and “computation”. Cognition is something that happens in brains, physical, biological brains. Computation is a thing that happens with software strings on electronic tracks that are inscribed out of silicon and put on fibre board. They are not the same thing, and saying that makes the same mistake as in earlier times, when people said that human thought was like a steam engine. The idea comes from metaphysical problems: Is mathematics thinking? If a machine can do mathematics, is it thinking? If a machine can play chess, is it thinking? There are a lot of things that machines can do, that algorithms can do, that »
Boys and men must not be told, as is currently the predominant refrain, that their masculinity is inherently bad. They must not be taught to hate and suppress natural male aggression and energy. On the contrary, they should be taught from a young age to control and direct it properly. The very word “virtue,” which has been replaced in large part by the decadent notion of “values,” entered English from the Latin word for manliness. Virtue is manliness purified, controlled, and properly oriented. Boys must be reminded that their strength does not exist for the purpose of imposing their will on those who are weaker, but for the sake of helping those who cannot help themselves. Every strength is a responsibility, boys (and girls) must be told, to those who do not have that strength. Teaching boys that respect, responsibility, »
I am often treated with disrespect, but I respond as respectfully as I can, because it makes trolls look stupid when you don’t stumble.
Journalism’s biggest competitors are things that don’t even look like journalism
As journalist/programmer Stijn Debrouwere has argued in a persuasive essay about the challenges facing the news business, journalism isn’t being disrupted just by different forms of journalism — it’s being disrupted by things that don’t even look like journalism
“…focus on storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable, and concentrate on appealing to readers who are passionate about a specific topics.”
“Don’t feed a guy a sponge Bobby!”
Men who want to be feminists do not need to be given a space in feminism. They need to take the space they have in society and make it feminist.
Kelley Temple, National Union of Students UK Women’s Officer
via feminist kitsch
(via ericmortensen)
Fellas, this is how you be a feminist.
I firmly believe in small gestures: pay for their coffee, hold the door for strangers, over tip, smile or try to be kind even when you don’t feel like it, pay compliments, chase the kid’s runaway ball down the sidewalk and throw it back to him, try to be larger than you are— particularly when it’s difficult. People do notice, people appreciate. I appreciate it when it’s done to (for) me. Small gestures can be an effort, or actually go against our grain (“I’m not a big one for paying compliments…”), but the irony is that almost every time you make them, you feel better about yourself. For a moment life suddenly feels lighter, a bit more Gene Kelly dancing in the rain.
Jonathan Carroll (via theremina)
As a die hard fan of Singing in the Rain, this is »
Horace Mann is a pretty amazing guy if you’ve never heard of him. Among being a pillar of education reform in the 19th century he was also a very early abolitionist.
He was chosen president of the newly established Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio. There he taught economics, philosophy, and theology; he was popular with students and with lay audiences across the Midwest who attended his lectures promoting public schools. Mann also employed the first woman faculty member to be paid on an equal basis with her male colleagues, Rebecca Pennell, his niece. His commencement message to the class of 1859 to “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” is repeated to the graduating class at each commencement. He collapsed shortly after the 1859 commencement and died that summer. [via wikipedia]
Today is the day that Carl Sagan passed away fifteen years ago. Here’s a quote of his I’d like to pass along:
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
– “In the Valley of the Shadow”, Parade, 1996
If anyone ever looked death in the eye, it certainly was you Carl. Thanks for setting the bar.