#sociology-quotes

[thepersonalwords]

Teach your little ones about the rules of decent behaviour. When they grow up, it will be too late to learn.

Eraldo Banovac

[quotelr]

Acquiring knowledge through the centuries has influenced human society more than all other factors.

Eraldo Banovac

[dakota-zen]

[st-just]

A great question to get at this is: Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail? If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.  The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship—self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

-Ada Palmer, Tools for Thinking About Censorship

[sivavakkiyar]

Herzog was real for this

[she-is-ovarit]

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

- Desmond Tutu

[wavecorewave]

Most people today believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow

[theoptia]

Ed Simon, from Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

Text ID: The numinous realm, the astral plane, the transcendent dimension—the sacred—is a terrifying kingdom,

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

dannies are like “yeah i know i have the worst taste. don’t worry i know i’m garbage. also sorry for having a lesbian crush on dan howell idk how to explain it he’s just my wife sometimes. also i hate him but it’s only ok for me to hate him btw. i’m very ashamed but sadly i was just born this way and lady gaga told me to love myself the way i was born but i make it pretty fucking hard to do that. dan is an annoying dumb whiny bitch and he’s everything to me. phil is a god and deserves to be worshipped as such i just belong in the trash bin with dan. it’s where i was born it’s where i grew up and its where i will die. its who i am inside and out to my core. i cannot tell you what this man means to me. he’s so stupid and he owns my heart. every time he talks i scream SHUT UP at my phone and here’s his handwriting tattooed on my arm. love is love okay and god has cursed me to love a cringefail whore that’s just the way it is. yeah ‘embrace the void and have the courage to exist’ was my senior quote so what. what about it. let me have inferior taste. yknow what why are you interrogating me” and honestly we’re so real for that

[weil-weil-lautre]

The moment a thing is named, the moment representation and concepts take hold of it, is the moment when it begins to lose its energy--with the risk that it will become a truth or impose itself as ideology. It is when a thing is beginning to disappear that the concept appears.

Jean Baudrillard, "Why Is there Nothing Rather than Something?" (2007)

[emptyanddark]

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

[thepersonalwords]

Tell us which ideas you promote and we will know which type of person you are.

Eraldo Banovac

[kafkasapartment]

C. Wright Mills argued that people are often unaware of their connection to broader historical narratives. This can limit their understanding of how their actions impact the world and their potential to shape it. History, with its cycles of wars, revolutions, and personal struggles (education, economic circumstances, health) offers both cautionary tales and opportunities for learning. Whether we engage with these lessons or not, the echoes of the past continue to resonate.

Guernica, 1937. Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas.

[dakota-zen]

[st-just]

A central misconception regarding American education is that we are a uniquely terrible nation when it comes to schooling. This assumption is not defensible. It’s certainly true that our performance does not look good relative to expenditures, but then school funding is not consistently or simplistically associated with student performance. Overall, I think the evidence is strong that the United States has mediocre mean academic outcomes and that this disappointing average performance is the product of a relatively small number of schools in economically-challenged parts of the country that perform truly terribly. Our median student does alright, not great but alright, but our worst-performing students struggle dramatically compared to the rest of the developed world. Meanwhile, the top-performing American public school students are competitive with those from anywhere; I would put our top 1% or 3% or 5% of students up against those from any country. In events like the International Chemistry Olympiad and the International Mathematics Olympiad, for example, American students have excelled for decades. American high school students go on to flourish in the most elite universities in the world. Our problem isn’t at the top. The story of American education is not of generically bad or even mediocre results but of extreme inequality. Which is the general American story.

-Freddie deBoer

[disease]

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.”

—ALDOUS HUXLEY | “SERMONS IN CATS” >> MUSIC AT NIGHT AND OTHER ESSAYS [1931]