with this dude p e a c e FIRE, especially his joint sapphire that came out last year and has been getting some shine. I posted the GRUM edit of Sapphire on my tumblr. Seriously, this joint hit me in that Galactic Fun kinda way. (and that’s major). Very much looking forward to more from this guy.
late pass me or whatever, but caught Please Vote For Me on PBS. Here is the trailer:
Of course there all kinds of implications of democracy in China, impact of one child laws etc, but just as a study of these kids and their parents (one of the kids’ parents is friends with the director who is from Wuhan where it was filmed) and school it’s pretty fricken crazy. These kids tear each other apart and not in ways that are all that different that happens here, it’s just presented in a pretty intense way, with teachers looking and on and encouraging some of the gnarliness (again: not a comment on some kind of cultural difference, the same “cutthroatedness” is all over the US school system, just often manifested in stranger ways (and often more insidiously)).
It’s just (sometimes painfully) really entertaining and often visually impressive.
via, Matthew Yglesias, The Limits of Service:
A friend Twitters:
Service is great! But MLK’s life and work wasn’t about volunteering: it was about altering the distribution of power.
Quite so. I mean, it was about volunteering. But it was about volunteering for the cause of social justice—for a new, fairer, and more equal distribution of political and economic power. It wasn’t about doing charity work. More on this later.
If you weren’t aware, today is the “Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service.”
Yglesias and “friend” bring up excellent points and ones that begin for me the discussion re: the distinctions between “service” and “charity” and “volunteerism” et al. The charity argument is well worn: both David Wagner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It and Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism address the other side of private and corporate “giving.”
I guess in my mind the terms need all to be defined in popular parlance more, or just used more specifically. In any case, my main belief is that service can be a two way street. You serve because you recognize some kind of disparity that urges you to help, which could be the first step toward a consciousness that demands social justice. Or maybe you serve cause your church or school told you to…well in that case you are exposed to injustices that you may not have been aware of.
The key then is how you make meaning of those service experiences. It’s a pretty iffy prospect. Service experiences can go either way. Not that teach for america is the best example, but i know not a few TFA alum that became pretty hardened in their “man THEY are just lazy!”
All I’m sayin is: a blanket call for service is dangerous, it has to be in the larger framework, as Yglesias and friend point out, of working to end systemic inequality. (If that is the sort of thing is what you want)
Then of course, there is this:
Shot 14 times? 12 times in the back? (via diff kitchen)
Living in Santa Clarita, home of EXTREME NEIGHBORHOOD MAKEOVER (aka make your neighborhood look like ours or we’ll figure out a way to kick you out), this Yglesias post is rather comical and timely, as giant office buildings are still being built here…as commercial vacancies skyrocket. Linking to a Times piece articulating the surprise facing developers, dude easily points out how patently idiotic and without basic logic this all seems. WHO WERE THESE MORONS!?
