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thinkahol *

If You Don't Make At Least $200K, No One Cares About You | Care2 Causes - 0 views

www.care2.com/...0k-no-one-cares-about-you.html

If You Don't Make At Least $200K No One Cares About | Care2 Causes

shared by thinkahol * on 24 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 24 Jun 11
     
    It has become clear that in a era of Republicans focused on defending tax breaks for millionaires while cutting government assistance for everyone else, the middle class - and its influence in society - is shrinking. But we haven't just lost our political clout.  It turns out that we're no longer that influential in multiple spheres, including marketing.  At some point as more of the nations wealth became consolidated within the top percentage of the upper class, the consumer industry turned to them as the only people to woo.  And as the income gap grows, that's only going to continue.
thinkahol *

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11
     
    I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:
thinkahol *

Poll: 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans want interracial marriage ban - War Room - ... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Poll: 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans want interracial marriage ban - War Room Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Apr 11
     
    And more of those who oppose interracial marriage have a favorable view of Sarah Palin, a new poll reports
Amira .

How Language Shapes Thought By Lera Boroditsky | Scientific American January 20, 2011 p... - 3 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

languages culture Cultural differences cognitive science Cognition perception relativity

shared by Amira . on 26 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • In Brief People communicate using a multitude of languages that vary considerably in the information they convey. Scholars have long wondered whether different languages might impart different cognitive abilities. In recent years empirical evidence for this causal relation has emerged, indicating that one’s mother tongue does indeed mold the way one thinks about many aspects of the world, including space and time. The latest findings also hint that language is part and parcel of many more aspects of thought than scientists had previously realized.
  • The notion that different languages may impart different cognitive skills goes back centuries. Since the 1930s it has become associated with American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied how languages vary and proposed ways that speakers of different tongues may think differently. Although their ideas met with much excitement early on, there was one small problem: a near complete lack of evidence to support their claims. By the 1970s many scientists had become disenchanted with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it was all but abandoned as a new set of theories claiming that language and thought are universal muscled onto the scene. But now, decades later, a solid body of empirical evidence showing how languages shape thinking has finally emerged. The evidence overturns the long-standing dogma about universality and yields fascinating insights into the origins of knowledge and the construction of reality. The results have important implications for law, politics and education.
  • Under the Influence Around the world people communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages—7,000 or so all told—and each language requires very different things from its speakers. For example, suppose I want to tell you that I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb I used would reveal whether the event happened just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in Indonesian, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had already happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens to be a mother’s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states). And in Pirahã, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn’t say “42nd,” because there are no words for exact numbers, just words for “few” and “many.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Languages differ from one another in innumerable ways, but just because people talk differently does not necessarily mean they think differently.
  • Research in my lab and in many others has been uncovering how language shapes even the most fundamental dimensions of human experience: space, time, causality and relationships to others.
  • Let us return to Pormpuraaw. Unlike English, the Kuuk Thaayorre language spoken in Pormpuraaw does not use relative spatial terms such as left and right. Rather Kuuk Thaayorre speakers talk in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west, and so forth). Of course, in English we also use cardinal direction terms but only for large spatial scales. We would not say, for example, “They set the salad forks southeast of the dinner forks—the philistines!” But in Kuuk Thaayorre cardinal directions are used at all scales. This means one ends up saying things like “the cup is southeast of the plate” or “the boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother.” In Pormpuraaw, one must always stay oriented, just to be able to speak properly.
  • Amira . on 26 Jan 11
     
    The languages we speak affect our perceptions of the world.
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