Group items tagged

So many scholars and commentators attribute suicide terrorism to such factors as poverty, foreign occupation, or religion, among many other things.

Over the past two hundred years, there has been a global, though highly uneven, shift within the values systems of various societies.

One particularly profound transformation has been the relegation of one’s religion to the private sphere, as a matter of purely personal choice.

What better measure of society is there than through the fiction it creates? In 1988 the Japanese animation feature film AKIRA was released to the world envisioning the near future of a 2019 neo-Tokyo.

THE MATRIX in the U.S. would do for action and sci-fi movies, what AKIRA did for animation. The directors of THE MATRIX, the Wachowski brothers, cited one of their main influences and inspirations as AKIRA and that films director Katsuhiro Otomo

Fiction represents the ideas of a society that’s thinking as much about it’s future as it is it’s past and present. It represents as much about the hopes of that collective society and it’s factions as it does the fears. The concept of who and what heroes and villains are, protagonists and antagonists, are critical concepts for framing identity

Authorities in Venezuela say they will punish TV stations if they continue to broadcast episodes of cult US animation Family Guy.

the show should be banned because it promotes the use of marijuana

messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents

The term multiculturalism generally refers to the acceptance of various cultural divisions for the sake of diversity that applies to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the scale of an organization such as a school, business, neighborhood, city or nation.

Australia The response to multiculturalism in Australia has been extremely varied, with a recent wave of criticism against it in the past decade. An anti-immigration party, the One Nation Party, was formed by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s. The party enjoyed significant electoral success for a while, most notably in its home state of Queensland, but is now electorally marginalized. One Nation called for the abolition of multiculturalism on the grounds that it represented "a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values", arguing that there was "no reason why migrant cultures should be maintained at the expense of our shared, national culture."[83] A Federal Government proposal in 2006 to introduce a compulsory citizenship test, which would assess English skills and knowledge of Australian values, sparked renewed debate over the future of multiculturalism in Australia. Andrew Robb, then Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, told a conference in November 2006 that some Australians worried the term "multicultural" had been transformed by interest groups into a philosophy that put "allegiances to original culture ahead of national loyalty, a philosophy which fosters separate development, a federation of ethnic cultures, not one community". He added: "A community of separate cultures fosters a rights mentality, rather than a responsibilities mentality. It is divisive. It works against quick and effective integration."[84] The Australian citizenship test commenced in October 2007 for all new citizens between the ages of 18 and 60.[85] In January 2007 the Howard Government removed the word "multicultural" from the name of t

The response to multiculturalism in Australia has been extremely varied, with a recent wave of criticism against it in the past decade. An anti-immigration party, the One Nation Party , was formed by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s. The party enjoyed significant electoral success for a while, most notably in its home state of Queensland , but is now electorally marginalized. One Nation called for the abolition of multiculturalism on the grounds that it represented "a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values", arguing that there was "no reason why migrant cultures should be maintained at the expense of our shared, national culture." [83] A Federal Government proposal in 2006 to introduce a compulsory citizenship test, which would assess English skills and knowledge of Australian values, sparked renewed debate over the future of multiculturalism in Australia. Andrew Robb , then Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, told a conference in November 2006 that some Australians worried the term "multicultural" had been transformed by interest groups into a philosophy that put "allegiances to original culture ahead of national loyalty, a philosophy which fosters separate development, a federation of ethnic cultures, not one community". He added: "A community of separate cultures fosters a rights mentality, rather than a responsibilities mentality. It is divisive. It works against quick and effective integration." [84] The Australian citizenship test commenced in October 2007 for all new citizens between the ages of 18 and 60. [85] In January 2007 the Howard Government removed the word "multicultural" from the name of t he Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, changing its name to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Cairo

Mr Berry: When you walk in the gate it's nice. It gives you the impression that maybe you have a place in Australia maybe, maybe it feels like you in Australia, maybe somebody else, OK, maybe in Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else in the world, maybe in Italy, maybe somebody has the same feeling like Oh, this looks somewhere in Rome, somewhere in Greece

Mr Berry: Golf, it's a very prestigious thing.

Multiculturalism can be defined as a demographic make-up of a country where various cultural divisions are accepted for the sake of diversity. A melting pot, on the other hand, is a society where all of the people blend together to form one basic cultural norm based on the dominant culture.

They are young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance -- meet the "herbivore men" of Japan

some men who she said were changing the country's ideas about just what is -- and isn't -- masculine

"Some guys still try to be manly and try to be like strong and stuff, but you know personally I'm not afraid to show my vulnerability because being vulnerable or being sensitive is not a weakness."

News that Germany and France have, with a mini-bound, escaped recession must be the most ominous development of the week.

For those within this system, Germany had been an extremely comfortable place until the downturn. But the apparent failure of its export-driven social model changed all that. As a result, Germans had begun to campaign for a responsive political system.

In all sorts of ways,  Germans had begun to realise that the economy - and thence German society - had reached the end of the post-war path. The worry is that today’s GDP figures will drive them back to the old, familiar way of thinking.

coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. Can't we celebrate something else? Canberra is the political capital and Sydney is the economic capital and Brisbane is the lifestyle capital and Melbourne, we're the capital of brown boiled bean-juice that gives you morning-breath and loosens your stools with colonic laxativity

And I'd chosen the coffee machine because, as a resident of this city, I felt it was my municipal duty.

Boss blames smartphones for stress as company suicide rate comes under scrutiny September 25, 2009 Comments 12 A top executive at France's biggest telecommunications company, which is dealing with a spate of suicides, warned that the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees.

Research in Motion's popular BlackBerry has been dubbed CrackBerry in the United States, where some users say they are addicted to checking emails.

That is probably something we've not undertaken, not only at France Telecom but, it's more a global society issue, the impact of the new ways of working on personal behaviour," Pellissier said.

Concubines are no longer kept hidden away behind closed doors. In modern China's far more open society, concubines can be seen in the shopping malls and cafes of the cities, especially in the south, where there are thousands of what are known as "er nai" or "second breast".

"China's future will be undermined in those corrupt officials' hands," wrote one outraged citizen. Another described the corrupt cadres who keep concubines as "absolutely superfluous, vampires, corrupt scum. They deserve to be killed".