Equal Representation Quotes

...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

The representation of women in the society, especially through mass media has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence.

How often have you heard the argument that we have to slowly implement gender and racial equality in order to not “shock” society? Who is the “society” that people are talking about? I can guarantee that women would be able to handle equal pay or a harassment-free work environment right now, with no ramp-up. I’m certain that people of color would be able to deal with equal political representation and economic opportunity if they were made available today. So for whose benefit do we need to go so slowly? How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.

Most women and people of color have to claw their way to any chance at success or power, have to work twice as hard as white men and prove themselves to be exceptional talents before we begin to entertain discussions of truly equal representation in our workplaces or government.

she talked until she was hoarse about the basic rights of every citizen: equal education, equal pay, equal representation, and equal participation. Everyone quoted her and lots of people hated her,

Choose a leader who will build bridges - not walls. A leader who will promote peace - not wars. A leader who believes in equality - not discrimination. A leader who is transparent - not secretive. A leader who will speak for all - not just animals.

Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice.

the structure of the Senate is the result of the “Great Compromise” or “Connecticut Compromise” at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Smaller states were worried about being controlled by larger, more populous states. The South in particular was worried about losing the privilege to work and rape Black people to death. The compromise provided that one chamber of the legislature, the House of Representatives, would be apportioned based on population, while the other, the Senate, would give equal representation to each state. To put it another way: white slavers feared “democracy” so much that they wrote it out of the Constitution.

At the time, I thought the point was about representation: there should be more women chefs covered by the food media, just as there should be more people of color. But no, we’re talking about something much more vicious. It’s not just about the glass ceiling or equal opportunity. It’s about people being threatened, undermined, abused, and ashamed in the workplace. It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to grasp that.

If women really are practically interchangeable with men, because there is hardly any difference, why would it be important to strive for equal representation in a presidential cabinet? The distinction becomes something equivalent to hair color. Would fairness demand an equal number of blondes and brunettes in government?

Representation in popular culture is key. It is often the first way many of us learn about different identities, cultures, and ideas.

The dialectic of antiquity tended towards leadership (the great individual and the masses--the free man and the slaves); so far the dialectic of Christendom tends towards representation (the majority sees itself in its representative and is set free by the consciousness that it is the majority which is represented, in a sort of self-consciousness); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most logical--though mistaken--fulfilment is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative reciprocity of all individuals.

So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality—as it continues to do—there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.

But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine.

My pronoun is people, I'm divergent, yet invincible. I am straight, I am queer; I am civilian, I am seer. Spirit of life, I - am universal! Call me disabled or differently able, Call me collective or individual. Fleshly forms I've got plenty, All run by same love and liberty - Culture supreme is inclusion.

That was the way it worked. Hard to define, this stalking, this predation, because it was piecemeal. A bit here, a bit there, maybe, maybe not, perhaps, don’t know. It was constant hints, symbolisms, representations, metaphors. He could have meant what I thought he’d meant, but equally, he might not have meant anything. Taken on their own, or to describe each incident separately, particularly while in the middle of it, might not seem, once relayed, to be all that much at all. If I’d said, ‘He offered me a lift as I was walking along the interface road reading Ivanhoe,’ it would have been, ‘Why were you walking along that dangerous interface road and why were you reading Ivanhoe?

Equality has a built-in revolutionary force lacking in such ideas as justice or liberty. For once the ideal of equality becomes uppermost, it can become insatiable in its demands. It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality-once, that is, equality becomes a cornerstone of national policy. In this respect it resembles some of the religious ideals or passions that offer, just by virtue of the impossibility of ever giving them adequate representation in the actual world, almost unlimited potentialities for continuous onslaught against institutions.

The California State Department of Education has issued guidelines called “Standards for Evaluation of Instructional Materials with Respect to Social Content.” According to Education Code section 60040(a) and 60044(a), “Whenever an instructional material presents developments in history or current events, or achievements in art, science, or any other field, the contributions of women and men should be represented in approximately equal number.“ In effect, this law demands that the historian be more attentive to the demands of “equal representation” than to the historical facts. Needless to say, histories and social studies presented in this “fair” but factually skewed manner constitute an unworthy and dishonest approach to learning.

Equal opportunity” laws and policies require that individuals be judged on their qualifications as individuals, without regard to race, sex, age, etc. “Affirmative action” requires that they be judged with regard to such group membership, receiving preferential or compensatory treatment in some cases to achieve a more proportional “representation” in various institutions and occupations.

The last is the worship of God in innumerable forms. Each is a symbol that points to something beyond; and as none exhausts God’s actual nature, the entire array is needed to complete the picture of God’s aspects and manifestations. But though the representations point equally to God, it s advisable for each devotee to form a lifelong attachment to one, so only then can its meaning deepen and its full power become accessible. The ideal form for most people will be one of God’s incarnations, for God can be loved most readily in human form because our hearts are already attuned to loving people. Many Hindus readily acknowledge Christ as an incarnation as well as Rama, Krishna, and the Buddha. Whenever the stability of the world is seriously threatened, God descends to address the imbalance.

The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina.

Perhaps it is true that a representation of only the female side of things - which tends to be one long protest and complaint rather than the portrayal of a full and substantive existence - is limited. But an equally relevant question, one much less frequently asked, is: Is it more limited than the prevailing male view of things, which when not taken as absolute truth - is at least seen as "serious," relevant and important?

Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work: the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy. Which is why the success of these unruly women is inextricable from the confluence of attitudes toward women in the 2010s: the public reembrace of feminism set against a backdrop of increased legislation of women’s bodies, the persistence of the income gap, the policing of how women’s bodies should look and act in public, and the election of Trump. Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

Perhaps the most obvious political inequality is the violation of the precept one person one vote. Yet until recent times most writers rejected equal universal suffrage. Indeed, persons were not regarded as the proper subjects of representation at all. Often it was interests that were to be represented, with Whig and Tory differing as to whether the interest of the rising middle class should be given a place alongside the landed and ecclesiastical interests. For others it is regions that are to be represented, or forms of culture, as when one speaks of the representation of the agricultural and urban elements of society. At the first sight, these kinds of representation appear unjust. How far they depart from the precept one person one vote is a measure of their abstract injustice, and indicates the strength of the countervailing reasons that must be forthcoming.119

As lawyers, our first responsibility is, of course, to see that the legal profession provides adequate representation for all people in our society. I would suggest there is no subject which is more important to the legal profession, that is more important to this nation, than & the realization of the ideal of equal justice under law for all. RICHARD NIXON, IN HIS SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL LEGAL AID AND DEFENDER ASSOCIATION (OCTOBER 1962) [E]very

I’m done being polite about this bullshit. My list of professional insecurities entirely stems from being a young woman. Big plot twist there! As much as I like to execute equality instead of discussing the blaring inequality, the latter is still necessary. Everything, everywhere, is still necessary. The more women who take on leadership positions, the more representation of women in power will affect and shift the deep-rooted misogyny of our culture—perhaps erasing a lot of these inherent and inward concerns. But whether a woman is a boss or not isn’t even what I’m talking about—I’m talking about when she is, because even when she manages to climb up to the top, there’s much more to do, much more to change. When a woman is in charge, there are still unspoken ideas, presumptions, and judgments being thrown up into the invisible, terribly lit air in any office or workplace. And I’m a white woman in a leadership position—I can only speak from my point of view. The challenges that women of color face in the workforce are even greater, the hurdles even higher, the pay gap even wider. The ingrained, unconscious bias is even stronger against them. It’s overwhelming to think about the amount of restructuring and realigning we have to do, mentally and physically, to create equality, but it starts with acknowledging the difference, the problem, over and over.

You see... the cave is a metaphor, a tool, an illustration. The formula for its accurate representation is something like S2=(2^2)+1. As I just pasted that formula into this document I realized I do not speak math and therefore could not read that formula aloud were I ever in a situation like a reading where I would need to say the formula out loud. I don't know what S means or what S2 equals, nor do I know how to pronounce that little upside-down V between the pair of 2s. If you speak math, then you know what it means.

The underlying principles, accidental and incoherent though their evolution may have been, have been exported around the globe for good reason: the presumption of innocence and burden of proof, the right to a fair trial, the right to independent legal representation, equality of arms, an independent judiciary, non-partisan tribunals of fact and the other fiercely debated, non-exhaustive aspects of the rule of law on which our present settlement is premised, all stand as self-evidently necessary to our instinctual conceptions of justice.

My Pronoun is People (Inclusivity Sonnet, 1266) My pronoun is people, I'm divergent, yet invincible. I am straight, I am queer; I am civilian, I am seer. Spirit of life, I - am universal! Call me disabled or differently able, Call me collective or individual. Fleshly forms I've got plenty, All run by same love and liberty - Culture supreme is inclusion. Each heart is a shelter for another, Each life is sanctuary for another. Blasting all traditions of divide into cinders with knowledge-dynamite, we shall emerge as each other's keeper. You ask, what am I - I say, I am human, Better yet, I'm human's idea of a human. I am but the human absolute - morally unbending 'n divinely cute - ever evolving testament to expansion.

Questioning this most dearly held core of the Dutch sense of self not only is felt as a direct attack, it also means that the nonbeliever, the antiracist killjoy, is putting himself or herself above “us,” which in itself again runs deeply counter to another strand in the Dutch sense of self: “gelijke monnikken, gelijke kappen” (literally, equal monks, equal cowls), which invokes the deep egalitarian strand in Dutch self-representation. Critical self-reflection, moreover and ironically, is a scarce commodity in a culture that delights in imagining itself as “nothing,” “just normal” (Ramdas 1998), without specific characteristics, much less infused with deep racializations. The point of not knowing, racial ignorance, and innocence has long passed.

Reason uses this discrepancy between intention and unintended results for the insidious realization of its own purposes; Hegel speaks here of “the cunning of Reason.” Half a century before Hegel the point had already been made most eloquently by Adam Ferguson: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not of human design. Cromwell said, That a man never mounts higher, than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affirmed of communities, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects.” See A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767; repr., Cambridge, 1995), 119.

The point was that the ‘continual toil’ and want of leisure of the majority of the population would automatically exclude them from active participation in government though, of course, not from being represented and from choosing their representatives. But representation is no more than a matter of 'self-preservation' or self-interest, necessary to protect the lives of the labourers and to shield them against the encroachment of government; these essentially negative safeguards by no means open the political realm to the many, nor can they arouse in them that 'passion for distinction' - the 'desire not only to equal or resemble, but to excel' - which, according to John Adams, 'next to self-preservation will forever be the great spring of human actions'. Hence the predicament of the poor after their self-preservation has been assured is that their lives are without consequence, and that they remain excluded from the light of the public realm where excellence can shine;

One should not conclude too hastily that the degradation of American political practices is a decline in power. Behind this masquerade, there is a vast political strategy (certainly not deliberate; it would require too much intelligence) that belies our eternal democratic illusions. By electing Schwarzenegger (or in Bush's rigged election in 2000), in this bewildering parody of all systems of representation, America took revenge for the disdain of which it is the object. In this way, it proved its imaginary power because no one can equal it in its headlong course into the democratic masquerade, into the nihilist enterprise of liquidating value and a more total simulation than even in the areas of finance and weapons. America has a long head start. This extreme, empirical and technical form of mockery and the profanation of values, this radical obscenity and total impiety of a people, otherwise known as "religious," this is what fascinates everyone. This is what we enjoy even through rejection and sarcasm: this phenomenal vulgarity, a (political, televisual) universe brought to the zero degree of culture. It is also the secret of global hegemony.

The most obvious way that defensive motivational states make themselves known to us is, in fact, through our own behavior. The ability to observe one’s behavior and thus create representations of behavior in working memory is called monitoring.77 By directing our attention to our behavioral output, we can acquire information about what we are doing and intentionally adjust our behavior in light of thoughts, memories, and feelings. As an executive function of working memory, monitoring, not surprisingly, involves circuits in the prefrontal cortex.78 We use observations of our own behavior to regulate how we act in social situations.79 If you become aware that your behavior is negatively affecting others, you can make adjustments as a social situation evolves. Or if you notice you are acting in a biased way toward some group, you can make corrections. In addition, through monitoring one can observe undesirable habits and seek to change these through therapy or other means. Not everyone is equally adept at using monitoring to improve self-awareness. The field of emotional intelligence is all about how people differ in such abilities and how one can be trained to do better.80

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple. ...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, and spiritual proofs; on the other, the expansion of Christian dogma in the direction of tradition and esoteric science, and subsequently a reorganization of the Church according to a graduated initiation; this by a free and irresistible movement of all Christian churches, which are also equally daughters of the Christ. Science must become religious and religion scientific. This double evolution, already in preparation, would finally and forcibly bring about a reconciliation of Science and Religion on esoteric grounds. The work will not progress without considerable difficulty at first, but the future of European Society depends on it. The transformation of Christianity, in its esoteric sense would bring with it that of Judaism and Islam, as well as a regeneration of Brahmanism and Buddhism in the same fashion, it would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe.

Naturally, at first, one is inclined to regard such differences as mere individual idiosyncrasies. But anyone with the opportunity of gaining a fundamental knowledge of many men will soon discover that such a far-reaching contrast does not merely concern the individual case, but is a question of typical attitudes, with a universality far greater than a limited psychological experience would at first assume. In reality, as the preceding chapters will have shown, it is a question of a fundamental opposition; at times clear and at times obscure, but always emerging whenever we are dealing with individuals whose personality is in any way pronounced. Such men are found not only among the educated classes, but in every rank of society; with equal distinctness, therefore, our types can be demonstrated among labourers and peasants as among the most differentiated members of a nation. Furthermore, these types over-ride the distinctions of sex, since one finds the same contrasts amongst women of all classes. Such a universal distribution could hardly arise at the instigation of consciousness, ie. as the result of a conscious and deliberate choice of attitude. If this were the case, a definite level of society, linked together by a similar education and environment and, therefore, correspondingly localized, would surely have a majority representation of such an attitude. But the actual facts are just the reverse, for the types have, apparently, quite a random distribution. In the same family one child is introverted, and another extraverted.

The manifold content in our representations can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous—in other words, is nothing but susceptibility; and the form of this intuition can exist a priori in our faculty of representation, without being anything else but the mode in which the subject is affected. But the conjunction (conjunctio) of a manifold in intuition never can be given us by the senses; it cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the faculty of representation. And as we must, to distinguish it from sensibility, entitle this faculty understanding; so all conjunction—whether conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions—is an act of the understanding. To this act we shall give the general appellation of synthesis, thereby to indicate, at the same time, that we cannot represent anything as conjoined in the object without having previously conjoined it ourselves. Of all mental notions, that of conjunction is the only one which cannot be given through objects, but can be originated only by the subject itself, because it is an act of its purely spontaneous activity. The reader will easily enough perceive that the possibility of conjunction must be grounded in the very nature of this act, and that it must be equally valid for all conjunction, and that analysis, which appears to be its contrary, must, nevertheless, always presuppose it; for where the understanding has not previously conjoined, it cannot dissect or analyse, because only as conjoined by it, must that which is to be analysed have been given to our faculty of representation.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

The textbooks of history prepared for the public schools are marked by a rather naive parochialism and chauvinism. There is no need to dwell on such futilities. But it must be admitted that even for the most conscientious historian abstention from judgments of value may offer certain difficulties. As a man and as a citizen the historian takes sides in many feuds and controversies of his age. It is not easy to combine scientific aloofness in historical studies with partisanship in mundane interests. But that can and has been achieved by outstanding historians. The historian's world view may color his work. His representation of events may be interlarded with remarks that betray his feelings and wishes and divulge his party affiliation. However, the postulate of scientific history's abstention from value judgments is not infringed by occasional remarks expressing the preferences of the historian if the general purport of the study is not affected. If the writer, speaking of an inept commander of the forces of his own nation or party, says "unfortunately" the general was not equal to his task, he has not failed in his duty as a historian. The historian is free to lament the destruction of the masterpieces of Greek art provided his regret does not influence his report of the events that brought about this destruction. The problem of Wertfreíheit must also be clearly distinguished from that of the choice of theories resorted to for the interpretation of facts. In dealing with the data available, the historian needs ali the knowledge provided by the other disciplines, by logic, mathematics, praxeology, and the natural sciences. If what these disciplines teach is insufficient or if the historian chooses an erroneous theory out of several conflicting theories held by the specialists, his effort is misled and his performance is abortive. It may be that he chose an untenable theory because he was biased and this theory best suited his party spirit. But the acceptance of a faulty doctrine may often be merely the outcome of ignorance or of the fact that it enjoys greater popularity than more correct doctrines. The main source of dissent among historians is divergence in regard to the teachings of ali the other branches of knowledge upon which they base their presentation. To a historian of earlier days who believed in witchcraft, magic, and the devil's interference with human affairs, things hàd a different aspect than they have for an agnostic historian. The neomercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of presentday world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics.

Deists, not religious authoritarians, codified the clear separation of church from state in addition to the division of powers within the state. Deists, not the Continental philosophers, established our democratic republic upon uniquely radical interpretations of constitutional and procedural stability, representation, accountability, and transparency. Deists, not autocrats, formed a more perfect Union that preserved equally for each individual the universal civil liberties inscribed in the Bill of Rights. It was Deists who stood up for Everyman by instituting true equality and freedom for all.

It may be thought that administrative legislation at least comes with virtual representation. Although the administrative lawmakers themselves are unelected, they are appointed by presidential authority, and they act under congressional authorization or acquiescence. It therefore could be imagined that they are virtually, even if not actually, acting as representatives of the people. In fact, however, most administrators are not even chosen directly by the president. Although heads of agencies and a few others at the top of each agency are political appointees, selected by the president or his staff, almost all other administrators are hired by existing administrators. Thus, almost all of those who make law through administrative interpretations were never even picked by elected politicians. Far from being elected by the people, let alone elected politicians, they are appointed by other administrators. Their authority thus is not even virtually representative, but is merely that of a self-perpetuating bureaucratic class. Accordingly, the suggestion that their lawmaking comes with virtual representation is illusory. Virtual representation, moreover, is not a very convincing theory, for it traditionally was an excuse for denying representation to colonists and then to women. For example, although women could not elect representatives and senators, they were said to be virtually represented through their husbands or fathers.10 Nowadays, the same sort of theory (whether put in terms of “virtual,” “delegated,” or “derivative” representation) remains an excuse for refusing representation—this time for refusing it to the entire nation. Nor is this a coincidence. As will soon be seen, it was when Americans acquired equal voting rights that much legislation was shifted outside the elected legislature. The virtual representation excuse therefore should be understood in the same way in the past, as a brazen justification for denying representation. Administrative agencies or officers thus are not representative lawmaking bodies, let alone the Constitution’s representative lawmaking body. Perhaps it will be suggested that it is sufficient for administrative power to be mere state coercion. But no one, neither an individual nor a government, has any natural superiority or power over anyone else. Therefore, if a law is not to be mere coercion, it must be made by the people or at least by their representative legislature, and obviously administrative law is not made by either.

The delegates solved this baffling riddle by deciding that all states would enjoy equal representation in the Senate (a sop to small states) while representation in the House of Representatives would be proportionate to each state’s population (a sop to large states). This broke the deadlock, though the Senate’s composition introduced a lasting political bias in American life in favor of smaller states.

The Pluto boys were already The Planets so the Pluto girls were The Lady Planets. Their colors were purple and white, their mascot was a round planet with legs, arms, a perky face. The Reservation team was The Warriors but the girls weren't The Lady Warriors, they were just The Warriors also. Their colors were blue and gold. They didn't want to have themselves as a mascot so they had an old time shield with two eagle feathers.

It is clear that now the war for legal equality has been won, the war for lover’s parity has begun.

One of the shortfalls of representation rhetoric is that it advertises a simplistic blueprint for racial equality in which people of color are visually “included” in spaces regularly reserved for white people. The dominant thought is: If we just show more minoritized faces in the white marketplace, then progress is being made.

Our revolution of '76, and onward, was not a rebellion; it was resistance of oppression, of burdensome taxation without equal representation, and it resulted in our distinct nationality.

If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture.

Majorities, no less than minorities, need the assurance that they are being treated fairly, otherwise they are sure to mobilize through democratic channels to affirm their interests. By not only tolerating but enshrining it in law, proportional representation is rapidly balkanizing the country along racial lines, destroying the confidence of citizens that the law will treat them equally and provoking a strong and largely justified backlash.

He painted beautiful demons that smiled with frightening realism from the canvas; demons that-even though only representations in paint-promised pain and pleasure in equal measure.

In order for Japan to become an equal member of the international community, the western perception of time had to be accepted. The western calendar was adopted with much complaint in 1872, with the decision that the third day of the succeeding twelfth month would become the first day of 1873. The decree added: On this day a ceremony…will be held, and the Emperor will inform the sun goddess and the imperial ancestors of the change…. The day will be divided into 24 hours instead of twelve two-hour periods, as hitherto.

Such distrust regarding democracy was also very widespread in the United States in the era of the supposed “Founding Fathers.” Ralph Ketcham perfectly summarized this situation by writing that “virtually all shades of opinion reviled monarchy and democracy, and, publicly at least, supported republicanism.” In effect, the distinction between democratic government and republican government was of the utmost importance (even if there were semantic variations), and politicians such as James Madison condemned the error consisting in confounding “a republic with a democracy.” He opposed, for his part, the qualities of republics, founded on representation and better adapted to large states, to the flaws of democracies, which are incapable of stretching across vast territories or of protecting themselves against pernicious factions. In a similar fashion, Alexander Hamilton called for the unification of the states into a “confederate republic” rather than into a democracy, which he described as being unstable and imprudent. William Cobbett, the editor of a pro-Federalist paper, went further still by expressing himself with remarkable candor: “O base democracy! Why, it is absolutely worse than street-sweepings, or the filth of the common sewers.” Yet it is perhaps John Adams who, better than anyone, lucidly summarized the dangers of democracy in the eyes of the most powerful statesmen. For he feared that the majority, who were very poor, would wish to redistribute goods and establish material equality.

Men globally need urgent lesson in basic mathematics regarding representation of women. Any mention of equality of women inevitably give rise to questions of morality of women. There is a dire need to realize that there is no morality in inequality.

There are laws of nature. We may describe the laws of nature but still not wholly unravel and understand them to pronounce that scientific laws are equal to natural laws or that they are an absolute representation of natural laws. Scientific laws did not yet cover, describe, and explain all natural laws, mysteries, and secrets.

Equally scandalized by this election are the colorful band of lipstick jihadi Hirsi Ali wannabes who are writing one erotic fantasy after another about Iranian “women,” oversexualizing Iranian politics as they opt for “love and danger” during their “honeymoon in Tehran.” The representation of Iranian women in the flea market of the US publishing industry began under President Bush with Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and has now reached a new depth of depravity in Pardis Mahdavi’s Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Between a harem full of Lolitas and a bathhouse of nymphomaniacs is where Nafisi and Mahdavi have Iranian women, marching in despair, awaiting liberation by US marines and Israeli bombers. What a contrast to the real work of women, as testified to in this election, and now on the street in defense of the collective will of the nation.

The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that God created man “in His image, after His likeness.” Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that God has no image. Hence the prohibition against making images of God. For God is beyond all representation, all categorization. “I will be what I will be,” He says to Moses when Moses asks Him His name. All images, forms, concepts and categories are attempts to delimit and define. God cannot be delimited or defined; the attempt to do so is a form of idolatry. “Image,” then, must refer to something quite different than the possession of a specific form. The fundamental point of Genesis 1 is that God transcends nature. Therefore, He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings “in His image,” God gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative. The unprecedented account of God in the Torah’s opening chapter leads to an equally unprecedented view of the human person and the capacity for self-transformation. [...] Everything else in creation is what it is, neither good nor evil, bound by nature and nature’s laws. The human person alone has the possibility of self-transcendence. We may be a handful of dust but we have immortal longings.

Calling God 'her'so that women have some kind of 'representation' in the divinity, makes God a projection of ourselves and language about God the instrument of our social projects. If either men or women worship a God made in their image they are idolaters, worshiping themselves.... Behind worry about using masculine pronouns for God lies a logic, pervasive but wrongheaded. It begins, admirably, with justice. But biblical justice gets defined in terms of American legal equality, and equality gets reduced to interchangeability.

For the main object of his representation is the word itself, and specifically the fully signifying word. Dostoevsky’s works are a word about a word addressed to a word. The represented word comes together with the representing word on one level and on equal terms. They penetrate one another, overlap one another at various dialogic angles. As a result of this encounter, new aspects and new functions of the word are revealed and brought to the fore,

The same thing appears in the nature and design of the sacraments, which God hath appointed. God, considering our frame, hath not only appointed that we should be told of the great things of the gospel, and of the redemption of Christ, and instructed in them by his word; but also that they should be, as it were, exhibited to our view, in sensible representations, in the sacraments, the more to affect us with them. And the impressing divine things on the hearts and affections of men, is evidently one great and main end for which God has ordained that his word delivered in the holy Scriptures, should be opened, applied, and set home upon men, in preaching. And therefore it does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend as well as preaching to give men a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the things of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word to men in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of the things of religion, and their own misery, and necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; and to stir up the pure minds of the saints, and quicken their affections, by often bringing the great things of religion to their remembrance, and setting them before them in their proper colors, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already, 2 Pet. 1:12, 13. And particularly, to promote those two affections in them, which are spoken of in the text, love and joy: "Christ gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; that the body of Christ might be edified in love," Eph. 4:11, 12, 16. The apostle in instructing and counseling Timothy concerning the work of the ministry, informs him that the great end of that word which a minister is to preach, is love or charity, 1 Tim. 3, 4, 5. And another affection which God has appointed preaching as a means to promote in the saints, is joy; and therefore ministers are called "helpers of their joy," 2 Cor. 1:24.

Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply. Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances. These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.

The states are given representation in the Rajya Sabha on the basis of population. Hence, the membership varies from 1 to 31. In US, on the other hand, the principle of equality of representation of states in the Upper House is fully recognised. Thus, the American Senate has 100 members, two from each state. This principle is regarded as a safeguard for smaller states.

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; a Quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President. The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States. No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States. In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected. The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them. Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I say this because all religions, accurately understood, will take away your fear of not being enough. I believe there is a way to understand the tenets of your religion, right now, that will take away your fear and make you feel loved and safe. The problem is that no matter what you believe or to which religion you belong, there are two ways you can experience your beliefs. There is a fear way you can experience your religion, and a love way to experience it. All religions can be experienced both ways. All life philosophies can be experienced both ways too. If you search your personal books of scripture, you will find both ideas equally represented. There will be verses or sections that validate a fear-based view of God and there will be some that validate a love-based view of God. Don’t be confused by this. Both ideas had to be represented for you to have free agency. Anything less than equal representation of each idea would take away your freedom to choose.

The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate—it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President on August 31—was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless democracy. The idea of cabinet government was borrowed from England and France, of a strong popular President from the United States, of the referendum from Switzerland. An elaborate and complicated system of proportional representation and voting by lists was established in order to prevent the wasting of votes and give small minorities a right to be represented in Parliament.*   The wording of the Weimar Constitution was sweet and eloquent to the ear of any democratically minded man. The people were declared sovereign: “Political power emanates from the people.” Men and women were given the vote at the age of twenty. “All Germans are equal before the law … Personal liberty is inviolable … Every German has a right … to express his opinion freely … All Germans have the right to form associations or societies … All inhabitants of the Reich enjoy complete liberty of belief and conscience …” No man in the world would be more free than a German, no government more democratic and liberal than his. On paper, at least.

Representation for representation sake is very dangerous.

The ideal of whiteness makes a strong appeal. It flatters white people by associating them with (what they define as) the best in human beauty and virtue. The very idea of a best and of striving towards it accords with the aspirational structure of whiteness. There is an ecstasy to be felt in the luminescent representation discussed in the next chapter, a luminescence that makes sense in the context of the idea of whiteness as transcendence, dissolution into pure spirit and no-thing-ness. Equally, the ideal of white as absence may be confounded with the wider representational mode discussed above: being nothing at all may readily be felt as being nothing in particular, the representative human, the subject without properties.

The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of “deputies” to represent it. This meant that the clergy and the nobility together could outvote anything that the rest, collectively known as “the Third Estate,” wanted; the idea of proportional representation—or any meaningful voice for the people—was

which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.

Ethnicity is often mistakenly associated exclusively with People of Colour, particularly in its use in 'official' terms such as BAME but equally when White people refer to 'ethnic clothes' or 'ethnic food'. However, ethnicity is a term that refers to any group of people who share an intersection of several factors of identity........ As such there are a range of ethnicities within the White population. eg Cornish ethnicity.

Equality is the planning committee. Diversity is being invited to the party Inclusion is being invited to the dance Belonging is choosing a song

All dramas, and more comprehensively, all works of art, necessarily contain a surface, namely, the explicit action, poetical discourse, or symbolic representation of spiritual states, and a deeper interior consisting equally of the artist’s fuller intentions as well as the responses of the audience. It is intrinsic to the nature of things that the surface conceals the depths, not because of the insincerity or duplicitousness of the artist, but because depths reveal themselves only through the specificities of surfaces.

We too often forget," says Spencer at the outset, "that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil/ but generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous." He proposes, therefore, to examine religious ideas, with a view to finding that core of truth which under the changing form of many faiths, has given to religion its persistent power over the human soul. What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, "God made the world," the child's unanswerable query comes, "Who made God?" All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable. All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule: we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible, which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility, which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. "Ultimate scientific ideas," then, "are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended. ... In all directions the scientist's investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known." The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley's word, is agnosticism.

The male student flung up his hands in exasperation. “For the last time, Marie-Delphine, I never said women didn’t like all porn,” obviously attempting to clarify some earlier statement he’d made. “I’m saying that they don’t like this kind of stuff. It’s so... degrading and demeaning. I can’t believe that someone who fights so hard for equal representation in the wizarding world isn’t able to see that.” “I see it,” the dark-skinned woman shot back, “and I happen to think it's goddess-damned hot. Just because a woman likes a little of the rough shit in the bedroom doesn’t preclude her from being able to harness the primordial forces of creation.

Allowing the extension of slavery, leading to the creation of new slave states, would magnify the voting advantage the Constitution had granted to slaveholders from the start. Slaves could not vote, but three-fifths of their number counted toward representation in the lower house of Congress. As a result, white Southerners wielded more power per person than white Northerners. Lincoln cited two states: South Carolina and Maine. Each had six representatives and therefore eight presidential electors. “In the control of the government, the two states are equals precisely.” But Maine had more than twice as many white people as South Carolina. “Thus each white man in South Carolina is more than the double of any man in Maine.

The world is a very strange place, and there are times when the metaphorical or narrative description characteristic of culture and the material representation so integral to science appear to touch, when everything comes together—when life and art reflect each other equally.

The one difference between Godse and the so-called secularists in India is that Godse swore by genuinely secular and democratic principles, so that ‘all Indians should enjoy equal rights and complete equality on the basis of democracy’ and no special privileges on the basis of communal identity, such as weightage in parliamentary representation for the Muslims.

No matter the response though, I still and will always believe that representation of all kinds is essential. My work-the memoirs, anthologies, novels, television pilots, magazine articles-is just one long attempt to make sure that people from different backgrounds are seen and heard, especially people who are in some practical way challenging the status quo, and offering different interpretations of what it means to be a human being right now. What it means to be a feminist, for example, what it means to be a man in a culture that demands toxic masculinity. What it means to spend your days challenging the racism coded into artificial intelligence, to be pansexual and polyamorous, to be the third generation in your family to struggle with schizophrenia, to embark on the arduous search for your identity as a transracial adoptee. To have a family member in prison.

Rarely do issues have “two sides” of equal scientific merit that deserve equal representation. Credentials alone mean little. Those representing themselves as scientists or physicians may well have doctorates, but they may also be speaking well outside their areas of expertise. The story of the little guy going up against an evil corporation may make for a compelling (and well-worn) narrative, but often the little guy is working with bad science.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the plurality, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for finding for plaintiffs, noting that the Equal Protection Clause “guarantees equal protection of the law to persons, not equal representation in government to equivalently sized groups.” The plurality opinion cited one of the leading casebooks on voting rights for the proposition that, throughout its subsequent history, “Bandemer has served almost exclusively as an invitation to litigation without much prospect of redress.”88 Justice Scalia pointed out that those who had sought relief under Bandemer had achieved nothing except to rack up substantial legal fees. The

he law is a blunt tool and though it makes tall claims of being objective and neutral, in itself, the law is fragile and will not smash patriarchy. Rather, The courts have always favored the power structure and shielded those who are resourceful. The courtrooms, themselves as a symbol of authority, defend the values of supremacy and protect the oppressive and regressive system. However, those on the margins with their conviction and belief in the values of democracy, justice, and the rule of law, need to shake the system. With individual or through collective action the marginalized are challenging the power structure and are compelling the state and the society to make social and political transformation at a larger level. Angela Davis said that “in a racist society it is not enough to be a non-racist. We must be anti-racist”. Similarly, here it may be derived that `in a patriarchal society, it is not enough to be a non-patriarchal. We must be anti-patriarchy’. The women with their sheer will and conviction are marching ahead to smash patriarchy using law as an instrument of change. However, what is required is the radical interpretation of constitutional values by the courts and this should be strengthened by assuring the equal representation of women within the judiciary at all levels to open up the possibility of nondiscrimination within the patriarchal hostile settings.

9 We were antonyms The chemical imbalance An erupted Yellowstone Creek volcano We were lost in translation Our bodies equally in contemplation This has to be it The myriad form of intoxication. The Metaphor of Metamorphosis 10 A glacial naked body "A poetic equivalent of representation Governed in your mind as an option of versatility I was only one of your many drafts How naïve of me to think that this, this was love at first sight.

Even with their strengthened rights under the Lisbon Treaty, citizens still lack a meaningful connection with the EU; and it would be unwise to ignore the track record of representative democracy as a major element in citizenship. As long as citizens do not see the Parliament as being on an equal footing with the Council of Ministers, they are not likely to regard it as a sufficiently important channel of representation. The Council of Ministers, representing the states, is an essential part of the EU’s legislature too. But despite the progress in holding legislative sessions in public, it remains at the centre of an opaque system of quasi-diplomatic negotiation. Representation in a powerful house of the citizens may well be a condition of the latter’s support for the EU over the longer term.

What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, “God made the world,” the child’s unanswerable query comes, “Who made God?” All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable. All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule; we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible,—which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility,—which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force—a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. “Ultimate scientific ideas,” then, “are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended... In all directions the scientist’s investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known.”305 The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley’s word, is agnosticism.

they not only recognize and comply with prescriptions to imagine but also themselves serve as reflexive props, generating by their actions and thoughts and feelings fictional truths about themselves, and imagining accordingly. Thus do appreciators immerse themselves in fictional worlds. They are carried away by the pretense, caught up in the story. Such immersion is not equally part of all appreciation, however. Sometimes appreciators participate scarcely at all. Some representations positively discourage participation, especially the psychological participation that would constitute the experience of being caught up in the story. That experience is perhaps the aim of much “romantic” art, broadly speaking, but works of certain other kinds shun it as sentimental excess, deliberately “distancing” the appreciator from the fictional world. Representations sometimes hinder even the imagining of what is fictional. In doing so they effectively undercut appreciators’ roles as reflexive props. For if one does not imagine a proposition, it is unlikely to be fictional that one knows or believes it; and if one imagines it with minimal vivacity, one is unlikely to have the experience of fictionally being concerned or upset or relieved or frightened or overjoyed by the fact that it is true.

It’s natural that we should fear and be suspicious of representations of us by those who are not like us. Equally rational is the assumption that those who are like us will at least take care with their depictions, and will be motivated by love and intimate knowledge instead of prejudice and phobia. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing by women, and by oppressed minorities of all kinds, has wondrously expanded the literary landscape, ennobling griefs that had, historically, either passed unnoticed or been brutally suppressed and caricatured. We’re eager to speak for ourselves. But in our justified desire to level or even obliterate the old power structures—to reclaim our agency when it comes to the representation of selves—we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood. Of what a self may contain that is both unseen and ultimately unknowable. Of what invisible griefs we might share, over and above our many manifest and significant differences. We also forget what writers are: people with voices in our heads and a great deal of inappropriate curiosity about the lives of others.

ON JULY 1, 2006, Cory Booker officially took office as the new mayor of Newark. He’d gained fame in the late ’90s as a city councilman who would sleep in a tent at city housing projects, hold hunger strikes and live on food stamps, patrol bad neighborhoods himself and physically confront the dealers holding down their corners. His victory was the first regime change in two decades, and it happened only after six years of near-bloody battling between the young, charismatic, light-skinned, Stanford-Yale-Oxford-educated upstart and the old, grizzled, but equally charismatic incumbent. The tension between Cory Booker and Sharpe James had been national news for most of the ’00s. The 2002 election, which Booker lost, was documented in the Oscar-nominated Streetfight, which between talking head interviews showed intense footage of the predominantly poor, black constituents who ardently supported James’s altercating with the working-class whites and Puerto Ricans who fought for Booker and his eloquent calls for public service and revitalization. The documentary was a near-perfect picture of a specific place and time: the declining city at risk of being left behind, the shoulder-height view of the vast number of problems in play, and the presentation of two equal and opposing paths forward whose backers were split almost definitively along socioeconomic lines. The 2002 election had been beyond combative; a riot nearly broke out when Booker showed up at a street basketball tournament that Sharpe James was already attending, and James called Booker “a Republican who took money from the KKK and the Taliban . . . who’s collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.” When James—who was constantly being investigated for various alleged corruptions—won the election by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, his victory seemed to cement Newark’s representation of “permanent poverty,” a culture of violence and corruption (at least if you subscribed to the New York Times).

...I'm learning the need to actively seek diverse representation in decision making, leadership and speaker scheduling. To the degree we do not, we are consciously or unconsciously discriminating and thereby doing a disservice to the kingdom. To be clear, diversity doesn't trump competence, character, or having a message. Leaders and teachers have, and should have, a high bar of accountability with regard to teaching and influence.

In American politics, power is presumptively illegitimate. It’s important to remember this. Our founding is premised on the notion that power is inherently hostile to freedom. The pamphlets of the Revolution are heavy with warnings that citizens must “jealously” guard their liberties against tyrannies of the state. The Constitution, even as it created a stronger national government, hobbled that government with checks and balances, separations of power, local prerogatives, and deliberate ambiguities meant to be resolved in favor of the people. So if power has always been suspect here, on what basis does it truly earn legitimacy in America? On this basis only: inclusion. From hatred of “taxation without representation” to passion for “equal protection of the law,” we Americans have believed in and preached inclusion. Even when we have failed to practice it.

About the principle of representation and the concept of a parliament, today we have grown accustomed to associating them exclusively with the system of absolute democracy, based on universal suffrage and the principle of one man, one vote. This basis is absurd and indicates more than anything else the individualism that, combined with the pure criterion of quantity and of number, defines modern democracy. We say individualism in the bad sense, because here we are dealing with the individual as an abstract, atomistic and statistical unity, not as a ‘person’, because the quality of a person — that is, a being that has a specific dignity, a unique quality and differentiated traits—is obviously negated and offended in a system in which one vote is the equal of any other, in which the vote of a great thinker, a prince of the Church, an eminent jurist or sociologist, the commander of an army, and so on has the same weight, measured by counting votes, as the vote of an illiterate butcher’s boy, a halfwit, or the ordinary man in the street who allows himself to be influenced in public meetings, or who votes for whoever pays him. The fact that we can talk about ‘progress’ in reference to a society where we have reached the level of considering all this as normal is one of the many absurdities that, perhaps, in better times will be the cause of amazement or amusement.

Because the world is our collective Idea – our Conception, our Representation, a manifestation of our Collective Will – we can change it whenever we want, but only if we all act together. We can do so only if we all accept, know and understand the same Truth, the mathematical truth of existence. This hell we are in is just a mental projection. We can project heaven if we want to, but we have to be smart enough. We have to overcome the delusion of mainstream religion and the equally serious delusion of scientism. Mainstream religion concerns emotional and mystical misperception, while scientism involves sensory misperception. Only thinking – reasoning – can cure these disastrous misperceptions.

Such is the allegory of otherness vanquished and condemned to the servile fate of resemblance. Our image in the mirror is not innocent, then. Behind every reflection, every resemblance, every representation, a defeated enemy lies concealed. The Other vanquished, and condemned merely to be the Same. This casts a singular light on the problem of representation and of all those mirrors which reflect us `spontaneously' with an objective indulgence. None of that is true, and every representation is a servile image, the ghost of a once sovereign being whose singularity has been obliterated. But a being which will one day rebel, and then our whole system of representation and values is destined to perish in that revolt. This slavery of the same, the slavery of resemblance, will one day be smashed by the violent resurgence of otherness. We dreamed of passing through the looking-glass, but it is the mirror peoples themselves who will burst in upon our world. And `this time will not be defeated'. What will come of this victory? No one knows. A new existence of two equally sovereign peoples, perfectly alien to one another, but in perfect collusion? Something other, at least, than this subjection and this negative fatality. So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less ... I'll not be your mirror!

If I said that our top 3 cultures in America need equal representation in Congress and that all cultures should have a representation, you would tell me that is never going to happen, even though we have made great strides. How do we build a democracy? It is not a question that we can ignore any longer because the alternative is letting a dictatorship or a oligarchy form of government govern in the near future with the face of growing mounting problems, too big to overcome.

All religions are not equal in their capacity to mete out violence and genocidal hate. To say otherwise is to be hopelessly misguided or profoundly duplicitous. Two other popular deflections are 'But what about the crusades?' and 'But the Bible also has violent passages.' The crusades were a response to hundreds of years of Islamic aggression, and they took place within a very restricted time and place, nearly a millennium ago. As for the Bible, you can count on one hand the number of individuals who have used violent passages from Deuteronomy to justify act of terrorism in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, innumerable Jihadis around the world use Islamic doctrines to justify their violent actions. Scale matters. Another classic ploy used by apologists is the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. This argues that entire Islamic countries, Islamic governments, and leading Islamic scholars are "fake" representations of the true faith. If you point to sharia law in Saudi Arabia, the retort is that this does not represent True Islam. Similarly, Iran's mullahs apparently do not represent True Islam. Osama Bin Laden was a "fake" Muslim. Other "fake" Muslims include Amin al-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was on friendly terms with Adolf Hitler), Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (arguably the leading Sunni theologian today), and Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the late leader of ISIS).

There is throughout the whole United States this caste prejudice which is unknown in any other part of the civilized world. It differs only in degree North, East, South or West. If they do not lynch the negro in some of the States, they refuse him accommodations equal to those of other travelers; try to freeze them out at the public schools; give him no adequate political representation; and refuse to employ him in any other than the most menial capacities. It is almost as great a cruelty to educate youths in the public and industrial schools of this country and then shut the doors of the factories, mercantile establishments and trade unions in their faces because they are black, as it is to deny them trial by jury and lynch them. In one case you kill the body, and in the other you murder all the higher aspirations which distinguish man from brute creatures. America has much to learn before she can be the justice-loving, Christian progressive nation that she deludes herself into thinking she now is.

We know that the doctrine of equality leads by steps not only logical, but almost mechanical, to sacrifice the principle of liberty to the principle of quantity; that, being unable to abdicate responsibility and power, it attacks genuine representation, and, as there is no limit where there is no control, invades, sooner or later, both property and religion.

could never doubt that our fathers did a noble, glorious, and Christian deed in throwing off the yoke of Britain, and proclaiming a new government for themselves and their posterity. It was right to contend and bleed for equal representation, for freedom of conscience, and for an independent nationality in which these high ends could be secured.

Southern rebels on one side. Northern regime on the other. A war that had been ongoing in one form or another since independence in 1956. The South wanted development, education, healthcare, equal representation in government. The North wanted to keep them poor, illiterate, while digging up the oil. Saraaya was in the middle of the country, right in the middle of the oil fields. A mixed population: Southern Nilotes and Northern nomads, who spent half the year grazing their cattle here. Whoever controlled Saraaya controlled the oil. Right now it was the government.

Democratic government that relied on direct representation and universal suffrage could not succeed, since it assumed an equality within the Volk that did not exist. To a certain extent, scientists and engineers—like women, the working class, churches, and so on—gained access to power through the Führer. This was the “leader principle” that operated in all Nazi institutions and drew strength from the tradition of monarchic authoritarianism in Germany. In 1934, Hitler declared himself not only chancellor but “leader.” This meant he claimed not only constitutional powers but extragovernmental powers that required his followers to declare their allegiance to him. He expressed the true will of the Volk so that any opposition or criticism was precluded. No interests or groups or ideas existed alongside him: “In place of conflicts and compromise, there was to be only the absolute enemy on whom the sights of the unified nation were fixed” (Bracher 1970, pp. 340–44). Since authority and power originated with Hitler, the fate

The book Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology by Monica Coleman gave voice to what I couldn’t fully articulate, but have felt since the work of rest has received greater attention: “Not all evil can be overcome in this world, and yet a postmodern womanist theology maintains hope in the struggle to creatively and constructively respond to it. Sometimes feelings of discord are the result of the conflicts in this world. Sometimes liberation is not possible, but survival and quality of life are. All-encompassing health, wholeness, unity, and salvation are never fully attained in this world. As we constantly become, we are constantly vulnerable to evil and constantly capable of overcoming it. In postmodern womanist theology, salvation is an activity. Each new moment brings possibilities in both directions. A postmodern womanist theology strives for tangible representations of the good. The good includes justice, equality, discipleship, quality of life, acceptance and inclusion.

the Constitution a threat to democracy as never before. Some of its flaws—such as the framers’ distrust of democracy in using the Electoral College to choose the president and its creation of a Senate that accords every state equal representation regardless of size—have become dramatically and dangerously problematic because of changes in demographics and national politics.