“
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience--that of half the global population, after all--is seen as, well, niche.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic… asshole.
”
”
George Carlin
“
By thinking globally I can analyze all phenomena, but when it comes to acting, it can only be local and on a grassroots level if it is to be honest, realistic, and authentic.
”
”
Jacques Ellul (Perspectives on Our Age)
“
Do not avert your eyes.
It is important
that you see this.
It is important that you feel
this.
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
Ideally, the ISS program will just be one more incremental step on an expanding, incredible journal of exploration and understanding, taking us higher and farther.
”
”
Ron Garan (The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles)
“
Inventions are not solely the making of material things, inventions are also the mental unleashing of ideas by a genuis with a sixth sense.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“
Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.
”
”
Russell Kirk (Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective)
“
One of the goals of this show is to have a much more genuinely global perspective [...] This really is a global, collaborative endeavor [...] There is a shared working condition that's universal, and there are overlapping trajectories and aspirations and we can learn from each other.
”
”
Michael Brooks
“
You are not white,
but a rainbow of colors.
You are not black,
but golden.
You are not just a nationality,
but a citizen of the world.
You are not just for the right or left,
but for what is right over the wrong.
You are not just rich or poor,
but always wealthy in the mind and heart.
You are not perfect, but flawed.
You are flawed, but you are just.
You may just be conscious human,
but you are also a magnificent
reflection of God.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
while it’s five in the morning here, it’s also five in the evening somewhere in China—proving that incompatible truths make perfect sense when seen with global perspective.
”
”
Neal Shusterman (Challenger Deep)
“
We essentially had to build a docking mechanism between the two capsules. We didn't have to share a lot of data, and we did that at the height of the Cold War, which was pretty symbolic." –Bill Gerstenmaier
”
”
Ron Garan (The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles)
“
Don't just focus on seeing things from your own perspective. It can give you blind spots.
”
”
Sudakshina Bhattacharjee (Improve Your Global Business English: The Essential Toolkit for Writing and Communicating Across Borders)
“
I’m not reporting on Indigenous Knowledge systems for a global audience’s perspective. I’m examining global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective.
”
”
Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World)
“
Americans can't stand any stranger looking them in the face. They take it as an insult. It's something they don't forgive. And every American carries a gun. If they catch you, a stranger, looking them in the face, they will shoot.
”
”
Okey Ndibe (Never Look an American in the Eye: A Memoir of Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American)
“
Being Bahamian, Panamanian and US American allows me to have a very unique perspective on the Americas, on the world, and on global commerce. I think big and I think holistically. And I've embedded that way of thinking into Mayflower-Plymouth.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
You need to take a step back from the problem in order to see it in global perspective. At present there are five and a half billion of you here, and, though millions of you are starving, you’re producing enough food to feed six billion. And because you’re producing enough food for six billion, it’s a biological certainty that in three or four years there will be six billion of you. By that time, however (even though millions of you will still be starving), you’ll be producing enough food for six and a half billion—which means that in another three or four years there will be six and a half billion. But by that time you’ll be producing enough food for seven billion (even though millions of you will still be starving), which again means that in another three or four years there will be seven billion of you. In order to halt this process, you must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion.
”
”
Daniel Quinn (Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit)
“
WONDERLAND
It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder
That sets them on their initial quest for truth.
The more doors you open, the smaller you become.
The more places you see and the more people you meet,
The greater your curiosity grows.
The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander.
The more you wander, the greater the wonder.
The more you quench your thirst for wonder,
The more you drink from the cup of life.
The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become.
The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel.
And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding.
And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences.
And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective,
And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance.
Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel.
And the smaller you feel, the greater you become.
The more you see, the more you love --
The more you love, the less walls you see.
The more doors you are willing to open,
The less close-minded you will be.
The more open-minded you are,
The more open your heart.
And the more open your heart,
The more you will be able to
Send and receive --
Truth and TRUE
Unconditional
LOVE.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Moving towards mastery will naturally bring you a more global outlook, but it is always wise to expedite the process by training yourself early on to continually enlarge your perspective.
”
”
Robert Greene
“
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.
While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.
”
”
Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet)
“
The problem will never be diversity, the challenging of tradition or the one person that questions the way life should be. The person that shows the world that this is wrong, there is a perspective you didn't consider, this is worth fighting for and being different is a blessing, will always be the solution for change.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
Millions of people work in global settings while viewing everything from their own cultural perspectives and assuming that all differences, controversy, and misunderstanding are rooted in personality. This is not due to laziness. Many well-intentioned people don’t educate themselves about cultural differences because they believe that if they focus on individual differences, that will be enough.
”
”
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.
”
”
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
“
Even though it is piracy, scanlation has had positive impact.
”
”
Toni Johnson-Woods (Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives)
“
From an anthropological perspective, identities are neither fixed nor inherent, but are created and reproduced continuously through social practice and in interaction with others.
”
”
Naomi Leite (Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging)
“
Espionage is the world's second oldest profession.
”
”
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History)
“
The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility – more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level—and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word.
”
”
Hanzi Freinacht (The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One)
“
In books such as Isis Unveiled (1877) or The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky covers everything from archaic mystery cults to modern paranormal research, giving one the sort of global perspective found in anthropology classics such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).
”
”
Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy)
“
Our concept of truth becomes more universal as we reach higher levels of consciousness and awareness, taking in a wider spectrum of information and possibility. As we adapt a more expanded perspective on our reality, our concept of what is true and meaningful changes--from local to regional, regional to global, beyond global to the galaxy, and then to the cosmos.
”
”
Robert David Steele (The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust (Manifesto Series))
“
Art is an attempt to capture the truths of the world as you see it in a medium you can share with others. It is about lending your voice, your perspective to local, national, and global conversations. And that is why, in the United States in particular, our definition of what is art and who is an artist must be as varied as our citizenry.
”
”
Dan Rather (What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism)
“
Daily Law: The person with the more global perspective wins. Expand your gaze.
”
”
Robert Greene (The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations)
“
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see,” which I interpret to mean that looking way back into the past provides much better perspective into the enduring patterns of history. I’d
”
”
Jeffrey E. Garten (From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives)
“
This work indicates that the fourth industrial revolution is unique, driven as it is by a global network of smart (network-driven) cities, countries and regional clusters, which understand and leverage the opportunities of this revolution – top down and bottom up – acting from a holistic and integrated perspective.
”
”
Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
“
It’s as if the future is coming to us faster than we are heading to it. I think it was the author William Gibson who suggested that global stocks of cognitive dissonance are currently so high they threaten to make the traditional idea of science fiction redundant. And once you reach my age, you tend to find that the individual days become really long, but the years get shorter, which only distorts your temporal perspective still further.
”
”
Terry Gilliam (Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir)
“
Millennials bring a unique perspective to business. Those of us who were in college and entering adulthood and beginning our careers during the global recession that started in 2008 have a unique view on business and economics.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries. Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income,24 and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth.25 The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.26 From an international perspective, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty aren’t merely rich, but filthy rich. A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%.
”
”
Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There)
“
Global women's issues like forced female circumcision, sex clubs in Thailand, the veiling of women in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Europe, the killing of female children in China, remain important concerns. However feminist women in the West are still struggling to decolonize feminist thinking and practice so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperialism...
A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women's bodies globally are linked. For example: linking circumcision with life-threatening eating disorders (which are the direct consequence of a culture imposing thinness as a beauty ideal)...
”
”
bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
“
Because just as in more confused times, like today, we don’t just need experts. We also need people who will think more radically to arrive at the real root of problems. So the first thing to fight for, I think, is simply to make people, the experts in certain domains, be aware of not just accepting that there are problems, but of thinking more deeply. It is an attempt to make them see more. I think it can be done. I believe this may be the main task for today: to prevent the narrow production of experts. This tendency, as I see it, is just horrible. We need, more than ever, those who, in a general way of thinking, see the problems from a global perspective and even from a philosophical perspective.
”
”
Slavoj Žižek (Demanding the Impossible)
“
We often discuss issues such as pollution, poverty, or corruption from a global perspective; yet we fail to consider them locally—in our city, neighborhood, or even family. We’re thus trained to be irresponsible: the more we think and talk about problems we can’t control—the more virtuous we feel but—the more we neglect the problems which are in our control.
”
”
Vizi Andrei
“
show me your eyes and i should tell who you are and what would your future
”
”
Mohamed Khadra (Regulatory Failure and the Global Financial Crisis: An Australian Perspective)
“
God is not a being among other beings, but the infinite Whither that makes possible the very functioning of our human spirit.
”
”
Elizabeth A. Johnson (Abounding In Kindness: Writings for the People of God (Theology in Global Perspectives Series))
“
Discrimination can occur through blanketed ideological perspectives that segregate or singles out an individual or a group of people.
”
”
Asa Don Brown
“
Religion stabilizes us and reassures us. Revelation destabilizes and disturbs us.
”
”
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical & Global Perspectives)
“
Our side has agents. Their side has spies.
”
”
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History)
“
At its essence, discrimination is the intentional or the unintentional prejudice or prejudicial perspectives, behaviors, actions, beliefs, propaganda, or treatment that affects the life of another.
”
”
Asa Don Brown
“
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.” —Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
“
Leaders have always needed to understand human nature and personality differences to be successful in business--that's nothing new. What's new is the requirement for twenty-first century leaders to be prepared to understand a wider, richer array of work styles than ever before and to be able to determine what aspects of an interaction are simply a result of personality and which are a result of differences in cultural perspective.
”
”
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
Elite support for so-called free trade is due to the fact that elites share a global perspective at odds with the best interests of the United States. Policies that produce world growth at U.S. expense are endorsed. Policies that benefit the United States while slowing world growth are rejected. Today globalization’s triumph over nationalism is energizing a nationalist revival as nations reassess their individual interests. Certain
”
”
James Rickards (The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis)
“
A culinary cosmopolitan perspective resides in a context of tremendous inequality, but it may simultaneously facilitate meaningful cultural exchange, and attempt to link food choices to global risks like climate change.
”
”
Josée Johnston (Foodies (Cultural Spaces))
“
I am no longer willing to accept Christian expression that refuses to hear voices from the margins. Christ’s body is global and diverse. The perspectives that come from the people who make up Christ’s body reveal the brilliance of our Creator, like the different facets of a diamond. Erasing the edges is equal to denying the beauty of God. Others have different contexts and areas of emphasis, but they should be heard and valued as legitimate.
”
”
Lecrae Moore (I Am Restored: How I Lost My Religion but Found My Faith)
“
Note that most people don’t even think of the state of poverty when they think of the “livability of the planet.” That’s how anti-human a perspective the anti-impact framework and its vague environmental terminology give us.
”
”
Alex Epstein (Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less)
“
In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalised. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The “global village” has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism. Many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now seem to be frightened functionaries; in a more uniform culture, their management skills would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they seem unable to converse with the complexities and hungers of our longing. From this perspective, it seems that we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul; perhaps, the recognition of the depth of our hunger to belong may gradually assist us in awakening new and unexpected possibilities of community and friendship.
”
”
John O'Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
“
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
It’s not easy to feel good about yourself when you are constantly being told you’re rubbish and/or part of the problem. That’s often the situation for people working in the public sector, whether these be nurses, civil servants or teachers. The static metrics used to measure the contribution of the public sector, and the influence of Public Choice theory on making governments more ‘efficient’, has convinced many civil-sector workers they are second-best. It’s enough to depress any bureaucrat and induce him or her to get up, leave and join the private sector, where there is often more money to be made. So public actors are forced to emulate private ones, with their almost exclusive interest in projects with fast paybacks. After all, price determines value. You, the civil servant, won’t dare to propose that your agency could take charge, bring a helpful long-term perspective to a problem, consider all sides of an issue (not just profitability), spend the necessary funds (borrow if required) and – whisper it softly – add public value. You leave the big ideas to the private sector which you are told to simply ‘facilitate’ and enable. And when Apple or whichever private company makes billions of dollars for shareholders and many millions for top executives, you probably won’t think that these gains actually come largely from leveraging the work done by others – whether these be government agencies, not-for-profit institutions, or achievements fought for by civil society organizations including trade unions that have been critical for fighting for workers’ training programmes.
”
”
Mariana Mazzucato (The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy)
“
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
”
”
Oliver Sacks (Gratitude: Essays)
“
As business people today, it's important to realize that from one perspective, we live in a global society. As executives and entrepreneurs and employees, we should embrace and cherish both diversity and unity. We should embrace the diversity of language from Spanish to English to Mandarin to Japanese... We should embrace the diversity of race and ethnicity.... We should embrace the diversity of philosophy and religion... Embracing the diversity opens up more business opportunities and it also allows you to cultivate more meaningful connections.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
some students look at the problems that they're facing and they draw global conclusions from them. They say this is not just a professor giving me a bad grade or someone not sitting next to me in the cafeteria. This reflects that fact that I am not ready for college, or I shouldn't be in this college at all.
”
”
Shankar Vedantam
“
World order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone. To achieve a genuine world order, its components, while maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural, and juridical—a concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals of any one region or nation.
”
”
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
“
The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...
”
”
Vandana Shiva (Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology)
“
I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
“
Perhaps one of the greatest means to achieve global peace and harmony is cultural exchange. It opens up the vistas of human understanding and further expands our universal consciousness. Let us raise ourselves from the narrow perspective of being a citizen of a particular country to global citizenship that is the greatest demand of modern world.
”
”
Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar (The Voyage to Eternity)
“
To put it into perspective, it is estimated that globally around 220 million land animals are killed for food every day,1 and when you factor in marine animals that number increases to somewhere between 2.4 and 6.3 billion.2 Every. Single. Day. That means that somewhere between 28,000 and 73,000 animals are killed every second, a completely incomprehensible number.
”
”
Ed Winters (This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You))
“
It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s liberation is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your disposal of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.
”
”
bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom)
“
Excess has impaired perspective in America; we are the richest people on earth, praying to get richer. We’re tangled in unmanageable debt while feeding the machine, because we feel entitled to more. What does it communicate when half the global population lives on less than $2 a day, and we can’t manage a fulfilling life on twenty-five thousand times that amount? Fifty thousand times that amount?
”
”
Jen Hatmaker (7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess)
“
For the global skill of drawing, the basic component skills, as I have defined them, are: The perception of edges (seeing where one thing ends and another starts) The perception of spaces (seeing what lies beside and beyond) The perception of relationships (seeing in perspective and in proportion) The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things in degrees of values) The perception of the gestalt (seeing the whole and its parts)
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Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence: The Definitive 4th Edition)
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Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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I call for all religions, cultures, countries, crews, parties and peacemakers to unite for the sake of building a peaceful, united global village for future generations. It starts TODAY. If we stay divided, we will only remain crippled - and we will fall. It is time for everyone to see there is more for us to GAIN through unity and love than hatred and division. Get wise and unite. This is the only way. We need to start fresh with a truly united perspective.
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Suzy Kassem
“
Imagine, for a moment, that you're trying to build a new habit. You've set a goal, charted a path, and are making progress. But then, an external event - a global pandemic, a personal loss, or a professional setback - throws you off course. It's easy to feel disheartened to let go of your goal. But "The Enchiridion" offers a different perspective: see the setback not as a barrier but as a test of your resolve. It's an opportunity to practice resilience, to strengthen your commitment, and to reaffirm your path.
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Michael Whiteclear (Stoicism for New Life: The Path to a Stoic Mindset for Emotional Resilience and Joy: Including 52 Practices and Rules for Daily Life - Philosophy of Marcus ... and Others (The Stoic Wisdom Book 1))
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One way of looking at our current predicament is that the existing global order splits humanity into a large number of sovereign states, each of which has considerable internal coherence, but only loose coordination with the others. This structure has some advantages, even from the perspective of existential risk, for it has allowed us to minimize the risk that a single bad government could lock humanity into a terrible stable outcome. But as it becomes easier for a single country—or even a small group within one country—to threaten the whole of humanity, the balance may start to shift.
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Toby Ord
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Perhaps more than never, in a highly globalized world, we must recognize that multiculturalism is not simply understanding ethnic/racial histories or the mere appreciation of cultural “difference,” but accepting that multiculturalism spreads across the very inner core of America’s institutions, and ingrained in the very essence of life, for multicultural perspectives, ideas, and ideologies empower us to elevate the multicultural discourse to a higher level of social transformation—ultimately, universal equality, justice, respect, and human dignity for all, in all facets of human existence.
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Martin Guevara Urbina (Twenty-first Century Dynamics of Multiculturalism: Beyond Post-racial America)
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Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer from the consequences of _globalization from above_, cosmopolitanism differs, according to Mignolo, form these two types of globalization. Mignolo defines globalization as 'a set of designs to manage the world,' and cosmopolitanism as 'a set of projects toward planetary conviviality
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Namsoon Kang (Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World)
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...Analyses of globalization may also include statistics on poverty and human development indicators such as health, life expectancy, education, and infant mortality. While such statistics are important and can provide powerful statements about reality, perspectives based mainly or exclusively on aggredate data remove us from the lives of real, embodied human beings. A shortcoming of these kinds of distant analyses is that they often miss or gloss over how peopple experience capitalist globalization in and on their bodies, and how embodied subjects in marginalized communities, both in the Global North and South, have challenged and resisted such powerful social forces (38).
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Barbara Sutton (Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina)
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From a monetary competition perspective, keeping gold reserves is a perfectly rational decision. Keeping reserves in foreign governments' easy money only will cause the value of the country's currency to devalue along with the reserve currencies, while the seigniorage accrues to the issuer of the reserve currency, not the nation's central bank. Further, should central banks sell all their gold holdings (estimated at around 20% of global gold stockpiles), the most likely impact is that gold, being highly prized for its industrial and aesthetic uses, would be bought up very quickly with little depreciation of its price and the central banks would be left without any gold reserves.
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Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
“
The global nature of the religious knowledge of a learned Muslim sitting in Isfahan in the fourteenth century was very different from that of a scholastic thinker in Paris or Bologna of the same period. On the basis of the Quranic doctrine of religious universality and the vast historical experiences of a global nature, Islamic civilization developed a cosmopolitan and worldwide religious perspective unmatched before the modern period in any other religion. This global vision is still part and parcel of the worldview of traditional Muslims, of those who have not abandoned their universal vision as a result of the onslaught of modernism or reactions to this onslaught in the form of what has come to be called “fundamentalism.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr (The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity)
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Outside The Museum (The Sonnet)
Enough with, patria o muerte*!
Enough with, god save the queen!
Enough with, heil hitler!
Enough with, o say can you see!
Bronze age beings yell about national glory,
Stone age beings yell about religious glory.
Electric beings got no time for such make-believe,
On their shoulders walks the present of humanity.
There is no earth till all roots combine,
Till we crave for each other all roots are chains.
Museums add perspective on the direction of life,
But to spend a life in museum is life lost in vain.
Enough with vande mataram**,
it's time for vasudhaiva kutumbakam***.
To hell with nation, culture and tradition,
civilization awaits outside the museum.
(*homeland or death, *hail the motherland, ***world is family)
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Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
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It’s time to recognize that a broad, multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, multinational initiative, guided by a broader, more integrated and unified perspective, should be playing a central role in guiding our scientific agenda in addressing this issue and informing policy. We need a broad and more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantitative, predictive, mechanistic theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the “natural” environment—a framework I call a grand unified theory of sustainability. It’s time to initiate a massive international Manhattan-style project or Apollo-style program dedicated to addressing global sustainability in an integrated, systemic sense.1
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Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies)
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If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions?
Faced with so disquieting an alternative, we are always tempted to minimize the seriousness of the problem, to argue that those who worry about doomsday’s are alarmists; to hold that fundamental changes in our institutions are impractical or contrary to ‘human nature’, as if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one human nature. Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. But then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics.
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Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
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in my name to train young women for global leadership. Wellesley’s twelfth and thirteenth presidents, Diana Chapman Walsh and Kim Bottomly, embraced the idea and, over several years, helped put the pieces together. In January 2010, I traveled to Massachusetts for the inaugural session. The Albright Institute was founded on the belief that a student doesn’t have to major in international relations to have a global mind-set. By giving young women the chance to work in partnership with peers from a variety of disciplines and countries, we encourage them to see differences of perspective as a strength and even as a tool to help solve complex problems. To that end, we provide an intense course of study over a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters, complemented by summer internships. Of the hundreds of Wellesley juniors and seniors who apply annually, forty are selected. In the first two weeks of each session, we offer classes run by professors, former government officials, nonprofit leaders, and businesspeople. During the final seven days, the fellows work in teams to analyze and make recommendations regarding a thorny international problem. At the end, they present their findings, which we pick apart and discuss.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir)
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Nietzsche's response to this situation is not to seek narcotics in a return to the past or a flight to the supersensible, but instead to assert, and in a deeper form to accept, even to accelerate, the approach of nihilism on a European, if not global, scale. A rejuvenation of the human spirit is possible only through a complete destruction of the decadent present. Like very few before him, Nietzsche sees the necessary link between radical creativity, on the one hand, and war, courage, and brutality, on the other. The great creators abominate everything that interferes with the full expression of their will to power; they are not egalitarians, democrats, or refined and tolerant appreciators of the poems of their competitors. The bestiality of the blonde beast may be understood not simply as an expression of the need to destroy in order to create but as a consequence of Nietzsche's fundamental identification of Being and history History is the dissolution of Being into chaos, as reorganized by the shifting perspectives of man, the highest incarnation of the will to power. As we have seen, a reliance upon courage led Nietzsche to invoke the unleashing of the blonde beasts and wars of universal destruction as the negative prelude to the advent of positive nihilism.
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Stanley Rosen
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Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.
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Joshua Foer (Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)
“
Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
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allegory (which is an extended metaphor or image),
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Eric B. Shiraev (A History of Psychology: A Global Perspective)
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Plato theorized that the world could be described in three dimensions. The first dimension is the world of the ideal forms (which is the primary reality). The second is the material world created by God. The third is psychological, which is a reflection of the ideal through material.
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Eric B. Shiraev (A History of Psychology: A Global Perspective)
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Worldliness is always a spiritual myopia. It falls for the spirit and system of the age and fails to correct itself through the correcting lenses of the perspective of the global (the Church in other continents), the historical (the Church in other centuries), and above all, the eternal (the Word of God across all places and times). Over
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Os Guinness (The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy's Plot to Undermine the Church)
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Differing historical perspectives inevitably shape attitudes towards globalization and its sub-plots. The Western view of globalization has always been just that: a view based on the spread of Western values to the rest of the world. Other parts of the world, with their competing histories and mythologies, are not so immersed in Western values. And from their perspectives, Western values have, in any case, been anything but stable: the imperial attitudes of the nineteenth century, for example, are hardly aligned with the self-determination of the twentieth. During the Cold War, these competing histories and mythologies were typically repressed, thanks to a persistent ideological battle between capitalism and communism. In the twenty-first century they have re-emerged, forcing upon nation states choices that, in an increasing number of cases, end up either restraining the forces of globalization or putting them into reverse. We are returning to a world of territorial disputes, competing ideologies and unstable alliances. It’s as if we’re still coping with Columbus’s unfinished business.
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Stephen D. King (Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History)
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Another benefit of having Development and Operations using a shared tool is a unified backlog, where everyone prioritizes improvement projects from a global perspective, selecting
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Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations)
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This emphasis calls into question some of the most ingrained insights into the history of the modern world—for example, conceptualizing the nineteenth century, as is so often done, as an age of “bourgeois civilization,” in contrast with the twentieth century, which historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed the “age of catastrophe.”19 An assessment such as this can only be derived from a vision of the world that focuses its moral judgments on Europe. Looked at from the perspective of much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, one can argue just the opposite—that the nineteenth century was an age of barbarity and catastrophe, as slavery and imperialism devastated first one pocket of the globe and then another. It is the twentieth century, by contrast, that saw the weakening of imperial powers and thus allowed more of the world’s people to determine their own futures and shake off the shackles of colonial domination. Without its Eurocentric distortions, decolonialization would be at the very center of the narrative we tell about the twentieth century
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Sven Beckert (Empire of Cotton: A Global History)
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federal government to protect it from foreign terrorist attacks. That lesson caused him to create a global intelligence division and a counterterrorism force. The audacity of the idea was breathtaking—a local police force with a worldwide perspective that could unearth terrorist plots wherever conceived and prevent them from reaching New York City. When Kelly proposed hiring a deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and another for a reconceived intelligence unit, Bloomberg approved it. “The world no longer stops at the oceans,” the mayor said at the time. “We have to make sure we get the best information as quickly as we possibly can,” he asserted. It was the same concept—accurate information delivered in real time to people making important, complex decisions—that had been the basis for Bloomberg’s global business. Kelly had little trouble convincing his boss of the need, or the viability of the bold idea, even though at the time he had not yet developed a detailed plan.15 Kelly rapidly changed the status of the NYPD on the Joint Task Force on Terrorism that the FBI had been running in New York City since 1980. He named retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Frank Libutti the first NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, and he increased the number of NYPD detectives assigned to the group from twenty to more
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Chris McNickle (Bloomberg: A Billionaire's Ambition)
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The earth and all life upon it endured and was devastated by what can only be described as a globally distributed firestorm at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago. In this planetary debacle, 10 million square kilometers of trees and other plant matter burned.
To put that in perspective, the United Kingdom was in a state of traumatic shock in late June and early July 2018 after 4,942 acres of Lancashire moorland were consumed by wildfires. That's an area of just 20 square kilometers, but firefighters and emergency services from seven counties were utterly overwhelmed by the blaze and the military had to be brought in to assist.
Meanwhile, a report in the Sacramento Bee dated July 2, 2018, opined that California's wildfire season had started early, with two 'major fires' already fought at huge expense and requiring evacuation of local residents. These two fires were estimated to have consumed 85,000 acres, which sounds an awful lot but in fact converts to just 344 square kilometers.
The previous years, 2017, was California's most destructive wildfire season then on record, with a total of 1.25 million acres burned. The cost of dealing with the disaster, including fire suppression, insurance, and recovery expenditures, was estimated at US$180 billion. Yet 1.38 million acres converts to just 5,585 square kilometers--an insignificant fraction (around 0.05 percent--that is, a twentieth of 1 percent) of the 10 million square kilometers destroyed in the Younger Dryas wildfires.
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Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
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Better storytelling can overcome our deepest barriers.
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Per Espen Stoknes (What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action)
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21 As environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson puts it, “The Anthropocene presents novel challenges for living a meaningful life.”22 Historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed that global warming “calls us to visions of the human that neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever contemplated.”23 Whether we are talking about ethics or politics, ontology or epistemology, confronting the end of the world as we know it dramatically challenges our learned perspectives and ingrained priorities. What does consumer choice mean compared against 100,000 years of ecological catastrophe? What does one life mean in the face of mass death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful decisions in the shadow of our inevitable end? These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They cannot be graphed or quantified. They are philosophical problems par excellence. If, as Montaigne asserted, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age, for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene.24 The rub now is that we have to learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.
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Roy Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media))
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Page 61-2
... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems.
Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses."
Page 64-5:
The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002.
This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries.
Page 68:
In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production.
Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.
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Emmanuel Todd (After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism))
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Views of Earth from space transform global perspectives for the better, I would say. But evaluating and judging individual humans from a distance hardly ever ends well. The brush strokes with which we paint and characterize the views of others tend to be broad and without nuance, leaving us susceptible to bigotry and prejudice.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
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I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs.
They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.
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Aida Mandic (Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina)
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I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs.
They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.
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Aida Mandic (Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina)
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Where there is simplicity, there is sustainability. Donde hay simplicidad, hay sostenabilidad. A materialistic and self-absorbed world chasing after the so-called sustainable development goals is like a superobese dog chasing after its own tail.
In a self-absorbed world sustainability is a myth. In a simple and gentle world sustainability is the norm. So let's forget about sustainability. Let's forget about sustainable development goals. These are all gimmick. I’ll tell you why.
Sustainable development goals is actually the privileged lot's code for ‘let's screw this world with our narcissistic shenanigans, then we can make TV shows on us pretending to fix the world's problems that we continue to create with our lavish, self-centric lifestyle.’ It's not a global goal, it's a global scam, sold by the rich to the rich at the expense of everybody else - at the expense of the working people of planet earth.
Am I being too harsh? Perhaps I am, but then again, this planet has never been the home of the human race, it has always been the home of the rich and privileged, while the rest of humanity slave their butt off, barely scraping by on hand-me-downs and leftovers. The privileged screw the world, then the privileged pretend to fix the world. What a joke!
So instead of focusing on intellectual pomposities like sustainable development goals, the next time you indulge in a luxury, ask yourself, is it a luxury you really need – if not, how many lives you could lift with the resources spent on that particular luxury!
Let me put it into perspective. One fancy apple watch could feed a family of four in the developing parts of the world for half a year. So, stop talking about sustainable development goals, and start practicing sustainable habits.
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Abhijit Naskar (Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability)
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Global Unmanned Ground Vehicles Market 2022-2032 report is a prominent growth segment within the commercial and defense sector. The total market has been segmented by Region, Application, and Mode of Operation. The Table of Content would give the readers a perspective of the coverage of the Global Unmanned Ground Vehicles Market 2022-2032. To know about the Research Methodology :- Request For Global Unmanned Ground Vehicle Market Report.
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Defense Market
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result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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Seen from this perspective, our unstable environment is the essential wellspring of human evolution and change, and the more serious our environmental problems become, the more creatively we are responding to the challenge.
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Art Bell (The Coming Global Superstorm)
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Ultimately, from the evolutionary perspective, the only sustainable solution not to repeat the mistakes humanity has been trapped into is a global shift to a new consciousness.
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Monica Esgueva (7 Levels of Wisdom, The)