Globalization Definition Quotes

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Another problem with the official definitions of terror is that it follows from them that the US is a leading terrorist state.
Noam Chomsky (Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance)
China’s race to AI supremacy will have a profound impact on world order, disorder, and global AI geopolitics.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
Finally, consider your predicament a privilege in a world so shrunken that certain people refer to it as the 'global village.' The term 'explorer' has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a faray into the unknown, and a four-year old child, wandering about along in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.
Tim Cahill (Jaguars Ripped My Flesh)
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed — be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitely won. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.
Václav Havel
All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built — then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material “sufficiency” which our global “experts” are so insistent we be concerned about.
John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
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)
This is the conservative problem: reality itself is radical, so we must not get too close to it. The Third World really is poor and oppressed; the U.S. often does side with Third-World plutocrats; our tax system really is regressive and favors the very richest; millions of Americans do live in poverty; the corporations do plunder and pollute the environment; real wages for blue-collar workers definitely have flattened and even declined; the superrich really are increasing their share of the pie; and global warming really is happening.
Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
Father of the Constitution,” said: “The accumulation of all power – legislative, executive, and judiciary – in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
James Perloff (Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: Unmasking the Forces behind Global Destruction)
Globalization is not just about changing relations between the ‘inside’ of the nation-state and the ‘outside’ of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities.
Philip G. Cerny
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. (227)
College of St. Catherine Staff (The Global Search for Justice)
Think before you write, while you write- and definitely after you have written.
Sudakshina Bhattacharjee (Improve Your Global Business English: The Essential Toolkit for Writing and Communicating Across Borders)
Clinging to politics is one way of avoiding the confrontation with the devouring logic of civilization, holding instead with the accepted assumptions and definitions. Leaving it all behind is the opposite: a truly qualitative change, a fundamental paradigm shift. This change is not about: • seeking "alternative" energy sources to power all the projects and systems that should never have been started up in the first place; • being vaguely "post-Left", the disguise that some adopt while changing none of their (leftist) orientations; • espousing an "anti-globalization" orientation that's anything but, given activists' near-universal embrace of the totalizing industrial world system; • preserving the technological order, while ignoring the degradation of millions and the systematic destruction of the earth that undergird the existence of every part of the technoculture; • claiming-as anarchists-to oppose the state, while ignoring the fact that this hypercomplex global setup couldn't function for a day without many levels of government. The way is open for radical change. If complex society is itself the issue, if class society began with division of labor in the Neolithic, and if the Brave New World now moving forward was born with the shift to domesticated life, then all we've taken for granted is implicated. We are seeing more deeply, and the explorations must extend to include everyone. A daunting, but exciting opportunity!
John Zerzan (Twilight of the Machines)
for 99 percent of Americans, incomes increased by a mere 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, the incomes of the top 1 percent jumped by 11.6 percent. It was definitely a recovery—for the 1 percent.
Chrystia Freeland (Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else)
By definition, posthumanism (I call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind transfer, or rather 'mind migration,' for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.
Alex M. Vikoulov (The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence (The Science and Philosophy of Information))
In the era of globalization, everything is interconnected. A problem in one part of the world will definitely impact on other parts of the globe. Such phenomenon is also valid for defense and security context. A conflict in a state will bring implications in its neighboring countries or other countries extended in the same region. Therefore, collaborative efforts in tackling common defense and security problems are essentially required.
Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono
... the slow, complicated evolution of how we as humans decide to define and act on an agreed definition of human rights that would be functional and useful for all national cultures. So far this has been an impossibility.
Michael Bronski (Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World)
Disciplines are by definition based on territorial epistemologies: studying the borders doesn’t lead necessarily to border thinking . . . unless scholars engage in epistemological disciplinary disobedience and bring to the fore the existential experience of dwelling in the border. By
Walter D. Mignolo (Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History))
THIS IS HOW AMERICA BECAME A HOTSPOT OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Because my generation was raised to believe not just that safety is for dweebs but that it’s EVIL! Maverick is a full psycho and would definitely be at the “reopen America” protests because he wants the RIGHT to get his b-hole waxed even if he isn’t actually GOING to go get his b-hole waxed and even though he knows that many thousands more marginalized and high-risk people will die and many b-hole waxing businesses will ultimately fail because you cannot sustain an economy on a handful of slobbering fascists who feel the need, the need for a Jamba Juice. Goose alludes to some dark past involving Maverick’s dad, who was also a fighter pilot: “Every time we go up there, it’s like you’re flyin’ against a ghost.” And I’m sorry, but that is not an excuse! Go to therapy! You can be in a men’s group with Snape!
Lindy West (Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema)
Indeed, why even study history? The brief response is because our understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here—inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future.
Robert B. Marks (The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (World Social Change))
The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.
Lisa Duggan (The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy)
Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns. The definition plays off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality—materiality on the one hand, information on the other. Normally virtuality is associated with computer simulations that put the body into a feedback loop with a computer-generated image. For example, in virtual Ping-Pong, one swings a paddle wired into a computer, which calculates from the paddle’s momentum and position where the ball would go. Instead of hitting a real ball, the player makes the appropriate motions with the paddle and watches the image of the ball on a computer monitor. Thus the game takes place partly in real life (RL) and partly in virtual reality (VR). Virtual reality technologies are fascinating because they make visually immediate the perception that a world of information exists parallel to the “real” world, the former intersecting the latter at many points and in many ways. Hence the definition’s strategic quality, strategic because it seeks to connect virtual technologies with the sense, pervasive in the late twentieth century, that all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the World Wide Web.
N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics)
So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions will have longer growing seasons, increasing the food supply and reducing tensions. Some people will eschew conflict, being preoccupied with saving their homes from the encroaching ocean or growing pineapples in the Arctic. But amid squabbling about the details in predictive models, the consensus is that global warming won’t do good things to global conflict. For starters, warmer temperatures rile people up—in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4 percent increase in interpersonal violence and 14 percent in group violence. But global warming’s bad news is more global—desertification, loss of arable land due to rising seas, more droughts. One influential meta-analysis projected 16 percent and 50 percent increases in interpersonal and group violence, respectively, in some regions by 2050.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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)
Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence: definitive 4th edition)
Therapy entails the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent the “inhabitants” of a given universe from “emigrating.” It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual “cases.” Since, as we have seen, every society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomenon. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psychoanalysis, from pastoral care to personnel counseling programs, belong, of course, under the category of social control. What interests us here, however, is the conceptual aspect of therapy. Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the “official” definitions of reality, it must develop a conceptual machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that includes a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the “cure of souls.
Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
we want to expand Chapell’s FCF to more explicitly account for the global contexts. This means that we must fit the FCF for unchurched and in-between cultural contexts as well. The expanded definition for this homiletic tool looks like this: The Fallen Condition Focus (FCF) is the mutual human condition that contemporary believers or nonbelievers share with those to or about whom the text was written that requires the grace of the passage for God’s people to glorify and enjoy him or for those who resist God to properly regard him and to be reconciled to him.
Zack Eswine (Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture)
We are so crazy because of our brains (thoughts). Only we are want live extra ordinary lifestyle, only we necessary to know builder of universe, only we need the definition and mathematical theory of universe formation (reason of big bang), only we need peace and also, we need power for control the universe etc. Other way we think global warming, bad society, culture, crime, politics, bad relationship, unsafe life, not satisfaction etc. But other animals are also living life with joyful in same universe. Nothing or Everything cannot be created or destroy, why we think a lot? let’s go
Jagannath Hembram
think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future. As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.
Michael Miklaucic (Commanding Heights: Strategic Lessons from Complex Operations)
The short answer to our question is that we are not entering a post-American world. It is not possible for this (or any) book to see “the future,” because there are so many possible futures dependent on unpredictable events and they play a larger role the further out one tries to look. Thus it is important to specify a time horizon. For example, if the “American century” began in 1941, will the United States still have primacy in power resources and play the central role in the global balance of power among states in 2041? My guess is “yes.” In that sense, the American century is not over, but because of transnational and non-state forces, it is definitely changing in important ways that are described below. But first, we must look at the charge that the United States is in decline.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Is the American Century Over? (Global Futures))
Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual "cases". Since ever society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomena. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psycho-analysis, from pastoral care to personal counseling programmes, belong, of course, under the category of social control. [...] Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the "official" definition of reality, it must develop a machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that include a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls".
Peter L. Berger
For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.
John Baylis (The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations)
Everything that capitalism and fascism and the rest were designed to balance or manage—supply, demand, production, capital, labor, debt, scarcity, logistics—isn’t so much contorting as evolving into forms we have literally never experienced as a species. We are entering a period of extreme transformation, with our strategic, political, economic, technological, demographic, and cultural norms all in flux at the same time. Of course we will shift to a different management system. Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been “more” on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings. Between the demographic inversion and the end of globalization, we are not simply ending our long experience with more, or even beginning a terrifying new world of less; we face economic free fall as everything that has underpinned humanity’s economic existence since the Renaissance unwinds all at once.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
The smartest person to ever walk this Earth in all probability lived and died herding goats on a mountain somewhere, with no way to disseminate their work globally even if they had realised they were super smart and had the means to do something with their abilities. I am not keen on 'who are the smartest' lists and websites because, as Scott Barry Kaufman points out, the concept of genius privileges the few who had the opportunity to see through and promote their life’s work, while excluding others who may have had equal or greater raw potential but lacked the practical and financial support, and the communication platform that famous names clearly had. This is why I am keen to develop, through my research work, a definition of genius from a cognitive neuroscience and psychometric point of view, so that whatever we decide that is and how it should be measured, only focuses on clearly measurable factors within the individual’s mind, regardless of their external achievements, eminence, popularity, wealth, public platform etc. In my view this would be both more equitable and more scientific.
Gwyneth Wesley Rolph
It is possible that we are already living through the twilight of democracy; that our civilization may already be heading for anarchy or tyranny, as the ancient philosophers and America's founders once feared; that a new generation of clercs, the advocates of illiberal or authoritarian ideas, will come to power in the twenty-first century, just as they did in the twentieth; that their visions of the world, born of resentment, anger, or deep, messianic dreams, could triumph. Maybe new information technology will continue to undermine consensus, divide people further, and increase polarization until only violence can determine who rules. Maybe fear of disease will create fear of freedom. Or maybe the coronavirus will inspire a new sense of global solidarity. Maybe we will renew and modernize our institutions. Maybe international cooperation will expand after the entire world has had the same set of experiences at the same time: lockdown, quarantine, fear of infection, fear of death. Maybe scientists around the world will find new ways to collaborate, above and beyond politics. Maybe the reality of illness and death will teach people to be suspicious of hucksters, liars, and purveyors of disinformation. Maddeningly, we have to accept that both futures are possible. No political victory is ever permanent, no definition of "the nation" is guaranteed to last, and no elite of any kind, whether so-called "populist" or so-called "liberal" or so called "aristocratic," rules forever.
Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air. “One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades. Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.
Sally Bedell Smith (Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch)
The work of PME-ART is highly collaborative and is also very much about collaboration, about people working together, trying to negotiate what is meaningful to them, where and how they disagree, and how such agreements and disagreements might be evocatively conveyed. Collaboration is definitely not easy. As a teenager in Toronto I would see many one-person shows and think the reason there is only one person onstage has little to do with art and much to do with economics. I would see many shows where the people onstage felt like employees primarily doing what they had been told. Instead I wanted to see people onstage doing what they wanted to do, and felt that this wanting should include active, alive ways of working together. However, looking back over the past twenty years, I also have to admit that I’m not completely sure collaboration is the place for me. It seems I am temperamentally ill-suited for it. Twenty years of doing something I’m ill-suited for and justifying it to myself through compelling artistic results. (This book is in many ways the story of this struggle.) Because though collaboration has never felt good, I still believe in it. Perhaps I believe in it even more because I find it so difficult. Perhaps I believe in it too much. We are all here on this planet, in our various societies and communities, and like it or not we must find ways to work together. The fact that it is often not easy makes it all that much more necessary. I sometimes wonder if over the years I have over-relied on the metaphor of the collaborative process as microcosm for various global-political realities. It must be a way for me to feel that what I’m doing is more important than it actually is. I think this might be true of all art. Art is a place where the artist feels what they are doing is more important than it actually is. I sincerely wonder if we’ll make it another twenty years.
Jacob Wren (Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART)
We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states. In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton. Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.
Grace Blakeley
Sadhguru: See, it’s not that the other person is totally bereft of understanding. With your understanding you can create situations where the other person would be able to understand you better. If you’re expecting the other to understand and comply with you all the time while you don’t understand the limitations, the possibilities, the needs and the capabilities of that person, then conflict is all that will happen; it is bound to happen. Unfortunately, the closest relationships in the world have more conflict going on than there is between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan have fought only four battles. In your relationships, you have fought many more battles than this and are still fighting, isn’t it so? This is because your line of understanding and theirs is different. If you cross this L.O.C., this Line of Control, they will get mad. If they cross it, you will get mad. If you move your understanding beyond theirs, their understanding also becomes a part of your understanding. You will be able to embrace their limitations and capabilities. In everyone, there are some positive things and some negative things. If you embrace all this in your understanding, you can make the relationship the way you want it. If you leave it to their understanding, it will become accidental. If they are very magnanimous, things will happen well for you; if not, the relationship will break up. All I am asking is: do you want to be the one who decides what happens to your life? Whether they are close relationships, professional, political, global or whatever, don’t you want to be the person who decides what happens in your life? If you do, you better include everything and everybody into your understanding. You should enhance your understanding to such a point that you can look beyond people’s madness also. There are very wonderful people around you, but once in a while they like to go crazy for a few minutes. If you don’t understand that, you will lose them. If you don’t understand their madness, you will definitely lose them. If you do, then you know how to handle them. Life is not always a straight line; you have to do many things to keep it going. If you forsake your understanding, your capability will be lost. Whether it’s a question of personal relationships or professional management, in both places you need understanding; otherwise, you won’t have fruitful relationships.
Sadhguru (Mystic’s Musings)
In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serving in all of the armed forces.[64] If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.
Jack Donovan (The Way of Men)
Many in China already believe that U.S. policy is, in fact, to weaken China from within and to constrain Beijing’s options abroad. Xi’s China has deep reservations about the long-term strategic intentions of the United States towards their country. Beijing does not believe the United States will happily surrender its current dominant position in the regional and global order and therefore concludes that Washington is actively pursuing a policy of containment to deny China international policy space. Chinese hardliners also conclude that this policy of containment abroad is matched by a parallel U.S. policy of undermining the legitimacy of the CCP at home. This deeply realist conclusion in Beijing about U.S. policy is matched by Washington’s conclusions about China’s operational strategy in the region and the world. The United States concludes that China is actively pursuing a policy based on Xi’s statement that the people of Asia should manage Asian security. Washington also concludes that this, by definition, is designed to exclude the United States and that the objective of Chinese operational strategy is to push the United States out of the security architecture of the region, to be replaced with a Chinese sphere of influence across East Asia.
Anonymous
How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal?
Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (Economic Controversies))
The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole. Explanations of emergence, like simplifications of complexity, are inherently illusory and can only be achieved by sleight of hand. This does not mean that emergence is not real. Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained. “Emergence offers a way to believe in physical causality while simultaneously maintaining the impossibility of a reductionist explanation of thought,” wrote W. Daniel Hillis, a computer architect who believes that architecture and programming can only go so far, after which intelligence has to be allowed to evolve on its own. “For those who fear mechanistic explanations of the human mind, our ignorance of how local interactions produce emergent behavior offers a reassuring fog in which to hide the soul.”33 Although individual computers and individual computer programs are developing the elements of artificial intelligence, it is in the larger networks (or the network at large) that we are developing a more likely medium for the emergence of the Leviathan of artificial mind.
George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
The proceedings of these ecumenical councils remind me of the experience of sitting down at a table before a large, thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Many of us know how frustrating it can be to keep trying piece after piece that looks like it should fit, but it doesn’t. I have even been guilty of trying to force a piece into the wrong space, even though I know only one will be a true fit. Eventually, I find the proper puzzle piece that provides an exact fit. Likewise, the delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological “pieces” found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole “picture” of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. At times, various groups presented “pieces” they believed were a proper fit regarding the humanity or deity or natures or wills of Christ, but, in the end, each was declared to be improper fits. The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, than to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions. We may know that the “Arius,” “Nestorius,” and “Eutyches” pieces do not fit the Christological puzzle, but this is not to say that a final and complete picture emerged.
Timothy C. Tennent (Theology in the Context of World Christianity: How the Global Church Is Influencing the Way We Think about and Discuss Theology)
Anthropology should be required for citizenship for people who are native-born because it helps them to understand the world we live in, the country we live in, the histories we have. People really don’t know much about their own culture, their own country. For instance, people really don’t know to what extent the United States has mistreated its own native peoples. In my home state of California, we had veritable genocide that lasted from the period of the gold rush to the first decade of the twentieth century. We have never really confronted and acknowledged that. To move forward, we have to face our complicated history with indigenous genocide, slavery, and eugenics applied to immigrants in the 1920s as well. Our history is not all negative, of course. I love to travel across the country by car every few years to meet with and talk with Americans from different parts of the country. There is also a lot to be proud of in being an American. But we do have to understand how our nation came into its present form. We’re no different from any other country. All nations are born in violence. But our role is to make them less violent, make them more viable, make them more equitable. That’s where anthropology comes in. I think anthropology helps us to look and question what Virginia Woolf called “unreal loyalties” — loyalties to a particular definition of an ethnic group or an origin story. Instead, anthropology helps us to understand and engage the richness, complexity, and conflict involved in making the United States. In this way anthropology can help us become better Americans.
Kenneth J. Guest (Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age)
Smee worked both in theory and in the laboratory to explain the electrochemical basis of vision, sensation, memory, logic, and the origination and recombination of ideas. He believed that the mental powers of animals, human beings, and mechanisms were different not in kind but in degree. His definition of consciousness has seen scant improvement in 150 years. “When an image is produced by an action upon the external senses, the actions on the organs of sense concur with the actions in the brain; and the image is then a Reality. When an image occurs to the mind without a corresponding simultaneous action of the body, it is called a Thought. The power to distinguish between a thought and a reality is called Consciousness,” he wrote in his Principles of the Human Mind deduced from Physical Laws, published in 1849.
George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
Question: Do the machines depicted in the economy of The Matrix produce value? The answer, of course, depends on what value means and how it differs from price. One definition of value is the price towards which the actual price tends under normal market conditions. Another derives from the idea that the value of things reflects the true costs of producing them. One thing is certain: just like love, poetry, porn and beauty, one knows value when one sees it, even if one finds it impossible to define it analytically.
Yanis Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (Economic Controversies))
The truest definition of civilization—a civilized society with a civilized government—is a world without war, for it has become unified by global democracy; not at the hands of a calculating minority, but by will of the People for a more perfect union, drawn together by ideas like those in the Declaration of Independence.  The promise of civilization is the escape from the primal hunt, and the development of a society beyond, not against primal nature.” ~Definition of a Civilized Society
Matthew Holbert (Economy of The Planetary Organism: A New Economic Paradigm)
Because I am a professor, I will later give dry, dense, detailed defini-tions for globalization and media. But for now, a perfectly good definition of globalization is anytime anyone does anything anywhere across borders. And a perfectly good definition of media is anything people use to communicate. Those definitions work because they emphasize people and human action.
Jack Lule (Globalization and Media: Global Village of Babel)
Nierenberg was a man of strong will and even stronger opinions—a good talker but not always a good listener. Some colleagues said that the old adage about famous physicists definitely applied to him: he was sometimes in error but never in doubt. And he was fiercely competitive, often debating until his adversaries simply gave up.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy—the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an ‘alternative network of relations’.
Paul Mason (Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions)
test3 defines the sin function as a keyword argument, with its default value being a reference to the sin function within the math module. While we still do need to find a reference to this function within the module, this is only necessary when the test3 function is first defined. After this, the reference to the sin function is stored within the function definition as a local variable in the form of a default keyword argument. As mentioned previously, local variables do not need a dictionary lookup to be found; they are stored in a very slim array that has very fast lookup times. Because of this, finding the function is quite fast! While these effects are an interesting result of the way namespaces in Python are managed, test3 is definitely not “Pythonic.” Luckily, these extra dictionary lookups only start to degrade performance when they are called a lot (i.e., in the innermost block of a very fast loop, such as in the Julia set example). With this in mind, a more readable solution would be to set a local variable with the global reference before the loop is started. We’ll still have to do the global lookup once whenever the function is called, but all the calls to that function in the loop will be made faster. This speaks to the fact that even minute slowdowns in code can be amplified if that code is being run millions of times. Even though a dictionary lookup may only take several hundred nanoseconds, if we are looping millions of times over this lookup it can quickly add up. In fact, looking at Example 4-10 we see a 9.4% speedup simply by making the sin function local to the tight loop that calls it.
Micha Gorelick (High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans)
Marx’s original definition of “bourgeoisie” referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker.
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
The first function has side effects because it relies on data outside of itself, and changes data outside of the current function—it incremented a global variable. The second function does not have side effects because it does not rely on or change any data outside of itself.
Cory Althoff (The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally)
The object-oriented programming paradigm also addresses the problems that arise in procedural programming by eliminating global state, but instead of storing state in functions, it is stored in objects.
Cory Althoff (The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally)
Then, just in time to trigger the sleeper contracts, WHO––in a sleazy switcheroo––changed the definition of Class 6 “pandemic” deleting the words and the requirement for “mass deaths around the globe.” “You could now have a pandemic with zero deaths,”66 explained Michael Fumento in Forbes magazine.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Swami Shankarananda of Melbourne, Australia, offers this definition: “In the late sixties when spirituality arose within me for the first time, I could have said (had I enough awareness), ‘I’d like a path that is as spacious as the universe. A path that includes everyone and every possible belief system. A path that is as tolerant and forgiving as a mother, yet as precise and on-purpose as a brain surgeon. A path whose mode of thinking is so broad that no thought or idea is left outside of it. A path of inner transformation and self-development. A path of truth that is also a path of kindness. A path whose love is so deep and all-embracing that no sinner is excluded from its mercy. A path whose source is Universal Consciousness.’ Had I been able to formulate those thoughts that were in me in an inchoate way, perhaps the sky would have parted and a voice from on high might have said, ‘Your path is Hinduism.
Hinduism Today Magazine (What is Hinduism?: Modern Adventures Into a Profound Global Faith)
When you start reading up on infectious diseases, it isn’t long before you come to the subject of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. The definitions for these terms are less strict than you may think. A good rule of thumb is that an outbreak is when a disease spikes in a local area, an epidemic is when an outbreak spreads more broadly within a country or region, and a pandemic is when an epidemic goes global, affecting more than one continent. And some diseases don’t come and go, but stay consistently in a specific location—those are known as endemic diseases. Malaria, for instance, is endemic to many equatorial regions. If COVID-19 never goes away completely, it’ll be classified as an endemic disease.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life
John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
Dr. Fauci presided over these atrocities, collaborating with pharmaceutical company researchers and winking at their loose definitions of “informed consent” and “volunteer.” Instead of looking out for the best interests of children, Dr. Fauci gave outlaw drug makers56 free rein to torture vulnerable children behind closed doors, with neither parental permission nor requisite oversight from child welfare authorities.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
I came to realize that the point was not to arrive at a place where I could make definitive statements about what is or isn’t sustainable. It was about learning how to live in the presence of a world we did not make. Like the plants, the world is alive, and the task first is to meet that aliveness. That realization, in turn, helped me listen more deeply.
Ann Armbrecht (The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry)
But what aren't you doing already? What more can you possibly do?’ ‘I guess he means the team stuff’, I said. ‘The bonding. The camaraderie I've never really been –‘. ‘Don't start judging yourself’, she said sharply. ‘Don't start seeing yourself in the light of those kinds of standards.’ ‘No, but it's true. There's always been the part of work I've struggled with, the unquestioning side. The feeling of joining in. I've always tried to do it at this kind of remove. Maybe what he's saying is –‘ ‘Of course you've done it at a remove. How else are you supposed to do it and still be you?’ ‘But maybe those days are gone’, I said. ‘Maybe I have to accept that. Maybe there just won't be those kind of jobs anymore - the ones where you can roll out of bed and staggering without speaking to anyone and keep your head down and just do it, you know? maybe this is what work is, now’ […] ‘Definitely. Simple tasks can be automated. They've already almost got the machine learning to do what you do. It's about what else a human can bring to the table, which is, literally, their humanity.’ It was possible, I realised, to imagine. A semi-global future in which the bulk of paid human employment would revolve not around hard skills, but around the messy, blurry business of interpersonal success. A new divide would open up, between the well liked, The easy to get along with, and the awkward, The rude, the unfriendly. I pictured the encampment on which I had lived, filled not as it was then, with migrants, unfortunates, hard drinkers, the out of luck. But instead, the abrasive, the poorly adjusted, the excessively reserved and painfully shy. (p.136-7)
Sam Byers (Come Join Our Disease)
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change defines “climate change” as: . . . a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods . . .7 That definition explicitly excludes changes due to natural causes, which differs from the plain-language meaning of the term. So when the average person hears “climate change” (as in the commonly shouted credo Climate change is real!), they are likely to assume it means change we are responsible for.
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
As the doubly vaccinated overwhelmed Israeli hospitals, the government announced in August a new plan for coping with its “Pandemic of the Vaccinated.” Israel said it will “update” its definition of “full vaccination” to require three, or even four, injections. “We are updating what it means to be vaccinated,” said Israel’s COVID czar, Salman Zarka.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
You might be thinking: Okay, great. I definitely have problems in my life and relationships, but how do I overcome them? Where do I even start? When you encounter challenges, adversity, or conflict, you must engage your core. I’m a lifelong athlete. Every sport I train for has one common need: a strong core. It helps prevent injuries. It gives you stability that makes you less likely to fall over, and it makes it easier to get back up when you do. Thoughtfully Fit also has a core that is central to everything you do in the model. It always comes back to control and choices: What do you control? What are your choices? For example, you can’t control what other people do, but you can control your thoughts and actions. You may not be able to control angry customers, the effects of a global pandemic, the results of a presidential election, or decisions coworkers make, but you do control how you respond. And you always have choices in how you respond.
Darcy Luoma (Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success)
Global governance is commonly defined as the process of cooperation among transnational actors aimed at providing responses to global problems (those that affect more than one state or region). It encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which nation states try to bring more predictability and stability to their responses to transnational challenges. This definition makes it clear that any global effort on any global issue or concern is bound to be toothless without the cooperation of national governments and their ability to act and legislate to support their aims. Nation states make global governance possible (one leads the other), which is why the UN says that “effective global governance can only be achieved with effective international cooperation”.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
Jesus' definition of submission isn't about giving in to the whims and wishes of others. It is rather about giving out from the completeness we have in him and our passion for his kingdom. The submission Jesus models is gospel centered, for he was aligning himself with God's purposes and pouring himself out to rescue a lost humanity (Philippians 2:3-9). Submission for us follows that same trajectory of putting the interests of others ahead of ourselves...
Carolyn Custis James (Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women)
We could add privilege theory to Žižek’s long list of fake left ist “radicals” who bombard the existing system. As with “ Médecins sans frontières , Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns,” privilege theory runs the risk of falling prey to what Žižek names “interpassivity”: the risk of “doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc. activity fi ts the formula of ‘Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!’ ” The problem with privilege theory—especially as vulgarized in liberal universities—is that it ends up becoming “an empty gesture which obliges no one to do anything definite.” White liberal multiculturalists put on display their “progressive” leanings by calling for inclusivity and tolerance, parading their own self-critique—in a pleasure-ridden act of virtue signaling—as a model for others to follow. Whiteness or white privilege is treated as a reified thing that could be singled out and denounced, and not as “a set of power relations,” as Charles W. Mills insightfully puts it. Privilege-checking does not necessarily translate into campus radicalism. It remains utopian and impotent when it fails to confront capitalism itself: “The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly ‘realistic’ is to think what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.” The advocates of privilege theory are today’s “true utopians.” They muzzle ideology critique, believing that gradualist reform is the key to social transformation. But privilege theory’s antiracist insights are diluted, never really touching the reality of domination and exploitation, never “demanding ‘impossible’ changes of the system itself.
Zahi Zalloua (Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future)
While we’ll be discovering the edges of our new economic models as we go, our history strongly suggests that fewer workers by definition means more expensive labor. That in turn should prompt everyone to figure out how to make that scarce labor more productive.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
Interpretation operates by relating the particular to the universal, by taking a seemingly isolated event and seeing its larger importance. The universal provides the framework of meaning through which the particular acquires whatever sense it will acquire. Without the possibility of a reference to the universal, particular events lose their connection to the whole and thus take on the appearance of contingency. We can see this phenomenon at its most egregious in the contemporary attitude toward crime. People fear crime today in large part because it always threatens to take them by surprise. Rather than being the product of definite sociohistorical conditions, the criminal seems to emerge out of nowhere, strike, and then return to anonymity. As the victim (or potential victim) of the crime, I experience it as a wholly random act, disconnected with the functioning of the social order as a whole. What I experience most forcefully is the fact that the crime could have happened to anyone—that it could have happened to someone else just as easily as it happened to me. Certainly it is never anything that I did that triggered the crime—or at least such is my experience. Crimes appear, in other words, in almost every instance as particular acts without any link to the universal, without any connection to the social order in which they exist. One might have a theory about crime—blaming it on “liberal judges,” for instance—but when crime actually strikes, it seems random and irreducibly singular. Hence, it becomes impossible to interpret crime, to grasp particular crimes within their universal significance. 9 But nonetheless crime does have a universal significance, and it does emerge from localizable conditions, despite its appearance of isolation and particularity. In fact, one could convincingly argue that crime should be easier to understand within the current context of global capitalism than ever before in human history, simply because never before have those who live in squalor been bombarded on a daily basis with nonstop images of opulence. Making connections like this is increasingly difficult today, however, because subjects increasingly view their experience as an isolated, essentially private experience.
Todd McGowan (The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Psychoanalysis and Culture))
In retrospect, his ambition to become an actual global dictator definitely should have been a red flag.
Naomi Kritzer (Catfishing on CatNet (CatNet, #1))
Every technological development that has brought us to our industrialized, urbanized present must be reevaluated to make today’s greentech work. But by far the biggest challenge is the very existence of cities themselves. All are by definition densely populated, while greentech by definition is not dense.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
U-turn for climate change, not possible; right turn, with or by right drivers, definitely is.
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Climate Flip - Climate Risk Reporting In Banks)
WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as ‘someone who causes harm to others by mystical means’. In stating this, he was self-consciously not providing a personal view of the matter, but summing up an established scholarly consensus, which dealt with the witch figure as one of those whom he termed ‘primordial characters’ of humanity. He added that no more rigorous definition was generally accepted.1 In all this he was certainly correct, for English-speaking scholars have used the word ‘witch’ when dealing with such a reputed person in all parts of the world, before Needham’s time, and ever since, as shall be seen. When the only historian of the European trials to set them systematically in a global context in recent years, Wolfgang Behringer, undertook his task, he termed witchcraft ‘a generic term for all kinds of evil magic and sorcery, as perceived by contemporaries’.2 Again, in doing so he was self-consciously perpetuating a scholarly norm. That usage has persisted till the present among anthropologists and historians of extra-European peoples: to take one recent example, in 2011 Katherine Luongo prefaced her study of the relationship between witchcraft and the law in early twentieth-century Kenya by defining witchcraft itself ‘in the Euro-American sense of the word’ as ‘magical harm’.3
Ronald Hutton (The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present)
Globalization believed it would succeed in the neutralization of all conflicts and would move towards a faultless order. But it is, in fact, an order by default: everything is equivalent to everything else in a zero-sum equation. Gone is the dialectic, the play of thesis and antithesis resolving itself in synthesis. The opposing terms now cancel each other out in a levelling of all conflict. But this neutralization is, in its turn, never definitive, since, at the same time as all dialectical resolution disappears, the extremes come to the fore. No longer a question of a history in progress, of a directive schema or of regulation by crisis. No longer any rational continuity or dialectic of conflicts, but a sharing of extremes. Once the universal has been crushed by the power of the global and the logic of history obliterated by the dizzying whirl of change, there remains only a face-off between virtual omnipotence and those fiercely opposed to it. Hence the antagonism between global power and terrorism - the present confrontation between American hegemony and Islamist terrorism being merely the visible current twist in this duel between an Integral Reality of power and integral rejection of that same power. There is no possible reconciliation; there never will be an armistice between the antagonistic forces, nor any possibility of an integral order. Never any armistice of thought either, which resists it fiercely, or an armistice of events in this sense: at most, events go on strike for a time, then suddenly burst through again. This is, in a way, reassuring: though it cannot be dismantled, the Empire of Good is also doomed to perpetual failure.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
There is no quick fix to ending terrorism and organized violence, but disregarding the way that false definitions of manhood are used to prey on marginalized men who end up joining those groups is ignoring one of the potentially most cost-effective paths to a rigorous and global terrorism reduction strategy.
Liz Plank (For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity)
The United States has about 13 million children living in poverty. Of those, about 2 million may live in “extreme poverty” by global definitions (in households earning less than about $2 per person per day), when looking at their cash incomes. These kids would be considered extremely poor if they lived in Congo or Bangladesh, yet they’re here in the United States.
Nicholas D. Kristof (Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope)
Any researchers of age forty or older who have surveyed the poor in countries like India can recall an occasion when they were surprised to discover that someone they thought was much older than them was in fact significantly younger. Premature aging can result from many causes, but steroid use is definitely one of them—and it is not just that affected individuals look older, they also die sooner. Yet because the immediate effect of the medicine is to make the patient feel rapidly better and she is not told what might happen later, she goes home happy
Abhijit V. Banerjee (Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty)
If extensive and global economic engagement and growing wealth have not already persuaded China to change its behavior, it is unclear why it would be more likely to do so as it grows stronger and thus less susceptible to outside pressure. A state like China, with a deeply entrenched economic model that is fundamentally different from - and in key respects antithetical to - that of the United States, seems more likely to continue the course that has brought it wealth and power... By definition, an established hegemon, able to direct the relevant policies of subordinate states, is harder to eject from its position than a state still grasping for hegemony.
Elbridge A. Colby (The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict)
How Lithuanian we all felt,” Gitanas said, “when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we’re not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized—this doesn’t make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age. So how do I be a patriot now? What positive thing do I stand for? What is the positive definition of my country?
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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)
Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive Edition)
The exact definition of veto disregards the small and the developed states, and it is also a visible idiocy of the member states of the United Nations that they confer a veto right on those powers that are already superpowers of the world. Such states exercise their hegemony and devious interests to oppress and victimize weak states. Change is necessary to eliminate judicial bigotry and unfairness, global racism, and unjust international conduct for the sake of peace and prosperity in every society.
Ehsan Sehgal
The field of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, took a giant leap forward in 1953 with one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century: the molecular structure of DNA. This Nobel Prize–winning effort of Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of how genetic information is encoded and transmitted through the double helix. Or did it? Even decades after this seminal event, scientists do not agree on the definition of what constitutes a gene.1 We are endowed with 22,500 genes; some scientists think that less than 2 percent are helpful, whereas others assert that more than 50 percent are. As a result, we do not know what most of our DNA—comprising more than six billion letters—does. More surprisingly, even when there is agreement on the function of a particular bit of DNA, it is still a mystery how this DNA translates into a phenotype, or observable trait. The plain truth is that despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent every year by dedicated researchers globally, we don’t understand how evolution works at the molecular level.2 And this is a good—no, great—thing.
Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
Finally, consider your predicament a privilege. In a world so shrunken that certain people refer to “the global village,” the term “explorer” has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a foray into the unknown, and a four-year-old child, wandering about alone in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost. When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown—either through the misdirection of others or, better yet, through your own creative ineptitude—there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free.
Tim Cahill (Jaguars Ripped My Flesh (Vintage Departures))
Run for service, not office. Chase change, not campaign victory. If you can't change the world without office, you definitely can't change it in office. Who am I? I am Abhijit Naskar, EAS - Earth Administrative Servant the First. Who's next - who is thunderful enough, to shoulder the world as living Atlas!
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets)
The PCR test could not identify active HIV infection. Mullis, who invented the tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no threat from HIV and had no live HIV virus in their bodies. Researchers naturally found harmless HIV DNA detritus in people with a constellation of other diseases. All those unrelated ailments soon became incorporated beneath the umbrella definition of AIDS.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
One of the hegemonic contexts of blackmailing is also known as a Veto; surprisingly, the juristic ideology accepts and respects that; consequently, peace collapses and dies under that. The veto is such a privilege that disregards and prevails the majority vote and consensus and all rules. The exact definition of veto disregards the small and the developed states, and it is also a visible idiocy of the member states of the United Nations that they confer a veto right on those powers that are already superpowers of the world. Such states exercise their hegemony and devious interests to oppress and victimize weak states. Change is necessary to eliminate judicial bigotry and unfairness, global racism, and unjust international conduct for the sake of peace and prosperity in every society. World peace stays a dream and is impossible until the veto power holders become unable to practice veto dragon since that causes injustice, wars, and destruction. The UN Security Council is such a place or venue, where the veto dominant states and supremacists delineate, stipulate, and arbitrate the rules, with its motives, and penetrate or violate the rules of law and precepts, is not the infraction and duality, whereas, it is true! A veto is a crime that is unpalatable because it ignores rules, fairness, consensus, and even global peace.
Ehsan Sehgal
Joint ventures thrive not just on paper agreements but on shared visions and complementary strengths.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
The spectrum of market-entry vehicles is vast, from short-term plays using domestic distributors to sell internationally, to long-term strategies like setting up foreign operations. Understanding the cost, risk, and time commitment involved as you move along this spectrum is crucial, as it determines not only the potential return on your investment but also the complexity of disengagement should you choose to exit the market.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
I've learned about this need for communication and connection with different departments from personal experience; in fact, this is one of the areas in this book where my knowledge comes not from my success, but from my failure. Fairly early in my career, I had the credit manager of our company come into my office with his hair on fire, wanting to know why I had just agreed to a distribution deal that had 120-day terms. If I'd been thinking further ahead and discussed it with him beforehand, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Fortunately, we talked it through and made it work, but it took some begging, genuine understanding, and empathy to make sure I could repair that relationship.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
The last great hope of humankind, I believe, lies not in governmental interventions or global treaties but in international business. It is here, in the web of personal and corporate relationships that crisscross borders and time zones, that we find our best chance for a peaceful and prosperous world. Every hand we shake, every deal we close, every bridge we build between cultures and economies holds more promise than a hundred resolutions passed in the halls of the United Nations.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
The complexity of managing an international business can be likened to playing a game of chess on several boards at once. Each country represents a different game board, and each move you make has consequences not just on that board but potentially affects the others. The successful international manager must therefore be a master of strategy and an excellent multitasker, constantly aware of changes on multiple fronts.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
As we explore the strategies for entering foreign markets, it becomes apparent that the differences in legal environments, cultural norms, and business practices require a high level of adaptability and foresight. For instance, what works in one country might be completely ineffective or even illegal in another, making the need for localized knowledge and expertise paramount.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
As you move along the spectrum, the market-entry vehicles become more expensive, riskier, and require a greater time commitment
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
Everyone gets excited about making sales in a new market and loses sight of the real goal, which is to earn an acceptable return on the company’s investment.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
The key to making money in this context, then, is understanding the financial structure of your business.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
Measure twice, cut once applies as much to international strategy as it does to carpentry.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
What really counts in a new market is not your past successes but your adaptability and learning capacity.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
Building relationships across cultures is much more than just a business necessity; it is an art form that demands sensitivity, patience, and an open mind. A true global leader sees beyond mere transactions to the building of long-term partnerships that respect and honor the diversity of practices and values.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
Economic theories teach us about the efficiency of markets, but when it comes to international business, it's the inefficiencies that often create the greatest opportunities. Spotting these inefficiencies requires a keen eye for detail and an understanding of local consumer behaviors that only comes with experience.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)
There is also a risk in some markets of a significant devaluation of the local currency. For example, if the country experiences a financial crisis and devalues its currency to the point that your goods are no longer competitively priced, you can lose your market position overnight. There are no easy answers when it comes to getting paid for international sales but planning in advance beats learning hard lessons after the fact. Choose the solutions that work best for your company and prepare for the implications of those choices. The best strategy is to do the due diligence on your new customers.
Craig Maginness (Go Glocal: The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets)