Socio Political Quotes

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean...' He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. 'I mean... can't you guys just let a story be a story?

I might face death any minute now! But I should try not to put myself in harms' way as long as I can live. Of course it is not important if I die, because this is going to happen anyway. I know my purpose, my purpose is: How will my life or death impact the lives of others?

The writer should have a comprehensive outlook. He should aim at a holistic understanding of the prevailing social, political and economic conditions. He should evaluate all factors in a balanced way. To take a selective view will be erroneous. A realistic approach becomes necessary. This requires healthy literary criticism and exchange of views. A writer should necessarily venture into his enterprise by touching on a single issue. But then he should relate it to other socially relevant issues. This is what we call the socio-spiritual approach. You may begin your work dwelling upon the problems of an individual, but then as a writer you should be able to view it as part of the larger social reality.

[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view. Perhaps also, one body may, in one lifetime, move through many identities and desires. The use of,queer’ then, is a deliberate political move, which underscores the fluidity (potential and actual) of sexual identity and sexual desire. The term suggests that all kinds of sexual desire and identifications are possible, and all these have socio-cultural and historical co-ordinates.

An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality.

Children’s literature must build a bridge between the colorful dream world full of fantasy and illusion, and a tougher real world full of twists and turns. The child armed with the torch of knowledge, awareness and guidance must cross this bridge and set foot to the intense harshness of the bigger world.” An In-Depth Analysis of Educational Deadlock

Modern science, as we have noted earlier, has a world-view that both supports and is supported by the socio-political-economic system of western capitalist patriarchy which dominates and exploits nature, women, and the poor.

Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean... Can't you guys just let a story be a story?

Municipal Bond investment risk is substantially influenced by socio-politics.

Rulers craft stories, the ruled listen.

A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role, according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive. Or, consider him socio-politically: most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean . . .” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean . . . can’t you guys just let a story be a story?

Christian hope frees us to act hopefully in the world. It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice altogether. Christian hope, after all, does not need to see what it hopes for (Heb. 11:1); and neither does it require us to comprehend the end of history. Rather, it simply requires us to trust that even the most outwardly insignificant of faithful actions - the cup of cold water given to the child, the widow's mite offered at the temple, the act of hospitality shown to the stranger, none of which has any overall strategic socio-political significance so far as we can now see - will nevertheless be made to contribute in some significant way to the construction of God's kingdom by the action of God's creative and sovereign grace.

All the terrorism in the world that fester in the name of religion, are in fact not religious in nature, rather they are socio-political. Their roots are not religion, but socio-political condition. Religion is only used as a divine tool of authoritative justification in the search of absolution.

For the correct Marxist classification of the proletariat-the class which is forced by socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production – implies that both variations in the level of the reserve army of labour, and the variegated relations between the ‘purely physiological’ and ‘moral-historical’ components of the value of labour-power,63 are of decisive importance for the proletarian’s immediate destiny.

Let’s face it. There are good people and bad people everywhere. Illiteracy, poor education, wars, greed , corruption and similar factors were responsible for the problems in both India and Pakistan. Religious fanatics benefited from these factors and developed formidable socio-political strongholds in both countries.

In short, the superhuman beings and laws that petty human beings see as the source of their socio-political organization must do more than simply provide rules. They must also justify those rules, explain why they are good even though they feel uncomfortable, how they are conducive to happiness, indeed why there is so much unhappiness to overcome and why those who live by the rules rarely seem to be any less unhappy than the rest; and this almost invariably involves explaining why the world exists, what humans are doing in it, how their society relates to it, how and why they should go on, or alternatively how and why they ought to get out of it all again. The more complex a society, the more elaborate its belief system will be, obviously because the more variety there is in the human condition, the more there is to explain.

write these pages, Japan and the U.S. are still practicing widespread selective denial of major problems. Japan currently acknowledges some problems (its large government debt and aging population), and incompletely acknowledges the issue of Japanese women’s role. But Japan still denies other problems: its lack of accepted alternatives to immigration for solving its demographic difficulties; the historical causes of Japan’s tense relations with China and Korea; and denial that Japan’s traditional policy of seeking to grab overseas natural resources rather than to help manage them sustainably is now outdated. The U.S., as I write, is still in widespread denial of our own major problems: political polarization, low voter turnout, obstacles to voter registration, inequality, limited socio-economic mobility, and decreasing government investment in public goods.

Masquerade of scripted lives, A perfect play unfolds. Masquerade of scripted... Strings are being pulled. Masquerade of… Awakened to the truth.

...Shouldn`t we tell the child that in your country there are boys and girls who have never seen a piece of meat on their plates? Shouldn`t we tell the child that more than half of the world`s population are hungry, and why they are hungry, and how hunger could be diminished? Shouldn`t we give the child a true and logical understanding of the history and development of human societies?…" An In-Depth Analysis of Educational Deadlock

A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator’s role, according to one way of seeing things; he’s unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive. Or, consider him socio-politically: most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

In neoliberal victim theory, the rather uncompassionate conception of victimization as self-made – the idea that winners win and losers lose because they have simply chosen to do so – fairly obviously evacuates sociological explanation of social suffering, directly subverting progressive political efforts to make victimization through poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence visible as collective and socio-economically embedded in an array of intersecting engines of social hierarchy and difference.

History is not merely about kings and their wars. We should know the story of people at large-not necessarily only those of politicians or film stars. How else can we relate to the lives of people influenced by the socio-political milieu, beyond their control?

When Marx and Engels applied the law of contradiction in things to the study of the socio-historical process, they discovered the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, they discovered the contradiction between the exploiting and exploited classes and also the resultant contradiction between the economic base and its superstructure (politics, ideology, etc.), and they discovered how these contradictions inevitably lead to different kinds of social revolution in different kinds of class society.

Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.

Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism. Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes

The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates.

Florence, Colorado, was a small town, and a much less annoying one than it would have been had the Split in the early 2020s not cut off the endless supply of liberal refugees from blue states who arrived eager to inflict the same socio-political atrocities upon their new home that had made their old one uninhabitable.

The Arabic Qur'an and authoritative Christian translations of the Bible into a limited number of languages contributed profoundly to the universalisation of a single ethnic religious—linguistic community in the Muslim case and to the distinction between major written languages and dialectic vernaculars in the Christian case. While the Islamic socio-political impact was thus in principle almost entirely anti-ethnic and anti-national, the Christian impact was more complex. Its willingness to translate brought with it, undoubtedly, a reduction in the number of ethnicities and vernaculars, but then a confirmation of the individual identity of those that remained: Christianity in fact helped turn ethnicities into nations.

Our discussion so far reveals that the early egalitarian Islamic community largely recognized differences among the faithful on the basis of personal piety and moral excellence alone, tending to devalue kinship and social status in conscious contradistinction to the pre-Islamic period.50 Such a moral attitude found broad reflection in the socio-political organization of the early polity as well.

Florence, Colorado, was a small town, and a much less annoying one than it would have been had the Split in the early 2020s not cut off the endless supply of liberal refugees from blue states who arrived eager to inflict the same socio-political atrocities upon their new home that had made their old one uninhabitable. Back then, the place was flooded with Californians who moved east having learned nothing.

As glitch feminists, this is our politic: we refuse to be hewn to the hegemonic line of a binary body. This calculated failure prompts the violent socio-cultural machine to hiccup, sigh, shudder, buffer. We want a new framework and for this framework, we want new skin. The digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify our own. Through the digital, the body 'in glitch' finds its genesis. Embracing the glitch is therefore a participatory action that challenges the status quo. It creates a homeland for those traversing the complex channels of gender's diaspora. The glitch is for those selves joyfully immersed in the in-between, those who have traveled away from their assigned site of gendered origin. The ongoing presence of the glitch generates a welcome and protected space in which to innovate and experiment. Glitch feminism demands an occupation of the digital as a means of world-building. It allows us to seize the opportunity to generate new ideas and resources for the ongoing (r)evolution of bodies that can inevitably move and shift faster than AFK mores or the societies that produce them under which we are forced to operate offline.

The inspiration our campaign was providing, the sight of so many young people newly invested in their ability to make change, the bringing together of Americans across racial and socio-economic lines - it was the realization of everything I’d once dreamed might be possible in politics, and it made me proud. But the continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizer’s instincts, that sense that change involves “we” and not “me”.

What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.

Personally, I’ve never met a person who was evil in the classic Hollywood mode, who throws down happily on the side of evil while cackling, the sworn enemy of all that is good because of some early disillusionment. Most of the evil I’ve seen in the world—most of the nastiness I’ve been on the receiving end of (and, for that matter, the nastiness I, myself, have inflicted on others)—was done by people who intended good, who thought they were doing good, by reasonable people, staying polite, making accommodations, laboring under slight misperceptions, who haven’t had the inclination or taken the time to think things through, who’ve been sheltered from or were blind to the negative consequences of the belief system of which they were part, bowing to expedience and/or “commonsense” notions that have come to them via their culture and that they have failed to interrogate. In other words, they’re like the people in Gogol. (I’m leaving aside here the big offenders, the monstrous egos, the grandiose-idea-possessors, those cut off from reality by too much wealth, fame, or success, the hyperarrogant, the power-hungry-from-birth, the socio- and/or psychopathic.) But on the mundane side of things, if we want to understand evil (nastiness, oppression, neglect) we should recognize that the people who commit these sins don’t always cackle while committing them; often they smile, because they’re feeling so useful and virtuous.

Reading the hymn of Philippians in a baptismal key and, reciprocally, understanding baptism as participation in the descending movement of Jesus Christ (kenosis) turn out to have extremely important consequences: if such interpretations have validity, then the church is by essence and by definition constituted as a kenotic body. The socio-political implications of this affirmation are only too evident in a society structured according to the totally opposed movements of dominion, power, oppression, social ascent, meritocracy, violence, and injustice.

Religious fundamentalism advocates homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, polygamy and many other primitive evils. Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist – a theoretical pest from the stone-age, who somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect. Such a creature with no modern mental faculty whatsoever, knows nothing beyond the words of a book, written hundreds or thousands of years ago, when ignorance was the default mode of thinking in the society. It does not only believe every single word of a book to be literally true, but puts all its efforts to convince others to believe the same. This way, it would be an understatement to say, such is a worthless creature. In reality, such a creature can cause a catastrophic contagion in a society, especially if that society is already going through socio-political turmoil.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean . . .” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean . . . can’t you guys just let a story be a story?

THE economic consequences of fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money have such important bearings on the life of the community and of the individual that as soon as the State had abandoned the attempt to exploit for fiscal ends its authority in monetary matters, and as soon as the large-scale development of the modern economic community had enabled the State to exert a decisive influence on the kind of money chosen by the market, it was an obvious step to think of attaining certain socio-political aims by influencing these consequences in a systematic manner. Modern currency policy is something essentially new; it differs fundamentally from earlier State activity in the monetary sphere.

Most people remember COINTELPRO from the days of the Black Panthers, Yippies, and other revolutionary groups who threatened our government during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. Sensing that these groups might incite American citizens into radical action, the FBI sent in agents to agitate members of these various groups, often pitting them against each other through various forms of subterfuge, such as blackmail. It appears that the CIA, FBI, and NSA are now sending their goons into the metaphysical marketplace, making sure that people who think they are aspiring to higher and positively transformative things are, in reality, only becoming more self-indulgent, disconnected, and confused. The biggest influx of these agents occurred during the blossoming of the "human potential" movement in the early '70s, through such institutions as Esalen. Legions of people threw away their protest banners and followed their bliss during a time when directly addressing the socio-political problems of the day was imperative. Since then, the emphasis on personal development - and more recently, the You Create Your Own Reality movement - a significant segment of the population has been brainwashed into disdaining all socio-political issues. For what better way to disempower people than to have them focus on their personal evolution at the expense of their families, communities, and the countries they live in?

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.

In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential.

don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean . . .” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean . . . can’t you guys just let a story be a story?” No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack. Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.” “I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

When we think without Marx's perspective, that is, without considering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many things are reported in the news but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits: as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations - propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests - and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity. Thus we fail to associate social problems with the socio-economic forces that create them and we learn to truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something different; for example, if we tried to explain that wealth and poverty exist together not in accidental juxtaposition, but because wealth causes poverty, an inevitable outcome of economic exploitation both at home and abroad. How could such an analysis gain any exposure in the capitalist media or in mainstream political life?

According to socialism, instead of spending years talking about my mother, my emotions and my complexes, I should ask myself: who owns the means of production in my country? What are its main exports and imports? What’s the connection between the ruling politicians and international banking? Only by understanding the surrounding socio-economic system and taking into account the experiences of all other people could I truly understand what I feel, and only by common action can we change the system. Yet what person can take into account the experiences of all human beings, and weigh them one against the other in a fair way? That’s why socialists discourage self-exploration, and advocate the establishment of strong collective institutions – such as socialist parties and trade unions – that aim to decipher the world for us. Whereas in liberal politics the voter knows best, and in liberal economics the customer is always right, in socialist politics the party knows best, and in socialist economics the trade union is always right. Authority and meaning still come from human experience – both the party and the trade union are composed of people and work to alleviate human misery – yet individuals must listen to the party and the trade union rather than to their personal feelings.

As long as you keep treating the individual as the basis of political agency,’ he was saying now, ‘you’re going to be stuck with different forms of capitalism. This is my whole idea. This is what I’m trying to write about. What if we stopped talking in terms of individuals at all, and instead we took the relationship as the base socio-economic unit? The relationships, the bonds, the connections–they’re just as basic to any system as the actual individuals, the actual data. Right? And in relationships, we do all sorts of things that radically challenge the neoliberal status quo: we make sacrifices, we put the other person first, we learn to compromise, we care, we help, we listen, we give ourselves away–and fundamentally, those are different kinds of sacrifices to the kind that are all about self-discipline and following a regime. They’re not individualistic; they’re mutual. Like, all the stuff that you were saying before, stopping eating meat, flying less, shopping local, I mean, all power to you, for sure, but there’s something so puritanical about it, like, it’s a programme of asceticism, always being strict and consistent and never being lazy or whatever–and at the end of the day it’s still about you as an individual. Your purity, your moral conscience, the sacrifices you’ve made.

Age of Extremes" delivers its fundamental argument in the form of a periodisation. The ‘short 20th century’ between 1914 and 1991 can be divided into three phases. The first, ‘The Age of Catastrophe’, extends from the slaughter of the First World War, through the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism, to the cataclysm of the Second World War and its immediate consequences, including the end of European empires. The second, ‘The Golden Age’, stretching approximately from 1950 to 1973, saw historically unprecedented rates of growth and a new popular prosperity in the advanced capitalist world, with the spread of mixed economies and social security systems; accompanied by rising living standards in the Soviet bloc and the ‘end of the Middle Ages’ in the Third World, as the peasantry streamed off the land into modern cities in post-colonial states. The third phase, ‘Landslide’, starting with the oil crisis and onset of recession in 1973, and continuing into the present, has witnessed economic stagnation and political atrophy in the West, the collapse of the USSR in the East, socio-cultural anomie across the whole of the North, and the spread of vicious ethnic conflicts in the South. The signs of these times are: less growth, less order, less security. The barometer of human welfare is falling.

Classical liberalism has been reproached with being too obstinate and not ready enough to compromise. It was because of its inflexibility that it was defeated in its struggle with the nascent anticapitalist parties of all kinds. If it had realized, as these other parties did, the importance of compromise and concession to popular slogans in winning the favor of the masses, it would have been able to preserve at least some of its influence. But it has never bothered to build for itself a party organization and a party machine as the anticapitalist parties have done. It has never attached any importance to political tactics in electoral campaigns and parliamentary proceedings. It has never gone in for scheming opportunism or political bargaining. This unyielding doctrinairism necessarily brought about the decline of liberalism. The factual assertions contained in these statements are entirely in accordance with the truth, but to believe that they constitute a reproach against liberalism is to reveal a complete misunderstanding of its essential spirit. The ultimate and most profound of the fundamental insights of liberal thought is that it is ideas that constitute the foundation on which the whole edifice of human social cooperation is Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition constructed and sustained and that a lasting social structure cannot be built on the basis of false and mistaken ideas. Nothing can serve as a substitute for an ideology that enhances human life by fostering social cooperation—least of all lies, whether they be called "tactics," "diplomacy," or "compromise." If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice. If they err and go astray, then one must endeavor to enlighten them by instruction. But if they cannot be enlightened, if they persist in error, then nothing can be done to prevent catastrophe. All the tricks and lies of demagogic politicians may well be suited to promote the cause of those who, whether in good faith or bad, work for the destruction of society. But the cause of social progress, the cause of the further development and intensification of social bonds, cannot be advanced by lies and demagogy. No power on earth, no crafty stratagem or clever deception could succeed in duping mankind into accepting a social doctrine that it not only does not acknowledge, but openly spurns. The only way open to anyone who wishes to lead the world back to liberalism is to convince his fellow citizens of the necessity of adopting the liberal program. This work of enlightenment is the sole task that the liberal can and must perform in order to avert as much as lies within his power the destruction toward which society is rapidly heading today. There is no place here for concessions to any of the favorite or customary prejudices and errors. In regard to questions that will decide whether or not society is to continue to exist at all, whether millions of people are to prosper or perish, there is no room for compromise either from weakness or from misplaced deference for the sensibilities of others. If liberal principles once again are allowed to guide the policies of great nations, if a revolution in public opinion could once more give capitalism free rein, the world will be able gradually to raise itself from the condition into which the policies of the combined anticapitalist factions have plunged it. There is no other way out of the political and social chaos of the present age.

Even the pleasures and luxury happens is side effect happens when you are travelling towards Enlightenment. Anything other than Enlightenment is put as a priority, that tradition is not a Religion. Be un.. very clear. It is a socio-political cult. ~KAILASA's SPH JGM Nithyananda Paramashivam

It is inconceivable to many modern scientists who have also studied Qur’an that how can a person without extensive travel, writing ability and attending modern universities of knowledge, could explain things about history, nature and make socio-political predictions that would appear perfectly correct afterwards. Dr. Keith Moore, former President of the Canadian Association of Anatomists and of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists remarked at a conference in Cairo that details of human development as mentioned in Qur’an must have come to Muhammad from God, or Allah, because most of this knowledge was not discovered until many centuries later.

The historical accuracy of Qur’an’s socio-political predictions, perfect transmission through ages of its text, the unique eloquent language it carries and its accurate description of humans and nature should compel one to give it a sincere reading and reflect on its basic message. The basic message for us is that we are not created without any purpose. As per Islam, the purpose is to excel in our duties to Allah with a thankful attitude and be kind to all of His creations including humans, plants and animals we interact and live with.

The fact that depriving prisoners of the opportunity to acquire an education increases the rates of crime and violence in our society, and that there is no reason a society as wealthy as ours cannot afford to provide free higher education for everyone, are points that tend to get lost in discussions of this issue. But there are two even bigger points that also tend to get lost, so I will emphasize them here. The first is that it is in the interests of the extremely wealthy upper class for the government to pursue policies whose effect is to raise the rates of crime and violence in our society. It is in their economic interest to increase the gap between rich and the poor to the highest level possible because they are the rich, and the greater the gap, the more they get. But the larger that gap becomes, the higher the rate of crime and violence. There is a clear conflict of interest between their economic interest in becoming wealthier, and the public's interest in preventing violence. There is also a political dimension: namely, how to persuade the public to vote for politicians who will write the laws that keep diverting more money into the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the middle and lower classes. A high rate of crime and violence pits the middle class against the lower class. Most of the categories of violence that the laws define as criminal are committed by lower-class people, and this makes the middle classes angry at the poor and afraid of them. But it also divides the lower class against itself — most poor people do not commit violent crimes, but most of the victims of violent crime are poor. The higher the rates of crime and violence, then, the more the middle and lower classes are distracted from noticing that they are in most danger of being robbed by the very wealthy and their political agents. As the old saying goes, the poor man robs you with a gun, the rich man with a pen. In this analysis, I am not assuming that there are many individual members of any class who are consciously aware of the role they are playing in this conflict. Some are, and of those, some work consciously to support this system, and some work consciously to oppose it. But the beauty of the system, from the standpoint of the rich, is that the vast majority of people whose lives are affected by it, whether for good or for ill, do not have to understand the system or consciously support it in order for it to work. The socio-economic and criminal justice systems do that job for them.

The sufferings which some people go through in this world are in some cases a result of morally indifferent behaviour. Lack of social justice, unequal opportunities, extractive socio-economic institutions, socio-political injustice and outright wars have resulted in loss of millions of lives in the modern scientific age. Religion compels pro-social behaviour to avoid sufferings as far as possible and even if the sufferings do occur without human interventions, then religion urges moral action to help the needy and exemplify self-less spirit in dealing with catastrophes. If we leave the faith altogether, then science alone cannot provide any solace and meaning to the people who live their lives in unfair circumstances and who die in vain unjustly.

All the religions which caters to your mind, which tries grab the Truth, the Religions which tries to cater to your mind, which grabs the Truth, which does not have patience to grasp, they only give a set of rules, finally evolve into a socio-political cult. ~KAILASA's SPH JGM Nithyananda Paramashivam

Some people suggest that being not religious does not mean that we are or will become immoral. However, faith does not argue that moral values originate solely from scriptures. There is an innate ability in our consciousness to differentiate right from wrong actions. The different approaches to life and its meaning can result in different ways of responding to moral calling. Faith not only compels and elicits pro-social behaviour, but it provides meaningful consequences for good and bad actions. Else, altruism while in poverty, anonymous charitable giving, and sacrificing one’s life in the service of humanity would seem irrational if we are just going to die after some moments in the cosmos without any absolute justice. Inaction to not help change matters is also immoral, even if not illegal. If one possesses the means and finds an opportunity to help causes by way of spending wealth, volunteering and engaging in socio-political and democratic struggle, then one should undertake every feasible effort to contribute in social well-being by looking beyond one’s self-interest.

From these dimensions emerge the alternative identity and lifestyle or practices of these followers of Jesus: 1. Instead of looking to Abraham, Enoch, Moses, Baruch, Ezra, and Solomon, or to the synagogue's leadership, or to imperial ideology for revelations about acceptable teaching and praxis, this community looks to Jesus to manifest God's will. 2. Instead of commitment to the emperor as head of the empire, this community is to follow Jesus crucified by the empire (chs. 26-27). 3. Instead of embracing Pax Romana, this community encounters, proclaims and prays for God's empire (4:17; 6:10; 12:28; 24-25). 4. Instead of understanding the emperor as manifesting the will of the gods, this community finds God's saving presence and will manifested in Jesus, Emmanuel (1:23; passim; 18:20; 28:20). 5. Instead of gladly embracing imperial power, this community is to critique kingship and leadership (ch. 2; 14:1-12; 20:20-28; 27). 6. Instead of supporting imperial power as the sustainer of order, this community sides with the prophetic tradition (John the Baptist, ch. 3) in calling it to account.

Instead of emulating the exercise of power over others exhibited by the Gentiles and “their great men,” this community is to live as a community of slaves (20:20-28). 8. Instead of maintaining hierarchical, patriarchal households, this community is to embrace an alternative, more egalitarian household structure (chs. 19-20). 9. Instead of paying taxes as an act of submission to the empire, this community is to pay them as an act which recognizes God's sovereignty over the earth (17:24-27; 22:15-22). 10. Instead of using violence to retaliate, this community is to be committed to active, nonviolent resistance (5:43-48). 11. Instead of pretending the empire has brought health to the world (Aristides; Matt 4:24), this community is to be an inclusive community, adopting in the fragmented urban chaos and hardship of Antioch a praxis of indiscriminate mercy, actively responding to need regardless of social, gender, or ethnic boundaries (chs. 8-9; 9:13; 12:7; 25:31-46). 12. Instead of seeking wealth to establish status, this community is to seek God's reign and use wealth in alternative, lifegiving practices of loans and almsgiving to those in need (5:42; 6:19-34; 10:9-15; 19:16-30).

My reading perspective is that Matthew's gospel is a counternarrative. It is a work of resistance written from and for a minority community of disciples committed to Jesus, the agent of God's saving presence and empire. The gospel shapes their identity and lifestyle as an alternative community. It strengthens this community to resist the dominant Roman imperial and synagogal control. It anticipates Jesus’ return when Jesus will complete God's salvific purposes in establishing God's reign or empire over all, including Rome.

BLACK SHEEP - A HAIKU Midst a starlit dance, The moon emerges alone, Thus she steals the show.

RIGHT AND LEFT - A HAIKU Craving, aversion Swinging pendulum's dance fades, Peace in the centre.

I aimed to go fast, I fared on my own path. I aimed to go far, Found friends to share and laugh.

Born in his circumstances, would my thoughts change? Or echo his views, radical and strange? Unbelievable, yet a question that's clear, Does environment shape the beliefs, we hold so dear?

Once chipping away at empire commenced, it became unthinkable to not see politicos, of now or centuries past, for exactly what they were: soulless, bloated, necrophagan creatures glutting on decay of their own assembly.

Join me on a writing journey that expands through, beyond, and toward powerful creative expressions with rich perspectives centered on inspiring work. I delve into the socio-political dynamics at the intersection of culture, pop culture, news and media, social issues, politics, faith, and everything in between.

The result may be a realignment of our socio-political landscape by the advent of a fifth power—the power of data—which is independent of the four other powers: legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and the media.

Despite repeated and often factitious references to the tyranny of the Red Menace, the anticommunist opinion makers never spelled out what communists actually did in the way of socio-economic policy. This might explain why, despite decades of Red-bashing propaganda, most Americans, including many who number themselves among the political cognoscenti, still cannot offer an informed statement about the social policies of communist societies.

the study of socio-political denial is the study of how appearances are kept up, the moral order is sustained, and necessary changes are pressed up into the service of existing interests. this can be seen at the family and community level, and in the way that national and international politics is managed.

But the political system is where individuals in society should advocate for the use of resources to strengthen and advance our social systems. When businesses enter the socio-political realm, they undermine the individual voices of their own stakeholders, disrupt the democratic process, and distort social systems.

To be more explicit, I believe that healthy, positively impactful companies shouldn’t take a position on socio-political topics. There are a number of reasons for this, but at the core of it is the desire and responsibility to support a fully inclusive environment. If we truly lead diverse and inclusive organizations, then, by definition, our organizations will be filled with people with varying socio-political views. Taking a position on socio-political topics—be it guns, voting issues, environmental issues, abortion, or anything else—leverages the platform of the business for the use of the CEO, owner, or leaders and in the process, undermines inclusivity and alienates people on the other side of whatever position one might take. In the process, it hurts democracy, infringing on the rights and responsibilities of each of us as citizens by putting individuals at odds with their own company.

One can say that liberation theology adopts no particular methodology. But starting from its own socio-cultural and political point of view, it practices a reading of the Bible which is oriented to the needs of the people, who seek in the Scriptures nourishment for their faith and their life.

This day I remember well. It is the very first moment in my life when I saw desperation enacted by hate. I watched as the second plane flew into the second tower, the pit in my stomach plummeting to a place I have yet to recover. The devastation of those jumping, the visions of cement and debris falling from the sky like thunder. I remember not being able to reach my friends and coworkers, the fear paralyzing me as I imagined them fighting for their lives and the lives of countless others. I remember my cousin who was in the Pentagon who was narrowly spared that day. That day — like it did for so many — that changed me. Forever. And while we honor those lost and remember those who did such things, remember that it was everyone coming together that saved this nation. It was us standing beside one another regardless of politics or religion, race or gender, and no one cared about wealth or poverty, or anything else for that matter. In that moment America stood tall. Today we are completely undone … unraveled and our excuse is moot. I wish we could, as a nation, realize that 9/11 represented a multitude of things. Our freedom, our fear, our triumphant spirit to overcome tragedy and terrorism—foreign and domestic—and our ability to eliminate prejudice when confronting human decency. Today we remember the many lives lost, those still suffering, and those who bravely and courageously continue to do all they can to protect our freedom to speak out, to challenge oppressors, and to rise above the lunacy. New Yorkers are proof that communities of all colors, beliefs and socio economic statuses can come together in the face of adversity. I hope this country — state by state — can stop acting like children and instead act like human beings. That we can be worthy of the months and weeks and days that followed 9/11 when we rose to the occasion as a collective whole.

The Congress maintained its official by-line: that the minorities should not migrate and should carry on as though nothing had changed. This did not sit well with the Sindhi Hindus, who were looking for guidance on how to adjust to the new socio-political reality of Pakistan.

For full effect, this is, of course, proceeded by normal brainwashing. The victim is first isolated from his or her previous environment and trained to hook the bio-survival circuit onto the “guru” and/or the Ashram or commune. The emotional circuit is bent and broken by continuous attacks upon status (ego), until the only emotional security left is found in Total Submission to the group reality-island. The re-infantilized victim is then ready to imprint any semantic circuitry desired, from psychological cults, political cults, religious cults, etc. The socio-sexual circuit can then easily be programmed for celibacy, for free love, or for whatever sexual game the guru has selected. Then, and only then, the neurosomatic buttons are pushed and ecstasy is “given” to the subject “by” the guru.

Despite all odds, the practice of single mothering signifies a political act of resistance against patriarchy and intersecting inequalities. Being on the margins, oppressed, and excluded by society, single mothers, through their active and empowered mothering, are contesting the marginalities and questioning the domination.

Moreover, it is especially relevant that the kingdoms, empires, and societies of the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean can each be seen as an individual sociopolitical system. As Dark says, such “complex socio-political systems will exhibit an internal dynamic which leads them to increase in complexity.… [T]he more complex a system is, the more liable it is to collapse.”25

I create inspirational learning experiences so you can 'see' the socio-political dimension.

The discourse around the practice of dowry intertwined the individual rights of women within the paradox of patrilocality, a woman’s traditional position and role with her natal and matrimonial family, and the privileged position of men within the institution of marriage. Women are being considered as the `valiant keepers of the tradition’ of marriage, how violent it is, rather than as humans or citizens endowed with political rights. The discourse also ignored the tensions between women as individuals, as citizens, and women as daughters, wives, and daughters-in-law. Upholding patriarchy and not women’s emancipation remains the goal of such socio-legal debate.

When one theologian of the period says that the “priority” for the prophets is “spiritual repentance” and not “socio-economic reform,” that assumes the spiritual and material are separated in a way they are clearly not by the prophets.39 Isaiah 1 urges socioeconomic reform (“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow”) and spiritual repentance (“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”) in the span of two verses (vv. 17–18).

I used to be a gibber-poet. . . . assemblages of appropriated text from cereal box side panels. I’d spell every third word backwards to foreground the slipping signification of say, riboflavin, dextrose, whatever — the arbitrariness of the act is what charges the work with politically subversive anti-hegemonic gender inspecificity. Once you implode the ingredients hierarchy you’ve eradicated the implicit privileging of the phallocentric socio-economic taxonomy. The whole banana to slip . . . into pro-metaphoric usage is so de-centered you can bet your boots they won’t be recon-deconstructing Sugar-Frosted Flakes again till the cows some home to roost.

我們中國，不論怎樣，總是個有數千年傳統的文明大國，更是東方文明的主流，縱是一貫被現代革命黨人所詛咒的文化糟粕，所謂封建帝制，也未必全是垃圾。一個曾經數千年不斷改革修正的社會政治體制（socio－political entity），不可能一無是處，他老人家在抵擋不了西方文明的挑戰（challenge）而逐漸崩潰之時，斷壁頹垣之下往往也有些珠寶黃金和名人字畫，不可玉石皆焚。不幸的是，我們老一代的革命家，都是「一次革命論者」，一旦把這些斷壁頹垣摧毀之後，都信心十足，甚至驕橫萬狀（事實上，國、共兩黨都是一樣的），以為一座合乎他們理想的西式摩天大樓，立刻就可聳入雲霄。結果往往適得其反，新居未建，而故居已拆，群眾露宿街頭，餓殍載道，癘疫橫行，如此則受害群眾就要抱怨今不如古，民國不如大凊了。豈然哉？豈不然哉？　　全民受苦受難百餘年了，吾人今日回看，固知一個新的政治社會體制之建立，除舊佈新，完成一個適合自己的定型，不斷改進實踐，非兩三百年不為功，哪可一蹴而幾。這就是筆者所要說的歷史三峽了。三峽過盡，實驗告終；國有定型，民有共識，始可重享太平也。明乎此，我們就可以瞭解民國初年那些要幫袁世凱做皇帝的「封建殘餘」，居然能以「六君子」頭銜來招搖過市，實在是也有他們的群眾基礎和實際需要的。只是「人間無水不東流」，中國近現代史之走向「共和政體」的「民治時代」，已經是個改變不了的客觀實在，是不能掉頭的。民國搞得再糟，歷史方向是無法改變的，這場陣痛是避免不了的，「民治時代」這個嬰兒，遲早是要出生的，只是「六君子」者流，為時過早，見不及此，誤以為民國永遠不如大清，而要恢復帝制，那就大錯特錯了。

In introducing technical innovations, or using energy in novel ways, or developing alternative sources of power, we are not subjecting ‘society’ to some new external influence, or conversely using social forces to alter an external reality called ‘nature’. We are reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point. These entanglements, however, are not recognised in our theories of collective life, which continue to divide the world according to the conventional divisions between fields of specialist knowledge. There is a natural world studied by the various branches of natural science, and a social world analysed by the social sciences. Debates about human-induced climate change, the depletion of non-renewable resources, or any other question, create political uncertainty not so much because they reach the limits of technical and scientific knowledge, but because of the way they breach this conventional distinction between society and nature.

These notoriously destructive White-on-Black race riots started en masse just one year after the end of the Civil War and continued until the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Some historians have claimed that there were anywhere from 250-300 race riots over this period, most of which have been conveniently forgotten about by the American academia and press. Over 25 race riots broke out between April and October 1919 alone, a six-month period poet James Weldon Johnson labeled the "Red Summer." Among the most deadly outbreaks were those in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Chester, Pennsylvania (1917); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1917); Houston, Texas (1917); Washington, D.C. (1919); Chicago, Illinois (1919); Omaha, Nebraska (1919); Charleston, South Carolina (1919), Longview, Texas (1919); Knoxville, Tennessee (1919); Elaine, Arkansas (1919); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). Ward noted,   Although urban race riots in the United States between 1866-1951 were unique episodes rooted in the particular historic situation of each place, they shared certain characteristics. To begin with, the whites always prevailed, and the overwhelming majority of those who died and were wounded in all of these incidents were blacks. They also tended to break out in clusters during times of significant socio-economic, political, and demographic upheaval when racial demographics were altered and existing racial mores and boundaries challenged. Perhaps most importantly, the riots usually provoked defensive stances by members of the black communities who defended themselves and their families under attack. Seldom did the violence spill over into white neighborhoods.

Pareto explained how every elite is overthrown by a jealous minority which stirs the masses by denouncing the abuses of the establishment and finally replaces it. Elites, as he said, circulate. Naturally, their names and the rationalizations of their privileges change. But it is important to note also that each elite inspires a new socio-political mythology by which the new situation is interpreted for the occasion. Yet the same leitmotiv runs through all these self-glorifications: “where would the people be if it were not for our services?

The definitional attributes of the far-right relate to enduring political and ideological qualities as well as those social layers produced by capitalist development most drawn to the far-right style of politics. The key appeal is to ‘the people’, understood as a racially-defined demos, premised on a gendered social hierarchy and obscuring the class cleavages associated with capitalist development. This is significant as it reflects an acceptance, indeed, an embrace of the possibilities of mass-democracy and particularly through the way in which this political form enables a censoring of elites, whether traditional, liberal-cosmopolitan or otherwise. 4 Further, in appealing to a people through language and symbols that both reify and fetishize particular qualities and attributes associated with the cultural identity of ‘the people’, the far-right not only articulates those values and institutions that it sees as key to the identity of a people (e.g. race/ethnicity, culture rooted in fixed narratives and symbols, history, masculinity, etc.), but also seeks to erase and obscure those other qualities – notably the socio-economic – that are, arguably, central to the material and lived reality of concrete individuals within capitalist societies.

Now, in this generation, the entirety of the globe is facing an ideological and socio-political collapse on a grand scale. This is by design, it is man-made. The outcome is still carefully assessed with little room for error or improvement. There is only one flaw: the divine element in humanity. Our sentient consciousness bestows with the capacity to support the freedom of thought and movement with the inherent awareness that both come at a cost. When we speak our minds, we are going to offend and be offended. There are no safe spaces in conversation. People will say things we don't like. We have to accept this is the price of freedom of speech. When we allow for freedom of movement during times of war, we have to accept that we are inviting in enemies as well as refugees, especially when we don't bother to discern which is which. Even the best, most selfless intentions can pave the way to our downfall...

What used to be communal living has become socio-political manipulation on a planetary scale. Everything has become a tool to engineer our consciousness development at every step, ranging from breathing to food to water...

Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,’ Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the confused inheritance of Mexico from colonial rule, and the failure of its many political and socio-economic programmes, derived from Enlightenment principles of secularism and reason. Paz himself was convinced that Mexico had to forge a modern politics and economy for itself.

There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature’s God in America and China’s Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington.

As they debated the ethics and efficacy of activism, social workers were under attack from both conservative politicians and organized client groups. At the 1970 National Conference on Social Welfare conference, Johnnie Tillmon, the leader of the NWRO, blamed social workers (rather than the socio-economic system) for the problems welfare recipients faced. At the other end of the political spectrum the Nixon administration frequently trumpeted the view that social workers promoted community programs out of self-interest. Given this climate, it was no surprise that a popular book of the time referred to social work as “The Unloved Profession” (Richan & Mendelsohn, 1973). Social workers, in Tom Wolfes (1970) memorable phrase, had become one of the “flak catchers” of a turbulent society—bombarded with criticisms from ideological opponents of the left and the right. Despite the presence of radical

Different Strokes for Different Folks “First things first—differences abound! Race, creed, color, gender, national origin, handicap, age, familial status, socio-economics, education, politics, religion, geography, and job status. Does that list look like a poster ad for the ACLU? Add in our vastly different life experiences and things really start to get interesting.

Inside a jihadi brain, the neuropsychological elements of aggression and rage run rampant, due to socio-political conditions. These overwhelming mental elements of young souls, when attached to the sacred texts of the Quran, by the authoritarian groups of fundamentalists, become weapons of mass destruction in the pursuit of the exclusive supremacy of one religion over the others.

Some forms of Indian asceticism, although not all, have a socio-political dimension and these cannot be marginalized as merely the wish to negate life.

Why does this happen even though India has a good economic foundation? It is because we have an economic system which is vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world economy and our economic growth is not sustainable, as witnessed from the 5 per cent GDP growth in the 1990s to 9 per cent for around four years till 2009 and, finally, the present 5.5 per cent. This is mainly due to our prevailing economic policies which are stifling the growth of agriculture and food processing, the manufacturing sector and the service sector. If we bring a marked change in our socio-political and economic policies with a focus on inclusiveness, then I am confident that we as a nation will be able to overcome the economic crisis and progress to new heights.

Inclusive growth-oriented policies will bring equitable, inclusive growth and level socio-economic imbalances in society which will remove socio-economic and political alienation and reduce Naxalist and Maoist tendencies. Developmental politics instead of political politics will also reduce the prevalent bitter political alienation.

I see the world as a multi-layered, encrypted message—encrypted for countless reasons, by numerous sources. I believe our job as actively-engaged humans is to decode these messages for our own use and to document them for the greater body of human literature at the means each individual has at hand. As an artist—specifically, a cartoonist—that is the means/medium I use for my own decoding duties. Through my research, I use logic, reason and intellect to intuitively follow the knowledge thread that intrigues me, connecting the dots from pattern recognition, and producing the cartoons that form my socio-political analysis.

atheism, as any rational human being may come to understand it, is not a logically coherent position, but has only been made to seem so by a combination of hardcore marketing, propaganda and a socio-political scene ripe for the belief to take hold.

As the concept of ideology is a socio-historical one that bears the features of social and political developments, it would be strange, by then, that transcendence is seen as a mechanism of producing ideology in Islam, while it seems to untie its connections with socio-historical reality. This is related to the fact that any attempt to untie the connection of an epistemological system with its socio-historical reality aims at fixing its absolute dominance on the one hand, and marginalizing the opponent systems on the other. Needless to say that transcendence, by then, performs the same tasks of ideology (like dominance, exclusion, marginalization and absolutization)

Whereas in 1800 at least 90 per cent of Egyptians were poor peasants, by 1900 more than 25 per cent of the population of 10 million lived in Cairo, Alexandria and the Delta's main cities, and could be counted as lower middle class or working class.11 The economy was by and large in the hands of the royal family, its Turkish-Albanian-European entourage and the thousands of foreigners who had settled in Egypt from the mid- and late-nineteenth century; yet Egyptians, and especially the increasingly influential landowners, were rapidly climbing the political and socio-economic ladder.

The liberal constitutional experiment that the Egyptian political scene had witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s remained the province of Cairo's and Alexandria's elite and upper middle class. The liberal cultural fashions of the same period were detached from the crushing living standards of the peasants in the Delta and Al-Saeed, as well as the poor in the country's urban areas. It was no surprise then that the vast majority of people on the Egyptian street cheered Nasser's repudiation of the ‘bygone era'(which conveniently lumped together the monarchy, the aristocrats, the landed gentry and the different political parties – from the liberal and secular to the conservative and religious). Nasser's political and socio-economic plans emerged as the country's sole and compelling project with a substantial, expansive mandate.

A key finding is that violence is remembered, given meaning and lived with in the present, in ethical terms. As we have seen from the stories belonging to former insurgents and former state counter-insurgency officers, the mediation of violent memories is fundamentally an ethical exercise for those who have participated in violence. It entails a reconstruction of one’s experiences in moral terms, in ways that enable ‘perpetrators’ to continue living with their unsettling pasts in the present. Memories of violence are morally tendentious, rather than being abstract and objective recollections of a recorded past. Shaped by the changing socio-political and moral contexts of recall, memories of violence are continuously reworked in the present, with profound implications for notions of the self and sociality.

The practice of design is intrinsically linked to the world around us. It is all about reflection. Understanding the disciplines that feed and influence our practice is essential: art in the broadest sense, music, politics or socio-economic environment.

The role of political leadership in any society will remain critical to the socio-economic progression of the world. It is however worrying to see the growing number of people, including the youth, getting into politics for economic gain and not for a cause. This, inter alia, is the contaminated seed and eventual root of chronic corruption because such leadership will always be selfishly seeking gain and enrichment from their roles and offices.

In other words, almost everything Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Hirsi Ali, and Maher have written or said on the topic of Islamic terrorism ignores politics, socio-economics, history, and studies of global terrorism.

[F]orgetting takes multiple guises and sometimes infuses life in the most subtle and taken-for-granted ways. Therefore, forgetting consists not only of markers that indicate the erasure of knowledge, but also the habits, routines, and physical movements that lead one to present and practice detachment and hiding. It includes hiding the outward indicators of one’s religion. It is taking care when choosing one’s words in public, or even when speaking among family, so that the children will not learn what is supposed to be forgotten. Practicing these habits until they become ingrained and no longer require conscious attention makes forgetting a part of everyday life… In Ulaanbaatar (and the next-biggest city, Darkhan) the state built wedding palaces, thus making marriages and the establishment of families matters that came under state control. The alphabet, personal names, food, hairstyles, consumer goods, clothing, and fashions also changed due to the revolution. All this meant that the younger generations had little reference in everyday life from which to inquire about the past. When the memories of those belonging to an older generation contradicted the national narrative, there was little chance they would be heard by succeeding generations, whose ideological training and values conflicted with those of the past. “The erasure of socio-political context . . . allowed for the absorption of the particular (memories) into the general” (Steedly 1993:131), and furthered the homogenization of history and the nation. In a homogenizing society, to be a misfit, a reactionary, was not only a source of shame and public alienation, but also invited the threat of state intervention… Those of the next generation were born in the 1940s and 1950s, after most of the political massacres had been carried out. They grew up with socialist propaganda and were removed from the past, owing to the silencing of their parents’ memories and the dominance of the state’s narrative. The past seeped through to them accidentally, against the will of their parents… Often silences are a sign of powerlessness, not of the lack of a story to tell. As Tsing (1990:122) argues, power consists, at least in part, of the ability to convene an audience. According to Steedly (1993:198), this ability requires telling a compelling story that is strategically designed to meet the interests of the listeners.

This suspicion [selling out] often rubs up against another tendency in Black America: the habit of celebrating any promotion by a fellow Black as a sign of collective advancement.

Baudrillard argues that there used to be a time when the role of objects was primarily to signify rather than to function. Thus, the symbolic structure of the traditional domestic ambience reflected the rituals and traditions of the socio-political order, arranged according to prescriptive and unchanging rules based on, and extracted from, ‘tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together […] Hence, the fixed and immovable meanings with which these objects were endowed: if mirrors and family portraits symbolized a particular sense of introspection and enclosure, the clock crowning the marble mantelpiece symbolized both the hierarchical structure of the family and the permanence of time. Linked to one meaning and one meaning only, every object of the traditional domestic interior can thus be understood as theatrical and ceremonial, thus occupying a specific place within the domestic interior exactly as family members occupy a specific position in their corresponding family tree.

One criterion might be mutual intelligibility: while we wouldn't expect to understand another language, we might well understand a different dialect of a language we do speak. But this criterion soon poses problems. The ‘dialects’ of Chinese (e.g. Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese) share a writing system but are mutually unintelligible, whereas the Scandinavian ‘languages’ Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are similar enough to be mutually comprehensible (sometimes with a little effort). The difference in practice is generally determined on socio-political rather than linguistic grounds: we tend to associate languages with nation states where they are spoken. Or, as cynics would have it: ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’. To avoid problems of this kind, linguists talk of language varieties.

Millennials are young, tech-savvy, and—increasingly—non-white. This combination of changing socio-demographic factors, their population size, and their tendency to want everything filtered through a digital interface means that they will leave an indelible mark on society. Enabled by mobility and digital connectivity, the sum total of these changes represents the emergence of a new social contract with vast implications for the social, economic, and political environments whose impacts will be as significant and far-reaching as that of the printing press of the Industrial Revolution. I refer to these changes as a whole as the “Untethered Society.” I define coming untethered as a condition in which ties to people, places, jobs, traditional processes, and organizing structures in society—like churches and political parties—are being weakened, broken, and displaced by digital hyperconnectivity.

Maternal death during childbirth is not unique to humans, although it has long been accepted that humans have a somewhat unique situation of having to fit a large-headed infant through a narrow pelvis. This biological constraint, along with socio-economic and political issues, makes childbirth (except in the case of surrogacy) a potentially dangerous event that women must face if they wish to be evolutionarily successful.

The trick to having an incorrect take almost 100% of the time is in being tethered to some socio-political narrative, and within that sphere, being tethered completely out of touch with your conscience.

The society of the spectacle paints its own picture of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the world and its history. Fear is the very last response. For everything that happens is reassuringly part of the natural order of things. Real historical changes, which show that this society can be superseded, are reduced to the status of novelties, processed for mere consumption. The revolt of youth against an imposed and “given” way of life is the first sign of a total subversion. It is the prelude to a period of revolt — the revolt of those who can no longer live in our society. Faced with a danger, ideology and its daily machinery perform the usual inversion of reality. A historical process becomes a pseudo-category of some socio-natural science: the Idea of Youth. Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal revolt of youth; every generation espouses ”good causes,” only to forget them when ”the young man begins the serious business of production and is given concrete and real social aims.” After the social scientists come the journalists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is contained by overexposure: we are given it to contemplate so that we shall forget to participate. In the spectacle, a revolution becomes a social aberration– in other words a social safety valve–which has its part to play in the smooth working of the system . . . In reality, if there is a problem of youth in modern capitalism it is part of the total crisis of that society. It is just that youth feels the crisis most acutely.

In sum, then, my socio-literary approach to Mark's healing and exorcism stories takes into account both the social and cultural dimension. It attends to the discursive function of the episode in the narrative strategy of the author: as symbolic action addressing a symbolic system that oppresses. This opens up and maintains access to the text for all. It also explains why Mark's Jesus is such a threat to the stewards of the status quo.

And, as in ancient Israel, modern purity codes function politically as well as socially. The very same myths of “chosenness” that shape patriotic ideologies in the U.S.A. also shape the dreams of neo-Nazi white supremacists and the social codes of Afrikaaner apartheid. And what about the socio-symbolic apparatus of our national security state, with its “priesthood” of the security-cleared and its “holy places” surrounded by barbed wire?

Today, most countries fail to comply with the 1951 Convention. Signatory states in the developed world find ever more elaborate ways to disregard or bypass the principle of non-refoulement, adopting a suite of deterrence or non-entrée policies that make it difficut and dangerous for refugees to access their territory: carrier sanctions, razor wire fences, interception en route. Signatory states in the developing world do tend to admit refugees more because of geoghraphical necessity and international pressure than law, and when they do, they still almost universally fail to implement the socio-economic rights in the Convention. And, yet, paradoxically, many of the most generous host countries in the world are not even full signatories: Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Nepal, and Turkey, for instance.

Ideally refugees should be allowed to fully participate in the socio-economic life of the host state. But even when full participation is politically blocked, we should at least be able to reimagine geographical spaces that can empower people, and allow them to become self-reliant pending a longer-term solution.

The Hardest Part of being Black is not the way I watch my words around different people or how I feel like it's me against a wide array of enemies in an ongoing fight that's socio-economic and geo-political. It’s the sense of not being free enough, of (even in moments of happiness) not being able to enjoy a good meal or a hard victory or deserved peace or a beautiful mountain vista before it is snatched away from me.

The concept ‘Brahmin’ in my diction does not mean knowledge. It means consumption of the socio-economic resources of the nation without investing any amount of labour power in it. It means consumption and destruction of national resources without any understanding and effort for rebuilding such resources. The concept ‘Sudra’ does not mean a particular people who are stupid with an un-cultured existence. It means the construction of the knowledge of production, of innovation of agrarian and artisan technology. The concept ‘Chandala’ does not mean unworthy of being a human being and leading an impure life in a spiritual sense. It means making the villages, the towns and the nation pollution free. The Chandalas are the builders of a culture that kept the living environment clean. It implies the transforming of skin into leather, into commodities. The notion ‘Brahmin’ in essence, on the other hand, represents unclean ugliness. The concept ‘Dalitbahujan’ now in essence means constructing the science of leather technology, building up the scientific use of manure, constructing the tools of production which not only improved our production but also kept our environment green and clean. Brahminism is the opposite of all this. It is the other name for consumption of natural resources without regenerating them. While Dalitism is positive, Brahminism is negative. India as a nation, thus, needs to undergo a revolution of reformulating knowledge and language.

For those who have been denied the right to write a text, writing a text of their own history and that of the Other is also a process of their socio-political movement. Though the movement of writing has its own limitations, it breaks the shackles of those who were denied writing. Writing becomes a weapon of the weak. In a casteist society, the brahminic forces who prevented this writing by the Dalitbahujans had made the physical struggles of millions of Dalitbahujans invisible. When a historical struggle becomes invisible, it does not kindle the fire of liberation. The process of writing in the face of bitter opposition is a torturous course. Yet this process has to go on without end.

The current socio-political climate, exacerbated by the media's addiction to falsifying our existence, has meant that being trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming in the twenty-first century feels like constantly trying to prove your existence... When we have to venture into the world, where we aren't heard, or listened to, it can feel like we are shouting against the wind.

Trump is hardly the first president to promise a crackdown on illegal immigration. But he has tried to erase the political distinction between illegal and legal immigration, the former in the interest of law and order and the latter in the interest of national security. Of course, reality is very different than the one Trump portrays. He dismisses the socio-economic importance of immigration, keeping our working population younger as the baby boomers retire. And he ignores the push and pull behind global migration. The push relates to the disintegration of fragile countries due to conflict and climate change. The pull involves the unmet need for low skill work within the United States at a time of effective full employment, which existing immigration quotas can’t meet due to political paralysis. Given the political polarization, the parties talk past one another. Calls for comprehensive immigration reform are blunted by accusations of amnesty. Thus, there is no reasoned debate and little room for compromise.

But Mark is not concerned with advocating lower prices for the poor or fair economic practices. For Jesus has already repudiated the purity and debt systems themselves—and its specific marginalization of lepers (1: 41ff.) and women (5: 25ff.). Thus Jesus calls for an end to the entire cultic system—symbolized by his “overturning” (katestrepsen, which can also mean to “destroy”) of the stations used by these two groups. They represented the concrete mechanisms of oppression within a political economy that doubly exploited the poor and unclean. Not only were they considered second-class citizens, but the cult obligated them to make reparation, through sacrifices, for their inferior status—from which the marketers profited. Jesus’ action here is fully consistent with his first direct action campaign to discredit the socio-symbolic apparati that discriminated against the “weak” and the “sinners” (2: 17). The third and final action implies that the goal of these disruptive steps was a shutting down of temple operations altogether (10: 16).

It is not possible to ensure the success of political, psychological and socio-economic measures by means of military actions alone, for success depends on the quality of the political leadership.

This book explores how the ethical charge carried by violence seeps into the fabric of life in the aftermath. The key arguments proposed are that for those who have perpetrated violence, the mediation of its memory is ethically tendentious and steeped in the moral, and so carries important implications for notions of the self and the negotiation of sociality in the present. 3 Memory does not entail an abstract recording of the past, but is informed by the socio-political context of recall. This means that people who have engaged in violence remember and give meaning to their experiences in ways that allow them to continue living with themselves, with their violent pasts, and with others, in the aftermath.

Not only were people to be liberated from socio-political and economic oppression, but from theological oppression as well.

In this vision, the worlds is conceived as multiple and performative, i.e. shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies brings concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nom-humans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage, which makes heterogenous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a high degree of scientific precision. But studies that conclude health disparities are caused by genetic difference do not even come close. These studies typically control for the socio-economic status (SES) of the research subjects in an attempt to compare subjects of different races who have the same SES. If there remains a difference in the prevalence or outcome of a disease, the researchers typically attribute the unexplained variation to genetic distinctions between racial groups. But this conclusion suffers from a basic methodological error. The researchers failed to account for many other unmeasured factors, such as the experience of racial discrimination or differences in wealth, not just income, that are related to health outcomes and differ by race. Any one of these unmeasured factors—and not genes—might explain why health outcomes vary by race.

There are socio-economic factors to consider. Successive generations of white residents create environments that are hostile towards minority ethnic residents. Add in the groups and even political parties spreading hate. In this country we have the BNP, EDL, Combat 18. Some operate like conventional parties to gain power through the ballot box, like the BNP. Others favour an activist street movement, like EDL, but one thing they all have in common is intolerance.

God calls God’s people to create a new community of shalom. We must take care not to simply make God's mission into a social ethic or universal morality. God’s call is not merely a means for achieving better wages and working conditions for the enslaved. It cannot be narrowly defined as a socio-political intervention or strategy...God did not give Moses a theory of justice. God wanted to foster real, transformed, and renewed relationships among the people of Israel and the people of Egypt. Remember, the story of Israel in the land of Egypt began with friendship between a lost son and a ruler, Pharaoh and Joseph. What is broken by Israel’s slide into slavery is that original relationship. A time had come when people did not remember the blessings they have been for one another. Shalom, peace, is not a political "symbol" or "myth," but a real action of relationship that has a communal/social function in building a different kind of kingdom than the reign of humanity

Cross-stitch, as with all embroidery, is also bound into a socio-political debate about gender, as it is traditionally considered a pastime for women, particularly from older generations. This gender bias adds to the success of cross-stitch as a political medium; one cannot help but feel kindness toward cross-stitched pieces, as though they had been created by a senior matriarch.

But, all joking apart, there are more serious objections. The sociology of knowledge is not only self-destructive, not only a rather gratifying object of socio-analysis, it also shows an astounding failure to understand precisely its main subject, the social aspects of knowledge, or rather, of scientific method. It looks upon science or knowledge as a process in the mind or ‘consciousness’ of the individual scientist, or perhaps as the product of such a process. If considered in this way, what we call scientific objectivity must indeed become completely ununderstandable, or even impossible; and not only in the social or political sciences, where class interests and similar hidden motives may play a part, but just as much in the natural sciences. Everyone who has an inkling of the history of the natural sciences is aware of the passionate tenacity which characterizes many of its quarrels. No amount of political partiality can influence political theories more strongly than the partiality shown by some natural scientists in favour of their intellectual offspring. If scientific objectivity were founded, as the sociologistic theory of knowledge naïvely assumes, upon the individual scientist’s impartiality or objectivity, then we should have to say good-bye to it. Indeed, we must be in a way more radically sceptical than the sociology of knowledge; for there is no doubt that we are all suffering under our own system of prejudices (or ‘total ideologies’, if this term is preferred); that we all take many things as self-evident, that we accept them uncritically and even with the naïve and cocksure belief that criticism is quite unnecessary; and scientists are no exception to this rule, even though they may have superficially purged themselves from some of their prejudices in their particular field. But they have not purged themselves by socio-analysis or any similar method; they have not attempted to climb to a higher plane from which they can understand, socio-analyse, and expurgate their ideological follies. For by making their minds more ‘objective’ they could not possibly attain to what we call ‘scientific objectivity’. No, what we usually mean by this term rests on different grounds8. It is a matter of scientific method. And, ironically enough, objectivity is closely bound up with the social aspect of scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists. Scientific objectivity can be described as the intersubjectivity of scientific method. But this social aspect of science is almost entirely neglected by those who call themselves sociologists of knowledge.

The truly cost effective lifestyle would be to produce everything you require, it would subsequently imply a self-created kind of freedom. Time would be lost but it would all be your own, this however does not account for skill. The current institutionalised education system was not made for self-sustainability but rather extreme specialisation. The business sector itself accounts for a large amount of activity, so much so that it has its own defining term: the economy. Spaces in the world, both virtual and spatial have always had the socio-polticial-economic system but now it is more defined, more contested and more vulnerable.

Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness ere typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism. From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to ergional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world." First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security... Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade... Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.

Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism. From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world." First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security... Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade... Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.

The seductive, dominating power of these values is not an economic mistake, a political accident, or a military miscalculation. It is rather the work of the power of death which is having its relentless way among us. In tilting the gospel toward socio-economic, political matters, let it not be imagined that I am introducing a category that is "liberal" or partisan or new or modern. Indeed, all through the Bible the gospel has been exactly and precisely concerned with social relations related to power, goods, and access. Indeed, there is almost no aspect of the biblical presentation of the gospel that is otherwise. The issue, however, is not finally socio-economic or political. It is theological. It concerns the power for life and the power for death and the struggle between them for our life, our loyalty, and our imagination.

### Get to Know the Extensive World of books in Kannada If you're a book lover with a penchant for diverse cultures, you might find the world of Kannada literature particularly enticing. Karnataka, a state in the center of India, is home to a thriving literary scene that reflects the unique narratives and rich heritage of the Kannada-speaking population. There are a lot of books for you to choose from, whether you're a native speaker or just want to learn this beautiful language. Finding Treasures in Kannada From contemporary novels that tackle modern themes to timeless classics that have shaped the literary landscape, Kannada offers a wealth of material for readers of all tastes. The beauty of Kannada literature lies in its variety—each book offers a glimpse into the culture, history, and philosophy of the region. Imagine immersing yourself in a compelling novel set against the backdrop of Karnataka's lush landscapes, or enjoying the lyrical poetry that encapsulates emotions and experiences in a few poignant lines. ### Captivating novels Diverse genres abound within Kannada novels. For readers seeking gripping narratives, look for works by iconic authors such as Kuvempu, whose stories often weave in elements of nature and human experience, or B. M. Srikantaiah, known for his unique storytelling style. The novels encompass themes of love, struggle, tradition, and change, appealing to a broad spectrum of readers. Newer authors are also stepping into the spotlight, bringing fresh perspectives and contemporary issues to their works, making the books in Kannada scene dynamic and ever-evolving. ### Classics that are still relevant Kannada has a lot to offer readers who appreciate classic literature. Titles that have stood the test of time usually reflect the socio-political climate of their eras, providing insight into the cultural fabric of the time. For example, “Manteswamy” by Shivaram Karanth delves deep into spiritual and existential themes, while “Chennabasavanna” focuses on social reform. Exploring these classics not only enriches your understanding of Kannada culture but also offers a profound reading experience. ### Discovering New Titles Translations and digital formats have made it easier to find Kannada literature in recent years, making it much more accessible. Local bookstores and online platforms present a treasure trove of titles for you to explore. Connecting with local reading groups or literature forums can help you discover hidden gems in the Kannada language for those who prefer guidance. ### For suggestions, contact us. Are you interested in diving into Kannada literature but unsure where to start? We are here to assist! Contact us for personalized recommendations tailored to your interests and reading preferences. Whether you're looking for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or children's books, we can connect you with the right titles to enrich your reading experience. ### Embrace the Journey Reading books in Kannada is more than just learning the language; it also takes you inside a culture that is full of stories and wisdom. Every page turned offers an opportunity to learn and grow. So grab a book, settle into your favorite reading nook, and embark on an adventure through the captivating world of Kannada literature. A universe that needs to be discovered is only a page away. Happy reading!

We are invited to contemplate God face to face. This involves prayer, biblical reflection, and the practice of solitude and a fruitful hearing of the voice of the Spirit. This is the movement of transcendence. But we are also invited to contemplate Christ in the face of our brothers and sisters, neighbour, the stranger and the poor. This is the movement of incarnation. The two movements clearly belong together. This gives faith a socio-political concern and gives service a profound Christian spirituality.

The belief that caste has a "divine origin"—central to Brahminical ideology—can be effectively deconstructed using historical-critical methods that examine the textual origins, historical interpolations, and socio-political functions of canonical scriptures. The Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda (10.90.12), often cited as the foundational text on caste, describes the cosmic being Purusha from whose body the four varnas emerge: “The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made. His thighs became the Vaishya, from his feet the Shudra was produced” (Griffith, Rig Veda 10.90.12). However, historians like Romila Thapar assert that this hymn is a late addition, not found in the earlier layers of the Rig Veda. She notes, “The Purusha Sukta is not among the oldest hymns of the Rigveda and appears to have been composed when varna divisions were becoming more rigidly defined” (The Past Before Us, 2013, p. 52). This suggests that the so-called divine origin was retroactively constructed to legitimize social hierarchies already taking form.

The human work, the transformation of nature, continues creation only if it is a human act, that is to say, if it is not alienated by unjust socio-economic structures. A whole theology of work, despite its evident insights, appears naive from a political point of view. Teilhard de Chardin is among those who contributed most to a search for a unity between faith and the “religion of the world,” but he does so from a scientific point of view.

Another important socio-cultural aspect, related to modern industrial societies and which also leads to an emptying of the sense of purpose in life, is the fact that human beings come to be seen as labor forces, as machines and reduced to their functions. Industrial societies have hijacked the free time of the individual, who needs to devote most of their life to labor activities, since they are part of a gear that cannot stop; a gear that, as said, is responsible for the GDP - Gross Domestic Product - that is, a country's economy. The progress made in terms of labor laws and in relation to exploitation in post Industrial Revolution factories, such as protecting children, reducing working hours, benefits, etc., cannot be denied, but they are certainly still a long way from guaranteeing a dignified life for working people. Neoliberal capitalist contemporary societies are once again subjecting workers, through large transnational conglomerates, to working conditions that continue to be exploitative, with low pay and the need for overtime to supplement earnings. The 40-hour working week achieved by the labor reforms is also related to a regime of exploitation, in which free time for leisure, for the family, is considered secondary, relegated to second place. Even so, this free time, according to Theodor Adorno (1995), is not totally free because it is directly related to work and the demands of the system; it is just a time of rest for the subject to recharge their batteries and then return to work (...) Certainly, work that dignifies cannot hijack a person's time. Leisure time is essential, free time for nature, for family, for enjoying life, for connecting with Life. When work steals this time by docilizing bodies, which are objectified as machines, there is a loss of enjoyment, of the intimate connection with Life and, consequently, a loss of meaning in life, of the feeling that life is worth living. These are socio political issues that transcend the clinical practice, but about which psychiatry, psychology and the entire field of mental health cannot remain silent, as they are producers of mental suffering (Oliveira, Stephan Malta .2025. Barbarism and the Human - phenomenology, meaning of life and psychiatric practice, pg. 88-89) What do you think of this quote? Do you agree that exploitative work regimes, which steal a person's free time, prevent them from enjoying life and connecting with Life, according to Michel Heny, thus draining their vitality?

Myths masquerading as reality do enormous damage.

Second, he stresses that ‘the rather impressive urban developments of the south of the Kachi Plain, adjoining the Indus Valley and the region of Mohenjo-daro, are linked to a continuous cultural tradition starting at least as early as the Period III of Mehrgarh around 4000 BC’. The craft specialization and its accompanying socio-political organization are the key to the type of urbanization seen in the third millennium (ibid.: 27–8).