How women and the poor are targets of governmental control — “I never knew what they’d done to me.” — Carrie Buck We want control of our bodies Forced sterilization is an act of genocide. The United States has a history of forcing, coercing, and surreptitiously sterilizing women to reduce the birth rates of certain peoples. It’s not enough to want genocide to not happen again. It’s…

How Randolph Bourne determined government is the problem — “Indifference is the deadweight of history.” — Antonio Gramsci The government doesn’t work for us. In his 1918 essay, The State, Randolph Bourne wrote that the state was intrinsically linked with war. War depends upon the state for its existence. Without the state, armies cannot be formed. Without armed forces…

Improving society is an individual effort — Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster. — Dwight McDonald In his 1967 speech, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky says scholars have the time, means, and resources…

How government controls the population it’s meant to serve — When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door. — Simone Weil The role of attention Unbroken attention is the key to solving problems. It’s troubling that one minute we have it — the next minute we don’t. And many hours of the…

How prisons antagonize progress — In the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison. — Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed What is a violent crime? The definition varies by state and changes over time, but a violent crime does…

When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refused to defend it – at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice. — Mumia Abu-Jamal Will the world’s biggest problems ever…

Simone Weil’s radical conception of attention leads us to be kinder — Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity. — Simone Weil Original Philosophy A space on Medium for serious philosophers to post their research and thinking for a broader audience.medium.com Attention is like the unconscious. When we pay attention, we take in all stimuli around us without forming a judgment — and our desire becomes what we act on from what we have observed.

Two phantoms haunting conservative thought presage an increasingly sectarian future — Our failure to listen is evidenced across our overindustrialized, overcongested planet. All over the world, the clash between modern and ancient cultures continues, and indigenous cultures, less well represented in government and policy, usually lose those conflicts. All around us is evidence of the need to ensure our students learn…

This war did not spring up on our land, this war was brought upon Us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land without a price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things… This war has come from robbery — from…