How TV Ruined Your Life - “Aspiration: how TV rubs our noses in other people’s ‘superior’ lifestyles”
In this episode, Charlie Brooker explores how hollow, moneyed lifestyles have come to be so ubiquitous on TV, and how people have been made to think that their possessions mean so much. Aspirational imagery is everywhere now, and over time it has infected and bent reality and people’s expectations to unrealistic, privileged, self-serving, and off-the-Earth material standards. Brooker’s program makes particularly excellent use of archival and contemporary imagery to make his point, that “it was a collective delusion, and none of it was real.”
Global Voices tells the story of how this short, heartfelt 3-minute video made by a Saudi filmmaker changed the lives of family living in abject poverty in a cemetery. Three hours after the video was posted, Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel tweeted through her official account:
Al-Waleed bin Talal Charity Foundation will provide the family with a permanent residence, we are currently contacting Bader AlHomoud
Talk about swift change brought about by a film! I lived in Saudi Arabia, and it was a sad thing to see so much poverty in a country that has grown so wealthy over the decades. Some day, I hope, the Saudi people will demand more for themselves.
How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
“When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment…
“Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.”
“Is there a real you?” - Julian Baggini eloquently presents a very powerful view that goes way back and is increasingly supported by modern neuroscience; what you think of as “you”, isn’t a real “self” the way we intuit — we are empowered, changing processes. This idea stretches back to the early days of Buddhist thinking, and has been echoed by modern thinkers, like Albert Einstein and Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller, in fact, on the verge of suicide in his youth, was suddenly struck by the realization that his life was more a part of the whole universe than something he owned, and decided to set out on “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.”
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If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
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If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?Buckminster Fuller
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Minimalism is not a lack of something, it’s simply the perfect amount of something.Nicholas Burroughs
Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 (of episode one of two)
Louis Theroux make an endearing exploration of one of the biggest jails in Miami, where inmates wait for weeks, months, and sometimes years to even go to trial. Worse than many prisons, this temporary holding facility represents some of the worst aspects of America’s broken justice system:
“Held in large cage-like dwellings for up to 24 men, the inmates have developed a strange and violent jail culture. The men - who remain in the cells almost all the time and may only leave for yard time twice a week - live under the sway of a gladiatorial code. They fight each other for food, for status, and often just to pass the endless hours of confinement. Trips to the infirmary are a frequent occurrence as inmates are viciously attacked and beaten, but the guards say they are powerless to end the abuse.”
