...In Two Cheers for Materialism James Twitchell tells all about materialism and how it is relevant in our lives. Twitchell seems to cheer for materialism all throughout the essay, stating "Who but fools, toadies, hacks, and occasional loopy libertarians have ever risen to its defense?" Twitchell cheers for materialism because "sooner or later we are going to have to acknowledge...human beings love things." Materialism is a part of our daily lives and will continue to be a large part of our lives. Both Twitchell and Kilbourne both make similar arguments that consumers allow themselves to be influenced. Twitchell sees consumers as normal people going about their lives, buying and taking part in things merely for entertainment. I see consumers...
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...flashy goods, materialism. I myself have first-hand experience of materialism and the negative effects that our society brings with it. I remember in high school, more specifically sophomore year, I was lucky and thankful enough to be the recipient of a substantial gift from my parents. For my 16th birthday they gifted me with a $15,000 check and said to spend it wisely. I could not believe it, I was so ecstatic and shocked I had no idea what to do. After a few days of careful consideration, I finally decided buying a car would be the best investment at the time. I did what most people do and bought myself a car, a BMW. Little did I know that the BMW would come with negative judgments from my high school peers. In the eyes of my peers I was known as the rich snobby kid who used his parents’ money to buy himself a flashy BMW to boast about. I was placed into a virtual social class of sort, being “better than everyone.” I was viewed as a selfish show-off, called rude and unwanted names just because of the car I owned. But this could not be farther from the truth. In no way did I feel better than anyone else, nor did I ever boast about having a fairly decent car for my age. But of course in our society, what I said did not matter, everyone judged me by the car I drove. I was left with feelings of sadness, dissatisfaction, and disappointment. I almost wanted to sell my car because I knew that would be the only way to make the judgments disappear. In James Twitchell’s Two Cheers for Materialism...
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...everyday lifestyles. The research will impact frequent shoppers, couscous buyers and young people that are the most easily persuaded with brand preference and products. The implications I can draw from this research is the team conducting the study wants to learn more about buying patterns and the association it has with peoples personal values. In the study, I was asked about my self esteem, stereotypes on materialism, affection and intimacy, views on shoplifting and how I basically view myself as a young adult in this fast passed consumer driven world. I was given a set of questions as a survey and my answer choices ranged from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”. Overall my reflection on the study was a bit surprised but at the same time glad these questions were asked. I was unsure how to feel about the variety of questions. One set would be asking about intimacy and sexual history, while the next set is my views on materialism and shoplifting. The correlation between the two was hard to understand at first, but if there is a strong relationship between the two this would be the way to find out. From the researcher’s perspective, I think they were trying to asses what really drives consumer behavior and what triggers the intensity or lack of it. Is it based on ones morals? What we do in our spare time? How confident are you? How we were raised? All these questions come in to play when trying to understand what really affects our consumption level. The second study...
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...Two Cheers for Consumerism In the article called 2 cheers for consumerism, the writer Twitchell explains how people, the consumers, are consuming more and more items everyday. According to the author of the article “The really interesting question may be not why we are so materialistic, but why we are unwilling to acknowledge and explore what seems the central characteristics of life.”. Many people spend most of their time and energy consuming or producing items all the time and most of that happened in the 20th century, like for example in the 1960’s. Some people consider this as Commercialism, and others as consumerism, but either way, commercialism or consumerism will stay up high for many people that like to buy stuff. The U.S. is a nation of consumers. Consumerism affects people in many ways, like for example age and many other things. The main idea for consumerism is that many people can’t resist having a specific item, most of those items are objects that they don’t really need. According to the author “ it is simply impossible to consume objects without consuming meaning.”. This means that consumerism is all around us, currents of desire are flowing around us all the time, like if it were white smoke. Some people say that consumerism It’s pretty much a waste because it’s now a big concern. America is considered a nation of consumers, one that can never have enough things (Twitchell). Twitchell refers to American material culture as a mallcondo...
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... but his message was not always well received. Thoreau began his lifelong friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson when he tutored Emerson’s brother William in 1843 on Staten Island, boarding with Emerson and his wife. He helped Emerson edit the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial. Thoreau kept a journal at Emerson’s urging, which aided him in his writing. He took a canoe trip with his brother John during the first two weeks of September 1839, which experience he transformed into a volume of poems and essays entitled A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849). While he published 1000 copies himself, only about 300 sold. On July 4, 1845 Thoreau moved into a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, on land belonging to Emerson, about two miles from Concord, and lived there alone for over two years. Thoreau condensed this outdoor life as if it were a single year in his classic Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854), in which he describes his lifestyle as experimental, emphasizing meditative awakening, the result of a wish “to live deliberately,” to shed materialism and to cultivate self-reliance. In July 1846 Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail because he refused to pay a local poll tax in protest against the Mexican War and America’s persistence in...
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...Naturalism in The Call of the Wild Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 to a working class family. He had to deal with a hard life from a very young age, but his constant struggling got him through most of the difficulties and by the age of 30, he was internationally famous for his books Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904) and other successful literay works. Though he wrote passionately about the great questions of life and death and the struggle to survive with dignity and integrity, he also sought peace and quiet inspiration. He wished society to be reformed that he expressed through his writings. His stories of high adventure were based on his own experiences at sea, in the Yukon Territory, and in the fields and factories of California. Similar to a number of writers at that time, he died young, at the age of 40, impoverished (again), sick and suffering from alcoholism. To this day it is still unclear if he the cause of death was accidental morphine overdose or he commited suicide. He as well was a fairly controversial person, so that different authors look at him in various ways: ”The basic law of his thinking was logic. His literary style was the clear, obvious and unmistakable sentences of the beautiful English language. ’The Call of the Wild’ serves as the reference book of English stylistics on Sorbonne. He was the man of facts: not to be afraid of looking inside of the eyes of reality, a great view of life. But Jack London's inner debates did...
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...Should We Give Up on Reductive Physicalism? Paul Sperring Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8 (Winter 2004) Should We Give Up on Reductive Physicalism? Paul Sperring Supposing you were a physicalist in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and supposing you were Australian too 1 , it is highly likely you would have thought that mental properties could be reduced to physical properties. Now, suppose you are a contemporary philosopher of mind and suppose further that you are also of a physicalist stripe. Will you be inclined to think that mental properties are reducible to physical properties? It’s by no means certain. These days physicalists fall into two, broadly conceived, camps: (i) the reductionist physicalists who think that minds (or mental properties, or states or events 2 ) can be reduced to brains (or something smaller) and; (ii) the nonreductive physicalists who think that minds are not straightforwardly reducible to some lower level set of physical properties. In truth if one were to carefully classify all the physicalist positions in contemporary philosophy of mind we would need distinctions of a much finer grain than this story suggests. For the purposes of this paper, however, those philosophers who have thought that mental properties can be reduced to lower level properties will be lumped together (and called ‘reductionists’) and those philosophers who, although embracing physicalism, have thought that mental properties in principle defy reduction to something lower...
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...Future Perspectives Quickening the Pace What a Slow-Growth West Demands of Brands 1 Quickening the Pace Section 1: Facts ...What’s the situation? • Storm Damage • What Happened?! • How Bad Was It? © 2011 The Futures Company. All rights reserved. 2 Storm Damage The eight days of near-doom in September 2008 struck like a lightning bolt, cleaving the market in two along an already-weakening fissure largely hidden from view until laid bare by a direct hit from the financial crisis. Across the developed world, most particularly the US, the UK and the Eurozone, decades of stagnant real wages, accumulating debt and flagging innovation had left the middle class acutely vulnerable to the financial storm that swept the globe. In the wake of the Great Recession, a sizable stratum of spent consumers has materialized where an aspirational middle used to be. Overlooked—or just ignored— during the boom preceding the global recession was clear evidence that the position of the middle class in developed markets was increasingly fragile. The New York Times reported in early 2008 that “[t]he European dream is under assault, as the wave of inflation sweeping the globe mixes with this continent’s long-stagnant wages.” A recent report from the UK-based Resolution Foundation Commission on Living Standards documents the failure of wages in developed markets since the mid-1970s to keep pace with economic growth, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Wages as a Percentage...
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...Random House, Inc. ISBN 978-0-345-52142-2 eBook ISBN 978-0-345-52144-6 [CIP Information] Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper www.ballantinebooks.com 246897531 FIRST EDITION Book design by Simon M. Sullivan What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life, in its height and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the drivers, the passengers, and the road. —Franz Kafka Introduction In 1949, a ship called the MS Westerdam departed from the coast of Europe, its hundreds of passengers headed toward U.S. shores. Nestled deep in the ship’s cargo compartment, a pair of headlights peeped out of a dark tarp; two wide, open circles leading to the soft curves of what would soon be known as the world’s most recognizable car. Protesters, rebels, dissidents, politicians, businessmen, the world’s corporate elite—all would eventually become entwined in its story. By the end of the 1960s, it would do what no other car had done before: transcend age, class, and country to become a symbol adopted by them all. Americans would call the car the Beetle. In other places it would become the Flea, the Turtle, the Vocho, the Foxi, the Buba, the Fusca, the Poncho, and the Mouse. Over the years, the car developed a cult following as well as a more public persona. It had fan club after fan club created on its behalf; it showed up in the films of Woody Allen and Stanley...
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...Mohammed a true Prophet. محمــد نبي حق. 1-Vocabulary: |claim |ادعاء |yield |يرضخ/يستسلم | |revealed |موصى به |endured |تحمل | |launched |يشن |blaspheme |يسب | |conduct |سلوك |proofs |براهين | |Denounce |يهين |staunch |قوى / مخلص | |renounce |يقبل - يذعن لـ |mocked |يسخر من | |integrity |أمانة وصدق |riff raff |أوباش/ رعاع | |infancy |طفولة |temptations |إغراء | |boycott |مقاطعة |apostle |رسول/حواري | |pagan |عابد الأصنام/ وثنى |acknowledge |اعترف -أقر بـ | |tribal | قبلي |humiliate |يهين | |bigotry | تعصب |besiege |يحاصر | |allegation |ادعاء |flat refusal |رفض تام | |unspotted ...
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...How Society Works – Lecture Notes Sep, 11, 2012 Introduction to Classical Social theory * “Theories in sociology are abstract, general ideas that help organize and make sense of the social world” (attempt to link idea’s with actual events) * Classical social theory (1840s – 1920s) – The enlightenment, political revolution (American revolution, French revolution), the industrial revolution * American and French revolution inspired more widespread adoption of democratic principle and rights of citizens * Industrial revolution caused dramatic, rapid urbanization, changes in family relations, gender relations, increased secularization * Classical social theorist and macro and micro theorists – macro are interested are in social theory that can explain huge social phenomenon’s (past and future), micro are interested in smaller scale phenomenon’s * Emile Durkheim was a positivist, saw society as analogous to a body, concerned with social solidarity, and developed the idea of the ‘social fact’ * Social Solidarity: division of labour Organic: present in modern societies, high dynamic density, high degree of labour specialization (works like a human body, everything works together with high specialization) Mechanical: present in traditional societies, low dynamic density , low degree of labour specialization (works like gears, works together to complete society) * Similarities of Social Solidarity: Conscience collective similar ideas...
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...B.A. (HONOURS) ENGLISH (Three Year Full Time Programme) COURSE CONTENTS (Effective from the Academic Year 2011-2012 onwards) DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF DELHI DELHI - 110007 0 Course: B.A. (Hons.) English Semester I Paper 1: English Literature 4(i) Paper 2: Twentieth Century Indian Writing(i) Paper 3: Concurrent – Qualifying Language Paper 4: English Literature 4(ii) Semester II Paper 5: Twentieth Century Indian Writing(ii) Paper 6: English Literature 1(i) Paper 7: Concurrent – Credit Language Paper 8: English Literature 1(ii) Semester III Paper 9: English Literature 2(i) Paper 10: Option A: Nineteenth Century European Realism(i) Option B: Classical Literature (i) Option C: Forms of Popular Fiction (i) Paper 11: Concurrent – Interdisciplinary Semester IV Semester V Paper 12: English Literature 2(ii) Paper 13: English Literature 3(i) Paper 14: Option A: Nineteenth Century European Realism(ii) Option B: Classical Literature (ii) Option C: Forms of Popular Fiction (ii) Paper 15: Concurrent – Discipline Centered I Paper 16: English Literature 3(ii) Paper 17: English Literature 5(i) Paper 18: Contemporary Literature(i) Paper 19: Option A: Anglo-American Writing from 1930(i) Option B: Literary Theory (i) Option C: Women’s Writing of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (i) Option D: Modern European Drama (i) Paper 20: English Literature 5(ii) Semester VI Paper 21: Contemporary Literature(ii) Paper 22: Option A: Anglo-American Writing from 1930(ii) Option B:...
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...Wiki Loves Africa: share African cultural fashion and adornment pictures with the world! Fascism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For the original version of the ideology developed in Italy, see Italian Fascism. For the book edited by Roger Griffin, see Fascism (book). "Fascist" redirects here. For the insult, see Fascist (insult). Part of a series on | Fascism | | Core tenets[show] | Topics[show] | Ideas[show] | People[show] | Literature[show] | Organizations[show] | History[show] | Lists[show] | Variants[show] | Related topics[show] | * Fascism portal * Politics portal | * v * t * e | Fascism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism[1][2] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. Influenced by national syndicalism, fascism originated in Italy during World War I, in opposition to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism. Fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.[3][4] Fascists saw World War I as a revolution. It brought revolutionary changes in the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilian and combatant. A "military citizenship" arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war.[5][6] The war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines or provide economic...
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...ABRIDGED GIVING WINGS TO WORLD ECONOMIC RECOVERY THROUGH MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION INNOVATIONS. BY DR ISAH MOMOH, 16 AUGUST, 2011 Tels: 234 803 196 1363; 802 325 8362; 809 569 3433 Email: imomoh@smc.edu.ng; isahmomoh3@yahoo.com; isahmomoh@gmail.com. School of Media and Communication (SMC) Pan African University, 2 Ahmed Onibudo Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria Tels: 01 4616170-2; 2711617-20 Email: info@smc.edu.ng Abstract This paper posits that the current economic recovery of the world from the recent economic melt down is largely due more to more honest, humble and sincere forms of communication and similar changes in the global information system. It holds that the pace and strength of recovery and its sustenance would be accelerated by innovations in global communication and information systems as well as orientation towards more honesty, consideration and concern for the world as one global economic, political and environmental system of linked and inter-dependent parts. Traditionally, journalism and mass communication as a whole demand that news and all professional communications be truthful and factual. They require that opinions be clearly stated and separated from facts through the doctrine that “facts are sacred” and “opinions are free”. It has also been the tradition, under the developmental communication theory to insist that news and professional communications as reports...
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...Positive Psychology An Introduction Martin E. P. Seligman Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi A science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions promises to improve quali~.' of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless. The exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance are ignored or explained as transformations of more authentic negative impulses. The 15 articles in this millennial issue of the American Psychologist discuss such issues as what enables happiness, the effects of autonomy and self-regulation, how optimism and hope affect health, what constitutes wisdom, and how talent and creativity come to fruition. The authors outline a framework .['or a science of positive psychology, point to gaps in our knowledge, and predict that the next century will see a science and profession that will come to understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish. E ntering a new millennium, Americans face a historical choice. Left alone on the pinnacle of economic and political leadership, the United States can continue to increase its material wealth while ignoring the human needs of its people and those of the rest of the ...
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