Probation is a less-well-known branch of our justice system, compared with, say, police and prisons, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Hundreds of thousands of offenders each year are rehabilitated back into society by probation, which is crucial for the public’s safety.
We’re living in a whole new social and economic order with a whole new set of problems and challenges. Old assumptions and old programs don’t work in this new society and the more we try to stretch them to make them fit, the more we will be seen as running away from what is reality.
Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response – that is, high touch – or the technology is rejected… We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.
Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of ‘Civus romanus sum’ set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.
It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it makes possible – what we call ‘the economy’ – is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is.
As a young artist in New York, I thought about postwar Japan – the consumer culture and the loose, deboned feeling prevalent in the character and animation culture. Mixing all those up in order to portray Japanese culture and society was my work.
I’m really not interested in other people’s opinions, because I think frankly most of those opinions are either misinformed and adding to this endless ball of hot air we have in our society where everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and sacred and what counts.
God makes it really clear that society and civilization is really held together by the glue of families… When a man and a woman come together and say ‘I do,’ they are committing for a lifetime to love each other and to model what love is and what forgiveness is and what joy is to their kids.
I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things – genre paintings, historical paintings – the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.
Half of my life, I’ve had people staring at me because they think I’m funny-looking and ugly. The other half of my life, I’ve had people staring at me because they think I’m fascinating. Everything neutralises. It’s more of a statement on society and how weird it is.
Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation – all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith’s vision of an opulent society.
Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.
America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society – in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.
This is not a slow movement of change. It’s a shift in the consciousness of each of us. It is a collective shift. It involves facing grief and trauma and undoing our numbness and our narcissism and our indulgence that we have in this privileged western society.
I think ‘The Wire’ is my all-time favorite TV show. It’s so brilliant, the way it critiques society, and how it handles that everybody who gets power loses their moral code and stops going to the root of the problem and just tries to maintain their own power.
It has always been the role of government to help solve problems, including and especially health crises. Obesity is a health epidemic across our country, and we have a responsibility as a government and a society to do all we can to promote good nutrition and healthy eating so we can reverse this alarming trend.
Outside of, as a kid, just wanting to be able to fly and run faster than a speeding locomotive and being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, we’d like to hope that, when push comes to shove, we can do the right thing. I think as long as there is that hope in our society and in the zeitgeist of superheroes, Superman will be relevant.
The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It’s about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it’s worth getting your teeth into.
Feminism insists on women’s right to make choices – about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other. It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting caregiving work.
Since the global financial crisis and recession of 2007-2009, criticism of the economics profession has intensified. The failure of all but a few professional economists to forecast the episode – the aftereffects of which still linger – has led many to question whether the economics profession contributes anything significant to society.
Pre-history tells us that our species used to be a hunter-gatherer society. This means that the job of raising a family was split 50-50 between the men and the women – the man’s 50 percent share was to sit in the woods with a sharp stick, waiting for something to hunt to wander by, and the woman’s 50 percent was to do everything else.
In the ‘80s, society created a caricature of what a hacker or a programmer looked like: a guy wearing a hoodie, drinking energy drinks, sitting in a basement somewhere coding. Today, programmers look like the men we see in the show ’Silicon Valley’ on HBO. If you look at the message girls are getting, it’s saying, ‘This is not for you.’
The question now afloat in the world respecting ‘things as they are’ is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society.
It’s not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It’s that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.
Labeling people single parents, for example, when they may in fact be co-parenting – either with an unmarried other parent in the home or with an ex-spouse in a joint custody situation – stigmatizes their children as the products of ‘single parenthood’ and makes the uncounted parent invisible to society.
