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Representation Of Minorities Quotes

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Representation Of Minorities Quotes

“Built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty, sanctioning, and, at the same time strengthening, their sway over the workers, parliamentary rule is pre-eminently a middle-class rule. The upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that a parliament or a municipal council represent a nation or a city. The most intelligent among them know that this is impossible. The middle classes have simply used the parliamentary system to raise a protecting barrier against the pretensions of royalty, without giving the people liberty. But gradually, as the people become conscious of their real interests, and the variety of their interests is growing, the system can no longer work. Therefore democrats of all countries vainly imagine various palliatives. The Referendum is tried and found to be a failure; proportional representation is spoken of, the representation of minorities, and other parliamentary Utopias. In a word, they strive to find what is not to be found, and after each new experiment they are bound to recognize that it was a failure; so that confidence in Representative Government vanishes more and more.”

“Secondly, this text will often refer to the “collapse of compassion” effect. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that humans care more about animals when they are presented as named individuals, rather than when they are shown in groups (Payne 2010). Generally, the more victims a tragedy has, the less humans will care, and the less-likely they are to donate their time or money to help solve the situation (Payne 2010; Cameron et al. 2011: 1). This is termed the “collapse of compassion” Effect.”

“The Hollywood storylines almost always go something like: the Russians are dangerous spies planning to invade us, the Chinese are trying to pull the carpet from under our feet, the people of the Middle East are terrorists, and on and on goes the list of malicious and intentional misrepresentations. At the end of the storyline, the American heroes always win and save America and the world from ‘evil’. What is quite ironic – and often goes unnoticed by many – in these Hollywood storylines is that, while the American culture is engineered to dismiss valid and genuine critique of American life and foreign policies as being ‘conspiracy theories’, America’s relationships with the outside world is strongly based on threats, punishment, sanctioning, wars, and revenge, all done under pretexts like ‘they hate us’, ‘they hate our freedoms and values’, and other such nonsense. It never occurs to many Americans that representing the outside world as constantly ‘hating’ us or wanting to destroy our nation and values (unless, of course, they do as we say), is in fact nothing short of conspiracy theory. Overall, Hollywood’s storylines ensure keeping the myth of exceptionalism alive.”