#structural

The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘natural’ sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#history #ideology #mythologies #nature #semiotics

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. ↗

— Barack Obama

#active #avoid #being #black #carefully

My task over the last two years hasn't just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created. ↗

— Barack Obama

#also #been #being #bleeding #created

We have a serious structural deficit problem. And it needs to be addressed. The president is trying to address it through reforms of Social Security, but the problem is there with other entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. ↗

— John W. Snow

#addressed #deficit #entitlement #entitlement programs #like

I would say the issue for the labor movement in the United States is not structural... there is no correlation between the success of workers and how the labor movement is structured. ↗

— Andy Stern

#correlation #how #i #issue #labor

We are in a bit of a policy box and it's going to require us being willing to give up one of the two, which is it's okay to take on more deficits but lets put in some massive spending. Alternatively to say, 'we're going to go through structural unemployment for a while because we want to address deficits.' ↗

— Indra Nooyi

#because #being #bit #box #deficits

The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom - that is, the ionization of the atom - means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer. ↗

— Johannes Stark

#change #electron #fundamental #ionization #layer

Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#advances #aesthetic #coming #innovation #nearly

In my book I specifically discussed the structural nature of injustice and offered Nine Touchstones of Goddess ethics as an alternative to the Ten Commandments of Biblical religion. ↗

— Carol P. Christ

#book #commandments #discussed #ethics #goddess

The staff at the Institute will present an analysis on how asset price fluctuations and subsequent structural adjustments influence sustained economic growth, based on Japan's experience since the second half of the 1980s. ↗

— Toshihiko Fukui

#asset #based #economic #economic growth #experience